Why Liu Bei Is Liu Bei
Shuchun lay under a savage downpour.
In obedience to the imperial command, and bearing the authority of the tally and axe, Liu Bei had led forty thousand troops against Yuan Shu. Victory had followed victory at Ruyin, Shen County, and Xiachai, and at last he had drawn his siege around Shuchun — the capital Yuan Shu had raised after usurping the imperial title.
What came after was the problem.
"Left General, forgive me! I will bring more grain to make up the shortfall. I swear it."
"You miserable wretch! You know how many times I've already heard that?"
"For days the rain has broken the roads, and landslides have blocked every path. Oxen and horses simply cannot get through."
"You call that a reason, you dog? Fail the supply and it's the headsman's sword — don't tell me you've forgotten!"
Zhang Fei, in a towering rage, ripped his Serpent Spear free and leveled it at the throat of the supply officer, Wang Hou.
"P-please, spare me..."
"Yide!"
Liu Bei's hand shot out and seized the shaft just as Zhang Fei drove the spear at Wang Hou's skull.
The cold blue edge trembled a hair's breadth from the man's brow. Gripping the haft, Liu Bei held his brother back.
"What guilt lies on a supply officer, that you would cut him down out of hand?"
"Brother, the rain won't allow it, the mountain's come down — you trust talk like that? Cao Cao sent these curs to toy with our grain, sure as I'm standing here!"
At the open naming of Minister of Works Cao Cao, what little color remained in Wang Hou's face drained away.
Liu Bei checked Zhang Fei with a firm hand, then stepped closer, took the kneeling man's hands, and raised him.
"Master Wang, the road was hard, and I thank you for the grain you did bring, scant as it is. Even so, we are still short, and we are pressing Shuchun with everything we have. With support, this city can be taken."
"I will get it, no matter what! On my life, I will bring it!"
"Then I will trust you."
Liu Bei soothed him and sent him off with an open hand.
Supplies had failed three times in a desperate hour, and still Liu Bei wore the face of benevolence.
The moment Wang Hou was gone, that face twisted.
"Hah. This is no small matter."
"Brother, sweet talk and threats only work once or twice! At this point they're stringing us along on purpose, I tell you!"
"Yide, enough. Go and relieve Zilong."
"Aye!"
Zhang Fei stomped out into the rain to take Zhao Yun's place on watch. In his stead, Lu Su and Hao Zhao came into the tent, soaked from inspecting the stores.
"My lord."
"How much is left?"
"Three days."
"Together with what we already held?"
"All of it together. Three days."
"Haaah—"
Liu Bei was swallowing it, but a fire raged in his gut.
"My lord, more and more of the men are beginning to doubt the supply line. Cut the rations, and this is what follows."
Hao Zhao seconded him.
"The quickest course is to seize the soldiers talking of a grain shortage and execute them as an example."
"Hao Zhao, you..."
"On operations and provisions, the rule is to know and pretend not to know. If rumor spreads carelessly through the ranks, you cut out the root."
Liu Bei shook his head at the machine-flat report.
"I, Liu Bei, will never do such a thing. Common soldiers though they are, I will not show them an unrighteous act."
"My lord, the men's morale comes before chivalry."
"Doing what is righteous comes before the men's morale!"
He was absolute. Lu Su laid a hand on Hao Zhao and stopped him there.
"My lord! My lord!"
Jian Yong burst into the tent through the rain, beat the water from his straw cape, and made his report.
"The horses are in a bad way as well. They have taken so much rain they can barely stand. Even if the storm breaks, an advance will be hard."
"This is a siege in any case. Cavalry will be of little use, so the horses can rest."
"Their fodder is soaked through, too. Mold is already showing."
The ground worsened by the hour, and Liu Bei clutched his head.
Even so, he did not lose his humanity.
"The grain. I will find a way to solve it."
"My lord!"
"However short we are, however badly the ground lies against us, we fight and we win! The traitor who dared call himself emperor is inside that city!"
Before the force of his will, the advisors could not bring themselves to argue, and no one stopped their lord as he stepped out into the pouring rain.
Without rain hat or straw cloak, Liu Bei walked the camp and looked over his men.
"Damn it all. My feet are so swollen I can hardly get them in."
"When this lets up it'll be worse. You'll sink to your knees and make a fine meal for arrows."
"To hell with it! Weather like this calls for hot pork and wine, and I'm starving to death!"
From tent to tent the soldiers' voices drifted, and Liu Bei listened in silence.
He lifted his eyes to the rain-choked sky as if laying a grievance against it.
"Yunchang. Baijin. This has turned truly difficult. I don't know what state you're in back in Xudu... but I am having a hard time of it."
He spoke the names of the men in Xudu, clenched both fists, and the rain ran down his face like tears.
Shaaaa— shaaaaaa—
"This has gone past falling. The sky is emptying itself on us."
I had come in person to that much-discussed, much-troubled ground, with Zhuge Liang and Wang Ling beside me.
Yingchuan had always been fertile flatland. Under the unending downpour and the slurries of mud and silt, the roads had vanished, and uprooted trees and heaps of stone had raised mountains where none had stood.
"I told you to block the watercourse first! Bring larger rocks — are you skipping stones into a well?"
Xiahou Dun was inspecting the site himself in the middle of the storm.
Later ages would joke and call him a company first sergeant, but the General Who Establishes Valor truly had a hoe in his hands, scraping away the earth the mudslide had overrun and turning the water aside in a desperate work of restoration.
"Deputy Imperial Censor, do you see? His Excellency the Minister of Works has committed General Xiahou in person, to open a passage and keep a supply line alive one way or another."
Military Counselor Xun You had come as well, to oversee the work.
It felt very much like an appeal aimed at me: Cao Cao was not deliberately starving Liu Bei of supplies.
"If the capital were Chang'an, or Luoyang, would it have come to this? A capital, by rights, ought to have clear roads running in from every side."
"Are you about to say that Xudu was the wrong place for a capital from the very start?"
"Well. That is all in the past."
Xun You let out a long sigh and hurried off to help Xiahou Dun.
"Yanyun. Kongming. What do you make of it?"
"This looks like a disaster beyond anything human hands can manage. How is anyone to speak of supplying the front from a place like this?"
Ah, Liang. Even I don't know how the you of that other world pushed supplies to the northern front, time after time, along the cliff roads of Shu.
"Better to drag in every idler we can find, set them to basket-haul work, and file a memorial to pull more labor. This... there is nothing to be done."
When Wang Ling added his word, I looked out over the ground ahead and made my decision.
"From this moment, I want every ox and horse we can lay hands on. In Xudu — no. Across Yuzhou, Yanzhou, and the Sili Province."
"Oxen and horses? What do you mean to use them for?"
"Gather them, and the uses will not be few. The two of you look into it and buy as many as you can. I don't care what it costs."
"Yes. We will see to it."
Wang Ling withdrew. Zhuge Liang, still watching the site, asked his question.
"Do you mean to contribute packhorses and oxen to that restoration?"
"There is no helping it."
Enough of political games with Cao Cao. It was time to move for the sake of the army itself.
When you are in the business of making a hero, you do not stop playing patron merely because the support has grown difficult.
Meanwhile, at the Imperial Secretariat, Xun Yu received an unexpected report concerning Zhang Qian.
"He is buying up oxen and horses?"
"They say not a calf is left in the marketplace. But he pays so handsomely that no one has found cause to complain."
At the words of Yang Xiu, Registrar of the Ministry of Works, Xun Yu hesitated, then let out a short breath of a laugh.
"No. Surely not."
"Prefect, as I see it, Lord Zhang means to sponsor the Left General by breaking the road open faster — offering packhorses and oxen to that end."
"Is that all?"
Yang Xiu turned the question over, and something flashed behind his eyes.
Serving in the Ministry of Works, he knew Cao Cao's policies and had standing to discuss them. What he had overheard in passing was more than enough.
"Prefect... could it be—"
"If you have a thought, speak it. I am told you are a considerable talent."
Yang Xiu said at once what had come to him.
"Is it because of the Official Ox Law?"
The Official Ox Law.
Not Guan Yu — not the long-bearded commander of the Tiger-Brave Guards who stood guard over the Son of Heaven. The name rang the same in the ear, but this was the law of official oxen, a new tax of the Ministry of Works by which the government lent oxen out to the people.
The court's coffers were thin. To refill a Han treasury worn hollow by endless war, the system had been devised so that wasteland might be opened, the people might borrow government oxen, and at harvest both the hire of the ox and the tax would be taken at a single stroke.
Borrowing an ox to farm was called the Official Ox Law. Borrowing fields was called the Official Fields. A new institution, already counting its take.
And now someone was sweeping up the very oxen the state meant to buy and lend to the people.
"If he has thought that far, and later sells those oxen dear... is this not speculation against the court itself?"
"I say it because Baijin is not that sort of man."
Rival though Zhang Baijin was, Xun Yu defended him.
"I should like to see for myself how he means to move, once he has those oxen in hand."
"Commander of the Tiger-Brave Imperial Guards. From this moment, carts will be hitched to the oxen and packhorses gathered here and sent to the flood works in Yingchuan."
"Oh? Is that the way of it?"
"By my reckoning, two days of grain remain up there, three at the outside. But food from Yanzhou will arrive soon."
They might have to go hungry for a few days. Even so, the broken line of supply would be joined again.
"After that, there is something I must ask of you, Brother Yunchang."
"Say whatever it is. I shall see it done."
"Once the packhorses and oxen have served their turn, I mean to pick out horses and use them to lead troops."
"Breed, and the muscle a beast is built for, are not the same thing."
"I know. That is why I need you to choose which can serve as stud stallions and brood mares — sound foals fit to stand in a cavalry arm."
"I did plenty of that in Youzhou. It shall be so!"
While Guan Yu remained in Xudu, he had taken on a great deal beyond battle: materiel, administration, personnel.
One day he would have to shoulder an entire province. This was the time to harden his hand at the business of governing.
Today, fortunately, the rain had stopped. Far off in Shuchun, I could not know how Liu Bei was faring.
"Imperial Uncle, we are doing all we can on this side. I only hope it will be enough."
Liu Bei gathered the whole host and drew a long breath.
"Brothers, all of you — hear me! We stand against the traitor Yuan Shu, who defied the Han, raised a state, and usurped the imperial title, and of that campaign only this single city remains!"
His voice rang with vigor. Food was short, discontent was climbing, and morale had sunk into the mud.
"You have endured through the downpour, and what you had to eat was poor. As your commander, I feel the weight of that. The fault is entirely mine. You have fought with courage!"
"What?"
"He can't mean to say it outright..."
"How can a general speak to his soldiers like that?"
His advisors had urged him again and again to hide the shortage of grain. Liu Bei said it to the soldiers' faces.
"So if there is no rice, then ears of barley! If there is no stew, then I myself will boil it!"
Dozens of army horses were led out before him.
Every one of them was worn thin by battle after battle, and short of fodder besides.
"Whatever comes, I will not let the men who fight beside me starve and drop! Therefore I will slaughter my own horse and feed you!"
His mind was already made.
Liu Bei drew his sword and, without a heartbeat of hesitation, struck his horse across the neck.
The white horse, proud of its pale mane, crashed down in a spray of red, and a murmur ran through the ranks.
Then Liu Bei's household troops came forward and butchered the carcass with practiced hands.
Not a cut of meat, not a shard of bone, not a drop of blood was left behind. Great cauldrons were set ready.
Amid the murmuring soldiers, Liu Bei drove his sword into the earth.
The general himself would charge with the infantry and scale the wall.
Of his own will, he was walking into the place where death stood nearest.
"Wet your lips with the horse's blood, and fill your bellies with the boiled meat until the warmth comes back! We will take Shuchun!"
"We follow!"
"We go with the Left General!"
"We will bring Shuchun down! You need not climb the wall yourself, General!"
The soldiers answered him.
Liu Bei had every horse upon the platform slaughtered, and horse-meat stew set to boil.
He had thrown away even his own mount, determined to feed his men to the last and take the city. The army forgot that the grain was gone. Morale surged until it seemed to pierce the sky.