Eastern Wu: Realm of the Sun Clan sample (Act I) -- T. P. M. Thorne
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FOREWORD
This is my sixth historical novel taking place in the era that is known popularly as the time of the ‘Three Kingdoms’: it follows on directly from ‘East of the River: Home of the Sun Clan’ (though there is no obligation to read that prior work - this has been designed, like all of my work, to work in isolation) and aims to tell the story of that same family as they live through the rise of the warlord Cao Cao and the continuing decline of the Han Dynasty that has ruled China for hundreds of years. This novel is, in fact, set during the period prior to the actual Three Kingdoms (3K) era, better termed ‘the last years of the Eastern Han’ (the novel ends a whole decade before the last Han emperor abdicated), although that was when most of the more famous figures - Cao Cao, Guan Yu, Lü Bu, Yuan Shao, Zhou Yu, and, of course, Sun Jian and Sun Ce - were active: all of the aforementioned were actually dead by the time that the 3K era started, and many more - Liu Bei, Zhuge Liang and Cao Pi to name just three - did not live for long thereafter. Sun Quan was one of the few men that lived for decades after the fall of the Han - he outlived the Han by 32 years - and this novel is, in one sense, a telling of the story of how he rose from the position of brother and son of famous heroes to becoming a powerful warlord in his own right.
To tell the story of Sun Quan is to also tell the story of ‘Bofu’ (to use Sun Ce’s style/courtesy name) during his last eventful years: it took me close to a fifth of the book to cover Bofu’s last battles with the remnants of his former lord Yuan Shu’s following and the subsequent clashes - political and military - with the Han emperor’s ambitious ‘guardian’, Cao Cao. The remaining time is, by circumstance, the story of the last years of Bofu’s close friend, ‘sworn brother’ and strategist, ‘Gongjin’ (as Zhou Yu is known throughout the main text, for it is his style name): it is impossible to tell the story of Sun Quan’s rise without emphasising the integral part that Gongjin played, not least for his most famous exploit, namely the destruction of the Han navy at the ‘Battle of Red Cliffs’.
But revisiting the years after the strategist Zhuge Liang first began his career has not been without its problems for this author: a fair few scenes in my first work, ‘Crouching Dragon: The Journey of Zhuge Liang’ were seen from the point of view of Sun Quan’s court (despite the novel’s ‘protagonist’ being a vassal of Sun Quan’s rival Liu Bei), and yet those scenes (and the perspective that they were shown from) are also important to the story that I have to tell in this work. I therefore made a compromise: there are a small number of scenes in the last three acts (Zhuge Liang meeting Sun Quan’s court for the first time, Sun Quan’s ‘slicing of the table to demonstrate his authority’ and some of the ‘war room’ scenes during the Battle of Red Cliffs are the most obvious examples) that draw upon existing scenarios and reuse dialogue from ‘Crouching Dragon’ - all narrative is rewritten - though, where possible, those ‘shared scenes’ are extended or shortened to better focus on the Sun clan. The overwhelming majority of the content of those last three acts is, like the entirety of the preceding acts, newly-presented work by its very nature: different focal points include Sun Quan’s cousin Ben’s loyalty dilemma, the loss of loved ones after various political and tactical missteps and the resulting internal strife that Quan was desperate to conceal from allies, rivals and enemies alike.