Hulao Pass (9)
After Sun Jian withdrew from the vanguard, the coalition threw itself at Hulao Pass again and again. At first there had still been a confident air about the undertaking, but as the days wore on, the allied lords began to sense that something was deeply wrong.
Their original estimate had been that within a year or so — at heavy cost, admittedly — the pass would surely fall. Having now experienced the reality of the siege firsthand, however, none of them believed it any longer. Jeong Reung's army was defending far better than anyone had expected, and the coalition bled casualties day after day as the campaign dragged on without end.
Hadn't it been written in The Art of War that assaulting a walled city was the worst of all options? However impressive the coalition's numbers, this slow accumulation of losses was a bitter draught for the lords to swallow, and some of them sank deep into deliberation.
Why had they gathered here in the first place? In name, to drive out the traitor — yet not a soul present was ignorant of the fact that they had truly assembled for the sake of their own ambitions. Would it not be better to call it enough here and return home?
Their original aim — to check Jeong Reung's army and put the brakes on his expansion — had already been achieved. The capture of Hulao Pass and Luoyang had always been a best-case bonus: pleasant if it happened, no great tragedy if it did not. Jeong Reung's faction had contended at once against most of the warlords under heaven, so its losses must be staggering, and it would take him long years to recover from them.
The coalition had suffered too, but measured faction by faction, the damage was hardly ruinous. Even if they stopped here and turned for home, Jeong Reung would hardly find it easy to retaliate against them — and should he truly come for revenge, they need only raise another coalition, exactly as they had now, to bar his way. Even if they did seize Luoyang, the allies would only end up at one another's throats over who got to keep it. Rather than needlessly shoulder catastrophic losses for a fight to the death against Jeong Reung's army, better to be satisfied at this point and go home.
The lords who reached that conclusion gave a nod, and their subsequent conduct was swift indeed. Like Yuan Shao, who had already all but washed her hands of the coalition, they threw themselves into the allied cause with the most exquisite passivity. And so the coalition — unstable, yet at least still turning — began to creak in earnest.
"Those thankless beasts dare—!"
CRASH!
Yuan Shu's restraint finally snapped, and he swept everything on the table onto the floor. Even that did not vent his fury; he began hurling whatever his hands could seize to all four corners of the room.
"They leeched my supplies to their hearts' content, and the moment things turn even slightly against them, they start covering their own hides?!"
"M-My lord, please calm yourself!"
"As if YOU could stay calm?!"
The aides who attended Yuan Shu hunched their shoulders at his thunderous bellow.
"Damn it all! I never should have lavished favors on wretches too witless to know gratitude!"
This was the trouble with men of base birth. Sitting in the seat of the coalition's leader, he had evidently let his spending run loose without even noticing it himself. Yuan Shu ground his teeth as he spoke.
"If that's how they choose to behave, then I have no reason to share my supplies with anyone!"
At those words, several of them cried out in alarm.
"Lord Yuan Shu! It is true that a few lords who have begun to hang back are a disgrace — but there are still lords out there giving battle to Jeong Reung's army with everything they have!"
"Silence! I can see plain as day that they'll tuck tail soon enough — so tell me, why should I waste precious supplies on them?!"
"Please, reconsider, just once mor—"
"Did I not tell you to be SILENT?!"
BANG!
Yuan Shu brought his fist down hard on the very table he had just stripped bare.
"Utter those words one more time, and I will have your head!"
…
Cowed by his furious threats, the men who served him had no choice but to hold their tongues.
Afterward, Yuan Shu supplied the coalition with no provisions whatsoever, turning back every request for grain and materiel from the other lords. Lords who had lately begun to hang back, lords still fighting hard against Jeong Reung's army — none were spared. He barred his doors tight as though he would not hear a single word, cutting off all communication, and the lords could only shake their heads.
"Good grief. What in the world is going through his mind?"
"The coalition is beyond saving anyway. Has he simply given up on holding it together?"
What the coalition could never have imagined was the truth of it: that the whole thing rested on a reason so childish as not wanting to do good turns for people whose faces he was sick of seeing. And so the coalition's offensive, already growing listless with time, dwindled further still. Everyone within it felt it in their bones: for all practical purposes, the coalition was finished. Now its members merely watched one another sidelong, hunting for a pretext to withdraw — waiting to see who would leave first.
Yellow Heaven.
"The Azure Sky is already dead. The Yellow Sky shall soon rise."
He had carried those words in his heart all his life.
"I want to save them all."
The Great Worthy Teacher's words, spoken in a voice so plain, so level. "Because nothing in this world is more wretched than a soul starving to death." So saying, the Teacher had stroked the head of a child who would never open his eyes again — and the hand that caressed him trembled, ever so slightly.
"I only wish to change this world — this world that turns its back on its own people." The mask hid any expression, but at that moment the Great Worthy Teacher was, beyond all doubt, weeping. "So — will you help me?"
How could anyone refuse? From that day on, he had begun to dream the dream of the Yellow Heaven.
But the dying strength of the rotting Han dynasty proved far greater than anyone had guessed. They say chaos forges heroes — and as if heaven itself had resolved never to permit the Teacher's dream, the Yellow Turbans went down in defeat before the peerless champions who had sprung up like bamboo shoots after rain across the realm, each one a match for a hundred men. That lofty ideal never did reach the heavens.
Why? Why now, of all times — just when the people, persecuted for untold years, had at last barely begun to lift their voices! Would this godforsaken heaven deny them even that? Was this truly the will of that aloof, exalted Heaven? He raged. When word came that the Teacher, driven back again and again, would make a final stand at Julu, he had been ready to bolt from his place that very instant.
But then a single letter arrived, and it brought him up short. One message, and one alone, sent to every Yellow Turban soldier outside Julu:
Please live.
A single sentence, simple beyond all measure — letters so plain that even a man who could barely read would grasp their meaning at a glance. She had worried for the people — for us — right up to the very last. Unable to presume at the heart pressed into that one page, the Yellow Turban army could not bring itself to take a single step.
And when Julu fell at last, and rumor arrived that the Great Worthy Teacher had vanished without a trace, he wept for days. Then he unfolded the letter once more. Turning the plea over and over in his mind — just live, it said — he gritted his teeth.
I'm sorry. It seems I cannot do as you ask. How could I go on living under the same sky as those beasts, devoured by their own greed?
Afterward he gathered all who shared his resolve and raised the Yellow Turban remnant. Measured against the original host they were a mere trickle — yet a trickle that no one dared dismiss. Through guerrilla war he gnawed away at the government forces without pause, and however desperate their straits became, they never laid a finger on the common people. Claiming to carry on the Teacher's will while raising a hand against the people themselves? Such an act would befoul her noble ideal — an unforgivable sin. Let them die if death must come; that beastly thing they would never do.
Tempered through countless engagements with the government troops, they were no longer any ragtag band of peasant rebels. The way they clung, fiendish and unrelenting, to inflicting hurt upon the enemy at every turn called vengeful demons to mind. Knowing that any village entangled with them would pay dearly at the soldiers' hands, they accepted help from no one and carried on their lives deep in the uninhabited mountains. Lives poured whole into a single aim — they might have been ascetics.
And then, one day, this man dreamed a dream he could not name.
'...What is this?'
He should have stopped dreaming altogether since that day. But the cityscape laid out before him, rendered so vividly it might have been real, told him at once that this was a dream. People laboring earnestly, sweat beading on their brows. Children scampering about with delight written across their faces. And elders looking on at it all with soft, contented eyes. At a scene that seemed for all the world like the Great Worthy Teacher's dream — his own dream — made real, his expression contorted. A dream was a dream. A meaningless thing that would only leave him more wretched still when he woke…
'…'
Then he witnessed one scene amid the crowd, and his eyes went wide as lamp flames. A girl, beaming, trailing after a man whose face was blurred beyond all making out. He, who had followed at the Great Worthy Teacher's heels since the founding of the Yellow Turban army, knew it instinctively.
"And where might you be off to this time?"
"Mm. Who knows."
That dear, familiar figure was the very one he had wandered heaven and earth searching for. It was true he had nursed a hope — that, being merely 'missing' rather than confirmed dead, she must surely be alive somewhere. Then why was he suddenly dreaming this? Was this truly nothing more than a simple dream? …And if — if it was showing him a scene from somewhere real? The thought would not stop.