An Offer You Can't Refuse (2)
"The year before last, the armies of Han and the Xiongnu were beaten by the Xianbei. Last year, the Xianbei began their counterattack."
Last year: 178 CE.
The Xianbei host had fallen on Jiuquan Commandery.
Even before that raid, people had been saying that Silk Road trade had never recovered the vigor of the Eastern Han's golden age — not since the dynasty had, in all but name, withdrawn from the Western Regions. The Xianbei strike on Jiuquan had driven a spike through what remained of that artery.
The Hexi Corridor — or the Hexi Four Commanderies, as they were also called: Dunhuang, Jiuquan, Zhangye, and Wuwei.
In modern terms it was the narrow passage pinched between the Tibetan Plateau and the Mongolian steppe. Only while that road held could Chang'an drink in the wealth of the Silk Road in peace.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, Wuwei Commandery sits at the northwestern edge of the map. In truth it was nothing of the kind — merely the place where the westward road began. Beyond Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang the Western Regions unrolled, and beyond those opened the great steppes of Central Asia and the roads that ran on toward Persia.
How much fortune that traffic poured into whoever held it hardly needed saying. Above all, if you wanted the superior bloodlines coming off the Central Asian steppe — the Ferghana horses, the blood-sweating steeds — you had to hold this road.
And the country itself made perfect pasture for the animals you brought in. That was why the Xiongnu, after Emperor Wu of Han and Huo Qubing tore the region from them, were said to have gone north to Mobei in tears.
The place mattered so much that even those infamous scoundrels Li Jue and Guo Si paid it special mind. They carved the Hexi Four Commanderies out of Liangzhou and stood up a new province — Yongzhou — and that is where the Yongzhou of the games, the one wrapped around Chang'an, first comes from. That Yongzhou later swallowed old Liangzhou and Chang'an besides, until Cao Pi peeled the four commanderies back off and restored them to Liangzhou, leaving the arrangement the games remember. But that is a story of how lines on a map wander, and it can wait.
Cao Cao, Cao Pi, and Cao Rui would all fuss over the Hexi Four Commanderies in their turn. That Cao Cao, after beating Ma Chao in 211, did not start the Hanzhong campaign until around 215 had other causes as well — but one of them was the time it took to settle Hexi. After Cao Pi took the throne there is a record of him lighting up at the treasures that came in along this road. Cao Rui even bargained with Sun Quan using horses brought from the Western Regions, and walked away with the South Asian jewels Wu had been importing through Jiaozhi.
In any case. A blow to this road was not Han's problem alone.
It hit us Southern Xiongnu just as hard.
The Silk Road's other path — the Steppe Route — was in Xianbei hands. With our northern border sealed shut, the only way we could bring in horses from the Western Regions was through Han's Hexi Four Commanderies. And that way had been cut.
To keep the Red Hare bloodline our Southern Xiongnu had built — the strain whose living emblem was the Red Hare I had given Lü Bu — those Western Region imports were not optional.
"In the war the year before last we Xiongnu were lucky enough to keep our cavalry intact. But horses are living things. They grow old. That is the trouble."
"They take wounds, too, and they sicken. Managing the pastures properly is what actually matters."
Having fought Wuhuan horsemen, Liu Bei seemed to understand well enough that horses were the root of any mounted army. Which, come to think of it, was probably why he had waved off everyone who told him not to raise Dilu because it was an ill-omened beast — as if any of you have ever even kept a horse...
"If the Xianbei lock down not only Mobei but the Western Regions as well, the flow of warhorses to Han and the Xiongnu will dry up by degrees. To get out from under that, we had to find allies beyond Xiongnu territory, and we had to find them quickly."
"And the Khagan of the Xiongnu decided those allies were Guan Yu and the rest of us?"
"That's right. I pitied Miss Du, of course, and I had a private wish to see the two of them brought together. But that was the real purpose."
It was that justification, and no other, that had let me leave Yufuluo's side and travel beyond the Southern Xiongnu domains at all.
"Did that Heaven-God of the Xiongnu have anything to say about me?"
Hmm.
Here, as always, I would have to put my knowledge of the Three Kingdoms to work, dressed in the guise of second sight.
"There is a great mulberry tree at Commander Liu's family home, is there not?"
Until that moment Liu Bei had been perfectly at ease. Genuine astonishment broke across his face.
"A mulberry so magnificent it looks as though it could canopy the Emperor's own carriage."
"You — how do you know that..."
"I did tell you. I am the Khagan. Not merely a shaman — the Great Shaman."
"I'll give you that. That's something..."
"You dream of becoming the Son of Heaven, don't you?"
At those words every Han man present, Wei Xu among them, went still.
Liu Bei laughed.
"I do."
I grinned back. Faced with audacity like that, what else was there to do? Whether it meant he did not even fear death, or whether it was the confidence of a man whose claim to imperial blood was so thin that a little loose talk would never be punished, I could not tell.
I answered him in the same coin.
"What if the Xiongnu were to help you?"
I had already offered Zhang Jue an alliance, but diplomacy was a matter of multiplying one's choices. I could weigh them at leisure, and then decide — whether to help Zhang Jue succeed where history said he would fail, or to help Liu Bei rise even higher than he had in the world I remembered.
Liu Bei was just as quick.
"You'll make me Emperor?"
"I would like a reward for the service."
"What kind of reward?"
"What if I said I wanted to go back to Mobei?"
"...Meaning you want me to help you break the Xianbei and make the Xiongnu masters of the north again?"
Liu Bei gave a short, sharp snort, then answered.
"That's the same as saying the Xiongnu would start a war with Han in the Xianbei's place."
I could not give ground here. Audacity had to be met with audacity.
I heard Huchuquan suck in a sharp breath, but I let it pass and kept my eyes on Liu Bei alone.
He looked at me for a long time without speaking. Then he laughed again.
"I like that. If you'd started in with some nonsense about swearing me, once I was Emperor, the same loyalty you Southern Xiongnu currently show the Han... I wouldn't have listened to another word."
The wooden slips at his waist rattled as he drew them out.
"Bao — that was it, wasn't it. Xiongnu Khagan Luanti Bao. You're a prince, and yet you call yourself a shaman. The voice of a god... it really does seem as though you hear it. In any case, that's how you've gathered people to you, isn't it?"
The slips in his hand tipped toward my companions.
"The Xiongnu are not one people. Am I wrong?"
This time it was I who could not speak.
Nineteen years old, and he was still Liu Bei.
He unrolled the slips that had been wound tight.
"Do you know what book this is?"
"What is it?"
"The Lord of Shang."
The work of the Legalist Shang Yang — the same book Zhuge Liang would, in a distant future, retitle The Book of Lord Shang.
I knew Liu Bei had pressed that book on Liu Shan. So I had assumed he must have read it himself. I had not imagined he would already be carrying it, years before Zhuge Liang ever laid a hand on his thinking.
"The Han way of doing things... somehow it feels as though we've been on the wrong road for four hundred years."
"And so you turn to Shang Yang's Legalism?"
"I found myself wondering. If the First Emperor's state had never fallen — if my ancestor Emperor Gao had lived and died an anonymous village peasant — what kind of country would be standing in the Central Plains today?"
He gave a little chuckle and went on.
"The very idea that Han is the opposite of Qin is ridiculous, if you think about it. Commanderies, counties — even the title of Emperor itself — they're all the First Emperor's inheritance."
Shouldn't the path we ought to have walked be found here? he said, and rolled The Lord of Shang back up with a clatter of wood.
Something in me settled, as if a question I had been carrying had finally found its shape.
Why had Liu Bei never won the broad support of the great clans and celebrated scholars that Cao Cao and Yuan Shao gathered so easily?
The Book of Lord Shang was not a book you could wave away as a treatise on Legalist thought. It was a book in which Shang Yang's obsessive hatred of Confucianism practically seethed off the slips.
The Confucians attack Legalism for governing only through harsh law, without ever preventing the crime itself. And how did the Legalists — how did Shang Yang — look at Confucianism?
This was not an argument that ended with whether human nature was good or evil. The good and evil Shang Yang named, and the good and evil the Confucians named, were so opposed you could call them exact inverses.
A Confucian calls it good to cover a fault and ease a man back toward the right, rather than denounce him, and calls a society of informants and watchers evil. Shang Yang, turning the glass around, names that Confucian goodness treachery, and that Confucian evil, good.
What Confucianism holds up as virtue, The Lord of Shang condemns as vice. What Confucianism condemns as vice, The Lord of Shang holds up as virtue.
That Liu Bei had never been loved by the mainstream scholars, and that he found a working harmony only later, in Jingzhou, with the peculiar school that gathered around Zhuge Liang — was it not, from the beginning, because his sense of good and evil was simply not the sense the literati of the Central Plains carried?
Like Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism. The faith that flowed into Persia and the faith that flowed into India share a great many gods. Yet if one of them treats a given god as a lord of light, the other treats that same god as a demon. The deity one side names evil, the other names good — inverted, each of the other.
And I, here, in the world of the Three Kingdoms, in the society of the Eastern Han, had to decide how to deal with this creature called Liu Bei, whose very measure of good and evil was alien.
"You couldn't apply it as it stands, of course. But what I'm saying is that you Xiongnu need a reform of the laws like Shang Yang's, too."
I had no choice but to sit and hear him out.
Far in the future, Liu Bei — and this was one of the reasons a monkey demon's curse had dropped me here at all — would be treated as such a fraud that they would call him Liu the Swindler.
But it was strange. If he truly were a swindler, why could Cao Cao, Sun Quan, Tao Qian, Gongsun Zan, Yuan Shao, and Liu Zhang — not one of them, in the moment they met him face to face — see that he was a fraud? Even when the people around them warned that he was a swindler, why did they fall for him as though they had forgotten every word?
Perhaps it was only natural. Not every charming man is a swindler. But every swindler is charming.
Only after I finished speaking with Liu Bei did I realize I had poured my inner thoughts out to him in a daze.
Sorcery? Hypnosis? There was no other way to understand this strange human being. No — this creature.
That, perhaps, was Liu Bei.
Come to think of it... yes. Consider Cao Cao and Liu Bei at the Discussion of Heroes.
Their conversation reads as though Liu Bei hid his own dark designs from Cao Cao. Hiding one's true thoughts in conversation is something everyone does. The real question is this: why could Cao Cao not hide his? Why did he empty his mind into Liu Bei's hands?
And the talk itself is wrong, if you look at it closely.
Cao Cao asked who he thought was a hero. Naturally Liu Bei should have said, Cao Mengde is a hero. That kind of flattery is how a man stays alive.
And yet from Liu Bei's mouth, not once did Cao Cao ever rise to the rank of hero. He said it to Cao Cao's face, in so many words: You are not, and will never be, a hero.
Looked at that way, the conversation becomes one in which Cao Cao is practically begging Liu Bei to acknowledge him — without Cao Cao himself ever realizing it.
What was he? What in the world was Liu Bei?
What kind of monster was Liu Bei?