Night was drawing in. As the last thread of sunlight sank below the western horizon, the sky’s color faded slowly from orange-gold to leaden gray, and the blue-black night came rushing in like a tide.
The great tumult still raged across the plain — the clash of weapons, the thunder of warhorses, the screams of the wounded, all merging into a flood of sound and cries. Luo Ye was still pushing forward with his shield, running hard, while the comrade beside him thrust his spear out from above and below the shields, blood surging up. Under his feet he trod over a corpse that could still faintly twitch, and the tip of a spear grazed past his cheek.
“Three, two—” Luo Ye roared, and on the last count of “one,” he flung the shield wall open. The men around him shouted in unison as the saber in Luo Ye’s hand slashed out. A spear thrust at him from ahead, nearly catching his shoulder, while beside him his comrades’ sabers and spears hacked and stabbed with all their strength. The Western Xia soldier in front of Luo Ye took a blow to the head, then another across the neck — blood sprayed up like a fountain — and a spear was driven straight through his throat, the tip bursting out the back of his neck, pressed down with force.
The blood that gushed out was still warm, and the Western Xia soldier’s eyes still seemed to hold something fierce and wild, though anyone who took a wound like that could no longer possibly be conscious. Even so, his body kept being pushed backward through the sea of men, sinking lower and lower as it went. Behind him stood more soldiers, rank after rank falling back, and as each man in front was cut down, the next was exposed — and the blades of Luo Ye and the others kept falling on them, one after another!
Another Western Xia formation collapsed. Luo Ye’s hands trembled slightly as he led his men in pursuit, widening the range of the slaughter and the chase. All around him were the crowded, fleeing shapes of routed men, and the reek of blood was thick enough to turn the stomach. Far off in the sky, another streak of light appeared, and now and then a fire-arrow shot off toward some distant point. In the dimming light, the Western Xia commander’s banner not far away toppled with a crash, lit by the glow of flames.
“They’re broken! Kill the general! Take the banner—”
Luo Ye’s voice had gone hoarse from shouting. Fighting continuously, charging again and again, there was no escaping exhaustion. In the slaughter of the battlefield, in this exchange of life and death, every stroke of the blade demanded everything a man had — if it had been a raw recruit who had just gone through this, even without ever drawing a blade, the sheer tension of battle alone would have drained him completely. Luo Ye and the others were veterans by now, and yet the charges since afternoon, the more than ten li of marching and shifting ground, had wrung the strength out of every one of them.
But no one stopped. No one was willing to stop. If someone fell along the way, the comrade beside him would haul him back up: “Move — kill Li Qianshun!”
The Black Banner Army charging down from the northwest numbered barely three thousand men, yet in their advance they had formed more than ten separate spearheads. The advance of spear and shield was as unshakable as a mountain — after a brief moment of deadlock, they would erupt suddenly, pressing forward with a fearless, all-or-nothing momentum that crushed whatever enemy stood before them. In that instant of eruption, dozens of men throwing life and death aside to hack and kill was a weight that any enemy trying to hold the line ahead simply could not bear.
Among the Western Xia forces, the infantry had never been their elite. The Bubagan were skilled at mountain terrain and formidable as individual fighters, but poor at holding formation. On the main battlefield, the largest contingent — the Zhuanglingláng — were essentially cannon fodder, most of them not even ethnic Tangut. Though Western Xia had stood as a nation for many years, and these soldiers were no longer truly slave-troops in nature, in essence they were probably still on par with the soldiers of the Wu Dynasty. Even the elite among the Zhuanglingláng that had come along with the royal banner this time — how could they possibly withstand such crushing pressure head-on?
The charging Black Banner cavalry unleashed one desperate burst, and what followed was a rout on a massive scale. The crossbowmen in the rear ranks might inflict casualties on the Black Banner Army with the advantage of their weapons, but when three thousand men broke into the midst of thirty thousand, that damage amounted to pitifully little.
By the time night fell, the battlefield, spread across tens of thousands of men, had already become an indistinguishable chaos of front and rear. Ye Lifeng’s commander’s banner was toppled in the retreat, and as the main army collapsed, the other two formations were swept up in disorder as well, to greater or lesser degrees. And a little further south, another astonishing slaughter was pushing steadily northward.
Arrows arced through the air, warhorses ran with all four hooves flying at their absolute limit, and the light cavalry of the Black Banner and of Western Xia chased each other across the plain at tremendous speed, closing the distance amid the chaos!
“Run, run! Scatter, quickly—”
The Western Xia light cavalry squad leader Hun Ye bellowed this as his horse galloped at full speed beneath him. Not far to his side, a Black Banner cavalryman, sword in hand, was closing on him at high speed — an arrow still lodged in the man’s shoulder — and even in the fading light, Hun Ye thought he could see the wild, frenzied look in the man’s eyes.
These were light cavalry, and in most situations they were never meant to charge into a line — least of all meant to collide head-on with anything.
Arrows still flew now and then, but at this speed, most of them had already lost any real effect. Hun Ye had men following him, and the enemy rider had comrades of his own nearby, but that one cavalryman simply kept barreling toward him at full speed regardless.
“AAAAAAH—”
Hun Ye hauled hard on his reins, his horse wheeling sharply and losing its footing beneath him, and the Black Banner light cavalryman crossing in at an angle likewise stumbled — in an instant a great cloud of dust erupted from the collision. Bodies of men and of horses rolled and twisted on the ground; besides Hun Ye, five or six other Western Xia light cavalrymen were caught up in that same collision, and in a blink seven or eight horses were tangled in a chain of pileups. The light cavalry behind them who hadn’t been fast enough were run down by the Black Banner riders and speared off their horses.
Yu Cangmatong, the Western Xia general commanding the light cavalry, was likewise fleeing — his general’s armor was simply too conspicuous — and several cavalry units were closing in around him from across the plain at high speed, first with volleys of arrows, and then with a reckless, headlong charge.
“Spread out, scatter them — spread out—”
By this point Yu Cangmatong’s shouted commands had grown hoarse with exhaustion. His four thousand light cavalry had been carved into pieces on the plain, and many of them were being hunted down and were fleeing without pause — Yu Cangmatong was no incompetent commander; the situation had never been meant to unfold like this.
That afternoon, around the hour of You, Qin Shaoqian’s heavy cavalry had smashed through the main force under Mo Zangyiqing, cutting him down in the field, and had then begun pushing northeast toward Li Qianshun’s own position. Yu Cangmatong, leading four thousand light cavalry, had been battered several times by that iron wall of a force and its cannons, and when the enemy’s cavalry had come charging in, his own men had been swept along and driven back by the mass of routing troops around them. Partly this was because the field was already thick with their own men, leaving the cavalry little room to maneuver, and partly it had been meant to cover the retreating troops. But once he had steadied himself somewhat, Yu Cangmatong had already spotted the enemy’s weakness.
Of the roughly three thousand men in that advancing force, nearly fifteen hundred were heavy cavalry, a thousand were light cavalry, and a thousand were infantry. The heavy cavalry feared no arrows, but the light cavalry and infantry could not say the same, and though the enemy’s firearms were formidable, his own light cavalry could wheel and maneuver quickly. After regrouping his men, he had sent his light cavalry sticking to the enemy like leeches, wheeling in at speed to loose volleys and then peeling away before contact — the enemy’s firearms could barely be brought to bear in time before the arrows had already done their damage. Yu Cangmatong split his light cavalry into four large groups, harassing from different directions in rotation, and by the time another Western Xia force came into distant view, the advancing Black Banner force had very nearly been harried to a standstill.
Then a thousand of the light cavalry had broken off from the main body and began an assault on Yu Cangmatong’s own cavalry.
In the arts of charging and volleying at range, of pulling away at just the right distance, the elite light cavalry under Yu Cangmatong yielded to no one in the realm. After two rounds of probing exchanges of fire between the two sides, Yu Cangmatong had once again turned to harassing the enemy’s main body of heavy cavalry and infantry — and it was at this same moment that the enemy’s light cavalry had split.
One of its groups had broken into several smaller bands and launched a charge straight at Yu Cangmatong’s own cavalry.
Yu Cangmatong had not thought much of it. Scattered riders moving at high speed across open ground might well cut down the threat from arrows considerably, but even in a clash at close range, with his advantage in numbers, why should he fear this mere thousand-strong enemy force? He ordered his men to keep drawing the enemy on while using volleys to meet them and to keep harassing the infantry formation. Four thousand cavalry wheeled and clashed at high speed across the field, while over on the other side, the infantry stood silently behind raised shields, waiting. And across the way, the Western Xia army had by now advanced still closer.
It was at this point that the approaching Black Banner light cavalry and Yu Cangmatong’s elite riders met in their first true clash.
The enemy struck at the flank of the advancing thousand-strong cavalry column, using their sabers to hack at the horses’ legs, plunging in with a mad ferocity!
These charging Black Banner cavalrymen came in groups of five or ten; some were shot down by arrows along the way. But once they closed the distance, with both sides moving at full speed, the enemy made no attempt to fight blade to blade — they simply collided, and that was, in the most literal sense, trading life for life. In the first few high-speed collisions, Yu Cangmatong didn’t yet sense that anything was wrong; it was only the Western Xia riders nearby who felt the touch of madness in the enemy’s roared curses of “die, you scum—”. To dodge the enemy’s firearms, the Western Xia cavalry too was moving at speed by now, and groups of five, six, seven, eight riders collided together in tangled masses — for nearly all of the horses and riders involved, it was a coin flip between life and death.
The mad charge of even a single warhorse could sometimes be enough to strike fear into a crowd of men; even battle-hardened veterans felt a chill at conduct like this. However much death a man had seen, there were those unafraid to die, but none who went looking for it.
This wave of mad, reckless collisions kept coming, and before long it had nearly shattered the formations of four entire thousand-man cavalry units. After that came high-speed mounted archery to dodge the enemy’s charges, and after that, the Black Banner cavalry pursued from behind while several thousand riders, with Yu Cangmatong among them, fled the field at full gallop. The Black Banner light cavalry drove their horses on past the point of exhaustion, charging in without regard for their own lives, and Yu Cangmatong himself was the very heart of that pursuit.
What Yu Cangmatong and the others did not know was that the officer commanding this light cavalry was Liu Chengzong, commander of the Small Cangriver Special Regiment. Upon receiving Qin Shaoqian’s order to hold off the Western Xia cavalry, this thousand-strong light cavalry unit had not hesitated for long. The task was nearly impossible, but there had been no other choice.
It was Liu Chengzong himself who first wanted to lead half the cavalry in the charge, but the man who claimed the task instead was Zhou Huan, chief of staff of the Special Regiment. He was a man usually silent but extremely calculating, always with contingency plans ready for any situation, and was often mocked behind his back as “afraid to die” — yet, holding to the same highest creed as Ning Yi, that of “solving the problem,” he was well respected all the same. He led just over a hundred cavalrymen in the first charge, then vanished silently into the blood and dust of that first collision, and some of the soldiers under him followed in his footsteps.
—No one wanted to die. It was only that the problem that needed solving mattered more than life.
By then the sun was setting, and the heavy cavalry and infantry on that side watched in silence as their comrades charged into a cavalry force four times their number, a sacrifice that was nearly mutual annihilation, and then took up their blades and shields, their long halberds, and began to advance to meet the Western Xia army pressing toward them — by this point, with the light cavalry gone, they numbered only twenty-five hundred men.
The darkness of night at last swallowed everything. Across the plain, fires of every kind flickered to life, scattered and sparse, dotting the ground. Within the Western Xia king’s own encampment, campfires stretched out in vast, unbroken swaths, and reports of every kind kept pouring in, carried by routed soldier after routed soldier. In that darkness the retreating soldiers came first one, then two, then in groups of squads — since the afternoon, in the span of a mere two hours, that demon army of the Black Banner had broken through the Western Xia defenses, and now the great collapse was surging forward like an ocean tide.
Some of the routed officers were dragged out and executed within the camp itself.
As the Western Xia king listened to this chaos of reports, his expression shifted from fury, to rage, and then slowly into silence, numbness, stillness. At the second quarter of the hour of Chen, an even greater collapse was spreading before him. To the west, the advancing Black Banner demons, sweeping the routed troops along with them, were pushing toward the Western Xia king’s own position.
The two sides entered each other’s sight.