Lü Bu, Become a Legend (1)
Bow against bow. Arrow against arrow.
And so, locked in that grinding stalemate, the battle between the Xiongnu and the Xianbei slid into a war of attrition.
"Both sides will bleed, but at this rate the side with the numbers wins. The Xianbei will take it in the end."
Hozheng stared at me as if he meant to wring an answer from my throat.
A shaman who delivers a false prophecy and dies for it is nothing unusual. For me, this war was nothing but one crisis stacked on another.
Victory here could lock in my authority as Grand Shaman. By the same measure, Hozheng could take any defeat as his excuse to strike off my head and grind the line of the Wise King of the Right into the dirt.
Winning a little popular affection and being called Khagan was no license to grow arrogant.
There is only so far talk of Tengri will carry you. I would have to show them a strategist.
"We must hold until voices start rising in the Xianbei ranks — until they start saying that even if they wipe the Xiongnu out, their own losses will be too heavy to push any farther south."
On a battlefield, what finally persuades is not a god. It is the logic of how you mean to win.
"Say we hold, as you suggest. Until when? Do you mean to hold until the Xianbei accept every sacrifice and kill us all?"
"......The victory I have prepared is coming from the southeast. We need only last until then."
"And when, exactly, is that?"
"If we refuse to abandon this Duman City, Tengri will surely answer."
Tengri, and Duman City.
I invoked the city as a symbol. In truth, it was sound tactics.
First: we were outnumbered. We had to shrink, at the very least, the difference in the forces that could actually meet head-on. Riding out onto open plain to crash into their full strength at once would have been suicide. Better to keep Duman City at the center and wheel around it, cutting down how many of them could strike us from the front at any one time.
Second: luckily, the ground around Duman City rose in a modest hill, and the Xianbei were reluctant to assault our positions on that mound. They wanted no part of arrows plunging down from above. We could pull the exhausted and the wounded back into the city to rest. We could fight, and breathe, and fight again.
Third: given all that, Xianbei morale was none too high — while our own men seemed to steady themselves whenever they glimpsed my banner flying over the traces of the walls.
The sun and the moon. The Sky — Tengri. Clinging to the things their Chanyu prayed to, night and day, the Xiongnu army held on by a thread.
I could not tell when that patience would run out.
Here, truly, all I could do was hope that luck arrived before my head left my shoulders.
No. I had to hold with the desperate conviction that if they took my head, the Xiongnu faith — and the Xiongnu themselves — would be finished.
The investment into which I had poured every last scrap of Elder Cao Song's remaining subsidy.
Until Lü Bu, armed with the new weapons, arrived.
"The new Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu, Wang You, isn't the type to go looking for trouble. The problem is he's too cautious."
Just before we left for the north, my master Lü Bu had said that.
"He won't make life hard for us — but he won't lift a finger for anything that might inconvenience him, either."
"He watched how his predecessor Zhang Xiu lost his head. That'd make anyone careful."
Wang You never meddled in the command of the Xiongnu army. He never went to browbeat the Grand Chanyu the way Zhang Xiu had. But he never used his authority, either.
Not interfering also meant not helping.
"All we can do is wait for His Majesty in Luoyang to recognize the crisis and issue the order to march himself."
Honestly, I still did not know what kind of man Liu Hong of Luoyang really was. Zhang Xiu's death only let me guess he might be more cunning than I had thought.
But I could not give a kind assessment of the men he had appointed and posted to Bing Province.
From the sort who picked a fight with the Xiongnu and ended up in league with the Xianbei, like Zhang Xiu, to Wang You, who would walk nothing but the most politically safe path available.
Pure Stream or Turbid Stream — I was not even sure what those were supposed to mean, and people do not fit neatly into one type or the other anyway.
Still, I could not help being irritated.
They were officials, were they not? Did the men who became officials not style themselves shi — scholars? Did they not call themselves grandees? Scholars and grandees together: the scholar-gentry?
"If they're scholar-gentry, they might at least show some backbone. One of them was obsessed with tormenting the Xiongnu. Another cares only about saving his own skin, whether the country falls or not."
Lü Bu gave a bitter smile, then reached out and rumpled my hair this way and that.
He could do that because it was a Xiongnu child's hair, left hanging loose — not bound up like a Han child's.
"How about a different kind of shi than the ones who just rattle off the classics? A martial shi, say. A warrior."
He had tossed it out like a joke.
But his words snagged on something in my mind.
Not a scholar of letters. A warrior.
I, who had to tear down the Han order and rule northern China as a Xiongnu, might have to reject the old scholar-gentry and raise up a new one.
A scholar-gentry that rode horses and drew bows.
The conversation with Lü Bu felt like something from a distant past.
I had thought I was only using him. Standing on the crumbling walls of Duman City, I found myself... missing my master.
I could feel the Xiongnu cavalry's patience running out.
A useless shaman who only kept repeating that they should wait for the victory Tengri had prepared. The thought seemed to be spreading that it would be better to kill such a shaman and find another path.
It might have been my imagination. But I thought I saw killing intent in the way they looked at me.
Perhaps because a shepherd comes to resemble the wolf more than the flock.
They would listen to a nine-year-old if he proved miraculous — which meant, in reverse, that they would kill a nine-year-old if he did not.
If the grumbling ever broke into the open, Hozheng would seize the chance with both hands and take my head.
And every time that thought came, Liu Bei would come and rest a hand on my shoulder. Without a word.
So this was how he did it. Was this how Liu Bei led his men — telling them, without speaking, that today was not the day they would be finished?
Well. Separate from that sudden understanding of where Liu Bei's stubborn strength came from —
Today, once again, the Xianbei charged the Xiongnu army deployed around Duman City.
A tedious exchange of arrows that never closed to melee. That could not close to melee.
But around the time the sun had climbed to its height and begun to tilt, something different from yesterday happened.
Beyond the Xianbei, to the east, something appeared.
A dark, writhing mass that grew steadily larger. The way the Xianbei themselves had approached not long ago.
From behind the Xianbei army.
Of course the Xianbei ranks stirred. What were those? Who were they? How had they gotten around behind? Did that mean they were surrounded, front and rear?
But Tanshihuai was Tanshihuai.
The unrest settled quickly. The Xianbei kept their composure and split in two. Troops assigned to hold the rear formed up, staring down the unidentified army that had appeared behind them.
But the force beyond the Xianbei did not stop. It drew closer, and soon even my eyes could make out its shape.
I called two men.
"Liao! Uncle!"
They ran to my side. When I pointed ahead, they looked — and shouted. They had recognized what was coming.
"Nephew — then that's...?"
"Please go tell Grandfather and Granduncle as well."
The moment Huchuquan sprinted off, I turned to Zhang Liao.
"Let's prepare to receive our master."
Lü Bu had done everything in his power to make what his disciple called "stirrups," and a saddle fitted exactly to Red Hare's back and chest.
He had spoken with the craftsmen himself, soothing Red Hare's temper again and again. He had the horse shod with iron "horseshoes," and commissioned armor to cover Red Hare's face, neck, chest, and forelegs.
He had replaced his own armor with something denser, more tightly scaled.
And last of all, instead of a ji-halberd, he had forged a new spear — one whose blade flared slightly at the base, so the shaft would not punch all the way through an enemy's body, and would come free more easily.
Lü Bu named that spear the Masaq.
......By the time he had done all that, the money was gone.
He had not been able to armor Red Hare's flanks or hindquarters.
"I did my best, but it's four horses. And even those are only armored in front."
Lü Bu looked at Hou Cheng, Song Xian, and Wei Xu and let out something like a sigh.
In the end, the four of them would have to stand at the point of a sharply tapered charge formation.
Lü Bu would take the very front. Hou Cheng and Wei Xu would ride slightly behind and to either side, covering Red Hare's rear. Song Xian he placed behind Wei Xu, to the right.
The rest of the cavalry he arrayed behind the four cataphracts like the scales of a fish.
Just before the charge, Lü Bu sent a messenger.
"Tell Brother Zhishu — Zhang Yang — that we're charging first."
Then he faced forward and cinched his helmet strap tight. He even drew the neck armor he had always found stifling until it sat snug.
He tucked the shaft of the Masaq under his right armpit and leveled the point. On the left he had found an infantry shield and lashed it to his shoulder.
Both feet drew the stirrups taut. His seat settled against the raised cantle of the saddle.
And slowly, he asked Red Hare for more speed.
Clever Red Hare understood Lü Bu's meaning from little more than the way he stroked the mane.
Feeling Red Hare's stride lengthen beneath the saddle, Lü Bu thought: this heavy cavalry his disciple Luanti Bao had named was painfully slow.
Of course it was, once you put armor on the horse as well. Even covering only the front, heavy was heavy.
So rather than drive straight into the enemy's front, Lü Bu moved at an angle, feeling them out, and left every man behind him as a horse archer.
A slow-charging cataphract that the enemy simply dodged accomplished nothing — and for much the same reason, horse archers alone could not win a victory.
So Lü Bu had decided to combine the two.
"......Bao, you brat."
Looking at how the enemy was deployed, he could not help admiring it. His disciple had laid out a magnificent feast for his master.
The Xianbei horse archers could not simply flee into the distance. If they abandoned the comrades still locked with the Xiongnu to their rear and tried some clumsy lure, the whole army might collapse.
Before long, Tanshihuai's position caught Lü Bu's eye.
Not Tanshihuai himself — the great banner of Tanshihuai.
The Xianbei Khagan.
No doubt some Han advisors under Tanshihuai had cooked that up to keep Luanti Bao in check. But thanks to it, Lü Bu knew which way to go.
The real rush began.
The Xianbei archers who had been edging back, trying to keep their distance and pin Lü Bu with arrows, were struck by the shafts of the horse archers coming on behind him.
The Xianbei had no choice but to draw their swords.
The distance closed.
KRRAAASH—!
Even from Duman City they could see it: Lü Bu, Hou Cheng, Song Xian, and Wei Xu. Four riders of primitive cataphracts slamming into the Xianbei cavalry.
The Xianbei horseman who took Lü Bu and Red Hare's charge head-on burst apart and went down.
The swords they had drawn, forced into melee, had no hope of stopping the weapon Lü Bu had newly forged — or the weight of Red Hare. And the Xianbei horses were smaller than Red Hare besides.
Fallen horse and rider vanished as if sucked under the tide of cavalry pouring after Lü Bu.
I recalled something Lü Bu had once said as a joke, and I could finally put a clear name to the idea I had had then.
That was the new shi I meant to sow across the Central Plains.
A shi who rode. A mounted scholar-warrior.
A knight.
And in the same breath, I was certain.
Lü Bu, sweeping the field on his red horse, would leave his name in the myths of Tengri as a God of War.