The Battle for Nanjun
A general's instinct, perhaps. I was tall for my age and still small among the soldiers, and yet he had picked me out as the one who had done it.
If I set the men up as a wall and fell back, sheer weight of numbers would eventually kill that general or take him alive. I stepped forward instead.
It was closer to empty bravado than the fire of youth, but I was too drunk on the fight to know it.
"All right."
When I owned it so readily, the general came toward me and asked,
"Young soldier. What's your name?"
"Zhang Lan."
"Ha! A child without even a courtesy name. I, Niu Jin, never thought I'd close my eyes in a place like this."
Niu Jin. Spoken in the tongue of this age, the name rang the same as that of Yu Jin—one of the Five Elite Generals, a famed commander who had served Cao Cao so long he might well be called a founding merit of the state. But Wei held another man written with different characters, a second Niu Jin.
This was the Niu Jin who served as Cao Ren's lieutenant and would later pass under Sima Yi. Set beside Yu Jin of the Five Elite Generals he might seem a lesser man, but there was no doubt he was a seasoned commander of real skill.
Niu Jin glanced up at the sky. The gesture looked full of openings, and still I understood at once, by instinct, that if I went in now I would only eat a counter.
A wounded beast is still a beast. I had been lucky enough to unhorse him, but Niu Jin was not yet a man I could face.
To the Niu Jin who seemed to be sinking into emptiness, I added,
"I may have no courtesy name, but my father is Zhang Fei of Yan. When you reach the underworld, tell them you fell to Zhang Fei's child."
"Zhang Fei's son? Impossible. Zhang Fei's sons are soft and bookish—"
Shock stopped him halfway. He had realized it too. They say the difference between boys and girls is not so stark in childhood, but even I thought my looks were rather fine.
No one had ever assumed a woman could be on a battlefield, so he had not seen it. Now that the possibility had occurred to him, Niu Jin understood I was a girl, and only a hollow laugh escaped him.
"You're saying you're the grand-niece of the Acting Commander of the Host. Of Xiahou Yuan."
"My mother is of the Xiahou clan, yes."
"Hah... Blood of Zhang Fei and of the Acting Commander. Good. No unworthy companion for the road to the underworld. This is the realm's business. The Acting Commander will understand."
Having carved into himself the resolve to bury his bones here, Niu Jin let his momentum explode toward me. The pressure was the same as the day I had first begged Zhang Fei to teach me the martial arts, and my breath caught hard in my throat.
But compared to Zhang Fei, this is light.
That day, merely standing before him had been like a mouse facing a snake, and it had taken everything I had. Now my body moved in faithful answer to my command.
I drove hard off the ground and tracked the charging spear with both eyes, forcing them wide so I would not blink. The spear reflected there was impossibly fast.
I had already drawn every nerve taut, and still I barely dodged. A counter was beyond dreaming. Had my frame not been small, the blade would surely have sprayed blood from some part of me.
"Hup—!"
The Romance's praise of him as a valiant general was not merely Luo Guanzhong's fiction. Niu Jin's spear grew ever rougher, ever more vicious.
How could a wounded man show such strength? Standing at the threshold of life and death, he was burning what remained of his moments.
"Kh—!"
Drops of blood wet the ground. Where the spearhead had grazed my shoulder, pain ran searing, as if fire had caught.
I can't dodge the next one!
That instant of pain had braked me. Instinct screamed that if I tried to evade the next strike, the wound would be worse.
I have to block it.
No shout. Teeth clenched. Both hands locked on the spear until the grip threatened to split. I met the shaft of Niu Jin's descending blow with my own.
The crack of wood on wood rang out. Had I not caught shaft against shaft a little below that blue-gleaming head, the blade would have split my body in two.
It felt as if my shoulder would tear from its socket. I had barely held, but if I stayed like this he would twist the spear and drive the point into me.
I shoved his spear aside with all the strength I had and let the attack slide off. Niu Jin was wounded in the arm as well. The blade passed just before my nose and cut empty air.
The moment I somehow slipped free, I rolled across the ground and tumbled clear.
All of that had been only a few breaths. I thought I was breathing properly, and still the air climbed all the way to my throat.
"Haa... haa..."
"A pity. Blame yourself for taking the field too soon."
Our men were struggling however they could to get close to me, but the Cao army, trying to guard their commander's last moments, was doing the same.
Given the difference in numbers, the Cao forces would collapse before long. They had, however, bought Niu Jin enough time to try to bring me down. Even so, I felt no sense of crisis at all.
"I'm not so sure."
Everything up to now assumed we were facing only common soldiers.
"Focusing only on me was your mistake."
Before an outstanding general, the Cao army's death throes were nothing but a castle of sand.
"What—"
Before Niu Jin could finish, a blade passed through his neck.
The body that had lost its head did not last. It folded like a puppet with its strings cut. As Niu Jin fell, the whole of a blood-soaked giant came into view behind him.
"Father..."
Zhang Fei, who had cut Niu Jin down in a single stroke, looked down at me with his spear hanging loose, blood dripping from it. His eyes were cold.
"This was far too reckless."
"Yes..."
I was already taking it to heart.
If I had not stepped out to block Niu Jin—if I had withdrawn the moment I unhorsed him—if I had not declared myself Zhang Fei's daughter—he would have put escape first no matter what, and my life would never have hung by a thread as it just had.
I had sunk too deep into the heat of the field. Losing my reason, being swallowed by the excitement and the madness a battlefield gives: that, without question, was my fault.
"Fall back to the rear."
"You're pursuing them?"
"Yes."
Zhang Fei wasted no time. He mounted at once.
Cao Ren's army, having broken the encirclement around Jiangling, would be checked by the blocking line Guan Yu had drawn, but the Cao forces outside were just as desperate to tear through that line and rescue him.
Leave Cao Ren be, and Guan Yu would be the one encircled in turn. Zhang Fei had no choice but to be in a hurry.
"I wish you fortune in battle."
He answered with a nod, gathered his men in an instant, and set off in pursuit.
Where the storm had passed, only corpses and the wounded remained. Groans dyed with pain rose on every side, and a lonely wind carried the stench of blood.
A battlefield after the fighting held no glory—only wounds. I, who had crossed the ridge between life and death, barely kept a body heavy with exhaustion upright. As I sank down somewhere suitable, one of our men came over and asked,
"Young lady, are you all right?"
"Yes. I'm only tired, so you needn't worry. And here I'm not a young lady. I'm nothing but a soldier."
"The fighting is over now, isn't it? What's more, the general has gone and everything is in disorder. If you give an order, the men will all follow."
"And who are you, to urge that on me?"
"Your subordinate, Fan Qiang, a company commander."
"Fan Qiang?"
That my brow drew tight at the name was not only because fatigue had loosened me.
Fan Qiang and Zhang Da. How could I forget? The names of the traitors who would cut off Zhang Fei's head and surrender to Sun Quan. More than ten years still remained until Yiling, but I had not known they were already following him from this time.
I put no faith in physiognomy, and yet, hearing the name, his face looked exactly like a jackal waiting only for its chance. He was an opportunist in truth, so it was not entirely wrong.
It was the same now. Strictly speaking I was nothing but a common soldier. I was Zhang Fei's daughter, yes, but Zhang Fei himself had ordered that I receive no special treatment. And yet the moment he was gone, Fan Qiang ignored the chain of command and waited on my orders. A typical opportunist.
By rights I should have ignored him and told him to issue the orders himself, but because of his words the soldiers' attention had already gathered too tightly on me.
If Zhang Fei caught me later I would catch hell for it, but there was no help for that.
"Rescue of the wounded comes first. We'll need to hold funerals for the dead, so gather the bodies."
"But the looting and the spoils..."
I grimaced and glared at Fan Qiang.
"I won't say it twice. See to our own wounded first."
"Yes, yes... Then what shall we do about the soldiers of Sun Quan, the General Who Campaigns Against the Caitiffs?"
"Allies aren't our own men, you mean? Of course they're included. I'll see to it myself."
I was just rising, unwilling to leave matters to a Fan Qiang I could not trust at all, when a pleasant voice reached me, mid-low and beautiful.
"I'll do that."
The face that owned the voice was, even more than the voice itself, a rare handsomeness. It was not merely good looks. An extraordinary appearance that carried its own aura made anyone recognize who he was.
Zhou Yu, Gongjin. Among those who had held the military authority of Wu, he was judged the most outstanding, and his talent shone in so many fields that men always called him accomplished in all things.
The qilin prodigy known as the Beautiful Zhou Lang, beloved of heaven and of men alike, stood before me.
"Zhou Yu..."
"Yes. I am Zhou Yu. You're wounded as well, aren't you? Get treatment. I'll set this place in order."
Gravely hurt as he was, perhaps following the pursuit had been too much for him. Father was already in the chase after Cao Ren, and the Tiger Ministers of Eastern Wu who followed him were there too, so there was no need for Zhou Yu himself to go.
Zhou Yu I could trust with it. He belonged to the side that had sought to embrace Liu Bei's forces rather than shut them out. At his words I brought my hands together in a formal salute.
"As you say."
And so the battle for Nanjun was drawing to its close.
Before the fighting ended—that is, while it was still in full swing.
Zhou Yu, who knew that if the Cao army withdrew it could only be by the north gate, had been watching that side closely.
He had placed Zhang Fei toward the north gate for the same reason. At the sight of Zhang Fei's banner, Cao Ren would realize he could hold no longer and pull back, and that moment could only be now, while Zhang Fei's men had not yet shaken off the fatigue of the march.
Everything flowed as Zhou Yu had expected.
Zhang Fei, a match for ten thousand, and Cao Ren, a general of a thousand, both moved inside the frame Zhou Yu had built. The one who ruled this battlefield was unmistakably Zhou Yu, and victory was coming smoothly into his hands.
Cao Ren's valor had lain outside his expectations. Only after Gan Ning took a thorough beating from Cao Ren, and Zhou Yu himself was badly wounded, did he call Zhang Fei in to stop that martial prowess.
However astonishing the might Cao Ren was displaying, in Zhou Yu's judgment Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were heaven beyond heaven. A strength that seemed to have left the human behind—the kind he had once seen in Sun Ce, his former sworn brother, and in Sun Ce's father, Sun Jian. With both of them committed to this war, Cao Ren would never return unharmed.
Watching Zhang Fei smash the Cao army apart, Zhou Yu confirmed once more that calling him in had been the right judgment.
"Ziming, we should be—"
He was calling to Lü Meng, who had been guarding his side, about to join the field himself, when a shout reached even Zhou Yu's ears.
To follow a sound with one's eyes is instinct, and Zhou Yu was no exception. Seeing one small soldier holding off Niu Jin—Cao Ren's lieutenant, and an able commander—he murmured,
"Is that child the one?"
When he spoke, only half believing, Lü Meng added from beside him,
"Yes. It seems to be the daughter Zhang Fei brought."
"Zhang Fei's daughter. That's right. Zhang Fei is turning back."
"Even so, it ought to count as a merit of sorts. Taking Cao Ren would have been best, of course."
When Niu Jin died to Zhang Fei in a single stroke, Lü Meng clicked his tongue.
"Zhang Fei is formidable indeed. But the daughter is astonishing too. I hear she's only just turning ten. They'll have to mint a new saying: a tiger for a father, a tiger for a daughter."
"So they will. We should go as well."
"Yes, Lieutenant General."
It was an office that would be conferred once Nanjun was taken, but neither Lü Meng nor Zhou Yu made an issue of it. Nanjun had already fallen to them. All that remained was whether Cao Ren would be caught.
Even as Zhou Yu set the finished field to rights, he did not take his eyes off Zhang Fei's daughter. Unlike Zhang Fei, who was harsh with his soldiers, she put the relief of the wounded first, and she treated the men of the Sun house the same way. It was plainly a face different from her father's.
"I'll do that."
And when he spoke to her himself and met her face to face, Zhou Yu had to work not to show his surprise. The face of the deeply cultivated Zhou Yu was as usual, but inwardly he was rather startled.
The reason was simple. Zhang Fei's daughter was more beautiful than he had thought. When he heard that Zhang Fei had brought his daughter, he had thought little of it, but she was far too pretty a child to pass the camp gates.
Even Zhou Yu—called the Beautiful Zhou Lang, and famed as the foremost handsome man under heaven—found Zhang Lan's looks fit to be set beside his own. She was still young, and the impression was strongly that of a cute child, but his eye did not miss even a girl's potential.
"Zhang Lan. Zhang Lan..."
There was the valor to enter the army's gate and stand unflinching even against Cao Ren's lieutenant. There was the character that thought of the soldiers before herself and did not forget what was owed an ally. There was a beauty holding a promise equal to his own, or greater. And even the blood was noble—born of Zhang Fei, a match for ten thousand, and a niece of Xiahou Yuan, Cao Cao's own kin.
If it were this child...
Zhou Yu's thoughts ran deep.