“When I am fighting next to you,” Zhang Fei said, wiping streams of blood from his black face, “I do not know what fear is. My mind is harder, my heart keener, my spirit the greater as our might lessens.”
The one hundred men with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei gradually became fifty men, and then fifteen, and finally, only Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were left, charging back and forth through the sea of swords and spears that was Cao Cao’s army.
It was evening again. Cao Cao called for a halt to the battle, pulling his troops back. Rivers of blood ran across the field, and hacked-off limbs and heads littered the ground like sea shells on the beach at low tide. The evening sun cast long, scarlet shadows over everything so that one could no longer be sure whether the redness was from the light or blood.
“Surrender,” Cao Cao called out to them. “You have proven your courage and loyalty to Liu Bei. No god or man would ask more of you.”
“I would,” Guan Yu said.
Though Cao Cao was a man with a cold heart and a narrow mind, he was overwhelmed with admiration for Guan Yu.
“Will you drink with me,” he said, “before you die?”
“Of course,” said Guan Yu. “I never say no to sorghum mead.”
“No sorghum mead here, I’m afraid. But I have some barrels of a new drink the barbarians of the West have given to me as tribute.”
The drink was made from grapes, a new fruit brought over the desert by the barbarian emissaries of the West.
? ? ?
You mean wine?
Yes, but that was the first time Guan ?Yu had seen it.
? ? ?
Guan Yu and Cao Cao drank it in jade cups, whose cold stony surface complemented the warmth of the wine excellently. It was getting dark, but the jade from which the cups were made had an inner glow to them that lit up the faces of the two men. The pretty barbarian girls who were part of the tribute to Cao Cao played a mournful tune on their strange pear-shaped lutes, which they called pi pa.
Guan Yu listened to the music, lost in his own thoughts. Suddenly he stood up and began to sing to the tune of the barbarian lute:
Give me grape wine overflowing night-glowing cups,
I would drink it all but the pi pa calls me to my horse.
If I should fall down drunk on the battlefield, do not laugh at me,
For how many have ever returned from war, how many?
He tossed the cup away. “Lord Cao Cao, I thank you for the wine, but I think it is now time to get back to what we have to do.”
? ? ?
“So, that banjo-thing you were playing, that’s a pi pa, isn’t it?” ?The mournful song Logan had been singing was still in Lily’s head. She wanted to ask Logan to teach it to her.
“Yes, it is.” He shifted the pi pa around on his knees, cradling its pear-shaped body lovingly, like a baby. “This one is pretty old, and it sounds better with every year that passes.”
“But it’s not really Chinese, is it?”
Logan was thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess you’d say it’s really not, not if you look back thousands of years. But I don’t think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.”
“That’s not what I would have expected to hear from a Celestial,” Jack said. He was still trying to get used to the taste of the sorghum liquor that Logan assured him was what every Chinese boy drank along with mother’s milk. Swallowing it was like swallowing a mouthful of razors. Lily saw his furrowed brows as he took another drink and laughed.
“Why not?”
“I thought you Celestials were supposed to be mighty jealous of your long history, Confucius being from before Christ and everything. I didn’t think I’d hear one of you admit that you learned anything from the barbarians.”
Logan laughed at this. “I myself have some blood of the northern barbarians flowing in my veins. What is Chinese? What is barbarian? These questions will not put rice into bellies or smiles onto the faces of my companions. I’d much rather sing about pretty girls with green eyes from west of the Gobi Desert and play my pi pa.”
“If I didn’t know better, Logan, I’d say you sound like a Chinese American.”
Jack and Logan laughed at this. “Gan bei, gan bei,” they said, and tossed back cups of whiskey and sorghum liquor.
“I want to learn ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ from you. Ever since I heard the two of you singing that night, I can’t get it out of my head.”
“You have to finish the story first!” Lily said.
“All right. But I have to warn you. I’ve told this story so many times, and each time I tell it, it’s different. I’m not sure I know how the story ends anymore.”
? ? ?
How long did the battle last? Was it still against the treacherous Cao Cao or the deceitful Sun Quan? Guan Yu could not remember.
He did remember telling Zhang Fei to leave and get back to Liu Bei.
“I am in charge of the men, and because of my carelessness, I have led them into death. I cannot show my face back in Cheng Du, where the wives and fathers of those men will ask me why I have returned when their husbands and sons have not. Fight your way out, Brother, and seek revenge for me.”
Zhang Fei halted his horse and gave a long cry. At the piercing sound of that cry, full of sorrow and regret, the ten thousand men around them shook in their boots and stumbled back three steps each.
“Good-bye, Brother.” Zhang Fei spurred his horse to the west, and the soldiers parted to make way for his spear and horse, fought with one another to get out of his path.
“On, on!” Cao Cao shouted angrily. “The man who captures Guan Yu shall be made a Duke.”
Red Hare stumbled. He had lost too much blood. Guan Yu deftly leapt off the back of the war stallion just as he fell to the ground.
“I’m sorry, old friend. I wish I could have protected you.” Blood and sweat dripped from his beard, and tears carved out clear channels through the dried blood and dirt on his face.
He threw down his sword and put his hands behind him, looking for all the world like a scholar-poet about to recite from the Book of Poetry in front of the Emperor at his court. He stared at the approaching soldiers with contempt.
? ? ?
“They cut off his head at the next sunrise,” Logan said.
“Oh,” said Lily. This wasn’t the ending she had wanted to hear.
The three of them were silent for a bit, while the smoke from Ah Yan’s cooking in the kitchen drifted into the clear sky. The sound of spatula on wok sounded like the din of sword on shield to Lily’s ears.
“You are not going to ask me what happened next?” Logan said.
“What do you mean?” Jack and Lily said at the same time.
? ? ?
“What do you mean?” Cao Cao shouted, and stood up in a hurry, overturning the writing desk in the process. The ink stone and brushes flew everywhere. “What do you mean you can’t find it?”
“Lord Cao Cao, I am telling you what I saw with my own eyes. One minute his head was rolling on the ground, and the next his head and body were simply nowhere to be found. He . . . he disappeared into thin air.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for? Come!” Cao Cao gestured to the guards. “Tie him up and have him executed. We’ll hang his head outside my tent since he lost Guan Yu’s head.”
? ? ?
“Of course he’s not dead,” the grizzled veteran said to the pink-faced new recruits. “I was there the day Lord Guan Yu was captured. Among the one hundred thousand men of the Army of Wei, he fought as if they were nothing more than motes of dust. A man like that, do you think he would succumb to an executioner’s ax?”
“Of course he’s not dead,” Liu Bei said to Zhang Fei. They were both covered in the white armor of mourning, and they had raised an army of every last able-bodied man of the Kingdom of Shu for vengeance. “Our brother would not die when he still has the Oath of the Peach Orchard to fulfill.”