General Star (3)
In this era of the Han dynasty, physicians who healed the sick were held in considerable contempt. Healers who save lives, treated with scorn—how does that make any sense? Well, don't go expecting anything rational from an age as chaotic as this one. From a modern man's standpoint, the way people of the past saw the world was riddled with things I simply couldn't wrap my head around, and the nobility's disdain for physicians now was hardly any different.
But that very fact worked in my favor. Since everyone else scorned healers, the moment I improved their treatment by even a little, physicians who caught wind of it came pouring into Luoyang like a burst dam. The capital was packed with every convenience and commercial amenity there was, its well-paved roads made travel easy, and on top of it all it carried the symbolic weight of being the Han capital—strange, really, if physicians didn't put down roots here.
Naturally enough—inevitably, even—my improvements drew faint murmurs of discontent from within the court. Scholars devoted to learning deserved even more honor than they already received, the grumblers sniffed, so how dare we exalt those worthless creatures who fiddled with herbs in some back-alley room. Funny thing, though: the men who talked like that always seemed to be the first to die whenever illness found them. The established scholar-officials were so hopelessly ossified between the ears that by now I couldn't even be bothered to bring it up. As for those who couldn't read the tide of the times, they had been demoted with Her Majesty the Emperor's approval, so there was nothing to worry about on that score.
"A physician I know... hmm..."
At my question—did I know of anyone suitable?—Zhang Jue sank into deep thought.
"Is this person far from Luoyang?"
"Not that far."
Nanyang Commandery in Jing Province was remarkably close to Luoyang. Even on foot, a generous four to five days would see you there—and on horseback, far quicker still.
Having heard me out, Zhang Jue tossed out another question.
"What are his symptoms like?"
"Hmm... now, how was it again..."
I rifled through my memory. By all accounts he'd been driven to the very brink of death in an ambush, so he'd likely been cut by spear or blade, or perhaps caught a few arrows besides.
The instant she heard my answer, Zhang Jue narrowed her eyes ever so slightly and studied me.
"Don't tell me this patient of yours..."
"That's right."
As her voice trailed off delicately, I gave a small nod. Only one famous man in the whole world was in such a state at the moment, after all.
Zhang Jue, it seemed, had received reports of her own.
"Is there some particular reason you'd go to such lengths?"
Having caught on to what I was aiming at, she asked in a puzzled voice.
"You want to know why that Yuan Shu runs rampant, with no idea of his own place?"
I answered her question as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Because he has that Sun Jian under his command. That's why he gets to rampage however he pleases."
In actual history, Yuan Shu had cut a remarkably incompetent figure in matters of war. The few victories he did manage were sly ones, snatched through backdoor schemes—dispatching assassins against enemy commanders, setting rivals at each other's throats—not once had he won by purely commanding soldiers in open battle.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Sun Jian is shown returning to his home base of Changsha after the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition, yet in reality he went on serving under Yuan Shu long after the coalition fell apart. It was Sun Jian, after all, who had handed Yuan Shu his present stronghold of Nanyang Commandery in Jing Province. And the reason Yuan Shu lost to Cao Cao at the Battle of Kuangting, I suspected, owed much to his having absurdly thrown away Sun Jian beforehand.
At my words, Zhang Jue posed another question.
"In that case, would there not be little need to help Sun Jian—Yuan Shu's general—any further?"
"And yet I can't quite write the man off entirely, either," I said, gently pushing back. "Sun Jian serves under Yuan Shu, first and last, as a guest general."
That much was plain from the mere fact that Sun Jian's officers had never been absorbed wholesale into Yuan Shu's army after his death. Men like Huang Gai, Han Dang, and Cheng Pu followed Sun Jian's son, Sun Ce, out on his conquest of Gangdong, joining forces along the way with his sworn sister Zhou Yu and gathering men of talent until their strength grew formidable—but none of that mattered just now, so let's move on.
"And Yuan Shu knows it perfectly well. That's exactly why he keeps Sun Jian at his side—to keep an eye on him."
It was true that Yuan Shu made a show of cherishing Sun Jian, but trace his actual conduct and all he ever did was milk the man's military genius for all it was worth, while the "rewards" that trickled down were nothing but hollow offices of Yuan Shu's own invention. Just as depicted in the Romance, he really did play games with Sun Jian's grain supply. Sun Jian rode his horse through an entire night to prove his sincerity and win the shipments back—but what must that have done to his heart?
Yuan Shu, at present, had a blade pressed right up under his chin. Beside him, exactly as I had foreseen, Cao Cao was taking the bandit hordes of the Qingzhou region under her wing and swelling her strength. And from below, Liu Biao—the very man Yuan Shu had first picked a quarrel with—was now creeping in to apply pressure of his own. Yuan Shu would move his armies, whatever it took, to turn the situation around: drive Cao Cao out of Yanzhou, seize the province for himself and harden his interior, then join hands with Gongsun Zan to squeeze Yuan Shao from north and south.
The plan wasn't bad. It wasn't bad at all—except that none of it was possible without first beating Cao Cao.
The man did show the occasional glimmer of statesmanship, but in the end, Yuan Shu was Yuan Shu. In a situation where he could barely keep himself afloat, would he truly go out of his way for the Sun family? In his own mind he might have believed he'd done right by them at every turn, but shabby treatment there had certainly been.
I said, letting a touch of cheer slip into my voice. "Sun Jian can't be blind to all that. Hasn't a certain resentment toward Yuan Shu been piling up?"
"That, I could not say for certain."
"Even so, it's worth a try to win him over."
Besides, even if Sun Jian died, would the Sun family simply crumble? If history ran its original course, they would sooner or later put down roots in Gangdong and stand a fair chance of rising against me one day. All the more reason to extend a conciliatory hand now. And who was it that succeeded Sun Jian? Sun Ce—that's who. A man who had never once known defeat, whose valor was said to rival that Hegemon-King of Western Chu who could tear mountains up by the roots and whose spirit towered over the age—hence they called him the Little Conqueror.
But think on what sort of man that Hegemon-King had been, and it became clear the name Little Conqueror was never meant as pure praise. If all they'd meant was that the fellow fought well, they'd have pinned a Match for Ten Thousand on him like anyone else—why insist on Little Conqueror? Sun Ce did fight well, that much was true, but his temper was every bit as vicious as his sword arm was fierce, and the nickname carried a quiet sneer within it: the insinuation that a man this foul would come to a violent, unnatural death, cut down young and never living out the years heaven had allotted him.
Those predictions struck true to the letter. Sun Ce, who had managed to earn hatred in every direction, died at barely twenty-five, and his younger sister Sun Quan succeeded him. He had been ambushed by assassins nursing old grudges while out enjoying a hunt, and the wounds he took that day festered until they killed him. Even that Hegemon-King with the rotten temper had lived into his early thirties...
Then again, Xiang Yu was the sort who'd have pulped a hall full of assassins with his bare hands, all alone. Was that the difference? I honestly couldn't picture Xiang Yu falling to a handful of hired blades. You could have called Sun Ce a discount version of Xiang Yu and not been far wrong.
If someone owed me their life, wouldn't they move heaven and earth to repay it, whatever it took? Even beasts, it was said, trotted faithfully at the heels of whoever spared them. Short of a truly extraordinary bastard, no one simply waved away a debt like that. And the Tiger—the very beast behind Sun Jian's own epithet—once it knew whose hand had spared its life, how could it not follow that man?
Watching my confidence, Zhang Jue asked, "And if the Sun family should disregard that debt of grace, what would you do then?"
"Then it ends there," I replied without missing a beat. Ignoring a life debt and declaring open enmity against me? That's as good as announcing they'd like to be Emperor themselves. Even Xiang Yu, that walking dumpster fire of a personality, had cherished his own flesh and blood. Unless they were truly lower than beasts, no one stabbed in the back the man to whom they owed their family's lives.
I told Zhang Jue, my voice flat. "People like that, you just wipe out their whole damn clan. Simple."
"General-in-Chief. I do recall asking you not to use such unrefined language?"
"...Sorry."
Every so often words like that sprang out of me before I knew it. The grinding years I'd endured in Bing Province had made me this way. Anyway. Bing Province's fault.
"But surely Yuan Shu's domain must have at least one physician?"
It was a fair question, and I gave it a fair answer. "Think back on the kind of governance Yuan Shu practiced in Nanyang Commandery."
"Ah."
Zhang Jue nodded, catching on at once.
Governing Nanyang, Yuan Shu had plundered the very people he was meant to protect, dragged the young off into forced conscription, and indulged in luxury while behaving like a man with no reins at all. His lands had never known a peaceful day, and the people had suffered for it without end—would any physician in that wasteland step forward for Sun Jian, a guest general under such a lord? I had my doubts. And as I'd just mentioned, physicians in the Han era were a thoroughly despised profession; if Yuan Shu persecuted them, that was to be expected, and favors were beyond imagining. Worse, right next door sat Luoyang, where physicians were treated well? Any physician in Nanyang Commandery would have cleared out of there long ago.
I steered us back to the matter at hand.
"So. Do you have a physician to recommend?"
"...If it's a physician who could treat Sun Jian with certainty, right now, there is one."
After a moment's deliberation, Zhang Jue let it slip out.
Somehow, I had a feeling I knew exactly who she meant.
A smile touched the corners of her mouth. "I will send a personal letter, so please wait just a little while."
"All right. Thank you."
Could I truly draw the Sun family over to my side? We would simply have to wait and see.