The Warring States, Books 1-3

by Greg Strandberg

  A gurgling cough came from the bed and the three men looked that way. Marquis Wu was holding his blood-stained cloth to his mouth as the cough came again. Both Pang and Zhai looked at one another, but Hui only stared at his father. He knew that the sound coming from his father’s mouth was not a cough but as close as he could now get to a laugh.

  “You find this amusing, father?” Hui said as he took a few steps closer to the bed. “Does the prospect of Wei being annihilated give you humor?”

  Wu pulled the cloth from his mouth and stared up at his son with those sunken eyes.

  “You brought this on yourself, Hui,” he said in a wheezing whisper. “What did you think would happen when you broke the peace?”

  “I certainly didn’t think that Qin would be the next to invade us.”

  A trace of a smile came to Wu’s lips. “The population of Qin has been rising steadily for nearly a generation. The changes that’ve been made have done much to make them great.”

  “So now Qin is great? Great enough to defeat us?”

  “Perhaps,” Wu said faintly before another fit of coughing took him.

  Hui turned away in disgust and looked at Pang. “The messages say only that they’re moving toward Hexi, nowhere else?”

  “That is correct.”

  Hui moved to the maps and both men gathered closer around the table.

  “Here,” Hui said as he pointed at one map that showed the western-portion of the Seven States. “They’ll have to come out of the Hangu Pass and then move northeast. Is there any way we can bottle them up there?”

  Pang shook his head, even though Hui was still staring down at the map. “By now they’d have already come through the pass. It’s less than a day from there to our border.”

  “So we have to assume that they’re already at the border by now,” Zhai said. “That is of course if they’re indeed moving through the Pass.”

  Hui narrowed his eyes and looked up at him. “Where else would they come from?”

  Pang pointed down at the map. “They could circle around the Helan Mountains and swing north where the Jing River ends. That would take them right into northern Hexi. From there they could push south toward our capital.”

  “They could push north like Pang said while also moving another army through the pass,” Zhai said as he stared down at the map. “Although I don’t think they would have enough troops for two large movements such as that.”

  Hui stared at Zhai for a moment and nodded before looking to Pang. “What forces do we have in Hexi?”

  “Perhaps as few as five thousand men are stationed there,” Pang answered. “Not enough to stop the amount of men that Qin is bringing forth.”

  “How long will it take us to marshal our forces around the capital and gather those still along the Chu and Zhao borders,” Hui asked.

  “We can have the soldiers around the capital marching north before the day is through,” Pang said, “but the soldiers on the border will take longer to get moving. The message alone will take a day to reach them.”

  “Is it wise to move our forces away from the borders with Chu and Zhao so eager to invade?” Zhai asked. “We’ve already lost large portions of land to the north and south.”

  “What else am I to do?” Hui asked loudly, desperation in his voice. “Am I to keep the forces along the border to stop Chu and Zhao from coming while Qin just sweeps across our lands? Or am I to pull them away to try and stop Qin, thus allowing Chu and Zhao the opportunity to invade once again?” Hui shook his head and beat his fist on the table. “There is no favorable outcome to this scenario.”

  Again the coughing came from the bed, and even Pang and Zhai recognized it as more of a laugh this time.

  “Oh, shut up, father!” Hui yelled as he turned to face the bed once again. “Unless you have a better idea, that is?”

  The laughing quickly turned into coughing and lasted a few moments, but Wu waved his hand above him in a gesture that all three men recognized as one meaning he wanted to talk. When the fit had passed he waved them over to him.

  “Map,” he wheezed, waving his hand back at the table, and Zhai went back to grab the map that they’d just been looking at.

  “Help me up,” Wu said in little more than a whisper once Zhai reached him. Zhai looked to Hui, who nodded, so he put both hands under the true Marquis of Wei’s arms and pulled him into a sitting position on the bed, surprised all the while that the man seemed to weigh little more than a feather.

  “Here,” Wu said as he slapped his hands down on his legs and looked at Zhai. Zhai stepped forward and draped the large map over the spot Wu had indicated and within moments he was tracing his fingers along the surface.

  “You will have to pull all of your forces away from the borders,” Wu said in his rasping voice. “And don’t try to rush any forces north to Hexi – it’s already lost to us.”

  “Just give Hexi to Qin?” Hui said incredulously. “That I can’t do.”

  “It is already done,” Wu said in a stronger voice as he looked sharply at his son. “Besides, we took it from Qin twenty years ago, it’s rightfully theirs, and perhaps when they have it again they’ll go back across their border.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Pang said. “Once they’re rolling over our lands it’ll be hard to stop them.”

  Wu nodded. “That’s why you’ll need all the troops available in one spot. Create two lines, one to the north to block the advance of Qin, and possibly Zhao, and another to the south to keep Chu at bay.”

  Hui leaned in closer to look at the map. “And those lines should be near the capital.”

  “No,” Wu shook his head. “Not unless you want Qin to march across hundreds of miles more of our land than is necessary.”

  “Then where?” Pang asked.

  “Here,” Wu said, pointing down at a small dot on the map that didn’t even have a name near it. “Shimen.”

  “Shimen? I’ve never heard of it,” Pang said.

  Wu looked up at his son. “Hui?”

  Hui nodded. “It’s a small town, little more than a village actually, with perhaps one or two hundred people. It lies on the southwestern edge of the Luliang Mountains and west of the Yellow River. If Qin is indeed moving toward Hexi with two armies, one moving north around the Helan Mountains, then that army would have to skirt around both ranges before pushing further south toward Anyi.”

  “The mountains will protect both our flanks then,” Pang said.

  “We’ll need them to if they come at us from both directions,” Zhai said. “We’ll be fighting on two fronts if they do decide that the Hangu Pass is not the only route into Wei.”

  Hui nodded. “It’s not the most favorable place to make a stand, but I suppose it will do.”

  “It is the only place we have,” Wu wheezed. “And that may not even be enough. The other states are out to get us, now that the peace has been broken. Even if we stop Qin now, others will follow.”

  Hui stared down at his father as he began to cough again, all the talking suddenly too much for him. His body might be gone, Hui thought, but his mind was still there, and in force. Shimen would never have occurred to Hui; he hadn’t even remembered the place until his father had pointed it out. Now as he looked at the map shaking atop his father’s legs he realized that it would either be the place of deliverance for Wei or their last stand. He wondered which his father thought it would be as he stared at him coughing. After a moment he turned to Zhai.

  “Do as my father says, call up the troops on the borders and have them move toward this Shimen. Do the same with the forces around the capital.”

  He turned to Pang.

  “Zhai will lead the forces around the capital north, but I want you to head south and take command of the army on the Chu border. What happened in Wey will be forgotten for now – make sure that you don’t make any mistakes this time.”

  Pang nodded as he looked at Hui, the Marquis’ eyes making it all too-clear that he wasn’t kidding.
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br />   “And you, Sire?” Zhai asked. “Will you be taking the field as well?”

  Hui looked down at his father, asleep now that the coughing fit was over.

  “No,” he answered slowly, “my place is here with my family.”

  Zhai nodded. “Will there be anything else?”

  Hui looked up at the two men.

  “Stop Qin. If they get by you then Wei is finished.”

  Both men looked at one another and then back at Hui before nodding.

  Hui looked to each, hoping they were up to the task, dreading the outcome if they were not. “Now go,” he said.

  They went.

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