Conquer Qingzhou
"Good."
Father laid a hand on my shoulder with open pride and sighed his admiration more than once. I had passed through the capping ceremony, shed the shell of boyhood, and grown into a man sound enough to take the field as a general at once, and the sight seemed to draw a breath of relief from him.
In the history I knew, Father would one day suffer a crushing defeat at Cao Cao's hands in the Battle of Guandu, then waste away in grief until his eyes closed. I had always assumed he would remain in full health until then. Lately, though, fatigue clung to him, and the weight of affairs had begun to show. He must have felt how little time remained to him, and so he was hurrying to set me in the heir's place.
I wanted him to live long, and well.
"Now that the capping is done, we ought to see to a wedding as well."
"I understand, Father."
"I won't rush a burden onto you. Still, a fine young lady who can brace your faction from beneath — that would be no bad thing."
Marriage talks were surely already moving in secret through the Inspectorate of Jizhou. I was curious which great house would be chosen as my in-laws, but I did not ask. In an age like this, a marriage was nothing but a political bargain struck by cold calculation.
"How do you feel?"
"As if wings had broken from my back, and I might take flight across the realm this very hour."
"Hahaha! Bold, and not a whit too much!"
Father burst into laughter. Afterward he laid out the cautions one by one, then gave me a strict order: a great charge would come before long, and until then I was to return to Zhaojun and wait. Above all he charged me, again and again, that even if I took the field I was never to throw my body about and come to harm. I thanked him once more with full courtesy and left the audience hall.
Outside, Qu Yi had been waiting. He offered a crisp military salute.
"I will never forget Dudu Yuan's kindness. Because of you I won our lord's deep trust and took my place, openly, among the core generals of the Inspectorate of Jizhou. If there is anything I can do for you hereafter, you have only to say it."
"How could the credit be mine? Colonel Qu drilled hard in tactics against cavalry, and the skill itself was outstanding. You've won a great merit and secured your post — I congratulate you, truly. Let us trade letters now and then, even away from the battlefield."
"I will only wait for the day I can be Dudu Yuan's blade and cut his enemies down."
"Even the words steady me. I will be counting on you."
I caught Qu Yi's rough hands and gripped them hard. The warmth that came through was blunt, and hot. With that, one of the Inspectorate's fiercest generals was mine.
Afterward I paid my respects to Mother and received the congratulations of my own followers. All of them celebrated my capping and prayed for my success.
Then I met the man I had least wanted to see.
"So you've gone and stolen every last thing that was mine."
Yuan Tan stood across the road, reeking of strong wine. Killing intent glittered in his eyes, and with it a rank inferiority. I felt less anger than pity. He was an unhappy man, born with an ambition far larger than his ability. Had I never distinguished myself, he, the eldest, would have stood tall as heir, so the resentment in his words was not wholly without cause. Even so, I had not the slightest intention of handing him my leash out of cheap sympathy.
I squared my shoulders and looked at him. In childhood this eldest brother had seemed vast as Mount Tai. Now he stood only a little above my eye line, and in bearing alone I did not yield an inch.
"Theft is the wrong word. Elder Brother, you are challenging His Lordship's solemn authority to his face. Do you know that?"
"...!"
"Elder Brother. Don't tell me you mean to deny our lord's will."
"Don't you dare fancy a whelp like you is the heir! Father has never once declared it in any official way!"
"Think whatever comforts you."
I answered him dryly. Every civil and military official in the hall already upheld me as heir in his heart. Even Xin Ping and Xin Pi, said to be Yuan Tan's closest men, had bowed their heads to me. What was there to gain by flushing red and denying it alone?
"Before long this brother of yours will set everything back the way it was."
"I'm returning to the Office of the Dudu of Zhao."
I shook my head and moved past him. In the instant my shoulder was about to brush his, he reached with a hard hand to seize it. I did not break stride. I turned half around, struck his left hand aside, and clamped it in return. Startled, he shot out his right; I met it with my left and locked both his wrists. When he found my strength not a whit behind his own, a deep confusion crossed Yuan Tan's flushed face. Two years of hard training in Yiyang had left me his equal.
"That will do. Too many underlings are watching."
I flung his hands off and drove the rebuke home. Shame burned Yuan Tan scarlet. He staggered back.
"Just you wait..."
He spat on the ground, left that short threat, and went. I watched his shabby back for a moment, then turned my steps toward the city gate. I had no leisure to indulge a petty scuffle.
Father had said he would call me again before long. The charge would be a heavy one, meant to prove my ability beyond doubt. The capping had quietly marked me as heir, yet that was still not enough to bring the Inspectorate's seasoned officials and the great clans wholly to heel. I needed a military merit so overwhelming that none of them would dare object.
It was true I had achieved much as Dudu of Zhao over the past two years. Looked at coldly, though, Zhaojun had been the rear, and Father's vast shadow had done a great share of the work. The time had come to prove what I could do in truth.
Yiyang, in Zhaojun.
Chief Clerk Min Chun met me beyond the gate with the guards and offered a military salute. After I took office as Dudu of Zhao, I had given an order: unless a man was returning in triumph from a campaign, the officials were not all to turn out and welcome him home. I would not have the hall emptied so that men could stamp their faces upon a ceremony. The work was to run, and run efficiently.
"Now that you have held the capping, the weight on your shoulders is heavier still."
"Even while I was away from this office, I never let the tension out of me. For the glory of the Inspectorate of Jizhou and the peace of the people, I mean to run looking only forward, and not once back."
"Splendidly said."
On the way to the hall I told Min Chun everything that had passed in Ye. He had been the man I trusted most these two years, and the habit of sharing all but the deepest secrets with him had settled in. If I left for the field, he would need to hold the Office of the Dudu of Zhao without a hitch.
"Hm. When His Lordship summons you next, he will surely lay a grave military task upon you."
"I think the same. Have you any guess?"
"If you are to win a merit so clear that no one can doubt Dudu Yuan's authority or ability, a war of conquest is best. In that case there is only one answer."
"Qingzhou."
The name left both our mouths at once. I clapped my hands lightly.
Qingzhou, bordering Jizhou, had once been rich land. The remnants of the Yellow Turbans had been left to plunder it, and half the people, unable to endure, had fled into neighboring provinces until the country lay waste. Now it was torn to scraps: Tian Kai held Le'an and Pingyuan; Kong Rong held Qi, Beihai, and Jinan; Guan Tong held Donglai. Every one of them was a warlord of middling size. If Jizhou's elite host drove down upon them, not one could stand.
Tian Kai, in particular, was the man Gongsun Zan had named Inspector of Qingzhou. After securing the tax rights of Bohai, Gongsun Zan had meant to use that commandery as a stepping-stone, join Youbeiping to Qingzhou, and raise a vast domain. Then Father had crushed him and taken Bohai, and Gongsun Zan and Tian Kai were cut off from each other in body as well as in name.
"Just so. If His Lordship should mean to give you some other charge, you must urge him, hard, that Qingzhou has to be taken. When spring comes, Gongsun Zan will certainly attempt a great drive south. If Tian Kai strikes Jizhou's rear at that moment, the war becomes viciously difficult. Should you break Tian Kai with a first blow and quiet the worry at our backs, there is no merit more complete."
"It matches my own thought exactly."
I looked at Min Chun and smiled brightly. Tian Feng had once praised him as one of Jizhou's finest talents, and the praise had been exact. As second man of the Office of the Dudu of Zhao he had braced me without wavering, and even now he offered the best counsel a man could have, cutting straight through the shape of the war.
"If the task of subduing Qingzhou falls to you, take the elite of this office with you. Yan Bai and Zuo Xiu of the Bandit Bureau, with their men, are enough to keep the peace in Zhaojun. It would serve you to keep Detached-Corps Major Sui Gu at your side."
"And if I leave only the peacekeeping troops behind, and the Heishan Bandits rise again?"
"The Bandit Bureau alone has four thousand. Should remnants of the Heishan appear, we can levy able-bodied men at once and trample them well enough."
The Bandit Bureau, charged with hunting outlaws, was strangely large beside the other forces, because the past two years of reforming more than sixty thousand Heishan Bandits had been thick with revolt and disorder. Yan Bai and Zuo Xiu were wholly my blades now. More precisely, I trusted Duntian Sima Guo Daxian, who held them under perfect control.
As the fighting with Gongsun Zan sharpened, Jizhou's fierce generals — Wen Chong, Zhao Yun, and Zhao Du — had already joined the main host at Ye and gone. The only general who would take the field with me out of Yiyang was Sui Gu.
Talking as we walked, we reached the hall before I noticed. I ordered Min Chun to pass the necessary instructions for civil government to Guo Daxian at once, and I called Sui Gu in.
"You sent for me, Dudu Yuan?"
His face was carved with savage scars, and his frame was huge as a bear's. In the spirit he gave off and in his shape alone, Sui Gu was one of the few fierce generals who could break an enemy commander's nerve before a blow was struck.
"Sit."
I commended him for his labors, then came straight to the point.
"There is a strong chance I will soon leave Zhaojun for a war of conquest. When I do, I want to take you with me, Major Sui. Are you willing to take the field?"
A dudu's order was law; I need not have asked. I asked his will all the same, lest he, once a chieftain of the Heishan Bandits, shrink from leaving this land where he had only just taken root. If not him, lieutenants I might take were thick on the ground in Ye.
"I'll go. No question. When the other generals were called north one after another to take Gongsun Zan's head, I was sick with envy, watching the point of my spear rust."
"You envy a battlefield that can kill you?"
"A battlefield is a hell where you put your life down. But for a general, isn't the only dream to cut off an enemy's head and shake his name across the realm? I was a bandit crew that lived on the mountains once, but now I'm a proper officer of the Dudu of Zhao, and I want to leave my name standing upright. And... if the chance comes, I want to raise a decent house as well."
Sui Gu flushed as he forced out the last of it.
"A house. I don't know about a scholar-official lineage, but a proper powerful clan — that I can make you."
"I... this general..."
"Speak freely."
"The wives I keep... there's more than one..."
When he came to his household, his voice crawled inward. He had two wives and three concubines, and the second wife was blood of a scholar-official family ruined in the Yellow Turban Rebellion. In an age when birth and looks were themselves a kind of strength, a scholar's daughter would have stood out far above common folk, fallen house or not.
"Years back, raiding a village in Julu, I took a woman who was drifting. Her face was fair, so I forced her to be my wife. Later I found she could read, and recite hard books straight through, but I was a bandit then. I knew nothing, so I left her be and paid her no mind."
"Reading was of no use in banditry."
"Right. But my station isn't what it was. Would it be possible, in my son's generation, for one of them to hold office?"
"Do you have a son who inherited her gift?"
"The third boy is his mother's very image. I used to abuse him for being frail, for a child. Looking at him now, he's the only rope that can raise my house."
A deep fatherly tenderness wavered in Sui Gu's dark eyes. I nodded slowly.
"I'll speak with Chief Clerk Min and find a teacher of letters. You take that teacher into your house first, Major Sui, and set the boy to study. When Chief Clerk Min examines him and judges he has reached a certain level, I will personally appoint him a zongshi of the dudu's office. Even the lowest post, once a foot is inside, opens a road of office as far as ability can carry him."
"Dudu Yuan. This Sui Gu will be your spear while he lives, and even if he dies and becomes a ghost, he will repay this grace!"
Sui Gu shot to his feet, knocked his head against the floor, and swore it in a voice like a drum. Give a man a clear aim, and his eyes are the first thing to take an edge. Sui Gu was mine now to the bone, and he would swing a blade on the field more savagely than anyone.
I raised him up and encouraged him. After that I remained in Yiyang, looked over the civil government of the Office of the Dudu of Zhao, and studied the maps without rest, turning Qingzhou's ground and the tactics for it over and over.
In the second month, the summons from Ye fell at last.
Once I entered the city, I might have to turn my horse straight toward war. I gave Min Chun and Guo Daxian instructions for the chief troubles that might arise in my absence, and I left Yiyang.
I don't know when I'll return.
I looked back at the city shrinking behind me and steadied a heart that wanted to weaken. Vast Ye was less a home to me than Yiyang. For two years I had thrown my whole body against a wasteland with nothing to lean on, and built my own power there.
The audience hall at Ye.
Today was no regular council, but an emergency council of war. When the civil and military officials saw me enter in court dress, they offered courteous bows. I returned the courtesy and took my place below the seat of honor. The matter, as expected, was my march.
"When the weather warms, Gongsun Zan is very likely to open a war to seize Jizhou. Winning Jizhou's land and securing grain is his fate. If he does not, want of provisions will dry him out by degrees until he falls."
Military Supervisor Ju Shou delivered the report in a voice with weight behind it, and set his pointer to the map. The tip rested on Qingzhou. Once Gongsun Zan had been defined as an enemy who must be cut down, they called him by his bare name, not by any office. In that moment I clenched a fist inside my sleeve.
"The part that must be settled first is Tian Kai, Gongsun Zan's loyal dog, coiled in the two commanderies of Le'an and Pingyuan. If Gongsun Zan drives down hard from above while Tian Kai stabs into our rear, we are dragged into a grinding war on two fronts. Therefore, before Gongsun Zan moves his main host, we must trample Tian Kai and break him ourselves."
Ju Shou set the heart of the plan down, short and clean. When the report ended, every official's gaze, Father's among them, gathered on me at once. They had already agreed I was the man to bring Tian Kai down.
"Your Lordship. If you permit it, I will take an elite force, march on Pingyuan, and bring back Tian Kai's head in a single stroke. And since the sword will already be drawn, I will go on, break Kong Rong and Guan Tong as well, and set the whole of Qingzhou beneath the Inspectorate of Jizhou."
I stepped forward with high spirit and not a hair of hesitation. Father laughed, great and open, and turned to the officials.
"Hahahaha! The spirit of a man fresh from his capping — fierce, and bold! Are you not astonished? What do you gentlemen say? Dudu Yuan has already proved himself by breaking the savage Heishan Bandits to the rein. Give him seasoned generals at his side, and a man of Tian Kai's measure should not be difficult."
"Dudu Yuan took the violent Heishan Bandits in, remade them into proper farmers, and gathered a vast tax. When they rebelled, he slaughtered them without mercy and set a cold discipline. In my view, Dudu Yuan is the perfect man to break Tian Kai and pacify Qingzhou."
Xu You came forward.
"Just so. Tian Kai is already cut off from Gongsun Zan and isolated, and Dudu Yuan's host will put him down without great difficulty. Only — Qingzhou will be Dudu Yuan's first time taking the field, so veteran officers must be attached to him as lieutenants. Not because anyone doubts his ability. With them, he will control the army all the more easily."
Even Feng Ji rose to support my march. It felt like a script, meticulous and exact. Jizhou's chief officials must already have turned the war over dozens of times and judged my chances firm. Father was arranging a flawless first merit and pressing it into my hands, and my chest swelled.
"Dudu Yuan. Can you do it?"
"I will certainly subdue Qingzhou and scatter Your Lordship's fame across the realm."
"I will give my life to carry out your command!"
I answered with a heavy military salute, loud enough to make the hall ring. If I broke Tian Kai cleanly this time and established the merit, Father would declare me his heir in the open.