Pang Tong

Painted by the cowherd before he ever appears: the nephew Water Mirror loves like a brother, who once kept the master up a mulberry tree talking from noon till evening. Whether he is the Young Phoenix of the prophecy, Water Mirror will only answer 'good, very good!'

Named at last: 'Young Phoenix is Pang Tong of Xiangyang' - Xu Shu unseals the half of Water Mirror's riddle that Liu Bei is not yet fated to pursue.

Waits in the cabin Zhou Yu chose, lets Jiang Gan 'discover' him, and plays the neglected genius all the way into Cao Cao's confidence: flatters the land camp with Sun Zi and Wu Qi, diagnoses the seasickness - and prescribes the chains. Thirty and fifty ships bolted stem to stem, boards across, 'even horses could move about on them.' He begs a protection paper for his 'family by the river bank', warns Cao Cao to attack only after he is gone - and walks into a stranger on the shore who names every ruse aloud.

Caught on the shore by Xu Shu, he trades the escape whisper - ask for the western command - for silence, and slips back to the southern bank, his chains already forging.

Clutches Zhuge Liang's arm at the embarkation laughing at the funeral theatre, is rejected by Sun Quan for his face and his boast, and carries two letters to Jingzhou - showing neither. Fobbed off with the paltry magistracy of Leiyang, he drinks for a hundred days, then clears every arrear of business in half a day before the astonished Zhang Fei: 'when I can take on Cao Cao and Sun Quan as easily as I can read this paper...' Liu Bei begs pardon at the foot of the steps and makes him Vice Directing Instructor.

Turns Liu Bei around with the opportunist's creed — 'annex the weak and attack the deluded, as Kings Tang and Wu taught' — is named Commander of the fifty-thousand-man expedition, and at Fucheng proposes the banquet assassination of Liu Zhang: a hundred ruffians behind the arras and no arrow fitted to the string.

Pang Tong; presses Liu Bei to assassinate Liu Zhang at the banquet; Wei Yan's sword-dance is meant as the cover. Liu Bei stops it; the chance is lost.

Offers the three schemes (fast, middle, slow), reads the falling flag as an assassination omen, springs the dagger search, and insists on the execution Liu Bei flinches from. Splits the quarrelling Huang Zhong and Wei Yan into one camp each — and takes Liu Bei's drunken insult at the feast 'in very good part from the first.'

Dismisses Zhuge Liang's star-warning as jealousy, argues Liu Bei out of his iron-club dream — and takes his lord's white horse in kindness after his own shies. At the narrow defile the ambushers mark the white horse as Liu Bei's; when a local names the place 'The Fallen Phoenix Slope' he shudders — Young Phoenix is his own Daoist name — but the arrows come before the retreat. Dead at thirty-six.

Pang Tong; named in passing - already dead at Falling Phoenix Slope.