Hulao Pass (7)
So this was what an army led by the great Sun Jian looked like. The battle against his forces unfolded with ferocious intensity. Backed by Yuan Shu's support, Sun Jian directed the siege with an inborn genius for tactics and the practiced hand of a veteran commander.
Not that I believed our walls would break — but neither did Sun Jian's side show the slightest sign of being driven back by our army. His valor, reckless to the point of folly, had proved a poison that cost him his life in the end, but judged purely on the art of commanding soldiers, few men in the Three Kingdoms could stand beside Sun Jian. In truth, setting aside Xu Rong, he was a general who had never known a defeat worthy of the name. Even his death at Huang Zu's hands only came about because, after one long unbroken winning streak, Liu Biao's side hit the jackpot a single time.
Just look at them. They could never have run joint drills with the other contingents, yet there they were, fighting with practiced ease even with part of Yuan Shu's army folded into their ranks. They hadn't earned the name Tiger of Jiangdong for nothing.
He had his flaws, no question — the hair-trigger temper, the rash and reckless behavior — but ask anyone whether he fell short as a general, and every last one of them would shake their head in denial.
...Wait, he is a man, right?
Has to be. Fierce as his temperament might be, I refused to believe even he was the sort of commander who would personally scale the walls and show himself in the middle of a siege.
The siege — launched early each morning and raging until sundown — had already dragged on for more than a month. Yes. This was how it should be. A siege was, by its very nature, a battle that bled along at a crawl like this. If anything, it was Dong Zhuo's fortress at Tianshui, snapped up in a single day, that had been the freakish anomaly.
Once the siege passed the one-month mark, the coalition — which until then had sent none but Sun Jian — began to change its behavior. One after another, certain lords started gingerly, furtively edging their way into the fighting. Presumably they had reasoned that if this was to be a simple war of attrition, their far greater bulk gave them the advantage. And perhaps mixed in as well was the sentiment that they could hardly let Sun Jian walk off with all the glory.
I couldn't say how Sun Jian felt about his allies' maneuvering, but the coalition stirring into action was bad news for us. Not that we could exactly launch a stealth assault in the dead of night. The vanguard being Sun Jian's army, of all forces, loomed enormous. Attempt some half-baked night raid, and we would be the ones caught in a counterattack and driven to the brink.
Even in the original Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Hua Xiong had only managed to defeat Sun Jian with a night raid after the provisions ran dry and his soldiers could no longer fight properly. So let me think this through. Would Yuan Shu, wary of Sun Jian stealing the credit, cut off the grain supply here as well before long?
If the siege dragged on indecisively, perhaps — but for the time being, I didn't believe he would. Now that he occupied the coalition leader's seat, a man like that would count every merit the coalition earned as good as his own, and there was no reason on earth to starve the fierce hound battling so hard in his place at the front. As I said a moment ago, the other lords were already drifting into the fighting, each angling for glory of his own. From where Yuan Shu stood — wishing nothing more than to watch them bicker and bleed each other white — he'd sooner cheer them on than pull some pointless stunt and get his knuckles rapped.
A vast coalition host with Sun Jian at its tip came surging toward Hulao Pass like an incoming tide. And behind them, the wealthiest power of them all — Yuan Shu — held up the rear. Sounded ideal, didn't it? Positively ideal...
Did anyone think the word coalition had been attached for nothing? My intelligence from inside their camp was thin, so I couldn't speak to specifics, but I would have bet anything that cracks large and small were already spreading through the coalition even now.
And in the midst of all that, suppose one major incident landed — a single blow that snapped the coalition's precarious unity? From that day on, the alliance would come apart in midair. And I was certain that incident would come.
It was true the coalition was enormous. But the bigger the host, the more mouths there were to feed. Layer a long-range campaign on top of that? Merely imagining the provisions it would burn through was enough to raise gooseflesh.
Sun Jian had long been unable to master his own temper, piling up one incident after another and operating under Yuan Shu's wing — so the odds were high that Yuan Shu now regarded him as a subordinate. That was why he was so lavish with his support for the man he counted as his own. But that grasping Yuan Shu would never, for anyone outside his camp, part with what was his.
For now he would play the benefactor, graciously doling out his supplies to the coalition — but how long could that possibly last? The host numbered a good several hundred thousand. The lords were no fools; they would have hauled along enough grain to feed their own, but it couldn't have been much. Sooner or later they would have no choice but to beg for support, and I did not believe Yuan Shu would supply provisions enough to feed an army of that size.
Nor was it Yuan Shu alone. The other lords were likely burying their own granaries deep, each looking out for his own belly alone. Hunger makes people short-tempered — that is simply human nature.
So I dug in and endured, waiting for nothing so much as that day to arrive.
KRAK—!
Just then, one of the siege engines beyond the wall caught fire and came rumbling down. A few coalition soldiers who failed to clear the collapsing inferno in time went up screaming.
Looked like today, too, would pass without anything out of the ordinary.
Hulao Pass, where the siege was unfolding even now. Sun Jian, directing his soldiers, stroked his chin as a troubled look settled over his face.
"Hm... I expected as much, but this is no easy nut to crack."
Jeong Reung's rank and file were not much of a problem. The traces of conscripts scraped together in haste, their numbers forcibly padded, were plain to see. The raw recruits couldn't withstand the heat of a war they were tasting for the first time and kept dropping out of the line.
The soldiers weren't the problem. The generals leading them were. Lü Bu, who lifted the morale of every soldier around her by her mere presence, went without saying; there was also the young woman in the bloom of youth with her crescent-moon blade, and the orange-haired woman whirling a massive axe.
Sun Jian was himself a man confident in his martial arts — and it was precisely because of that that he could tell. Not one of them was a general he could reasonably expect to beat. This was a man who prided himself on being able to defeat even Gongsun Zan, the White Horse General called the nightmare of the northern nomads; even so, on eyeball judgment alone, he could feel this would be anything but easy. Sun Jian let out a hollow laugh, his face full of disbelief.
It was utterly absurd. The instant a siege engine touched the wall, one of the generals he had just tallied would be on it like a phantom, rendering it useless. Lü Bu, flitting lightly back and forth along the ramparts, was the greatest spectacle of all. The cloud ladders — siege ladders tall as towers — she swatted aside with her monstrous strength as if they were kindling. Naturally, the allies clambering up them could only stare, aghast, at a ladder now lopped off clean in the middle. The unluckiest few plunged from a fatal height, and the allies around them were swept up in the fall, dying several at a stroke.
As for the jinglan siege towers, she simply planted herself in front of one and barred every ally trying to mount the wall — and not a soul could bring himself to take that first step. Of course not. If Lü Bu stood glaring before him in full fury, even Sun Jian would have wanted to keep his distance; what hope had common soldiers? And so, even with the way open, a farcical tableau unfolded: soldiers fidgeting in place, darting glances every which way. The archers posted atop the towers? Watching Lü Bu pluck them off one arrow, one man at a time, drew nothing from him but a hollow laugh.
In fairness, had Lü Bu been all there was to her, they might have found some way to rattle Hulao Pass. However formidable she was, she was still only one woman. But the two women trailing in her wake were every bit as troublesome. Commanding their soldiers, the pair deftly sealed whatever points Lü Bu couldn't reach — and judged on leadership alone, they seemed if anything superior to Lü Bu herself. As if that were all. They even took to the front lines in person, wielding martial skill that Sun Jian himself could not have promised to overcome, and the defense grew all the more ironclad for it.
FWOOSH—!
"GYAAAAH!"
Just then, Lü Bu — having swept an entire siege tower clean — hurled an oil-soaked torch and set the whole thing ablaze. The outer shell was leather-treated and stubborn against flame, so apparently she had decided to simply burn it from the inside out. Sun Jian shook his head.
"Enough to drive a man out of his mind."
That the coalition, until now mere spectators at the rear, was gradually committing to the siege and adding its weight was welcome news. A coalition of that size could not be held off forever; however well the defenders fought, keep hammering and the wall would give way someday. But how much time would pass before that gate came down? By Sun Jian's own reckoning, breaching it called for a very long view indeed. Would the coalition even hold together until then? He sank into thought.
"You incompetent fools! What are any of you actually good for?!"
"If you're going to exalt me as your leader, you had better show the attitude that befits it!"
"BWAHAHAHA! The age of this Yuan Gonglu is close at hand!"
They wouldn't last. Recalling the precarious spectacle of the coalition creaking at the seams from the very start, Sun Jian exhaled a long sigh. There were other problems besides, but the worst of them all was the man strutting about as coalition leader. When the leader — the very man who ought to be solving the coalition's problems and binding it into one — was what he was, well...
"GYAAAH! Fire!"
Gazing at yet another siege tower — ablaze and burning to nothing barely moments after the last — Sun Jian clutched his head.