As Cao Cao released Xuzhou’s siege and rode toward Yanzhou, Puyang (濮陽), a city of Yanzhou, already stood under Lü Bu’s banner. Chen Gong (陳宮) offered Lü Bu a quiet proposal. “There is one man we may use. Have Tian (田氏), a rich household of Puyang, send a false letter to Cao Cao saying he will open the gate by night. When Cao believes the letter and enters, set fires from every side and burn him at a stroke.”

Lü Bu nodded. Tian wrote the letter and sent it to Cao Cao. Cao Cao received it. At his side Liu Ye (劉曄) spoke cautiously, “Your Lordship. This letter is suspect.” Cao Cao laughed. “Tian is a rich household of Puyang. Unable to endure Lü Bu’s tyranny, he turns to our side naturally. Tonight we enter Puyang.”

That night Cao Cao led ten thousand light cavalry to Puyang’s gate. The gate stood open. Cao Cao rode in at the head. The streets inside the city were silent. Only the doors of every house along both sides were shut.

Cao Cao paused for a breath. A strange quietness pressed from behind him.

At that moment, drums sounded from four directions together. From the rooftops of every house, fire poured down. The center of Puyang’s main street turned into a sea of fire. Cao Cao’s ten thousand light cavalry were, all at once, trapped inside a great ring.

From the front, Lü Bu rode down with a company. The tip of the Sky-Piercing Halberd flashed red under the red light. Cao Cao turned his horse backward, but the way behind was also blocked. He turned right; another company blocked him. He turned left; the left too was blocked. Cao Cao’s body was caught within the middle of a fire.

At that moment a large man drew up beside Cao Cao. It was Dian Wei (典韋), holding a pair of iron halberds in both hands. “My Lord. I shall open a road.” Dian Wei swung the two halberds together and cleft a whole line of armor in a single stroke. He cried loud. “My Lord. Follow this road.”

Cao Cao followed Dian Wei. The two rode toward the northern gate of Puyang. Before the gate Lü Bu had already taken his stand. The Sky-Piercing Halberd pointed at Cao Cao’s face. Lü Bu’s voice rang loud. “Where is Cao Cao? Hand him over, and the rest shall not be asked.”

Cao Cao’s two eyes widened. Under the firelight, his face was plainly visible. He hastily covered his long beard with one hand, hiding it inside the palm. Avoiding the tip of Lü Bu’s halberd, he called out in a loud voice. “He fled ahead. The man on the red horse there is Cao Cao.”

Lü Bu was deceived by that line. He turned his horse and rode forward. Cao Cao, following Dian Wei, slipped out of the northern gate. Below a hill outside the gate, Cao Cao drew a great breath. The grain of beard inside his palm was wet with sweat.

Behind him, Puyang burned on into the night. Some of his ten thousand light cavalry did not ride out of the fire. Their names would be written on no headstone, yet their horses’ hooves had bought the breath Cao Cao drew under that hill. He knew it and said nothing about it. Some debts a general acknowledges in speeches; some he acknowledges by never again taking a rich man’s false letter at face value. Cao Cao would, in the decades to come, be famous for the second kind of acknowledgment.

Dian Wei knelt beside him, wiping blood from the edges of his two iron halberds. He too did not speak. A guard who has just cleared a path through a fire rarely requires praise inside the hour he cleared it. Praise belongs to the next morning’s table; the hour itself belongs to the weight of the halberd.

Above them, the sky showed the color of a sky before another morning. In a few hours, word would begin to travel through every army of Yanzhou, and then of Xuzhou, and then of Chang’an: that a rich household had opened a gate, that four fires had risen at once, and that one general had walked out beneath a hand held over his own beard. Each army would tell the story differently; yet each would end at the same image of that hand. Some gestures of survival, once performed, become in time the shorthand by which a man’s whole life is remembered. Cao Cao would now live, for a long time, under the shorthand of one hand upon a beard at a burning gate.

The sixteenth night of Book 2 deepened quietly below a hill outside Puyang’s gate. The three characters Bogyanghwa (濮陽火, the fire of Puyang) were planted as a seed: the breath on which a rich household’s false letter, the fire of four sides, and the road of two iron halberds gathered at one seat. Day 45’s Dangigung of the single bow had crossed, this night, into the grain of another bow at Puyang’s fire.

—

WIA Code 스캐너로 비추면 인터넷 없이 발행 사실과 위·변조 여부를 확인할 수 있습니다.
휴대폰 기본 카메라로 찍으면 스캐너 안내 페이지가 열립니다 — 기사 바로 열기

움직이는 코드는 스트림입니다 — WIA Code 스캐너로 약 37초 비추면 기사 전문(사진 포함)이 폰에 저장되어 인터넷 없이도 읽을 수 있습니다.

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