Cataclysm (4)
With every preparation complete, I made all haste to the imperial palace and submitted a memorial to Her Majesty.
───A grave menace has appeared in the north. I shall make haste and resolve it myself.
The memorial's contents, set down in a single line.
In the Han, where court etiquette was strict to a fault, filing a memorial in this fashion was more than grounds for censure—but Her Majesty was not the sort to scold a person over such things. ...To be precise, that leniency extended to me alone. Were any ordinary soul to attempt it, she would likely demand to know just how friendly he imagined himself to be with her—and then make him pay for it in full.
"...A menace, you say."
Having received my memorial and read it aloud, Her Majesty closed her eyes for a brief moment before speaking again.
"Must you march to war, no matter what?"
"Yes."
"Even if I ask it of you—as the mother who bore your child?"
"......"
Right. At this moment, Her Majesty was a brand-new mother who had only just given birth. Ordinarily, a father's duty would be to hurry to her side nearly every day, reaffirm his love, and help tend the child. But...
"It is precisely because of that, that I must march."
Having received Her Majesty's question, I held my silence for a moment before answering.
"Is it not my role to protect our family from powers beyond our walls?"
"...Pfft."
The Emperor let a laugh slip at my answer.
"Yes, that is exactly the kind of man you are."
"......"
"Very well. General-in-Chief, you are to march north and safeguard the peace of this nation and of this family."
"I shall obey your command."
When I bowed my head with that reply, the Emperor opened her mouth again, as though something had only just occurred to her.
"Ah, now that you mention it—an envoy from the northern tribes has arrived."
"...Has he, now?"
"He has. He bade Us choose between war and vassalage."
If that wasn't just like the Mongols, I didn't know what was.
Even in the original history, the Mongol Empire never once opened a war by surprise attack. Once the fighting began they would commit every means imaginable, yet when it came to the formal declaration itself, they were oddly scrupulous, never once failing to issue one. ...Whether to call that sporting, I couldn't say. Still, I would take it over the sort who strike without a word, get thrashed in return, and then wail about how cowardly their enemy was. In any case, ahead of every war, the Mongol Empire sent an envoy bearing a proposal that was, for all intents and purposes, a provocation—exactly as they had done now. And should the nation receiving that proposal refuse it in any shape or form, their army came pouring over the border.
What came after—did that really need spelling out?
The Mongol Empire smashed everything to pieces, and a hell on earth unfolded, one where even emperors and sultans were too busy fleeing for their lives to look back.
Treasuring the child in her arms, Her Majesty continued.
"I told him We would give our answer within days, and sent him on his way. So the decision on this matter, General-in-Chief, you shall make yourself, once you have gone north."
"...Yes."
At those words, relief washed through me in secret. Had the Emperor sent the Mongol envoy home with refusal plain in her voice, their army would have been in motion before I ever set foot in Hebei.
A vast host of cavalry, its riders having lived their entire lives in the saddle, its one great weakness—organization—already cured. It was not as if we had no cavalry of our own, but how best to put this... Set against a nomadic state where every last soldier rode, we were plainly short on numbers, weren't we? On a modest battlefield, leading the horsemen alone and racing north would have served well enough. The trouble was that the tribesmen massed up there numbered beyond one hundred thousand.
The armies about to collide were of such staggering magnitude that a melee of a mere few thousand would scarcely deserve the name of battle—which meant that on a field like that, a settled nation had to bring infantry if it hoped to win. There was no getting around it.
And in the time it took me to trudge northward step by step at the head of foot soldiers, You Province and Jizhou would be scorched earth. Just as it had gone for the countless nations that suffered the Mongol Empire's invasion in the original history—everything trampled flat, leaving nothing behind but ruins and ash. The Mongol army's marching speed was, quite literally, something out of another world entirely.
Her Majesty had surely weighed all of this as well, which was why she had sent the envoy back without committing to an answer.
...Though the Mongols' leader surely understood, too, that such a vague reply was a ruse to buy time. And yet even knowing it, he would likely make no move at all.
Nomads, who never put down roots in any one place, were famously hopeless at siegecraft—the business of storming walled cities. Plenty of their soldiers would be laying eyes on a castle for the very first time in their lives, and they were expected to take one? They would probably just float a question mark above their heads and wear the expressions of complete fools. The Mongol Empire that Genghis Khan led had overcome even that shortcoming, but next to an open-field battle they still fell a shade short—that much was simply true.
Which meant that from the Mongol standpoint, it suited them far better for an enemy host numbering in the hundreds of thousands to march out and lock horns in the grand pitched battles they trusted above all, than for that same host to burrow into fortresses and hold out.
To phrase it a touch crudely in modern terms—wasn't this them taunting, "Come on, let's settle it in one big teamfight?"
Well, turn down that kind of provocation and you're no true Korean.
...Except I was Chinese at the moment.
Done with that fleeting nonsense, I assembled the army and marched north. Not some ragtag rabble of peasants swept up off the streets, but the Han Empire's elite to a man—an army in which every last member had been tempered on real battlefields.
Their number, naturally enough, reached two hundred thousand.
The army of two hundred thousand that followed me now.
In truth, had I raked together every elite soldier under heaven, I could have surpassed three hundred thousand. But the Han was still reeling from the aftershocks of a chaotic age, its provinces steeped in disorder here and there, and I could not draw them all in. The land was simply that vast; keeping the peace alone was bleeding away soldiers in enormous numbers. Yet strip out even the garrisons holding that peace, and revolts would flare across the realm, sending everything we had labored to build up in smoke—so leaving them behind as our final bulwark was the right call. Add to that the several units I had detached and placed under Ma Chao to guard our flank, and the count shrank further still.
Truthfully, even clearing three hundred thousand, we would still come up short beside the armies of the nations the Mongols of the original history had faced. For one, the Jin dynasty had fielded an army of four hundred thousand from the very outset, and over in the Middle East, four hundred thousand more—troops raised by the conquering monarch Muhammad II's own hand—lay spread across the breadth of the state. ...Why was it forty myriad for both of them, though? Well, the Jin went on pouring out armies by the hundreds of thousands even afterward, so reckoning them at roughly eight hundred thousand all told would be nearer the mark. And Western Xia, another settled nation right next door, had scraped together a hundred and fifty thousand from that tiny patch of land—while I, holding most of China, managed a mere three hundred thousand.
...In fairness, if I conscripted even the ignorant farmers into service, the army's size would swell to easily twice its number. But numbers puffed up like that would amount to nothing more than arrow fodder. No—being arrow fodder would almost be a compliment. Conscripts inflated purely for count were far likelier to shatter and scatter at the first shock, gnawing away at allied morale and wrecking the formation itself. Could even the most rigorously drilled elite stay unmoved while comrades died in terror a breath away? Some other army might shrug that off, but the Mongol Empire was supremely skilled at exploiting exactly such chaos—so bloating our size for its own sake was no good choice at all.
Case in point: wasn't it the Mongol Empire that butchered the Jin and the Southern Song—the undisputed endgame bosses of sheer numbers, who had churned out hundreds of thousands without end? Far more economical, then, to concentrate on the elite troops the supplies that would otherwise have gone to feed conscripts. Had there been time to conscript the people and train them properly, perhaps—but I doubted the bastards up north would wait around for that. ...And beyond that, turning the very people I was sworn to lead into one-shot arrow fodder sat poorly with me from the start. It was a problem on humanitarian grounds and a problem on strategic grounds alike, so I had no cause to prattle on about needing more soldiers and drag even more of the populace from their homes.
Good grief. If the age of chaos hadn't been spent on mutual slaughter, I could have led four hundred thousand north myself. Of course, call it a mercy that with fewer men, the quality had climbed until we would yield not an inch to the Mongol Empire on that front.
One hundred thousand of the Mongol Empire's finest against two hundred thousand of the Han Empire's finest.
"......"
Whichever side won this coming battle would almost certainly seize the initiative in every war thereafter. It would be lovely if this single clash ended the whole war... but who could say. Mongol and Han alike had chewed through civil wars until war itself held no novelty for them; this was bound to drift toward a long, grinding campaign. I suspected this was the very reason Genghis Khan, even with a grand pitched battle looming, had not massed every soldier on the northern front and had instead sent a portion circling wide. Even if he lost the battle, he would simply bolt—and then that monstrous mobility of his would give us no end of grief.
"My lord, there is a force ahead of us."
"A force?"
I had been wringing my brain dry, forecasting how the campaign would unfold, when the adjutant's report made me lift my head.
"......"
Far in the distance, a golden-haired woman sat astride her horse, gazing our way. The moment I spotted the woman with that familiar face—her hair plaited neat and straight down her back—the words slipped out of me.
"Now there's a face I haven't seen in a very long time."
"Hmm?"
Cao Cao, who had been leading the host at my side, caught my murmur and flashed an impish smile.
"Rating her looks right off the bat? Don't tell me you've set your sights on Benchu—Yuan Shao's courtesy name—as well?"
"......"
Just how had she parsed what I said to arrive at that?
I pulled a thoroughly exasperated expression, but Cao Cao, meeting my gaze all the while, simply kept on beaming.