The Black Mountain Bandits (4)
Having dealt with the Black Mountain Bandits, I was combing through the mountain, seeing to the cleanup.
"Flatten every last stronghold and gather up whatever valuables are inside."
The hoard the bandits had amassed was considerable. Beyond the foodstuffs, I spotted gold and rare gems in more than a few places—plain proof of just how ruthlessly these men had plundered.
"Who goes there!"
A handful of Black Mountain Bandits who had luckily been left out of the battle stood guard, but they were hardly a problem.
"You know this is our territory, right? Turn back this instant, or our boss won't let it slide!"
"What, living buried up in the mountains made the news travel slow?"
At Lü Bu's words, she gave a signal, and a soldier beside her stepped forward. Impaled on the tip of his spear was a head, and at the sight of it, the bandit guards' faces began to drain white.
I couldn't tell how he had died, but it was Zhang Yan's head—slain in utter misery, tears and snot streaking down his face. Lü Bu had forgotten to bring it along, apparently, so she'd dashed off with a soldier to hack it from the corpse. Whatever that soldier had witnessed in the process, he spent a good while frozen solid afterward.
"How about it? Want me to make you look just like him?"
"Aigoo! Right this way, honored guests! What are you standing around for?! Open the gate, hurry!"
At Lü Bu's murderous tone, the bandit on watch broke into a sheepish grin and swung the gate open. Quick on the uptake, that one—he would probably survive a good long while.
It was a strange feeling, looting the looters. Not that my conscience pricked me—these were men who had stripped others blind all the same.
As if to disprove that the Black Mountain Bandits had once numbered a hundred thousand, several villages already dotted the mountainside. They held not only the bandits' dependents but also many who had been dragged there and treated as slaves. There were surprisingly ordinary families as well, and plenty of cases where men and women taken by force had been kept as spouses.
Sorting these people out by their crimes on the spot would have been impossible, so I resolved to untangle it slowly later. The bandits who had lost their will to fight and surrendered were organized into the ranks, with the promise that diligent service would wipe their sins clean. As for those who never let go of their bandit days and kept stirring up trouble, I handed the authority over to Zhang Liao and Gao Shun to deal with as they saw fit.
Zhang Liao and Gao Shun—both of them famed generals, gifted at commanding troops. They would find some way to win the Black Mountain Bandits over and mold them into loyal soldiers.
That said, piling everything onto those two alone would be rough on them. The thirty thousand bandits who had surrendered as prisoners were one matter, but the countless commoners who had come attached to them were a problem all their own.
I was beginning to grasp, vaguely, why the Black Mountain Bandits had staked their very lives on plunder.
"So, anyway—happen to have any good ideas?"
I asked Zhang Jue, who was smiling nearby. Since fleeing Julu, the Zhang sisters had been running a clinic while lending a hand with official paperwork in their spare time. This was the woman who had once led anywhere from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand followers. Hoping she might hand me a solution, I gazed at her with the most earnest eyes I could muster, and Zhang Jue slowly opened her mouth.
"From what I've seen, there is a great deal of ownerless land around the cities."
"That there is."
Compared to our next-door neighbor Jizhou, Bing Province's population was downright wretched. The northern tribes killed and carried people off day in and day out, and the Black Mountain Bandits had lent a hand in that too. The population was scarce to begin with, and it only kept shrinking—and since the rest of the realm knew exactly what conditions here were like, not even migrants came. When even the land inside the city walls sat ownerless, imagine the land beyond them. Nothing but vast, empty plains.
"What if we lent that land to the people, and each year collected a portion of their harvest as tax?"
"Now that's a fine idea."
Why had that never occurred to me? It genuinely felt like a good one. Do that, and mountains of grain would pile up for the army. ...Though with Bing Province this full of mountains, maybe even that was asking a lot.
"In an age as turbulent as this one, the people long for two things above all else."
Zhang Jue looked at me with amber eyes that glittered like jewels.
"Land on which they can settle, and work by which they can live."
"......"
"Do that, and the people will naturally come to support you, Lord Jeong Reung—and the loyalty of the Black Mountain Bandits, whose families now count among those people, will harden in turn."
I nodded.
"Extend the same opportunity for work to the poor within the cities as well, and I believe your burdens will lighten considerably."
"Zhang Ye."
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
"......?"
It felt ridiculous to say, but not a single person in the Bing Province I now governed was using their head. Not that I was one to talk. Haven't I said, time and again, that I'm not that clever? If anything, I leaned toward dim. The sum total of my achievements was trimming taxes and running a bit of relief work, and that was it.
Lü Bu. Zhang Liao. Gao Shun. They fought superbly. In a head-on brawl, no lineup in the world matched them—short of some stratagem slipping past their guard, they would not lose to anyone. And if things ever truly turned dire, I could always put Seo Yeo at the front line. Whether she would actually step onto a battlefield and leave my side was another question, but if I begged pathetically enough, surely she would oblige.
The problem was that even when we won the battle, I had no idea how to collect the winnings afterward. In gaming terms, it was like winning the team fight and then dithering over whether to crack the base or secure the buff—only to fumble both. Anyone watching would be so exasperated they could breathe fire, and no one would blame them.
"...Am I to take it that you accept my proposal, then?"
"I do. Do as you see fit."
Hers was a flustered expression I hadn't seen since I talked her around at Julu. Savoring a face I hadn't witnessed in quite some time, I returned to my paperwork.
"You've heard the news too, haven't you? The people who came in with you have started farming."
"We have, sir!"
So it was true—ownerless land granted out, a share of the harvest collected in return. Far from being worked like slaves, the new lord had handed their families another chance at life.
"You lot, who did nothing but steal from others and live off wild beasts and berries in the mountains, can finally live like human beings."
"......"
"Why no answer? Has the discipline training not stuck?"
"No, sir!"
The Black Mountain Bandits standing at rigid attention thundered their reply at Lü Bu's words.
"Well, given the season, this year and the next we'll simply have to shoulder the cost ourselves."
It was already mid-autumn—the time of year when winter came hurtling in. The season when even those hardy nomads curled in on themselves and made ready for the year to come.
The next year was closing in.
The Yellow Turban Rebellion that had erupted the year before had at last been crushed, its suppression spanning two full years. But the fire in the people's hearts, lit at the Yellow Turbans' spark, was already burning slowly through the Han.
The times were in upheaval.
Lü Bu could feel it in her bones. A world already brutal to survive in was about to grow far more chaotic still. Soon would come an age in which the weak and powerless were robbed, endlessly, of everything they had—and made to suffer for it.
Something in Lü Bu's grave gaze must have registered, for the mood among the Black Mountain Bandits shifted subtly as well.
"Your families are yours to protect with your own two hands. That's why you took up weapons in the first place, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir!"
"I like that answer. Then let's start with an easy jog, shall we?"
"Sir!"
Lü Bu flashed a murderous grin.
"Full armor and weapons, of course."
"......"
"Tsk. Gone quiet on me again?"
"No, sir!!"
"Then run!"
Watching Lü Bu drive the newly enlisted bandits through their drills, Zhang Liao allowed herself a small smile.
"We'd best train hard ourselves, if we don't mean to be shamed by General Lü."
"Agreed."
Gao Shun, at Zhang Liao's side, answered tersely.
"You're supposed to go bounding up mountains for fun, so why is your stamina this pathetic? Was all of that just empty rumor?"
"No, siirr!!"
"One extra drop of sweat now is one less drop of blood later! Run faster!"
Running alongside something as inhuman as Lü Bu, the soldiers were the ones getting a taste of death.
Seo Yeo's duty was to remain at Jeong Reung's side and cut off anything that might bring him harm. That work, naturally, knew no difference between day and night—and so Seo Yeo kept her every nerve fixed on him around the clock.
"......"
Ordinary eyes—yet in Seo Yeo's gaze, more striking than anything in the world. Hair lovelier than any other. Even the line of his throat, moving so pleasingly whenever he opened his mouth to speak. Seo Yeo beheld every bit of the scene without a trace of selfish desire.
......
...Though perhaps the tiniest trace had slipped in.
Jeong Reung attracted threats to his life with an almost eerie regularity. Kidnappers hunting ransom, of course, and killers with no motive but murder itself. Blind arrows whistling at him across a battlefield were the least of it—assassins' strikes had flown at him beyond counting.
To guard the man who forever walked the rim of death. That alone was the mission to which Seo Yeo devoted herself.
If. If, truly, the day ever came when she failed to protect him—
For one instant, Seo Yeo's eyes flashed with something chilling, and Zhang Jue happened to witness it. Half-knowing what Seo Yeo would become were Jeong Reung ever taken from the world, Zhang Jue shivered despite herself.
"...Please, stay alive."
"??"
At Zhang Jue's out-of-nowhere words, Jeong Reung could only wear a question mark on his face.