The Realm in Sudden Upheaval
Rain fell—a torrential downpour that had not ceased in more than ten days.
As if it meant to swallow the world, as if some hole had been torn clean through it, the sky emptied an endless storm upon the earth.
The Han River, running between Xiangyang and Fancheng, swelled its bulk in the space of an eyeblink, burst its banks, and swallowed Xiang-Fan whole. So vast was the flood that Xiang-Fan became a sea, and no word but submerged would do. Taken by the Han's overflow, the twin cities vanished beneath the water save for the walls piled high above it, and a wretched farce unfolded: thousands of soldiers and horses clinging to high ground no more than a few boards above the flood.
Had the old battle of Jinyang, fought between the states of Han and Wei, looked like this? The sight all but reproduced that ancient siege, when the diverted Jin left scarcely three boards of the city clear of the water.
If the cities of Xiang-Fan were thus, the country round them was no more spared. Not only the ground near Fancheng, where Guan Yu had drawn his encirclement, but even the camps of Wang Shuang and Yu Jin, far to the rear, lay wholly within the flood's reach. They had scrambled up onto the hills and so kept their lives, but the grain and supplies they had brought were lost to the last measure, and with no preparation made against the waters they could only stamp and fret upon the high ground.
Where the army of Wei showed mankind powerless before great nature, Guan Yu was a man who overcame nature by human design. He directed his troops with a nimbleness, as if he had known the disaster was coming. No—he had known. He had not trusted it, but he had known.
Standing on the deck of his boat and surveying the surroundings, untouched amid the flood, Guan Yu let out a breath of wonder.
"Hah... so it came to pass, just as she said."
He affected composure, but within he was badly shaken. Cold sweat ran down his back.
He had only ever judged that it was possible. The conditions had been favorable enough that it seemed worth holding out until then, and so he had waited—half of him with the feeling that he was humoring a fancy. If it happened, well and good; if not, no matter. In that spirit he had kept the standoff.
And yet a downpour had truly fallen, heavy enough to drown the whole region.
Absurd. It defied belief.
That rain comes in the flood season, anyone can foresee, and that a river rises because of it is only natural. But to predict the precise time, the precise place, and the precise fall of rain—that is impossible. No one had expected the seasonal rains to submerge a city. Not Cao Cao. Not Zhuge Liang. Not Guan Yu himself.
And yet Zhang Lan had done it.
Can it be true? Was Lan born bearing the fate of the luan?
As the saying goes, a name holds a destiny. True to the name Zhang Fei had given her—had his daughter truly been charged with the sacred task of ending this age of chaos and bringing peace?
Guan Yu stroked the long beard that was his pride and set his thoughts in order. Whether Zhang Lan was truly a luan born in human form was not the question that mattered now. As for how she had known, there would be time enough to pursue that once the crisis already upon them was finished.
"The enemy can no longer fight. Take those who surrender. Shoot down those who will not."
What followed scarcely deserved to be called a battle. Penned on that narrow hillside, they could barely move, and they could mount no real resistance. In the end Yu Jin surrendered to Guan Yu, and with him Fu Fang, Administrator of Nanxiang; Hu Xiu, Inspector of Jing Province; Guard General Wang Shuang; and the rest.
The thirty thousand elite of the Seven Armies Yu Jin had led, together with the Jing Province officials Cao Cao had dispatched, passed to Guan Yu in a single stroke. With this one defeat he seized the governing authority of Jing Province in his grasp.
The moment the whole of the realm shuddered before Guan Yu's peerless, divine might.
Ye was thrown into an uproar.
They had not been optimistic, and yet they had still reckoned Jing Province among the safer quarters—only for a catastrophe fit to remake heaven and earth to strike overnight. Yu Jin, who had led out a great host wrung together with painful effort, had offered up his entire army without managing a single proper fight, and drowned Xiang-Fan could no longer even be properly reached. Contact had been difficult ever since Wang Shuang's rout, but it had still held, somehow. Now even that was cut.
"Wenze... surrendered..."
Cao Cao muttered it, hollow with disbelief.
Who was Yu Jin? Setting aside kinsmen such as Cao Ren and Xiahou Yuan, he was far and away the valiant general Cao Cao trusted most, a champion who had always repaid that trust. For that reason Cao Cao had given him the Seven Armies. That such a Yu Jin should surrender without even fighting was a thing difficult to imagine even in dreams.
"Kh—my head...!"
But this was no dream. The moment he recognized it as a thing that had plainly come to pass in the waking world, a splitting headache crashed down upon him.
"King of Wei!"
"King of Wei! Are you all right?"
"Summon the physician!"
When his chronic migraine burst forth and he clutched his head and staggered, the ministers great and small cried out in alarm. But Cao Cao swept his arm wide, silencing them, clenched his teeth, and endured the throbbing pain. This moment was the hinge—a turning point that would wrench the course of the age. He could not let it pass in vain over nothing more than a headache.
Like a wounded beast growling through its pain, he spoke.
"Do not speak of me. Speak of moving the capital."
At a command stern as autumn frost, the ministers' mouths shut.
Moving the capital! Shifting the seat of government was never a light matter. The present capital, Luoyang, was capital in name alone; the true seat was Ye, capital of Cao Wei. Yet whether even that empty shell of Luoyang remained the capital was a grave question of legitimacy and of the display of power.
A hush fell over the great hall packed with ministers. Cao Cao, brow furrowed, was on the point of lashing out in irritation when someone stepped forward before him.
"Zitong?"
"Yes. Jiang Ji, Protector of the Army, petitions the King of Wei."
"Speak."
"To move the capital would be too hasty a decision. General Yu Jin was not even defeated in battle, and yet we would fear Guan Yu's arms in advance and shift the capital? The great affairs of the state must not be undertaken lightly."
At Jiang Ji's words Cao Cao sank into thought. Beneath the depth of his deliberation the headache grew a little faint, and so, able to think with somewhat colder clarity, he asked again.
"Guan Yu is a warrior worth ten thousand, one even Guo Jia acknowledged long ago. And I hear that behind him stand Fengchu, and Pang De, who was Ma Chao's lieutenant. Do you still say so?"
"The General Who Campaigns in the South is a commander who need not yield even to Guan Yu. Summon Xu Huang and have him check Guan Yu together with Administrator Tian Yu, and with Man Chong they can surely hold at Xiang-Fan."
"Pang De and Pang Tong will send support. What of them?"
Nor was it those two alone. To relieve Xiang-Fan, Cao Cao would in the end have no choice but to draw troops from other fronts. The gap thus opened was not something Liu Bei would sit and watch. Driving up out of Hanzhong, he would churn Guanzhong and bring on yet another catastrophe.
Yet Jiang Ji's answer came without a hitch.
"All of it is resolved if we draw Sun Quan in."
"Sun Quan?"
"Yes. We set Sun Quan to strike Jing Province. Liu Bei's household remaining there will be held in check, and our own forces that have been containing Sun Quan will be freed. Every difficulty is cleared away."
"...Indeed."
The next question was whether Sun Quan would truly attack Liu Bei, his own ally. And the answer came from Sima Yi's lips.
"Sun Quan will certainly attack Liu Bei. His half-hearted assaults on Hefei are meant to turn Liu Bei's gaze aside while he husbands his strength, and the marriage he proposed to Guan Yu is meant to build a pretext. They have already been laying preparations to strike Jing Province. Let only some small occasion arise, and they will gladly raise their troops."
The refusal of that marriage might serve as justification, but it was not enough to wholly ward off the blame of betraying an ally. Add even the smallest further pretext, however, and Sun Quan would at once order the attack on Jing Province. In truth he did just that: the moment Guan Yu, to feed his prisoners, seized the army grain at Xiang Pass without leave, Sun Quan moved immediately to force.
"Good. The relief of Xiang-Fan I leave to Protector Jiang. Sima Yi will take charge of persuading Sun Quan and see it done."
Jiang Ji and Sima Yi acted at once. Orders of command written in Cao Cao's name went to Xu Huang and Tian Yu, and every soldier who could by any means be scraped free was raked together into a new relief army.
Sima Yi, changing horses as he went, reached Sun Quan in the shortest possible time and proposed a joint front against Jing Province. Sun Quan followed his design without a moment's hesitation.
Lü Meng, entrusted by Sun Quan with military authority, moved in secret. His mind was full of plans for how Jing Province was to be taken. Before illness could gnaw his body away entirely, he was burning what life remained to him, so that he might leave Jing Province behind as his legacy.
There was another as busy as Lü Meng. Xu Huang, receiving from Jiang Ji the order Cao Cao had written, let out a low groan.
However urgent the plight of Xiang-Fan, he was skeptical of advancing. The troops there had to be counted as effectively meaningless, and the army he himself held was small, the greater part of it raw recruits barely trained. However peerless a general he might be, the tactics one could attempt with such soldiers were much of a muchness. Against some ordinary commander, perhaps it would not matter. Against Guan Yu, they would be nothing but a ready supply of merit for the enemy.
"But an order is an order."
The Art of War grants a general the right to refuse a fight when defeat is certain—but the one who had issued this command was none other than Cao Cao. Nor was it an order to give battle, but to keep Guan Yu from concentrating on the siege of Xiang-Fan, and so it was not wholly impossible.
Yet before long Xu Huang was lamenting the judgment that had led him to obey, and regretting it bitterly.
From Shangyong, Zhang Lan had begun her march.