Cao Song (1)
Not long after I dispatched the imperial envoy, Cao Cao marched out for the outskirts of Qingzhou, bearing the Emperor's edict and accompanied by Bao Xin, the Chancellor of Jibei, who served under her.
Having mustered her forces, she led the army in person, crushing every bandit force she came across and sending up victory report after victory report. Liu Dai's soldiers, not yet fully assimilated, fought on the same battlefields alongside Cao Cao's own troops, and with each engagement the two forces bound themselves more tightly together. Victory piled upon victory until morale seemed ready to pierce the heavens, and riding that surge, Cao Cao's army drove toward Qingzhou faster than ever.
At that pace, subjugating the bandits would not take long. No one disputed that Cao Cao would succeed — however numerous the bandits, they were, in the end, nothing more than an unruly rabble.
Even in the original history, those bandits had been blasted apart column by column and sent scrambling; Cao Cao chased down the fleeing men, hammering their exposed backs until they could endure no more and surrendered wholesale. She took them in and forged them into the famous Qingzhou Army, and her power swelled mightily.
And then Yuan Shu, unable to simply stand by and watch, led his army into Yanzhou to secure influence there — the clash later generations would call the Battle of Kuangting. At the time, Cao Cao was allied with Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu's enemy, so for Yuan Shu it must have been a choice he couldn't afford not to make. Gongsun Zan, nominally on his side, was too busy trading blows with Yuan Shao back and forth across You Province and Jizhou to spare him a glance, and that old fox Tao Qian, for all his enormous strength, kept failing to punch through Cao Cao's lines and accomplished nothing of note.
As for the Battle of Kuangting that Yuan Shu had launched with such swagger — Cao Cao won it and booted him all the way to the edge of Gangdong, so I wasn't worried. Judging by what Yuan Shu had been up to lately, some colossal disaster was bound to blow up in the Yuan Shu–Liu Biao camp sooner or later anyway.
In the original history, one rather large event did fall between Cao Cao's formation of the Qingzhou Army and Yuan Shu's Battle of Kuangting: the Sanfu Rebellion, in which Wang Yun and Lü Bu killed Dong Zhuo, and Li Jue and Guo Si then defeated Lü Bu — the very woman who had betrayed Dong Zhuo — and drove her from the capital.
That Li Jue and Guo Si could beat Lü Bu at all owed a great deal to a proposal from Jia Xu, who served under them at the time. On Jia Xu's advice, the two circled the outskirts of Chang'an spreading the rumor that Wang Yun intended to put every person of the region to the sword. The terrified populace flocked to their banner; joining forces with Dong Zhuo's remnants, men who shared their plight, they swelled their strength until at last they shattered Lü Bu in battle.
If only Wang Yun had reined in his temper a little and accepted the surrender of Dong Zhuo's old officers, it would all have been avoided. Ordering every man who had ever served under Dong Zhuo to die — did he imagine they would sit quietly and oblige? They had armies. Of course they fought back.
But the Sanfu Rebellion is an event that will never happen now, so let it go. From what I heard, during the siege of Tianshui it was Lü Bu — the same woman who had been first through the gates raising hell — who cut down Li Jue and Guo Si. Li Jue was halved at the waist in a single stroke, upper body and lower parting company: Li here, Jue there. Guo Si's head left his shoulders in two strokes flat, his name beheaded along with him — leaving nothing behind but "Si."
According to the Book of Wei's "Biography of Lü Bu" and the Records of Heroes, Guo Si really did once cross blades with Lü Bu in single combat; there is a passage saying that when Guo Si took a thrust from Lü Bu's weapon, the cavalry behind him came galloping up to pull him out. This time, it seemed, he hadn't even been granted that much.
Bandits from Qingzhou and Xuzhou were already creeping into Yanzhou on quiet feet, so Cao Cao would only press the chase harder, and before long she would beat every last one of them flat. After that, when Yuan Shu came charging at Chenliu, she would stop him cold with a general engagement at Kuangting, in Dongjun, Yanzhou — the massing of great hosts in a single region to fight a decisive battle. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that battle is skipped entirely, so Yuan Shu simply appears one day, already ensconced around Gangdong as though he had always been there.
Beaten by Cao Cao and chased into Gangdong, Yuan Shu then became what everyone knows him as: the punching-bag villain who fixated endlessly on Xuzhou only to get smacked down again and again. And that much was fine by me. In this world, what was there not to enjoy about Yuan Shu — the man who had raised the coalition army — getting the living daylights beaten out of him by Cao Cao and flattened into the dirt?
But one thing gnawed at me.
Cao Cao. And massacre.
Put those two together, and one infamous event springs to every mind: the Xuzhou Massacre. It stands as THE massacre of Chinese history — the one that springs to mind first, so far beyond precedent that all anyone can manage is a weak "Whoa... you're really gonna do that?"
And when did that massacre occur? Barely any time after Cao Cao drove Yuan Shu from the field at Kuangting.
The cause was simple. Tao Qian had butchered Cao Cao's family — the kin who had taken refuge in Xuzhou to escape the wars — to the last soul. Deprived of her father and brothers in a stroke, Cao Cao seems to have gone genuinely, truly mad with rage, and she swept everything clean wherever she passed. Several hundred thousand men and women were slaughtered or buried alive until the Si River itself was dammed with corpses and could flow no longer; in the end, in some counties, travelers vanished from the roads altogether. Cao Cao's army scorched Xuzhou without sparing so much as a chicken or a dog, and the people no longer dared approach the ruined cities. Astonishingly, every word of this is actually written in the histories.
Because of it, Xuzhou — long hailed as the richest land under heaven — collapsed outright. Cao Cao trampled and devastated everything in her path; the bandits, scenting their moment, threw themselves into pillage; and even Yuan Shu, who had been sniveling in Gangdong since his beating, slunk north into Xuzhou while styling himself the Earl of Xu. You can gather from that "not even chickens or dogs" line how thoroughly Cao Cao demolished the region's foundations. Even those who somehow weathered the calamity were forced in the end to abandon Xuzhou and emigrate elsewhere, and the number of people who lost their homes and wandered the realm must have been immense.
There is a record that even Zhuge Liang — the Zhuge Liang everyone knows if they know anything at all about the Three Kingdoms — fled to Jing Province around this time, her clan unable to escape the massacre's reach and suffering grievously for it. Even Xun Yu, the Talent to Assist Kings, wore herself out trying to turn Cao Cao's gaze elsewhere, urging her to stop tormenting Xuzhou and stabilize Yanzhou instead. Fat chance. What came next was the second invasion of Xuzhou.
In truth, the single greatest reason Cao Cao never unified the realm was this very massacre. It goes without saying that Zhuge Liang, a daughter of the Xuzhou gentry, fled to Jing Province and ended up beneath Liu Bei, Cao Cao's sworn enemy; and Lu Su — the very man who at the Battle of Red Cliffs insisted on allying with Liu Bei because Cao Cao simply had to be resisted — was himself a son of Xuzhou. Zhuge Liang, once under Liu Bei, clung to Cao Cao's ankles to the very end, and because Lu Su drew Liu Bei into the war, Cao Cao was defeated at Red Cliffs as well, and the unification of the realm slipped from her grasp forever.
It is worth noting that the soldiers under Liu Bei — the woman who spent her early years routed and fleeing from pillar to post — were so fiercely loyal that even after a defeat they would seek her out on their own and help gather the army back together; and they, too, were natives of Xuzhou. And when Cao Cao marched on Jing Province, the people who fled in terror at her heels, following Liu Bei into exile — that, too, was the long shadow of the Xuzhou Massacre.
Even after Cao Cao herself met her end, the hatred of Xuzhou's people carried on unbroken for more than a thousand years. I could scarcely begin to fathom how terrifying that hatred must have been. Isn't that what they call karmic retribution?
Had Cao Cao never carried out the massacre, she would never have bound herself in blood feud to every soul in Xuzhou — and perhaps, just perhaps, she might have founded a dynasty that unified the realm.
So why did Cao Cao do something that gained her nothing? The popular verdict: she had set out to kill Tao Qian, and when it didn't go her way, she took her frustration out on the people. Say "Cao Cao" and most people picture a cold, ruthless colossus without blood or tears — but in truth she was an enormously emotional creature.
To avert the atrocity of the Xuzhou Massacre, I had done as I did when appointing her Governor of Yanzhou — dispatched an imperial envoy, and at the same time sent Cao Cao a letter of my own. The whole question was whether she would actually move as my letter asked. I had given her a course of action, and the justification to carry it out. If she ignored it and the massacre happened anyway... then I would have no choice but to break my silence and attack Yanzhou to stop it. And if it came to that, Cao Cao and I would end as enemies.
The letter Cao Cao had once sent me read thus:
I look forward to the day when you and I might walk this realm together.
— Cao Cao
Yes. I hoped for that too. The first fork in the road that would decide what Cao Cao was to me was slowly drawing near.
The army under Cao Cao's command, hot on the heels of the bandits who had poured into Yanzhou, reached Jibei on the edge of Qingzhou.
"Spineless bastards. One loss, and they bolt without even putting up a fight?" Xiahou Dun, campaigning at Cao Cao's side, spat out in disgust.
The bandits who had invaded Yanzhou, having taken one crushing defeat at Cao Cao's hands, were in morale free fall and fleeing nonstop. Xiahou Dun whipped her great saber through the empty air, whish, whish — and the air shrieked along its arc with a murderous hiss.
Watching her, Cao Cao smoothed her down with an even voice. "Steady, Yuanrang. The damage is light — isn't that a good thing for us?"
"Well, sure, but..."
Xiahou Dun eyed her lord. "...Then why the hell have you been grinning like that this whole time?"
"Hm? It's nothing."
Nothing, my foot. When had Cao Cao ever been like this, even once? Xiahou Dun had watched her since childhood, and she would stake her life on it: not once, not ever. She was certain of it — something had happened, something that had put Cao Cao in a very good mood indeed.
Xiahou Dun kept shooting her doubtful looks, as much as to say out with it already, but Cao Cao only let the glances slide right off her.