The Rebellion of the Four Kingdoms of Ji and Qing (2)
Everyone tensed as we crossed the Yellow River at Mengjin. An attack while we were still on the water, or sabotage of the boats, would have left us almost no way to respond. I was especially on edge, knowing what Yuan Shao would one day do at this very crossing in the original history.
But nothing happened. We crossed the Yellow River without incident and entered Henei Commandery. From there we angled northeast, the Taihang Mountains rising off to our left—due north.
"It's about time we summoned Dong Zhuo."
At my words, Cao Cao's eyebrows shot up.
"The man is dangerous at a glance. The Khagan knows that as well as I do."
"I do."
How could I not?
"His Majesty already knows the man profits from salt. He likely knows Dong Zhuo is taking a cut from his trade with the Khagan as well."
"So if we drag in a man the Emperor is merely choosing to tolerate for now and call him our ally, the burden on us will be considerable. That's what you're saying."
"If I am to be honest, I believe the only reason the Khagan has survived every reckless gamble so far is luck."
I thought so too. Even if five faces of a six-sided die show six and only one shows one, a string of sixes is still just good fortune—not the fruit of meticulous calculation. Someone might argue that multiplying one-sixth over and over drives down the odds of rolling a one. But this is not a statistical exercise in waiting for that one to appear. Roll a one, and you die. In other words, it has only ever been a game in which five-sixths kept coming up. We have simply been lucky.
"But there is a reason we have to use Dong Zhuo here."
"Which is?"
"Because Yuan Shao will use him."
Rattling Yuan Shao in the imperial palace had been deeply satisfying. But it also meant we had pressed him hard. I was now engineering something that might skip the Yellow Turban Rebellion entirely in the history of the Eastern Han—which meant I might also have pulled forward the affair that He Jin and Yuan Shao would one day set in motion.
Despite every warning, He Jin and Yuan Shao would eventually summon Dong Zhuo to Luoyang. If they were going to call him anyway, better that we be the ones to do it.
"I keep wondering what happens if Dong Zhuo cannot be controlled."
Cao Cao's unease was justified. In truth, Dong Zhuo had not been controlled. But the reason he grew into that unmanageable blight upon the Central Plains was only partly his own swift action. The rest was luck.
"His Majesty is alive and well."
So was He Jin. Dong Zhuo had only begun to ignore orders when Emperor Ling, Liu Hong, was hovering at the edge of death. And the atrocities he committed after marching on Luoyang came only after He Jin's death had been confirmed.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms paints the Revolt of the Ten Attendants as something that erupted in an instant, but in truth the Ten Attendants resisted with stubborn tenacity. The fighting between Yuan Shao's troops and the eunuchs began on the twenty-fifth day of the eighth month, in the year 189, when the Ten Attendants murdered He Jin. Zhang Rang, unable to withstand Yuan Shao's assault, fled with the Emperor and the Prince of Chenliu, Liu Xie, on the twenty-eighth. For a little under four days, battle raged inside Luoyang itself. Dong Zhuo watched that fighting unfold, then seized the Emperor and Liu Xie after they had slipped out as far as Xiaopingjin.
In other words, Dong Zhuo was a far more cautious operator than people assumed.
"Yuan Shao will inevitably make his move, so we summon Dong Zhuo to keep him in check. Which means Yuan Shao, in turn, can serve to keep Dong Zhuo in check."
Cao Cao made a low sound in his throat and did not concede the point easily. Neither did Yuan Shu.
"Without He Jin, just the bastard by himself? I don't know this Dong Zhuo well, but the man crushed the Qiang rebellion and held Chang'an. He turned those same Qiang into his own troops. People say he's a worthy heir to Zhang Yanming—Zhang Huan. And you think a bastard with no real combat experience can handle him?"
I looked from Yuan Shu to Cao Cao and back again, and grinned.
"Gentleman Cao. This is exactly why you poured so much support into our Southern Xiongnu."
"What are you—ah."
"Liao."
At my call, Zhang Liao, who had been nearby, stepped forward.
"Go to Bingzhou and fetch Master. Tell him to leave only enough troops to hold Shouxiangcheng and Duman City, scrape together every cavalryman he can, and come to Ye County in Wei Commandery. Put it that way and Master will organize the army with Father and come himself."
"Understood."
Zhang Liao did not ask why. He did not say when he would be ready to leave. He simply put heels to his horse and rode north at once.
Zhang Liao was sixteen this year. There was nothing to fear in sending him alone. Cao Cao and Yuan Shu both stared after him, a little dazed.
Jealous? Don't even think about putting in a bid.
Cao Cao muttered, almost too softly to hear.
"...So we pin Dong Zhuo with Lü Fengxian..."
I called for someone else at once.
"Uncle."
Huchuquan had been watching Zhang Liao ride off, and he seemed to have already guessed there would be a task for him as well.
"Alright. What do you need, nephew?"
"Go to Dong Zhuo and get us some support."
As I said it, I flicked a glance at Cao Cao. He sighed and called, "Yuanrang," summoning Xiahou Dun.
"Look, I get that you want us to talk Dong Zhuo around before we get any farther from Hedong Commandery. But is Dong Zhuo actually going to listen to me?"
Well. Perhaps that was the difference between Zhang Liao and Huchuquan. Or more precisely, the difference between the men they had to speak to—Lü Bu and Dong Zhuo. Lü Bu would trust me and come running. Dong Zhuo might not move at all unless a clear profit was laid on the table. Huchuquan knew that too.
"If you're right, other people will be sending men to Dong Zhuo as well. What if he decides to show the other side his sincerity by taking my head and this Uncle Xiahou's—snick—just like that?"
Huchuquan made a point of saying it in the Han tongue, not Xiongnu.
"Mengde? Are you really sending me to my death...?"
"No need to worry about that. The Khagan has something in mind."
Four pairs of eyes turned toward me—Cao Cao, Yuan Shu, Huchuquan, Xiahou Dun. I swallowed a sigh.
"Tell him we are giving that 'marriage proposal' serious thought."
With no capital to my name, this is the only way I can do business.
And so Huchuquan and Xiahou Dun set out for Hedong Commandery as well.
Dong Bai. She would be about eight this year.
Of course... I had not summoned Dong Zhuo solely to keep Yuan Shao down. If our side was putting something this large on the table, we were entitled to demand a matching price. Whether I could push matters as far as that situation, though, was another question.
"The Great Worthy Teacher has left Julu Commandery and is coming to Wei Commandery."
Ma Yuanyi, whom I had not seen in some time, brought that welcome news.
"He said, 'If the Emperor has found the courage to come out and meet me in person, I have no reason not to hear what he has to say.'"
"A welcome piece of news. Though we will have to phrase it more delicately when we report to His Majesty."
For me, a modern soul inhabiting this body, it was no great stretch to think of it as a summit between the Han and the Taiping Dao. Cao Cao and Yuan Shu, however, looked distinctly sour. Even so, there was something in their faces that said they would take it, if it kept the situation from running to extremes.
Ma Yuanyi took the measure of how far our imperial party had come, then turned straight back toward Julu. After that, Ma Yuanyi—or men who called themselves his fellow disciples—came and went several times.
By the time we crossed the Henei border into Wei Commandery, Ma Yuanyi found us again, looking like a man who had forgotten sleep, food, and drink. If anything, he seemed more cornered than he had been when Yuan Shao was hunting him.
"What in heaven's name is the meaning of this!"
I watched Ma Yuanyi and his attendants twitch their hands, ready to draw steel at any moment, and knew at once that something had broken.
"What happened?"
"Government troops from the kingdoms of Anping, Hejian, and Ganling have begun attacking the Taiping Dao's Lesser Fangs and Greater Fangs all across Jizhou! In Qingzhou, the army of Pingyuan Kingdom is doing the same!"
The muscles in Ma Yuanyi's face jumped and trembled.
"The main temple of the Taiping Dao is accusing me of selling out my brothers! No—if it were only criticism of me, I could bear it. They are saying the Great Worthy Teacher himself may have erred in his judgment!"
...So this is what Yuan Shao had been preparing.
Across the broad fields of Anping Kingdom in Jizhou, men and women in yellow headcloths worked the soil, helping one another as they went. Winter had passed and spring had come. It was time once more to tread earth the same color as the cloth on their heads, and to sow the seeds of life.
The farmers and their wives straightened their aching backs now and then, looking from the fields still waiting ahead to the fields already finished behind them. Even the looking was enough to swell the chest. No single household could ever have brought a day like this into being. But the Great Worthy Teacher had gathered the strength of many households into one, and with that pooled wealth he had bought the fields, little by little. On those fields the peasants had made themselves a new home.
Almost none of the men and women here had ever seen the Great Worthy Teacher with their own eyes. But every one of them had, at least once, been treated by disciples who had learned the healing arts from him. He had saved lives that would otherwise have guttered out for nothing, and he had given them fields and told them to go on living.
Without the Great Worthy Teacher and the Taiping Dao, they would have wandered as displaced people until a bandit's blade found them, or become bandits themselves, or gone into bondage under some magnate who was a bandit in all but name.
No one had ordered them to tie on the yellow headcloth, whether they belonged to a Greater Fang or a Lesser Fang. They had simply begun, one after another, to wear it out of respect for the Fangs and for the Great Worthy Teacher who was their master—and before long the entire village went in yellow. It was a strange thing. Before the yellow cloth, they would have worked these same fields side by side and still glared at one another over my land, my share, and ended up brawling with their neighbors. But so long as they wore the yellow headcloth, they were all brothers. A man could give another his food. He could pour out his sweat in another man's place.
It was not because they had become prosperous. They had not escaped poverty even now. But they still carried the memory of the day a magnate had arrived with his retainers, announcing he would buy up even this scrap of land—or rather, that he would take it. The men in yellow headcloths had come running with murder in their eyes and driven them off. How sweet that memory still was.
It was with that thought that the farmers looked out toward the horizon, and saw a strange cloud of dust.
"What's that?"
They did not understand that the dust was an army until the soldiers had come close enough to recognize face by face.
"Hey! What do those people think they're doing! Aigoo, they'll ruin the whole crop!"
The army advanced in a straight line, trampling the fields as it came. There was a road. They did not use it. It was as if ruining the harvest were the point.
A few of the farmers ran forward to protest. Only after those men had been cut down without mercy—stabbed, slashed, beheaded—did the rest of the peasants begin to scream.
A hideous slaughter unfolded. The soldiers killed every man in a yellow headcloth they could see, and every woman in a yellow headcloth they beat and dragged away. If a woman had an infant on her back, they tore the child from her, dashed it to death, and hauled off the shrieking mother, laughing as they went. Unmarried girls were dragged away regardless of age. If the men rushed to save them, they too were stabbed and cut down, regardless of age.
Liu Hai, King of Hejian, and Liu Su, King of Anping, watched it all with expressionless faces. Only when screams and weeping and howls of despair had filled every direction did the King of Hejian open his mouth.