A Capable Minister in Peace, a Cunning Hero in Chaos (5)
Just when it had looked as though Cao Cao might charge at any moment, she abruptly hardened into a defensive stance. Kong Rong eyed the shift warily, yet readied his lines all the same, prepared to give battle at a moment's notice.
And so the two armies, facing each other across a stretch of empty plain, pitched their camps and settled in to wait.
Xiahou Dun, who had sat mounted and itching to raise hell the instant Cao Cao gave the order to attack, swung her great saber through the empty air with a disappointed whoosh, over and over.
"And here I thought we'd finally get to fight. Instead it's a rest break. Talk about a letdown."
Whumm—! Whooong—!
The great blade shrieked as it carved the air, whipping up a wind that made Guo Jia, standing nearby, jump clean out of her skin.
"Whoa! That's dangerous, you know! Kindly stop whirling that terrifying weapon around!"
"Relax! I know exactly what I'm doing!"
Guo Jia's full-blown panic sent Xiahou Dun into a hearty, delighted laugh.
"Honestly, how do you even stand on a battlefield, being that much of a coward?"
"Anyone who wouldn't be scared stiff facing a weapon like that is the strange one!"
Xiahou Dun watched Guo Jia put a prudent distance between them, then seemed to recall something.
"Oh, right — why'd we call off the battle, anyway?"
"Pardon?"
"You said if things flowed the way you expected, we could settle it amicably without a fight."
"Ah. You mean that?"
To a question that was, if anything, obvious, Guo Jia nodded with a distinctly breezy air.
"And what sort of man does this Kong Rong fellow strike you as, General?"
"Hmm... Stiff-necked old codger, from the very first look at him."
He was the man who had kept denouncing Dong Zhuo even after the tyrant had shoved Yuan Shao entirely aside and seized the reins of government in Luoyang. Criticism was a polite word for it — Kong Rong would dredge up every classical precedent in existence while showering his target in abuse, until even Dong Zhuo himself trod carefully around him. Perhaps because the man counted Confucius among his ancestors, Dong Zhuo found himself utterly helpless before this scholar who mocked him armed with nothing but that vast learning. If even Yuan Shao, ever mindful of public opinion, had not dared move against him openly, one can imagine how untouchable Kong Rong was.
This was a gentleman who, from way back, had made a habit of materializing the moment something struck him as wrong — and of sparing no one, whoever they might be, the full force of his censure. He cursed the corrupt Ten Attendants, impeached the General-in-Chief He Jin, and refused to bow even to Dong Zhuo of Xiliang. People lauded Kong Rong as an eminent Confucian who spoke only what was right, to whoever needed hearing it.
But surely someone, somewhere, must have thought it: in the end, hadn't Kong Rong accomplished nothing? Defying the powerful with swagger was all very well — follow his story to its conclusion, and the sum of his achievements came to precisely zero. The Ten Attendants ignored every word of his censure and went right on gnawing at the Han. After his impeachment memorial, He Jin's aggrieved subordinates had tried to assassinate him, and he survived only because He Jin personally extended mercy. Dong Zhuo, the target of his most vigorous denunciations, naturally loathed him for it and hounded him off to Beihai at the far eastern edge of the land. In the end, he left not one notable achievement behind.
All he had done was hold out long enough that Qingzhou did not fall wholly into the bandits' grasp. And even that much — had Cao Cao in Yanzhou not crushed the great majority of those bandits herself, Kong Rong, with precious little experience commanding armies, would never have brought Qingzhou under control on his own.
If this trajectory held, posterity's verdict on Kong Rong would split into opposite extremes. An honorable man who stood against injustice to his final breath, even if it broke him. Or an idealist who did nothing but let his mouth run and sow discord from within. He was a man who embodied, in a single body, both the finest virtues and the most exasperating failings of the Confucian scholar.
Xiahou Dun looked at Guo Jia.
"So what? Other than him being a stubborn old coot, is there something about him we need to care about?"
Guo Jia gave her a faintly dumbfounded look.
"...My. How refreshingly blunt."
"That's what you call one of my virtues!"
"Ah. Right..."
When it came to running an army, Xiahou Dun displayed extraordinary talent — but the moment talk turned to politics, that formidable mind of hers went positively guileless. After a moment's thought about how best to explain, Guo Jia began calmly.
"Kong Rong is a man of unwavering loyalty to the Han imperial house, is he not?"
"Sure is."
"And one of the powers on friendly terms with us happens to be in a position to send down an imperial edict."
Having said that much, Guo Jia smacked her palms together with a snap.
"In which case — wouldn't that power be willing to help us stabilize Qingzhou?"
"Hmm... You think so?"
"I do."
Watching Xiahou Dun's reaction, Guo Jia pressed on.
"My one worry would be that the power in question, wary of our own rise, might play the ignoramus and keep its distance, but..."
"..."
"If my read is right, they'll help us without a shred of hesitation."
"What read?"
Guo Jia flashed a sly grin, looking for all the world as if she had been waiting for precisely that question.
"The father of our little young master — the General-in-Chief, isn't it?"
"...Huh? How'd you know that?"
Guo Jia had seen through in a single stroke the very secret Cao Cao kept hushed, seeing no reason to broadcast it. When Xiahou Dun gaped in astonishment, Guo Jia explained with a look of deep satisfaction.
"The moment word comes that an envoy from the General-in-Chief has arrived, her whole mood flips on the spot. Frankly, anyone who failed to notice would be the strange one."
Guo Jia, who stood at Cao Cao's side offering counsel day in and day out, had witnessed that scene far more than once or twice.
"...Hm. You again?"
"Indeed."
The trouble was that whenever Liu Bei came calling as envoy, as she did now and then, Cao Cao's eyes would turn to ice.
"..."
"..."
Her lord's frostbitten glare was a fearsome thing — but this Liu Bei, who absorbed it square and shrugged it off with perfect calm, was every bit as formidable.
Cao Cao and Liu Bei. How to put it — the pair simply radiated the certainty that nothing in this world could ever make them coexist.
That the General-in-Chief kept such a woman in his service struck Guo Jia as genuinely remarkable.
"Oh dear, my apologies. Of late I've been feeling rather heavy, you see."
"...It's quite all right."
It was odd, though, how that dreadful contest of wills — the kind that tensed up even the onlookers — kept getting rerouted into something else entirely. Like the sight of her lord welcoming Liu Bei with one hand resting on a belly that rounded a little more with every passing day.
"Yunchang, sis. What do we do now?"
"...Do not ask me."
Even Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, the two generals glued to her side as her honor guard, kept stealing glances at Liu Bei, visibly at a loss.
"Come now, have a look at this child. Takes after someone rather wonderfully, doesn't it? Simply adorable."
"..."
In the end, confronted with Cao Cao proudly presenting the baby she had suffered to bring into the world, Liu Bei seemed to lose the power of speech.
"Congratulations... to you..."
And that faint grind of molars just before had most certainly not been Guo Jia's imagination.
Having weighed every piece of the situation, Guo Jia nodded to herself, arms folded.
"Our two houses are, for all practical purposes, bound by marriage alliance already. I simply cannot see the General-in-Chief abandoning a friendly force like ours."
"Aha."
"Though how he intends to manage the aftermath, collecting women at that rate, is beyond me."
By her own private intelligence, the tally seemed to have cleared five long ago. Well, that was his problem to sort out, and Guo Jia spared it no further thought. If a woman could drink her fill and live exactly as she pleased, wasn't that happiness enough?
"Oh, that reminds me — something's been nagging at me."
"Yes?"
Xiahou Dun, watching Guo Jia fish a wine flask from her sash, tossed out a question.
"Don't they say you can size up people you've never once laid eyes on? Like it's nothing."
"I am rather brilliant, yes."
"..."
The woman genuinely did not know the meaning of humility. Perhaps it was this outlandish temperament that made her and Cao Cao such a good match. Eccentrics do flock to eccentrics — the saying held true.
"Then how do you read this General-in-Chief of ours?"
"Ahh... you mean him?"
This was the woman who had foreseen, with flawless precision, that Sun Ce — the Little Conqueror of the original history — would die at the hands of a mere nobody. The same strategist who had once stood before a Cao Cao reluctant to cross swords with Yuan Shao, enumerated Yuan Shao's ten failings one by one, and argued there was nothing to fear, now spoke in an even voice.
"I would say the most fitting comparison is Emperor Gao — Liu Bang, founder of the Han."
"Really?"
"Probably."
Guo Jia answered between long pulls at the flask.
Liu Bang had been an idle drifter squandering his days in Pei County, a village in the middle of nowhere. Beside Han Xin, he lacked the gift for command; he could not read the shape of a war the way Zhang Liang did; and he had no notion of how to govern a realm as Xiao He did. Yet it was this man who brought down the Hegemon-King of Western Chu — a foe none had dared face — and founded the Han dynasty. The reason was simple: he knew how to admit what he lacked and where he had gone wrong. He listened to the counsel of the talents beneath him, could tell right from wrong, and possessed the decisiveness to act on what he saw.
They say that when a nation falls into chaos, heroes arise. And yet even that Emperor Gao, in his final years, lost the ability to trust another soul and purged the meritorious officials who had built his throne.
The rabbit dies; the hound is boiled.
Once the rabbit was taken, even the hound that had taken it would end up simmering in its master's pot. Dissect it closely and Emperor Gao had his reasons for those decisions — but the plain fact remained that he had doubted other men and driven them to their deaths, had he not?
Han Xin — one of the greatest military minds of all time, hailed as a strategist without equal in the realm — once passed this judgment on Emperor Gao:
"Bu neng jiang bing, er shan jiang jiang."
"Your Majesty lacks the talent to command soldiers — yet possesses the talent to be not a general of soldiers, but a general of generals."
"And that is a gift beyond all others, one the likes of me would never dare presume to rival."
"Huh? Where's that coming from all of a sudden?"
"Just thinking out loud."
Guo Jia's face was already flushed deep with drink; she broke into a giddy, silly grin.
Would the General-in-Chief, in the end, prove different from Emperor Gao? Watching to find out, she suspected, would be tremendous fun.