Cataclysm (1)
Even after my exchange with the Empress had taken on that briefly murderous edge, I stayed right where I was. She had only just given birth to our child — the least I could do was remain at her side for the day.
"Hmm... naming avoidance, hm..."
Her Majesty, who almost never refused my suggestions, sank deep into thought at my mention of the name taboo. Well, of course. An Empress who faced high officials and great lords day in and day out surely possessed literary talents well beyond mine — perhaps she knew rare characters that ordinary people never touched.
"Eeboo..."
Meanwhile, the child whose name had yet to be chosen had stopped crying at some point and drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep. True to her status as a princess, even her swaddling cloth was of the finest quality — silk her imperial grandfather had woven thread by thread with painstaking care, gleaming in smooth, beautiful colors.
...Well, I suppose it's only natural for the imperial family to use fine things.
People around me kept telling me that while thrift was no vice, a certain minimal dignity had to be maintained. Even I, as things stood, had several luxury items I'd once stashed in a warehouse with the vague intention of selling them off someday — only for them to end up displayed throughout my residence.
Unless luxury goods had grown legs and marched home on their own, someone had clearly given the order. I had plenty of suspects, and if I'd truly wanted to find the culprit, nothing could have stopped me — but I saw no need to bother. Nobody had stolen from me; they'd simply done a bit of interior decorating. What was the point of nagging about that?
Frankly, half the reason those luxury items had been nailed into the warehouse in the first place was that arranging them properly sounded like a hassle.
"Ah — what do you think of this name?"
Just then, Her Majesty spoke in a calm voice, as though she had finished wrestling with every last doubt.
"I only glimpsed it in passing, but there are said to be a few readings that would suit the surname Liu."
"Is that so?"
When I made a puzzled face, the Empress nodded slowly.
"Hmmm... surely one of them was..."
The Son of Heaven, seated upon the most exalted throne under heaven, had doubtless devoured mountains of books in her time. She smiled.
"There we are. Jeong, as in a bench seat, seems fitting."
"A bench seat... jeong?"
...Now what was that word again?
It took me a good long while of racking my brain before I finally dredged it up. The character was utterly unfamiliar from the very first stroke — it referred to a cushion placed against a wall for reclining, a word entirely different from the jeong used in the idiom for being too anxious to sit still.
"...Ahem."
I addressed Her Majesty, who was watching me struggle to recall a single word with eyes that found it all terribly endearing.
"Then have you decided upon Liu Jeong for the child's name?"
"I have. With a character this obscure, few of our subjects will suffer inconvenience under the naming taboo."
That much was true. Even I — who received constant instruction from Jia Xu and my little prodigy strategists while they ghost-wrote my documents — had only barely managed to recall it. With a character like this, few people would be tormented by the taboo.
Still, something nagged at me, and I couldn't help putting the question to Her Majesty.
"But... are you certain it's all right?"
"Hm? What do you mean?"
"The name of a child who will one day lead this nation... means a bench seat."
It felt a bit... ambiguous, as names went. Not that I wanted to be contrarian for its own sake — but disagreeing with the Empress's own choice left an uneasy taste.
Had any ordinary courtier behaved as I just had, the atmosphere would have frozen solid in an instant. But in the end, the decision was hers to make. I merely offered my opinion; once the decision came down, I obeyed in silence.
"Fufu. What a very you sort of worry."
Her Majesty smiled at my concerned objection.
"The character for a bench seat also carries the meaning of a pillar, you see."
"...It does?"
Well, that was news to me. The only character I knew for pillar was the common one. So many characters shared overlapping meanings — could this, too, be a trace of some ancestor's desperate dodge around a naming taboo?
"One day she shall inherit my throne and become the pillar that upholds the nation."
Her Majesty said this with a gentle smile.
"Well? Would you not call that a fine meaning, in your eyes as well?"
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Having heard that explanation, I had no choice but to answer with due courtesy.
Her Majesty proceeded to poke the child's soft, plump cheeks.
"Eee..."
"Fufu. She takes after her father — such an adorable little thing."
Poke, poke — Her Majesty chuckled as she watched Liu Jeong squirm in her sleep whenever her cheeks were prodded.
...If anything, the child looked more like Her Majesty than like me.
If she'd taken after me, there was no way she'd have been born with looks as adorable as Her Majesty claimed. 'She resembles you, my lord.''Look, look! The way she stares — she's the very image of Jeong Reung!'
But recalling how the other women had behaved in the past, I quietly conceded the point. Love blinds people, as they say. The rose-tinted lenses were on so thick that every aesthetic judgment had been recalibrated to me as the standard — arguing otherwise would have gotten me nowhere. She'd bulldoze forward with utter conviction that she was right, so what could I possibly do about it?
"My darling daughter. Grow up strong and healthy, and quickly now."
Watching Her Majesty bless her child with such sincerity, I couldn't help but wear a soft, contented smile.
By the time the cold truly began to set in, I was dragging my reluctant, stay-indoors-at-all-costs body outside to map out my plans for the coming year.
"Let's see now..."
I slid gaming counters back and forth across a vast map of the Han dynasty, taking the measure of the current situation. The realm, carved into enormous provinces for the purpose of governance — I surveyed with my own eyes the great regions commonly known as the Thirteen Provinces of Later Han. Sili, Jing, Ye, Yan, Xu, Yi, and all the rest besides. If one included the territories of Yang and Jiaozhou, which we had seized in this latest campaign, it would be no exaggeration to say that most of the realm now lay within our faction's grasp.
Oh — and by the way, I had submitted a proposal to Her Majesty to rename the Jiaozhi region to Jiaozhou. That faint, lingering discomfort had finally been scrubbed away. Felt good.
"......"
Which left only two powers standing: Yuan Shao in Jizhou, and Gongsun Zan in You Province. Though calling them two powers was generous — in truth, they were all but one now.
Gongsun Zan, who had once crushed Liu Yu, the Inspector of You Province, and risen as the undisputed warlord of Hebei, now lived with his very life hanging by a thread. At the Battle of Jieqiao he had lost the greater part of the White Horse Volunteers, his pride and joy — his elite special forces — and after that, bogged down in endless, indecisive attrition, he had begun to be crushed under sheer weight of numbers by Yuan Shao, who had claimed the honey-pot province of Jizhou for herself.
And Gongsun Zan's everyday conduct had been rotten to begin with, so he'd thrown away even the friendly powers he might once have counted on. The local gentry had all turned their backs on him, and the common people, subjected to his endless tyranny, could offer nothing but curses. Driven into a corner like this, what exactly was the man supposed to do?
In the end, Gongsun Zan had shut himself inside the fortress called Yijing Tower, built by pouring every last ounce of his strength into its construction. Even so, he hadn't quite abandoned hope — he sent me letters proposing that we attack Yuan Shao from both sides at once.
'I have a fine plan in mind. Care to hear it?'
I refused — and instead, taking up Zhuge Liang's stratagem, opened secret negotiations with Yuan Shao and slammed a blade into Gongsun Zan's unguarded back. Someone once said it, didn't they? You are betrayed only because you hoped.
Thus thoroughly betrayed in his expectations, Gongsun Zan withdrew into Yijing Tower afterward and was seen by no one.
No — "not being seen" understates it. By all accounts the man was repeating incomprehensible acts of madness. According to the intelligence our spies gathered, he refused to meet with any of his own subordinates, instead issuing one-sided orders from a distance, speaking only through a favored concubine.
I couldn't help but chuckle at Gongsun Zan faithfully retracing his steps from the history I knew. And as his madness mounted, desertions from Yijing Tower were hemorrhaging in real time. Not merely common soldiers — even their officers, aides, and commanders were fleeing. That alone told you how dire the situation had become.
For now he showed no movement at all, but I could predict what would come: the moment the weather warmed, Yuan Shao's army would dig tunnels and take Yijing Tower. The ground freezes solid in winter — try swinging a shovel then. I remembered my own past, hopping about like a rabbit on top of a spade, forcing the frozen earth open, and shook my head.
At any rate, once Gongsun Zan was disposed of by Yuan Shao, only one matter would remain.
"Hmmm."
How to absorb Yuan Shao's faction without everything going sideways? If Yuan Shao could read the board at all, she'd know that standing against our faction now was suicide. Well — drunk on ambition like her own dear cousin Yuan Shu, she could pick a fight, but the odds of that were vanishingly small.
I'd said Yuan Shao held the advantage earlier, true — but she hadn't fully recovered from the damage Gongsun Zan had inflicted. Gongsun Zan had built his reputation slaughtering nomads on the frontier, and in the early days of the warlords carving up the realm, his was a force as formidable in sheer scale as Yuan Shu's own. Could a woman who had fought him tooth and nail for years across all that time truly have come away unscathed?
Even if she destroyed Gongsun Zan and swallowed You Province whole, if I marched straight in, she'd crumble — "oh dear" and all the way to the border. She lacked any just cause to oppose me besides, so with a handful of loyal souls as exceptions, everyone else would turn their coats. That was not the behavior of Yuan Shao, a woman who had won her towering reputation through sheer political cunning.
Hmmm... right. I'd coax her gently, the way I did with Cao Cao — dangle an enormously high office under her nose. If my plan went as intended, the Hebei region would fall into our hands without a single drop of blood—
"My lord! Urgent report!"
"...Hm?"
Just as I was lost in such thoughts, a messenger appeared without warning.
"...What is it?"
"My lord! The matter is—"
The messenger opened his mouth at once in answer to my question — and as I listened, I could do nothing but stare in shock.