Aftermath (3)
The trip back from Hebei to Luoyang didn't take all that long.
These lands had housed the Han's great cities since ages past, so the roads were well kept and the public order sound, and there were no godforsaken natural obstacles forcing us to loop around and burn days for nothing. My mind was at ease the whole way.
The only thing even worth mentioning was the Yellow River, which cut right across the route between Hebei and Sili Province.
And even that was no trouble at all—hop on a boat at the docks, zip, and you were across.
And so, with Luoyang looming before us in what felt like the blink of an eye, I was grinning ear to ear at the thought of finally taking a nice long rest...
...until it dawned on me that one piece of business still remained unresolved.
And not just any piece of business. A very serious one.
"Ah, so you've finally arrived."
"...Your Majesty."
"We have heard every last report."
The Emperor smiled sweetly, cradling a soundly sleeping child against her chest.
"Where, then, is that Jebe fellow?"
...
At the question, my eyes went straight to Liu Zheng, dead asleep with the face of a little angel.
Won't you wake up and give your daddy a hand here?
"Zzz..."
But contrary to my hopes, Liu Zheng was off deep in dreamland, breathing the tiniest, most adorable little breaths.
Whose daughter was this, that even the way she slept was this cute...
Ah. Right. That wasn't the urgent matter.
Wrestling my mind back from wherever it was trying to drift off to, I answered calmly.
"...The foreign prisoners, Jebe included, are being transported under our troops' escort, held one or two at a time."
I had warned that anyone whose mistreatment cost a prisoner his life would be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and so every last captive of the Mongol Empire was delivered safely—not a single straggler lost along the way.
Because every single prisoner was money.
Nothing stings quite like losing a walking treasure chest through careless handling, after all.
Considering what these men were worth, they would fetch a fortune vast enough to fill thousands upon thousands of carts and still have room to spare.
We would become, quite literally, fantastically rich.
Just look at the Gangdong development project and the Grand Canal construction plan already underway—between them, they would swallow staggering sums over the coming decades.
We could just barely keep things afloat on the taxes gathered from the people, but I couldn't help feeling a little anxious about it all the same.
Everything in this world costs money—and in a situation like this one, the more wealth in our coffers, the less we stood to lose.
"Grand General."
"Yes."
"You know full well that is not what We were asking."
...
So she really is furious.
Her face stayed perfectly composed, but the voice coming out of it was sharper than any I'd ever heard from her. Meeting Her Majesty's gaze, I opened my mouth.
"Your Majesty, I know it is but a trifling stubbornness of mine, but I beg you—calm your wrath."
As I've mentioned before, Jebe was the single most valuable prisoner our faction had ever taken.
Which meant we stood to wring a very tidy profit out of the Mongol Empire—the empire that would one day unify Central Asia and pile up mountains of wealth brokering trade between East and West.
And since Jebe came with a kind of guilt-by-association premium attached, we might extract not merely money but rights as well.
You know the sort of thing.
Waiving our intermediary trade fees for the next several years, that sort of thing.
As the saying goes, when your cousin buys land, your own stomach aches. If the Western nations ever learned the Han was reaping benefits like these, they would be sick with envy.
Rome above all—the one bleeding the most coin.
If the envy truly drove them mad, they were welcome to declare war on the Mongol Empire, win, and take prisoners of their own.
Or no—forget prisoners entirely; they could simply present an unequal treaty as their price for peace.
Of course, I hardly need to explain in detail how absurd that would be.
Winning a war against the Mongols, on the boundless open steppe that was their home turf?
They would be lucky not to be the ones withering away and dying instead.
The Mongols, after all, made merciless retaliation for acts of war their standing doctrine, and they would never stop until one side or the other had seen the very end of things.
Pray heaven there is no fool of a ruler out there who writes them off as mere savages and picks a fight with the Mongol Empire.
Even Muhammad II—the conqueror hailed in his day as the Alexander of the East, revered by some as the very incarnation of Allah—was thrashed by Genghis Khan as helplessly as dust on a rainy day, spent the rest of his life in flight, and breathed his last on a remote island.
If a man like that was no match for them, what hope did some upstart have of winning? For the likes of the Jin or the Song, merely escaping annihilation counted as holding one's own.
And Jebe was the very card that could buy us enormous diplomatic leverage from an empire this powerful. Throwing him away was far too great a waste.
"———If you truly wish to spare my life, then pass judgment upon me."
Recalling the words Jebe had once spoken to me, I bowed my head respectfully.
"I intend to pass judgment on him with my own hands, so if Your Majesty would only be magnanimous of heart—"
"What judgment do you intend to pass?"
"...?"
Before I could even finish, the Emperor cut in, fixing me with a level stare.
"I asked what judgment you intend to pass."
...
Holding that unsettling gaze, I answered.
"...An eye, or an arm. I intend to make him choose one of the two."
Become half-blind, or one-armed. Lose an eye and your depth perception is gone, your sense of distance thrown hopelessly askew; lose an arm and you cannot so much as draw a bowstring.
Whichever he chose, for an archer of Jebe's caliber it amounted to a death sentence.
That was precisely why Jebe had gone out of his way to name those two examples himself—cut off his arm, or put out his eye.
Truth be told, if it were up to me, I would have sent him home intact and wrung out that much more money in his place. But doing that, just as Jebe had warned, he would likely end up quietly dead before the prisoner exchange ever took place. I'd had no choice.
The moment she heard my compromise, the Emperor shook her head.
"No. An arm or an eye will not turn Our heart."
...
"Even in this very moment, each time I look upon how gaunt you have grown, it pierces Us to the core. How could We possibly let the matter pass for so little?"
Her Majesty—who had inherited, whole and undiluted, the vicious temperament of her mother, Empress Dowager He—spoke in a voice cold enough to frost the air.
"Unless all four of his limbs are torn from his body, he shall not be spared."
"...Your Majesty."
"There will be no compromise."
No, really—that's going too far, even for this...
Stripping a perfectly healthy man of all four limbs and then saying, 'Well, I did spare his life, didn't I?' was mockery of a human being, nothing more and nothing less.
The misery of the man himself would be beyond all telling, and those close to him would all but certainly rage at it as an unforgivable humiliation.
If that was the punishment on the table, killing him outright would be a mercy by comparison.
An Emperor who had weathered every political battlefield the palace contained could not possibly be blind to that. Which meant that right now, Her Majesty was handing my own argument back to me.
'I have no intention of sparing him.'
...
Just what am I supposed to do here?
Honestly, I had anticipated massive resistance, but now that it had actually materialized, I was at a complete loss.
Well... even so, meekly backing down here wasn't like me.
I could be every bit as stubborn in my own way, and I had every means at my disposal for turning Her Majesty's heart...
"...Ugh."
Why has my stomach been hurting this whole time?
It had ached dully ever since I first faced the Emperor; now it was outright screaming.
If this were merely a desperate need for the toilet, it would have been a hilarious situation indeed.
But that particular kind of pain inevitably arrives hand in hand with the sensation of something knocking at the back gate(?), and there was none of that.
In other words: this was plain, ordinary abdominal pain.
"Nnngghhh..."
"...Grand General?"
When I finally lost my battle with the pain and let a strange noise slip, Her Majesty's composure cracked into open alarm.
Not now, of all times...!
Why were the aftereffects that had finally quieted down thanks to all the medicine I'd been taking now throwing a tantrum at the worst possible moment?!
Whatever the cause, you had to admire the timing!
"Hwahyeon!"
It took the Emperor only an instant to grasp that something was gravely wrong with me, and she sprang up from her throne.
"Hnn...?"
The violent motion jolted Liu Zheng out of her cozy slumber,
"W-waaahhh——!!"
and the moment she saw me half doubled over, she burst into a tremendous wail.
And the chaos didn't end there.
"Wait! You must not enter without Her Majesty's leave!"
"Move it——!!"
"Whoa—?!"
CRASH—!
Voices clashed outside for a breath, and then, without the slightest warning, the doors of the audience chamber exploded inward.
"...My lord!"
The moment she confirmed it was me, Seo Yeo—who had crossed the room in the blink of an eye—drew a single medicinal pellet from her bosom.
"It's all right. Slowly now—don't choke..."
...
While Seo Yeo, handling me with practiced ease, carefully fed me the medicine, Lü Bu—who had flattened the Imperial Guards barring the chamber with her bare fists—fixed the Emperor with a low growl.
"I heard every word from out there! What do you think you're doing, hounding a sick man like that?!"
"Th-that is..."
"He already can't get a moment's proper rest as it is, with all the strange ideas you're always cooking up...!"
Strange ideas?
Was that how she'd been looking at me this whole time?
The Emperor's eyes, darting every which way with nowhere to land. The baby wailing in her mother's arms.
The audience chamber doors, blown clean off their hinges. The Imperial Guards, unconscious and sprawled spread-eagle across the floor.
Feeling considerably better after taking the medicine Seo Yeo had brought, I hurried to speak and salvage this disaster.
"...I will apologize in their stead for my people's rudeness."
"Jeong Reung!"
"Ah-ah. Quiet now."
"Mmph..."
Lü Bu looked to have plenty more to say, but apparently foreseeing that I might keel over again if she pushed it, she clamped her mouth shut.
Hadn't I mentioned this before?
The people around me were under standing orders to bend their opinions unconditionally whenever a situation threatened to pile stress onto me.
They worried that if they pushed their own views and clashed with me head-on, this fragile little sunfish might drop dead on the spot from the strain.
...
That the prediction had proven at least partially accurate was, frankly, too absurd for words.
Whether thanks to the medicine's painkilling effect or not, the pain had vanished entirely. I stroked my belly, then stepped up to Her Majesty and received Liu Zheng into my arms.
"There, there, my darling girl. What could possibly have upset you so?"
"Waaah...?"
Liu Zheng, who had been bawling at the top of her lungs, lifted her big tear-glazed eyes and stared up at me as I smiled.
"Your Majesty. About what we were discussing just now—"
"...!"
The moment Jebe's name left my mouth, the Emperor flinched hard and answered in a rush.
"Do—do as you see fit."
"Your Majesty?"
"Our thinking was far too short-sighted.... Forgive Us, I beg you..."
I had barely finished soothing my crying daughter when now my wife crumpled down at my feet, clutching my waist and weeping.
...
Naturally, all I could manage was a thoroughly helpless expression.