Cataclysm (7)
Straight hair that seemed neatly kept, and yet not kept at all. Indifferent eyes that gave away nothing of what lay behind them. The woman who faced me atop her horse carried an aura much like Lü Bu's, and yet entirely different.
If Lü Bu was, quite literally, a flame that blazed furiously at a moment's notice, then perhaps the woman before me was a flame that burned in quiet stillness, holding its place. But there was a difference between these two flames. The ever-raging flame loses its ferocity the instant I draw near, dwindling until at some point it goes out with a little puff, snuffed flat. That calm flame, on the other hand, would reduce everything to ash in a heartbeat the moment I carelessly reached out my hand.
"……"
Having marked me, the woman began to move slowly once the distance between us had narrowed, and I advanced at precisely the same pace until we faced one another.
"...So you're, the Grand General?"
"I am."
Only one person in the world could open her mouth so boldly at a meeting like this, and so I had already worked out who the woman before me was.
"……"
The woman, whose gaze suggested indifference to all things under heaven, looked me over once and then lapsed into silence.
"……"
"……?"
No, why isn't she talking? Hadn't she summoned me because she had business with me? Unable to bear the strange quiet a moment longer, I had no choice but to speak first.
"So then... am I to call you the Great Khagan?"
"No."
Genghis Khan shot me down so flatly that the questioner was left looking foolish.
"I don't like... lofty titles. Call me Temüjin."
"……"
"If that's hard, Tie Muzhen is fine too."
Tie Muzhen, was it. If my memory served, that was Genghis Khan's name rendered in Chinese characters. Perhaps because this was an age when the steppe peoples absorbed no small measure of Chinese influence — the characters seemed quite familiar to her, if a touch awkward on her tongue.
"Mm. Understood."
Hearing Temüjin out, I answered in a thoroughly nonchalant voice.
"Then you must call me Jeong Reung as well, not Grand General."
"...Why?"
"Why, you ask."
I looked straight into those crimson eyes that gave nothing away.
"The same reason as yours, Temüjin."
"Reason?"
"I'm not fond of being addressed by lofty titles either."
Sometimes you look at the kings of old and find ones who pile on this honorific and that until their titles run past ten characters. I understood the desire to project authority, but that struck me as a bit much. At that point it would be exhausting for the one inventing the title and the one forced to memorize it alike.
"Besides, if you're called by your name and I'm the only one addressed by my office, it would look rather strange, wouldn't it?"
Temüjin herself might not have cared, but the Mongols who followed her could easily have muttered behind their hands — does he dare belittle our Great Khagan? Respecting one another. Wasn't that the very foundation of diplomacy?
"……"
"Nothing more you wish to say?"
When I put the question to her, she — who had kept a silence so complete it bordered on uncanny — blinked once and nodded.
"Yes. I was simply curious what your face looked like."
"I see."
I had no idea why my face should interest her, but at such a plain answer, I calmly accepted it.
"Then I suppose it's time we discussed the most important matter of all."
She had made herself perfectly clear: unless we submitted to her, there would be war. As expected of the Mongol Empire — what a terrifying option to lay on the table.
"Entrusted with full authority to decide by Her Majesty the Emperor, my answer is this."
"……"
"Not vassalage, and not war. How about we maintain friendly relations as equals?"
It was a proposal that would have sent the scholars of this Han dynasty — the ones who strutted about with their noses in the air, proclaiming it the center of all culture — toppling straight out of their seats. Wherever people live, human nature is the same, and there were always a few who carried their pride in their own culture to excessive lengths. No — the problem was that it wasn't merely a few. It was the overwhelming majority. My authority at court was all but sacrosanct at the moment, but had there been even the smallest crack, certain scholar-officials would have resisted with everything they had. ...Or perhaps they already had, and simply vanished without a trace.
Recalling the sight of scholar-officials being converted into former scholar-officials before Her Majesty the Emperor, I pressed on.
"If we maintain friendly relations, establish trade routes, and exchange whatever each of us needs, what reason is there to fight?"
"……"
Truthfully, from my standpoint this was the best possible outcome. I had prepared for war — expanding the armories, swelling the size of my forces — but that had only ever been a means of preserving the peace. There is a very great difference between a cat yowling in self-defense to warn you off and a tiger growling that it will kill you if you lay a paw on it. The one problem being, of course, that the creature over there was also a tiger.
"If two beasts fight with every intent to kill each other, both will be left bleeding from grievous wounds. That is all."
"……"
"What say you? If you agree, we each withdraw our armies from this place and—"
"No."
Temüjin, who had held her silence for a moment, cut the conversation short before my words had even finished.
"Even if we open trade routes, the initiative would, in the end, be yours."
"...Initiative?"
"Yes."
When I asked her to elaborate, Temüjin acknowledged it flatly.
"We... die without trade."
"……"
"But you... live even without it."
A region of savage cold where the average temperature everywhere sank below freezing. Where rain rarely fell, and nearly half the territory was desert. To endure so harsh a natural world, the nomads of the north lived wandering lives, drifting from pasture to pasture. Yet even with all that effort, survival never came easily. However diligently they hunted, there was never enough to eat. Their families and their herds froze to death, unable to outlast the cold. Fierce beasts prowled every corner of the land, endlessly singling out the weak. And in the end, to survive, they killed their own kin — and other peoples besides. What they lacked, they took. If they could not take it, only death remained; they had no more choice in the matter than anyone else.
If, as I had just proposed, trade routes were established and necessities procured on a stable footing, then perhaps neither side would need to kill the other. But such an arrangement would never solve the fundamental problem. What if the friendly nation severed trade one day, citing this grievance or that pretext? And what if, at that moment, the nomads had no leader of Temüjin's caliber to hold them together? They would fall into disarray once more, and in the end shatter into fragments. The nation that cut off trade would suffer its share of losses too, but nothing beside a people whose very nation splintered apart. History would repeat itself, and the blood of countless kin would soak the earth once more. Was that truly right? Was entrusting the lives of one's own people to a foreign power genuinely right?
Temüjin — the Great Khagan who led the Mongol Empire — spoke.
"Can you truly... never betray us?"
"……"
A woman who, betrayed her whole life long, had risen to her feet again and again and at last unified her nation. When those unfathomable eyes turned on me, I held my silence. Whether it was Temüjin, called Genghis Khan, or I, called the Grand General of Han, neither of us would live forever. History and war were, in the end, inseparable. A relationship in which one side unilaterally gripped the other's lifeline was bound to go wrong sooner or later. Which meant the Mongols had only two paths open to them: reduce the nations around them to vassals, or trample everything flat and seize the land outright. Submission or death. It was cut from the same cloth as the proposal Genghis Khan had first sent us.
"...I see."
Becoming a vassal state for the sake of avoiding war was no choice at all. I knew all too well what miserable fates awaited nations that surrendered their sovereignty. The suzerain would strip its vassal's resources without end, and the vassal's people would be conscripted again and again as disposable arrow-fodder. And as I watched Temüjin's eyes, I understood.
"……"
I glimpsed the flame that flickered, half-hidden, behind those indifferent eyes. Was it a sense of duty — the obligation to answer for her own people? Or was it the conqueror's hunger — the desire to trample all things and press ever onward? Realizing that the conqueror before me would not turn her heart, I let out a long breath.
"Very well. So in the end, we fight at least once."
Whether the Mongol Empire fled after losing most of its soldiers, or the armies of Han were utterly crushed and overrun — only when a verdict was reached, one way or the other, could real conversation begin.
"……"
I looked over the Mongol officers and soldiers who guarded Genghis Khan so vigilantly. Judging by that extraordinary bearing, settling matters here and now was out of the question. Genghis Khan herself, I suspected, possessed considerable martial prowess. ...Roughly on the level of Seo Hwang or Zhang Liao, perhaps? Not the Match-for-Ten-Thousand caliber of Lü Bu or the Peach Garden Sisters, who put whole battlefields through a blender — but more than skilled enough to cut her way free of almost anything. Compared to that, I was a man who couldn't handle a single Mongol soldier. Hmm... wasn't I actually the one in greater danger here? Not that I'd had any intention of ambushing anyone at the parley in the first place. Unless one planned to forswear diplomacy with every other nation entirely, questions of trust mattered a great deal.
I turned my horse's head aside and looked at Genghis Khan.
"Well then. Let us leave the matter of trust for later."
"……"
"I'll see you on the battlefield, Temüjin."
"Yes. Jeong Reung, you too."
At the very least, I didn't seem to have left a bad impression. Who knew — perhaps, even if I lost the war, she would deal with me generously.