The twenty-first day of the seventh month. Full night had fallen.

When the sun leaves the world, it is truly humanity that takes possession of it — for light has the power to change people.

Much of what people do in the light is performance: acting in ways that move themselves, with the result of moving others.

But more often, people perform a kind of dazed and repetitive cycle, and then give that life the name of ordinary.

When darkness comes, human nature takes hold of the body, and people become something a little different.

At the most fundamental level, there is no essential difference between a person and any beast — until the word *morality* was invented, and then taught to all under heaven.

So when people speak of morality, they invariably speak of restraint. When people speak of the beast within, they invariably speak of release.

The battlefield is the place where the beast within is released.

Morality cannot exist on the battlefield. People may use morality to *constrain* war, but no one has ever used morality to *control* it.

You see a wounded enemy and do not finish him. When you are the one wounded, do you suppose the enemy will spare you the same way?

If you think so, you have never seen a wounded man on a battlefield hacked to pieces.

The Chu army’s first assault had collapsed, and the casualties were nearly ten thousand — close to half the vanguard wiped out.

In these circumstances, invoking morality to condemn the Ning army would only invite ridicule.

“General.”

Dou Yong returned to the Princess of Wu Wang’s side, guilt written plainly across his face.

“It is not your fault. There is nothing to reproach yourself for,” the Princess said before he could utter a word of self-reproach. The guilt on Dou Yong’s face only deepened.

“The Ning army was prepared from the start. Shen Shancoral’s method was to lure us into charging, then use their superior weapons and equipment to bleed us. That is all.”

The Princess raised her spyglass and looked. The Ning side had deliberately lit their torches very brightly — it was brilliant as a river of stars. She understood at once what Shen Shancoral meant by it.

The Ning army was deliberately showing Wu Prince where the battle was. That calculation, one could not call it anything but ruthless.

“General, give me troops and I will charge again,” Dou Yong said, pleading in his eyes. “Trust me, General. Next time I will break through their line.”

The Princess of Wu Wang nodded, and — imitating her husband’s manner — raised her hand and patted Dou Yong on the shoulder. “I trust you, and so do the soldiers. But right now you need to rest for a moment. I will arrange the new formations. Once they are assembled, you will lead them forward.”

Those words warmed Dou Yong’s heart, and that feeling of being valued returned.

Some say that humans are the only animals governed by emotion. This is not so — most animals are governed by emotion; they simply lack emotions as rich as ours.

When a lion cub is surrounded, the mother lion charges into the enemy pack. Is that not being governed by emotion?

About half a quarter-hour later, the reinforcements had assembled up front and Dou Yong, having rested a little, had recovered much of his strength.

“I had all the great shields brought forward,” the Princess of Wu Wang told him. “The Ning army’s greatest strength is their arrow formation. Our great shields stand a full man’s height and are thick and solid — form a shield wall and press forward with it.”

Dou Yong answered immediately, seized his phoenix-beak blade, and returned to the vanguard.

Reinforced with fresh troops, the vanguard was now larger, but simply spreading tens of thousands of men in a broad line was pointless.

Reducing the surface area exposed to attack meant reducing casualties on a massive scale.

Following the Princess of Wu Wang’s instructions, Dou Yong ordered the vanguard to form shield walls.

Each unit of twelve hundred men — organized by battalion — formed its own shield wall. The walls linked end to end, creating long columns like dragons.

Shields standing more than a man’s height effectively blocked the arrowheads’ assault; even against the heavy bolt-throwers their defensive value was considerable.

Reducing the exposed width of the Chu formation caused the Ning forces to concentrate their fire in turn — most things in war are relative.

A heavy bolt came in and struck the front of a shield with a *thud*. The shields chosen for the front ranks had an extra layer of iron plating, and even a powerful heavy bolt could not shatter them outright — but the impact knocked the men holding them off their feet.

If only one such bolt arrived, the men inside the shield wall would suffer little. But there was never only one.

Second, third… Before the men knocked down could rise, more heavy bolts punched through into the shield wall, skewering a string of Chu soldiers.

“Get low! Everyone get low!” Dou Yong bellowed from within one of the columns, his voice raw and hoarse.

The fixed-mount bolt-throwers fired at a set height; the bolts could not be aimed low enough to cut down a man crouching close to the ground.

“Sound the horn,” Shen Shancoral said, watching from above as the shield walls crept closer. “Change formation!”

It was as if every Chu tactic had been anticipated. Her battlefield experience vastly exceeded the Princess of Wu Wang’s — by a long measure.

They were both women. But this was a woman who had made foreign enemies weep and cry for their mothers.

If raw ferocity in a charge was the measure, the Bohai fighters who had once charged at her had been far more savage than these Chu soldiers.

At the sound of the horn, the Ning defensive formation shifted. Gaps opened in the front ranks; the archers in the fore stood fast while the long-spear infantry behind them filed through the lanes and formed a spear wall ahead of the archers.

Spear and shield — perhaps the eternal adversaries of the battlefield.

As the Chu shield walls closed in, the front rank of the Ning spear wall went to work. These spears had been purpose-made to counter shield formations, each one a full zhang in length.

The Ning soldiers thrust continuously into the shield walls; the surface of the shields rang with a dense, unbroken drumming. Spears jabbed through the gaps between shields, and when they were pulled back, the speartips were red.

“Open up — kill!”

Dou Yong’s roar tore through the noise.

The shield walls split apart and Chu soldiers threw themselves forward in a mad press.

The Ning spear wall held its tight formation: the front rank crouched low, the second rank half-crouched, the third rank stood upright.

Three staggered ranks of spears, so dense that a glance from the side made the skin crawl.

Yet Dou Yong had turned savage. They had taken far too many casualties under the relentless one-sided punishment — and that bred hatred.

The Chu soldiers closed in and began hacking with sabres. At first there was no advantage — their sabres were far shorter than spears. But once they pressed inside the reach of the spears, the sabres came into their own. The spear-fighters’ weakness is precisely the spear: too long, and the moment the enemy is inside that length, the wielder is in danger.

Then another horn sounded from above.

The Ning formation shifted again. The spear wall contracted, opening lanes for the ranks behind.

The shield-bearers from the rear pushed through and took over the front — and the shields they carried were rattan shields, captured from the Yong Prefecture army.

The Great Chu regulation sabre was razor-sharp and powerful — yet rattan shields seemed born to be its natural nemesis. No amount of hacking could break through a rattan shield’s defense.

These too had been allocated to Shen Shancoral by Tang Pidi and Li Chi from other units.

As the only female general in the Ning army, they spoiled no one but her.

So among all the Ning forces, no unit was better equipped than Shen Shancoral’s.

“The Ning army changes formation so swiftly.”

In the Chu center, the Princess of Wu Wang — watching from a low hill she had chosen — felt her expression begin to sour.

For the first time she understood what kind of force she was facing.

This Ning army out of Qing Prefecture — how many battles had they fought?

They had cut their way from Yan Prefecture to Qing Prefecture, destroying Gan Daode’s Slaughter King army in one blow.

Then from Qing Prefecture to Su Prefecture to reinforce Tang Pidi, where they annihilated more than a hundred thousand of Li Xionghu’s Chuang army.

Then foreign enemies came across the border, and this force marched thousands of li back to Yan Prefecture to repel the invaders.

After driving the Bohai troops into flight with rivers of blood in Yan Prefecture, they wheeled and pressed north to the frontier to resist the Black-Martial forces.

Every formidable enemy under heaven — Shen Shancoral’s army had fought them all.

The world only knew the Ning army fought well. But where did that fighting quality come from? Who had ever truly thought it through?

What is an iron army? An iron army is one that, no matter the time, no matter the battlefield, no matter the enemy, always makes the enemy tremble.

After the formation change, the Ning army did not hold its ground — it began to counterattack.

The defensive formation Dou Yong thought he had been on the verge of breaking had, in an instant, become an offensive formation.

In the clash that followed, the Chu forces began to weaken.

This brings one back to why Shen Shancoral had pulled her army fifty li back to set up her position.

Drawing the Chu forces into the pits earlier could be called: *buying time*.

The Ning counterattack now could be called: *what that bought time made possible*.

After pulling fifty li back and waiting in prepared positions, the Ning army had preserved their strength — every soldier had rested at least half a day.

The Chu army was different. They had sprinted fifty li from the Panxing River. Counting from when they left the Chu camp — the march, the river crossing — every Chu soldier had traveled nearly sixty li.

For an ordinary man, sixty li of forced march is enough to leave him completely spent. Even for soldiers, whose physical conditioning far surpasses ordinary people, sixty li is enough to drain the vast majority of their strength.

People always say that to win a battle you must account for the right time, the right terrain, and the harmony of men. Easy words — but who can calculate all of that so precisely?

The Ning countercharge stunned the Chu forces. Dou Yong still had his personal fighting strength, but his troops could not hold.

The Chu forces fell back. Their greatest fear now was that the Ning army would press the advantage and pursue — if the Ning formed a rolling pressure, even the rear elements of the Chu army would be swept up.

But after gaining the upper hand, the Ning army did not advance. They drew the formation back and closed once more into a dense defensive array.

Watching from her hill, the Princess of Wu Wang felt a trace of helplessness enter her eyes, faint but unmistakable.

Shen Shancoral was doing it deliberately…

The Ning army was not pursuing because the time was not yet right. Wu Prince’s army had only just begun its breakout — if the Princess of Wu Wang’s Chu forces were routed now, Wu Prince might pull back.

“What a cruel heart,” the Princess of Wu Wang murmured to herself.

But was that not precisely what a battlefield commander ought to have, facing the enemy?

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