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Chapter Forty-Four: The Stallion and the Cuckoo Birds
One good deed deserves another.
Flirtatious giggles. Teasing hands. Heart-shaped lips curved into carmine pouts of affected sulkiness.
"Go ahead, General, try this."
"No, try this first."
"Come on, you know you should taste mine before you taste hers."
"General, I'm going to be very unhappy if you ignore me in favor of my sister."
More cooing, dimples, and little mewing noises of feigned displeasure. Warm plum spirits were poured, playful hands tickled at silk-covered flesh, delicate fingers traced sensual patterns over whatever bit of exposed skin that they encountered.
Amidst this scene of seeming decadence sat Ma Chao, a little unhappy, a little confused, and plenty impatient. Before him was a low teakwood table laid out with an evening meal, at his sides were two maidens as identical as a pair of peach blossoms from the same tree, and just as lovely.
"General Ma, try mine first," the girl to his left purred, while trying to stuff a piece of chicken into his closed mouth.
"No General Ma, try mine first," the girl to his right pouted competitively, attempting to drill some fish between his teeth.
There weren't many men in China who wouldn't enjoy this kind of fawning attention from two lovely sixteen-year-old twins, and even Ma Chao himself might not have objected too fiercely to said twins' adoration…had they chosen a more appropriate time and place to play their little dinner table games. As it was, camped at Jiameng Pass, with an upcoming Shu invasion looming in the horizon, certainly did not make for a winning combination to put Ma Chao in an indulgent mood.
Distracted with thoughts of battles and marching and armies swarming over from the Southeast, Ma Chao failed to realize that he'd just presented the perfect opportunity for the twins to feed their shared prize. In a single movement, they had pounced on him with mewls and squeals of delighted laughter. Ma Chao—the gallant and splendid Horse General—almost gagged on a huge mouthful of assorted poultry and seafood, as beside him, the twins giggled in triumph and clung even tighter onto his biceps.
So these were the consequences of being a hero, Ma Chao thought dryly to himself as he swallowed the food. He shifted slightly in the two girls' possessive grip, before making a silent note to never play hero again.
Or at least not to a village with eager unwed daughters prancing about.
Three Days Earlier…
"Shan Lin Village." Ma Dai craned his neck upwards as he read the faded name painted on a wooden tablet swinging by the tiny settlement's entrance. "Hmm, nice little village name."
"But where are the nice little villagers?" Ma Yun Lu pointed out, turning her face in the direction of what appeared to be the village square. "This place looks empty."
Ma Chao ignored his relatives' comments, and instead swept a scanning look of the seemingly deserted place. As per Zhang Lu's orders, he was currently leading an army of twenty thousand soldiers—if the hastily conscripted peasants could even be called that—to hold down the key stronghold that was Jiameng Pass. After days of exhausting, non-stop marching, he had discovered this cozy little mountain settlement and was hoping to lead his men inside so that they might rest for an evening.
But Shan Lin Village, as his sister had so aptly pointed out, appeared to have long been abandoned by its residents.
"Doesn't matter," Ma Chao frowned to himself, before spurring his horse into a slow trot and edging cautiously past the village gates.
After exchanging brief looks, the two younger Mas duly followed inside, and it wasn't too long before the entire Hanzhong army had filed efficiently into the weather-beaten hamlet.
Past empty dirt streets and lifeless alleys, closed shops devoid of any visible merchandise, little thatched-roof houses showing locked doors and dusty windows firmly barred by planks of wood…but no traces whatsoever of the people that must have once lived here. From atop her mare, Ma Yun Lu frowned impatiently and started to holler at her brother, "We're wasting time here; it's obvious this place is deserted! Can't blame them; I don't think I'd want to live in this old dump, either—Ow!"
Her kinsmen, who'd been pointedly ignoring her words up until that rather unexpected yelp of pain, now turned around. Ma Yun Lu was scowling and holding her temple. Already, a good-sized bruise was beginning to form, discoloring the skin to an unflattering plum-red shade. A small pebble lied innocently on the arid ground by her mare's behooved feet.
"Hey," Ma Chao turned his own horse around and began to ride back to his sister, "are you all right?"
Ma Yun Lu failed to respond, too preoccupied with searching out the culprit to bother gracing her brother with a perfunctory reassurance. Her angry efforts soon proved to be a waste, however, when said culprit boldly stepped out from behind the alley-side wheelbarrow where he'd been hiding. He was but a small child, no older than eight and rather short for his age, with a shock of black hair sticking up from his head. Yet despite his scruffy appearance, he wore his sun-bleached rags with pride…and held up his worn slingshot with even greater esteem.
"Get out of our village, you scum!" the tiny ruffian shrieked defiantly, waving his slingshot at Ma Yun Lu as if that sad little scrap of leather were a match against her spear. "We don't want no more of your army-men!"
Ma Yun Lu's eyebrows twitched dangerously, as she yelled back through her teeth, "Army-men? You thought I was a man!"
The little boy responded by shooting another pebble at her, but she was ready this time and easily deflected it with a flick of her armored wrist.
"You rotten little brat; how dare you…!" Ma Yun Lu hissed, her nostrils flaring with fury as she kicked her mare and the pair took off in pursuit of the fleeing child.
"Mei Zi(1)!" Ma Chao called out after his rampaging sister, trying to mask the amusement in his voice as he prepared to ride after the infuriated girl.
Thankfully, before he would be forced to intervene in any bloodbaths, a grizzled, salt-and-pepper-haired man in his late seventies came stumbling out, dragging the little slingshot marvel with him. The village elder promptly prostrated himself before Ma Yun Lu, forcing her to almost break her mare's neck as she hastily reined in the beast before it could trample down the human obstacles kowtowing on its path.
"What is the meaning of this?" By then, Ma Chao and the rest of his troops had caught up, inspiring Ma Yun Lu to turn her head away and make a brief Great! face.
The old man didn't lift his head from the ground, choosing to maintain his deferential position as he answered in a cracked voice, "Great General, my grandson doesn't know what he is doing. Please forgive his impudence."
Ma Yun Lu snorted at his understatement of what the boy had done to her, but her brother and cousin were in a decidedly more forgiving mood.
"We thought this village was deserted," Ma Dai spoke up gently as he rode forward. "What is going on here?"
"You just had to ask, didn't you?" Ma Yun Lu hissed accusingly at her cousin, as they both sat like carefully arranged statues on a granite bench and froze in the cold wind together.
Nightfall had descended over Shan Lin Village like an ominous storm cloud, bringing with it playful shadows, chirping cicadas, and flickering silver beams of pale moonlight. While the residents of the very much inhabited settlement crouched anxiously behind locked doors and snuffed-out candles, the two younger members of the Ma Clan were finding themselves deposited rather unceremoniously in the open. The way they'd been positioned, a garish "COME AND GET US!" sign might as well have been hanging across their foreheads…but then again, the mastermind behind this ambush—in which they were currently participating as live bait—had never been known for his subtlety.
Earlier in the afternoon, the village elder they'd confronted—whose name turned out to be Ke Gong Gong(2), and whose house happened to be the most affluent one, relatively speaking, in Shan Lin—had graciously allowed the Hanzhong army to settle in with the families of the village. Ma Chao and his relatives, as commanding officers, had been bestowed with the honor of taking up residence with the Kes themselves. Over cups of strongly-brewed tea, the family patriarch had gradually explained the reason behind his village's seeming abandonment.
"Shan Lin has always been a peaceful place," the old man began with a faint smile. "We've weathered our share of small troubles, of course, but the gods have been kind enough to protect us against true calamities. Until now."
His smile turned bitter, as he clutched at his teacup with gnarled, trembling fingers, before finally disclosing the reason for Shan Lin Village's deathly still atmosphere.
"For the past six months, we've been under siege by an army," he revealed sorrowfully. "Yellow Turbans. Or at least the tattered remains of what used to be the Yellow Turban troops. One of Zhang Jiao's old lieutenants now acts as commander, and he plans to use our village as his headquarters until he can raise enough men to stage another rebellion."
Ma Chao had scowled upon learning the source of the village's distress, setting down his own teacup with a bang just as he was about to take a sip. What followed next was an exchange between the two men in which the younger threatened bodily harm to Zhang Lu upon learning that his new lord had refused to send help, deeming Shan Lin Village too poor a settlement to waste his precious troops on, and the elder mournfully revealed that his home was a lost cause, anyway: on a personal level, the coarse army leader was demanding the Ke house's lovely sixteen-year-old twin daughters, Xiu Juan and Miao Juan, for his private entertainment. On a larger scale, the Yellow Turbans were planning to confiscate all of Shan Lin's crops for its own consumption, leaving the civilians to starve in the face of the upcoming winter.
One as dedicated to justice as Ma Chao naturally couldn't be expected to follow in his superior's example, and let an entire village get wiped out. Before he could announce that he was going to take a night away from his march to Jiameng Pass and rid Shan Lin of its yellow-turbaned plague, Ma Dai and Ma Yun Lu—the two people who knew him best—had already begun the necessary preparations to lay an ambush.
What the duo hadn't anticipated, however, was Ma Chao's need for live bait in order to ensure that the Yellow Turbans would show up that night.
And what better bait than the lovely twin girls—Xiu Juan and Miao Juan—who'd been personally selected to serve the enemy leader?
Earlier in the day, Ke Gong Gong had brought out his granddaughters to kowtow before Ma Chao—already hailed as their and their village's savior—and the young Horse General had immediately seen that the twins' delicate beauty would be hard to replicate with decoys. But the girls themselves couldn't be risked on a battlefield where stray arrows could easily rip away their lives, and in the end, Ma Chao had been forced to compromise.
So had, for that matter, the two people he trusted the most. Which was how his sister and cousin found themselves placed on a stone bench beneath a canopy of filmy willow branches at precisely midnight of that same day.
Ma Dai and Ma Yun Lu were currently shivering in the biting wind, exchanging not-so-flattering quips about their commanding officer and occasionally making a half-hearted attempt to look more like a pair of demure and helpless sixteen-year-old girls. Both were stuffed into the crimson-and-gold wedding robes that the village had fashioned for the Ke twins, although it had taken some mighty cinching and binding to squeeze Ma Dai into the diminutive Xiu Juan's outfit. Ma Yun Lu had learned a valuable lesson from her unfortunate cousin's troubles, and had simply thrown on the outermost flowered robe over her regular clothes. Heavy veils of scarlet capped off the ensemble, emphasizing that the pair were ready to be presented to the Yellow Turban leader while simultaneously de-emphasizing the glaring fact that the two Mas looked nothing like the two Kes they were masquerading as.
"What are you complaining about?" Ma Dai now moaned in humiliation. "At least you really are a girl; I'm a man and I've still got to wear a dress and makeup! My reputation's in shambles; I'll never be able to ride off into battle again and expect my opponents to see me as a viable threat! And these apples are heavy—my back's starting to ache."
Ma Yun Lu rolled her eyes at her cousin's diatribe.
"Stop whining," she drawled lazily, although she couldn't help a private snicker or two at the young man's expense.
Her laughter died in her throat when she heard the telltale thump of trotting hooves that preceded an approaching army. She could feel her cousin tense up beside her, so as discreetly as she knew how, she nudged him with her foot to signify that they should wait—for now. Don't do anything rash. See what the enemy plans to do first. Wait for our troops to reveal themselves before rushing into battle. Ma Chao had only drilled those instructions into both their heads about a dozen times. The man's obsession didn't stop at vengeance.
"Well, well, well. What a pretty pair of cuckoo birds we have here." The sneer that resounded in the midnight air was surprisingly close—apparently, the aforementioned enemy was standing directly in front of the two Mas on decoy duty.
Ma Yun Lu scowled in disgust, and had to fight to swallow back the heated retorts bubbling at her lips. Somehow, she managed to quell her flaring temper and keep her insults to herself and her head demurely lowered. Blinded as she was by her clumsy gold-tasseled veil, she could only hope that Ma Dai beside her was doing the same.
When a large green apple rolled out of the young man's dress and came to a stop by Ma Yun Lu's feet, she realized in dismay that her cousin had at least been keeping his head lowered—too well.
Above them, the rebel commander immediately stiffened.
"What's going on here?" the man snarled, reaching out with callused hands and hauling both "brides" to their feet. "Xiu Juan? Miao Juan?"
He started to roughly shake his captives by their collars, but before he could manage a good jerk or two, a bomb exploded deafeningly in the cool night wind. Battle drums beat out a thunderous roar, flaming torches sprang up from the mountainsides, and a thousand flags bearing the family name "Ma" soared proudly amidst the dancing orange flames.
Taking her cue, Ma Yun Lu flung off her stifling wedding veil and watched the face of her captor contort from shocked disbelief into a mask of dark rage.
"Not exactly," she answered his question with a smirk.
In a flash, her booted leg flew upwards, knocking his teeth right out of his mouth.
"That," Ma Dai winced, as a couple of bloody little souvenirs almost swiped him in the face, "was disgusting."
Ke Gong Gong was a cunning man, for all that he pretended to be a simple country bumpkin, Ma Chao now decided. Not only had the village elder prodded him into wiping out the ex-Yellow Turban rogues, but he'd also taken advantage of the situation to secure a privileged future for his two granddaughters. And what better social position could the twins hope to secure for themselves than that of the illustrious General Ma's chamber wives?
After the short skirmish was over and the few surviving Yellow Turbans had fled, Ke Gong Gong had come to Ma Chao and eagerly propelled him to a village-sponsored banquet in his honor. Amidst cups of wine and tears of gratitude, the old man had claimed that the only way he could demonstrate his thanks to the Hanzhong army was to award Xiu Juan and Miao Juan to the Horse General who'd so gallantly protected their honor. For all his youth, Ma Chao hadn't been fooled by the man's ceremonious words; he was familiar enough with these lines of thinking: better to be the concubines of a great man than the primary wives of simple village folk.
He was also rapidly becoming familiar with the twins' inane ability to play their coquettish little games at the most inopportune of moments. As his newest "gifts" flounced over, all pouts and kittenish coos and inviting sideways smiles, Ma Chao glared into the night sky, sure that somewhere up there, the Jade Emperor was having a good chuckle at his expense. Please don't let the Shu forces take much longer to attack Jiameng Pass, he prayed fervently, knowing that the alternative would mean his entertaining the Ke twins until the call of duty pried him away from their greedy clutches.
"General Ma, are you listening to us?" Xiu Juan purred in an injured tone, as she sashayed over and took her rightful place by his side.
"General Ma, one of your captains just made a very lewd comment to us!" Miao Juan sulked, jealously latching on to Ma Chao's free arm.
"Defend our honor, Great General!"
"That's right, General—kill that wretched man for insulting us!"
"General?"
"General, are you paying attention to us?"
"General Ma!"
So…where was an invading army when he needed one?
1. Younger sister
2. Grandpa
Note: "Juan" means cuckoo bird. Rather fitting name for the twins, isn't it?