“Turmoil”: Battle for the Han Empire sample (Act I) -- T. P. M. Thorne
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“Don’t be,” Yuan Shao insisted. “In fact… I think that we maybe miss his
naïve honesty more than we like to admit.”
Cao Cao lowered his head, smiled, and said, “I sometimes wear a white garment under my clothes for him…
not for long, just… for the moments where I want to weep for his idealism being so very, very out of place
in this mad world we live in.”
“…Yes,” Yuan Shao replied.
“…Xu Yòu said that he would not attend,” Cao Cao prompted.
“…He often elopes on ‘private business’,” Yuan Shao scoffed. “He’s not
here because it would be inappropriate, since he is a direct vassal of mine now. But… but since Zhang
Miao… before, perhaps, if I am honest… I wonder about him as well, sometimes.”
“He’s not like us,” Cao Cao suggested. “We’re heroes… he isn’t.”
“What, I wonder, is a ‘hero’, Mengde…?” Yuan Shao sighed.
Cao Cao hummed thoughtfully.
Yuan Shao was the head of the Yuan clan of Ru County in Yu Province, whose collective closeness
to the emperors of past times was well known. His distant ancestor, Yuan An, enjoyed commemorative odes and statues;
his paternal grandfather, father and uncles enjoyed some of the highest administrative posts in the empire; Shao
himself had been a close confidante of Hè Jin, the last Commander-in-Chief of the Han Imperial armed forces
before the administration in the capital Luoyang had collapsed and power had coalesced into the hands of the warlord Dong Zhuo.
Cao Cao was the son of Cao Song, a man who had been adopted -
and hence elevated - by an imperial court eunuch: this was at the time of Emperor Huan when, in contradiction to their
intended status as sub-human, the eunuchs were some of the most influential individuals in Han China, since they enjoyed
a social intimacy with the emperor and his courtesans that no normal man could.
Cao Song became a rich and powerful man
in his own right, and even received similar administrative responsibilities to the ones that members of more established
clans like the Yuans were considered to be exclusively entitled to: Cao Song’s sons went to the same schools as
the children of those clans, and Cao Cao was unquestionably part of Han nobility as a result of that.
Under other circumstances, the lofty Yuan Shao might have considered
Cao Cao to be his social inferior, but his own lineage was ‘tainted’: his biological father had sired him with a
housemaid at a time when his wife and consorts had yet to give him a much-wanted son and heir, and by the time that he sired
a ‘legitimate’ heir - Shao’s half-brother Shu - the clan chief had no male heirs, and Shao was adopted by
that important uncle to remedy the situation. That left Shao and Shu as cousins, but it had also robbed Shu of any possibility -
in his own mind, at least - of somehow being elevated to clan chieftain himself someday.
“You sheltered ‘partisans’… we both did,” Cao Cao replied. “You fought
the ‘Ten’… hah! You actually went into the capital, in a mad rage, and cut them all up! I remember you castigating me
once for petitioning against them; how feeble my little words seem when compared to your solution!”
“…What did we achieve, though?” Yuan Shao asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cao Cao replied. “We have an emperor that we neither of us want, but all the best alternatives
are dead… hah! And here’s me saying that, when I was so against having Liu Yu!”