Hejian Prefecture — the first news to arrive concerned the increase of oppressive taxes.
Ever since the Jurchens came and the Wu Dynasty was forced to move south, the Central Plains had rarely known a good day. In the mouths of old men and diviners, the Wu court’s Emperor had lost the mandate of fortune, and the years grew harder — now flood, now drought. Last year a great locust plague had ravaged the Central Plains as well, and those who had lost all means of survival turned into “hungry ghosts,” streaming south, until the banks of the Yellow River were crowded with countless homeless, wandering souls.
Just as the hungry ghosts were seen crossing the Yellow River, this year, north of the river, brought a rare stretch of peace. There were no more disasters arriving one after another, no rampaging refugees sweeping through. In the fields the wheat visibly grew tall, and then came a heavy harvest. In Zhaozi Village, Wang Laoshi had gritted his teeth, ready to find a wife for his son — when the officers from the yamen came knocking.
This year’s taxes and corvée labor had been drastically increased. From the officers’ hesitant, mumbling tone, it seemed that six-tenths of this year’s income would be taken. With wheat yielding less than two dan per mu, and more than one dan owed in tax, the days ahead would be unlivable.
Wang Laoshi was normally a mild-mannered man, but this time, facing the yamen officers, he could not help saying something harsh: “You’re human too — born of a mother and father, same as anyone. Are you trying to drive the whole village to its death?”
After the officers left in embarrassment, Wang Laoshi’s strength drained out of him. He sat gloomily in the courtyard, staring blankly at his family’s three earthen rooms. Living, he thought, was truly bitter — there was no meaning to it. Thinking it over, things had been better when the Wu Dynasty still held the north.
Not long after, his son came home, and on learning of the tax situation, flushed red in the face without managing a word. The son, too, was an honest, plain young man — you could beat him with three sticks and not get a peep out of him. He was already twenty-three this year and still had no wife. It wasn’t that there were no women nearby; it was that in the hard years before, no one dared marry, unable to feed a family. If the government’s taxes came down now, they’d be eating chaff and wild greens again this year — no talk of supporting a wife.
In the heavy autumn night, the same heavy worry pressed on many hearts. The next day, a meeting was called in the village ancestral hall — life could not go on like this. They had to carry their hardships to the officials above and beg them to show mercy, to give everyone some way to live. After all: “Even when the Jurchens came, it wasn’t this bad.”
The clan brought out its elders and gentry, and to smooth the way, everyone scraped together what little money and grain they could spare. Wang Laoshi and his son were chosen as porters, carrying wheat, cured meat, and the like as they followed the elders into the city. Soon after, they were joined by delegations from several neighboring villages, and district after district sent representatives to plead their case to the authorities above.
As their numbers grew, Wang Laoshi and the others felt their spirits rise. Along the way the officers let them pass, and before long they had gathered in great numbers at Hejian Prefecture. Prefect Wang Manguang came out to placate the crowd. After several rounds of negotiation, nothing was resolved. Down below, people began cursing the cunning of the “dog official,” and soon a mocking rhyme about him was circulating through the city.
Two days later, troops suddenly poured into the city and martial law was declared. Wang Laoshi and the others were terrified, thinking their defiance had grown into something serious. But it turned out the soldiers had not come for them — they marched straight into the prefectural offices, and word spread that the dog official Wang Manguang had been thrown into prison.
After that, matters moved fast. Within two days, the wailing of the bereaved filled the city inside and out, and the great officials of the government were thrown into prison one after another. In just two days, a great execution platform rose at the vegetable market of Hejian Prefecture. That day Wang Laoshi and the others got word and rushed there to watch the beheadings — the heads of dog officials, the heads of runners and clerks.
Men who had once thrown their weight around were marched up in file. Wang Manguang, quite fat, with the look of a well-fed glutton, was bound now, a strip of cloth stuffed in his mouth, utterly disgraced. Such a dog official truly deserved death — people snatched things up from the ground and hurled them at him. Before long he was the first pressed down before the platform, and a Jurchen official who had come down from the north announced the charge against him: dereliction of duty.
Most in the crowd could not follow the charge; they simply cheered. Wang Manguang’s head had split open, blood running down his brow as he knelt. When at last the moment came to behead him, the executioner pulled the gag from his mouth. This plump corrupt official glanced once at the crowd before him and spoke one final line. In an age when a man could grow so fat, Wang Manguang had been no good official — one might even say his record was riddled with wrongdoing. And yet, because of this one line, he was written into the history that followed.
“Run… run, good people…” said the dog official, his head broken and bleeding.
A moment later, the executioner’s blade fell.
That day, amid the people’s rejoicing, nearly a third of Hejian Prefecture’s administrative staff were killed — heads rolling, blood flowing like a river. The “Marshal” who had come down from the north, Wanyan Chang, presided over this act of justice.
With the Jurchen marshal present, the local elders no longer had any standing to face him, and everyone went back to their villages. Three days after Wang Manguang’s execution, a new yamen and its staff of runners had already resumed operation. This time, the two runners who came to Wang Laoshi’s home wore a completely different manner from before.
This time, they had come to save their own skins.
After the notice was read, even heavier taxes were pressed down. Wang Laoshi stared, dumbfounded, then cursed just as before — and was struck across the head with a club. As blood streamed down, he heard the runner curse: “If you won’t listen, everyone’s going to die because of you!”
That day, people around Hejian Prefecture began to recall what Wang Manguang had said before he died.
But by then it was already too late to run.
The runners and soldiers around Hejian had already begun moving, sealing off every road. The same thing was, at that very moment, spreading through the Hebei and Jingdong circuits under the rule of General Li Xizhi, the “General Who Pacifies the East.” On the Hebei circuit, three hundred thousand Jurchen troops surged south through the pass, and the vanguard led by Wanyan Zongbi had already crossed Zhending.
In the small village of Zhaozi, Wang Laoshi and the others still did not understand what was coming. But on the stage of the wider world, the southward march of three hundred thousand troops meant that a war aimed at destroying and conquering the Wu Dynasty had truly sounded its horn — there was no room left for retreat. Before long, a fierce war would break out on the front lines.
On the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month, the “Wolf Pack” struck Daming Prefecture!
Ever since the Wu Dynasty’s move south, the Wu forces that had spent years quietly building strength around Jingdong East and Liangshan — led by Wang Shanyue and the Hu family of Dulong Ridge — finally bared the fangs they had kept hidden for so long.
Ever since Liu Yu, backed by the Jin state, had established the puppet regime of Great Qi, the Jingdong circuit had been the very core of that regime’s territory. Yet Jingdong East — later known as the Liangshan region of Shandong — remained a blind spot in its rule. At that time Liangshan was still a vast marsh spreading for hundreds of li, and together with nearby places such as Dulong Ridge and Zengtou Market, the region remained remote and bandit-ridden.
What the Wu Dynasty had never managed to govern, the puppet Qi found equally impossible. By the time Liu Yu’s court had been infiltrated by the Black Banner Army and the emperor beaten within his own palace, Liu Yu fled south, and this territory fell to Li Xizhi and the Qi family — headed by the elder Confucian scholar Qi Yan — behind him. Li Xizhi tried repeatedly to root out the bandits without success; eventually, after great effort, he pacified Dulong Ridge and reported the matter closed in a perfunctory way. But behind the scenes, Wang Shanyue and the others, under the banner of “Wu orthodoxy,” continued quietly linking up and expanding their influence. Over the years, they had achieved effective control of the entire Liangshan region.
Bandits from the surrounding hills flocked to join at the mere rumor of their name, and men of righteous spirit gathered in crowds. Even some among Li Xizhi’s own men who still harbored a sense of justice — whether reached by Wang Shanyue himself or reaching out to him — had quietly come to an understanding with him. This time, when the order went out, the area around Daming Prefecture showed Li Xizhi’s faction exactly what it meant to be “riddled through like a sieve.” On the twenty-fourth, thirty thousand Liangshan troops suddenly appeared beneath Daming Prefecture. Outside the walls came the assault; inside, chaos broke loose. In under half a day, the fifty thousand troops guarding Daming Prefecture collapsed completely, and the husband-and-wife pair leading the assault, Wang Shanyue and Hu Sanniang, completed the seizure and takeover of Daming Prefecture.
This was almost the eruption of every resource the remaining Wu forces here had built up, and it was also where Wang Shanyue — who had once followed Ning Yi — most thoroughly applied what he had learned from the Black Banner Army. This time, gun against gun, cannon against cannon on the open field — there was no more room for compromise.
Daming Prefecture was one of the relay points on the Jurchen supply line heading south, and with the grain requisitions of recent days, the stores gathered there were staggering. This first strike by Wu forces landed squarely on the Jurchen army’s most vital point. As word spread, the more than one hundred thousand troops Li Xizhi had already gathered, together with the more than ten thousand Jurchen troops originally garrisoning Jingdong, joined forces and surged furiously toward the area.
With this first strike, the war spread violently outward. The roads north of the marsh were now a scene of desolation, occasional empty ruins and abandoned villages visible along the way. A train of carriages moved north along this road.
At this time, any merchant train able to travel such roads was no ordinary group. Though few in number, one could tell from the agile bearing of the men that they were no common travelers. The lead carriage jolted along, and now and then a woman’s voice drifted out — a soft humming, sometimes a line from the ancient “Ballad of the Orchid,” about the gracefully swaying orchid, sometimes a line from “The Peach Tree, Young and Fair,” about a bride going to her new home, and now and then a verse from “Li Sao” or “The Big Rat.” The singing had no accompaniment, yet it was strangely soothing to hear.
Only the disordered nature of the singing betrayed the singer’s unsettled heart.
Lu Junyi, riding at the head of the carriage, glanced back.
“Miss Shishi, it’s dangerous up ahead. You really ought to listen and head south.”
The woman in the carriage was Li Shishi. Dressed in coarse cloth, she hummed as she mended a torn garment in her hands. The woman who had once been the most celebrated beauty of Fan Tower had of course never needed to do much needlework. But over the years, as she had aged and been tossed from place to place, mending clothes in a swaying carriage no longer seemed to trouble her much.
“These days, there’s nowhere left in the world that’s peaceful anyway.”
“Head south and you’ll always find somewhere to stay. We have people there — the hungry ghosts won’t catch you.”
“If I go southwest, would he even want to see me?”
“That man Ning is no coward.”
“But I don’t want to see him anymore.”
Shishi lowered her head and smiled, biting off the thread in her hand. A moment later she set the sewing aside and leaned against the carriage window to look outside, the wind tousling her hair. Through years of upheaval and wandering, she had not grown haggard or worn — if anything, time seemed to have settled into her face, leaving behind only a free, easy grace about her brow and eyes.
Lu Junyi shook his head and sighed. “Xiao Yi’s gone off to see to business. I don’t understand the hearts of you women. But war is no game — if you’re prepared for it, I’ve nothing more to say.”
“Mm.” Shishi, inside the carriage, nodded. “I know. I’ve seen it before.”
She looked down at her own hands. More than ten years ago, when she was just past twenty, the Jurchens had finally come, laying siege to Bianliang. Back then she had wanted, with all her heart, to do something — clumsily trying to help. She remembered General Xue Changgong, who had defended the city then, and thought of his lover, her sister at Fan Tower, He Leier, who — carrying his child — had not dared go help beneath the walls. Afterward they lost the child. Had the two of them stayed together, in the end?
All of that now belonged to the past.
Ten-odd years of upheaval, and the world around her had turned entirely upside down. Between her and Ning Yi, too — by some strange twist, they had become “former lovers.” In truth, at more than one crucial moment, she had come close to becoming his lover. But fate played its tricks, and in the end it turned into distance and estrangement.
She had once felt drawn to him, then come to admire him, and later found she could no longer understand him at all. Now she understood some part of it, though much still eluded her. With the world so overturned, whatever small stirrings of feeling there had once been no longer seemed to matter much. In the years after learning of his “death,” she had left Dali and wandered from place to place. She recalled that last year, in Zezhou, they had very nearly crossed paths — but he had not wished to see her, and after that she had stopped much wishing to see him either. Perhaps one day, once she had come to understand everything, she would go find him.
“I’m sorry, Ning Liheng. I misjudged you.” She hoped that on that day she would be able to say those words to him, and then, honestly, lay bare some small, insignificant feeling. But for now she had no right to that — there was still too much she did not understand.
Yet there were things, too, that she had come to understand.
With the Jurchens marching south once more, Wang Shanyue’s resistance against them had finally begun, and the small band that had escorted her back and forth between south and north all this while had at last found its own purpose. A few days earlier, part of the group under Yan Qing had already broken off, heading north to carry out a mission of his own, while Lu Junyi, having failed to persuade her south, led his men toward the marsh instead.
“Time to go see some old friends,” Lu Junyi said.
“…When I was young I studied spear and staff and picked up something of strategy. I thought myself without equal in martial skill, yet no one recognized it. Then, of all things, I ended up on Liangshan — and that man Ning wiped Liangshan out. I joined the army, and again found myself hemmed in on every side, and only then did I understand I was no material for a great general. These years I’ve wandered and watched, and now I know there’s no more room left for hesitation.”
The young master of the Wang family, who had once served under Ning Yi, had finally set his strength in motion, and the Black Banner power that had waited quietly all this while in Shandong was, at last, no longer silent. It had been more than ten years since the former Chancellor Qin Siyuan had led the defense of the city, and since the bloody battle at Wuzhui Camp in Xia Village; several years had passed since the fierce fighting at Xiaocang River. Yet as the Jurchens marched south again, it was this same faction that stood first at the front of the rising storm.
Turning this over in her mind, recalling the turns of the last ten-odd years, Shishi’s heart ached with wistfulness — and try as she might, a surge of heroic feeling rose in her all the same.
Before long she came upon the assembled Black Banner forces at their destination. At the head stood Zhu Biao, the “City-Burning Spear,” together with “Great Blade” Guan Sheng, “Thunderbolt” Qin Ming, “Golden Spear” Xu Ning, and the Zhu clan’s Zhu Long and Zhu Hu — all the generals already waiting there. Soon after, “Jade Qilin” Lu Junyi rejoined the company.
That year, at the marsh, the long reeds had withered. The heroes, gathered together, brought each other a measure of wistful feeling, but more than that, ambition and heroic spirit gathered before their eyes. Compared to what lay ahead now, the old Liangshan Marsh and its Hall of Righteous Gathering were no more than small specks of dust in memory — Song Jiang, Wu Yong, and the rest, mere clowns left behind in the past.
The autumn wind sighs mournfully; the surging waves rise.
The great battle lies ahead.