Watch Your Back (2)
The encirclement of Guangzong County began to come apart from the west.
From the walls I watched the small force under Yuan Shao, Commander of the Rapid Tigers, close on the enemy, and for a moment I wondered if he might even be going out to surrender.
But not long after he made contact, the enemy ranks fell into turmoil.
"That'll be the Prince of Ganling's troops," Emperor Ling muttered, staring westward as if he meant to bore a hole through the horizon. Then, without so much as a glance back at me, he started walking.
"Biao. Time I paid the Great Worthy Teacher a visit."
Zhang Jue did not so much as flinch at the emperor's sudden return.
"Put the armies of the Taiping Dao in the field. I want them supporting Our own."
"I have not even agreed to become Grand Tutor, and already you speak as if you were my master."
"Making you Grand Tutor is not a matter of what We want. It is where the situation has gone. And you will put your armies in the field for the same reason—not out of any loyalty you owe Us."
"…Something has changed, then?"
"Yuan Shao, Commander of the Rapid Tigers, is trying to punch through the Prince of Ganling's lines in the west. If your men strike them in concert, he can break the siege and reach us here."
Zhang Jue fixed Emperor Ling with a gaze sharp enough to drive through the man's skull. The talks were not finished—but it was the look of a man who already knew he would have no choice but to agree.
Emperor Ling pressed him without mercy, the unspoken question hanging between them: Do you really think you'll still have the luxury of dreaming up a Taiping world once the fence called Han has come down?
Zhang Jue answered with his eyes alone. The day you betray us, we burn together. We go down together.
Emperor Ling seemed to understand him perfectly.
Zhang Jue beckoned a disciple forward and gave the order.
"Tell Bai Tu and Wu Jiao to march out and support the Commander of the Rapid Tigers."
This time I climbed the gate tower with Emperor Ling and Zhang Jue—and Cao Cao and Jian Shuo besides—to watch what unfolded.
Bai Tu and Wu Jiao, Zhang Jue's disciples and corps commanders, sortied from their own positions and struck the wavering, startled ranks of Liu Chong, Prince of Ganling, from behind. More precisely, they hammered the left and right of his rear in rapid succession, a pair of blows to the back of the skull.
Under that ferocious assault, banners marked with the Rapid Tigers and the character Yuan at last punched through the enemy line.
Yuan Shao's men and the Taiping Dao troops faced one another across a few yards of trampled earth, as if they might exchange some awkward greeting between new allies. They paused. Then they started toward Guangzong County together.
That was when it went wrong.
"Enemy to the north—!"
"South as well!"
From the north and the south, the other princes' armies were closing on Yuan Shao, trying to stitch the ruptured encirclement back together. They seemed to care less about the siege loosening elsewhere than about keeping this approaching force from ever reaching the city.
"The princes will want Us dead here," Emperor Ling said. "Pin the crime on the Great Worthy Teacher and be done with it. But once Yuan Shao is inside these walls, there will be no burying what they have done."
So they'd rather kill him here and sew his mouth shut.
The Prince of Anping from the north and the Prince of Pingyuan from the south clung to the combined force of Yuan Shao, Bai Tu, and Wu Jiao with the desperation of drowning men. They meant to seize them by the ankles, drag them down, and swallow them in a new encirclement.
"Great Worthy Teacher."
Emperor Ling called to Zhang Jue as if to ask whether he had any more troops to spend. Zhang Jue did not answer. He only set a hand on the battlements and watched the allied column take fire from two sides.
Was he running the numbers in his head? Whether to sacrifice some of his disciples to save the rest. Whether to send the others to their aid—and whether that would only walk them into a larger trap. Whether this entire performance was nothing but Emperor Ling's scheme to bleed the Taiping Dao dry.
At last the order left his mouth.
"Send Bai Po and Fei Yan."
The messenger had not even taken a step when something shifted in the west.
"…Another army."
Yuan Shao hated Yuan Shu every bit as much as Yuan Shu hated Yuan Shao. But hatred has a way of teaching you a man better than affection ever could.
Yuan Shu, for instance, would be waiting for the moment Yuan Shao finally showed his hand—the moment it became obvious he had been in league with the four princes. And the instant that moment arrived, Yuan Shu would come running, delighted, to take his head.
Which was why Yuan Shao had not taken the Rapid Tigers in full. He had struck Liu Chong, Prince of Ganling, with only a fraction of them.
"If the prince's death had scared the rest into surrendering one after another, that would've been even better!"
Xu You lamented it from beside him, swinging a blade as he did. In the middle of a battlefield even a man who called himself a strategist had to use a sword. Xu You was a man who lived by his wits far more than by his arm, but he knew enough of a blade to keep himself alive. He was careful about it, too—never straying beyond the reach of Yuan Shao or the soldiers who could cover him.
"Thank heaven the Taiping Dao aren't just some peasant mob!"
The household troops of the Ji Province gentry and the soldiers the princes had dragged from their fiefs were, it was true, better fed and better drilled than ordinary farmers. They were not, however, the Rapid Tigers, who drew their support straight from the imperial house. And once Zhang Jue's secretly trained Taiping Dao army joined the fight, the allied column managed to hold, even under attack from two sides.
"Brother Benchu!"
"…He's coming."
"Gonglu, coming to save you? Please. I'd believe Mengde swearing off women first!"
Xu You's shout notwithstanding, Yuan Shu arrived.
He had thrown together his own troops as Assault Colonel, the units Cao Cao and Jian Shuo had left behind, and even the main Rapid Tiger force Yuan Shao had posted to the rear—and with that combined weight he hammered the Prince of Anping's army in the north. The northern enemy peeled away like weather breaking. Yuan Shu's relief column wheeled south without breaking stride and drove at the Prince of Pingyuan.
He left his men to finish the mopping-up and rode toward Yuan Shao and Xu You with a face like a man who had just bitten into a worm.
"…I'm not dancing to that act of yours again after today."
Yuan Shao gave a short, dry laugh.
"Is that so? I'd rather we went on cultivating this 'brotherly affection' of ours. Just like today."
Yuan Shu flicked the blood from his blade across the dirt, as if it genuinely pained him not to take Yuan Shao's head with it.
Yuan Shao had already made his decision in the hours after Xu You hurried north of the Yellow River to join him.
"Is it that Hu child hanging about the emperor's side? His Majesty has started doing things I never thought he would."
The emperor had suddenly ridden for Guangzong County—where Zhang Jue was—taking only his inner circle with him.
And what did that mean?
"The emperor has taken the Taiping Dao's hand. He has decided, in the end, to throw the Qingliu away."
"So you'll depose him, Brother Benchu?"
At Xu You's question, Yuan Shao smiled the way only a well-bred young lord can smile—which made it all the more unpleasant.
Among those the emperor had left behind were several great ministers, Grand Commandant Yang Ci among them. Persuade them, frighten them—either way, the thing could have been done.
"If the emperor had sat quietly in Luoyang and kept negotiating with the Taiping Dao, or stayed in Wei Commandery nursing his suspicions of them, then yes. I would have. But he put his heels to a horse and rode for Guangzong. That changes the board."
Xu You saw where it was going and grinned.
"If the four princes seize Zhang Jue and the emperor, the initiative passes to them."
"Exactly. And he took Marquis Shi with him, as it happens. In a manner of speaking, the emperor has taken his own son hostage."
"If the emperor and Marquis Shi both die, we can't use He Jin."
"He Jin is still too useful to throw away."
Yuan Shao let out a long sigh, the picture of a man genuinely sorry—and without a shred of actual regret in it.
"A pity, but the emperor discarded the Qingliu. I can hardly go around picking up what he threw out, can I?"
Yuan Shu spurred toward Guangzong County first, as if he could not stand the sight of Yuan Shao a moment longer.
Yuan Shao watched his back, then turned and shared a smile with Xu You.
"It isn't that he couldn't bear to let me die. He just couldn't stand to miss his own chance to shine."
"Gonglu's old habit?"
"Anything big, gaudy, and magnificent—he loves it. He looked at the field and saw he couldn't kill me as a traitor, not with the way things were breaking. But leaving me to die would mean leaving meat on someone else's table, and that he couldn't stand either. One of these days Yuan Gonglu is going to get drunk on some grand picture he's painted of himself, and it's going to kill him."
Scratched, battered, his armor filmed with blood and sweat and dust, Yuan Shao came before Emperor Ling.
He entered the city, knelt, and offered up the head of Liu Chong, Prince of Ganling. All I could do was watch.
Someone tapped my shoulder. I turned. Yuan Shu.
"I told you, didn't I? That bastard's cunning is no joke."
"…For a man who was about to use a secret pact between the emperor and the Taiping Dao as his excuse, he's putting on quite a show."
On the surface, he had broken the encirclement at the risk of his life to save the emperor. He had even brought the head of one of the chief rebels all the way here. Even Emperor Ling would find nothing to pick at.
No—looking at Emperor Ling's face, he seemed to be weighing how useful Yuan Shao might still be.
"He's been like that since we were children. Even when he pulled a prank, he always dug himself a hole to crawl out of first. You'd turn around to say, 'Shao did it too!'—and he'd already be gone. So I was the one who ate the punishment…"
So that was Yuan Shu and Yuan Shao, once.
Perhaps they had even been close, when they were very small. But Yuan Shao's mother had been a slave. It was not only the gap in birth that drove them apart. It was the survival instinct that comes of being a slave's child—the watchfulness, the quickness, the habit of always leaving yourself a way out.
"Once he's wriggled free like that, you can't catch him."
"No. A man who digs his hole in advance has already imagined this turn of events and prepared for it…"
Which meant that no matter how deep we dug, we would never turn up anything that tied Yuan Shao to He Jin.
Killing Liu Chong, Prince of Ganling, would have been about sealing mouths as much as anything else. And as Yuan Shu's bitterness made plain, Yuan Shao would have kept himself invisible even inside a scheme of that size.
Besides, if Emperor Ling had decided to use Yuan Shao to put down the remaining three princes, he would overlook most of the man's sins.
So even if it turns my stomach, I have no choice but to work with Yuan Shao. For now.
Emperor Ling and Zhang Jue had gone back inside to confer, so I followed the other ministers in.
And just then—
I could have sworn Yuan Shao's eyes flashed toward me.
Xun You had timed the release of his proclamation with exquisite care. He had even allowed for the possibility that the emperor might do something sudden.
Which was why he had advised He Jin as follows:
"It will only work after the emperor and Zhang Jue have come face to face—in one fashion or another."
And then came news almost too strange to believe: the emperor had ridden hard for Guangzong County in Julu Commandery, and had met Zhang Jue.
"Well. I drafted this assuming the Taiping Dao might suddenly fall upon the emperor—and now it seems we shall actually use it."
Rumor is never precise.
On Zhang Jue's orders, Taiping Dao armies had risen across Wei Commandery as well. They had risen to fight the three princes, in accordance with the understanding between Emperor Ling and Zhang Jue—but in Luoyang the whisper that ran from mouth to mouth was, What if the emperor is in danger…?
And in that exact hour, the proclamation Xun You had prepared raced outward in three directions.
His Majesty the Emperor has been taken prisoner by the Yellow Turban bandits!