Listen:
Download Episode(Click this link. It will bring up a page with an audio player loaded with the file. Right click your mouse and "save as" to download episode.)
WARNING: BEWARE THE IDES OF SPOILERS. BEWARE. BEWARE, I SAY.
Annnd, you've waited a long time for this. Thank you for your patience. Your patience is about to be rewarded, because this is the first of several chapters I'm posting to the feed today for your listening enjoyment. Know what else it is, though? It's Chapter 60, also known as, the "Oh my freaking lord, after four years of making these we are FINALLY at the halfway point of the story" Chapter. Phew. I don't know if it's been as tiring for you guys to listen to these, but it's certainly been quite tiring for me to make 'em. Not that I'm going to stop or anything. When you get 60 chapters through a 120 chapter book, it's sort of pointless to turn back, isn't it?
So what does Chapter 60 bring? Well, as a matter of fact, it sets the stage for the second half of the book, literally. Or literarally, perhaps. Basically, this is the chapter where Liu Bei finally gets the chance he's been waiting for his entire life. For the first half of the book, Liu Bei has been a vagabond, either serving other, more powerful lords (like Lu Bu, Yuan Shao, and, of course, his old friendemy, Cao Cao) or else serving as part of an alliance with more powerful lords. (Sun Quan, anyone? 'Nuff said.)
Now, however, Liu Bei is treated to a unique opportunity, the type that tends to happen to a guy when he lives in a world where Heaven is a very potent offstage character that makes shit happen. And, quite true to form, it is Heaven which calls the shots in this part of the story.
See, Zhang Song, the ugly little charioteer that Yizhou's Imperial Protector, Liu Zhang, sent out onto the Central Plains to propose submission to Cao Cao, has a bit of a diplomacy problem. That is to say, he doesn't have the kind of patience for assholes that is, you know, sort of required in a diplomat. He's what you might call one of those "problem diplomats", and maybe that's why he was a charioteer, and not Prime Minister of Liu Zhang's Yizhou...
At any rate, to say that Zhang Song did not get along very well with the arrogant Cao Cao (who just thought himself the bees knees following his defeat of the mighty Xi Liang'er Ma Chao at Tong Pass) would be a bit of an understatement. Cao Cao, failing to intimidate him, instead had him beaten and ejected from the capital, and there is where we see the invisible hand of Chinese "Heaven" taking its part in the events of the day.
You know something? It's amazing how the great minds in this story, of which Cao Cao is one, talk about the will of "Heaven" out of one side of their mouths and yet, out of the other, say all sorts of things that really piss "Heaven" off. You would think that Cao Cao would have learned his lesson about pissing off "Heaven" after that ill-fated Southern Expedition of his, where he got his ass handed to him by the Wu Navy and his imperial ambitions went up in flame (literally). But no. Cao Cao's arrogance sort of screwed him over once again, didn't it? For instead of getting the populous, defensible, and rich region of Yizhou without a fight (I mean, come on. Zhang Song went to Xuchang to OFFER him the region), he made the huge mistake of angering the very man who had come to offer it to him. With Yizhou under his control, the entire country would have fallen into Cao Cao's hands soon after, and his battle for supremacy would have finally been won, once and for all. Instead, Cao Cao's arrogance drove Zhang Song into the allegiance of another. And hmmmm....who might that be?
Liu Bei. Heaven's favorite little servant, it would seem. Mr. Rectitude. Mr. Honor. Mr. Integrity. Mr. Soon-to-be-deposing-his-cousin-in-Yizhou.
I've got to give Liu Bei credit here. Even when offered Yizhou by Zhang Song, he attemped to refuse it, several times, at least ACTING as if he did not want to attack his cousin and divest him of his fief. Of course, we know that Liu Bei was an ambitious man, and his own subordinates (such as Pang Tong, for instance) were also ambitious. And unlike Liu Bei, Pang Tong was a Machievellian, some 1200 years before Machievelli was a Machievellian. He was willing to get down to dirty tricks in order to accomplish a desired goal, so it's only natural that his voice would be one of the foremost among the voices urging Liu Bei to enter into Yizhou with his army.
Ironically, even Liu Zhang, the Imperial Protector of Yizhou, asked Liu Bei to enter into Yizhou at the head of his army.
What is it about people in this novel that they do not quite get the idea that if you invite someone to bring an army into your territory, they ARE going to take your territory away from you eventually? Had Liu Zhang never heard of He Jin, who kicked off this entire age of chaos when he invited Dong Zhuo to come to the capital with an army to slay ten mere Eunuchs? Apparently, he had not. Or else he had forgotten, because He Jin's fatal act of idiocy was repeated in Ba-Shu.
I sort of feel sorry for Liu Zhang. Supposedly, he was not an absolutely terrible ruler in Yizhou. He maybe did not have the foresight to rein in the ambitions of some of his subordinates (which led to the treachery of men like Zhang Song, Fa Zheng, and Meng Da), but he DID have some very, very loyal servants during the days of his rule. Zhang Ren and Yan Yan were two of the more capable military commanders in the novel, and they were both loyal to him. Li Yan was loyal to him as well, and Huang Quan and Li Hui were advisors of quality that would have spared him what came later, if he had but bothered to heed their advice.
Isn't it sort of funny how a lost world would always have been saved if wise advice had been heeded? Isn't it also sort of funny how, in the 1800 years or so since the events of this novel took place, people STILL haven't learned that lesson? Hence, the daily frustration of any wise Revolutionary...
Anyways, Liu Zhang had a chance to avert what eventually happened to him, but as both history and literature tell us, that did not happen. And Liu Zhang, who had ruled Yizhou in the decades since inheriting that fief from his father, Liu Yan, lost it all on a roll of the dice, so to speak. He gambled upon Liu Bei being more honorable than he was ambitious, and, as it turned out, though Liu Bei was a pretty great guy, he was, indeed, more ambitious than he was honorable.
Maybe Cao Cao did indeed know what he was talking about when he said that the only other hero in the Empire, besides himself, was Liu Bei. Maybe Cao Cao saw even then the ambition which lay in Liu Bei's heart.
Chapter 60 begins the rise of Liu Bei, the great Imperial Dragon of the Shu-Han Empire, flying away from the muck of the pond to mount the very clouds of the sky. Enjoy this, Chapter 60 of the ongoing (and ongoing and ongoing and ongoing) Sanguo Yanyi audiobook, here at djraspe.com.