Jingzhou in Upheaval
At the very hour Fancheng finally fell into Guan Yu's hands, Lü Meng was leading his army into Jingzhou. The watchposts Guan Yu had raised to keep an eye on the Sun Quan forces stationed at Lukou had already been put out of action, exactly as planned.
From here it was a war of speed. Lü Meng had never much cared for Guan Yu, but he granted the man his ability. Worse, because Zhang Lan had checked Xu Huang, Guan Yu now had the leisure to pour everything he had into Fancheng alone.
Fancheng will fall. Take Cao Ren prisoner, and Guan Yu has a bargaining chip. Cao Cao cannot be trusted. Betray a man once, and the second time comes easily.
The best outcome would still be Cao Cao holding Guan Yu in place to the very end, just as he had promised Sun Quan. But nothing was more foolish than staking a plan on another man's conduct.
So—before Cao Cao tried some trick, and before Guan Yu could turn back.
Occupy Jingzhou. Isolate Guan Yu.
Zhang Lan had already thrown the scheme to catch Guan Yu into disarray. In the worst case the man could abandon Jingzhou altogether and slip through Shangyong into Hanzhong.
Even so, the chance to take Jingzhou is still ours.
Watching the walls of Gong'an begin to rise into view, Lü Meng hardened his resolve. A man just crossing into middle age came toward him.
He looked less the officer than the scholar—clear, refined features, a height nearing six feet, and a bearing that commanded the eye. A stranger might well have taken him, and not the pallid Lü Meng, for the supreme commander.
In truth he had already shown such astonishing ability that Lü Meng had marked him as his successor.
This was Lu Xun. In years to come he would follow Lü Meng to the pinnacle of Wu's military power, and he would be the man who burned away Liu Bei's last dream.
Serving in this campaign as deputy commander, Lu Xun delivered the formal report.
"Commander. That is Gong'an."
"So it is. Bring me Lord Yu Fan."
Yu Fan was the man charged with urging surrender upon Shi Ren, the Liu Bei general holding the city.
While Yu Fan rode for Gong'an beneath a white flag of parley, Lü Meng set about encircling the walls.
The city had once been Liu Bei's own administrative seat, and as a fortress it was nothing to scoff at. If it could be managed, taking Shi Ren's surrender without a fight mattered.
"Lord Yu Fan has entered the city."
"Mm. He had better bring it off."
"Shi Ren was treated with contempt by Guan Yu, and he fears the man besides for having failed to manage the baggage train as he should. Once he grasps the situation, he will surely surrender."
Just as Lu Xun said, Yu Fan—already deep in the work of persuading Shi Ren inside Gong'an—was certain of success.
"While the great host of the House of Sun marched on Gong'an, did you see a single courier? A single beacon? If this is not Heaven's will, then someone within your own ranks has deliberately cut you off. If it is the former, to resist is to defy Heaven's mandate. If the latter, you will meet a useless death in a fight that cannot be won. I beg you, General—consider carefully."
Look at Shi Ren's face, wracked by that fluent argument.
Had he truly resolved to remain Liu Bei's loyal man, there would have been nothing to agonize over. Instead he sighed, shut his eyes, and groaned beneath the weight of it.
At last he dropped his head.
"I will surrender."
A short while later, the gates of Gong'an opened.
Yu Fan, who had flung wide the first gate of Jingzhou's conquest, met Lü Meng with his shoulders squared and his pride plain to see.
"You have done a great service, my lord."
"I have only been faithful to the charge I was given."
A fine beginning. Lü Meng was racing the clock. What he feared more than Guan Yu himself was the sense of something even more dreadful pressing hard upon the man's heels.
In his urgency he meant to push straight past Gong'an and up toward Jiangling, but Yu Fan spoke of a misgiving that had been sitting wrong with him.
"Commander, Shi Ren may have opened the gates, but we cannot rule out a feigned surrender. Take him with you, and leave our own men in Gong'an."
Lü Meng admitted he had been hasty, and he acted at once. He entrusted the city to one of his lieutenants and rode straight for Jiangling with Shi Ren at his side.
The Sun Quan army covered the short distance from Gong'an to Jiangling at a run, and unlike at Gong'an they did not even trouble to prepare an encirclement. They sent only Shi Ren, who had already surrendered.
At first the people of Jiangling sneered at him. Then a sight they could not believe unfolded before their eyes, and they were struck dumb, forgetting even to try to stop it.
Jiangling was the most important city in Nan Commandery, the heartland of Jingzhou. The man Liu Bei had trusted with that vital seat was Mi Fang—a kinsman, a founding meritorious official who had followed him since Xuzhou.
And that same Mi Fang was now opening the gates with his own hands to welcome Lü Meng.
He came out with a table of wine to greet him, so promptly it seemed he had been waiting for this day and no other.
Yu Fan remained cautious to the last. Heedless of the banquet Mi Fang had laid for his surrender, he insisted they enter Jiangling at once and choke off any counterattack at the root.
And so, in a flash, Lü Meng occupied the government offices and the military camps within the city.
"Yu Jin and the Wei army aren't here."
"I am told the prisoners are in Pang De's keeping at Dangyang."
Failing to secure the Wei captives was a pity, but Guan Yu's family, who had not managed to flee, remained in Jiangling.
When word came that Guan Yu's wife and daughter had been taken, Lü Meng went to them himself.
"Do not be afraid. I have no intention of doing you harm."
"Traitor..."
Unlike Guan Yu's wife, his daughter stared at Lü Meng with her eyes sharp and lifted. Some old tie stirred in him, and a wry breath of laughter escaped.
"Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are generals like tiger and bear. Sworn brothers, without a drop of shared blood—and yet their daughters resemble each other more than a little."
Even as a hostage, Guan Hui, Guan Yu's daughter, made no effort to hide a rough and fierce temper. There was something of Zhang Lan in her.
The same age as Zhang Yan, Zhang Lan's younger sister, Guan Hui spat at Lü Meng with venom.
"When my father and my sister get here, do you really think any of you will walk away whole?"
"They won't get here. Cao Cao will hold them for us. And even if they sweet-talk their way past Cao Cao and come anyway, it won't matter. By then every city will already be lost. What could they do?"
He sneered, but just as he had said, he did Guan Yu's family no harm at all.
Nor did he lay a finger on the people of Jiangling. He let them keep to their ordinary lives, and went so far as to open the relief grain and supply them with goods—without touching a single coin of the official treasury while he did it.
Yet Guan Hui's words had pricked an unease that had been lying quiet in him. Leaving only enough troops to hold Jiangling, he sent the rest to occupy the surrounding country.
"Boyan. Advance west as you are, and cut the road into Yi Province."
He gave Lu Xun fifteen thousand men and the task of sealing Yiling, the link between Jingzhou and Yi Province.
"Yifeng. Take Wengui with you, strike Pang De at Dangyang, and secure the Wei prisoners."
He ordered Zhu Ran and Pan Zhang to attack Pang De there.
The Sun Quan army's occupation of Jingzhou fell into place as smoothly as dominoes, one city after another. Lu Xun seized Yidao County and Zigui County in a breath, took hold of the Yidu region, and drove in a single rush all the way to Yiling, his original objective.
Everything was going well. The only matter worth watching was how things unfolded in the north. Lü Meng concentrated most of his scouting toward Xiangfan.
And yet a strange discord kept scraping at his nerves. All at once he remembered a name he had forgotten, and he shot up from his seat. Why had he forgotten that name?
"Fengchu—what is Pang Tong doing?"
"Was he not stationed at Qingni?"
When Yu Fan, at his side, recited the intelligence they had secured before marching from Lukou, Lü Meng hounded him, nerves fraying.
"Then why is there no response at all? No—was Pang Tong ever truly at Qingni in the first place?"
He was on the point of issuing orders on the strength of that prickle of foreboding when word arrived ahead of him.
"Gong'an is under attack...?"
The Liu Bei counterattack began in the south, together with Pang Tong's appearance.
"What force is there south of Gong'an...? No—the Man of Wuling! He's brought in the Man of Wuling!"
Fighting by winning the tribal peoples over as allies was a strategy unfamiliar to the army of Sun Quan. Unlike Liu Bei, who had chosen amity and coexistence with the non-Han tribes, Sun Quan had treated them strictly as enemies to be broken and rooted out.
That was why it had never occurred to him. The very conception was different. Lü Meng felt the plan give way beneath him, but he still asked, needing to grasp the situation.
"How many are they said to be?"
"They looked to be ten thousand!"
As a rule, the fighting strength of the non-Han peoples fell short of a Han army. Their arms were poorer, and they lacked any systematic military order. But ten thousand was more than enough to take Gong'an.
The city, moreover, had only just been occupied, and unlike here in Jiangling, Lü Meng had never had the chance to soothe its people and settle their hearts himself. If an answer rose from inside the walls, Gong'an would fall at once.
"Lose Gong'an, and our line of retreat is cut."
Lü Meng thought it through. Among the generals still left in Jiangling, only one man was a match for Pang Tong.
Lü Meng himself.
"I'll have to go in person."
"But if you go, Commander, what becomes of Jiangling?"
"I leave Jiangling to you, Lord Yu Fan. I'll leave Shuwu behind as well. Consult with him, and govern the city together."
At the promise of Sun Huan—a capable general, and a man of Sun Quan's own house—Yu Fan closed his mouth.
Before Lü Meng left Jiangling in haste, with not an hour to spare, he left Yu Fan a single charge.
"Watch Mi Fang and Shi Ren closely. If they show the slightest strange behavior, do not hesitate. Kill them."
But Lü Meng's charge was never carried out.
Not because Mi Fang and Shi Ren had surrendered to them in earnest.
If one looked only at the result, Lü Meng's words were fulfilled.
Only the hand that carried them out was not Yu Fan's.
After Lü Meng had left Jiangling, two men faced each other in Mi Fang's quarters.
One was, of course, Mi Fang, master of the room. The other was the colleague who had agreed with him to surrender to Sun Quan and hand the city over. Or rather, the man he had believed to be a colleague.
Mi Fang could not believe it. Until only a short while ago, this was the man who had cursed Guan Yu alongside him and plotted the betrayal. He could not accept the reality now before him—that same man, looking at him with eyes full of contempt.
"Were you not of one mind with us...? You were scorned by Guan Yu too, Chengming!"
In Mi Fang's wavering eyes, Pan Jun's face was only cold.
"Don't tell me... he too, and Shi Ren, were false from the start...?"
Pan Jun wore a cold sneer and did not answer the question. He tossed out words that seemed to come from nowhere.
"They say the men who distinguished themselves in Hanzhong, aiding the General Who Guards the North, are called the Eight Wings of Luanling."
At that, Mi Fang only stared, as if the words made no sense to him.
"Absurd, isn't it. The ones who formed a bond with the General Who Guards the North—and with Mingjing—before anyone else were not them."
The comrade who had reviled Guan Yu with him, and conspired to hand Jingzhou to Sun Quan, was gone.
"If one were to name those who have entered Mingjing's confidence, surely I ought to come first of all. Wouldn't you say?"
Pan Jun had prized his bond with a true friend far above any humiliation he had suffered at Guan Yu's hands. Far too late, Mi Fang understood that the man had never been their comrade at all.
Looking down at Mi Fang, who shook with shock, betrayal, and fear, Pan Jun declared it.
From the very beginning, he had kept their company only for this moment.