Tianshui (3)
Having marched out at the head of my army to strike down Dong Zhuo, I arrived at Tianshui—the stronghold that could rightly be called his home base.
Right up until we set out, I'd braced for the dust to blow so hard it would drive me out of my skull, but the moment we reached Tianshui, the sky cleared up as if by sorcery.
Lü Bu, who had worn a scowl the entire road to Tianshui, spoke in a bewildered voice.
"Huh. It just suddenly cleared up."
"Works for us, I suppose."
As if heaven itself were ordering us to punish Dong Zhuo, the weather had turned in a way that would in no way hinder a siege. Perhaps even the sky had grown sick to death of his villainy. I'm a layman on such matters, so I couldn't say.
Surveying Tianshui, I could see traces of the city's defenses being reinforced. Since I hadn't granted him all that much time before marching in, the work hardly looked complete. Apparently Dong Zhuo wasn't eager to die either. If that was how he felt, he ought to have minded his conduct from the very beginning.
His chance had long since slipped away, and Dong Zhuo had crossed a line far beyond forgiving.
So—what to do now?
Encircle the city and strangle it into submission? Not a good idea. The man had gutted all of Chang'an down to the bones before fleeing; I couldn't begin to imagine how many supplies he had stockpiled since.
In the original history, Dong Zhuo—after burning Luoyang and moving the capital to Chang'an—raised a fortress called Meiwu and hoarded a full thirty years' worth of grain inside it. Watch for your moment, he had said: if the hour came, he would rise again and lord over the realm, and if it never came, he could idle away his whole life feasting behind those walls.
To say such a thing after putting countless innocent people to the sword—what a truly remarkable sight. How does a human being become so utterly without shame?
I had no desire to repeat with Dong Zhuo the kind of siege Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zan were grinding through at Yijing Tower, so I gave up on encircling the city and starving it out.
If not a siege, what remained was stirring them from within or crushing them under raw force... Regrettably, subversion from inside was out of the question as well. Whatever else you could say about the man, he was miraculously good at winning his subordinates' loyalty.
That he purchased that loyalty by bleeding his people dry turned my stomach, but the results were undeniable—every last one of Dong Zhuo's men was paying him devoted fealty.
Which left exactly one option: hurl ourselves at the walls with overwhelming force. There would be casualties, but it was far from impossible. This was the only way forward.
Just as I finished sorting my thoughts and moved to set the army in motion, a scout delivered a most unexpected report.
Wuwei—a city perched at the farthest edge of Xiliang. A force had marched out from that city, which lay a fair distance from Tianshui, and was now advancing toward us.
A faction making Wuwei its base at this point in time? Only one came to mind.
Lü Bu's thoughts must have traveled the same road, for she wrinkled her brow and growled.
"Weren't those two busy fighting each other? Don't tell me the Xiliang crowd actually ended up on the same side."
I shook my head at her words.
"I doubt it."
"Huh? What, you know something?"
"The man's an opportunist."
Han Sui. A man who had raised his banner in revolt the moment the Yellow Turban Rebellion sent the country staggering. Among the Xiliang generals—warriors good for precious little beyond fighting—he was a rare breed who had climbed the ranks on political talent alone. I couldn't say precisely what he had hoped to gain from his rebellion, but I imagined he'd simply wanted to carve out a share for himself. His instinct for preserving his own hide and pouncing on opportunity was first-rate, and he was likely adept at reading the room besides.
"He really does have a nose for this sort of thing."
At my muttering, Lü Bu threw me a puzzled look.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Since I'd come all this way anyway, I meant to finish Dong Zhuo and then roll up the Xiliang rebels one after another."
Han Sui had caught on to my intentions, and I had to grant him credit for it. A rebellion launched in peaceful times would have been stamped out on the spot; his had endured to this very day precisely because he'd picked his moment so well. Though when it came to actual fighting, he seemed rather poor at it.
"So he's realized that if he just sits tight, he's next in line to die once Dong Zhuo falls."
Sit quietly and die a docile death—or do something, anything, before the end arrives. Han Sui chose the latter.
"Then isn't he an enemy? However I look at it, all I can see is a man who's joined hands with Dong Zhuo."
A question mark floated above Lü Bu's ever-innocent head. Honestly, she was adorable.
I smiled and went on.
"Wait, and you'll see."
Just as I had roughly predicted, Dong Zhuo seemed resolved to trust his walls and hold out inside to the bitter end. Zhang Liao and Seo Hwang made the rounds of the camp, whipping the troops into order, while Gao Shun turned out siege engines in readiness for the assault.
With no battle to be had, Lü Bu yawned her days away complaining of boredom until, at some point, she was doing nothing but sparring with Seo Yeo. I wondered whether a general commanding an army had any business behaving that way, but the morale of the soldiers soared as they crowded to watch the bouts, so I decided it wasn't much of a problem after all.
And so several days passed, my camp pitched before the city, Dong Zhuo and I merely glaring at each other across the walls. Then, far out on the plain, mounted warriors made their appearance.
"Looks like the Qiang."
Clad in the fur caps and fur cloaks that sprang to mind at the very word "barbarian," they looked at a glance like men long hardened on the battlefield. The horses they rode were one and all wiry and overflowing with stamina—and I'd wager their tempers were every bit as rough.
The man leading them at the head of the column spotted me and came on at an unhurried pace. Meeting me with an air I could not read, he dismounted, sank to one knee, and bowed.
"I, Han Sui, courtesy name Wen Yue! I have come to this place to aid the General-in-Chief in punishing the archfiend Dong Zhuo!"
"Hm..."
I turned my gaze behind him, to the soldiers Han Sui had brought in tow.
"Is that their will as well?"
"It is!"
"Good."
Nodding, I smiled at Han Sui and spoke.
"How you conduct yourselves in this battle shall determine how you are treated."
I'd heard they had attacked Dong Zhuo not long ago and been beaten back once, yet they fielded a considerable host. If they threw their weight behind us, this battle for Tianshui would unfold that much more smoothly.
"Should you render distinguished service, I shall not only pardon your crimes—I shall grant you official office as well."
At my words, Han Sui shouted all the louder.
"We shall not refuse any toil, be it that of dogs or horses!"
The Xiliang rebels under Han Sui swore their loyalty to me.
Having stationed Han Sui's force toward the western gate, I loosened up my somewhat stiff body and let my thoughts drift. Han Sui's presence here meant, beyond question, that Ma Teng was lurking somewhere nearby as well.
Ma Teng. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms paints him as a loyal minister of the Han, but that portrait is a murky one. Loyalty he may have possessed, yet as I recalled, he was no martyr of the "I would sooner die than watch the Han collapse!" variety. He had begun on the government side, but once the rebels overwhelmed the loyalist army and Han Sui took him prisoner, he bent the knee for the sake of survival. You could fairly write him off as just another garden-variety warlord of the age.
He was also the father of Ma Chao, a name anyone with the faintest interest in the Three Kingdoms would recognize. Given the era, she was still a little tyke at present, but let the years pass and she would surely make her appearance.
Ma Chao... how was anyone supposed to resist that?
A winning ticket lying there on the ground, guaranteed to hit given nothing but time—who could bear to walk past without scooping it up?
So long as Han Sui did nothing monumentally stupid here, my course of action was already fixed.
Morale had been sagging of late among the Dong Zhuo army holding Tianshui. Rats had swarmed out of nowhere to gnaw through the army's grain; flagpoles that had stood perfectly firm snapped clean off without warning; and even inexplicable fatal accidents had begun claiming lives within the ranks.
As these incomprehensible events piled one upon another, a certain old man pronounced them ill omens, declaring that Heaven had abandoned Dong Zhuo.
The mood had been uneasy enough already, and with such sinister talk spreading through the city, Dong Zhuo boiled over with rage. He loosed his soldiers to hunt the old man down and put him to death, but as though mocking him, the old man slipped calmly away and vanished from the city.
Unexplained deaths stalking the Dong Zhuo army; in their wake, one unnatural portent after another; and an old man of unknown origin who spat words of doom and disappeared. Faced with these grotesque phenomena that no reason could account for, every soul in Tianshui shivered and held its breath.
And when the reinforcements arrived, that already-diminished morale plunged headlong into the abyss. True, they had come out on top in every fight so far—but they knew all too well just how relentless those nomad tribesmen were. And now those very tribesmen had joined forces with Jeong Reung's army, the mere sight of which was enough to raise gooseflesh. It felt as though even the thin thread of hope they had left had snapped.
A fortress stood between us and them, yes—but could we truly beat them? The Dong Zhuo army's dread seeped into every corner of the city.
And that very dread planted courage in the hearts of those Dong Zhuo had ground beneath him for so long. Now—now at last they could make that villain pay for everything he had visited upon them. They could bring despair to the men who had laughed in open delight while committing atrocities too vile to speak aloud.
The assault on the city had begun.
With every last soldier of the Dong Zhuo army up on the ramparts, utterly consumed with holding back the enemy—this, precisely this, was the moment to show them our fury.
The people, each cradling a conviction of their own, began to move, one slow step at a time.