Lü Bu's Courage
Cai Yong, exiled to Bing Province?
Come to think of it, this would be around the time he was here.
Emperor Ling had suppressed the Pure Stream faction, yet at times he also showed respect for the Confucian learning they so revered. That was how he kept the political balance in Luoyang. Cai Yong had been the scholar the emperor selected in that process.
Even while carrying out imperial commissions to compile the classics, he had—just as Sun Jian said—repeatedly petitioned for the convenience of the local gentry, and been driven out for it each time. Now it was Bing Province. Someday he would be banished all the way to Yangzhou. Then Dong Zhuo would summon him back… and after Dong Zhuo's death, Cai Yong would mourn him, only to be executed by Wang Yun.
Honestly, the moment I heard Cai Yong's name, my interest was piqued. After all, he was the father of Cai Yan—the woman whom I, "Xiongnu Liu Bao," had historically abducted and taken as a concubine. And Cai Yan was important to a certain design I had recently set in motion, so I would need to build a connection with Cai Yong as well.
Lü Bu, Sun Jian, and I entered the walled town of Guyuan County, the administrative seat of Wuyuan Commandery. The house where the exiled Cai Yong was staying proved easy enough to find.
"Even here in Bing Province, this many people lining up to have a famous man appraise them?"
Sun Jian's words carried a faint sneer, and he was right—a long queue stretched before Cai Yong's gate. They were, from the look of them, the Confucian students of Bing Province. To pass oneself off as a scholar in Bing Province, a family needed at least some means. That they all stood on their own two feet, without a single carriage among them, spoke volumes about the poverty of the province.
There was only one carriage. It belonged to Wang Zhi, Administrator of Wuyuan Commandery.
Cai Yong received Administrator Wang Zhi with such obvious indifference that Wang Zhi grew bored and left before long. It had been a thoroughly unpleasant stretch of time for Cai Yong, but he gave no sign of it.
Whether Wang Zhi is to be dismissed or not is a matter for His Majesty to decide. There is no need for me to waste my strength debating it with the man himself.
Cai Yong's distaste did not spring from Wang Zhi being a corrupt Administrator, nor even from his being Wang Fu's younger brother. He simply had no fondness for the families of eunuchs. It was not that he hated eunuchs and therefore hated their kin as well. The root of it ran deeper.
How does a man become a eunuch in the first place?
Of course, there were those who had lost their manhood to some childhood accident. But such cases were few. Most had chosen castration because of poverty. To become a eunuch, a boy had to be cut in childhood. Would a child decide to sever his own manhood? No—it was because impoverished parents had sold their sons to be made into eunuchs.
The surgery, of course, carried a high mortality rate. They had staked their children's lives as chips on a gambling table. And even if a boy survived and walked the path of a eunuch, his family remained a tribe that sucked the marrow from his spine. That a eunuch scrambled for bribes and vied for the emperor's favor was surely bound up with that predicament, Cai Yong thought. Unless one were a giant like Regular Palace Attendant Wang Fu, or the retired Cao Teng, a eunuch's official salary was pitiful. There was no way to feed a family on the legal stipend alone. The family would say, You live in luxury in the palace while abandoning your own blood! And so the eunuch would have no choice but to scrape together bribes.
In Cai Yong's eyes, Wang Zhi was precisely that sort of man. A man who had swallowed an Administrator's post as the price of his brother's severed manhood. It was possible, of course, that Wang Fu had given his brother the post out of genuine affection—but Cai Yong did not rate that likelihood very high.
"Raids by the Xianbei are the business of the Colonel of the Southern Xiongnu and the Xiongnu under his command. Anyway, once I finish my term as Administrator here, I'll have to speak to my elder brother about going up to Luoyang. After all, for the younger brother of a Regular Palace Attendant to be rotting as a frontier Administrator—it's a matter of face…"
Wang Zhi was merely a man living off his brother's prestige. He seemed to have little to do with whatever Wang Fu and Duan Jiong were planning. It was even possible that Wang Fu hoped his younger brother would simply rot away here in Wuyuan Commandery. In that case, conversation with Wang Zhi was useless. Watching the Administrator's retreating back as he left the house, Cai Yong roughly decided how he would report the matter to the emperor.
Then he called a servant.
"Tell all the guests outside to come in."
He had no particular interest in appraising talent. But the judgment of Cai Yong—a man of national fame, whose name carried weight far beyond Luoyang—was a single thread of hope for these people.
The scholars of Bing Province poured in and were made to stand in the courtyard. Cai Yong summoned them forward one by one and exchanged a few brief words with each. Not a single conversation afforded him even a flicker of satisfaction.
Every last one of them thinks of nothing but leaving Bing Province for Luoyang.
Not one possessed any remarkable scholarly achievement or strength of character. Most of those who boasted of their learning needed to start over from their letters. What they dressed up as integrity was nothing more than the desire to go somewhere more comfortable than Bing Province.
The appraisal and recommendation of men may be nothing more than a trade that exploits such hopes.
Disappointed, Cai Yong was considering simply driving them all out when two men entered his sight. They were hulking figures, a head or two taller than every scholar in the courtyard.
"You look more like warriors than Confucian students… Who are you?"
The darker-skinned of the two introduced himself.
"My name is Sun Jian, courtesy name Wentai."
"Ah—the one who suppressed the rebels alongside the Colonel of the Southern Xiongnu. I have heard of your reputation. But with fame like yours, you hardly need my appraisal, do you?"
"I only wished to pay my respects. And there is someone here I wanted to introduce to you."
Lü Bu, Fengxian. That was how the young man gave his name. He was a native of this very Wuyuan Commandery, he said.
If a man of Bing Province had come seeking him, Cai Yong concluded, it made little difference whether he was a scholar or a soldier. The post he hoped to obtain in Luoyang would simply be of a different kind.
"I do not know how one is meant to appraise a warrior. Do you wish to take up military duties in the capital region, or in Luoyang?"
Lü Bu shook his head.
"Advancement enough to rise through the ranks available in Bing Province will suffice for me. There is something I wished to ask of a gentleman who has come from Luoyang."
"…And what is that?"
"I wish to hear how you regard the war with the Xianbei."
Cai Yong's eyes narrowed.
Come to think of it, I knew almost nothing about Lü Bu at this point in his life.
Lü Bu. The man who betrayed Ding Yuan, betrayed Dong Zhuo, stabbed Cao Cao and Liu Bei and Yuan Shu in the back, and in the end died by Cao Cao's hand. That was the sum of what I knew. In the early chapters of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by the time Lü Bu was serving under Ding Yuan he was already in his thirties. I had never known the Lü Bu of his twenties.
Having taken him as my teacher, I had thought him a simpler man than expected. I had also glimpsed a kind of hostility in him toward people who did not understand the reality of Bing Province… but it was not enough to judge him by.
I did not know for what purpose Lü Bu had brought me this far. But standing here, watching him face Cai Yong, I wanted to know what kind of man the Lü Bu of his twenties truly was.
"How I regard the war with the Xianbei, is it."
"Every year—every month, in the worst stretches—reports go up to Luoyang of how savagely the Xianbei plunder Bing Province."
"Yes. I heard as much in Luoyang."
"I wish to know how Luoyang is responding. No—I wish to know how you, Master Cai, believe Luoyang ought to respond."
A look of interest crossed Cai Yong's face. I waited for his answer from behind Lü Bu. I was curious myself. In a manner of speaking, was Cai Yong not my future father-in-law?
"The Great Wall, and all the old watch posts, beacon towers, and forts along it, must be repaired, and the defenses made fast. Having seen the state of Bing Province with my own eyes, I believe taking the offensive first is absolutely out of the question."
Cai Yong closed his eyes, then opened them and asked,
"Now I shall ask you, Fengxian. As a warrior, how do you believe the Xianbei should be dealt with?"
I expected Lü Bu to answer, more or less, that they ought to cut down the chieftain Tanshihuai. But the answer that came from his lips was different.
"I too believe we must concentrate on defense. An offensive is impossible. If an expedition is launched, it will certainly be defeated."
Cai Yong was startled, and the scholars around them stirred.
Cai Yong asked again.
"You are a warrior. I thought you would say one must advance and fight, prepared to die."
"And why is that?"
"If a war truly cannot be avoided—if, for instance, there is nowhere left to retreat, or something behind you that must be protected at all costs—then you fight. But a war that can be avoided should be avoided. If," Lü Bu said, glancing around at the scholars, "the learned gentlemen here were to oppose a war, people would refuse to listen, saying, 'Men who know nothing of battle are simply cowards.' That is why a warrior—a man who knows battle—must step forward, even if it means bearing every accusation, and say, 'We cannot win.'"
"You might well be judged unwarriorlike for it, might you not?"
"If, for fear of such a judgment, a man throws himself into a war that could have been avoided, and prattles that a war which cannot be won can be won—that is a path that deceives His Majesty above and destroys the men under his command below."
Wait—then when he saved me, the reason he went out of his way to chase down those Xianbei cavalry was… oh. Because he could win.
Something like admiration was rising, little by little, on Cai Yong's face.
"Foolhardy valor, then."
"It is not even foolhardy valor. It is a filthy desire. A man who believes that, to climb to a higher post, the people and his own subordinates may be sacrificed in any number. That is—"
Lü Bu paused to draw a breath.
"A man who does business with war. …The dismissed Grand Commandant Duan Jiong, for instance, would be just such a man!"
Cai Yong nearly trembled.
Was this not close to the very thought he had been turning over, only moments ago, while looking at Wang Zhi, the younger brother of Regular Palace Attendant Wang Fu? Men who, for the sake of advancement, would mutilate even a brother's body and sell him as a eunuch. Men like Wang Zhi, Administrator of Wuyuan, who had done business with his own brother to feed his desires. The field had merely shifted from eunuchs to warriors. Did Lü Bu's thinking not run in the same channel as Cai Yong's own?
Cai Yong hesitated over what to say, then turned his eyes to Sun Jian at Lü Bu's side.
"Does Sun Wentai share this view?"
Sun Jian smiled with easy confidence. His answer, too, was remarkable.
"I just go out on the field and win. That way, I never fight a battle I would have lost."
Sun Jian was a different sort of man from Lü Bu, but both ranked among the finest people Cai Yong had met in recent years.
"I intend to go to Shuofang Commandery tomorrow to inspect the frontier. Both of you—come with me."
I followed Lü Bu and Sun Jian, and together with Cai Yong we set out for Shuofang Commandery.
Cai Yong looked at me, traveling with them, as if he found it strange, but he asked no questions. Bao, son of Yufuluo, Right Guli King of the Xiongnu. That much, it seemed, was sufficient for him. Instead he concentrated on hearing Lü Bu's and Sun Jian's views of the Xianbei.
"Tanshihuai boasts that his domain spans fourteen thousand li east to west and seven thousand li north to south, does he not?"
Lü Bu answered Cai Yong's question.
"He does."
"I find myself wondering whether those words were truly meant for ears inside the Xianbei."
This time Sun Jian asked.
"What do you mean, sir?"
"Talk of ten thousand li and a thousand li—does it not sound rather as if it were meant for us Han to hear?"
"Well, Han is the enemy of the Xianbei. Naturally he would want Han to be cowed by Xianbei might."
"And was that a thought Tanshihuai arrived at by himself?"
Lü Bu and Sun Jian looked at each other.
Sun Jian asked Cai Yong,
"If it was not Tanshihuai's own thought, then…?"
Cai Yong's eyes flicked toward me for a moment, then returned to the barren frontier of Shuofang Commandery.
"In ages past, the Xiongnu grew powerful because so many Han men defected to the Chanyu and served as his advisors."
"Then… you believe there are Han advisors in Tanshihuai's service as well?"
"You both saw how the scholars swarmed even to a place that is not my house in Luoyang, but merely a lodging in a place of exile. And those men still hold some hope for Han."
"If they were men who had given up on Han entirely…"
"There will be many who, in their despair, would gladly go over to the Xianbei and put their talents to use. Character and talent do not always keep company. …I shall memorialize His Majesty that this war cannot be fought."