The Open-Book Exam
With arms already unnaturally long and supple, he carved the air from horseback with a pair of swords. No Xianbei cavalryman stood a chance of keeping his life.
Guan Yu thought as much as he charged toward the Xianbei ranks at Liu Bei's side.
What had first seized his heart was that martial art of Liu Bei's.
He's strong...!
Those long arms were not reserved for driving a fist into the face of Gongsun Zan's subordinate. The joints moved with a flexibility that made a man wonder whether they were even built like other people's. The blades traced grotesque, impossible arcs — as if they had no hilts at all — and carved the Xianbei riders to pieces.
What if they had come to blows at their first meeting?
Had they fought barehanded, Guan Yu might have caught that arm as it stretched out and worked the joint somehow — though whether Liu Bei would ever have allowed such a grip was another matter. Closing inside the reach of those arms and striking from the breast was another possibility, and hardly an easy one. Whether he could have beaten a Liu Bei who held a weapon was a question he could not begin to answer.
Guan Yu himself had only just crossed from boyhood into youth. More than anything else, it was that strength that had drawn him in.
After that, it was Liu Bei's manner — light as a game, almost playful. At first Guan Yu had thought, How can a man be so frivolous?
Their temperaments had not, in truth, been a natural match. Guan Yu himself had fallen deep into the Confucian histories, into the Spring and Autumn Annals; Liu Bei preferred the Legalist Book of Lord Shang to any Confucian classic.
And yet there was weight inside Liu Bei's lightness. No matter the situation, he would toss off a joke, draw a burst of laughter from the men around him, and then, in the same breath, make the decision that needed making and put it into action.
If Guan Yu had to name the man in their company most like Liu Bei, it would have been Jian Yong.
Even the fact that Liu Bei prized the Book of Lord Shang — that his measure of value ran contrary to Guan Yu's own — had only sharpened Guan Yu's interest.
Until now, Guan Yu had believed that he had been driven to kill, that he had been hunted, that he had been torn from Du Ying, because the righteousness spoken of in the Spring and Autumn Annals had not been upheld.
Liu Bei saw it differently.
"When an official starts caring about the money a commoner makes selling salt — when he covets a woman meant to be some peasant's wife — isn't that because the officials who studied the Confucian books get too much respect?"
That was how Liu Bei had put it.
"An official just needs to check whether the people have settled properly on their farmland, whether the men fit for conscription are listed correctly on the rolls. That ought to be enough. But the Confucians can't stand the idea of an official being that kind of tool. So the respect they get overflows, and they grow slack — start acting like they can do whatever they please."
The words, added with a sly grin, had sounded startlingly fresh to Guan Yu.
"If those men — officials when they step forward, celebrated names when they step back — confuse what a shi is supposed to do with the treatment a shi is supposed to receive, can you call that righteousness? I don't think so."
The benevolence and righteousness Guan Yu held in his heart and the benevolence and righteousness Liu Bei spoke of were entirely different things.
"Confucian righteousness is evil. Plain as day."
Not because righteousness had crumbled, but because there was too much of it — or more precisely, because the world overflowed with an evil that had been mistaken for righteousness.
Guan Yu had not been able to agree entirely. He had taken Liu Bei's hand all the same.
He had accepted the name Liu Bei gave him — Yu, "feather" — and the courtesy name Yunchang as well.
"We'll pair a cloud with the feather, and keep one character from Changsheng."
Remembering the day Liu Bei had given him that courtesy name, Guan Yu found a smile rising to his lips unbidden.
Had Liu Bei been nothing more than a glib persuader, all mouth and no substance, Guan Yu would have left him long ago. But Liu Bei's strange righteousness — however far it stood from the righteousness Guan Yu had always imagined — was always, without fail, kept.
The Wuhuan prisoners, for instance. A Confucian would have dressed the act in principle: the cruelty of slaughter, the wrong of taking innocent lives. Liu Bei's view had been different.
"It's unnecessary, that's all."
In Liu Bei's eyes, Gongsun Zan's order to massacre had looked like an official refusing to be an instrument of the state and leaning instead toward his own private obsession. That had displeased him, and so he had spared the Wuhuan.
What he held to be right and what he held to be wrong were twisted askew from ordinary judgment. But what he held to be right, he always carried out.
And so, now. What did Liu Bei believe was right, that he had ridden to the front for the Xiongnu? Why was he cutting down Xianbei warriors from the most dangerous place on the field?
Guan Yu wanted to follow him to the end and see.
Cut Confucian righteousness down with a single stroke!
As if he had taken Liu Bei's words and forged them into iron, he had given a name to a crescent blade the likes of which the world had never seen: the Green Dragon Crescent Blade.
With it, Guan Yu cut down another Xianbei soldier.
"Elder Brother! I'll wheel to the right!"
Liu Bei looked back, his face lighting with delight.
Is this... because of me?
The weapons of the three sworn brothers — Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei — the Twin Ancient Swords, the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, the Eight-Zhang Serpent Spear — were originally inventions of the Romance. Dual swords from horseback were difficult enough; a crescent glaive like that belonged to the Tang dynasty, or was it the Song?
Of course, even in the Han there were records of generals using not standardized weapons but customized, peculiar forms of their own. Still — could something that leapt centuries ahead of its time simply... appear?
Watching Liu Bei whirl those twin swords, I thought I understood the cause.
Stirrups.
With stirrups, the effort spent simply controlling a horse dropped away. And that was the foundation that had let Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei take up weapons so close to the Romance in a single stroke.
...Was I really going to be able to make enemies of these people later?
A ridiculous sensation churned through my brain, as if Luo Guanzhong himself were whispering in my ear: Did you think the Romance of the Three Kingdoms was a joke? Try harder.
I left the absurdity where it was. I could not deny the reality of the Twin Ancient Swords, the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and the Eight-Zhang Serpent Spear tearing across the battlefield. I would have to act in accordance with that reality.
I ran to my granduncle, Chanyu Hozheng, and shouted.
"My Han cavalry have ridden forward to break the enemy vanguard's momentum! Darkhan, cover them with your arrows!"
In other words: a request for covering fire.
Hozheng nodded.
Before anyone started worrying about who would claim the merit, a war had to be won. If they lost this battle, every argument — who would hold Duman City, how they would conduct the northern campaign — would become meaningless. They could wait to perish alongside the Han, or hope to be absorbed by the Xianbei as the Northern Xiongnu had been. And in that process, Hozheng's hide might well be flayed from his body, just as a Chanyu of the Northern Xiongnu had been.
Hozheng raised a hand. Banners shifted, and a portion of the horse archers peeled off to close up tight behind Liu Bei's party.
The Xianbei cavalry who had charged Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei so recklessly, and been butchered for it, were just beginning to open the distance when the Xiongnu horse archers fed them a meal of arrows.
Among Liu Bei and the cavalry under him, the only men with improved saddles and stirrups seemed to be three: Liu Bei himself, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.
Well — even if they had adopted stirrups, these would be prototypes at best. How many failures had gone into making a saddle that truly fit a horse's back? How much cost, how much time? And how few artisans could even make such a thing? By that measure, three men with the new saddles and stirrups was already a great many.
Which meant the other riders trailing Liu Bei were doing no more than holding a formation just tight enough to keep him from being surrounded, and harassing the enemy. They were not a force that could drive a deep charge.
Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei might have taken up new weapons in the style of the Romance, but their other officers were no better than the Xiongnu troops, and they could not pursue any deeper.
As Liu Bei had said, this was a skirmish. A fight whose only goal was to crush the enemy's opening momentum.
The Xiongnu horse archers who had gone to Liu Bei's aid did not chase the Xianbei either. Both armies were nomad cavalry. Both knew perfectly well the danger of driving a pursuit too deep.
The tactic of seeming to retreat, then wheeling to counterattack. The tactic of making the retreat itself into a pit for the enemy to fall into. Xiongnu and Xianbei alike knew those tricks, and loved to use them, and so they opened the distance rather than let themselves be drawn in.
A few men died before the gap stretched beyond bowshot. After that they loosed a few arrows by way of keeping each other honest, and the fighting ended.
Tanshihuai, in the enemy's main camp, pulled his vanguard cavalry back for the time being.
When the cavalry who had gone out with Liu Bei at their head came riding back, we raised a cheer. Whatever the actual results, the spectacle of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei had been magnificent. And the fact that the Xiongnu army had won a victory against the Xianbei who had handed them defeat years before — that, too, must have been a sharp, satisfying thrill of vengeance.
Tanshihuai tried to stay in the saddle even as the coughing wracked him, but that, too, was growing harder. Sometimes he mounted with the support of his son Helian; when even Helian was not enough, he needed the help of his eldest grandson Kuitou, riding to war for the first time.
The situation on the field was not bad.
No — the fact that days and nights of fighting against the Xiongnu had not gone badly was itself what was bad. In the years when Tanshihuai had marched thousands of li to unify the Mobei Steppe, those Xiongnu riders should have been shattered in a single blow.
The Xiongnu cavalry would not take the Xianbei bait. When the Xianbei closed and loosed arrows, they answered with arrows of their own, and did not pursue.
As Tanshihuai's condition worsened, Helian and Kuitou could only repeat the same approach.
"Grandfather, among the Han cavalry mixed in with the Xiongnu, there are some strange ones..."
"...Han cavalry?"
Tanshihuai's dull eyes rolled. Then something seemed to surface, and he asked Kuitou:
"Were they riding a red horse?"
"No, Grandfather."
"Then what was strange about them...?"
"They had foot-rests fixed on both sides..."
A wet, tearing cough spilled from Tanshihuai's mouth again. Each spasm tore another hunk of strength from the sick man's body.
"...A Han rider who needs foot-rests like that is nothing but a green amateur!"
Judgment clouded. A restless urgency to accomplish something while he still lived. In that fog, Tanshihuai took his grandson's report as a waste of time.
"But their martial skill..."
"If they aren't as formidable as that Lü Bu, or whatever his name is, they aren't worth the attention! Are they men you cannot answer with a bow?"
"No, Grandfather. When we shoot, they dart away..."
"Report to me only when an enemy appears that the bow cannot answer!"
The boy Kuitou looked awkwardly toward his uncle, Helian. Helian had no clever means of persuading his father either. Uncle and nephew fell silent.
The Xianbei horse archers were excellent, but on a field that demanded breakthrough power they could not bring that excellence to bear. They had the numbers; they might have forced a melee — but the enemy simply fell back and used the old grounds of Duman City in their rear, and the advantage came to nothing.
The Xiongnu army was dragging the time out to a strange degree.
Tanshihuai... seemed to be waiting for even a brief moment when his body would come right again.
Had he been able to judge with a clear mind, he would have found a way to shatter the Xiongnu, or else abandoned this war outright. He would have understood what it meant that three Han cavalrymen were performing mounted martial arts that depended on a new kind of foot-rest and saddle.
But the failing Tanshihuai was locked in a nomad's fixed idea: cavalry raised the easy way are weak.
The appearance of a technology that will change an age always comes earlier than the age that will use it in earnest. The question is who recognizes the value of that technology, and who will stand up and face prejudice head-on.
A technology that cannot pass that gate is destined to be forgotten.
And so the stirrup slipped from the minds of Tanshihuai, Helian, and Kuitou, and was forgotten.