Bing Province (1)
A land the Xiongnu and the Xianbei never tired of descending upon to raid and plunder. And — lest things grow quiet once the Yellow Turban Rebellion finally erupted — a region insane enough to throw the Black Mountain Bandits into the bargain as well.
Bing Province.
One such tribe alone was enough to drive a man out of his mind, and here two of them lay stacked atop each other. It was a private circle of hell, no two ways about it.
Double the raids. Double the plunder. Double the raiders. Bing Province was the runt of China — the land that took a beating the moment it looked like easy pickings.
And in that very Bing Province, I was born as the son of Ding Yuan — a son whose existence history itself never recorded. Not as the grasshopper who would one day lop off Ding Yuan's head, mind you, but as her true son.
One oddity was that Ding Yuan was my mother, not my father — but I gathered within moments of drawing my first breath that this hardly mattered. Surviving this neck of the woods left precious little time for idle thoughts like that.
I'd stake my life on it: that farmer so leisurely tilling his field over there had learned to swing a blade far better than he'd ever learned to farm. Already a mean-looking face, made meaner still by the scar slashing across it. Thick forearms, muscle rippling with every movement. The longer I stared, the less certain I became — that man is a farmer... right?
"What do you think you're doing out here?"
Deep in my musings, I turned toward the irritable voice at my side. Fierce, blood-red eyes met mine — the eyes of a beast sizing up its prey. A girl in dark crimson clothes, her floor-length red hair bound into twin tails, stood glaring at me over a viciously barbed halberd slung across her shoulder.
Lü Bu Fengxian.
When Ding Yuan had turned out to be my mother rather than my father, I'd told myself it couldn't be — and sure enough, even Lü Bu, who in the original history had shown Ding Yuan the ultimate in "filial devotion" by taking her head, had been reborn a woman.
"Galloping around again on one of your precious 'inspections'? Keep that up and something really bad is going to happen, I'm telling you."
Scowling, Lü Bu aimed a fresh volley of nagging my way. And she had a point — wandering Bing Province alone was genuinely reckless. The tribes were one thing, but bandits had a habit of appearing the moment you looked distracted. To raiders and bandits alike, a prize as precious as me was a succulent target — all the more so because there wasn't a soul in Bing Province who didn't know my mother, the Inspector of Bingzhou and a high official of the realm, would drop dead for me on the spot. If the worst came to pass, the tribes could at least bolt beyond China's borders; what I couldn't fathom was how bandits planned to answer for laying a hand on me afterward. Either way, there were plenty of eyes on me.
In answer to her fretting, I gave a couple of pats to the shoulder of the girl standing guard at my side.
"That's what the bodyguard's for."
At that, Lü Bu's eyes flicked to the girl I'd patted. Chestnut hair cropped short, about Lü Bu's own height, the girl stood rooted to the spot without so much as a twitch.
"If it's her, I suppose there's no problem... but still."
Even Lü Bu — who'd write off just about anyone alive as a weakling — let the words die on her lips as she studied the girl beside me. Sword hanging at her hip, a handsome one at that, the girl stared dead ahead as if whatever we were saying was none of her concern.
"S-still, two is better than one, right? If you want, I could help out too?"
So that was what this was about? It made no difference to me — if Lü Bu of all people was volunteering as my guard, I could only be grateful. Betrayal? I'd watched her ever since I arrived, and this Lü Bu didn't strike me as an easy betrayal waiting to happen. So she'd cycled through three fathers in the original history; none of that had happened here yet. I'd stay careful, of course, but I had no intention of pushing Lü Bu away over paranoid what-ifs.
The instant I opened my mouth to tell her to do as she pleased, the gaze of the girl who'd been fixed straight ahead swung toward Lü Bu.
"......"
Suddenly, the air around us seemed to plunge several degrees.
"...Uh, sorry! Just remembered I've got somewhere to be!"
"Yeah?"
"So I'll think it over and tell you later, when she's not... around. I'm going now, so quit staring at me! Agh, seriously!"
Locking eyes with the girl's chestnut gaze, Lü Bu broke into a cold sweat, summoned a show of bluster, and bolted from the spot.
A look that could frighten even Lü Bu into flight. What a terrifying child.
I'd first met her while re-plundering the grain the tribes had plundered, to hand it back out among the people. Her mother had died the day she was born, they said, and her father had been swept up in some fight and killed just as suddenly. For reasons no one bothered to explain, the slums had written her off as a monster and left her to rot — but the sight of her sitting all alone before her parents' graves, so lonely it ached to watch, moved me to bring her home. I did this often enough that my mother let the swelling household pass without comment.
With the girl installed under our roof, I naturally asked her name.
"What's your name?"
"......"
"Your name. What is it?"
"......"
Whether she had none or couldn't speak it, the girl gave no answer.
"You don't know your own name?"
Shake, shake.
"You know it, but you can't say it?"
Nod.
Well, that was honest, at least.
Can't say her name...
Then she ought to have gone by some alias, but this artless child simply answered my questions truthfully. Being unable to speak your name usually means there's something shameful behind it — and nine times out of ten, that shame traces back to a capital crime. If a child far too young to have committed any such crime still couldn't speak her name, then her forebears must have been guilty of the gravest treason of all.
High treason.
...Rebels?
Oh, come off it. No way.
It varied by ruler, but rebels were usually exterminated to the third degree of kin at the lightest, the ninth at the worst. How would rebels even survive? The hunters would come with fire in their eyes and butcher the very last one of them.
......
And yet — what if some band of them had survived and slipped away? What if this girl truly was the daughter of a rebel house, and the central government ever found out?
'Dude. Why are you raising a rebel's descendant?'
'Dude. Don't tell me...?'
Horrible, even to imagine.
Even now, it wasn't too late. Send the girl back to the slums, feign ignorance, and the whole thing could still be unwound. Think about it coldly, and that was unquestionably the right call.
And yet there I stood, looking down at the girl still clutching my hand, trembling.
Back in the slums, she had taken my hand so carefully, flinching and shivering, as if even that much might be snatched away. What had she been so afraid of? She must have assumed I'd send her straight back. So why had she followed me anyway? Because she couldn't bring herself to give up hope.
A child who couldn't have been more than ten. Parents dead, shunned by everyone, abandoned in the slums. Too honest to tell a single lie, even with the terror of going back hanging over her. ...How was anyone supposed to abandon a child like that?
I resolved to help her, and she didn't refuse my hand. That was all that mattered.
That's what I told myself, anyway — I could be barking up the wrong tree. It might all be nothing but my own paranoid delusion.
I crouched down until the girl and I were eye to eye. Trembling as she was, she still met my gaze head-on.
"Knowing your name but not being able to say it — that means there's a reason, right?"
...Nod.
Eyes screwed shut, the girl nodded.
"Then would it be all right if I gave you a new one?"
"......"
At my next question, her closed eyes flew open, round with surprise.
Stroking the scrawny girl's hair, I said,
"First things first — let's get you washed up. New clothes, too. And you have to eat, all right?"
Scrubbed clean and dried off, the girl was changed almost beyond recognition. Call it fatally cute — like a blank-faced doll that had up and come to life.
Before I knew it, I was stroking the hair of the girl perched on my knee.
"So? Have you thought it over?"
Nod.
"May I give you a name?"
...Nod.
She nodded at my offer.
I'd chewed over names the entire time she bathed, but nothing had clicked. I hadn't known naming a person on the spot was this hard — not that a name was, in the end, anything more than a label. As long as it wasn't too rustic, it would do, wouldn't it? After all that agonizing, I'd landed on something I was quietly proud of.
"Seo, for 'each other.' Yeo, for 'to be together.'"
A child whose parents had died, whom everyone had turned away, left entirely alone. I named her out of the wish that, from this day forward, she might have someone to be together with.
"Seo Yeo."
A clan name? Er... let's just move on.
"......"
Just as I was congratulating myself on my naming genius, the girl stirred.
"Thank... you."
At the sound of her voice — the first I'd ever heard from her — I lowered my gaze. She was crying.
"You don't like it?"
She wasn't crying because the name was strange... right? I asked, just in case, but she shook her head. What a relief.
The girl — Seo Yeo — smiled through her tears.
An awl in a sack — so the old saying goes: a person of true talent cannot stay hidden, however deep they bury themselves. Seo Yeo was that saying made flesh.
At the start, she was trained in service like every other orphan I'd taken in — sweeping, laundry, that sort of thing. Nominally simple work, though for a child her age it was no small burden. Yet Seo Yeo finished every last task without a flicker of strain or complaint, then drifted back to circle my side like a little satellite. In those days, I took it for exhaustion she was politely concealing.
The moment she first stood out in our household was nothing dramatic. The servants had gathered at the storehouse to shift supplies when a child began hoisting rice sacks — sacks grown men grunted over — several at a time, all by herself. Yes. Not one. Several. Seo Yeo stacked the sacks layer upon layer like a mason raising a tower, then carried the whole thing off in a single trip.
Strength gifted from birth.
Seeing that, my mother resolved to raise Seo Yeo not as a maid but as my personal guard. I'd never been one to sit still at home, always off roaming somewhere, so from her side the worry must have been bottomless. The girl showed a gift for the martial arts, and trotted at my heels like a puppy — my mother likely judged her loyalty beyond reproach as well. And so she began inviting instructors from outside to teach Seo Yeo the sword, and Seo Yeo's talent for it surpassed all imagining.
One bout.
That was how many it took for a girl who had never once held a sword to defeat an instructor who prided himself on his edge work.
At first it looked like she was deflecting — no. She simply smashed the weapon clean out of the man's grip with raw strength and hammered his suddenly empty flank. One blow, and the instructor toppled with his eyes rolled white; at the sheer ferocity of it, the whole household lost its tongue. Everything that man had taught her amounted to a beginner's grip — roughly how to hold a sword, and nothing more. Whatever he had felt in that bout, the instructor collected his treatment fee and scurried off the moment he could stand, washing his hands of the whole enterprise.
My mother demanded to know where on earth I'd fished such a thing out of, and I refused to speak to her for a good while, telling her not to call Seo Yeo a thing. After that she watched her tongue and hired fresh instructors — every last one of whom lost to Seo Yeo in their very first match. Launching grown men with a wooden sword was the least of it: punches, kicks, even headbutts. Putting techniques she plainly had never been taught to enthusiastic use, knocking people flat, she left everyone keeping a careful half-step back.
Seo Yeo didn't care one whit how they treated her. I, apparently, was the exception — the single time I jokingly put distance between us, she was crushed on the spot. Her eyes went wide as saucers, and from exactly that state, tears the size of marbles came dripping down. Thrown into a panic, I had no choice but to wrap Seo Yeo in my arms and coax her for a good long while.
People clucked their tongues at her overwhelming strength and talent, and through it all, Seo Yeo kept right on growing.
Right up to that point, I had been certain this girl was Lü Bu. Even for Lü Bu she seemed a shade too strong — but say "human weapon out of Bing Province," and who else could it be? I did spare a thought now and then for why Lü Bu would hide her name, but I figured she had her circumstances and let it slide.
That is, until the day I watched a red-haired girl send a tribe of raiders flying — literally all by herself.
"Come at me, you cowardly bastards!"
A sword in each hand — unmistakably foreign steel — the girl hewed down the tribal cavalry as they charged her, again and again.
A man who looked to be their commander stamped in place, roaring.
"What the hell are you dogs doing, that you can't catch one little brat!"
"She's a monster, sir! She's killed a hundred of ours on her own!"
Surveying the corpses — men and horses alike — sprawled around the girl, the commander broke into a cold sweat. Arrows loosed from a distance were caught on her blades or batted away, and his agitation swelled with every volley that failed.
"We only have to hold until the main force arrives — GYAAAH!"
The commander of the tribesmen took a suddenly airborne sword through the chest and went down screaming where he stood.
The girl — who, mid-battle, had simply flung one of her own blades to skewer him — grinned crookedly.
"Thought you'd be safe skulking back there?"
"R-run! Run, damn you!"
"Running where? I said come at me!"
She snatched up the abandoned swords littering the ground and hurled them wildly after the fleeing tribesmen; several were struck clean off their horses.
By the time the raiders had vanished from view altogether, the girl turned her gaze on me.
"So. Who are you?"
"Interested in making a name for yourself?"
"...What?"
Before anyone else could snatch her up, I moved fast and enlisted the red-haired girl into our army.
"Your name is Lü Bu?"
"...I'm quite sure I asked you first."
And that was how Lü Bu and I first met.