Hulao Pass (12)
The coalition army had begun to pull back.
Perhaps they feared I would lead my cavalry down upon them in one crushing, concentrated charge, because they withdrew in tiny, cautious increments. Frankly, if they had bolted all at once without a shred of preparation, I fully intended to hammer my riders straight into those fleeing backsides — so it was a sound decision. Watching them keep it up right until the end, I could only conclude that getting skewered by Lü Bu that one time had left a truly spectacular trauma behind.
Day by day, the coalition camp crept a little farther into the distance. The siege of Hulao Pass had, naturally, ground to a halt, and as the situation held, a flush of relief slowly spread across the soldiers' faces. All the same, their commander had never once declared victory, and it was hardly proper to celebrate on one's own initiative — so the men kept stealing glances in my direction.
"So they really are withdrawing, then? This isn't some trick or stratagem?"
There was nothing wrong with being careful, so I tossed the question to Jia Xu, who stood nearby. She answered with her usual placid composure.
"There is nothing they stand to gain by moving as they do. Even if it were a stratagem, we need only decline to take the bait."
"And what if they suddenly pop up behind us or something?"
"...Short of the enemy learning to fly, my lord, such a thing cannot occur. You may rest assured."
And what was that odd little silence right before she answered?
Something told me the reply would wound me, so I never asked. At the very least, it couldn't not have been a thought like our dear, anxious lord — how adorable... could it.
"So cute..."
It actually existed. Word for word.
I did my utmost to feign deafness toward Zhang Liao's voice as it barged in out of absolutely nowhere. Then came Lü Bu, audibly flustered.
"Seriously, what is wrong with you, springing that on me out of nowhere?"
"Ah. It slipped out before I knew it."
Shooting a discreet sidelong glance, I found Lü Bu and Zhang Liao deep in conversation.
"Don't tell me you walk around thinking things like that all the time?"
"...I won't say that I don't."
"Zhang Liao??"
At Lü Bu's strangled question, Zhang Liao answered with a bright, easy smile. An unexpected side of her — the first I'd seen in years. Apparently Zhang Liao was the type who found everything adorable and wrapped it in a protective embrace. A woman with a pure, delicate face who genuinely loved taking care of people? Good heavens. I could only marvel that such a creature truly existed. More astonishing still was that I'd spent all these years without once noticing this side of her.
"My lord. As I am forever telling you..."
While Lü Bu went on wearing question marks at this never-before-seen version of Zhang Liao, Seo Yeo leaned in close and breathed softly into my ear.
"Save for me, every one of them is a beast with its eyes on you, my lord."
You're one of those beasts yourself.
Her voice was as level as ever, but I could tell — a strangely heated undercurrent ran through the way she carried herself. Then again, Seo Yeo had always been like this whenever she drew close to me, so I thought nothing particular of it. Seo Hwang, standing near at hand, watched the whole mad circus unfold with a wry smile on her face.
The dissolution of the coalition.
By all rights it was a decision that should have sent Yuan Shu into a shrieking fury, overturning every movable object within reach. Yet contrary to everyone's expectations, he did not rage anything like so spectacularly. ...Not that he didn't rage at all. For a while he bellowed and sent things crashing about his quarters, but the tantrum subsided faster than predicted. The few men of sense who had long watched at Yuan Shu's side marveled at what could have come over that petty, narrow-minded wretch — and the very fact that a merely reduced tantrum could astonish them said everything about the man Yuan Shu was on any ordinary day.
"Bellowing my head off like a man with no better plan will accomplish nothing."
His fury had perhaps not fully settled — he clutched at his head and groaned of a headache — but Yuan Shu spoke with unexpected composure.
"Staying behind alone would do no more than hasten my death."
"My lord..."
"The decision is already made, and the rest are slipping away by degrees. We return to our stronghold."
Having reached his conclusion calmly, Yuan Shu set down his honeyed water and waved a hand briskly toward the exit.
"What are you all standing about for? Pack the baggage and make ready to withdraw. Now."
"We shall carry out your command!"
Watching his officers jostle one another in their scramble out of the tent, Yuan Shu turned away. He sipped his sweet honeyed water to smother the last embers of his temper and sank into deep thought.
He had foreseen the coalition's collapse, which was precisely why it had angered him less than expected. Jeong Reung's army — mauled though it had been — still brimmed with the will to keep fighting and refuse defeat. The coalition, by contrast, had suffered the lighter losses yet shrank back in terror of suffering heavier ones. How could such a force ever prevail? An army that hurled itself eagerly into battle, and an army that did not: the gulf between the two was so vast that even with all under heaven massed in a single host, toppling Jeong Reung looked a distant dream.
Even in hindsight, what a pack of incompetents. They had held a several-fold advantage in numbers, and in the end could not take a single pass.
Of course, among that lightly bruised coalition there were a few lords who had been hit hard — but the other warlords had no attention to spare for their misfortune. No, rather, they were probably drooling over the chance to devour those lords later on, so perhaps "paying attention" was the honest word for it. Wang Kuang, Governor of Henei, and Kong Rong, Chancellor of Beihai — the two who had been savaged by Lü Bu's sudden charge at the very outset — would surely be swallowed whole by the warlords circling for their moment, and would not last long. There would be nowhere to wail about the unfairness of it, either. Such, in the end, was the nature of a lawless age.
On the surface, every one of them professed to be a guardian of the Han — but at bottom they were ambitious warlords who had each carved out their own dominion from the chaos of a bleeding empire. And whoever would set his sights on great things must see to his own road, must he not? By that measure, Yuan Shu could congratulate himself that he was steering his faction along quite splendidly.
But what had scraped Yuan Shu's nerves raw even more than the coalition's disintegration was another matter entirely.
Yuan Shao.
That spiteful witch. Sending a mere token force was bad enough; worse still was the uncooperative posture she had kept the whole way through — hanging a single step back and doing nothing but spectate whenever the rest of the coalition threw itself into the offensive. That lowborn creature, too base to be worth the breath a curse would cost, had set his teeth on edge from the moment she joined the alliance, and at the very end she had tested his patience to its last thread. When he severed the grain supplies over the coalition's spineless conduct, word came that Yuan Shao's people had stepped in with provisions of their own, buying the alliance's favor outright. A canny political parade: shrink Yuan Shu's standing within the coalition while hoisting her own name in the same stroke. A scheme every bit as vulgar as a slave girl's lowly birth demanded — Yuan Shu's molars ground together. There was, he gathered, one more woman who had shown the coalition the same insolent lack of cooperation as Yuan Shao, but with his skull packed wall to wall with thoughts of Yuan Shao, it was a matter of supreme indifference to him.
Yuan Shao, who had opposed him from first to last, capped it all by winning over the very deputy Yuan Shu himself had sent to the final council — and his patience detonated. It was there that Yuan Shu discovered a curious truth: a man pushed past the summit of rage arrives, strangely, at a kind of calm.
Perhaps out of some final scrap of loyalty, the fellow called Wang Lian did forward him a written summary of that last council. But having judged that a man already ensconced under Yuan Shao could not be trusted, Yuan Shu believed not a word the report contained — that Jeong Reung, mightiest power under heaven, had been so battered by the coalition he would remain staggered for some time to come, devoting himself solely to the care of his own domains.
However vast Jeong Reung's territory might be, Xiliang and Bing Province were lands of little real substance — frontier territory raided by foreign tribes day in and day out, with no great economic promise to speak of besides. Their military value was considerable, to be sure, but precisely for that reason the sums bleeding away into arms would be ruinous. Nothing in this world devours coin quite like an army.
Yes. Go home. Go home and grow strong. The Tiger of Jiangdong lay in the palm of his hand — what was there to fear? This Jiangdong bumpkin fought beautifully enough, but his political judgment was shallow; he had stumbled from one blunder into the next until at last he threw himself upon Yuan Shu's support. Taking in such a general, sheltering him well, and showing him the true road — that was the proper duty of a genuine sovereign. Set the Tiger of Jiangdong at the vanguard, toss him his meat, and shatter every man who dared bar the path. Advance one step at a time in that fashion, and this whole vast continent would come to rest inside his hand — and once it did, then someday, at last...
"Khmm! Khm!"
The hour was not yet ripe. This was the season to bow the head, hoard strength, and bury ambition deep. With both hands, Yuan Shu lifted, ever so carefully, the object he had swaddled so preciously in its cloth.
"The Mandate of Heaven rests with me."
Unwrapped, the cloth revealed an object of jade carved in the likeness of a dragon — the emblem of the Emperor, coruscating in five colors. The very seal said to have vanished during the Ten Attendants' Rebellion now lay in Yuan Shu's grasp.
"And is that not precisely why this has come into my hands?"
Yuan Shu let laughter spill from his lips. He had filched it in secret — the Imperial Seal — amid the purge of the eunuchs at the Imperial Palace, and now he thought: everything in this world would become his. The day was near when he would soar aloft in splendor and thunder his name across all under heaven — the name of Yuan Shu Gonglu, destined to ring far and wide down through the generations.
Seal in hand — the seal that proved the authority of the Son of Heaven — Yuan Shu laughed, low and dark and chill.