The Collateral Royal House
That I had fallen into the world of the Three Kingdoms was clear enough from the monkey devil's explanation. The problem was where, and when.
"The year you were born is, by the Western calendar, 173 AD."
"Isn't that a little early for the Three Kingdoms?"
The usual starting point of the Three Kingdoms was eleven years from now — 184 AD. The Yellow Turban Rebellion.
"It is early, yes. Liu Hong, emperor of the Han — the man history will call Emperor Ling — is still nothing more than a seventeen-year-old boy."
This was the year Liu Bei turned thirteen, and whether he had even started selling straw sandals yet was anyone's guess. Cao Cao was nineteen, just stepping out of boyhood into young manhood — around the time he would be abducting new brides with Yuan Shao, or raising hell at the eunuch Zhang Rang's house.
And time was not the only problem.
"The place you were born is Yufuluo's qionglu — his felt tent — somewhere between Lishi County and Meiji County, in Xihe Commandery of Bingzhou."
In simpler terms: I was off the map.
Vast Bingzhou could be split broadly into east and west, and in the Three Kingdoms games you usually only ever saw the east. Even then, most of the time you got Jinyang — Taiyuan — and nothing more. If Shangdang showed up, you were getting the deluxe treatment. Xihe Commandery, where I had been born, belonged to western Bingzhou. Games that bothered to depict this western half existed, sure, but they usually just lumped the whole thing under "the Xiongnu barbarians."
The fringes of the Han empire. It could not begin to compare with Cao Cao's hometown of Qiao County in Pei State, or with Luoyang, the stage of his youth. Even Zhuo County, Liu Bei's hometown, was a metropolis next to this place. Sun Jian's hometown of Wu Commandery might have been a backwater south of the Yangtze, but it had been folded into the Chinese world at least several centuries earlier.
And I was a Xiongnu. Time, space, even my social position — all of it lay outside the heart of the Three Kingdoms.
And yet I had been handed a quest to pacify half of northern China.
I could not even complain. Even if the hell that monkey devil had shown me was a fake, I never wanted to see it again. Just looking at it had felt like it was slicing my soul to ribbons.
"Hey, any more perks? ......I mean, are there any more perks?"
From the memories of the original Xiongnu Liu Bao — the one who had lived and died according to history — I had obtained a fairly accurate chronology of Three Kingdoms events and a working knowledge of the geography. But the perk had clear limits. The geography was something everyone living in this era already knew. And the chronology would start twisting the moment I began changing history, rendering it useless soon enough.
The monkey devil narrowed his eyes and answered curtly.
"Understanding second-century Xiongnu the instant you were born is a perk. You haven't met any Han people yet, so you haven't used it, but you can speak the Han tongue too. You can even read."
Being born fluent in two languages was a pretty good perk, granted.
"Yeah, but you're telling me to go toe-to-toe with heroes. Shouldn't I get some kind of stat boost?"
The monkey devil worked his mouth as if he were cracking a hard-shelled nut, then added, sounding thoroughly put out.
"I can't just hand it out for free, so I'll unlock a little more every time you take land connected to the Xiongnu."
With that, the monkey devil vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.
I was nothing more than a newborn, but I set growth as my goal and let the days pass. And as they did, a few facts came into focus.
First, I figured out what those animal smells were that I had been breathing since I was born here. Most of it was the distinctive scent of horses. After that came a great deal of sheep, with the smell of cattle mixed in now and then. My father Yufuluo led a fairly large herd, which meant a lot of livestock — or so it looked to my eyes, at least. I had never seen nomads before.
I could not ride a horse. I could barely walk. So I started by trying to hold my head up, straining at it every day. All that really accomplished was making me extremely dedicated to filling my diapers.
Well... it was not as if there were no results. I learned to hold my head up a little earlier than the other babies in the Xiongnu camp. Apparently there is a difference between a baby who simply grows however it happens, and a baby who wriggles with some kind of purpose in mind. It also helped that my father Yufuluo's standing was higher than most, which meant I was better fed.
"That's my son!"
Once I could hold my head up, Yufuluo tucked me into the breast of his armor and climbed onto his horse. Then he started riding circuits around the camp, spending time with his boy.
"The wind is cold!"
Mother... well, she was a young woman who had barely left girlhood behind. At her words, Yufuluo threw back his head and laughed.
"Our boy Bao is going to roam the world like the leopard he's named for! He's not a child who'll lose to a little wind!"
It was a bit chilly on a baby's body, true — but I had a purpose. I wanted to take in my surroundings. So I did not fuss. I took it.
"Look at that! He isn't even crying. He's saying, 'I'll survey my world'!"
It also helped that the inside of Yufuluo's armor was fairly warm. The smell of my father's sweat, of meat and wine — given time, I got used to those naturally enough. What I could not get used to was the fact that Yufuluo's bearded face belonged to a man still only in his mid-twenties.
"How about it, Bao? When you're a little bigger, I'll give you the finest warhorse among those foals."
Yufuluo rattled off his little plans for his son — he would make me a bow with his own hands, and a quiver too. Spending time with him, I was surprised by how deep his paternal love ran. I had expected the Xiongnu to be a bit more savage.
But what about the queue? The flattened skull?
Fortunately, I did not need to worry about either. The flattened skull — piantou — was the custom of pressing a soft infant's head with something like a stone to elongate the crown upward. Whether because the Southern Xiongnu had taken after the Han, my skull was intact. The queue meant shaving everything except a long tail of hair at the back — but looking at Father Yufuluo, he simply seemed to let his hair grow and hang as it pleased.
"......So, Bao, you must become the hope of our Luanti clan."
Yufuluo seemed to have said something important, but I had been thinking about other things and missed it. Still, I gleaned one piece of information: I was not calling myself a Liu yet.
Not Liu Bao — Luanti Bao, then. Luanti Bao. Luanti Yufuluo. Those were our names, for now.
When you spend every day trying to get control of your own body, time seems to crawl — but looking back, months had vanished in a blink. All I did was ride in someone's arms, but I tended livestock with my father and galloped on horseback. Time passed that way, the year turned to 174 AD, and I sat up on my own, stood, and took my first steps.
Once I could walk, Yufuluo put me on a horse himself. He still sat behind me, bracing my back.
One day, as I was listening hard to my father's words the way I always did, hungry for knowledge, riders from the camp came pounding up in a hurry.
"Right Luli King!"
Right Luli King was another name for my father, Yufuluo. The supreme leader of all the Xiongnu was called dargwa in the Xiongnu tongue, and Chanyu in the language of the Han. Beneath the Chanyu stood the Wise Kings, his left and right arms — the Left Wise King and the Right Wise King. The Xiongnu held the left in higher honor than the right, so the Left Wise King was, in effect, the crown prince. Beneath these left and right Wise Kings came the left and right Luli Kings.
"The Right Wise King summons you!"
"Father?"
The father of Right Luli King Yufuluo — which made him my grandfather. Luanti Bao's grandfather. The Right Wise King, Qiangqu.
Even between brothers, even between father and son, if each led his own herd they did not cross paths all that often. You had to move your people along the assigned pastures and the circuit routes. Even if you were not "nomadic" in the wandering sense — even if you stayed put on good land and raised your herds there — the rule of Xiongnu society was that you did not trespass on one another's roads and territories. The way relatives in the modern world gather on holidays, the Xiongnu here gathered at the New Year, or at the Grand Sacrifice in the fifth month.
"The Spring Sacrifice was only just now, wasn't it?"
Yufuluo and a handful of his inner circle had already made the trip to the Chanyu's winter camp — my great-grandfather's — at Lishi County in Xihe Commandery. Even after the new year, snow still came down hard in Bingzhou, so only the important figures moved, and in small numbers.
"It's... the Xianbei...!"
"They waited until the Spring Sacrifice ended and the Four Horns and Six Horns scattered back to their own camps. Sly bastards!"
A Xianbei raid. Listening to them talk, I could roughly sketch the picture in my head.
Far to the west, the Yellow River flowed in from Liangzhou, then bent sharply north through the western Bingzhou where we lived. At the border with eastern Bingzhou it bent sharply south again, and around Hongnong Commandery it bent east once more — nearly at a right angle — and cut across the Central Plains. That shape, flowing north and then south again like a cover, was why they called it the Hetao Plateau — the "River Cover." The cover of the River.
Cross the Yin Mountains north of the Hetao Plateau and you hit a vast desert. North of that desert was Mobei; south of it, Monan. We Xiongnu had split north and south long ago. Our ancestor Luanti Bi, who led the southern herds, came down into Monan and the Hetao and sought the protection of the Han. The Han called us the Southern Xiongnu. Those who remained on the Mobei Steppe were the Northern Xiongnu.
The Northern Xiongnu were weakened by attacks from the Han and the Southern Xiongnu, and were finally shattered completely by the Xianbei coming out of the east. And the Xianbei, having absorbed the Northern Xiongnu, attacked us whenever they saw an opening, hungry to conquer the Southern Xiongnu as well.
Yufuluo pointed at one of his retainers and gave the order.
"Every warrior who can assemble right now follows me to the Right Wise King's camp. You take the rest of the warriors, protect the women and children and the livestock, and go to Lishi County."
"Yes!"
Warriors, in practice, were just herdsmen. They were scattered all over feeding the livestock, which was why assembling them took time. And just as Father Yufuluo had said, the Xianbei had struck at the moment after the Spring Sacrifice, when the Four Horns and Six Horns had scattered. The Four Horns and Six Horns referred to the ten principal figures who, like Grandfather the Right Wise King and Father the Right Luli King, bore the title of King.
After Yufuluo and his inner-circle warriors rode ahead to Right Wise King Qiangqu's winter camp, I moved slowly toward Lishi County with Yufuluo's remaining retainers and my mother.
How far had we gone? We were just about to cross the Yellow River eastward when—
Fweeeeeeeeee......
An ominous sound split the sky.
"Whistling arrows!"
Arrows that sang. Arrows that announced battle. And if you could hear the arrows wailing, that meant—
"Xianbei!"
A band of cavalry, hard on our heels as we tried to cross the river. Maybe it was because I had lived among the Xiongnu long enough. To Han eyes, Xiongnu and Xianbei might have been one and the same — but to mine, these were horsemen alien to "our Xiongnu," and therefore terrifying.
They did not wait. They roared in a language strange to my ears and charged.
So. The monkey devil had not thrown in Xianbei as a language perk.
Trading arrow for arrow with the Xianbei, Yufuluo's warriors shouted.
"Protect the Right Luli King's son before the livestock!"
Whssst...... thunk!
"Ghk...... ghk......!"
A Xianbei rider's arrow punched through the throat of a man who had been one of Yufuluo's retainers. Sitting a horse with no stirrups, the man toppled straight off. I had been riding behind him. I could not hold the reins. I could not even hold my own body. I just shook, paralyzed with fear.
Once more, the sound of an arrow cutting the wind. I knew it was coming for me, but there was nothing a baby could do. I squeezed my eyes shut—
Clang.
The sound of iron striking iron. Before I could even understand what had happened, someone seized the reins of my horse and steadied it, then scooped me up and transferred me onto his own mount. I looked up at the person who had saved me. He was bigger than Yufuluo, but his face was still boyish — a young cavalryman.
The Xianbei, furious that the attack on me had failed, loosed their arrows all at once. The sound of no fewer than several dozen shafts cutting the wind. I nearly wet myself — but those sounds turned at once into several dozen clashes of iron on iron.
The boy cavalryman spoke in Xiongnu laced with a Han accent.
"Don't piss on my saddle pad."
From the weapon in the boy cavalryman's hand — a ji, the halberd — and from the terrifying martial skill he had just displayed, I knew at once who he was. This instinct would not be wrong.
"Ya-bu! Yabu!"
At my clumsy pronunciation, the boy cavalryman grinned.
"That's right. I am......"
The ji spun, its blade tipping toward the Xianbei.