The Magnates of Gangdong (2)
Liu Bei Xuande.
The one person who had dared to stand against Cao Cao—the Hero of Chaos whom nobody else had even dreamed of opposing—and clung to her ankles without ever letting go.
To put it bluntly, from about the middle of the Three Kingdoms era onward—once the backstabber Lü Bu and the honey-water beggar Yuan Shu had both kicked the bucket—you could have passed the whole saga off as the chronicle of Liu Bei versus Cao Cao, and lost nothing in the telling.
Had she stayed at Cao Cao's side long enough to realize their ideals could never align? Or had she simply nursed the ambition to climb to an even higher seat from the very beginning? No one could ever read her true heart, but after the campaign to crush Lü Bu, Liu Bei seized on a brief lull of chaos and hammered the back of Cao Cao's head in Xuzhou.
And then, as luck would have it, the assassination plot hatched by Dong Cheng—the Emperor's own father-in-law—came to light, and the storm of blood began howling in earnest.
Cao Cao cut down the assassins, then put to death even the Empress carrying the Emperor's child. When she discovered Liu Bei's name on the list of conspirators, she made certain her retribution was thorough.
From there, everything began getting smashed to bits, like some hapless gang of villains who spent every waking day hunting an electric mouse, got struck by lightning for their trouble, and blasted off into the sky to twinkle as stars—again, and again, and again.
Perhaps Cao Cao thought of Chen Gong in that moment. Chen Gong had been a strategist Cao Cao adored and treasured, yet he had betrayed her too, just as Liu Bei now had, for reasons no one could name.
And unlike Lü Bu, who wept and begged for her life, Chen Gong had declined Cao Cao's offer, accepted death with quiet grace, and refused to stand beside her to the very end.
But even Cao Cao likely never saw what came next coming.
Because Liu Bei held one decisive advantage over Chen Gong.
And what was that?
She was incredibly good at running away.
However hard Cao Cao pounded her—until her eyes swelled up like chestnuts—Liu Bei never once failed at the single thing that mattered: escape. Watching her, I could only conclude she really was Emperor Gaozu's flesh and blood.
After all, Gaozu too shattered into splinters every time he so much as crossed paths with the Hegemon-King of Western Chu, yet somehow he always fled, regrouped, and rebuilt his strength, didn't he?
Gaozu was so utterly devoted to the art of flight that he once flung his own child clean off a moving carriage.
...Honestly, that part gave me pause.
At any rate, whether or not she truly inherited her ancestor's escape DNA, Liu Bei managed to run away even from the Battle of Changban—while shepherding several hundred thousand civilians, no less.
So why am I suddenly dredging all this up?
The answer was simple: I wanted it known that Liu Bei was a woman who had known nothing but hardship since her youth.
Tumbling this way and that through one misery after another, perhaps it was no wonder she met her first son so terribly late. No joke—she didn't bear Liu Shan until well past her mid-forties.
Which, honestly, sometimes made me wonder. Was it truly the hard life that did it? Or did the lady simply have a low hit rate?
Her rival Cao Cao, after all, had given birth to something approaching thirty children.
When Cao Ang, Cao Cao's firstborn, fell in battle at Wan, Cao Cao had been only in her early forties. Liu Bei, meanwhile, didn't welcome her first child until she was well past her mid-forties...
And just now, I felt I finally understood why Liu Bei's children had been so strangely few.
"...You still haven't figured it out?"
"...No. Not yet, my lord."
How many times had Liu Bei and I lain together by now?
I speak, of course, of the awe-inspiring, utterly overwhelming milk jugs that could claim direct descent from Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang...
...Okay, was that gag too lowbrow?
At any rate, with a devilishly bewitching body built to drive men wild—and all the enthusiastic "heave-ho" a man could ask for—what red-blooded male alive would dream of refusing?
Yet for all my efforts, Liu Bei's belly continued to maintain a stony, unyielding silence.
At this point, was the problem me? No—thinking of the other women, the problem clearly wasn't me.
"......"
"......"
When I held her in my gaze, Liu Bei let her eyes slide just slightly away.
...Right. There was nothing strange about this. Even in my past life, I'd heard plenty of stories about couples who ached for a baby and couldn't have one, for all manner of reasons.
Some of them adopted a child the normal way. Others bent off in strange directions and became those horrifying cases who snatched other people's infants off the street.
"Well... I suppose that happens too."
I patted the shoulder of Liu Bei, who was avoiding my eyes even now.
"No need to take it so hard. It'll happen someday."
She had only borne her first son Liu Shan in her mid-forties, after all—before that, the record showed she'd carried daughters to term. I didn't take her for barren outright; a late-born child simply seemed the likelier fate.
...Would a child born now even count as late?
"...Yes. Thank you, my lord."
Liu Bei answered with a smile, but her heart looked anything but easy.
Once our conversation ended, she murmured in a voice barely above a breath.
"How on earth did that woman..."
For Liu Bei—a woman who almost never let her mask slip—to betray herself like this, she truly must be gnawed raw with anxiety.
But who was "that woman," I wondered?
Don't tell me she meant Cao Cao?
...So that was it.
Thinking it over now, Cao Cao was older than Liu Bei. A woman her senior had conceived on the very first attempt—of course the question would burrow under her skin.
"......"
Having reasoned that far, a stray thought drifted through my mind.
Both of them were younger than their original-history selves, granted—but they were still older than me...
"General-in-Chief?"
"Oh—hmm?"
"...It's nothing."
What was that about? Had she sensed me thinking something strange?
Cao Cao had certainly worn a similar look once before.
...I was quietly floored at the time.
'Hehe, Nanggun-nim. You're not entertaining any pointless thoughts, I trust?'
'...As if I would.'
'Then I'm glad.'
At my answer, Cao Cao had nodded, slow and deliberate.
'Is it not a woman's nature to wish to appear beautiful at all times—above all, before the Nanggun-nim she loves?'
'......'
'Love shines brighter than anything else under heaven, yet a light too radiant can blind the very eyes that behold it.'
Having delivered that one metaphor, Cao Cao smiled with deep satisfaction.
'See that you take good care it never comes to that.'
'Understood—so fret yourself no further.'
That was what Cao Cao had said—though not for a moment did it mean she looked her age. If anything, her skin stayed so supple it seemed time had simply skipped over her entirely, which was astonishing in its own right.
They say extremes meet, and it appeared Cao Cao and Liu Bei both fell squarely within that category.
Thinking of Cao Cao, I tried to rough out how far the letter I'd sent might have traveled by now.
From what I'd heard, she was down south at this very moment, cracking the skulls of every last Shanyue warrior who so much as met her eyes, so she could hardly be staying put in any one place.
Just as the Shanyue had raised their banners against the Han for centuries on end, Cao Cao too would be uprooting her camp at random, waging her own campaign of guerrilla raids.
If luck ran against us, her army and my messengers would miss each other's paths a dozen times over—which meant, well, our reunion would be pushed back a good long while.
And yet I knew it in my gut.
The Cao Cao I knew would have predicted long ago that a letter was coming. I did catch myself wondering just how anyone managed to forecast my movements like that—but the habits of clever people had always lain beyond the understanding of a fellow like me.
And when it's just a hunch, what exactly is there to rebut?
After a moment's weighing of my next steps, I nodded. What remained to me was precisely two things.
Meet Cao Cao and coax her with care so she didn't bolt off to who-knows-where, and take the personal measure of the Gangdong coalition said to have joined hands with her army.
Beyond that, I still had to decide what to do with the Jiaozhou region...
If Shi Xie, the man who should be governing Jiaozhou at present, was the same person I remembered, I could absorb his forces without a real fight. In the original history, he had been extraordinarily averse to clashing with anyone at all.
At first, Shi Xie had bent over backward to stay in Cao Cao's good graces, as she swelled ever more colossal—winning the Battle of Guandu, then snatching up Jing Province with hardly a fight.
And then that very Cao Cao lost the Battle of Red Cliffs to Sun Quan and Liu Bei, and her fortunes tanked, hard.
Shi Xie, a politician who could read the winds a hundred li off, cut ties without a heartbeat's hesitation the moment the news reached him. And then, realizing just how monstrous Sun Quan's appetite for land truly was, he kept the gifts flowing without end—laying the groundwork so that no invasion could ever come on a whim.
He likely conducted himself in a posture of near half-submission, no? No joke—the man sent gifts of such staggering scale it was as though a vassal state were pouring tribute into its suzerain's coffers, year after year.
Whether to call that spineless or brilliantly judged, I honestly couldn't say.
At any rate, Sun Quan—who happily gobbled up every last gift Shi Xie sent—kept licking her lips at the southern lands, yet never once invaded Jiaozhou while the old man drew breath.
Of course, the instant Shi Xie died, as though she'd finally seen everything worth seeing, she lopped off the heads of the entire Shi household and seized the region outright.
"......"
I turned my gaze to Sun Quan, who was marching with us as my adjutant.
She caught my look and asked, tilting her head with artless innocence.
"My lord? Is something the matter?"
"...It's nothing."
"??"
How would a child this pure ever come to change so completely?
All I could do was pray that this world's Sun Quan would never, ever become a bloodsucking tick.