Pacifying Jiangdong (1)
To give you the conclusion up front: the Shanyue tribe had, in the end, come crashing down.
They were a power whose soldiers were elite to a man and whose scale was nothing short of colossal. Judged on those two merits alone, there had not been a single flaw to find—yet they had never overcome the fatal weakness so peculiar to the frontier tribes: their sheer inability to unite with one another.
Then again, had they managed that much, the Shanyue would have made Jiangdong their own long ago.
The Shanyue who had fought to the very last without any fear of death were finally struck down, while those who had wheeled around to shield Yan Baihu displayed a truly remarkable knack for pulling her out of the jaws of defeat. They were every bit as fearless of death, it seemed—so much so that they raised a barricade out of their own bodies. Even impaled on spear and blade, they clung to the cavalry's ankles and refused to let go, a sight that was, in a certain sense, enough to inspire awe.
Yan Baihu, realizing her position had been exposed, did the natural thing and bolted. By hook or by crook she punched through the encirclement and tucked herself away deep inside Moling.
With matters having flowed this far, one might ask whether what remained was a siege. But the Shanyue had taken ruinous losses in the course of rescuing Yan Baihu. Those who had never followed her to begin with, lingering behind on their own, were struck from front and rear and annihilated; those who had marched back to defend her threw themselves before our pursuing troops and perished, glorious to the last.
Seeing all this with my own eyes, I understood that Yan Baihu had genuinely won the hearts of the soldiers under her command. The tribal leaders I had met up until now had, as a rule, gone shooting off into the distance the moment things turned sour, desperate only to save their own hides.
Now then—let us think this through. What must it feel like, to be a ruler who has lost the better part of her loyal followers through her own judgment?
Utterly miserable, I imagine. Heartbroken, even.
Of course, there are those who snort and shrug it off, Cao Cao fashion—but that is simply a case of Cao Cao being Cao Cao, so let us set her aside as an exception.
In any case, to have lost most of one's loyal followers is to face a powerful enemy. A ruler wrung with pain then arrives at yet another fork in the road. Does she wail for vengeance and resist that enemy to the bitter end? Or does she swallow her humiliation and surrender, to save whatever followers remain to her?
Were she to choose vengeance, I intended at least to send her off without suffering; were she to accept humiliation and surrender, I would owe her the same warm reception Meng Huo had received.
Frankly, I hoped she would surrender—but either choice would have been understandable, and so I simply waited, calm and unhurried.
And now.
"Hic... Surrender... I mean to surrender, I do..."
Stripped of every weapon and clad in a plain white robe, a tiny girl bowed low before me.
"Do with me as you please—only spare my kin, I beg of you...!"
"...Very well."
At the sight of the girl shedding great fat tears and pleading so piteously, I found myself utterly at a loss.
"Sniff... Big sis..."
...Wasn't the big one supposed to be Yan Baihu? So the nourishment meant for the older sister had all gone to the younger one, had it.
I addressed Yan Baihu, who had chosen surrender even at the cost of her pride.
"...I keep my promises, so that's quite enough crying."
"Hic... But still...!"
Well, this was awkward.
Had Cao Cao witnessed this scene, she'd have flashed a wicked grin and remarked that I harbored quite the spectacularly twisted streak of schadenfreude. And in truth, even now my heart gave a few guilty twinges of precisely that kind.
But what could I do?
The long feud between the Han people and the Shanyue had already festered for hundreds of years, well past the point where words could mend it. The Shanyue resented the Han for trampling into their territory wherever they pleased; the Han resented the Shanyue for perpetrating every manner of villainy while insisting this land had been theirs since time immemorial.
Sooner or later, I was always going to have to cross blades with them in earnest, just as Sun Quan had in the original history. The only surprise was that the leader at their head turned out to be a girl of such slight frame.
"It was because of my worthless ambition that so many comrades gave their lives, it was...!"
"......"
There had been a reason she'd won the hearts of those unruly Shanyue, it seemed—Yan Baihu never once stopped repenting the choices she had made.
A virtuous king of the east... So there had, at the very least, been a reason she styled herself the Eastern Wu King of Virtue. Honestly, I'd assumed the title was pure self-flattery.
She may have fallen short of true royal timber, but she was nonetheless a soul with a warm heart, one who genuinely thought of others. That such a person had risen from among the Shanyue was nothing short of astonishing.
Because when you speak of barbarian tribes, well—how to put it. The impression that sticks is 'Blood! Slaughter! Pillage!'—savages mad for battle, morning, noon, and night.
Though confined to the horse-riding tribes of the north, that impression wasn't actually wrong.
Yan Baihu went on speaking through her tears.
"This wicked karma is certain to haunt me for the rest of my days, it is...!"
Good grief.
She was filming a full-blown regret-and-ruin melodrama right here and now.
No words from me—her enemy mere hours ago—could possibly have consoled her. After all, there were nights when my own thoughts ran deep, and I too would reckon up just how much blood was soaked into my hands.
An age in which man slaying man was simply the way of things. To claim I had never lain awake gnawing on that truth would be a lie; even now, the nightmares still paid their visits from time to time.
But I knew exactly what it was I carried, and so I pressed on without wavering.
"...My lord."
"Huh—whuh? Is it morning already?"
"No. Only... you seemed to be caught in an unpleasant dream."
Every time a nightmare took hold, Seo Yeo would swiftly wake me before it could sink its teeth in. Apparently I was the type to groan and writhe in my sleep.
"Mmm... There, now. Come here. We'll sleep together."
"......Yes."
Well, on nights after a bad dream, all it took was falling asleep with Seo Yeo in my arms, so it was no trouble at all. Her body ran mysteriously warmer than mine, you see. Rather like embracing a soft, squishy heater, if I had to describe it.
I watched Yan Baihu's tears fall a moment longer, then turned my head away. ...The more I thought about it, the more I felt it was kinder to pretend I hadn't seen. That guilt of hers was something only time could hope to heal.
In any case, with Yan Baihu—fresh off her crushing defeat—surrendering to me, the Shanyue problem was all but settled. Not every Shanyue intent on resisting the Han had vanished, but their numbers had been slashed to a fraction.
What remained now were the great clans of Jiangdong down south, then?
"Hic... Sniff... Now that you mention it, there is something I had quite forgotten, there is..."
Just as I found myself thinking of Liu Yao, the Inspector of Yangzhou, Yan Baihu—swallowing back her sobs—spoke up.
"I... heard that my lord was searching for a man called Ze Rong, I did..."
"Ah."
Come to think of it, there was that bastard too. The bandit chief who had sent assassins after me with the aim of plunging the whole realm into chaos. Even now, the mere mention of Ze Rong's name made any number of people's eyes flash.
Needless to say, the assassins who had come for me had each taken a single blow apiece from Seo Yeo and Lü Bu and departed for the afterlife with their bodies blown apart.
But above all, the crucial point was that Her Majesty the Empress had gone so far as to issue an imperial decree ordering Ze Rong taken alive.
Uh... how should I put it—she had well and truly painted a target on his back. Unless he fled China altogether for some other land entirely, he would spend the rest of his days as a hunted man.
Ze Rong seemed well aware of this too, which was precisely the problem: at some point, all word of him had cut off without warning.
Specifically, his trail went cold after the news that he had betrayed Liu Yao and handed Moling over to Yan Baihu.
I put the question to Yan Baihu.
"Ze Rong... He is the man we're looking for, but didn't he already run?"
"Not so, he did not! With a bandit who betrayed his own lord, blinded by a paltry pile of riches, there is no reason to keep any promise—none there is!"
Huh. So that was how it was, then.
Going by her face alone she looked the picture of innocence, but there was a surprisingly calculating streak lurking underneath.
So what had become of Ze Rong, then? Yan Baihu had said she never kept her word to him, so had he already slipped the bonds of this world?
The whole affair had ended as a mere attempted assassination, so it was no skin off my back—but the people around me would hardly see it that way.
Half hoping, I threw out the question.
"Then what came of Ze Rong? Is he dead already?"
"Not so, he is not! The greedy bandit, blinded by tribute, sits locked in a cell at this very moment, he does!"
And anyway, her way of speaking was truly something else.
To think there was now another figure threatening the throne of the Nanman robot—that robot who needlessly chopped every sentence into little pieces.
"I meant to execute that bandit as an example to all, one day, I did!"
"Oh... I see."
Presumably her aim was to demonstrate, for all to see, what fate awaited bandits who plundered the common people.
This was only my personal guess, but I suspect Yan Baihu had at some point clashed with the more extreme-minded among her own Shanyue.
If even we who are called the Han tore at one another over this whole 'Warlords Carving Up the Realm' business and whatnot, one could scarcely imagine how much worse it was for a people whose daily life was war.
Those extreme-minded Shanyue had been all but wiped out in the recent fighting, however, so they posed no further problem.
Even now, a few units were diligently chasing down the stragglers, hungry to chalk up battle honors.
"Hold on just a moment—you're telling me that bastard is in a dungeon?"
At that, Sima Yi, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation from nearby, spoke up.
...She was most definitely supposed to be commanding soldiers in the rear.
So why, exactly, was blood dripping, drop by drop, from the blade in Sima Yi's hand?
"Ah, please don't go getting any strange ideas. I simply chased down the enemy as they fled, that is all."
"...Are you all right?"
"Pardon? As concerns what, exactly?"
Confronted with such perfect nonchalance from someone who had just cut men down with her own hands, I held my silence.
I had expected roughly this much, but she truly was a terrifying little tyke.
No—come to think of it, in this world, perhaps this was simply what passed for normal.
I gave Sima Yi's head a couple of light pats and said,
"I was asking whether you were hurt anywhere."
"...Hmph, and who exactly is worrying about whom? I am perfectly fine, so kindly spare me your concern."
Brusque to the last, but answer my question she did. That was Sima Yi for you.