The lamps swayed. The rumble and clamor from inside and outside the camp surged into the royal tent, wave after wave, like a tide. Some of it came from far off, faint but unmistakably the sound of tens of thousands of men; some of it was close at hand — running columns, the shouts of messengers relaying word that the enemy was closing in.
“We…”
Li Qianshun, who had been silent all this while, rose from his seat in the central tent. “We… now believe that such a formidable army truly exists under Heaven.”
Throughout the royal tent, Ashagambu and the others snapped to attention at the sound of his voice.
“But We do not believe they can keep up this ferocity forever! Ready the crossbows — meet them with fire-arrows!”
Ashagambu hesitated. “Your Majesty, the light is nearly gone — we cannot make out the enemy’s positions clearly, and besides, our own men are still out there…”
“If they are truly our men, why do they not turn and face the enemy?” Li Qianshun’s gaze swept across the room, then he said, “Burn them.”
“Ready the Iron Sparrowhawks!”
“Ready the crossbows and the catapult troops!”
“Ready the garrison battalion…”
Beyond the royal tent, amid the sprawling lights and fires, the elite of Western Xia stood waiting in unit after unit, row after row. Outside the main formation, banners and shapes ran and scattered in every direction — some heading toward the main position, others swerving away from it. By now the enforcement squad had sealed off the king’s position; even scouts sent out earlier were no longer being allowed back in. In the distance, something suddenly exploded in the midst of the fleeing crowd — an explosive charge dropped from high above.
Within the main formation, the crossbow troops lit torches, and then, like rain, streaks of fire rose into the sky and arced back down into the crowds below.
Far off, the throngs ran and the slaughter spread, and only faintly could the shapes of Black Banner soldiers be made out.
Li Qianshun climbed the wooden watchtower and looked out over the chaos and collapse before him, and from the bottom of his heart he sighed, “What a fine army…” Faintly, he too caught sight of the balloon drifting in the distant sky.
In the camp, Ashagambu mounted his horse, drew his blade, and bellowed, “Where are the sons of the Tangut people!?”
Before him, the Hostage Corps and the garrison battalion soldiers, stretching out in dense ranks, answered with a roar that shook the heavens.
“Move! Stand still and you die—”
Outside the camp, Luo Ye and his comrades were driving forward a column of over a thousand captives who had been stripped of their weapons.
Along the way, several thousand Black Banner soldiers, organized by company, had charged in and pulled back in turns, striking again and again — no one could say any longer how many engagements they had fought through. Along the way, great numbers of Western Xia troops had broken and scattered, and some of those fleeing had turned and been cut down again. Luo Ye and the others, speaking broken Western Xia, ordered the captives to drop their weapons, then slashed each one across the leg to force them onward. Somewhere along this road they had also crossed paths with Liu Chengzong’s light cavalry, and the tide of the Western Xia rout had only kept growing.
When they saw fire-arrows rising thick into the sky above the position of Li Qianshun’s main formation, everyone knew: the moment of the final battle was at hand.
The land in every direction lay dark, and in the night the plain seemed to stretch on without end, and so too did the din and the sea of heads around them. In that darkness the black banners had become almost invisible.
Nearly half a day of ceaseless slaughter and marching — exhaustion and pain were sweeping in now, trying to conquer everything.
How many comrades were still beside them, no one could say.
The final obstacle lay just ahead, and how difficult it would be, there was no way to know.
But over this past year and more, the pressure of having no road forward had never once eased. The pressure of the Jurchens, the pressure of a world on the verge of chaos, the pressure of standing against all under Heaven — every moment of it had weighed on them, always. Some had joined the rebellion swept along by circumstance, some on a moment’s impulse; but as soldiers charging at the front, they had come to see with ever greater clarity just how wretched life would become for common people in an age of chaos, if the realm fell and the Jurchens ran rampant unchecked. That, too, was why, once they had glimpsed something different, they had chosen to rebel rather than simply drift along with the current.
Had they never witnessed such scenes of slaughtered innocents — never seen with their own eyes families destroyed as the tide of war swept through, men butchered, women violated and driven to death in shame — they too would probably have chosen the same path as everyone else: find somewhere to hide and scrape out a life.
But even the most foolish among them understood how hard a thing it was, to stand against the whole world.
Over this past year, whether they had shown optimism or fearlessness, in truth every one of them carried this same weight pressed down inside. That they had made it this far was only because someone had told them: if there is no road ahead, then cut one with the blade — and the men beside them had all taken up that same blade. They had broken Yanzhou, destroyed the Iron Sparrowhawks; they were already among the strongest soldiers under Heaven. And yet, if they simply went back to Small Cangriver now, what awaited them there might well be an army of a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand bearing down on them, and their own momentum spent to nothing.
There had never been an easy road in this world — and now, the road lay right before them!
“—The road is right ahead!” A hoarse voice rang out in the darkness; even to hear it was to feel the exhaustion and hardship in it, the voice strained raw.
“…Die here, or cut our way through!”
“…Do you still have the strength!?”
“Forward—”
Voices like these rose up, no one quite sure who was shouting, but every one of them carrying that same exhaustion beneath it. Fighting their way this far, the veterans who had seen battles great and small were all trying to husband every last scrap of strength — and yet still, again and again, men cried out on their own, some officers, some ordinary Black Banner soldiers, spending their remaining strength just to keep the men beside them going.
The shield wall closed up again. Lu Jie fell to the ground, covered head to foot in the blood and flesh of the enemy. He struggled for a moment, and someone hauled him up from the side, shouting, “How are you!?”
“Fine—fine!”
Lu Jie pushed forward, adding his shield back into the line.
Chaos surged, arrows filled the air like rain. Before long the enemy came from ahead — the Hostage Corps and garrison battalion, the finest infantry Western Xia had. The shield walls crashed together, and then came a force like a mountain collapsing. From behind, men thrust their spears forward over the shields; some fell to the ground as halberds swept at their legs. Through a gap between shields a halberd thrust in, twisting wildly — Lu Jie seized it and forced it downward with all his strength.
He kept shoving forward against his shield with everything he had while a comrade climbed up over his body, swung hard, and somewhere ahead a burst of flame erupted with a crack — that comrade, who had just thrown the firebomb, was speared and fell.
The halberd in Lu Jie’s grip was being wrenched back now; bodies pressed against bodies around him, and the flat of the halberd’s blade dragged across his face, slowly cutting into the flesh, slicing his ear in two, then half his cheek. He clenched his teeth and cried out, still shoving the shield forward with all his strength, and the halberd being pulled back hooked around his fingers, crushing them against the shield — blood gushed from his hand as four fingers were sheared clean off between the halberd and the shield’s edge, and with the spray of blood, his strength began to drain out of his body. He was still pushing that shield with everything left in him, calling out on reflex, “Someone—someone—” He had no idea if anyone could hear him.
A comrade carrying a spear thrust the blade out from beside him, then pressed in against him, forcing the shield to hold. Lu Jie’s body slowly slid forward, blood pouring from his ruined hand: what a waste, he thought. He watched the shield wall, listened to the countless voices crying out, as the darkness slowly swallowed his strength, his sight, his life — but what comforted him was that someone had gotten there in time to hold that shield up.
—One man’s retreat was never the failure of one man alone. When you fall back, your comrades die.
Thousands upon thousands of the Hostage Corps pressed forward, and at the point of contact, the line finally began to give way…
The Iron Sparrowhawks charged out of the Western Xia camp, and ahead of the fleeing, routing soldiers, the iron-armored heavy cavalry formed up into a single unbroken line, a vast wall of a barrier.
These armored horsemen could no longer charge on horseback. The iron-clad riders dismounted and drove their own iron-armored warhorses forward on foot, pressing them ahead like a rolling wall. Fire-arrows streaked across the night sky, and now and then a stone hurled by a catapult would cut through the dark as well. The Iron Sparrowhawks pressed in through the flickering, shifting light, and half of them were caught and crushed together right at that front line.
Foot soldiers in iron armor and heavy cavalry in iron armor slaughtered each other in a churning mass, sparks flashing endlessly in the darkness. The rear troops had already used up all their explosives; these formations kept driving forward the blindfolded warhorses, charging and pressing on, and by the end even the last five hundred Iron Sparrowhawks had been swallowed up, their charge losing all momentum.
Meanwhile the light cavalry swung wide around the flank, joining with the infantry to launch one final, desperate assault.
The battlefield spread out vast and unbroken, and within that sea of men, Mao Yishan’s blade had already gone dull along the edge; in the press of shields he’d switched to another sword — one he’d snatched up when the man beside him, named Qian Suiying, had fallen. During training Qian Suiying had been nicknamed “Thousand-Year Hawk,” and Mao Yishan had always liked the name, thinking it must have been given by someone with real learning, and had once told him, “If you don’t live to be a thousand, that name’s going to waste.” When the man fell just now, Mao Yishan had thought, what a waste — and had grabbed the sword from his hand, meaning to kill the man across from him who had thrust a spear at them.
But the enemy ranks were packed too thick; there was no getting through to him.
Qu Qing’s old wound had torn open again; two arrows were still lodged in his body, and he staggered forward, still shouting with all his strength. At the clashing front line, Hou Wu was covered head to toe in blood, thrusting his spear forward, again and again, his hoarse shouts thick with froth and blood.
Standing atop the watchtower, Li Qianshun looked out over everything around him and suddenly felt something strange, something unfamiliar.
Western Xia and the Wu Dynasty had contended with each other for years; war and slaughter had come and gone since his boyhood, and he had witnessed and lived through such affairs of arms long ago. That the Wu Dynasty’s western armies were fearsome, that the folk of the northwest were fierce and hardy — he had known that for a very long time. In truth, if the Wu Dynasty’s northwest bred ferocity, so too did Western Xia; he had grown thoroughly accustomed to everything the battlefield had to offer. Only this time — this was a battlefield unlike anything he had ever seen.
The men charging out of the darkness on every side were, in truth, not so many, and they were plainly exhausted too — and yet the pressure radiating from all around the battlefield came crashing in like a mountain collapsing.
The Hostage Corps’ formation shook; at the very center of contact, gaps were beginning to open in the shield wall, forced steadily backward, and every single step of that slow retreat meant countless lives’ worth of blood spilled. More of the Hostage Corps were sweeping around from both flanks; on one side they had run into the light cavalry, who had formed a dense, well-drilled forest of spears, and high above, something was falling, dropping down into the crowd.
A tremendous blast rang out, flesh and gore flying in every direction, the shockwave rippling outward. A moment later, the rear crossbowmen loosed volley after volley into the sky, and the one balloon that had drifted close to the Western Xia main position was blanketed in arrows — its operator, trying to drop the explosive charge, had brought it down too low.
In the dark of night, a red tide of blood and fire churned and surged — light cavalry breaking through, infantry locked in slaughter, heavy cavalry pressing forward, and the hot air balloon drifting down, catching fire, and then the explosion sweeping outward. At one such moment, Luo Ye flung open his shield: “Li Qianshun! Lend me your head to play with—”
Beside him, war cries tore through the night.
The tide of blades and blood surged forward, into the light ahead—