The Battle for Nanjun
The Battle for Nanjun.
The struggle over Jing Province's fate—fair enough to call it the sequel to the Battle of Red Cliffs—had already dragged on for nearly a year.
Cao Ren and Zhou Yu. The contest between the finest talents each side could field was a clash of Cao Ren's valor against Zhou Yu's art of command. The fighting surged and ebbed, advance and retreat trading places day after day, yet on the whole the advantage lay with Zhou Yu.
Cao Ren was no mere brute. He was a famed commander who joined courage to intellect, but Zhou Yu's generalship still surpassed him. Had it not been for Cao Ren's superhuman bravery, Nanjun would have fallen into Zhou Yu's hands long ago.
The camp that Zhang Fei's thousand soldiers reached, folded into Zhou Yu's host, was somehow unsettled. Discipline and military order had not collapsed. Only the soldiers of the House of Sun could not quite hide their unease.
The reason was obvious: Zhou Yu's wound. He had fought on through an injury grave enough that it might yet kill him, but even a wounded spirit has its limits.
The men had seen him take a blow that ought to have been fatal, and still their morale held this high. That alone was proof of Zhou Yu's worth.
Even so, Zhou Yu himself could not be sure how long he could keep this up, which was why he had accepted Liu Bei's proposal.
No one knew Guan Yu's and Zhang Fei's abilities better than he did. While he could still command the army in person, he would not want to miss the chance to bring the battle for Nanjun to an end as quickly as possible.
Whatever the case, once Zhang Fei passed under Zhou Yu's command he cut training to the bare minimum and set every man to looking after himself ahead of the fight to come. Grand words for what it amounted to: sleep as much as you can, eat well, and store up strength.
"Young miss, are you really sure it's all right for you to stay with us?"
Zhang San, who had kept to my side ever since we first spoke, was the one who asked. Assigned to the same five-man squad as I was, he fretted more quietly than he let on.
I was still sharing quarters with Zhang Fei, and there was no training to speak of. What clearly gnawed at him was the thought of a girl of nine being thrown into a real battle.
"It's perfectly fine. Don't worry so much, Zhang San."
If I were truly about to charge into a fight where blades met and lives were taken, I would be tense as well. In this battle for Nanjun, though, that sort of thing probably would not happen more than a few times.
Cao Ren was already hard-pressed by Zhou Yu alone. Zhou Yu might have shifted two thousand men toward Liu Bei, but once Zhang Fei arrived with a thousand in support, Cao Ren would feel the limit and choose to withdraw.
Naturally Zhou Yu, who had Jiangling under siege, would attack to stop him. Tearing through an encirclement would not be so difficult for a man called a match for a thousand. Blocking the northern road by which Cao Ren might retreat and rejoin Cao Cao's army, however, was Guan Yu's task.
The disparity in strength was simply too great, and in the end Guan Yu's blocking line would be broken as well. Even so, the battle for Nanjun would end in victory for Zhou Yu and Liu Bei, and Nanjun would become Zhou Yu's.
So my first task was to check Cao Ren's army as it withdrew, and my second was to pursue that army once it succeeded in tearing the ring.
I could not say there was no danger, but set beside an ordinary battle the margin of safety was clearly higher. After a fight or two at most, the war would be over.
Zhang San, who knew none of this, would see one thing and the other as the same perilous war with no end in sight.
"Young miss, but..."
"And how many times do I have to say it? Don't call me young miss. Call me squad leader."
Not long before we reached Zhou Yu's camp, I had become a squad leader—the post I won by beating the previous one in a bout.
A rank that easy to take was no formal office, of course. It only meant I stood for the five men bound together as a squad. Still.
"Ah. Yes, Squad Leader."
The words young miss had been grating on my ears, and given a standing where even my own name was awkward to use, the title of squad leader suited me rather well.
Those around me knew I disliked being called young miss, so after that they addressed me as squad leader. All except Zhang San. He had called me that from the first time he spoke to me, and the habit had stuck to his tongue.
In any case, I gathered not only Zhang San but the soldiers of the squad I had grown easy with. We finished a simple meal, and I was about to check my weapon when a majestic drumbeat rolled through the camp.
Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!
The meaning carried in those evenly spaced strokes was very simple. March.
"Up we go."
Now I would meet a real battle with these two eyes, clear and unblinking.
Thousands upon thousands, locked in a vast struggle to keep their lives and seize victory. Standing before war—the worst spectacle human beings can stage—my mouth began to go dry, even though I knew the future.
Knowing a thing with the head and taking it into the heart were, as ever, different matters. The ease of a moment ago was gone. A chill climbed my spine, and my whole body seemed to go cold.
"Still... I can bear it."
At my mutter Zhang San asked, "Eh?" I only snorted a laugh and clapped him on the back.
"Come on. We'll be late."
When I took the place assigned to me beforehand, I could see Zhang Fei on horseback at the very front. A long spear lay across his shoulder, and a frame a good half again the size of the men around him made him impossible to miss at a glance.
Zhang Fei's force was posted at the north gate. They called it the battle for Nanjun, but strictly speaking it was a fight over this one city of Jiangling, not the whole commandery.
Of the ring laid around the Jiangling that Cao Ren held, the north gate mattered most of all. Where Zhang Fei's men stood was as good as the hinge on which this war would turn.
Perhaps, contrary to what I expected, I really would taste a true battle.
I'm shaking.
Sweat beaded in my palms. I set the spear on my shoulder and wiped my hands dry against my clothes. I was still shifting the formation alongside the Sun soldiers, following the voices of the company officers who led the ranks, when it happened.
The north gate opened, and Cao Cao's army began to pour out.
Sound. Sound. Sound.
Hoofbeats that shook the earth. The keen ring of spear on sword. Shouts, screams, weeping. A thousand noises battered the brain at once.
Those who meant to hold, and those who meant to break through. Amid the riot of noise the two sides made in their savage fight, I stood frozen, blank.
Not from fear. The opposite. As if the madness the battlefield exhaled had swallowed me whole, what my mind felt was not terror but excitement.
A thrill prickled the length of my spine. This was battle. This place was the field. And this age—this was an age of chaos.
I did not hold life cheap. I was no devotee of death, praising it and singing its glory. But it was true that something in a corner of my head was twisted. Had I not been that sort of person to begin with, I would never, in the moment I was given the chance to be born again, have said I wanted to live as someone crushed beneath a cannon on a battlefield.
Winnowed out by peace, I chased what was more extreme. I turned away from my own lack and pursued the supermen of the past. For someone like me, this place could never become a breeding ground of fear.
I clenched the spear with all my strength and stared straight at the enemy surging in.
"Come on, then..."
I spat words that would have sounded like madness to anyone else, and forced my head to cool. Do not be seized by emotion. A battlefield is a furnace where feelings burn hotter than at any other time, but you must never lose your composure. I repeated the lesson Zhang Fei had driven into me.
And the next instant, the clash.
Forward, into the enemy charging down on us. I thrust the spear.
Thunk.
The sensation traveling up through my hands was utterly strange. Nothing like cutting meat while cooking. This was the feeling of ending a life.
The shock of a first kill was fainter than I would have expected of myself. Had my brain, sensing on instinct how dangerous it was to flounder in shock in the middle of a battlefield, simply shut the feeling off on its own?
My heart hammered, but reason still breathed, and it issued the next order.
Clang!
I caught the blade meeting the spear shaft with a seizing technique, and the thrust that followed at once pierced the enemy's throat.
Only after cutting down two foes in succession did I have room to look around. Our side had not yet built a perfect line. We were tangled with the enemy trying to break the encirclement, fighting in a melee.
Zhang Fei?
He had been at the very front of the formation, so he would have had to meet the tide of Cao Cao's host head-on. Even Zhang Fei, called a match for ten thousand, was only human, so—
He wasn't human.
Around him it was as if a typhoon were raging. Every time he swung that spear, enemies dropped in heaps.
I had always taken a match for ten thousand to mean only that a man was outstanding enough to do the work of ten thousand. Watching the peerless slaughter unfolding before my eyes, the thought came of its own accord: perhaps he really could face ten thousand.
He was, quite literally, a human blender. In a flash Zhang Fei ground down the enemy soldiers throwing themselves at him, then spurred his horse and began to ride.
The direction he took would be wherever the encirclement had grown thinnest. Nine times out of ten, Cao Ren would be at the point of that thrust.
I wanted badly to lay eyes on Cao Ren, the general heaven itself had sent down, but this was a battlefield, not a fan meeting. With death on the line, letting my mind wander anywhere else was nothing short of suicide.
Focus on what is in front of you. Set the dream match between Zhang Fei and Cao Ren aside for a moment, and draw the shape of the field in your head. Cao Ren's army had struck the center of the north gate. The formation would be a triangle, with Cao Ren at its point.
Zhang Fei, posted on the right wing, was smashing a comparatively thinner portion of Cao Cao's force and driving in toward the center. That was how it looked.
Behind all of this, Guan Yu's second encirclement was waiting. Zhang Fei seemed intent on calmly tearing into Cao Cao's army from the rear and bleeding away their strength.
The unit he led naturally followed in his wake. The farther he pushed toward the center, the closer we drew to it as well.
In breaking an encirclement, two positions are the most dangerous: the vanguard, which must pierce the enemy, and the rear guard, which must hold them off from behind.
The men we faced were the latter, and a rear guard that had already resigned itself to death shoved our side back hard.
The soldiers under Zhang Fei numbered only a thousand, while Cao Cao's rear guard alone was far larger than that. Little by little, even the speed of Zhang Fei's charge began to slow.
In the midst of it, an enemy commander riding hard for the surrounded Zhang Fei came into my sights.
Honestly, even if enemy officers piled onto him, Zhang Fei could smash the lot of them and still have strength to spare. The actual histories record no wound to him. Had a figure that important been hurt, it would have been written down, just as Zhou Yu's injury was.
Even so, to stand idle would shame the very person who went about calling herself Zhang Fei's daughter.
I swelled my chest and drew a deep breath.
"Hup—!"
Then I shouted at the enemy commander with everything I had.
Perhaps I had inherited even Zhang Fei's gift for a voice that carried, for my own cry was so loud and so high that I startled myself.
The horse, sensitive to sound, faltered. Somewhere along the way I had traded the spear for a sword; I flung it aside and thrust an arm toward Zhang San.
"Zhang San! A spear!"
"Eh? Y-yes!"
Dazed as he was, Zhang San dutifully put the spear into my hands.
I snatched it from him, arched my upper body far back, and stretched the free arm straight out in front of me, as if measuring the weapon's path.
Not that far. At this range, I'll hit.
I had thrown a spear a few times before. The target was large, and the distance was short. Just then the horse, having stopped in a hurry, could not get itself moving properly either.
Then I threw.
My body, drawn taut, snapped forward, and the spear that left my hand cut straight across the empty air.
Had it been aimed at the commander himself, he would have dodged. Even if he failed to dodge, he would have knocked it aside. He would have been startled, but the harm would not have been great.
I had not aimed at the man. If you mean to take a commander, aim first at the horse he rides. What I had marked was none other than his mount.
"Heeee-hee!"
The instant the spear struck, the enemy commander's horse screamed in pain. With the shaft buried in a hind leg it lost its balance and collapsed, and the officer astride it pitched headlong to the ground.
Even then he tried somehow to break the fall, but the ambush had been too sudden. In the end he seemed to have injured an arm; one of them trembled uncontrollably.
Soldiers who realized their commander was no longer himself came running at once, but the officer showed with his own skill why he was a commander at all.
Swinging a spear with only one arm, he swept them aside in a frenzy. The title of fierce general was not wasted on him. I understood why Cao Ren had trusted him with the rear.
Having cleared his surroundings in a moment, the enemy commander turned toward the direction the spear had come from, looked straight at me, and narrowed his eyes.
"Was it you?"