Dangtugo (2)
I had shuffled out of the building at my usual dawdling pace when I caught sight of a messenger who had come all the way from Luoyang.
His every movement screamed urgency, and his face was white as death.
Even a passing glance told me the man was the picture of trouble, and instinct had me sensing at once that something had gone badly sideways.
"Lord Yuan Shu has usurped the imperial throne!"
So Honey Water had finally bared his naked greed for the throne in broad daylight.
I'd told myself there was no way. And yet — he really went and did it.
Even Liu Yan over in Yi Province, and Liu Biao — or what used to be Liu Biao — in Jing Province, had never gone so far.
Liu Biao and Liu Yan.
Both born of the imperial bloodline — so why had neither dared usurp the throne outright?
However much people declared the Han ruined or resurrected, the name of Han still lived on in every heart across the realm.
There were those who had risen with resolve to wipe that name from the world entirely, and scholars who, unable to forget it, went on swearing loyalty to it all the same.
That was why even Liu Biao and Liu Yan could not bring themselves to cross the line in the open.
For all their flaunted ambition, the boldest either had managed was playing emperor behind closed doors.
Not that the two of them, mere branches of the imperial clan, had the legitimacy to deny the reigning emperor and install a new one in any case.
To be fair, even Yuan Shu hadn't simply bellowed "I'm the emperor, deal with it!" — he'd insisted there were "such-and-such reasons" why he alone was fit to ascend.
Which begged the question: just what pretext had Yuan Shu used to usurp the throne?
The Confucianism of the Han era placed great store by chenwei prophecy and the Five Elements, and Yuan Shu made precisely those his stairway to the throne.
Chenwei sounds impressively forbidding, but the meaning was nothing special.
Prophecy.
In other words, Yuan Shu founded a nation on a sham book of prophecy whipped up in his honor and the peculiar logic of the Five Elements' cycle of generation.
Surely someone would ask: does that even make sense?
Yet, astonishingly, the logic held — up to a point.
Late Han Confucianism had been steeped so long in Daoist sects and folk belief that it had curdled into an unholy chimera of a discipline, and that muddled scholarship became the very opening that let Yuan Shu cite fabricated prophecy and Five Elements theory as his claim to the imperial seat.
It rather made a mockery of all the Confucian masters who had thundered for the expulsion of ghosts and strange powers.
...Then again, this world genuinely has people flinging Daoist arts and outright sorcery about, so I suppose the scholars had it rough.
When some eccentric flashes east and glitters west rearranging the weather on a whim, commoner and scholar alike falling to their knees crying "O Immortal One!" is hardly unreasonable.
For a Confucian scholar, it must have been enough to make him clutch the back of his neck in despair.
And sure enough — even now, something was off.
"...The hell? The wind's supposed to blow north around this hour."
Lü Bu, Bingzhou born and bred, must have felt it too, for she blurted it right out.
"Why's the wind blowing south?"
I opened my mouth to answer Lü Bu as she rode abreast of me, keeping pace at my side.
"...Couldn't tell you."
That was my answer — but it wasn't as though no one came to mind who could pull off exactly this sort of stunt.
'Changing the wind's direction? That's possible, to a degree.'
'Really?'
'Yes.'
I had once tossed Zhang Jue a teasing question — could she summon a southeast wind?
That had been during a visit to ask whether she could treat Sun Jian, the man who'd taken several arrows in the back and was said to be teetering between life and death.
'Of course, the heavens are fickle by their very nature, so there are plenty of times I fail.'
Zhang Jue, answering me, had flashed a bright, unhesitating smile.
So the art truly did lean enormously on luck.
If merely bending the wind cost this much, just how difficult would bending the weather itself be?
I caught myself picturing Zhang Jue's amber eyes.
Just then, Pang Tong, tucked snug against my chest, murmured in her tiny voice.
"W-we're lucky. If the wind had been against us, the whole march would have slowed..."
"...True enough."
Marching on a leg I was gritting my teeth through was ordeal enough — let the winds go haywire on top of it, and no sight on earth could be more wretched.
Bingzhou was mountain trail from end to end, and its temperatures ran comparatively low.
Perched at China's northern edge as it was, beside Sili Province the place was — frankly — cold for no good reason at all.
It was only early autumn, so a shivering soldier or two would hardly have raised an eyebrow.
See for yourself.
Even now, one discreet glance back was bound to turn up men trembling with the chill...
...There's... none?
Ah. Now that I thought of it — hell-bent on getting there as fast as possible, I had brought along nothing but Bingzhou natives.
The reasoning had been that men raised in Sili or Jing Province couldn't hope to keep pace over Bingzhou's punishing routes, where the road meant mountain track and nothing else.
Clear the Taihang Mountains entirely — the de facto frontier between the Han and the steppe tribes — and the plains finally open up, but that land already belonged to the Xiongnu.
We would set foot there someday. Today was not that day.
The trouble was that handpicking only Bingzhou men had left our numbers uncomfortably thin.
I had worried that even in victory we might bleed for it — and Sima Yi had brushed that worry aside in one stroke.
'That's a very strange thing to be worrying about, my lord.'
'Hm?'
'We win. Unconditionally. So don't waste time worrying — just go and come back safe.'
What could I possibly say when a pint-sized strategist months from her coming-of-age pronounced it that flatly?
I had marched out on her word — and, precisely as she'd called it, the Xiongnu bolted like startled hares the moment Lü Bu appeared.
'War is, in the end, a contest of mobility.'
'There are plenty of occasions when advancing safely, one careful step at a time, works out far better, you know.'
'The theory's not bad, I'll grant — but what do you do if the casualties only pile up while you're busy being careful?'
'Which is why one commits fully to civil administration and ensures such situations never arise in the first place.'
'...'
'Besides — by that standard, does a single risk-free tactic even exist?'
Somehow I felt I could hear, word for word, the conversation those two little prodigies had to be holding back in Luoyang.
Surely they weren't waging a battle of wills over there just because I wasn't around?
...
As I trudged along buried in these stray thoughts, Seo Yeo had been staring at me for some time now.
"Eep!"
...Or, to be precise, what she was watching was Pang Tong, nestled against my chest.
Whatever it was Pang Tong had read in those eyes, she turned her face up toward me, brimming with tears.
"G-General-in-Chief..."
Pang Tong had been the one to refuse my offer of a carriage and choose to ride with me instead — but even so, I couldn't just let a darling little girl sit there sniffling.
I spoke in a low, even voice.
"I'll do the same for you later, so stop staring."
"...Yes. Master."
Only then did Seo Yeo turn her head away, visibly satisfied.
...Mind you, to anyone else it would have looked like the same unreadable blank mask as ever.
Frankly, even on my end it had been less perception than a lucky guess off pure instinct.
Just then, another voice rang out beside me.
"Wh-what about me! Don't just do it for those two — do it for me too!"
I turned to behold Lü Bu throwing a fit atop Red Hare, thrashing in the saddle as if she meant to bounce clean off it.
Honestly. What are you, four?
Inside a modest building, a silver-haired woman was seeing to her usual work, leafing through one bamboo slip after another.
At the nonsensical news that had abruptly reached her ears, she blinked, dumbfounded.
"What? That idiot did what?"
The other woman delivering the report mused that it had been quite some time since she'd last seen Mengde caught so flat-footed.
Xiahou Dun, with her slate-blue hair, spoke up.
"You know Yuan Shu, right? Word is that bastard straight-up usurped the throne. Out in the open."
"...You do mean the same Yuan Shu I know, yes?"
"The very one."
Xiahou Dun nodded.
"Hmmm..."
Cao Cao set her work aside and sank into thought.
After a long moment spent weighing Yuan Shu's intentions, she spat out a verdict.
"That fool has finally gone mad."
"That's my read too."
For a new state to be founded while the Han still stood tall and unbroken was nothing less than pressing a ready-made casus belli into the hands of every power under heaven.
Xiahou Dun went on, her expression suggesting something else had just come to mind.
"And get this — they say he's torn up his own Jiujiang Commandery and rechristened it the Huainan Yin outright."
"He's usurped the throne itself, so I suppose there's nothing left for the man to hesitate over."
The title yin was a character reserved solely for the territory that governed a capital.
Which is to say, Yuan Shu had denied the Han — a dynasty with centuries of history — to its very face.
"I honestly cannot fathom where a man still groaning on this side of the Yangtze found the confidence to crown himself emperor."
"He keeps brandishing some queer prophecy — that one called Dangtugo shall succeed the Han."
As Cao Cao's gaze swung her way, Xiahou Dun shrugged.
"Not that I'm asking anyone to understand him. Pick apart a madman's thinking and all you get is one more madman, no?"
"...Hm."
Cao Cao offered nothing further.
"So what now?"
"What do you mean, what now."
Fielding Xiahou Dun's question with the faintest of smiles, Cao Cao answered:
"I'm going back to Chenliu."
"Really?"
"Yes."
Cao Cao laid down her bamboo slip and rose from her seat.
"One ought to welcome an envoy of the imperial house properly, don't you think?"
"Ah..."
Xiahou Dun nodded, understanding dawning.
"That old codger Tao Qian's a lucky one too."
...
"If all goes well, I may even get to see that face again after so long."
Having risen, Cao Cao strode out of the building.
Her decision was swift — and the army that had fought its way to Tao Qian's very doorstep ground to a halt where it stood.
To Tao Qian, who had lost to Cao Cao time and again and done nothing but fall back and fall back, it was a godsend of a report.