By Chivalry, to the Son of Heaven
I threw the archer corps forward as a hard screen around the three sworn brothers—Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei. Wherever an enemy banner showed, we made it a mark and poured shafts into it, and I promised a reward to any man who shot down a standard bearing the surname Li.
"So it really is Li Jue's army. They mean to butcher the Son of Heaven's column right here, while it tries to break free?"
Seeing it with their own eyes, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei flew into a towering rage and tore into the enemy ranks, paying the butchers back in their own coin—hacking them apart piece by piece, just as they had been doing moments before. Liu Bei on horseback with his twin swords, Guan Yu sweeping the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, Zhang Fei turning cavalry into meat on skewers with his Serpent Spear: before the three of them, even Li Jue's host, long called the strongest army in Guanzhong, must have reeled.
"Chief Zhang! Palace ladies and soldiers still alive are all mixed in together! There may be court ministers or imperial kin among them, so the arrows—"
Lu Su came sprinting out to shout it, and in that same breath a troop of riders burst from the melee around the three brothers, spraying blood. They carried a banner marked Li, soaked crimson, and charged our way at a full gallop.
"Pikemen to the front of the archers!"
Lu Su was hurriedly throwing the long-spearmen forward to stop them when a great thunder of hooves roared past my ear.
"Your pardon—"
Besides Liu Bei, only one other man in the whole camp rode a white horse and was a true master of the long spear: Zhao Yun. He drove straight at the cavalry bearing down on me, and the two forces met head-on. The impact was tremendous. My ears went numb for an instant, but my eyes still caught it all. The moment they struck, Zhao Yun flung his spear high and brought it down—not with the blade, but with the shaft—across the skull of the enemy commander at the front.
Crack!
The iron helmet split. The enemy general folded over his horse and did not move again. Zhao Yun's riders then dragged the masterless enemy horsemen from their saddles, and Guan Yu came charging up in haste.
"Brother Guan Yu!"
"That one should have been mine!"
So he said—and yet he clapped Zhao Yun on the shoulder and strolled over at his ease. Looking closer, I saw he held the Green Dragon Blade in one hand, and in the other a thick bundled mass of something.
"Qian!"
"Brother Guan Yu!"
"The matter is finished."
"Whoa—ah!"
What he had flung at me was a heap of enemy commanders' heads, each taken in a single stroke, each still wearing a proper general's helmet. He had claimed this many already, and still he begrudged Zhao Yun the one officer he had taken?
Truly, on a battlefield, that hunger to outshine every other man was something else...
"Lu Su, get this mess in order."
"At once!"
I cannot stand severed heads. I kicked aside the ones Guan Yu had given me and ran straight for Liu Bei. The three brothers, of course, and Zhao Yun and Zhang He with them, had all dismounted to catch their breath, shaking the blood from their faces and armor.
"Governor Liu!"
"Qian, water!"
I pulled the leather waterskin from inside my coat. Liu Bei snatched it and dashed off, hauled someone upright in a rush, and tipped the water into his mouth. For a heartbeat I thought it might be the Emperor. It was an old man. Past his middle years, his white beard matted and dyed red with blood, he trembled violently, gulped down what Liu Bei gave him, and then cried out with a face gone sick with dread.
"His—His Majesty must be saved. His Majesty!"
"Who are you, my lord, and what office do you hold? Where has the Emperor gone?"
"I—I am... Grand Minister of Agriculture... Shisun... Rui... His Majesty has taken refuge in Hedong... in Anyi... I... drew those villains off... with the palace folk... and the treasures as bait..."
The old man's name was Shisun Rui. One of the elder ministers of Han, and a loyal subject who had staked his life to get the Emperor clear.
"Brother, he says Hedong—Anyi. I know the road."
Guan Yu pointed at once with the Green Dragon Blade. Hedong Commandery was his homeland.
"We ride for Anyi!"
"Governor Liu! Leave me a hundred men here!"
"I'll give you two hundred, and Zhang He with them. You and Mi Zhu in the rear—put the field to rights. I'm counting on you, Qian!"
Spent as he was, Liu Bei swung back into the saddle and made ready to ride for Anyi to save the Emperor. As Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Lu Su, and Chen Deng moved to follow, I shouted to him before they departed.
"Governor Liu! When you come before His Majesty, you must say this—that the army of the Governor of Xuzhou will gather up every piece of the imperial treasure that was stolen from him, and return it all!"
I have a deep, ethical loathing for what amounts to gleaning—scavenging the fallen for leftovers. But this was necessary, and Liu Bei caught my meaning at once and galloped hard for Anyi.
"Godspeed!"
"See you soon!"
From here, Anyi in Hedong lay just over a single mountain, and Liu Bei rode for it. I propped Shisun Rui up and called for an army physician.
"Treat this man at once!"
"Yes, Chief!"
"Not only the Grand Minister! Gather up everyone still alive!"
Out of that great slaughter, a few hundred souls were clinging to life by the thinnest thread. The soldiers had been massacred, but old eunuchs, palace ladies, and others of their kind remained.
"Eek—ah! Please, spare me!"
"Rest easy! The men of Governor Liu's army are safe folk!"
I gathered the surviving women and eunuchs, gave them water and food, and had the wounded treated.
"Brother Zhang He, see to the corpses."
"At once, Chief!"
"The rest of you, with me! From this moment we search everything strewn on the ground for what belongs to the imperial house!"
Lifting the dead one by one in a place carpeted with corpses, we found jewels lying in the blood-water. A red pearl drunk on blood. A silver vase that flashed in the sun once it was wiped clean. Broken bamboo slips, shattered, but surely bearing writing of importance.
"Wipe what you find and put it in here. All of it belongs to the imperial house."
Every time we turned over the corpses of the Li Jue soldiers we had fought, something new and wretched came to light. Jewels and silver were one thing. Severed locks of women's hair, undergarments, and the like stirred a disgust so deep I wanted to desecrate the dead all over again.
Clink. Clatter.
"If anyone skims so much as a scrap, I will not let it pass. When this is over you'll be paid more than double the value anyway, so don't think of pocketing a thing—bag every last piece, just as it lies!"
"Yes, Chief!"
A hundred-odd soldiers hunted treasure through pools of blood and corpses, while the surviving palace ladies and eunuchs sat with the souls gone out of their faces.
I let out a long breath.
"Chief Zhang."
I turned. Zhang He had come with the soldiers, bearing a great load of severed enemy heads.
"Brother Zhang He, must we really be taking heads at a time like this..."
"No. This one. The officer Zhao Yun cut down just now—I know the face."
It was the cavalry commander who had charged me, the very head whose skull Zhao Yun had broken with the shaft of his spear.
"His name is Li Li. Nephew of the traitor Li Jue. A kill that must be entered, without fail, in the merit roll of the Governor of Xuzhou."
"Ah. That sort of man? Then he ought to go in a sack of his own."
"I'll keep the heads, and once the situation is settled—"
That was when it came.
"Chief! A body of troops is coming this way!"
"Li Jue's pursuit?"
"No. That is... Cao Cao's army!"
Cao Cao's army? So he had hung back to see which way the wind blew, and only now come to look the field over? If Cao Cao himself was out in front, I had a word or two I meant to—
"Whoa, whoa. Are you men of the Governor of Xuzhou?"
"We are!"
Not Cao Cao. That was Cao Hong. Three or four thousand at most—one of the detachments Cao Cao had split his strength into as he moved. Cao Hong looked the ground over, clicked his tongue at a battlefield where corpses were heaped like mountains and blood had pooled into a lake.
"Tch."
Then his eye caught on one place.
"You. What is that?"
"As you can see—imperial treasure we recovered."
"You wretch! You've been looting on the battlefield?"
Cao Hong bellowed and came at me.
"Cao Hong, don't talk madness! Loyal ministers of His Majesty were carrying this to lure Li Jue's army. We gathered it up again to present it to the Emperor!"
"What? How dare you bandy an elder's name around like—"
His hand slid for the sword at his waist. A keen spearpoint was already at Cao Hong's throat where he sat his horse.
"The army of the Governor of Xuzhou and the army of the Governor of Yanzhou joined purposes and boarded the same boat, did we not? What do you think you're doing?"
The moment Zhang He leveled his spear at Cao Hong's neck, the Cao officers around them started to draw. One man rushed in and caught Cao Hong back.
"Commandant! You must not!"
"Let go, Yu Jin!"
If you came looking to pick a fight, you've misread the field, Master Cao Hong.
"The elder minister we saved—Grand Minister of Agriculture, Lord Shisun—and the palace ladies and eunuchs are here as witnesses. You aren't thinking of silencing them, I hope?"
"You—what do you take me for..."
"What he says is true!"
Among the party the soldiers had rescued, one palace lady rose. Drenched in blood, dressed in a red campaign coat, her head and face wrapped in cloth so that only her two eyes blinked, she came toward us and cried out.
"I am a senior palace lady of the court! These men are indeed the army of the Governor of Xuzhou—they stopped Li Jue's troops who were hunting us. And these things are indeed the bait treasures we set out so we might shake the pursuit off our trail!"
"Ngh..."
"The misunderstanding seems to be cleared up."
"Tch!"
When Cao Hong drew back, Yu Jin—the man who had stopped him—hurriedly dismounted and bowed his head.
"I am ashamed. Our Yanzhou army keeps strict military law. We do not lay a hand on the belongings of the dead, not even an enemy's, and so we badly misunderstood!"
"Xuzhou would call that only proper. As I said, these were things meant to be returned to His Majesty from the very start."
"Ah—I misspoke! Please, set aside this misunderstanding born of the field. We mean to leave the battlefield, so show us the road!"
Yu Jin was mediating and apologizing however he could, so I let it pass for the moment. Then Zhang He abruptly pointed. Not toward Hedong, where Liu Bei had gone, but west—the road to Chang'an.
"Li Jue's army pursued straight down this road, so there is every chance men like Guo Si or Zhang Ji will come running back this way."
"Colonel Yu Jin offers his thanks!"
Yu Jin went straight to Cao Hong, caught him by the arm, and urged him to leave off before the clash grew worse.
"From the look of it, you had yourselves quite a brawl. The army of Yanzhou will show you we fight better than this. Move!"
Unpleasant to the very last, Cao Hong led his men off at a gallop toward the west. It had been the same the last time in Xuzhou—Cao Cao's kin, the Caos and the Xiahous, seemed to wander the land with their own troops, roaming wherever the road took them. So Cao Cao's army thundered away, and I decided to rest a little from picking over what treasure remained.
"My lady, senior of the palace—thank you! This Zhang Qian will repay you handsomely later."
She gave me a quiet bow and turned away again, her face still veiled.
We had to clear the field quickly. At daybreak, Mi Zhu's supply train would arrive. And I waited, hoping Liu Bei, gone on to Hedong, would meet His Majesty in Anyi soon and come back.
Liu Bei rode for Anyi as if his life depended on it, and there before him lay the armies of Li Jue and Guo Si, still pursuing the Son of Heaven.
"Brother, there!"
"We punch through!"
Having come this far, Liu Bei rode on without a single weak word about being tired. They were already outnumbered more than ten to one, but nothing could bar the three brothers of the Peach Garden. Just as they meant to charge the pursuit and smash it outright—
Thud-thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud-thud—
"Brother, there!"
"That Cao Cao bastard—where in blazes did he come from?"
Cao Cao's banner showed, and twenty thousand troops came straight for Liu Bei's army. This time it was no carriage. Cao Cao himself had come at a run on a proper fine horse, and the moment he saw Liu Bei's men he swung his front around and charged the Guanzhong army that was hounding the Son of Heaven. The battle reversed in an instant. Meeting not a few thousand of Liu Bei's soldiers but twenty thousand of Cao Cao's, the Guanzhong host fought with desperate ferocity—yet an army with Cao Cao at its head was truly strong.
"Xuande! Are you unharmed?"
"Brother Mengde!"
None of them could have said where Cao Cao's army had come from. Lu Su reported to Liu Bei.
"He preserved his main strength. From the look of it, the moment his scouts fixed His Majesty's whereabouts, he came straight here."
"Sly as a fox. Brother, looks like we'll have to ride neck and neck with that Cao Cao."
"No need to hurry."
Liu Bei watched the swift drive of Cao Cao's army, smiled, and flicked the pooled blood from his sword.
Liu Bei watched Cao Cao's fight, steadied his breath, and only then advanced. The sun went down. At the end of the pursuit the Guanzhong army withdrew, and Liu Bei and Cao Cao could at last confirm the Son of Heaven's carriage in Anyi. The imperial side, in turn, confirmed the two of them.
"Your Majesty!"
"Those men... are they allies? Or yet another pair of warlords?"
"If they show His Majesty the least disrespect, this Yang Feng will step forward and bar them!"
Yang Feng—chieftain of the band once called the White Wave Bandits, who had made Sili and Hedong his base; the man who had rescued the Emperor, been pardoned of his base status, and risen to General Who Raises Righteousness. His White Wave followers bristled with wariness toward Liu Bei and Cao Cao, and the Emperor chewed his thumbnail, anxiously watching how they would answer. Three men had raced in from Xuzhou, from Yanzhou, and from Hedong to save the Emperor, each nursing a different design. And at the center of the three lay the will of Heaven.