Chasing the Phoenix, page 20
He gave not the least indication that he had seen the newcomers.
The scouts consulted with one another and then two of them, spurring their horses to a canter, went down the main avenues to either side of the House of Joyous Governance. Hooves clattering on stone, they disappeared around the back of the building.
Silence.
The two remaining scouts waited. And waited. And waited yet more. But their comrades did not return.
When it became clear that the missing scouts would never reappear, the survivors wheeled their horses about and fled.
Darger lifted his hands from his instrument and waited.
* * *
TIME ENOUGH passed for the scouts to report their findings to their commanders and for a long argument to ensue. Then the assembled Three Gorges army stirred, bulged, and gave birth to a lesser body of men. With neither hurry nor delay, a force of perhaps two hundred soldiers advanced upon the city, led by a stocky woman and a dozen or so officers.
The woman was doubtless Shrewd Fox, and the officers the highest-ranking of her staff. No career officer with enough clout to insist upon accompanying her would pass by the opportunity to be a part of what they were sure would be a famous victory.
On their approach, Darger began to play again. He had taken a pedagogical draft that gave him the skill to play the guqin, but, being unpracticed, his technique was shaky. Still, he was not looking to gain the enemy’s admiration. He was presenting them with a story they would think they understood.
In disciplined array, the contingent of soldiers passed into Free Trade Square, its best warriors first, its officers next, and all the rest following.
They filled the square, and the command staff formed a line below the balcony. Darger continued to play, as if nothing had happened. The officers looked at one another.
Then Ceo Shrewd Fox stood in her stirrups. “Perfect Strategist!” she shouted. “If that is indeed your name. You set a false trap for me, expecting I would flee with my tail between my legs. But I am too canny a fox to fall for such obvious tricks.” Several of her subordinates grinned at one another. “I know that your army has been stricken by the plague and that you have not enough vital men to hold the city. Your game has been played, and it is over. I call upon you to surrender.”
Darger ceased playing his guqin.
The last note faded into silence.
As if this were a signal—which it was—the inner walls of Harmonious Intercourse Gate collapsed in a cloud of flour-dough mortar and a tumble of painted wooden bricks. Soldiers hidden behind the false walls, led by Vicious Brute, emerged to seize the outer doors, swing them shut, and bolt them with an enormous beam of wood. The inner doors followed suit. Meanwhile, cavalry came pouring from behind all the buildings fronting on the square, and archers and riflemen swarmed onto every rooftop and balcony, popped up on the city wall, and appeared in every window, all of them facing inward and pointing their weapons at Shrewd Fox’s soldiers.
By the time any of those soldiers could react, it was too late.
Darger stood. In a loud, clear voice, he said, “You are surrounded, outnumbered, and imprisoned, Ceo Shrewd Fox. If you try to fight, you and all your subordinates will die. But if you surrender, I give you my word as a gentleman that your people will be treated leniently.”
Shrewd Fox looked stunned.
“The choice is yours,” Darger said with just a touch of complacency.
* * *
WHEN THE square had been cleared, soldiers in the uniforms of Three Gorges troops opened the gatehouse doors again, raised Three Gorges flags, and waved the waiting troops into the city. Because all their first-rate officers had already been captured and only mediocrities remained in command, the enemy did not hesitate to do so. Once in Free Trade Square, they were divided into small troops and sent down the side streets to be surrounded, disarmed, and escorted to temporary processing facilities. There, the joyous ones swiftly and efficiently integrated the losing army into the Hidden Emperor’s Immortals.
Darger was kept busy overseeing the seizure of the Three Gorges river fleet, the decommissioning and recommissioning of officers, the tallying and assessment of seized weapons, the distribution of new uniforms (which every tailor and seamstress in the city had been working on since the plan was first devised), the swearing of oaths, the debriefing of spies from both sides, and a hundred related chores as well.
It took the rest of the day, but by sundown all that remained of the Three Gorges army was a scattering of deserters, fleeing in all directions and carrying with them the news of Shrewd Fox’s astonishingly sudden reversal of fortune.
Darger, however, was left with a nagging suspicion that something important had been left undone.
“What am I forgetting?” he said aloud.
A joyous one standing nearby said, “Many things, undoubtedly, noble sir. But if you are asking which previously scheduled task you have not yet performed, it is your interview with Ceo Shrewd Fox.”
At his direction, the joyous one lead Darger to a conference room. There, as soon as the door closed behind him, he said, “You are dismissed.”
All the joyous ones present of course left immediately. Not so the guards. “That is not possible, sir,” one protested. “This is a dangerous woman!”
“It is true that had her actions been performed as a civilian, Shrewd Fox would rightly be regarded as a criminal and a sociopath,” Darger admitted. “However, as they were done in the course of her duty as an officer, she is a virtuous woman and worthy to be treated as such. Depart at once or you will experience the usual punishments visited upon soldiers who disobey a direct order.” As they left, Darger could not help reflecting that the day when he could not handle a virtuous opponent would be the day he turned to an honest line of work.
The famed Ceo Shrewd Fox turned out to be a little woman with a hard, pinched face and eyes like two black buttons. She stood rigid and proud. “I have fought honorably,” she said, “and I am entitled to an honorable death.”
“Nobody wishes you to die,” Darger said. “Least of all me. Please, sit. I am exhausted, and to sit while you remain standing would be the soul of rudeness. Thank you.” Throwing himself into a chair, he resumed his line of thought. “It is the Hidden Emperor’s decision that you should take command of those armies of the province (for it is no longer a state) of Three Gorges remaining in the field and in his name use them to reclaim the nations to the south as part of his empire. With your military prowess and their relative weakness, I have no doubt you will make short work of them.”
Startled, Shrewd Fox said, “If I left Three Gorges unprotected, it would be overrun by armies from Twin Cities and the Republic of Central Plains.” Then, controlling herself, “But of course that is no longer any responsibility of mine.”
“If I was able to catch Shrewd Fox with a stratagem that was old ages before the rise of Utopia,” Darger said gently, “can you doubt that I can handle your enemies with equal ease? Not that they will be enemies for long. A new age is come to China—or perhaps I should say that an old one has returned. When the southern nations are subdued, you will come back to Crossroads to find it as you left it in all ways but one—it will be part of a nation at peace with itself and the world. Now. Will you accept the emperor’s offer?”
“I … for the second time today, I am caught by surprise. This must be what it is like to be of ordinary intelligence. I cannot say that I like it much.”
“It is hardly your fault that you were defeated, for you had only your own native genius to rely upon while I had the infallible mathematical science of psychopolemology. I applied a derivative hyperinversion to the set of all possible outcomes, mapped the result onto a swallowtail catastrophe algorithm, and then, once I had equaled out the Boolean constants, the solution was obvious.”
“I am not familiar with your terminology,” Shrewd Fox said, “but I see what you did clearly enough. Magicians do much the same thing when they alter an illusion. If the audience is confident that an ace of spades will be pulled from a deck of cards, the conjurer turns the entire deck to aces of spades. Or causes the card to catch fire. Or throws the cards into the air, where they turn into ravens and fly away. You knew I believed you to be a blowhard and a fraud and so confronted me with a trick that only a fool would think I’d fall for. Thinking I knew your thinking, I let myself be trapped in my own trap. Had I shown a proper respect for your cunning, I assure you that this day would have gone differently.”
“You have an exceptional mind, Shrewd Fox, and I am glad not to have to face you on the field of battle again. Tell me. As one strategist to another—what do you think of my chances against my next set of enemies?”
The smallest of grins appeared and disappeared on the ceo’s face. “It is almost too easy, this one. You have the one great advantage that, try though I might, I was never quite able to arrange.”
“Which is?”
“Twin Cities and the Republic of Central Plains must now fear you even more than they fear each other. Your forces swept out of a backwater land to conquer nation after nation in a matter of months. The renowned strategist Shrewd Fox had you cornered, yet you effortlessly turned the tables on her. Now your dread gaze moves northward. They will have no choice but to unite against you.”
“And how, if you were in my position, would you handle them?”
She told him.
For the space of one long breath, Darger said nothing. Then he flung up his hands in astonishment. “What an—”
Shrewd Fox held up both hands. “Stop. You were going to say, ‘What an extraordinary coincidence!’ or some such thing, when it is nothing of the sort. You needed a new strategy, and you plucked it from my brain. That is all. There is no need for you to pretend otherwise.”
“I assure you, madam…” Darger began. Then, “Oh, bugger it. You see through me, Shrewd Fox. I am dazzled and I am charmed. Indeed, if I admired you any more than I do at this moment, it would be necessary for me to immediately propose marriage to you.”
“I would not dream of marrying a man as clever as myself,” Shrewd Fox said. “I could never be certain what he was thinking.”
* * *
SEVERAL DAYS later, the Hidden Emperor called a meeting to plan the next phase of the campaign. As they were standing in the first-floor anteroom of Yellow Crane Tower, waiting to be blindfolded and led up stairs and down, White Squall said to Darger, “Will Shrewd Fox work with us?”
“She asked for a few more days to think it over. I told her that meant that she had already made up her mind and was angling for an increase in pay. That made her laugh and may well end up costing the emperor money. But she still insisted she needed more time. The Hidden Emperor looked grim when I reported this to him, but said nothing. And you? How go your endeavors?”
“Powerful Locomotive wishes me to read to him,” White Squall said in a disgusted tone. “Love poetry, some of it! If you can imagine. I sat at his bedside for hours while the fate of Crossroads was being decided without me. Every day since, I do the same thing. Then I have to return to my empty room and sleep alone in my cold and joyless bed.”
“It will be easier to drive Prince First-Born Splendor mad with jealousy this way. I take it your lovers’ quarrel went well?”
“Too well. Terrible things were said. I cried for hours.”
“Then all is as it should be. Remember what the Bard of Avon said: ‘The course of true love never did run smooth.’”
“Spare me your aphorisms, please. I begin to suspect you make them up.”
* * *
THE HIDDEN Emperor today wore neither bandages nor scarves but a dragon mask, which made him look dangerous and wise. As always when he sat in council, the Phoenix Bride gleamed demurely to his left-hand side. Today, however, a woman veiled in black so that her face could not be seen sat to his right.
It was rarely good news when the Hidden Emperor did something new. Nevertheless, Darger said, as he had planned, “As must be obvious to all, our next move is to use the Three Gorges Fleet to move down the Long River in order to engage with our northern enemies. Twin Cities and the Republic of Central Plains are the only other powers of any significance in central China, and they each have armies the equal of our own Immortals. To meet with one army and defeat it, only to shortly thereafter face a well-rested second force in battle, would be folly. So I propose to fight them both simultaneously.”
So soon after the startling victory that Darger had conjured up out of thin air, no one present was anxious to gainsay the Perfect Strategist. Nevertheless, the room was full of dismayed faces.
At a nod from his master, Capable Servant spread a map on the conference table. Darger continued, “The best and simplest way to arrange this is to write to the heads of both nations, proposing to meet their armies upon a mutually agreed-upon time and location. I shall suggest the floodplains before the city of Opera, with our forces positioned upriver and theirs arrayed before the city.”
That was too much for his audience. Several advisors leaped to their feet.
“This is madness!” General Iron Ridge cried. “You propose to place the Immortals between the river and a lake. To the south, solid land dissolves into a swamp. If we have to retreat, we can go only so far before being boxed in by marshlands. Meanwhile, the enemy will have complete freedom to maneuver. No one should willingly give up advantages of time, surprise, or terrain. Yet you concede all three.”
“As I do not intend to lose, the question of retreat is irrelevant,” Darger said.
“You are fortunate,” General Celestial Beauty said, “no one can deny that. But your luck will not hold forever. We cannot hop from one wildly unlikely stratagem to another, like a child crossing a creek by leaping stones, forever.”
“On the contrary. That is how I have lived my life to date—and if you examine your conscience candidly, you will surely realize it has been your own strategy as well. Yet here we are! Somehow, we seem to be doing well.”
“Sooner or later, one of those stones will be slippery underfoot and you will fall. Luck is impartial.”
“That is why we were put on earth in the first place—to give luck a little partial shove,” Darger said. “Cao White Squall, do you have anything to say?”
Rising to her feet, the cao said, “I cannot imagine how the Perfect Strategist hopes for victory with such a plan. But I am sure he will achieve it.”
General Celestial Beauty almost spat. “Faith is no substitute for wisdom. Arrogance is a poor stand-in for competence. And luck is an abstraction—you cannot shove it!”
“If you doubt my ability to apply that shove,” Darger said, “then simply urge the Hidden Emperor not to listen to me. I will abide by his wisdom.”
All turned toward the emperor.
The Hidden Emperor gestured for everybody to be seated, and was obeyed. “There is only one person qualified to pass judgment on such an audacious plan as this. That is our new chief executive officer of the soon-to-be Southern Army.” He turned to the veiled woman. “Shrewd Fox? Tell my advisors what you have told me.”
The former and now current ceo lifted her veil. Her dark eyes glittered with amusement. “I have heard the Perfect Strategist’s plan in detail, and I am certain it will work. It is quite simply brilliant. I could not have come up with anything better myself.”
“Then it is approved,” the Hidden Emperor said.
A low moan went through the room. But no one stood to object.
“I shall confer now with the Ceo of the South, the Cao of the Division of Sappers and Archaeologists, and the Acting Ceo of the North. All others may leave.”
* * *
WHEN THEY four (or five, if one counted the Phoenix Bride) were alone, the Hidden Emperor took off his mask and remarked to Darger, “Shrewd Fox told me you offered her money. That was uncharacteristically clumsy of you, Perfect Strategist. A talent such as hers is not to be bought with gold.”
“May I ask, Majesty, what you did offer her?”
The emperor nodded to Shrewd Fox, who said, “The Hidden Emperor has given me permission to accompany you to Opera as an observer, so that I might see with my own eyes the defeat of the enemies I have spent all my adult life fighting.”
“Ahhhhh.”
“But what of the Southern Army, in your absence?” White Squall asked.
“I will leave behind my most trusted subordinates to organize the armed forces still out in the field. In any case, they could not leave Three Gorges while there was yet a military threat from the north. They will also inform the government in exile of the former nation that they are now loyal servants of the Hidden Emperor. Those who embrace their new status will keep their positions in the regional government. The others…” Shrewd Fox shrugged.
Darger nodded sagely. “I see. Shall we go over the order of battle?”
“I am sure it is up to your usual standards,” the Hidden Emperor said. “Shrewd Fox, send for the stenographer.”
The ceo clapped her hands twice. From a small doorway to one side, a servant appeared, notepad in one hand, quill and ink in the other.
“Your plan requires letters of challenge. You may dictate them now.”
Darger swiftly ordered his thoughts, then said, “The first begins: To my beloved sister, the so-called Chief Speaker of the rebel province styling itself the Republic of Central Plains, greetings. The second begins: To my beloved children, the Hereditary Hierarchy of the breakaway state of Twin Cities, greetings. Then, word-for-word identically hereafter: Because a state of near-continual war has existed in the heartland of China the Great for over a century, because my subjects cry out to me in their misery, and because peace is a blessing which all men and women devoutly desire, your emperor has come to rectify the state and alleviate the suffering of the people. Alas, there are those who have hardened their hearts against the people, against peace, and against their rightful ruler. Therefore I must take action. On the third day of autumn, on the river plain before Opera, shall three great armies meet, as foreordained. There, an army will be crushed like a nut in the jaws of a dragon. Though my Immortals may retreat before you, do not be deceived. We will turn and fall upon our enemy with the savagery and mercilessness of the fabled Locomotive. Remember this and ponder it well. Then it should be signed, The Hidden Emperor, by the Grace and Mandate of Heaven Ruler of All China.”
