[Day 107] Fengxiao's Last Counsel (遺計)
April · The Night of All Losses | About 4 minutes' read
The next evening, the lamp inside Guo Jia's tent flickered, large and final.
Before that flicker, Guo Jia sat leaning against the wall. Sitting. Not lying down. Yet not sitting by his own strength either. Xun You (荀攸) supported his shoulders from behind. Of Guo Jia's two hands, only the right could still move.
Beneath that right hand, a length of silk lay spread out — a scroll still only half-written. Since the dawn of the previous day, Guo Jia had been writing it, line by line, in his own hand.
Cao Cao (曹操) drew back the tent flap and stepped inside. Xun Yu (荀彧) and Jia Xu (賈詡) followed. The three men stood a step away from Guo Jia.
Guo Jia lifted his head. Light still remained in his eyes.
"My lord… today… there is one thing, still left to say."
Cao Cao slowly bent his knee. He lowered his face down to the level of Guo Jia's knee.
"Not a single word of Fengxiao's (奉孝) will I miss, not today either."
Guo Jia's right hand pushed one end of the scroll toward Cao Cao.
"First… Liu Biao (劉表) of Jingzhou (荊州) is a seated man. One who has sat long in one seat cannot easily give it up. Do not strike him in haste. He will fall ill first… on his own."
Cao Cao nodded.
"Second… Sun Quan (孫權) of Jiangdong (江東) is only twenty-five. But at his side stands Zhou Yu (周瑜). While Zhou Yu is there… do not cross the river. Zhou Yu will, within himself… fight with himself first. Until then… wait, only wait."
"Third… Ma Teng (馬騰) of Xiliang (西涼) — do not leave him in his own seat. In his own seat Ma Teng is a tiger. But seat him in Xudu (許都), and there he becomes a single stick of dry kindling."
Cao Cao's eyes sank deeper. Then quietly he asked.
"Fengxiao. What of Liu Bei (劉備)?"
Guo Jia's right hand trembled. The brush paused above the scroll.
"…Liu Bei… my lord, all your life, not for a single day, must you take him lightly."
With that line as the last, the brush came to rest on the silk. Guo Jia slowly tilted his head back. Xun You quickly shifted to support his shoulders deeper.
"Fengxiao, speak no more."
Cao Cao's voice trembled. Guo Jia shook his head faintly.
"One more thing… only…"
"Speak."
"Your single beat, my lord… is already the beat of the realm. Within that beat, at least once, hear the moment of your own people first. Do not drag your own men along to your own pause. That is… the last strand of… my own greed, which Fengxiao leaves today."
When the words ended, Guo Jia smiled. Very small. First his eyes smiled. Then his mouth.
Cao Cao was silent for a long time. He grasped one end of the scroll with his hand. That hand trembled, very lightly. He thought of old years. At twenty-three he had met Mao Jie (毛玠) in Luoyang; at thirty-three he had gained Xun Yu at Yanzhou; at thirty-eight he had first seen Guo Jia. Guo Jia had already been twenty-six at that first meeting. At that first encounter Cao Cao had said in a low voice to Xun Yu, "The man who will make my great work is this one." Twelve years had passed since those words.
Cao Cao looked down at the last traces of ink upon the scroll. The weight of the brush had faded a little in the final stroke. That faded stroke, rather, summarized Guo Jia's whole life most precisely. At the end of thirty-eight years of measuring the realm with his head, the hand had faded upon a single line telling his lord to hear his own people first. Cao Cao laid his fingertip quietly upon that single stroke. A trace of faded ink came away on his fingertip. Without wiping it, he lowered the hand slowly onto his knee.
The wall of the tent trembled faintly. Outside, someone set down water-buckets for the evening, quiet and careful. Guo Jia's breath rose and fell, thin. Xun You's hands, holding the shoulders, held without tiring. Xun Yu stood one pace from the bed, his gaze not leaving the lamp. Four men in one tent; and among them one was leaving. The strange truth was that the one leaving was more composed than the three who remained.
Outside the tent, the summer evening wind of Yijing (易京) passed again.
Inside, the lamp, now, very slowly, grew smaller.
The ink on the scroll had not yet dried.
—
“✒️ A line from your editor — Dr. Yeon Sam-heum
When a man's last words, as he is leaving, are not protect yourself but first hear the measure of the ones who remain, those words cease to be a testament and become a gift, wouldn't you say? What Fengxiao left his lord today was not the two heads from Liaodong, but this single line: do not drag your own men along to your own rhythm. Perhaps there is, beside you today too, a place where you have pulled your own people along to your pulse? Might you slow that instant, to match the other's moment instead? The last sentence of one who is leaving can, in turn, become the first sentence of the one who remains. Is there, perhaps, upon your desk this evening a place, empty and ready, where that sentence might come to rest? If so, resist the urge to write around it; let it remain as a gap, for now. The sentence waiting to come will know its own time, and will arrive more precisely into an empty place than into a full one. When it arrives, it may not announce itself as a sentence at all; it may arrive as the feeling that a blank space on your desk has, without warning, grown luminous. That quiet luminosity is how the right word, across the centuries, has always come for those who made room for it in advance.
<저작권자 ⓒ 코리안투데이(The Korean Today) 무단전재 및 재배포 금지>
