Intrusion (9)
With the main body of the army organized, I was still trudging along, a good stretch of road yet between me and Bing Province.
For starters, I had attached cavalry to Lü Bu and Zhang Liao to serve as our vanguard and sent them out ahead of the main force.
"Can I head to Bing Province first?"
"...By yourself?"
"Yep! Zhang Liao can handle leading the cavalry on her own!"
...Or had I gotten that wrong? Because as things stood, Zhang Liao was leading the vanguard all on her own.
Permission secured, Lü Bu had promptly shot off entirely solo — not even with the vanguard, but completely alone.
It wasn't as though I meant for her to face tens of thousands of Xiongnu single-handedly; I'd given my blessing on the understanding that once she reached Bing Province, she would link up with the Black Mountain bandits, who should have been resisting the Xiongnu there. Even so, something told me she would simply barrel straight into them alone.
And yet the reason I had allowed it came down to one thing and one thing only: time.
Just how far was it from Luoyang to Taiyuan Commandery in Bing Province? A full thousand li. The exact figure shifted a little depending on how you measured, but converted into kilometers it came to roughly four hundred — about the distance between Seoul and Busan, if I remembered right. This land really was nothing but uselessly vast. A long-distance march was simply the price of admission every single time you wanted to go anywhere.
Had it been Shangdang Commandery, sitting close to Luoyang, things would have been easier, but the Xiongnu had cowardly set their sights on Taiyuan, far from the capital. Talk about a filthy move. I would have to use this opportunity to expand Bing Province's garrison.
Considering they had invaded at the precise moment our interior was briefly in disarray over the still-unruly Jing Province, their intelligence gathering must have been remarkably thorough.
Of course, even a distance of a thousand li meant nothing to Lü Bu. Or to be precise, it meant nothing to Red Hare.
Come to think of it, it really was astonishing. In an era where reaching anywhere at all took the better part of several days, here was a horse that could make the journey in a single day. Beasts capable of that had to be vanishingly rare. Ochyma, currently serving at Seo Yeo's side, could obviously manage it — and Dilu, the horse I had passed on to Liu Bei, might well be up to the task too, with a little luck.
The march ground on while I whiled away the hours on idle thoughts. This being the ancient world, paved roads were of course a pipe dream, and the faces of the soldiers jostling back and forth over the rutted track were, to put it generously, grim.
How much time passed like that, I couldn't say.
"General-in-Chief! Report!"
A lone rider approached from the distance and saluted. Judging by his soldier's garb he had certainly been sent by Zhang Liao, and the brightness of his expression made it plain this was no bad news.
The messenger spoke. "The Xiongnu who were clashing head-on with our defenders across the Taiyuan Commandery region are withdrawing!"
"Hm?"
Unexpected news. It wasn't that I had failed to imagine the Xiongnu pulling back before I even arrived — but I never dreamed it would actually happen.
I had assumed Zhang Liao's vanguard must have beaten them back, so I asked the messenger, "Why did the Xiongnu retreat? Were they crushed in a major defeat?"
"No, sir! The moment General Lü Bu — the first of our forces to arrive — joined the field, the Xiongnu withdrew their army without a moment's deliberation!"
"..."
In other words, they had bolted before the damage could grow any worse. Our army had been reduced, in the blink of an eye, to a dog chasing a chicken — plenty of running, nothing to catch.
Something about it didn't sit right with me. No — if they had hauled an army that size all this way, surely they'd come spoiling for a fight? Tens of thousands of Xiongnu fleeing in a body for no reason other than Lü Bu showing her face... something about that was deeply strange.
Perhaps, with their people split between the Northern and Southern Xiongnu and at each other's throats, they had judged there was no sense in a costly clash. It looked as though they had invaded on a "would be nice if it worked, no great loss if it didn't" sort of whim.
That anyone could start a war on so flimsy a calculation was hard to fathom, but then, that was simply the way of the nomadic tribes — a people who swung their swords first and asked questions later, the moment someone rubbed them the wrong way.
Even among them, the Xianbei — the most savage-tempered of the lot — had the steppe crawling with men who would kill their own fathers and brothers without a flicker of hesitation. Curiously, they left their mothers alive, and not out of filial devotion either; by all accounts it was closer to being unable to kill them, for fear of the vengeance her family would exact. Terrifying people, through and through.
The messenger asked, "What would you have us do now?"
I answered as though the question weren't worth a moment's thought. "Tell them to hold position and manage the aftermath until I arrive."
"Yes, sir!"
The messenger from Zhang Liao answered in a ringing voice and withdrew. Messengers were, as a rule, chosen for the speed of their legs — or in this case, hooves — and the rider was beyond sight in an instant.
"...Um... excuse me..."
"Hm?"
At the hesitant voice beside me, I turned my head — to find Pang Tong, marching with me as my aide, looking up at me with a fidgety air.
"Is there a reason we are not pursuing the retreating barbarians and conquering the north...?"
"Ah, that?"
It was, in a way, the most natural question in the world. One day she would be hailed as Fengchu — the Fledgling Phoenix — standing shoulder to shoulder with the genius strategists of history, but her talents had yet to truly bloom. She cut a very different figure from Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi, who had been turning heads since childhood. Well, that was a problem time and experience would solve, so I wasn't worried about it.
I opened my mouth to answer the question hanging in her curious expression. "A northern campaign has a low chance of success. That's why."
"...Is that so...?"
"It is."
The Han had risen after the fall of Qin, the first dynasty to unify all under heaven. Even Gaozu, founder of the Han — the man who had brought down the Hegemon-King of Western Chu himself — had been soundly thrashed attacking the Xiongnu, and the many emperors who came after and tried to conquer the north met with nothing but failure, time and time again.
Gaozu, at least, had his excuse — that he had never fully recovered from the wounds inflicted by the Hegemon-King of Western Chu. Every emperor after him had failed to subdue the frontier tribes despite commanding the full, unimpaired strength of a unified dynasty.
In all those centuries, only two emperors could claim genuinely meaningful results against the northern tribes: Emperor Wu of Han, and Emperor Guangwu.
Emperor Wu had commanded generals of the caliber of Li Guang and Huo Qubing, and as for that munchkin Emperor Guangwu, he hardly needed an introduction at all.
But even Emperor Wu had not conquered the north without cost. He did bring his northern campaigns to a successful close and earn the monumental achievement of opening the Silk Road, but the losses he took along the way were every bit as monumental. Do you know how many years the Xiongnu fought him? A full forty-three. Infantry numbering in the hundreds of thousands marched north in total, and cavalry a hundred thousand strong rode out to subdue the tribes — and even that took forty-three years. And even then, the Xiongnu endured. They refused, to the bitter end, to be destroyed.
The only reason they were withdrawing so half-heartedly now was that they weren't fighting with death in their eyes. The moment they were truly cornered, with annihilation staring them in the face, and resisted in earnest, a game of chicken with no winners would begin.
As for Guangwu — well, how to put this. I don't know whether he actually had the heavens on a leash or what, but a catastrophe of staggering proportions suddenly crashed down on the Mongolian steppe during his reign. Drought and locusts were said to have laid waste to the land for thousands of li on end; people and livestock died in unimaginable numbers, and hard on the heels of famine came plague. The result was that the Xiongnu split into the Southern and Northern Xiongnu and fell to fighting each other, and it was in that same period that the Wuhuan and Xianbei broke away from Xiongnu rule. And then Guangwu, backing the Southern Xiongnu who had submitted to him, pounded the Northern Xiongnu into the dirt. Truly the protagonist of a munchkin novel — casually deploying natural disasters on top of everything else.
In short: setting aside Guangwu, who rained heavenly disasters on his own enemies, even Emperor Wu had been forced to swallow bitter defeat more than once. And a fledgling power that had yet to properly secure its own interior was going to conquer the north?
I could only shake my head — and that was precisely why I maintained a fundamentally defensive posture toward the frontier tribes. Unless Her Majesty our Empress could command natural disasters the way Guangwu had, conquering the nomads without losses was simply impossible.
When I finished explaining all this, Pang Tong was trembling like a leaf, terrified of who knows what.
"I-I'm so sorry. I didn't even know that much..."
"There's nothing wrong with not knowing."
"No, it isn't. Compared to the ones my age who are always at your side, I'm hardly any help to you at all..."
Did she mean Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi? Because those two were the anomalies — if anything, Pang Tong was the normal one. Of course, saying so wouldn't have gotten through to her, so I opened my mouth to encourage her instead.
"Do you have any idea why I went to the trouble of leaving those two in Luoyang and bringing you along instead?"
Just as I'd said, Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi had remained behind in Luoyang. How should I put it — whenever those two were anywhere in the vicinity, Pang Tong's spirit just kept shrinking. That was exactly why I had separated her from them, with the aim of reviving her confidence. I had no idea what sort of looks they would give me when I returned to Luoyang, but I would deal with that myself.
"I said it myself, didn't I? And didn't Pang Degong say the same?"
Looking into Pang Tong's vivid green eyes, I went on. "That you would become a phoenix — one to stand shoulder to shoulder with the dragon."
"..."
"And if you still can't bring yourself to trust yourself, then trust my eye. That much, at least, I'm confident in."
To be precise, it wasn't an eye for talent so much as knowledge of the future.
At my confident declaration, Pang Tong buried her face, blushing to the roots of her hair.
"..."
And I could feel the strange gaze Seo Yeo had been wearing lately deepen just a shade.
...Somehow it felt as though the fuse on a bomb had just burned down another notch. Had I done something that was going to blow up in my face?
