Jingzhou in Upheaval
Jiangling had fallen into utter chaos.
After Mi Fang's surrender, Lü Meng had taken the city in hand, and the Liu Bei army—thought to have resigned itself to defeat—burst out with soldiers from God knew where and fell upon Sun Quan's forces. Amid the clash of arms, the shouts and the screams, Pan Jun walked unhurried toward the official residence. Even as he crossed the heart of the battlefield, his mind was not on the fighting around him. It was fixed on a conversation from the past.
It had been after the struggle for Hanzhong ended, when Zhang Lan settled herself at Shangyong. Pang Tong had come to see him. They were both men of Jingzhou and nothing more; they had never had any particular tie. The visit was somewhat unexpected, though hardly astonishing. Word had already reached Pan Jun of the posting of the two strategist-generals—Zhuge Liang to Yizhou, Pang Tong to Jingzhou—and he, charged with Jingzhou's administration, had expected that he and Pang Tong would meet sooner or later. What he had not expected was that the man would arrive bearing a letter from Zhang Lan.
"When we speak of the grand design for Jingzhou, Mingjing insisted I consult you. Timber for the Three Excellencies, he said—certain to be of great help."
"Mingjing said that...?"
It had moved him, truly. Those words from before—that he was a man who might rise to the highest offices of the realm—had not been empty courtesy. Zhang Lan had trusted his ability enough to recommend him to a giant like Pang Tong. He had climbed, yes, to one of the highest posts in Jingzhou, but it was an administrative office and nothing more, no seat from which a man debated the fate of a state.
Pan Jun strove to answer Zhang Lan's expectations. Upon the forecasts she and Pang Tong had made, he threw himself into the plan, even to the point of claiming, as now, the most dangerous part for himself.
Mingjing, in your letter you asked me to protect Jingzhou.
He was not content with that. If all they required was to hold the province, they need only have removed the traitor Mi Fang beforehand and stiffened the defenses of Gong'an and Jiangling. Instead Pan Jun proposed drawing the enemy into Jingzhou itself. Hearing it, Pang Tong had exclaimed that their minds ran the same way—that Zhang Lan's eye for men had not failed.
"Lü Meng comes to Jingzhou not to punish, but to conquer. That is a very great difference."
"As you say, Strategist. Lü Meng is a wise man. He knows the weight of the people's hearts, and he will never stoop to the blunder of plundering them."
Pang Tong and Pan Jun trusted Lü Meng. He would protect the common people and bend his strength to winning their allegiance. On that faith they chose only the most devoted men and hid them throughout the houses of the city. When Guan Yu called for reinforcements, Pan Jun made a show of sending Jiangling's soldiers out—then quietly turned them about and slipped them back inside the walls. Mi Fang's incompetence was incompetence enough, but the operation shone with Pan Jun's gift for administration and command. Had Lü Meng allowed the looting of civilian homes, all that groundwork would have come to nothing.
But what meaning was there in ifs? Look at the result. Caught utterly unprepared, Sun Quan's army reeled before Liu Bei's soldiers spilling out in scattered bursts, and was helpless. The unforeseen strike threw even the watch over the captives already taken into disorder, and Jiangling was passing once more into Liu Bei's hands.
"I've done all I can. What remains lies in other hands."
Pan Jun set foot in the residence of Jiangling with the soldiers escorting him, saw Yu Fan glaring at him from across the way, and murmured the words. Barely three days since Lü Meng had taken the city. By Pan Jun's hand, Jiangling had returned to Liu Bei.
Lu Xun, knowing nothing of the upheaval in Jiangling, had reached the threshold of Yiling. All the way there a sense of déjà vu had clung to him, and he could not shake it free. Taking Yidao and Zhijiang had been effortless. Men had resisted, but the fighting was as one-sided as twisting a child's wrist. Everything was running exactly as planned, and still he could not climb out of that uneasy feeling.
The clue came while he was weighing whether to strike Zigui County, where the remnants were said to be gathering after Yiling's fall, in a letter that arrived then. It was from Meng Da, stationed at Zigui, and it offered surrender. It even set out, in detail, his reasons for turning: Liu Bei, eager to advance his beloved niece Zhang Lan, had shoveled military merit her way—the attack on Shangyong and the like—and slighted him. Nor did it stop there. It laid out an eager plan: when Lu Xun came, Meng Da would answer from within, and together they would sweep the resistance away.
He could not, of course, move an army on the strength of a single letter, so he demanded evidence worth trusting. Meng Da answered by writing down, item by item, the number of officials and soldiers gathered at Zigui and the quantity of supplies, striving to prove that his heart was true. Lu Xun read the letter with care—very close care. And when he found in it a phrase that struck him as subtly wrong, he at last understood the déjà vu that had been gnawing at him.
A thrill like lightning raced up his spine. Grasping the whole of it at last, Lu Xun barely caught a mind that threatened to reel. Even so, a long sigh of dismay he could not hide escaped him.
"A trap? What do you mean, Deputy Commander?"
Sajeong, the officer who had come as his lieutenant, asked.
"Their response has been too swift. I should have seen it when we took Yidao and Zhijiang."
"Weren't they simply frightened into flight? They abandoned Yiling as well and ran for Zigui, didn't they?"
"They did. And this Meng Da, the man holding Zigui, even sent a letter offering to surrender to us, just as Mi Fang did..."
"Meng Da is playing at false surrender. He means to draw us in deeper still."
Lu Xun sketched the surrounding ground in his mind, and beyond it the whole of Jingzhou and Yizhou. A brain that never forgot what it had once seen unrolled an imaginary map at once. Then he turned over the phrase in the letter—the clue that had told him all of this was a trap.
"It makes no sense for the Administrator of Fangling to be named. Wang Ping, who held that post, followed Zhang Lan. The office ought to have stood empty. So why mention the Administrator of Fangling?"
In an age of contending warlords the title had become an empty thing, but an administrator was by nature a civil official with no military command. Why go out of one's way to speak of the Administrator of Fangling? Lu Xun judged that it was meant, conversely, to turn their eyes that way. The Administrator of Fangling is here, so there is no need to worry about Fangling—was that not the implication? His thoughts moved west of Fangling. Shangyong. Xicheng. And Hanzhong.
"The man who holds Hanzhong is Zhang Fei..."
He gauged how the war would run if he pressed on into Zigui as he was. They would drive deep into the county and attack, trusting Meng Da's surrender. But the promise to answer from within would be a lie. They would take the counterblow instead, and down from Fangling Liu Bei's army would come to seal Yiling. They would be cut off between Zigui and Yiling.
No. Something's wrong. Fangling to Yiling is a long way. If they expected us, they could time it. But to keep us from noticing, the march would have to be both secret and swift. Spent like that—and if Commander Lü at Jiangling sent reinforcements, if he sent them...
Would Pang Tong fail to think of that? That Fengchu? No. They would have accounted for it already. So they must have prepared some measure to keep reinforcements from ever leaving Jiangling. And the likeliest measure was the very scheme Meng Da had meant to use: false surrender.
"From the very beginning...!"
Mi Fang. Shi Ren. Pan Jun. The turncoats who had offered up Jiangling and Gong'an. Lu Xun did not believe every one of them had plotted a feigned surrender. If it was a matter of reading men's hearts, Lü Meng, Lu Xun, and Yu Fan each had a mastery of their own. Had the whole operation not begun with his own letter, written to lull Guan Yu into carelessness? Mi Fang, whom he had confirmed with his own eyes, could never be the one. That left a single name on the list of suspects.
"Pan Jun..."
He did not know precisely how they meant to pin Lü Meng down, but there was no doubt they had prepared for Sun Quan's army to turn. Prepared so thoroughly that they had planted a false surrender among the true traitors.
"We withdraw."
"Deputy Commander! That decision is too hasty."
"Meng Da may truly mean to submit!"
"He may. Which is why we will make a show of withdrawing."
If Meng Da led troops after them, the surrender was false. If he truly meant to yield, he would seek a second chance to betray them from behind the pursuing force.
"If they come after us, we turn, encircle them, and annihilate them."
Lu Xun's prediction did not miss. Hearing of the withdrawal, Meng Da knew at once that his false surrender had been seen through. Terrified of losing the great merit that had come within reach, he put himself at the head of a pursuit and chased after Lu Xun. The result was wretched. As Cao Cao, pursuing Dong Zhuo, had once been crushed by Xu Rong, the pursuit Meng Da led was slaughtered outright by Lu Xun. The difference between Meng Da and Cao Cao was this: Cao Cao had had Cao Hong to save him. Meng Da had no one.
Looking at Meng Da, dragged alive to stand before him, Lu Xun gave the order with cool indifference, as if the man were worth nothing.
"Effort wasted on something useless. There was no need to take him alive. Execute him."
Reading the resolve in that voice, Meng Da understood there was no longer any way to live. He had resigned himself, but to die like this rankled. Treated as a pebble in the road, he spoke with the thought of making Lu Xun look back at him at least once.
"Blinded by merit, I threw the chance away—grasped at a little and lost the great. The fault is my own lack; whom should I blame? But you too, Lu Xun, are too late. Deputy Commander Wei, who set out from Hanzhong, will already have reached Yiling."
For all Meng Da's last thrashing, Lu Xun did not turn. Only after the sentence was carried out and Meng Da's blood soaked the ground did he murmur to himself.
"As I expected."
The road that had brought him had been smooth. The road back would be harsh, and steep. The course of the war, which had seemed perfectly clear to Lu Xun, was shifting now into a confusion in which he could not see an inch ahead.
In the worst case...
Calling up that bleak supposition, Lu Xun shut his eyes tight.
It was dark.
