Chapter 648: Bringer of Wickedness

The crescent-shaped western lake of Juyan Marsh was a scene of beauty. Though winter had arrived, reeds still clustered thickly along its shores. Migrant birds of every kind from north of the desert normally roosted on the sandbars at the lake's heart, but today the clash of men had startled them into circling the sky for hours.

Only when the shouts of slaughter gradually died down did they dare return to the water. The once-clear lakeshore was now stained with spreading swaths of dark crimson. A corpse drifted up, its head submerged in the water, and a snow-white egret alighted upon it on slender legs.

Wu Han was also at the lakeside. Gazing at the floating bodies, he cursed furiously: "The Right Worthy Prince truly is a descendant of Yizhixie Chanyu — his skill at leaping onto a mule cart and fleeing for his life is every bit the equal of his ancestor's!"

The day before, the Wei vanguard had pursued the Xiongnu, seeking to pin them down, while Wu Han led ten thousand horsemen on a sweep around Juyan Lake, intending to cut off the Xiongnu's line of retreat.

It had been a superb battle plan, but Wu Han had clearly overestimated the Xiongnu's appetite for a fight.

When the Wei vanguard first caught up and began harassing them, the Right Worthy Prince had quite leisurely dispatched a sizable force of his tribesmen to engage them. Yet the moment his cautious scouts spotted Wu Han's trail far to the rear, the Right Worthy Prince promptly lost his nerve.

Mistakenly believing a vast Wei army was upon him, the Right Worthy Prince did not hesitate for an instant: he abandoned the several thousand captives he had seized in Hexi and withdrew from the battlefield with his core forces.

Once the Right Worthy Prince fled, the other divisions had even less reason to stay. The Xiongnu were, after all, a conglomeration of many tribes; their lesser chieftains had merely followed the Right Worthy Prince into Hexi to plunder a little, with no intention of laying down their lives here. The Chanyu Court's vision of "making the Xiongnu great again" found no resonance among the small tribes of the empire's western reaches — push the clock back a century or two, and it was far from certain whether the ancestors of these mixed barbarians had even been Xiongnu at all! The steppe revered the strong: when the Yuezhi flourished, every polity in the Right Territory called itself Yuezhi, and once the Xiongnu drove out the Yuezhi king, they all promptly renamed themselves Xiongnu.

Wu Han only managed to catch a few slower-reacting subordinate princes. After a bout of bloody fighting, the Bing Province cavalry won a complete victory.

Although they had taken several hundred heads and captured one or two thousand prisoners, even seizing several subordinate princes, this fell woefully short of the scene Wu Han had envisioned — "severing the Right Worthy Prince's head and presenting it at the Northern Watchtower." The general's pent-up fury was now directed entirely at the Right Worthy Prince.

It was only as he began cursing that Wu Han recalled something. He asked Dou You, "What is this current Right Worthy Prince called?"

Dou You replied, "His name is Lu Hun."

"Lu Hun?" Wu Han frowned. "Could he be a kinsman of that false Han emperor, Lu Fang?"

Dou You did not know whether to laugh or cry. "General, it is merely a phonetic rendering."

That the Right Worthy Prince had avoided battle and fled did not surprise Dou You in the slightest. Ever since the Former Han began its counteroffensives against the Xiongnu, the four great titled kings — the Left and Right Worthy Princes and the Left and Right Luli Princes — had been remarkably slippery. Even when Wei Qing and Huo Qubing won victory after victory and took multitudes of captives, those four were never caught.

The successive Right Worthy Princes, in particular, could be called geniuses in the art of flight. During the Battle of the Southern Desert, when Wei Qing made a lightning raid on the Right Worthy Prince's division, that particular prince was dead drunk in the middle of the night — and still managed to clamber onto a horse and slip away. Later, when Emperor Xuan of Han dispatched five generals to strike the barbarians, the two western columns scoured the entire desert yet utterly failed to find any trace of the Right Worthy Prince. Only afterward did they learn he had fled in one breath to the Hujie Kingdom, several thousand li north of the Tianshan Mountains…

Today's events? For a habitual escape artist like the Right Worthy Prince, it was a minor scene, nothing more.

Dou You offered his own understanding: "General, it seems the Right Division has no desire for a fight to the death. Perhaps the Right Worthy Prince's incursion into Hexi was forced upon him by the Xiongnu Chanyu in the first place."

Wu Han's interest was piqued. "What makes you say that?"

Dou You drew an analogy: "At the end of Qin, the Right Worthy Prince dwelt in the west, directly facing the region west of Shang Commandery, bordering the Yuezhi, the Di, and the Qiang. After the Yuezhi were destroyed and migrated west, Hexi became the Right Worthy Prince's domain as well — until Huo Qubing seized it and the Han established the four commanderies. The Right Division has now painfully lacked Hexi for a hundred years."

"But the present Right Worthy Prince harbors no grand ambitions and has no wish to recover his ancestors' lands. Over the past ten-odd years, the Xiongnu have re-entered the Western Regions, swallowed up the Tianshan grasslands, pressed the Wusun, and extorted the walled-city states. Xiongnu envoys run roughshod over everything east of the Yuezhi, and the Western Regions are also under the Right Worthy Prince's jurisdiction. The tribute of the thirty-six kingdoms comes without the slightest effort — is that not far easier to seize than Hexi, which requires bitter fighting?"

This indeed explained why the Xiongnu Right Division had merely gone through the motions in their incursion. To Dou You's surprise, however, Wu Han grew even angrier upon hearing it and burst out:

"Everyone says the Yuyang shock cavalry have poor discipline. Is that poor discipline? That is poverty! The soldiers of Yuyang were born in a land of bitter cold; they had never seen the wealth of Hebei. The first time they rode south, they simply couldn't resist taking a 'little' extra."

But whether they took "a bit" or "a lot," it was nothing compared to the savagery of the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu Right Division had regained the Western Regions and had no pressing need for the population and grain of Hexi — yet they still had to force their way in and lay it waste!

"True, the Yuyang riders do have the air of bandits about them. But even bandits have their code — the Xiongnu have none!"

As if having reached some decision, Wu Han stormed across the battlefield in a fury. On the way, he encountered a squad guarding Xiongnu captives, binding their hands behind their backs and driving them toward Tianbei Fortress. The Wei soldiers' methods were brutal; whenever a Xiongnu was too wounded to walk, they would often strike him with a spear shaft!

The "battalion commander" leading this small unit was none other than A Yun, a Di tribesman Wu Han had brought from Longxi.

Wu Han still remembered A Yun. This Di warrior had performed admirably in the pursuit of Wei Ao. Wu Han reined in his horse and called A Yun over, asking, "A Yun, what is your tally of captives?"

A Yun answered from a distance, "Several dozen slain, one hundred and seven taken."

"Excellent!" Wu Han was delighted. For a Di tribesman like A Yun, commanding only auxiliary riders drawn from the mixed barbarians of Bing Province, to achieve such a kill-to-capture ratio was already quite impressive. He encouraged him: "Keep up the good work. Once this campaign is over, you may well rise to Deputy Colonel!"

Wu Han even stressed the point: "The first Deputy Colonel of Di origin in our dynasty!"

The soldiers all came forward to congratulate A Yun, but the man himself was filled with melancholy. He had been lying low in the State of Wei for three years now. The man he had originally been ordered to assassinate, Wan Xiu, he had never even seen again, yet he had caught Wu Han's eye. A Yun did not know whether he ought to strike against this general or not. Strangest of all, merit kept piling up on him, one after another — he couldn't dodge it if he tried.

Not knowing whether to rejoice or to fret, A Yun merely lowered his head and murmured, "Another promotion…?"

…

Wu Han's mount pressed onward. He encountered more and more squads driving prisoners along. General Wu swept the captives with an icy gaze. They hung their heads, bearing their wounds, a thoroughly wretched sight. Yet among them were a few who dared to lift their eyes and meet Wu Han's stare, neither cowed nor fawning.

"Courting death!"

His resolve now firm, Wu Han wheeled his horse around and went to the western shore of Juyan Marsh to visit the rescued people of Hexi.

Just a few short hours ago, these common folk had been the captured and enslaved. They were ordinary civilians of the four Hexi commanderies. When the barbarians first invaded, they had intended to swallow Hexi whole and so merely plundered goods and wealth. Only after Wu Han arrived with relief forces and the barbarians realized they could not hold their ground in Hexi did they begin large-scale abductions, dragging the people off toward foreign lands.

The barbarians were vast in number, as cruel and vicious as venomous serpents, armored and bearing bows, arrogant and unrestrained the whole way. The common folk dared not resist; they could only trudge along bound like oxen and horses. A fierce wind blew across a thousand li, dust and sand swirling. The bitter cold of Juyan far exceeded that of the commandery heartlands. Food came but once a day, and they had to endure the whips and abuse of the barbarians.

Often, people would simply collapse as they walked. Come nightfall, death from exhaustion, starvation, sickness, or cold was a constant occurrence. To quicken their pace, the Xiongnu had even carried out a brutal massacre of the old and weak at Jiaqu! Now that they had left the bounds of Juyan and were about to enter the grasslands and the great desert, the common folk were all stricken with grief. Yet the hope in their hearts had long been crushed to nothing; only mournful sighs and weeping remained.

Who could have imagined that, just as they looked back toward their homeland, troops from the Central Plains would truly come charging forth? The Xiongnu scattered like a gust of wind, just as they had come. Nearly ten thousand people of Hexi, overjoyed at their rescue, were naturally filled with gratitude. Hearing that Wu Han was the commanding general, they all bowed their heads to him in thanks.

"The General has saved us!"

Wu Han's emotional intelligence had now risen by more than a notch. He actually smiled and said, "I did save you. However, this general was merely carrying out His Majesty's edict. If you wish to give thanks, you should bow eastward to thank the Great Wei's Sage Son of Heaven!"

Had someone demanded this of the common folk half a year ago, they would have complied outwardly but inwardly thought little of it. For the people of Hexi felt not the slightest sense of identification with the State of Wei — from Han to Xin to Western Han and now to Wei, the banners atop the city walls had changed several times over. Everyone was long accustomed to it. Yet the local gentry clans and powerful families remained as before; in some commanderies and counties, even the officials had not changed! The people of Hexi simply felt that this Diwu Wei was probably just another short-lived regime.

But now, having been saved by Wei generals and Wei soldiers, the feeling in the hearts of the Hexi people was different. Just as Wu Han had instructed, they bowed down toward the east.

Wu Han told the crowd, "All of you common folk may follow the army back to Hexi and return each to your homes. But the Xiongnu may return at any time. Until then, you must heed the orders of the military officers — the army shall govern the people."

He selected a few individuals who had previously held official posts to assist in management and ordered them to muster able-bodied men and distribute the Xiongnu weapons collected from the battlefield. And Wu Han very soon gave this makeshift militia its first task.

"To execute the captured Xiongnu north of Juyan Marsh?"

The able-bodied militiamen were momentarily stunned. Wu Han shifted his tone, his gaze sweeping over them. "What? Your wives and children were abused by the barbarians, your parents died wretchedly in the ravines of Jiaqu, you yourselves were whipped the whole way, driven like a flock of sheep — is there not one among you who hates the barbarian scum and wishes to kill them in revenge?"

Goaded by Wu Han, those who had been simmering with rage along the road stepped forward one after another. In the end, even the timid ones had no choice but to follow the crowd. Trembling, they gripped the barbarian weapons just issued to them — and aimed them at their former owners!

By the time Dou You rushed over upon hearing the news, the slaughter was already half finished. The one or two thousand Xiongnu captives were surrounded by Hexi commoners who vastly outnumbered them and were being driven in batches into sand pits. First, the Bing Province soldiers shot them down with crossbows; those who survived were finished off by the common folk with their blades. Recalling all the suffering they had endured over these past ten-odd days, everyone's eyes had gone red with killing fury. Some were even hacking madly at the already dead barbarians…

Dou You hurried to see Wu Han, only to find this god of slaughter seated upon a barbarian stool, drinking mare's milk wine found among the spoils and watching the scene with relish.

"General, this is…"

Wu Han raised his wineskin and declared smugly, "Driving prisoners along is a hassle. This method is quickest."

He sighed ruefully. "A pity there's no time to build a mound of skulls. Let these corpses remain north of Juyan Marsh and become a sight the Xiongnu behold every time they ride south. Only then will they learn fear and understand the consequences of violating Hexi!"

With that, Wu Han's gaze flicked toward Dou You. "What, is Governor Dou going to admonish me that killing captives brings ill fortune?"

Dou You would never dare admonish him. This slaughter was, after all, a catharsis for the people of Hexi as well. He smiled and said, "The barbarian scum deserve deaths a thousand times over! Only, your humble officer thinks we should still keep a few alive — it would be convenient for sending them to Chang'an to present as captives!"

"Right!" Wu Han slapped his thigh. "The leading lesser princes are still here. Have everyone hold back and leave a dozen or two alive. Otherwise, His Majesty might think I'm killing innocents to inflate my battle honors!"

Such was the relationship between sovereign and minister. Wu Han understood better than anyone why Diwu Lun had dispatched him to garrison Bing Province and resist the Xiongnu.

"The vile breed of Xiongnu have the hearts of tigers and wolves. They do not swallow virtue and civilizing influence — they can only be broken by force!"

"The only thing that can crush the Xiongnu is something even more vicious than they are!"

шшш ＿тTk án ＿c○

And Wu Han is exactly that kind of great villain!

Despite his long record of misdeeds, despite his brutality and bloodlust, he is also the most suitable candidate to deal with the enemy on the northern frontier.

After the battle just now, Dou You now felt nothing but awed submission toward Wu Han. He clasped his hands and bowed to him, saying, "After this campaign, your name alone, General, will be enough to stop the children of the Right Division from crying at night!"

"The Right Division alone is not enough." Wu Han laughed heartily, mare's-milk wine soaking his beard. "From the Wuhuan to the Thirty-Six Kingdoms of the Western Regions, across all the lands bordering the Xiongnu, my evil name is known to every soul — even the sons of the Xiongnu Chanyu will wail at the sound of it. Only that will suffice!"

Just as Wu Han was boasting shamelessly, the vanguard's deputy commander, Meng Ze, also arrived at the spot. He did not even glance at the Xiongnu captives being slaughtered, but came before Wu Han with a grim face to deliver his report.

Wu Han rose to his feet and accorded Meng Ze the highest courtesy. In this battle, the vanguard had paid an enormous sacrifice. They had struck decisively, pinning down the Xiongnu for a full two-hour watch; during their daring thrust, with just over two thousand riders, they had endured attacks from an enemy several times their number, and their casualties were the heaviest.

After giving a rough account of the battle, Meng Ze raised his head again, his eyes completely bloodshot, and delivered grievous news to Wu Han.

"General of the Rear, Company Commander Geng Guang of the subordinate-official brigade, was the first to strike the barbarians. He fought with outstanding courage and achieved great merit, but he was gravely wounded in the fighting. Geng Guang... he won't last much longer!"