The Choice (2)
Leniency.
A word meaning to graciously accept the faults of others.... Which, put another way, meant you might well end up the sort of soft-hearted fool whose own flesh gets carved off and devoured.
Even in real history, there was one ruler the phrase "sovereign of mercy and leniency" fit better than anyone. Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn — Saladin, for short.
Yes. The Islamic ruler who wrested the holy city of Jerusalem back from the nations of Europe and smashed crusade after crusade without fail. A man as famous for his dealings with Richard the Lionheart as for anything else. Contrary to the ugly image that tended to spring to mind at the word "Islam," he was profoundly merciful. He freed every prisoner he took, barring a handful of exceptions, and let the Franks of Jerusalem purchase their freedom with ransoms. He was even said to have covered the ransom out of his own purse for those who couldn't afford it before seeing them off. A very different picture indeed from the Franks who, decades before, had seized Jerusalem and — seized in turn by religious frenzy — massacred every soul there who believed in Islam. Honestly, when it came to religious fanaticism, Islam was hardly outdone by Christianity either. Had Saladin howled for nothing but blood and vengeance like any other Muslim, Jerusalem would surely have been left a ruin.
"First things first, let me get this out of the way: I have no intention of killing every last one of you."
"...?"
Genghis Khan, who had already resigned herself to the expectation that they would all die, tilted her head at my words.
"Hold on! Are you saying you intend to release them all?!"
Sima Yi — who until that moment had been standing nearby, mulling over how exactly the prisoners should be killed — jolted in shock and shouted.
"You do realize that is an incredibly stupid idea, right?! The moment those bastards are freed, they'll just come back and attack us...!"
"No one said anything about releasing them all," I replied, a shade exasperated.
Saladin. Christendom called him the merciful and tolerant sovereign; the Islamic world exalted him as a ruler worthy to stand on the same plane as the Prophet Muhammad himself. And yet even Saladin had paid dearly for that signature mercy of his, many times over. Prisoners he had freed on the battlefield had once regrouped among themselves and formed a hostile power in one region or another, and there had even been cases of men marching straight back to the Crusaders to reappear as enemies.
"These people are hostages."
"...?"
So I murmured, sweeping my gaze over the prisoners held here — several thousand Kheshig, and even the Four Steeds and Four Hounds, the generals Genghis Khan treasured above all others.
Kublai and Borokhula, who had been trying to pin down Lü Bu alongside their own soldiers, had failed to run even once the battle flipped completely on its head. Grabbing someone else's ankle, after all, rather tends to mean your own ankle gets grabbed in turn. In the end the two of them, able neither to advance nor retreat, were hammered by Lü Bu to a thunderous drumbeat and hauled off as prisoners, their bodies mottled blue with bruises from head to toe. Lü Bu had deliberately spared their lives, but she'd beaten them to a state that would turn any onlooker's blood cold; Kublai and Borokhula survived only because they'd been born with frames sturdy enough to hold the front line against her in the first place.
...Sturdy or not, if I hadn't reined her in, those two would honestly have been beaten to death.
Lü Bu had actually dismounted from Red Hare and was laying into the pair with the Sky Piercer Halberd, and it was only when I wrapped my arms around her from behind that she finally settled down.
"Let go! I have to kill at least these bastards before my anger—!"
"Thrash around like that and my wounds will tear open."
"?!"
Lü Bu had been flailing with all four limbs, but at my threat of self-harm she froze mid-wriggle, her face draining snow-white. A perfectly ordinary sunfish that might drop dead from a single tap had just evolved into an injured sunfish. ...Evolved? Wasn't that a devolution?
In any case, the generals around me already pulled their punches around me as it was, and it went without saying they would only grow more timid still.
Even Seo Yeo, who of all people ought to have been raging hotter than anyone, was merely pacing the vicinity with a restless air, doing nothing but stealing glances at my face.
And what, exactly, did that signify?
What else? For the moment, it meant I could push my opinion through by threatening that anyone who didn't listen to me might just kill me where I stood.
Laid out like that, I felt like a piece of human garbage even lower than a self-harm extortionist — but what could I do? Once everything was over and I'd recovered, they would begin actively voicing their own opinions again. For now they were simply hovering on tenterhooks, terrified that letting their emotions off the leash might somehow finish me. The Little Conqueror Sun Ce had died after flying into a rage despite his physician's orders to rest — if it could kill him, what chance did I have?
"Uuu... Big Sis Yunchang, can't I please hit them just one more time?"
"You may not."
Thank the heavens Guan Yu, who knew exactly how much an enemy commander was worth, was the one reining in Zhang Fei. Though even Guan Yu was letting a faint killing intent seep out of her — I could see plainly enough that she was strangling her own feelings down as far as they would go.
"Sima Yi, how many soldiers have we taken prisoner?"
"...Around three thousand, give or take."
The violet-haired strategist answered with a face full of displeasure.
"The rest are all dead or scattered."
"I see."
Far fewer than I'd expected — but it didn't matter, because those three thousand were without question the Kheshig, the most elite cavalry of the Mongol Empire. The Khagan's personal guard: a mere ten thousand strong, drawn from an army that swelled toward one hundred thousand. Which raised the question of where the other seven thousand had gone. Half must have bolted the instant Genghis Khan gave her order, and the other half had been ground into mincemeat by Seo Yeo and the cavalry streaming in at her back. And surely dozens — no, hundreds — more had died simply trying to hold down Lü Bu, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.
I put the question to Genghis Khan, who knelt before me.
"Word has it you have eight famed generals in all. Where did the rest of them go?"
"Ah...."
At my question, Genghis Khan turned her head — toward Kublai and Borokhula, swollen taut from head to toe, and toward Jebe, who was currently catching a glare perhaps even fiercer than the one I was aiming at her.
"Three of them are in your hands right now...."
"...."
"Subutai... appears to have escaped."
That one stung even for me. To let slip the finest commander in the Mongol Empire after Genghis Khan herself. He hadn't stopped at facing Yan Liang and Wen Chou single-handedly — he'd torn straight through the formation as he fled. That performance had every right to be called Match for Ten Thousand.
"Y-you can't come through here!"
"OUT OF MY WAY──!!"
CRASH!
"Uwagh?!"
Right before Subutai broke free, a female warrior had appeared to bar his path — only to lose the contest of strength and go skidding backward, step by step. While I was picturing that timid-faced woman, someone who seemed like she'd get along famously with Pang Tong, Genghis Khan kept talking.
"Muqali, I sent west."
Which meant the one currently trading blows with Ma Chao over in the Yi Province theater was Muqali. In the original history, the general who stayed behind alone in the Jin lands while Genghis Khan marched on Khwarazm — and shoved them back all the same. Command, statecraft: wanting in neither, she was more than equal to shouldering an entire front on her own.
"And...."
Genghis Khan closed her eyes for a moment as if dredging something up, then opened them again and spoke.
"Jelme. Boorchu. Chuluun."
"...."
"They all died here."
...Huh?
They died here? All of them? Genuinely?
Thrown for a moment, I checked where her gaze had drifted.
To the brown-haired girl who, even now, was fidgeting like a puppy anxiously watching its master's mood.
...So they'd all died to Seo Yeo.
Come to think of it, there had been a moment back when Seo Yeo carved open the road when the soldiers of the Mongol Empire wavered with almost unnatural uniformity. At the Battle of Pengcheng, the Hegemon-King of Western Chu was said to have cut down not only three hundred thousand soldiers but the dozens of generals commanding them as well. Remember that, and one could grasp exactly what an absurd thing it was to bar the Hegemon-King's path head-on. Had she known, from the moment she started this war, that a day like this would come?
Even having lost so many generals who had once served her loyally, Genghis Khan looked calmer than I'd expected.
"...Sparing us all and taking us hostage instead... means there is something you want from me?"
"There is."
I told her plainly. "Only one person walks free from here: you, Temüjin."
"...."
If this battle had taught me anything beyond all doubt, it was that utterly subjugating the nomads of the north was impossible. Fine, the fighting had been near the border — but we'd still let tens of thousands of them slip away while doing battle inside Han territory itself. So what would it be like on their home ground, the southern Siberian steppe? The nomadic way of life meant drifting from place to place; there wasn't even a heartland worth the name to strike at. Which meant we might have to cross a boundless stretch of grassland back and forth, again and again and again. A jolly round of tag across a frozen wilderness with nothing to eat, where the cold swung past minus twenty at the slightest whim....
Just imagining it sounded like such a blast I could die of excitement.
"What I want is just one thing."
The Silk Road — the route that even Emperor Wu of Han, the man who led the Han dynasty to its golden age, had only barely opened after grinding some half a million soldiers into it across decades.
"I would have you carve open the road west in our place."
I went on, picturing the Silk Road that reached all the way to Europe. "You claim war with us is unavoidable — a matter of eating or starving?"
"...."
"Then allow me to show you another answer."
It might have sounded like an obvious point, but the roads running west toward Europe were home to nomadic peoples besides the Xiongnu. The Türk... or was Kipchak the more accurate name? There had been a people called the Alani as well, if I remembered right. As the names gave away, these were nomads lingering in Central Asia, near Europe's doorstep. The Silk Road itself crossed the Middle East on its way to Europe, so under ordinary circumstances we would rarely cross paths — but there was no reason to insist on a single route. Indeed, once the Mongol Empire had swallowed Central Asia whole in the original history, trade had flowed briskly along those roads as well.
"You may not know this, but intermediary trade is a business that leaves staggering profit on the table."
You brokered dealings between nations and, as the price of making them happen, skimmed a commission off each. With only a little exaggeration, it amounted to conjuring something out of nothing. Just look at Anxi — Parthia — and how plump it had grown feeding off intermediary trade along the Silk Road. Parthia itself, come to think of it, was said to be a nation born when nomads moved in and raised a dynasty. And you claim that once trade is severed, there is no way to survive but plunder? Then the answer was simple: build a trade route where the very act of severing trade would be a catastrophic loss. The more wealth and property a nation amassed, the stronger it became. No great power on earth would care to wall itself in behind a pointless policy of isolation only to be overtaken by its neighbors. Cities would rise all along the Silk Road besides — which meant some nomads might even put down roots and settle there. And once you considered how precious the goods flowing along that road would be, the nomad self-sufficiency Genghis Khan had hammered on so stubbornly was suddenly within reach.
So I addressed Genghis Khan, who even in captivity had insisted, unbending, that she and I were enemies.
"I expect you to show me your answer through action."
"...."
"Do keep in mind the hostages we hold right now."
This was the very limit of the leniency I could extend as things stood. If they drove a knife into my back even after all this....
Well, at that point only one path would remain. Because unconditionally forgiving someone was never the answer to anything. Just as Saladin — the very model of a merciful ruler — had put every last Crusader to the sword for breaking a truce and stabbing him in the back, I too would have to become Emperor Wu or Emperor Guangwu and finish things with Genghis Khan once and for all.
...Although unlike Emperor Wu, Emperor Guangwu had enjoyed a reign in which natural disasters struck of their own accord and blew the barbarian tribes apart without him lifting a finger. So this was what they meant by blowing your nose without using your hands. If I wished for it earnestly enough, would heaven answer me too?
There was no way of knowing.