The Conquest of Jiangdong (3)
A few days after hearing Liu Bei's answer—resolute as a chestnut pumpkin—
"The time has come, my lord. You should make your move."
Zhou Yu, who could hardly let a single day pass without standing at the rail gazing out over the Yangtze as if pondering something, finally spoke those words to me.
Hearing her out, I naturally voiced my confusion.
"'The time has come'? What is that supposed to mean?"
"Hmm... To put it simply, I suppose the correct way to phrase it would be that the wind has chosen to side with us."
Ah, she was talking about the direction of the wind.
Ignorant as I admittedly was about naval warfare, even I knew how much the wind mattered in a battle of ships ramming ships.
...The problem was that this was just about the only thing I did know.
"If the Shanyue were strangers to naval combat, there would be no need for any of this. But hoping for nothing but good fortune is not a commander's business."
"Moreover, they style themselves descendants of the old Kingdom of Yue, so I judged they would have at least basic experience on the water. That is why I waited for the right moment."
So that was it.
Her explanation slid so smoothly into my ears that I found myself nodding along.
You would think a tribe called the Shanyue would do the Shanyue thing and hole up in their mountains, but these characters kept crawling down to the Yangtze to play pirate, raiding whatever ships passed nearby.
It made no difference whether the victim was a fishing boat simply trying to keep food on the table or a merchantman dreaming of a jackpot, loaded down with the specialties that only Jiangdong produced.
Any of them who crawled as far as Jing Province without knowing their place got sent by our esteemed Brocade Sail Pirates on a Yangtze riverbed sightseeing tour—dolphin viewing included—but around Jiangdong, their home waters, all we could do was stand by and watch.
A force gathered from raiders like these could hardly be assumed to suffer from seasickness the way our own soldiers did.
Sure enough, the moment some of our men laid eyes on the Yangtze and the tower ships spread wide across it, their faces drained to a ghastly shade of blue.
Probably the same poor souls who had suffered miserably from seasickness on the voyage home after we crushed Yuan Shu.
Worse still, most of the soldiers reacted as though they had never set foot on a boat in their lives, which left exactly one force capable of taking the river back from the Shanyue: the navy under Zhou Yu.
Seeing this, I could finally understand why the Cao Cao of true history had failed to cross the Yangtze even at the height of her power.
The moment you put an army on the water, everyone starts moaning about seasickness and their fighting strength craters. How are you supposed to win like that?
Seasickness makes it hard enough just to keep your own body upright; nobody in that state was going to swing a sword or draw a bow.
They would simply stagger around in a haze like zombies and drop dead where they stood.
I had assumed, last time, that we would never end up fielding a navy. That prediction had missed in the most spectacular fashion.
Apparently the person who styled herself the Eastern Wu King of Virtue was not entirely without ideas after all.
Still, the more I chewed on it, the stranger it seemed.
How did the woman's grand royal title come out sounding like Otaku King...
...Yes, yes, the meaning was completely different. But sound carries its own weight, you know.
Meng Huo had gone around calling herself the King of Ten Thousand purely because it sounded cool, so there was nothing inherently odd about another tribal chieftain crowning herself the Eastern Wu King of Virtue.
If anything, I was simply grateful it was more grounded than the Nanman, which had come sprinkled with every fantasy element imaginable.
Even now I would love to know how on earth she made savage beasts and venomous insects dance at her whim and walked away from blades without a single cut.
Daoist arts and sorcery were outlandish enough, but if anything deserved the name of true monstrous strength and uncanny divinity, it was that.
"So what is the plan?"
I asked Zhou Yu, who had been biding her time, how she intended to wage the coming battle on the water.
At my question, she offered a faint smile with the face that had earned her the name Meizhou Lang.
"It is quite simple. You see—"
Good grief. A smile from a face like that hit with terrifying force.
Of course, I threw everything I had into managing my expression, determined not to make a spectacle of myself.
Thank the heavens I saw Diaochan every day; constant exposure to beauty that seemed barely human had inured me somewhat.
Had I so much as wavered at that smile, Seo Yeo and Lü Bu would have drilled clean through the back of my skull with their eyes alone.
Setting Zhou Yu's smile beside my memory of Diaochan's back in Luoyang, I drifted for a moment into the past.
"...You wish to see me smile, my lord?"
"I do. The more I think on it, the more I realize I've never seen you wear anything but that calm expression."
"..."
"...And don't just force the corners of your mouth up."
Even that had been beautiful, of course—but with acting skills this hopeless, how had she ever pulled off the Chain Strategy and driven a wedge between Dong Zhuo and Lü Bu?
Or was her face itself simply the cheat code?
Certainly, if a beauty like that announced, perfectly expressionless, that someone was about to die, it would startle anyone in its own right.
If anything, the blank face might make it sound all the more sincere.
The wrinkle was that this world's Lü Bu was a woman, same as Diaochan—but that, too, would have somehow smoothed itself over as the two of them becoming fast friends.
Given Dong Zhuo's temper and Lü Bu's, the whole affair was bound to blow up sooner or later regardless.
After all, in the actual historical Records of the Three Kingdoms, where no Chain Strategy ever existed, didn't Lü Bu kill Dong Zhuo just fine?
"...Hm? Why are you staring at me?"
"Just got the feeling you'd swiped something and eaten it."
"Wh-what?! How did you know?!"
At my idle remark, Lü Bu jolted in alarm.
Wait. She had actually stolen food?
"..."
"..."
When I kept staring her down, Lü Bu broke into a cold sweat and angled her head away.
Ever since she had become pregnant with Yeo Hwa, she had craved sweets to an almost unnatural degree, and once I restricted them for her health's sake, it seemed she had been reduced to pilfering them in secret.
The image of the Peerless Under Heaven herself sneaking snacks from our own cupboard wrung a laugh right out of me.
I told her,
"Ask permission before you eat, from now on."
"O-okay."
I had restricted them simply to mean eat them in moderation, but apparently Lü Bu had taken it as never touch them again.
Then again, considering how readily I confiscated every jug of alcohol Zhang Fei tried to bring over, I could see how she might read it that way.
But Zhang Fei was pregnant and couldn't drink a drop. So why did she keep bringing the stuff around?
...She wasn't using liquor as bait for my attention, was she?
Zhang Fei had a cuter side than I gave her credit for.
Naval warfare. The word explained itself: combat fought upon the water.
So what separated fighting on water from fighting on land?
The greatest difference was that the ground beneath your feet was strictly limited.
No one could channel qi into their feet and stroll across the waves like the ninjas of some other fictional world, so you were inevitably stuck fighting atop a deck.
Now then—how did Uncle Luo Guanzhong depict the most celebrated naval battle in all of Three Kingdoms lore, the Battle of Red Cliffs?
Quite simply, as it turned out.
Cao Cao and Zhou Yu traded schemes back and forth until Huang Gai's false surrender landed perfectly, Cao Cao's fleet went up in flames, and—layered atop the southeast wind Zhuge Liang had summoned through prayer and the Chain Strategy by which Pang Tong had lashed the ships together—a blazing hellscape was born, annihilating an army of several hundred thousand on the spot.
Cao Cao's grand armada, still too green for naval combat and dutifully drilling away, ended as ash without ever fighting a real battle.
To put it more precisely: just as he judged his men finally ready, confidently composed a song, and moved to close with the enemy, the false surrender set him alight.
I could scarcely imagine what Cao Cao felt in that moment.
True history, after all, kept remarkably few records of naval battles.
At most there was the account that Cao Cao, much as in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, chained his ships together, was consumed by fire attack, and—with an epidemic raging at the worst possible time—burned his last remaining ships with his own hands before scurrying off to escape pursuit.
Which had left me wondering how anyone in a cannonless antiquity actually fought on water...
"Cut down every last one of them!"
"Hahahaha! Die! Die!"
Was this land combat or naval combat?
They opened with a few desultory volleys of arrows, then, no sooner had the ships closed than they came leaping across into one another's vessels to hack away at close quarters.
Honestly, aside from the business of steering the ships, it was little different from fighting on land.
Arrows at range; up close, everyone clambered over the rails and went at it...
...No wonder history barely bothered to record naval battles.
Granted, the naval battle the modern mind pictures involves cannons booming away in glorious chaos—and those had yet to be invented.
In an age when the arrow was the only ranged weapon a ship could carry, there were precious few ways to sink one.
Loose a hundred arrows and all you have done is make a charitable donation of arrows.
Cannons were one thing, but no ship was going down to arrows.
Strictly speaking, a ship listing under the sheer weight of embedded arrows and sinking was not physically impossible.
The trouble was that any force practiced on water simply swung its heading around and rebalanced with ease.
Even the Romance made a famous episode of it: Zhuge Liang feigning battle to fill his boats with a hundred thousand borrowed arrows.
Once gunpowder arrived in a later age, the cannon-thundering naval battle familiar to every modern person would be complete—but in this era, it was all much the same.
That said, I didn't mean land and water combat were entirely identical.
The Yangtze's current rocked the ships without warning now and then, and if you lost your balance at the wrong moment, down you went.
KA-THUNK!
"Waaah!"
"Well, well. Fighting right in front of me, and you just fall over? You gotta be kidding me."
"W-wait a moment... guhk!"
Yes. Exactly like that.
I nodded along as I watched the Shanyue warrior who had lost his footing get butchered by Gan Ning.
"Gongjin! You've gotten sharper! Let's cross blades one of these days!"
"Quiet down and focus on the battle!"
Off in the distance, Sun Ce and Zhou Yu were straight-up skewering entire ships.
Fine, Sun Ce—but why was Zhou Yu fighting that well?
They said the Zhou Yu of true history was one of those infuriatingly perfect prodigies who failed at nothing. Apparently the legend held.
Lü Bu, minding her escort duty near me, had grown bored enough to take aim at something or other.
"Hmmmm... wonder what'd happen to the ship if I hit that."
"Lü Bu?"
"Hold on. This is an important moment."
With that, she let the string fly—
SHWAAAA—!
The arrow tore through the air with a vicious shriek and severed the rope binding the anchor.
The freed anchor plunged into the river, and the onrushing Shanyue vessel wrenched violently sideways.
"Wh-what?! What's happening—?!"
"Grab something! Anything! You'll go over the side!"
SPLOOSH!
Several Shanyue, thrown off balance by the sudden turn, tumbled into the Yangtze—
"What in the—!"
"Aaagh! We're gonna hit!"
CRASH—!
The veering tower ship rammed its bow straight into its own ally alongside.
"Turn! Turn, quickly—!"
Naturally, the Shanyue behind the wreck startled into evasive maneuvers.
"No! Too close—?!"
BOOM!
Wow. A chain-reaction pileup on top of everything else?
What an absolute mess.
"Whoa. So that actually works?"
"..."
Lü Bu—who had just crippled ship after ship with a single arrow—wore an astonished look, as though she hadn't expected this outcome either.
I was pretty astonished myself.