The Negotiation
"I swear I will not refuse to sleep beneath the open sky, nor to take my meals in the wind."
"I would drink a slain general's blood, and wear it in place of rouge."
"The song of victory I sing from the saddle is the Qingping Melody."
"This is not the hour when Wang Zhaojun set out for the frontier."
When the recitation ended, the lodge, whose air had been frozen solid, stirred all at once, as if that air had thawed in a single breath.
The poem I had spoken was the third of the four verses the Chongzhen Emperor bestowed upon Qin Liangyu—the only woman commander whose name is entered in any of the Twenty-Four Histories recognized as the official chronicles of China.
I had liked it well enough to commit it to memory, even while wondering what use I would ever find for the thing. And now it had found its use. The old saying was right after all: nothing learned by heart is ever wasted.
Cao Cao—greatest man of letters of the age, praised together with his sons Cao Pi and Cao Zhi, who had inherited his extraordinary literary gift, as the Three Caos—closed his eyes and moved his lips, savoring the poem as one tastes wine.
When he had grasped the gist of it, he half-opened his eyes and asked, "This is not the hour when Wang Zhaojun set out for the frontier. The Zhaojun named in that last line—she is your answer to what I said before, is she not?"
It had been coincidence. Cao Cao, however, seemed convinced of it down to the bone. True to a man in earnest about poetry, his eyes shone as if to ask what I thought of his reading.
I nodded. He looked satisfied, as though he had expected as much, and yet one side of his face hardened, and he smiled with a bitter twist of the mouth. He had seen what I meant the poem to say.
Those last four lines he had singled out. Wang Zhaojun went as a bride to the Xiongnu of the frontier for the sake of peace. The poem insisted this was not that hour—which was as good as declaring that I had come not for peace, but for the fight.
The verse was of a piece from start to finish. A fighting spirit that would not give ground to the last. A resolve to meet the enemy and never retreat: I would not be taken in by his bluff, and I would not bend.
Cao Cao seemed to feel in his own flesh how little time remained to him. A fierce hunger for revenge might fan his will to live and let him outlast the span he was given in the history I knew. More reasonably, though, the heavier toll of bodily exhaustion and mental strain would cut that span shorter still.
Reading that I had no thought of yielding, he hid his regret and withdrew the offer he had first put forward—and even then, with perfect naturalness, he dressed the withdrawal as a favor he was graciously granting.
"A fine poem. And a fine, resolute spirit behind it. Very well. I will hear your proposal."
I had stepped forward, but the man truly responsible for this negotiation was Guan Yu, and no one else. When I looked to him, he nodded as if to say I might do as I pleased, then took a step back and settled into an easy calm.
"In return for sending the prisoners back, we will take Xinye as the border between our states, and the territory south of it."
"And?"
"We will set the term of the truce."
"Impudent. No date fixed means the truce lasts until you choose to attack again, does it not?"
That was precisely his reading, and when I owned it, a commander burst out from among the officials of Wei who had been listening at the side. A face I had seen before: Xu Huang.
"King of Wei! You need hear them no further. If they want a decisive battle, then give them one."
It was not our side that answered him, but Colonel-Protector Zhang Ji, who had come to us as envoy.
"Marquis of Duting, guard your tongue! Have you forgotten that the Marquis of Anping is their prisoner?"
"This is a grave matter of the realm. I too admire the Marquis of Anping, and I know how precious a man he is. But he himself would not wish this great affair ruined on his account."
As Zhang Ji and Xu Huang raised their voices higher and higher, the other ministers put in a word or two of their own, and the lodge grew clamorous.
"Enough. That will do. I accept the proposal."
"King of Wei!"
Xu Huang and Zhang Ji, who had been set against each other a moment before, now tried in a single voice to hold Cao Cao back. He only shook his head, slowly, and hardened his resolve.
"Zitong. It seems their preparations were more thorough than your scheme."
Zhang Ji, who had been the one to advise drawing Sun Quan in, was so overcome with shame that his face looked ready to spill tears. He flung himself down before Cao Cao in a full prostration, forehead to the ground.
"All of it springs from this vassal's inadequacy! I will gladly bear any punishment."
"How could this be your fault? I was the one who grew complacent. Whom, then, should I blame?"
Cao Cao let out a long sigh. After the unbelievable rout at Red Cliffs he had lost to Liu Bei again and again; how tangled his heart must be. And yet Cao Cao was Cao Cao.
"I accept the truce. Xinye shall be the border. In return I will have not only the prisoners of Xiangfan sent back, but Yu Jin and his seven armies as well."
This was no longer my ground. I looked to Guan Yu, and he, understanding that his turn had come, stepped forward.
"I accept Your Lordship's terms."
He offered the cupped-hand salute and bowed his head, and the courtesy that filled the gesture was the very courtesy with which he faced Liu Bei. The negotiation had gone better than he could have expected; perhaps he took it for Cao Cao's consideration. In truth it was a bargain in which our side had yielded, so that the uncertainty to the south might be swept away as quickly as possible.
"You mean to leave at once?"
"Both of us are pressed, are we not?"
We, because Sun Quan had invaded Jingzhou. Cao Cao, because popular feeling had begun to turn with Wei Feng's rebellion. Neither of us, carrying danger at our backs, was in a season for banquets.
Perhaps the question had been only courtesy. He did not ask again.
"And yet it is a shame to send you off like this. Is Zhongkang here?"
"Yes, King of Wei. You called for me?"
Xu Chu. Zhongkang. If one said that where Liu Bei had Zhao Yun, Cao Cao had Xu Chu, it would not be far wrong: the man had a towering frame and a presence as heavy as stone. Zhao Yun, of course, had not been Liu Bei's bodyguard as Xu Chu was Cao Cao's, but in that both had kept their lord and his household alive, the two bore comparison.
"Bring me my swords."
Xu Chu returned before long with several blades in his arms. The Heaven-Reliant Sword was likely a later fiction, but the swords Cao Cao possessed, as befitted the greatest power of the age, were every one of them masterworks among masterworks. Two of them were so alike that they might have been twins, and it was those he chose and took in hand.
"They are called the Baibi blades."
"The Baibi blades?"
The name was new to me. In later ages, when one thought of Cao Cao's swords, one thought of the Heaven-Reliant Sword and the Qinggang Sword.
I repeated the name without thinking, and Cao Cao himself explained the history worked into the steel. "Five of the same sword were forged, and I bestowed them upon those of my children who loved letters more than arms."
Five of them: quintuplet swords. They were not perfectly identical. The signs cut into the blades differed—dragon, tiger, bear, horse, and sparrow. The sword marked with the dragon was his own. The one signed with the tiger had gone to his eldest son and heir, Cao Pi. The blades bearing the bear and the horse, he said, he had given to Cao Zhi and Cao Lin.
Cao Cao, Cao Pi, and Cao Zhi—the Three Caos, whose literary gift was beyond compare. Fitting enough, for men whose letters outshone their arms.
I was listening in the mood of someone hearing a curious tale when Cao Cao's sudden declaration slipped into my ear.
"The last remaining Baibi blade I bestow upon you. It shall be the token of this negotiation."
He left no room even for misunderstanding. He looked me straight in the face and held the Baibi blade out before him. The gesture was one thing; the words that came with the sword were another, and they were exquisite. By adding the pretext that this was no mere kindness but the token of a negotiation, he sealed off refusal as a choice.
When I hesitated for a moment, Ma Zhong, who had come with the embassy, hurried close and whispered.
"General, you must not accept it."
"Dexin."
"That sword is a poisoned cup. In the greater sense, he would treat you as he treats his own sons and make the offer he spoke of before into truth—and that is a scheme to sow discord among us. In the lesser, he would cage a general born to a phoenix's fate as nothing more than a sparrow. I beg you, refuse."
It might have sounded like paranoia. But this was still an age, as I had said again and again, when superstition passed for established truth. Ma Zhong's fear was not wholly baseless. What he feared most, in any case, was the first of the two: the scheme to split us from within.
What came out of my mouth, however, ran clean against his anxious counsel.
"Shall I come and receive it myself?"
If the distance was one a hand could cross to another hand, then a hidden move would take no longer than a breath. However close his bodyguard stood, unless a blade was already laid against my throat, stopping me would be impossible. Even Cao Cao in his youth could not have been sure of winning such a clash, and Cao Cao, with death not far off, would cross into the next world the moment I willed it. His ministers would never sit still and allow that.
If it was hard for me to refuse, then I had only to make them withdraw the offer themselves.
But he was Cao Cao. Before Zhang Ji, Yang Biao, Chen Qun, and the rest could even raise a remonstrance, he put his will into words.
"I permit it."
"K-King of Wei!"
"Your Majesty!"
Agonized cries called after him in shock. Cao Cao remained aloof.
A step. The moment my foot settled on the first stair of the dais where his seat of power rested, killing looks stabbed at me from every side. I paid them no mind and took the next step.
I climbed all five, and stood upon the platform where Cao Cao's throne was set.
"You are hesitating."
He drew his gaze from the Baibi blade, toward which my hand was raised, and spoke.
"Bring it down on me as you are, and you can kill me. Will you?"
At his words the keen rasp of steel leaving scabbards rang from every quarter. In that standoff, balanced on a knife's edge, with men who looked ready to rush me at any instant, I admitted it calmly.
"I did consider it."
"Meaning you will not, now."
"No. There is no need. You know it as well as I do, Lord Cao."
That you will soon be dead.
Even to the words I had left unsaid, Cao Cao nodded as if he had heard what I spoke only in my heart, and he laughed aloud.
"So. You already knew. Then of course it would be so."
He let go of the Baibi blade and passed it into my hands, and in eyes shot through with regret he held me.
"Even now I do not think Xuande surpasses me. But that I myself raised Xuande into the rival who stands against me—that, I can no longer deny."
Taking Liu Bei in. Joining my father and my mother in marriage. Placing me under Liu Bei's command. Paradoxical as it was, the one who had done all of it was Cao Cao himself, Liu Bei's fated enemy. If, when he took Liu Bei in, he had followed Cheng Yu's counsel and killed him, he would without question have unified the world.
He closed his eyes for a moment and wiped the lingering regret away. Then, at the last, he spoke not as a sovereign, but as one poet to another.
"I wish to bestow a poem upon you."
"I will hear it gladly."
Cao Cao rose from his seat, walked the path laid out before him, and slowly parted his lips. Through the lodge there rang an answering verse to the poem I had spoken, a gift of parting. It was a recitation to mark the hour of farewell.
"A campaign robe, cut and sewn from the brocade of Shu."
"Astride a horse adorned with peach blossoms, you come seeking command."
"Even a woman has ever gladly borne hardship and reproach."
"Why, then, must a general be a man?"