JavaScript is off/unavailable on your browser. You will not be able to experience this website as it was intended without JavaScript enabled.
“Send a man to Father at once!”
Ma Chao ordered. “We cannot be
everywhere, but look at what we can do wherever we are! Send a man now and have
him renew Father’s spirit!”
“As you wish, Cousin,” Ma Dai
replied.
Ma Teng received Ma Chao’s jubilant communication within a few days, but
Teng had suffered two more serious defeats and lost a beloved consort during a
raid, and those events had left him further demoralised.
“What will you do now, Father…?” Ma Teng’s second son, Ma Tie, asked
quietly.
“…Your brother is an incredible man, but he is still just a man,” Ma
Teng replied. “Were it that I could breed a thousand sons like Chao to lead my
men, I would, but I have him and three or four other valiant leaders, and Han
Sui has a lot more, and more men than me to go with it now. I will see whether
Cao Cao can defeat Yuan Shao for a second time, just in case that first victory
was some sort of luck. I will go to whichever of them wins, Yuan or Cao, and
ask them to sue for peace. Han Sui and I have been harming each other long
enough, and peace is long overdue. I must, therefore, write to Chao in the
meantime and ask that he be less violent; if I could win, I probably would slaughter
them all, but I can’t, so we must show restraint.”
“…A lot of the chieftains don’t want to show restraint, Father,” Ma Tie
noted.
“They are chieftains of a handful
of men each, and I am their chieftain!” Ma Teng snapped. “They will obey me, and so will Chao!”
“I hope so, Father,” Ma Tie replied.
*************
There were many factions that were nervously awaiting the outcome of the
latest conflict between Yuan Shao and Cao Cao’s armies. In the northwest, Wei
Kang’s government, the Qiang warlords and Zhang Lu, the ruler of the theocratic
state of “Han’ning” - or, as it was once known, Hanzhong; to the west, Yi
Province Governor Liu Zhang; to the south, the semi-autonomous prefectural
administrators to the south of Jing Province and Sun Quan of Jiangdong; to the
east, Zang Ba’s ex-bandits and the remnants of the Han government that
controlled Xu Province and southern Qing Province; to the north, the Han and
non-Han peoples in Yuan Shao’s increasingly-lawless domains in Ji, Bing,
northern Qing and Yòu Provinces; and in the centre, Jing Governor Liu Biao, his
invited guest Liu Bei, his uninvited guest Zhang Xiu, and the Han government in
Yan Province.
If Cao Cao won, then the apparent fluke at Guandu
might be perceived as the ‘will of Heaven’, and Cao would decide the fate of
the nation, whatever his unreadable will might be; if Yuan Shao’s army won,
then there were two possible outcomes, namely a return to the ways of the past
or another attempt to remove Emperor Xian and replace him with kin or Yuan Shao
himself, which might then start the cycle of chaos all over again.