Boom—
A massive stone hurtled across the sky, accompanied by a sky-blackening rain of arrows, and after crossing a distance of several dozen zhang, crashed brutally into the towering city wall. Fragments of stone shattered and rained down; the wall itself trembled with the impact. Some fragments sailed over the parapet and fell among the soldiers packed within the city, causing devastating, gut-wrenching casualties. Atop the wall, amid shouts, men hauled cannons into position, lit the fuses, and the shells came crashing down onto the enemy’s positions outside.
In the ninth year of the Wu Dynasty’s Jianshuo era, in early September, the altar of hell had already drunk its fill of sacrificial blood, and at last, formally, the gates of the harvest swung open.
The Jurchens’ fourth southern campaign advanced, amid an atmosphere that everyone silently understood yet found suffocating all the same, to the moment when war finally broke out. The horn that sounded this moment was Daming Prefecture, along the path of the Jurchen Eastern Route Army’s southward advance.
Before this, every possible effort had already been made. Wang Shanyue’s Guangwu Army and the Black Banner forces led by Zhu Biao had crushed nearly two hundred thousand of Li Xizhi’s men, clearing the surrounding area in a display of overwhelming force. But the Jurchens’ arrival carried an entirely different weight than anything before it. Even with Daming Prefecture having made its final, desperate stand, no one could say for certain whether this lone city would be able to withstand the Jurchens’ first, fierce blow.
Years before, the Liao Dynasty’s Upper Capital had also been hailed as a stronghold capable of holding out for years, yet under Aguda’s command, the Jurchens, though outnumbered, had achieved the legendary feat of taking the Upper Capital in a mere half a day. Of course, the tides of battle shift in an instant — during the Jurchens’ first southern campaign, Qin Shaohe had led Wu Dynasty soldiers, of markedly lower quality than the Liao army, in defending Taiyuan, and had ultimately managed to drag the siege out for over a year. Either way, the Jurchens had arrived now, the true drama was about to unfold, and everyone involved could only step onto the stage with hearts full of dread, waiting for the verdict to come.
On the seventeenth of the eighth month, dusk quietly swallowed the western light, and the vanguard cavalry of the Jurchen “Fourth Prince” Jin Wushu — that is, Wanyan Zongbi — arrived at Daming, setting up camp to the north of the prefecture. Following behind came the main Jurchen force, along with their artisans and logistics corps, and after them, the mobilized puppet Qi forces from the surrounding area, driving before them the civilians who hadn’t managed to flee in time, all converging in a vast, sprawling tide upon this lone city on the northern bank of the Yellow River.
Great tents, banners, and the weeping, wailing masses being driven forward stretched on endlessly, merging in the distance into a terrifying, chilling sea of humanity. In every dawn and dusk that followed, the wails and cries rising from that crowd would make it impossible for the men atop the walls to keep from clenching their fists or shedding tears.
The war had not yet even begun, and already its cruelest omens had appeared. This tactic of driving civilians before them to storm cities had been standard Jurchen practice for over a decade now. After the third southern campaign drove the Wu Dynasty out of the Central Plains, this land, nominally under the puppet Qi regime, had submitted to Jurchen authority for years. But this time, facing the obstacle of Daming Prefecture, Wanyan Zongbi immediately labeled all the local Han Chinese as rebellious troublemakers — on one hand driving the human tide forward, and on the other, beginning a campaign of propaganda directed at these very civilians.
“…The Wu Dynasty has forfeited its virtue before all under heaven. The lands of the Central Plains have long since belonged rightfully to Great Qi, no longer to the Wu Dynasty! Our Great Jin and Great Qi are brother nations; it is only natural that you, as people of Great Qi, should live and thrive here. And yet now these Wu Dynasty bandits have come to seize your cities and stir up rebellion! Mark this well — it is these Wu Dynasty scoundrels who have destroyed the good lives you once knew—”
Even as this propaganda spread, select individuals were chosen to enter the city and urge surrender. Those who came into the city, whether pleading or hurling curses, were nothing more than a bitter appetizer before the coming feast of war. Once their pleas for surrender were refused, those sent out, along with their families, were dragged out and whipped to death before the city walls. Meanwhile, within the Jurchen camp, the construction of siege engines continued without pause.
On the morning of the fourth day of the ninth month, the human tide was driven forward toward Daming Prefecture. Weeping, pleading people trampled through the first wave of hastily buried land mines outside the city, while others carried siege ladders for the Jurchen army, trying to rush toward the walls ahead in a desperate bid for survival. Behind them, the Jurchen military police formed their lines — Han Chinese facing Han Chinese — and not long after they entered firing range, the first volley of arrows arrived, right on schedule…
…
War has never been a place where the weak-hearted can stand their ground, and after more than a decade of fighting, those forged in its fires had long since come to understand this truth.
Crimson clouds burned across the sky, faintly tinged with the color of blood. Daming Prefecture, on the north bank of the Yellow River, had by now been utterly submerged in it. On the fourth of the ninth month, the first day of the Jurchen siege, tens of thousands of Han Chinese driven forward against the walls of Daming Prefecture lay dead or wounded; under the lash of Jurchen blades, the entire moat had nearly been filled with corpses.
Amid the sky-darkening rain of arrows, catapult stones, and explosions, some raised ladders and tried to scale the walls amid shouts and weeping. Stones rained down from above in response.
No one knew where among the crowd the Jurchen soldiers themselves were hidden.
Amid the intense fighting, Jurchen forces launched three consecutive surprise assaults against Daming Prefecture’s defenses. The defenders atop the wall remained alert throughout, responding promptly to each attack. At midday, a Jurchen vanguard even briefly gained the wall, only to be cut down there by Hu Sanniang, who happened to be leading her men nearby, repelling the assault.
The Jurchens had no wish to lose too many of their own men at Daming, but the lives of the Han Chinese driven before them counted for nothing. To force these people to press the assault, the Jurchens rained arrows and stones down indiscriminately on both those atop the walls and those below. This intense fighting continued for a full day, and when the battle finally quieted that night, the exhausted soldiers atop the wall found themselves utterly spent. Below, countless bodies lay scattered, the wounded writhing among the dead, their wails and moans and sobs rising from a sea of blood — a scene of human tragedy too terrible to bear witness to.
Wang Shanyue then brought up reserve troops to relieve those on duty and take stock of the wounded. Deep into that night, the Jurchen camp’s catapults stirred once more, launching another wave of assault. Below, civilians were driven forward again, ladders on their backs, weeping and begging the defenders within to open a path for their survival. From atop the wall, men with reddened eyes hurled stones down upon them.
The next day, the fierce fighting continued as before. Soldiers atop the wall scattered leaflets reading, “If there is commotion, run east.” The notes passed hand to hand among the civilians below, and the Jurchens accordingly reinforced their defenses on the eastern flank. By the third day, amid the brutal ongoing siege, Wang Shanyue had the soldiers atop the wall shout in unison: “Head west! Quickly, head west!” The people, driven to the brink by three days under the shadow of death, broke into chaos and surged westward in a wild rush. The Jurchen cannons on the western flank then opened fire, shells tearing through the crowd, blasting bodies apart — but amid the tens of thousands surging forward, no one could tell front from back, left from right; even as some at the very front tried to stop, countless others kept running behind them. This chaotic surge tore open a gap in the Jurchens’ relatively weaker western defenses, and roughly ten thousand people poured through that breach, fleeing desperately toward the distant woods and open country.
On the fourth day, several thousand of those ten thousand were rounded up and driven back, forced once more into the death march against the city.
From the first defense of Bianliang up to now, over a decade had passed, yet the brutality of war had never once changed. Xue Changgong moved along the walls of Daming Prefecture, overseeing the defense operations across its full forty-eight li of length. Defending a city was an arduous and unrelenting task; across forty-eight li, every visible section required a clear-headed commander capable of directing and adapting on the spot. Beyond simply holding through the day, there was the night to endure as well, and during the most intense fighting, fresh reserves had to be held back to rotate in during any lull. Compared to offense, which prized raw courage and martial skill, defending a city demanded, even more, meticulous, watertight thinking from its commanders — perhaps this was precisely why Taiyuan, under Qin Shaohe’s command, had managed to hold out for a full year.
Amid this brutal defense, no different from the sieges of over a decade before, some things had nevertheless changed in the years since. In the lulls between the fiercest clashes, atop and within the city walls, soldiers would sit together and speak quietly of their own lives — their days back in the Wu Dynasty, how everything had changed once the Jurchens came, the humiliations they’d endured, the faces and voices of family members now gone. At such times, Wang Shanyue, whether arriving from the rear or having just come down from the wall, would often join in these gatherings, speaking of the Wang family’s own past — of the martyrs across an entire household, of the widow left behind from that family, and of how he would rather eat human flesh than ever admit defeat.
This shift had come about because of Wang Shanyue. It had originated, at first, from that inner demon’s Bamboo Records — ever since founding the Guangwu Army, Wang Shanyue had regularly held gatherings much like these, sessions of recalling past suffering to appreciate present blessings. The culture of this land tended toward reticence; a real man did not readily bare his past to outsiders, and Xue Changgong himself was similarly reserved. The first time he’d witnessed such a session, he’d felt it somewhat improper — but Wang Shanyue paid it no mind. He spoke of his grandfather, of losing to others in combat, of how, with only himself left as the sole man of the Wang family, he’d had no choice but to shoulder the entire household’s burden alone; he spoke of eating human flesh only to make others fear him — and to inspire that fear, he’d had no qualms about biting his enemies to death. It was only after spending considerable time around him that Xue Changgong came to realize that this man, with features more delicate than a woman’s, had likely never wanted to speak of these things either, at first.
And yet, once spoken, it proved genuinely useful for the army. Some men of few words might say only, “I want to avenge my child” — but having spoken it aloud, their spirit and resolve would visibly shift. Especially in the desperate straits of Daming Prefecture, when newly enlisted soldiers spoke of such things, each retelling would leave them more sorrowful, but afterward, the resolve for a fight to the death would burn a shade brighter in their eyes.
After the Guangwu Army and the Huaxia Army together defeated Li Xizhi, men of conviction from the nearby Yellow Snake Fort, Grey Mountain Fort, and other strongholds came to join their ranks. Though these outside fighters carried a certain spirit, in matters of coordination and discipline, they still bore traces of their bandit origins, and even after joining, many still held to their own ways of thinking. On the second day after the battle began, Yan Kan, chieftain of Grey Mountain Fort, spoke to the others of his own family’s story — he had once been a fairly wealthy man of the Central Plains. His daughter had been raped and murdered by the Jurchens; Yan Kan had gone to the authorities for justice, only to be arrested himself and beaten eighty strokes with the heavy rod. Left half-dead from the beating, he’d had to give up most of his family’s fortune just to save his own life; once he recovered, he took to the greenwood as a bandit, and had remained one ever since.
Sharing this with the others, the old chieftain wept openly before the group, and afterward sent several of his most capable men to disperse into the Guangwu Army’s ranks, resolving never again to act on his own authority. By the third day of the siege, Yan Kan personally led a charge that repelled a Jurchen assault; he survived, against all odds, and afterward, drenched in blood from head to waist, laughed heartily with the others, his relief and satisfaction beyond words.
In truth, over these years, since the Central Plains had become Great Qi, was there anyone who had joined the Guangwu Army without carrying some private grief of their own? Even those with no family left to grieve had, at the very least, watched comrades and friends die before their own eyes.
Listening to these stories, Xue Changgong would occasionally find himself thinking of his late wife, He Lei’er, remembering how timid and easily frightened she had always been — and yet, more than a decade ago, she had run down to the base of the city wall, and in that final moment, taken an arrow… All these years, fearing the Jurchens’ military might, he had never dared to bring children into this world; toward his wife, he’d never truly believed he’d felt any deep affection — what real man need fear finding another wife? And yet, thinking back on it now, he found her face and voice rising vividly before him again and again.
Ah well, so be it.
Women, he thought — in any case, I never expected to live forever anyway…
As a commander, such rather defeatist thoughts weren’t ones he could voice aloud; still, whenever he happened to look out at the tragic scene beyond the walls, at that surging tide of humanity, he found himself, more often than not, breaking into laughter instead. And within the city, Wang Shanyue continued, step by step, to rally the men’s spirits and reshape their thinking.
“…True, the Wu Dynasty was never anything remarkable, but compared to the Jurchens, isn’t it a world better?… Look at those people outside the walls — their suffering is terrible, but what good would surrendering do us? If the whole realm surrendered, would we live any better for it? We’d all become slaves — the Jurchens aren’t gods, they used to have… nothing at all. Now that we’ve held this city, you know why? Because now we have nothing left either…”
“…We can’t defeat them, not on our own… but even if all we do is chip their teeth, we’re going to keep them pinned here… Aguda is already dead, Wuqimai is dying too. If we hold out long enough, they’ll turn on each other, and the Wu Dynasty will fight its way back. If we hold out, the Black Banner Army will fight its way back too… Those ten thousand-plus Black Banner troops, that man Zhu Biao — if we can just hold this line, they can strike from behind. Brothers… this city is hard to hold, and it’s hard for any of us to keep living… I don’t know, come tomorrow, which of you might not wake up, or whether I myself will still be here…”
“…But we have to hold this line. I want to live. The people outside these walls want to live too. As long as the Jurchens live, none of us can hope to. So even if I die, I’ll drag them down with me, and we’ll die together.”
“…Die together…”
The drifting smoke of battle was swept up by the wind. The walls were pitted and cratered from the boulders that had struck them, and the bodies below had begun to give off the stench of decay. Stripped of everything, the people held their ground on this last, desperate stand…
In early September, as the Jurchen Eastern Route Army marched south in its first campaign to destroy Southern Wu, Wanyan Zongbi had once planned to take Daming Prefecture, held by a defending force of over forty thousand, within three days at most. But three days passed. Then another three. The city had nearly drowned in blood in that first wave of assault, and yet by mid-September, Daming Prefecture still stood unmoved atop that mountain of corpses and sea of blood. This city had, from its very founding, been built to guard the Yellow River and hold off foreign invaders; once its defenders had managed to grit their teeth and hold on, breaking through its defenses from outside proved genuinely no easy task.
By now Wuqimai had been paralyzed by stroke for nearly a year, and the changing of the era loomed close at hand. Neither Zongfu nor Zongbi could have imagined that their very first battle in this southern campaign would run headlong into so stubborn a bone to chew — nor could they have imagined that, beyond the Black Banner, the Han Chinese of the south had, it seemed, gradually begun to grow bones of their own like this too.
To the west, Wanyan Zonghan had already crossed Yanmen Pass and set foot on the soil of the Central Plains.