Chapter Text
曹瞞軍敗走華容，
Cao Cao fled along the Huarong trail,
正與關公狹路逢。
but Lord Guan barred his passage hardily.
只為當初恩義重，
Then, weighing obligations once incurred,
放開金鎖走蛟龍。
He slipped the lock and let the dragon free.
《三国演义》 罗贯中
Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong
Translated by Moss Roberts
Yunchang knew without looking at the map that Cao Mengde was already heading this way. Zhuge Kongming said that he would come, after all, and Zhuge Kongming was almost always right.
In the windows that looked out towards the vast darkness of space, he could see his own skin, white as the stories of old Earth’s moon except for the streak of darkening red at his throat. His heart was starting to beat louder and louder in his ears.
Yunchang was aware of the eyes around him, and ignored them to watch the tiny blinking dot on the holographic map ahead as it approached the dark blue dot that represented his own ship. He bit back a sigh.
“How many does he have left?”
“Forty-two, General.”
And how many had Cao Mengde started with, Yunchang wondered. His ships had covered almost the entire horizon – or what passed for horizon in space – when Yunchang had looked at them—
There are five thousand ships in my army, the echo of an echo whispered in his mind, and carrying within them five hundred thousand men. Yunchang let out a long breath, but could not stop the voice from continuing:
You, alone, would have outshone them all.
Whatever that was between them, whatever that had been exchanged through the touches of their skins and the caresses of their breaths throughout the three months they had spent together… All that had been wiped away the moment Yunchang’s sworn older brother Xuande— no, Liu Bei and Liu Bei’s once-brother-in-law Sun Quan had formed a coalition to try to recover Earth from Cao Mengde’s hands.
His clawing, greedy hands, as Yunchang’s eldest brother had frequently said.
(What had happened to the Lady Sun Shangxiang? Yunchang did not know, and dared not suspect. She was here one day, only ever looking at Liu Bei through the corner of her eyes, and then gone the next.)
“General?”
“How many were destroyed?” His own voice sounded soft and weak to his own ears, entirely unlike the famed warrior that Cao Mengde had always painted him to be.
“Viceroy Zhou Yu had the ships counted at the beginning of the battle, General,” came the reply. “Cao Mengde brought one thousand, three hundred, and twenty-five ships.”
Yunchang bit back a sigh.
Fire could not exist in space. All of those old Earth movies of space battles with their explosions were lies made to comfort; space was strange enough that there was no need to show how vacuum devoured everything.
Once, long ago, their galaxy was named the Silver River. Yunchang supposed that, for the people of those times, it was an appropriate name – he had seen photographs of the galaxy from Earth, and it really looked like a streak of spilled mercury, a trail of shattered crystals that caught light upon light to shine.
But now… Now, Yunchang refused to look outside the windows. There was still light out there, stars upon cruel stars that still blared light no matter how much death had occurred around them.
Too many ships had been destroyed, folding themselves itself tighter and tighter within the twisting vacuum of space until they completely vanished. And the lives of humans, so small among these monstrous machines and gigantic supernovas…
Space was no place for death. The darkness of vacuum was too deep to be stained by red, and its hollow emptiness was far too vast to contain corpses.
There was only cessation. No death; only a complete lack of existence, as if time had been turned into itself, strangling not only what you could become, but all that you had once been.
“Incoming communications, General.” The briefest of pauses. “Not from one of our own ships.”
Yunchang nodded. Settling his hands on the handles of his captain’s chair, he pushed himself to stand. “Is the Grand Strategist Zhuge still on the line?” he asked.
“No, sir,” came the reply. “He has hung up a while ago already.”
Good. Yunchang knew better than to say that out loud, instead keeping his eyes fixed upon the blinking dot in front of him. Cao Mengde’s ships had stopped moving, and now looked like a congregation of tiny lights.
(“There used to be a festival called Christmas,” Cao Mengde had told him once, lying on the bed on his stomach with his fingers carding through Yunchang’s hair. “People of Earth would cut down pine trees to put in their homes, and string lights upon the branches.”
“Did they have dirt for the floor of their homes?” Yunchang had asked, mystified. “Is that how they continued letting the tree grow?”
“No,” Cao Mengde had laughed, his thumb running along the curve of Yunchang’s cheekbone. “They didn’t plant the trees in their homes. They cut the trees, leaving the roots behind, and then moved the rest into the house.”
“Then—” Yunchang started, helplessly shuddering at the thought of calluses upon his barely-stubbled chin.
“The trees would be burned or thrown away after the festival was over,” Cao Mengde had continued, and had given Yunchang a crooked smile in exchange for his obvious horror.
Waste breeds confidence. Waste breeds assurance that their efforts were not in vain.
He never needed to repeat himself for his words to linger in Yunchang’s mind.)
There were far fewer lights now than there had been when Cao Mengde had first arrived. Could he, Yunchang wondered, remember each dead soldier’s name, like Liu Bei had always claimed to do so? Could he write beautiful elegies for them, praising their sacrifice and willingness to die for a cause, like those that Zhuge Kongming had always written for those who willingly followed them?
Would he, like Yunchang’s sworn younger brother Yide— no, Zhang Fei, lock himself in a room full of alcohol bottles, and weep into them even as he drank without end?
(Green sleeves floated across my vision, Cao Mengde once wrote on Yunchang’s back. My heart aches for you.
“The youngest of my brother’s army,” Yunchang had whispered that night, “is only fifteen. We could not turn him away.”
“Out of your need, or his desire?” Cao Mengde had asked.
“Is there a difference?” Yunchang had blinked, peering over his shoulder to look at Cao Mengde. “If there is no need from the lord, then why would there be desire from the soldier?”
“What difference, indeed,” Cao Mengde had murmured, and had not said anything further.
Within the space of three months and some, Yunchang had learned to read his silences. And here was a heavy one: filled with words upon words that Cao Mengde clearly was keeping behind his teeth for Yunchang’s sake. Because, Yunchang suspected, he did not wish to offend him; because he wished for him to stay.
Cao Mengde should not have bothered: Yunchang’s decision had been made long ago, on a spring day with the smell of peaches surrounding him, and he had confirmed it with the weight of a newly-chopped peach wood branch dropping into his palm.
Even when the peach wood had been broken and replaced with cedar, even as the pillars of his heart had rotted away and rebuilt anew, Yunchang’s path could not change.)
A click, and the map vanished, leaving the black screen behind. Yunchang made a gesture, and the colour crawled backwards. Slowly, piece by piece, he could see: all forty-two of Cao Mengde’s ships laid out right in front of him in perfectly ordered formation.
Behind him, Yunchang knew, was the wormhole that led straight to Venus, the closest one could get to Earth itself by travelling through such paths. The rest of Cao Mengde’s two thousand and some ships were, Yunchang was sure, stationed in that area, awaiting news of their master’s victory or defeat.
If Yunchang let him go, then the victory that was won today – wrenched from Cao Mengde’s hands by the combined efforts of Zhuge Kongming and Sun Quan’s strategist the Viceroy Zhou Yu – would be practically null and void, for they would be no closer to getting to Earth than they had been before.
Another click.
Cao Mengde’s face had not changed from the last Yunchang had seen him: not the wrinkles around his eyes, not the streaks of grey at his temples, and definitely not the crooked, soft-edged smile he wore whenever he looked at Yunchang.
“In the ancient times,” Cao Mengde said, fingers linked in front of his chest and elbows loose by his sides, “we would be facing each other from astride our horses, and I would have been able to see the wind whip through your hair.”
A quiet laugh, and he shook his ahead. “Alas, I now only have a screen, and miles of cold emptiness with no hopes of feeling the warmth of wind.” Yunchang had never felt wind that was warm, either; Europa’s winds were always too strong, nearly enough to strip one’s flesh from the bones, and they were always cold.
“Still,” Cao Mengde continued, “I must ask: how have you been, General, since our last parting?”
Never a word when he could have a sentence, and never a sentence when a paragraph was fancier-sounding. Yunchang bit back a smile, aware of his watchers.
“From your voice alone, my lord, I can already see you standing here.”
It wouldn’t be the first time.
“There have been no harms dealt on me since we saw each other last,” he dipped his head. “Though I will not ask you the same question in return.”
Cao Mengde threw his head back and laughed.
(This happened two months after he left Cao Mengde:
The last Yunchang remembered, he had been heading to bed. The dark, narrow hallways of Liu Bei’s ship had loomed in front of him, and the long row of closed metal doors gave no respite to the sense of loneliness and entrapment. His fingers had been running along the walls, the chill of steel sinking into his bones and making him ache for the now-cedar wood of his glaive.
But when he had blinked, there was light. Not the piercing white light had was so used to, but something that was simultaneously brighter and softer.
“I still can’t believe that you managed to find hardcopies of the blueprints.”
The voice was one Yunchang had never heard before, but the pitch and cadence were familiar to his ear – a young boy’s, perhaps no older than eighteen or nineteen. He turned.
The first thing he saw was gold, rough and bumpy. He blinked, and his eyes managed to focus: it was gold thread, brilliant underneath this soft nearly-yellow light. The cloth that was attached to this— this embroidery was black, dull and bright both as the boy flicked his wrists outwards.
Yunchang dipped his head further down. His eyes widened when he recognised the same gold thread and black cloth on shoes, and below the off-white sole was…
He had only ever heard descriptions of Earth’s soil. He had never seen even a tiny bottle of it. Much less this like: spreading out with every step of the boy’s rather large and ungainly feet, brown yet rich in shade, and topped by verdant green grass that – unlike the imitation grass that carpeted the receiving rooms of ships like the Marquis Sun Quan’s – faded to yellow and light brown at the tips.
This was—
“The work was not mine,” another voice replied, a hint of mirth. “A group of scholars led by Xun Wenruo were the ones who had found it.”
Cao Mengde was dressed in plain black, as dull as the nylon that Yunchang usually found himself in. Not even the light from above – this burning ball of brightness was Sun, these rays carrying heat were the sunlight; Yunchang had never dared imagined either while he was stuck in the eternal chill of Jupiter’s moon – could give any further shades to flat, dull cotton.
“Still, it was by your order,” the boy said. Yunchang stumbled backwards, his eyes adjusting and, oh, the gold thread he had first focused on was no common picture at all, but a dragon. This boy wore dragons on his long sleeves, the heavy silk – he could recognise the dull sheen from Cao Mengde’s closet – sweeping over grass and dirt as the boy dropped his hands to his sides.
“Help me pass my compliments to them, won’t you?”
“Of course,” Cao Mengde said, one hand pressed against his chest. “Your Imperial Majesty.”
The Emperor was very young, Liu Bei had once told Yunchang, when Cao Mengde forcibly took the power of the throne from him as a Regent. Over a decade has passed since then, and the Emperor has grown into a man. The laws that we had since ancient times mandate for him to pass the power to the Emperor, but he has held onto it like the tyrant that he is.
The boy snorted, waving his hand again. “What do you think we can do with the blueprints?”
“That is up to Your Imperial Majesty, isn’t it?” Cao Mengde returned immediately, straightening up. His strides matched the Emperor’s, and Yunchang had never seen him walk with steps so light and seemingly purposeless, as if he was simply meandering instead of being intent upon a destination or purpose he had in mind.
Yunchang had never known him to not have at least two rationales to every action.
“Is it?” the Emperor arched an eyebrow, turning to look at Cao Mengde over his shoulder.
“My job is to sign the papers, Cao Mengde. Yours is to come up with the ideas.”
When Yunchang blinked, he was suddenly behind them, having a full view of the mischief glittering in the boy’s eyes and the edge of indulgence in Cao Mengde’s smile.
“But my ideas are according to Your Imperial Majesty’s desires,” Cao Mengde said, folding his hands into his sleeves. “Is there not something that you desire?”
“I’d be better at answering that if you’d tell me what the blueprints are about,” the Emperor snorted.
“Have I been that neglectful?” Cao Mengde tipped his head to the side in a gesture Yunchang was abundantly familiar with. “I am certain that I must have mentioned something to you, Your Imperial Majesty.”
Another indelicate snort, and the Emperor tossed his head back slightly. “Take it that you’ve said nothing,” he said, and the attempt at imperiousness in his voice was utterly ruined by his grin. “Remind me once more, Cao Mengde.”
“Very well,” Cao Mengde stopped in his tracks to lift his arms. With the fingers of one hand tucked behind the other, he placed his palms against his chest before straightening his elbows and lowering his head. “As Your Imperial Majesty desires.”
The Emperor’s grin widened, and he spun on his heel to fully face the other man. “Well?”
“Xun-lingjun,” Cao Mengde started, and Yunchang had to draw in a sharp breath. And the next few words turned into nothing more than buzzing in his ears, because—
Lingjun was a title that translated literally to “to command gentlemen,” and it was a title that had not been used for centuries even before humans had fled from Earth into space.
Yunchang frequently spoke of honour, but he sometimes could not help but admit that he barely knew what the word meant. A man who had lived millennia ago named Confucius had defined it as one of the values that one must strive towards, because honour was one of the biggest factors that separated a gentleman from a normal person. And Confucius had defined the greatness of humanity to be someone who could be described as a gentleman.
A junzi. A person that, Liu Bei had said, was in great scarcity among the several worlds humans inhabit, because the values of the ancient world were held close only by those away from Earth, because Earth had been far too corrupted by the presence of Cao Mengde.
Once, Liu Bei had offered Zhuge Kongming the title of lingjun, for Liu Bei considered himself a junzi, and he gladly and willingly obeyed Zhuge Kongming’s commands. That man, he had once told Yunchang, had greater wisdom and intelligence than all three sworn brothers had put together. So, it was only fitting for him to hold such an honoured title.
Zhuge Kongming had demurred. It was far too heavy a burden for him to carry, he said, for he was but human at the end. To be a junzi was already too high a pedestal for most of them in this current world to reach, much less a lingjun.
In the face of such objection, Liu Bei had told Yunchang later, what could he do but acquiesce? What could he do but to retract his own words, and admit grudgingly that there was still much he himself needed to accomplish before he could take upon the title of junzi?
Yunchang had only nodded, and filed away the knowledge that junzi and lingjun were both greatly important titles that only the best among the best could carry. It must be so, because Zhuge Kongming had said so, and Zhuge Kongming had been born and raised on Mars, only the barest stone’s throw from Earth.
Now… Now Yunchang knew these, too: unlike what Liu Bei had said, Earth had no lack of junzi, and there was even a man so respected that he could command even those who were granted the title of being above all others. And that man, from the barest snippets Yunchang had heard, worked for Cao Mengde.
If the lingjun was the greatest a human could achieve, and Cao Mengde had one in his employ, what did that make Cao Mengde? Was he, then, greater than the dragon embroidered on the Emperor’s robes?
Than the Emperor himself? No. It couldn’t be.
Liu Bei had said it himself: the Emperor was a child, unable to wrest the power Cao Mengde had stolen from him back into his own hands. If that was the case, then… didn’t it mean that Cao Mengde was—
Yunchang skirted away from the thought without finishing it. It was not only a potential betrayal of his older sworn brother, but also threatened to upend the world order that had been in place since most of Earth’s land mass had been wiped out and humans had escaped into the cold comforts of space.
He wasn’t a scholar. He was but a soldier. He shook his head hard and tried to focus once more on the conversation between the Emperor and Cao Mengde.
“—ozone layer over there is really bad, though,” the boy was saying. “So, I don’t know if it’s possible.”
“The blueprints are plans for a machine to rebuild the ozone,” Cao Mengde said, tone patient like he was repeating himself yet again. “The best place for us to test it out is at the worst area.”
“I guess,” the Emperor said. His sleeves nearly smacked him in the face as he stretched his hands up, interlocking his fingers as he stretched his shoulders. “There were just a lot of pictures of that area that I’ve found, and I want to see it.”
“What about those pictures you like best?” Cao Mengde asked.
“The little fat birds,” the Emperor replied immediately, grinning from one side of his mouth. “The way they fly in the video is funny; their bodies don’t move while their wings just go so fast they’re blurred even on camera. I don’t even know if there’s a word for how they fly.”
“Likely not,” Cao Mengde provided, chuckling. “But the birds won’t be there,” he reminded the boy in a tone gentler than any he had ever used, even with Yunchang. “They had died out centuries ago, remember?”
“I know, I know,” the Emperor said, turning his head in a big huff. “And it doesn’t matter if they have died out! Just seeing the places where they used to live is fine.”
“Those don’t exist anymore either,” Cao Mengde said. “The ice has all melted; that’s why most of the land masses up north you saw from pictures no long exist. Everything has sunk underwater.” He didn’t even bother stepping aside, weathering the Emperor’s weak slap on the arm with an indulgent smile.
The Emperor heaved a long sigh. “You’re no fun—” He paused, and suddenly jabbed a finger into the air. “Puffins! That’s the name of the birds!”
“I’m sure Your Imperial Majesty is right,” Cao Mengde said mildly.
“Of course,” the Emperor grinned. “Anyway, tell me what you’d do with a machine to repair the ozone layer.”
“Exactly what Your Imperial Majesty desires,” Cao Mengde inclined his head. “The layer above the Arctic took the greatest damage, so we can try to repair that first. And if it works…”
“Then it can work for the rest of the world, too,” the Emperor finished, sighing. “Though nothing we can do now would make the puffins come back.”
“Do you really want them to come back?” Cao Mengde asked. “Once the ozone layer is repaired and it is once again safe to be in the area, perhaps Xun-lingjun and I can think up of an idea to try to find remnants of the birds. Even a tiny bit of DNA…”
“Really?” the Emperor brightened immediately, whirling on his heel to stare at Cao Mengde. “You can do that?”
“The technology—”
“No, no, I mean,” the Emperor waved an impatient hand. “Isn’t there some battle you must fight? Some rebels out there who are going against my rule, or something like that?”
Every careless word from the boy was like another finger added to the icy fist closing around Yunchang’s heart.
“Oh?” Cao Mengde raised an eyebrow. “Is that Your Imperial Majesty finally showing some interest in ruling your people?”
The Emperor snorted. “What for?” he tossed out. “You do it far better than I do, or ever can.”
Liu Bei had always told him that they fought for the Emperor, because the Emperor had been cruelly and unlawful deprived of his right to rule.
“You could learn,” Cao Mengde said, tone very mild. “You are, after all, the Imperial Majesty.”
Tossing his head back, the boy laughed. It was not the carefree laughter of a child that he had been giving Cao Mengde this whole time, but neither was it the bitter laughter of an old man that Yunchang could feel building up in the back of his own throat. It was somewhere in-between.
It was the laughter of a man who—
“I know my own limits,” the Emperor said, and Yunchang let out a shuddering breath.
“Keep walking with me, Cao Mengde,” the boy said, striding forward again. “And tell me more about those blueprints you and Xun-lingjun found.”
A brief flick of his sleeves sent Earth’s dirt scattering all over, some landing on the grass blades in a display of dull brown against grass green that made Yunchang ache desperately for a camera to take pictures to show his sworn brothers.
Then the Emperor lowered his hands again, and once more dragged the silk ends over the ground.
Even to Yunchang’s inexperienced eyes, the tails of the embroidered dragons had been irrevocably stained.
Cao Mengde lifted his hands in the traditional salute, and bowed his head low again. “Of course, Your Imperial Majesty,” he murmured.
When Cao Mengde straightened, his gaze shifted to meet Yunchang’s. His smile was wry, and sorrow was tucked into the edges of his eyes.
And Yunchang wasn’t at all surprised.)
“Zhuge Kongming had assigned you here,” Cao Mengde was telling him now, dark eyes finding Yunchang’s unerringly. “I only ask, General, that you would—”
Yunchang lifted his hand and swept it to the side. “Move aside,” he ordered, eyes fixed upon Cao Mengde’s. “Let him and his people pass.”
“But—” Zhuge Kongming had assigned Jiang Wei to him, Yunchang knew, because Zhuge Kongming could not trust him to capture Cao Mengde.
As always, Zhuge Kongming was right and wise.
Yunchang bent his knees. Without taking his eyes off of Cao Mengde’s face, he wrapped his arm around Jiang Wei’s neck. A brief squeeze, and the boy’s eyes rolled to the back of his head. Yunchang slowly lowered him to the ground.
“I do not wish to be the cause of your death,” Cao Mengde said.
They were separated by miles of empty vacuum. Even if Yunchang reached out now, all he would touch was the cold screen.
Yet he could almost feel the warmth of Cao Mengde’s breath upon his nape.
“That would be for me to handle,” he said. A brief glance around him told him that these were still his people: incapacitating Jiang Wei had not moved any of them at all. Yunchang wouldn’t be surprised if all of them had already expected this.
Yunchang walked over to the controls
“Why?” Cao Mengde asked.
“During the time I was with you,” Yunchang spoke, lowering his head to stare at his hands as they flew upon the controls, sending out the signal to his fleet to open a path for Mengde to the wormhole, “you treated me well. This is a return of the favour.”
“General,” Cao Mengde said, the title falling heavy from his lips, “I do not wish to be the cause of your death.”
How rare it was for one as eloquent as Cao Mengde to repeat himself.
Tipping his head up, Yunchang smiled and said, “Neither do I want to be the cause of yours.”
Their eyes met again. There was a line, Yunchang knew, from the ancients: one glance that seemed to stretch out to a thousand years. He could almost feel Cao Mengde’s breath on his neck, could almost feel his heartbeat pressing against his own wrist, right where his pulse sat underneath the thin skin.
Finally, he turned away. Another few taps of the controls, and his own ship turned, and moved aside.
“The way is clear.” Yunchang’s voice was barely loud enough to be heard by his own ears, and definitely not enough for the mics to pick up.
Still, he knew that Cao Mengde could hear.
“General,” he could feel against his own lips. “The next time we meet, I hope our feet could tread upon the soil of Earth together.”
So many hopes within a single sentence. So much weight within a single breath.
“Return once more to Earth, my lord,” Yunchang lowered his head. “And guard it well.”
(Liu Bei had said: we fought for the Emperor. Liu Bei had said: Cao Mengde was a tyrant.
Yunchang knew: the Emperor was a child who neither wanted nor needed power. Yunchang knew: an Earth under Cao Mengde’s hand had a chance to return to its former glory. Yunchang knew: the path he and his sworn brothers had chosen to walk was not the correct one.
He knew this, too: the wine he had drunk at the peach garden, and the glaive he had carved out of the peach wood branch, were merely symbols of this war. Every time he lifted his now-cedar glaive to fight, standing ahead of Liu Bei to guard him and shoulder to shoulder with Zhang Fei to support him, he only prolonged this war.
But to know was not to act. But to know was not to change.
Like an old tree that had remained rooted to its spot for decades, reaching desperate hands up towards the thin sunlight peeking up through the canopy, he could not bend.
All he could do was to wait for a gale strong enough to break him instead.
Yunchang had never seen the sun. He had never felt the warmth of Earth’s gales.
He could only use their shadows as metaphors.)