It didn’t seem useful, but Zhu filed it away. As they walked back to camp, she said, “I know you’ve worked hard on the hand cannons. Are you ready to make a test of it against the eunuch general? Or do you need more time?”
Jiao gave her a long look. Zhu had always had the impression that Jiao didn’t really trust her. She remembered how he’d left Commander Sun’s force to join her own. He was one of those people who made sure to hitch their fortunes to the one they thought would win. Someone who was perfectly loyal—until the day he wasn’t. He did choose correctly between me and Sun Meng, Zhu thought, not entirely comfortably. She supposed it was a vote of confidence that he was still with her.
In the end all he said was, “You’ll have your artillery unit. We’ll be ready.”
* * *
“If we wait too long before starting the engagement, he’ll suspect we’re just a lure,” Xu Da said. “But the quicker we begin, the longer we’ll have to last until he gets Bianliang’s message to withdraw.” They were in the house Zhu had chosen as their command post in a small town a dozen li east of Jining. When Zhu had climbed onto the roof earlier, she had been surprised and more than a little disconcerted to see Jining surrounded by the white fungal sprawl of the eunuch general’s army. There had been nothing there the day before. The vibrating connection between her and that distant opponent churned her stomach like nerves.
She said slowly, feeling her way along that connection, “We won’t be starting the engagement.”
Xu Da raised his eyebrows. “He’ll come here?”
“His last encounter with the Red Turbans humiliated him. There’s no way he’s not still angry. He won’t want to stand still and wait for us to come to him, just so he can play defense.” The truth of it rang inside her like the sound of a fingernail flicked against a blade.
“Ah well,” Xu Da said cheerfully. “That reduces our options, but we can manage.” Like all the other towns in the area, the one they occupied was unfortified. There weren’t even enough trees in the area for them to put up a temporary palisade. “We’ll hold here for as long as we can, then retreat and lead him on a merry chase.”
There was a map on the table between them. Zhu used her finger to trace a line eastwards from their position to a long valley between two nearby mountain ridges. “This is our path.” The valley’s narrowness would force any pursuing army into a single column: a configuration that meant Zhu could engage with only a small front line, and fall back the minute she started taking casualties. “He’ll see where we’re going, though, and split his force. He’ll bring his infantry into the valley in pursuit, and send his cavalry around to the other end of the valley to engage us as soon as we exit. But this”—Zhu tapped the lake that lay along the foot of the nearer ridge—“will keep them away for a while.” Any force wanting to reach the far end of the valley would need to take a days-long detour around the lake’s far shore.
“Chen Youliang’s assault won’t start for another three days, and it will take at least another two days for the eunuch general to get the message from Bianliang calling him for help. So if he starts the engagement tomorrow, we have to keep him busy for another four. That’s doable. We can hold here for at least a day—two if we’re lucky—and then we’ll retreat to the valley. He’ll get the message and withdraw before his cavalry ever makes it around the other side, so we don’t need to worry about them.”
Zhu stared down at the map. All logic told her to trust Chen, but she couldn’t shake a deep uneasiness. Speaking of the eunuch general, she said, “He doesn’t know this is pretend. He’s going to give it everything he’s got. He’ll want to make us suffer.”
“Let him!” said Xu Da, and his familiar grin filled Zhu with an intense fondness. Under the downwards slope of his eyebrows, his right eyelid creased a little more than the left. His hair, in the awkward stage between shaved and long enough to tie up, gave him a disreputable look. “I’m not afraid of a bit of suffering. Haven’t ten thousand years of past lives brought us to your side to support you? Trust that I’m strong enough—that we’re all strong enough.”
His faith warmed her, even as she felt a stab of future pain. This was the price of her desire: to ask those she loved for their suffering, again and again, so she could get what she wanted. And at the same time she knew she wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t stop. If for a moment she stopped trying to reach that great fate—
Gathering herself, she said, “Thank you.”
Xu Da smiled, as if he knew everything that had gone through her head. Perhaps he did. He came around the table and clapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get some rest. If he’s as beautiful as you say, I feel like I should get my beauty sleep so he can be distracted by the breathtakingly good looks of our side, too.”
* * *
“There they go,” Shao said as he came up beside Ouyang, his horse casually trampling the fingers of a Red Turban corpse lying in the middle of the street. Ouyang’s army had departed Jining at first light, and the subsequent battle against the rebels—if you could even call it a battle—had barely lasted two hours. Oh, the first time Ouyang had seen a dozen of his men drop simultaneously under a barrage of hand cannon fire, he’d been surprised. But when you had the numerical advantage, and most of those were conscripts, what did you care? You just sent in more men, then more after that, and eventually the rebels failed to reload in time or ran out of ammunition, and then they were done.
To the east, the rebels were fleeing towards the hills with a speed and coordination that suggested their retreat was preplanned. Which of course it was. A beautiful performance all around, Ouyang thought sourly. The rebels were clearly trying to distract him from the imminent attack on Bianliang. And if he hadn’t been playing along, it wouldn’t even have taken him two hours to finish the job. But that wouldn’t have been a good performance. For all that it was necessary, he hated it. It made him look stupid. And now to cap it all off he had to chase the rebels, a prospect about as enticing as the idea of deliberately sticking his hand into a rotten log so a scorpion could sting him.
Just a few more days. He tried not to think of what lay after that. “Send the cavalry battalions around to meet them at the other end,” he ordered. “We’ll take the infantry in pursuit.”
His bad mood only worsened as they entered the valley. A narrow strip running between two towering cliffs, it was the strangest place he’d ever seen. In contrast to wintry Jining, it seemed a different world entirely. The ground was warm to the touch, like it would be around a hot spring—but there was no liquid water in sight. Instead they were passing through an uncanny desert, littered with rocks and bleached stumps. Wisps of steam emitted from cracks in the ground. Ouyang’s men looked around uneasily. The steamy air muffled the sounds of their passage; even the crack of the subcommanders’ whips on the conscripts had lost its edge.
Night was even stranger. The landscape was alive with hundreds of points of dull, pulsing red light, like embers under slow bellows. Men who went to investigate reported that the light was coming through cracks in the rock of the valley floor, as if the earth itself were on fire. They all slept badly, the valley cracking and groaning around them.
In the morning a layer of hot fog slowed their progress even further. The heat was rapidly growing intolerable, and the water they found tasted so foul that it was hardly any relief. Shao rode over, looking as miserable in his armor as a steamed lobster. “Where are they? Are they hoping to bother us to death?”
For the last hour Ouyang had had the sense that the rebels were lingering just out of sight ahead. Trying to ignore his ferocious headache, he said shortly, “I suppose they’re planning an ambush.”
“With those hand cannons again?” Shao scoffed. “And do what, take out one layer of our front line? They’d better try harder than that if they don’t want it to be over in a day.”
Ouyang didn’t want it to be over in a day, either: it was too soon. He frowned and pressed his thumb between his eyebro
ws, which did nothing to relieve his headache. The smell didn’t help. They were passing through a depression, the shape of which seemed to have trapped the air, and the place had a marshy reek as strong as last winter’s mustard greens.
There was a warning shout. Ouyang peered through the swirling steam, expecting to see the rebel front line. For the first moment all he saw was a rocky outcropping, so camouflaged was the small figure in plain armor with a monk’s gray robe underneath.
The monk. Everything in Ouyang’s body seized in shocked recognition. His headache throbbed in double time. All this time, he’d had no idea the rebel commander he was facing was the monk. The memory of Yao River rose up as a wave of pure anger. The last time he’d seen this monk, his actions had set Ouyang on the path to his fate. Every day since then, Ouyang had felt the agony of that fate like a fatal wound. There might not be any escaping one’s fate, but it was that monk who had put it into motion.
He was almost surprised that his fury didn’t incinerate that slight figure on the spot. Taking revenge on the monk wouldn’t do anything to change Ouyang’s future, but it would be payment for everything he had suffered since Yao River. The idea of the monk suffering as Ouyang had suffered sent a sullen pleasure pumping through him, like the burn of a muscle taken to its limits. It could be one last thing to look forward to, before everything else began.
He had just opened his mouth to order the advance when the monk tossed something in the direction of Ouyang’s front line. It hit the ground with a muffled clunk. In the moment of puzzled silence that followed, Ouyang heard it rolling downhill towards them.
Then the world exploded.
* * *
The explosion smacked Ouyang from his horse. Bodies and burning rocks crashed down around him. His ears rang so loudly that he could only tell men were screaming by their gaping mouths. Covered in ash, their bodies twisted unnaturally, they looked like demons stumbling through the smoke. Coughing, Ouyang staggered in the direction of his front line. Which wasn’t there. There was only a vast burning pit, as deep as a ten-story pagoda. And all around it, in a blackened starburst of horror, was a wreckage the likes of which Ouyang had never seen in all his many years of war. Human and animal bodies had been torn apart and mixed back together. The ground was strewn with charred bones, pieces of armor, tangled swords, and helmets peeled apart like metal flowers. He stood there, hand pressed against his ribs and eyes streaming furiously, looking at the shattered flotsam of his army.
Someone limped up. It was Shao. Shao would probably survive the apocalypse like a cockroach, Ouyang thought uncharitably. He thought he should probably be thankful.
“What the fuck just happened?” Shao said, and for once Ouyang didn’t care about his tone, the fact that he spoke Han’er, or that he addressed Ouyang as one soldier speaks to another. “That wasn’t just a hand bomb. The air was on fire.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ouyang said. His voice sounded muffled, like it was coming to him through the bones of his skull rather than his ears. The anger he had been feeling towards the monk only a moment ago had taken on a perfect clarity. He recognized it as pure, murderous intent. He hoped the monk could feel his ill will, even at a distance, and be tormented by it for every moment until Ouyang came for him. “Account for the dead, send the injured to the back, and continue.”
To absolutely no one’s surprise, the rebels were waiting for them on the other side of the burning pit. Ouyang led the push himself. The hand cannons spat their shrapnel, taking down a wave of men, but then they were upon the rebels in earnest. The monk’s apocalypse might have caused Ouyang some losses, but he was a Yuan general: he knew how much it took for an army to lose its muscle memory of being a behemoth. His men, ten abreast with him at their center, flung themselves forwards as though they were still part of a thousand-man front line. And then it was all the chaos of hand-to-hand. Men stumbled and swung wildly; the fallen writhed and screamed; horses broke their legs in holes. Blood and red headscarves lent their bright color to the monochromatic landscape.
They fought until night fell. The next day when they awoke, the rebels had already melted backwards. Ouyang advanced until he found them, losing another layer of his front line in the process, and did it all again. Day by day, he was pushing the rebels towards their inevitable end: the plain beyond the outlet of the valley where, extremely soon, Ouyang’s cavalry would be ready and waiting to crush them when they emerged from the protection of the valley’s jagged terrain. For all that Ouyang knew that the pursuit was still nothing more than a glorified time-wasting exercise on his part, he found a genuine, savage delight in the rebels’ mounting desperation as time went on. Their suffering was an appetite-whetting prelude for the far greater suffering he was about to enact upon their dog whelp of a leader.
The thought of this revenge, unlike the other, filled him with an uncomplicated, viciously pleasurable anticipation. I don’t have to end you, he thought to the monk, but oh: I will.
* * *
“Something’s not right,” Xu Da said. “He should have gotten the message about Bianliang by now. Why hasn’t he withdrawn?”
Zhu looked automatically at the waning moon, though the date felt hammered into her bones: they had been in the valley for four days, far longer than they’d thought they would have to be, and it was already two full days past the agreed time for Chen’s attack to begin. She and Xu Da had climbed from the camp and were sitting on the crest of the right-hand ridge, although this close to the mouth of the valley it was barely more than a gentle mound. In front of them lay the darkened plain. Slightly to their right was a cluster of light, like a new constellation: the campfires of the eunuch general’s cavalry battalions. By tomorrow those battalions would be directly ahead, waiting to meet them.
“It has to be Chen Youliang,” Xu Da went on. Even in the space of days his face had thinned from the stress of their mounting losses. “Don’t you think he wanted us to die all along?”
Despite her convictions, Zhu had started to wonder the same. She felt sick with tiredness. “Even if he wanted to get rid of me, there are so many ways he could have done it without losing my men as well.” She sighed. “Strange as it is, I trust in his ability to murder creatively.”
There was a scrabbling behind them. Yuchun, almost invisible in his dark armor, emerged onto the ridge and plonked himself down beside them. “So this is the end,” he announced. He’d probably intended it to sound careless, but to Zhu it seemed uncharacteristically small and afraid.
For a moment none of them said anything else. Zhu reached inside herself and touched that strange resonance between herself and the eunuch. She remembered herself at twelve, looking down at him from the roof of the Dharma Hall, and the mysterious feeling of her own substance connecting to its likeness. And now somehow, because of that connection, his presence marked every critical junction in Zhu’s progress towards her fate. He had destroyed the monastery and sent her to the Red Turbans. He had provided her with her first victory. And now—
In her mind’s eye she saw his beautiful face that she had only ever seen from a distance. And all at once she knew what she had to do in order to keep moving towards her fate.
“Not the end,” she said. “Not yet. There’s one last thing we need to do.”
Xu Da and Yuchun swiveled their heads towards her from opposite directions. Xu Da said, “No.”
“I don’t think he ever received the message. That’s why he hasn’t withdrawn; he doesn’t even know Bianliang needs his help.”
“Even if that’s the case! Even if he did believe you—”
“—he might just kill me anyway,” Zhu said. But if she didn’t believe in her fate, what else was there?
His expression stricken, Xu Da said, “Not you. I should do it.”
“Do what?” Yuchun nearly screamed.
Zhu smiled at him. “Challenge the eunuch general to a duel. He seems the traditional type; he’ll respect the challenge. That will at least give me the chanc
e to speak to him face-to-face. I’ll tell him what’s happening in Bianliang. Then he can believe me or not.”
After a long pause Yuchun said, “It should be me. If it’s a duel then I’m the best man you have. That eunuch is better with a sword than both of you, and so am I. You know it!”
His loyalty was warming. Trust that we’re strong enough. She said gently, “I know it. Ten-thousand-man Chang.” It was a new nickname Yuchun had picked up somewhere along the way, when the men had realized he was as strong as (maybe not quite) ten thousand men. She patted Yuchun’s shoulder. “If winning was the point, I would definitely ask you.” She spoke to Xu Da, too. “But it’s not about the duel. It’s about convincing him. So it has to be me.”
A wounded sound escaped Xu Da. Zhu reached out and took him by the back of the neck, that vulnerable part above the collar of his armor, and shook him gently. It gave her a possessive, protective feeling, like a leopard holding its cub in its mouth. She had no idea whether it was something Zhu Chongba might have felt for Xu Da or not. “Big brother. I’m counting on you to manage our escape as soon as his men show the first signs of withdrawing.”
Xu Da relaxed his head back into Zhu’s grasp. “And if they don’t?”
There was no point fueling fear and doubt by thinking about what wouldn’t happen. What couldn’t happen, because of the sheer force of her belief and desire. Instead she sat up as tall as she could and slung her arms around both their shoulders, and together they sat watching the moon set over the endlessly burning campfires of the Yuan.
* * *
The armies assembled on the plain at dawn. Heaven looked down on them from a pale winter sky that seemed as brittle as a skin of ice. Zhu took in the sight of her small force of Red Turbans standing before the enormous expanse of the eunuch general’s army, with its eerie front line of ghosts. She had compressed her fear and uncertainty so tightly that they were nothing more than the faintest tremble of water under the still surface of a deep lake. She took a breath and reached into herself, touching that point in the pit of her stomach where fate anchored, and let it pull her forward.
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