Up through the seventh slip, it was foresight. From the eighth onward, it was resolve.

In the late winter of Jian'an 11 (206 CE), Cao Cao's (曹操) column passed the last stretch of its northward road, a year after Ye (鄴城) had fallen. The glove on Guo Jia's (郭嘉) right hand had gone ten months unremoved. The fingers inside had grown thinner, unseen. Only the left hand still ground ink each early morning.

The seventh slip bore a title of four characters: 南征不三 — Do not make the southern campaign in a set of three. A resolve not to move upon Jingzhou (荊州), Jiangdong (江東), and Xiliang (西涼) within a single year. Beneath it, one line stated that the three directions could not be struck in one year.

The eighth slip was shorter. Three characters at the top carried the weight of a full passage.

失子哀 — The grief of losing a son.

Beneath them lay five lines. That the anniversary of Cao Cao's lost eldest, Cao Ang (曹昂), approached this year. That Cao Ang had gone ten years earlier at Wancheng. That the seat of the eldest son remained not quite filled by Cao Pi (曹丕). And that this year was the time to settle that seat, cleanly.

Guo Jia knew where the Chancellor was weakest as a father. On the evening Cao Cao received the slip, he sat long with his eyes closed inside the tent. The next morning, a quiet order placed Cao Pi a pace closer to his father's side. The resolve was less Cao Cao's than a resolve seeping out from behind the eighth slip.

The ninth slip arrived on a late-spring morning. Its title was 赤壁候 — Await Red Cliffs (Chibi).

Cao Cao looked long at the three characters. Red Cliffs, as a place name, sat on his maps only as a small dot — a long cliff on the southern strand of the Jiangdong, no more than that. Guo Jia's ninth slip, pointing at that small dot, had set down only six characters.

Two years hence, my lord, a seat upon which you shall once be greatly broken.

Cao Cao folded the slip and placed it within the breast of his robe. Unlike the others, he did not leave it upon the desk. He kept it within his robe, shown to no one. A slip that had spoken defeat first belonged inside the Chancellor's breast rather than upon his desk.

The tenth slip, in the end, Guo Jia could not write.

In the summer of Jian'an 12 (207), a few days before the two heads from Liaodong arrived, even his left hand began to tremble. The brush could not leave a whole character upon the paper. On that last morning, Guo Jia set a tenth blank slip before Cao Cao. At its center, one small character alone remained.

劉.

One character. A surname. The full name of that surname went unwritten by Guo Jia's left hand. A thin line ran along the slip's corner: The next character of the name shall be called out to my lord, some years hence, by the mouth of another.

Cao Cao looked long at the blank slip. He laid it beside the other nine upon the desk. The ten slips stood in a single line. The first slip's Ye was already closed; the second's Liaodong was on the point of closing; the ninth's Red Cliffs was still a dot, not yet opened; and the tenth's single character was a seat awaiting a name.

After Guo Jia left that autumn, Cao Cao hung the ten slips in one line upon the inner wall of his study. No one else passed that wall. Only the Chancellor himself paused briefly before the line of ten each morning. The breath of that pause grew shorter on some mornings, longer on others.

The slips were not spoken testaments. They were written ones. A testament made with the mouth flies off; a testament made with the hand stays, pinned to a wall. The ten slips had become the one wall of Cao Cao's morning.

At the end of that wall, beneath the tenth slip's single character 劉, a name was still unwritten. What reached first the place where that name was to be set down was the first stride of three strides of a certain man in the south. That man's three strides, on this day too, walked one round of the back yard of Xinye (新野). Neither the man in Xinye nor the Chancellor in Xudu knew of the other's wall. And yet the two mornings, eight hundred li apart, were already moving, each in its own direction, toward the same single name.

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