The Conquest of Jiangdong (7)
"Mmm...."
The battle lost, the Shanyue tribe wheeled their prows about and fled in utter disarray. Watching them scatter, I stood gazing out over the Yangtze and sank deep into thought.
To think I would one day cross this very river — the river that had thrashed even Cao Cao so soundly in the original history. It certainly stirred up some novel feelings.
"Aaaargh!"
"Hurk!"
Even with the tide of battle having turned completely, a handful of Shanyue warriors refused to give up and kept fighting to the very last.
They truly had no idea how to quit. Was that the sort of grit it took to hold out for centuries?
Of course, such resistance was, in the most literal sense, nothing more than a futile struggle. If sheer willpower alone could settle everything, they would have founded their Kingdom of Yue in Jiangdong ages ago.
It was true that the Shanyue were formidable in battle, but the navy Zhou Yu had spent two years painstakingly raising didn't simply tremble at its first taste of real combat, either.
In truth, only the fleet under Zhou Yu's command had moved in this engagement. Forcing soldiers unaccustomed to water warfare onto the Yangtze would have done nothing but manufacture meaningless deaths. Given all that, if Zhou Yu had actually lost this battle, something would have been very, very wrong with the way the world worked.
The notion that the commander who had repelled even that Cao Cao with naval warfare in the original history could fall to Yan Baihu was beyond imagining. Even if Yan Baihu had undergone some crisis-forged awakening and become Super Yan Baihu, there was simply no way he was beating Zhou Yu. What was a two-star rarity supposed to do against a five-star, even with an extra star tacked on?
From the gossip drifting about, Yan Baihu seemed to possess the martial strength and popular standing to lead the Shanyue — the problem was that this fell far short of what it takes for a man to strut around declaring he would found a kingdom.
And that was precisely what I was counting on.
Just as I had when I pacified the Nanman, I planned to clean up the Shanyue who had taken root in Jiangdong. Yan Baihu himself was a nobody, but the Shanyue who followed him were a genuinely serious problem.
In the original history, it had taken Sun Quan decades to fully pacify the Shanyue, who kept stirring up trouble in Jiangdong. That's right — decades. Could you even picture it? They say even mountains and rivers change in ten years, yet he spent longer than that wrestling back and forth with the Shanyue before the land finally knew peace. Endlessly ridiculed though he was with nicknames like "Rat Brat" and "Jerry Sun," he had unquestionably been capable enough to rule a nation. The real trouble was that his dotage in later years hit too hard, birthing the great catastrophe known as the Two Palaces Incident.
While I was lost in such thoughts, Sun Quan darted briskly to my side and called out in a voice bursting with energy.
"My lord! Just as you ordered, I've relayed instructions to the units to deliberately let Yan Baihu and his cronies slip away!"
"Good. Well done."
I nodded along with her report. If Yan Baihu simply dropped dead out of nowhere, the Shanyue would surely splinter into scattered cells, just as they had in the original history, and breed trouble of every conceivable kind.
I didn't know why, but Yan Baihu seemed to command genuine loyalty from his people.
...Seriously, why, though?
Was it because, unlike most chieftains of the border tribes, he never treated his followers like dirt?
The tribes were quite the headache — perhaps growing up in such brutal environments had roughened their tempers. Even the Qiang of Xiliang, who had been absorbed into our faction a good while ago, managed to cause some fresh trouble every time I let my guard down. It was only because Ma Teng, who governed Xiliang, and Han Sui, who still watched my every mood, worked themselves to the bone cleaning up after them that the rift between Han and Qiang never deepened into something truly ugly. Even now, I'd wager you could find a Qiang head or two dangling in the marketplace of any Xiliang town, strung up on one charge or another.
If you don't get caught, it isn't a crime, hm?
That was how they operated. Did they genuinely believe they'd never be caught? I understood their whole way of thinking was different from ours — I simply wished they wouldn't act on it.
I had made my policy clear to Cao Cao before we marched out, too: keep Yan Baihu alive if at all possible. From here on, every time Yan Baihu lost a battle he would flee, rally the nearby Shanyue, and rebuild his strength — over and over. In other words, what the Sun Quan of the original history had spent decades clearing away piece by piece, we would now sweep away in one grand campaign.
If a certain someone sprang to mind from that description, that was only natural.
"Haha! Just leave it all to me! I'll sweep away every last one of those — Shanyue, was it? Or was it Danyue? — rascals!"
That was exactly how I had brought to heel the King of the Nanman, the sovereign single-handedly responsible for every ounce of fantasy in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
In a sense, the Nanman had been even worse than Jiangdong. Having already pacified a place like that, tidying up Jiangdong shouldn't take all that long.
Besides, the Shanyue weren't the only blight on the region. There were also packs who had cast off the Han entirely and made villainy their trade — and the Shanyue would rope them in with cries of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," then proceed to make an even greater mess of everything. The Shanyue of the original history had done exactly that, so would the Shanyue here be any different?
If things played out as expected, a magnificent event would present itself: the chance to deal with the Shanyue and the bandits in a single stroke. Only a fool would pass that up.
Once the Shanyue were handled this way, all that remained were Liu Yao and the great clan factions of Jiangdong.... Well. Would factions barely clinging to survival against the Shanyue really contemplate opposing me? Unless they were truly deranged with lust for power, I expected they would come crawling to me to save their own skins.
Yan Baihu, it seemed, was not entirely brainless — every road in and out had been blockaded, leaving the clans with no way of knowing what was happening beyond their borders. According to the latest intelligence, the allied army of the great clans was currently holed up in a wilderness hardly deserving of the name "city," doing nothing but patching up their walls. Only to be expected, really, when Jianye — that is, Moling, the one place with even a pretense of order — had fallen into Yan Baihu's hands.
I've mentioned this before, but Jiangdong was a region that had seen not an ounce of development. When an official is demoted and sent into exile, what image comes to mind? A village rotting in some forgotten corner of the countryside, wouldn't you say? That was Jiangdong, exactly. In fact, back in the Former Han, the region had actually served as a place of exile — though those days were long past now that Rinan Commandery, the land corresponding to Vietnam, had appeared on the map.
Ah, come to think of it, there was also Jiaozhou down there. The territory always held by that fellow Shi Xie in every Three Kingdoms game I ever played.
...No idea. I'd think about it once Jiangdong was pacified.
I turned to Sun Quan, who had been diligently attending me nearby.
"How far has Cao Cao's advance pushed?"
"Um... according to the most recent report, if I recall correctly...."
Sun Quan mulled over my question for a moment before her face lit up.
"Ah! She said she was somewhere near Danyang County!"
"...She's already that far?"
Wasn't this Cao Cao's first campaign into Jiangdong? Then why was she advancing this fast? The roads in an undeveloped backwater like this couldn't possibly be in decent shape.... Perhaps because she was treating this like a hardcore game, she seemed to be moving with genuine, single-minded resolve.
In any case, if Cao Cao had pushed as far as Danyang County, she must have thrown back the Shanyue armies at least a few times by now. I had taken Yan Baihu for myself, so I supposed Cao Cao had been matched against Yan Yu.
Cao Cao versus Yan Yu, hm.... A matchup whose outcome you could see coming a mile away. On top of that, I had attached Meng Huo to Cao Cao's force, leading the Wudang Feijun — losing was simply not an option, even if she'd wanted to lose.
The Wudang Feijun. Broken down, the name meant "flying soldiers whom none could stand against." They were the corps Zhuge Liang had founded fresh after conquering the Nanman — no, Nanzhong. Nanzhong being a region maddeningly overgrown with mountains and forests, these troops lived up to their name to the letter, flitting across Yi Province to repel every invasion Wei attempted.
These were border tribes whose fighting prowess was already formidable — and they had picked out only the elite among them? One could guess from imagination alone how ferociously they would fight. In truth, the Wudang Feijun numbered barely a few thousand, yet those few thousand withstood the frenzied assault of the tens of thousands under Zhang He's command during the Northern Expeditions and ultimately succeeded in summoning Zhuge Liang's relief force. They were also phenomenal archers, and after Zhuge Liang's death they were said to have used the mountain terrain to toy with the hundred-thousand-strong army led by Cao Shuang without mercy.
With soldiers like these, I couldn't imagine them losing a guerrilla war to the Shanyue.
And yet, the battles in which the Wudang Feijun distinguished themselves were never depicted in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Had Uncle Luo Guanzhong grown tired of writing as the ending drew near? Then again, most readers of the novel lost all interest after the Wuzhang Plains arc where Zhuge Liang dies, anyway.
The book does go on to describe Sima Yi's Incident at the Gaoping Tombs, the unprecedented outrage of his son later stabbing the Wei emperor to death in broad daylight, and the rise of the Jin dynasty — but considering the legendary trolling that Jin dynasty would pull off down the road, it wasn't exactly material to get invested in.
Perhaps Uncle Luo Guanzhong simply had no love for Jin, either. Even that Dong Zhuo had at least dragged the emperor down from his throne before killing him, whereas Sima Yi's son Sima Zhao just straight-up stabbed the emperor to death where he stood. I could grant that he took after his father in boldness — but wasn't this a touch too bold?
My thoughts having wandered their way to Sima Yi, I turned my head toward my Little Strategists.
"...What are you looking at?"
Reading some unnameable emotion in my gaze, Sima Yi spoke up in a sulky growl. I answered blandly.
"Just checking you weren't getting seasick again this time."
"Hmph! You saw perfectly well last time that I'd already gotten used to it. What on earth are you going on about?"
Sima Yi did not disappoint my expectations, delivering her signature prickly response. Her personality truly was something else. If a girl like her ever had a child of her own someday, what sort of temperament would that child grow up with?
I couldn't help but wonder.