At that moment, Sun Ce and Zhou Yu were hiding up on the mountain slopes, watching anxiously in the direction the carriage was traveling in.
Fei Yu screeched as it sped through the air toward them.
Sun Ce untied the cloth strip tied to Fei Yu’s claw to check it. Neither spoke.
“Let’s retreat,” Sun Ce suggested.
“We’ve missed our opportunity,” Zhou Yu responded. “Oh well.”
Sun Jian was unwilling to send them men, which they’d known was always a possibility. The plans of man were nothing in the face of the will of the gods, and in the end, they had no choice but to return, tails between their legs.
They were about to head down the mountain when their path crossed in front of the Liang Province patrol, startling them.
“Who’s there?” one of them roared. “Spies!”
“Capture them!”
The soldier leading the patrol immediately spotted the two of them, and Sun Ce hissed, “Run, quickly!”
At the bottom of the slope awaited only Sun Ce’s white piebald; they would ride together on the mount. They slid down the mountain. Branches whipped their faces and bodies, each leaving behind a fiery lash of pain.
Zhou Yu shouted, “Break off and run! You escape first!”
Sun Ce protested, “No way!”
“Even if they catch me, I’m no use to them! Your dad is Sun Jian; if they catch you, Dong Zhuo won’t let you off easy. Quickly, now!”
Sun Ce replied angrily, “If I lose you again, how am I supposed to find you?! This isn’t up for discussion!”
Zhou Yu was giddy with emotion. Sun Ce dashed forward, dragging Zhou Yu behind him. Zhou Yu complained, breathlessly, “Why is it that every time I’m stuck with you, we end up running for our lives…”
“Our eight characters21 don’t match up,” Sun Ce laughed.
Then the two of them simultaneously slipped sideways, down the final part of the mountain’s foot, where they mounted the white piebald.
“Capture the assassins!” the soldier issuing commands shouted.
“Don’t go that way!” Zhou Yu called loudly, his arms tucking around Sun Ce’s waist.
“What are you afraid of?! Wait until I send them running for their lives!” Sun Ce shouted optimistically. “Shaoye’s coming for you!”
Zhou Yu rolled his eyes.
Arrows whistled toward them, and Zhou Yu squeezed his eyes shut. Sun Ce urged his horse onward and managed to dash through the encirclement, right into the enemy’s caravan!
The procession fell into disarray. Rather than chase them, the soldiers turned their focus to protecting their horse carts. Sensing this reaction was wrong, Zhou Yu turned his head, studying the direction the soldiers shifted.
Sun Ce immediately guessed what he had in mind. “No. We can’t possibly do that.”
The emperor and Dong Zhuo were somewhere… For them to miss out on such an opportunity would be a pity. But before Zhou Yu could even breathe, their horse brayed and slammed into a freight cart, sending it flying. The steed leaped through the air, over the fallen cart, and slammed back to the ground before galloping away across the plains like a bolt of lightning.
The wind rushed by. As Zhou Yu surveyed their surroundings, he found their enemies were unwilling to relinquish them so easily. Thousands of Liang Province troops split off from the rest of the army and were now in hot pursuit.
“We need a way to throw them off our trail,” Zhou Yu said.
“No problem!” Sun Ce replied breezily. “My steed is a white piebald; nothing in this world can catch up with this horse!”
“You sure?”
The commander of the Liang Province troops had drastically closed the distance between them.
“Jia!” Sun Ce roared. “Like they’ll get close!”
The great jolt as the horse spurred forward almost knocked Zhou Yu from his seat.
“Careful!”
“Hang on!”
Zhou Yu unstrung the bow that was coiled around Sun Ce’s body, restringing it and leaning backward. The instant after drawing the bowstring back, he loosed an arrow which whistled through the air. The commander chasing them ducked, easily dodging it.
“He’s getting closer!”
“What?! That’s impossible!” Sun Ce said.
“If your beloved horse wasn’t carrying two people…”
“Shut up!” Sun Ce said, gritting his teeth. “I’m not leaving you behind!”
“Then you get off the horse, and let me go first!” Zhou Yu couldn’t resist shouting.
Sun Ce blinked.
“There’s a copse of trees ahead!” Sun Ce said loudly. “Be careful!”
The horse beneath them dashed into the forest. There was a series of clatters and clangs as Sun Ce led them on a twisting, winding path through the woods. Every time Zhou Yu thought the two of them would smash straight into a tree, the white piebald managed to twist its body out of the way by a hair’s breadth.
Even as preoccupied as Sun Ce was, guiding his horse, he had the spare time to chat. “There are less than five horses that can outrun my beloved steed. I can count them all with one hand…”
“My only worry is that one of those is pursuing us,” Zhou Yu replied.
But the landscape disagreed with their idle chatter. The woods suddenly flattened out, and Sun Ce roared, “Watch out!”
With a long whinny, the horse with its two young riders burst out from between the trees, sketching an arc through the air as they fell toward a creek glimmering with thousands of rays of golden sunlight.
Someone by the creek shouted, “Who goes there?!”
“We’ve been driven into an ambu—”
Before Zhou Yu could finish his sentence, they crashed into the water.
Thankfully, both were adept swimmers. Only moments after they plunged in, both their heads popped up through the water’s surface. Zhou Yu’s heart stopped. An ambush in front of them, or the mass of troops in pursuit behind. This time they were truly stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Sun Ce stood up out of the water as the creek was only waist-high.
The two sloshed a few steps forward, only for a voice to threaten: “Don’t move!”
“At least let us get on dry land first!” Sun Ce shouted angrily back, disheveled.
“Stay in the water,” a man said from nearby.
Sun Ce and Zhou Yu turned at the same time, only to lay eyes on a martial general and a white horse standing in the creek. The martial general’s completely black hair was long but wet and tied loosely, his upper torso bare. Not even sparing them a glance, he wrung the water out of an inner robe.
“What brings you here?” he said, finally leveling his gaze on the two of them.
Despite his apparent youth, the martial general looked heroic. His features were gentle, and below the well-proportioned muscles of his back and chest, he only wore a pair of long white pants embroidered with lifelike depictions of coiling dragons in black thread.
Neither Sun Ce nor Zhou Yu responded to his question, and so he led his white horse up onto the bank. A set of silver armor was drying on a rock, and a long spear lay to one side.
Zhou Yu roughly had an idea of what happened. This martial general had been all on his own, with only his horse for company. When Zhou Yu and Sun Ce came barging in, he had been washing his horse and taking a bath.
“Ignore him,” Sun Ce said quietly. “Let’s get out of here, quick.”