The Choice (1)
Just as I had predicted, the moment Seo Yeo stepped onto the field, the temper of the battle began to flip on its head.
A human tank that simply could not be held in place, and a cavalry force riding at her back to crush everything in reach. In the original history, did the Eight Thousand of Jiangdong — the troops said to have shared every rise and fall with Xiang Yu, the Hegemon-King of Western Chu — ever look like this? Even as the tribal invaders hurled themselves at them from all four directions with snarling ferocity, they shrugged off every obstruction in stony silence and pressed forward toward one point and one point alone.
"……."
Even in a battlefield where hundreds of thousands churned together, the red-haired woman stood out unmistakably. Watching from afar, Genghis Khan looked faintly startled by a sight that blew her every assumption to pieces — the guards who had flung themselves at the enemy to shield her were failing to hold for even a single breath.
──…….
Genghis Khan, taking this in, seemed to grasp something; she turned her head and murmured something to the aides gathered near her.
──……!
The distance swallowed her words entirely, but one look at the appalled faces of her subordinates told me she was issuing some kind of outrageous order.
But that lasted only a moment.
──…….
When Genghis Khan repeated it with resolute finality, her aide at last seemed to concede and nodded slowly.
──……!
Then she wheeled her horse in another direction and began ranging this way and that across the field — and no matter how I looked at it, the shape of it was a retreat from the battle.
"...Huh. So she means to pull out, does she."
I muttered under my breath as I watched the scene unfold. To think she would order her soldiers to withdraw the very instant the tide turned against her. For a woman who had forged her name on so many battlefields, she must have judged that she herself had no chance of slipping away from here. Even so, it astonished me that a sovereign would command her men to flee and leave her behind — and astonished me all the more that her soldiers obeyed without a word of protest. In the original history, they say the soldiers who followed Genghis Khan would dive into water if she pointed at water, and into fire if she pointed at fire. I knew that loyalty was immense, but I hadn't realized it ran deep enough to swallow an order like that.
Once the unit attending Genghis Khan broke away, the other Mongol Empire forces seemed to grasp exactly how things stood, and every one of them began scattering to the four winds. Of course, Genghis Khan had no intention of being taken quietly either, and she wheeled about to flee—
"SHRAAAK—!!"
"CRUNCH!"
"...Ah."
Seo Yeo, still locked in the chase, hurled the Chuzhen Spear in her hand with every ounce of her strength — and it ran Genghis Khan's horse clean through.
"……."
Her throw had struck its mark perfectly, and yet Seo Yeo gave the faintest impression of disappointment. I chose to believe that was just my imagination.
...Still, the more I looked at her, the more curious I became. Just what manner of man was Emperor Gaozu of Han, to have slipped out of the Hegemon-King of Western Chu's grasp not once but over and over? Did he run away using some kind of teleportation sorcery or what? I felt like I had plunged into a riddle that would never be solved.
And so, after the battle ended on the strength of Seo Yeo and the generals beside her, I went over the prisoners we had taken and heaved out a groan.
"...Unbelievable."
One hundred thousand troops Genghis Khan had led in with her own hands. And another hundred thousand that Subutai had arrived leading as reinforcements mid-battle. I had succeeded in crushing a tribal army two hundred thousand strong in all, and yet, for a victory, we somehow hadn't inflicted anything like the damage we should have. True, the Mongol Empire's forces had suffered casualties well past half their number — the trouble was that the remaining tens of thousands had scattered to every point of the compass and bolted with their tails between their legs. As a result, the prisoners we held amounted to little more than the few thousand who had stayed to guard Genghis Khan until the bitter end. The one silver lining, I supposed, was that a few genuine prizes had been tucked away among those thousands.
Kublai and Borokhula, who together with the Kheshig had hung off Lü Bu's ankles and refused to let go.
"……."
And Jebe besides — the man who had once punched a hole clean through my side. Jebe had given a fine account of himself against Guan Yu, letting her blade slide off his weapon with practiced grace, but the moment Zhang Fei laid eyes on him she came hurtling in spewing every curse in the book, and the blow he took from her was that. He was captured on the spot.
...Why is it that the Peach Sisters always seem to end up dogpiling one unfortunate soul? If Liu Bei — staying in Luoyang these days on account of the baby — had been there as well, I half suspect the Battle of Hulao Pass would have played out all over again.
Apart from them, no prisoner of any real note turned up. Which meant it was time to see to the most important business of all.
Genghis Khan had tumbled from her slain mount, blinked her eyes dumbly for a spell, and then been trussed up tight in rope by the enemies who closed in on her.
"Mm... So I'm caught."
"That's right. You're caught."
I turned my gaze on Genghis Khan, who even in the worst predicament of her life wore that same unruffled expression.
"Before we get into the real discussion, I have just one thing to ask you."
"...What is it?"
"Suppose you had somehow made it out of this place alive. What was your plan then?"
"My plan, if I'd survived?"
So asked, Genghis Khan answered in a voice utterly without turbulence.
"Rally my troops. And attack again."
"……."
Well. How remarkably honest. Genghis Khan showed a strange, almost uncanny honesty toward other people — and no doubt the countless events she had lived through were what shaped her that way. If my memory served, her life could only be called one long chain of betrayals. It was never she who knifed others in the back; Genghis Khan was the one who caught the knife between her shoulders, again and again.
For a start, from her earliest childhood she had been betrayed by the very tribe her family followed. The reason? Her father — a warrior of great renown — had died, and so, as far as the tribe was concerned, they had outlived their usefulness. With that, the tribe Temüjin's family belonged to left them stranded on the steppe and shot off without so much as a backward glance.
Worse still, her father Yesügei had died from drinking poisoned water — which is to say, he had been betrayed and struck down in the middle of a feast. The Mongols kept a custom of lavishing hospitality on any guest who came to their fire, however bitter the feud between them, and her father's enemies had turned that very custom into the instrument of his death.
Her father, backstabbed and murdered at a feast — and the tribe that heard of it, far from avenging him on his killers, abandoned Temüjin's family, whose only grown member was a single woman, and left them out on the steppe. That act was as good as commanding them to freeze or starve come winter. She would have been about ten at the time. In other words, from her tenderest years she had taken one betrayal after another and drunk the bitterness of life to its dregs.
Then came the day her half brother tormented her one time too many. Her resentment finally burst its banks, and she put an arrow through him — and the instant that happened, the very tribe that had abandoned her family came swarming back to make Temüjin a slave. The official pretext was that a criminal could hardly be left to roam free... Sure it was. More likely, once Temüjin turned out to be alarmingly good at staying alive, they grew afraid she might one day repay them for the abandonment, and so they loosed their hunters. Records to that effect actually survive, you know.
Ignore the family in their hour of need and leave them stranded on the southern Siberian steppe — then, the moment a pretext to sink their teeth into her presented itself, come rushing in as if they had been waiting years for exactly that, and bind her in chains. Enslaved, Temüjin lived on with a knife at her throat, until an old man who took pity on her helped her make good her escape. But Temüjin's procession of backstabs was not yet finished with her. Later she would be betrayed, grandly, by her own uncle Ong Khan — sent fleeing this way and that, reduced to drinking muddy water. Her entire life was one unbroken relay of knives in the back.
So. Now let's think. What manner of creed would Temüjin come to hold, betrayed and betrayed and betrayed again from childhood, betrayed even as a grown woman, made to endure every hardship there was? She came to loathe the act of betrayal itself — and she showed, time and again, that once she sealed a promise, she would never be the first to break it. That disposition of Genghis Khan's would weigh enormously on how she ruled the Mongol Empire in the years to come.
"So even if I release you here, you mean to tell me you'd come marching in again a few years from now, exactly the same?"
"Yeah."
No doubt that same nature was why she could answer so honestly right now.
"……."
Truth be told, if Genghis Khan had pledged to surrender and begged me only to let her return to her homeland, I would have cut them all down where they stood. It would have been a lie so threadbare anyone could see through it — no different from announcing, in advance, that she would swing a blade into my back one day. But Genghis Khan, even at the cost of dying on this spot, stood unbowed by her convictions and declared that she and I were enemies. It was her way of proclaiming that she would never stoop to the cowardly backstabbing of the people she despised.
"...So that's how it is."
That short exchange with Genghis Khan brought every last deliberation to its close. I opened my mouth, slowly.
Clemency.
A word that meant to forgive another's fault, or to accept it with an open hand. From now on, some would sneer at what I was about to do, calling it the weakness of a soft heart, and others would criticize me at no small length for failing to sever a root of future calamity. I had heard the very same words when I took the Nanman and the Shanyue Tribe — peoples who had risen against the Han Empire with armies hundreds of thousands strong — into the Han fold and granted them treatment no different from the Han themselves.
But war, since time immemorial, has been a thing waged to force one's own will upon another. I would simply keep walking the road I believed to be right — and if war came of it, I had no intention of running.