The mountains rolled on and on, tracing fierce, jagged contours across the land in the southwest.
Beneath surging leaden clouds, white snow fell thick and heavy across the earth. From Xiangfan toward Jiange, across a thousand li of land, some places lay in chaos, others in dead silence.
Cities that had once stood strong had, over the past several months, had their gates broken open, and the damage wrought by hundreds of thousands of rampaging troops had still not begun to heal. Among the charred ruins, people in tattered clothes still searched for some last shred of hope; in villages ravaged by soldiers and bandits, elderly couples slowly died of cold in their own homes; and the refugees who had fled and gathered outside the few cities in this region that still stood unbroken had, once the heavy snow fell, begun dying of cold and hunger in great numbers as well.
The land stretched on toward Jiange, and several hundred thousand troops, packed together like ants, were gradually building a new ecosystem of their own across this ever colder land. In the hills adjoining the encampments, the trees had already been stripped bare; every day, columns of smoke rose from the vast camps for warmth, as dense as towering forests reaching for the clouds. In some camps, new war supplies were manufactured every single day, hauled by ox-cart toward the battlefront near Jiange, while some self-sufficient units continued to ravage Han territory even further afield.
Over the past autumn, the fruits of the harvest, plundered by armies sweeping across a thousand li of land, had by now mostly been gathered here. And in exchange, several million Han civilians had been left entirely without food or savings to see them through the winter. This rear logistics base, built to sustain the great southwestern war, held a force numbering in the several hundreds of thousands, its zone of surveillance and control radiating out several hundred li.
In November, Wanyan Xiyin had already arrived to take personal command here. What he was watching and waiting for was a force of twenty thousand Black Banner troops, making its way over the mountains from Dayang in Tubo. This was the most elite unit of vengeance the Huaxia Army possessed, forged in the blood of the Battle of Xiaocang River—led by Qin Shaoqian, it was like a venomous serpent, its blade now aimed at the several hundred thousand Jin troops gathered outside Jiange.
Had Xiyin not spent years preparing for a confrontation with the Black Banner, thoroughly investigating the state of this particular force, the Jurchen army’s rear defenses might well have been shattered by a single strike from this unit—and at that point, the Jurchen elite already committed to the southwest might have found themselves unable even to make it back out through Jiange, trapped with an iron chain stretched across the river, unable to move forward or back.
And so, in November, Xiyin arrived here and took direct command of these several tens of thousands of Jurchen elite troops, placing this heavy piece squarely against that particular force. Qin Shaoqian understood at once that their movements had already been detected; the more than twenty thousand men quietly settled into position among the mountains and, for the time being, made no move at all.
Some things, when spoken of before they happen, are hard for anyone to believe. But Xiyin understood clearly in his heart: should the war in the southwest turn against the Jurchens, this force of twenty thousand men, quietly watching and waiting, would deliver the sharpest possible blow against the Jurchen rear.
Would the Jurchens really lose?—for the time being, no one on their own side entertained such a thought. But this Black Banner force, waiting for its moment of vengeance, was clearly treating that very possibility as a real and concrete future to prepare for.
The fighting at the front had only just begun, and already Ning Yi had set this blade down in the rear—an ambush, an opportunistic strike, or perhaps even simply waiting to annihilate the entire Jurchen western army during its eventual retreat. Such boldness, such audacity, left Xiyin distinctly displeased.
He calmly reorganized and trained the surrendered Han troops in the rear, sifting them, step by step, for whatever usable soldiers he could find, while at the same time organizing ample logistical supplies to support the front.
Shifting one’s gaze from here, past Jiange, and stretching onward: across the vast, hazy mountain ranges, the sprawling column of troops wove together like a long dragon, with military camps forming the segments along its body. From these camps, the traces of human activity radiated outward, and across the forested mountains, patches of blackened, bald terrain appeared here and there—ugly scars carved by slaughter and fire, like patches of scabbed scalp.
By December, beneath the leaden sky, occasional rain and snow fell, the roads turning muddy and treacherous. Though the Jurchens had organized a large logistics workforce to maintain the roads, forward transport capacity had grown steadily harder to sustain. Advancing troops, alongside ox-carts, slipped and struggled through the mud; at times people crowded together tightly in the mountains, and at every logistical bottleneck, one could see soldiers huddled shivering around campfires.
From Jiange onward, the figures of men, ox-carts, and horse-carts filled a stretch of muddy mountain road extending some fifty li. Spurred on by the encouragement and mobilization of the Jurchen marshal Zonghan, the advancing Jurchen troops appeared resolute and unbroken, while the Han troops forced along beside them appeared numb and hollow—yet the column still stretched onward regardless. In some especially rugged stretches of the mountains, people had even carved out entirely new roads by sheer brute effort; men shouted out across the hills, and scouts in strange, mismatched clothing and varied expressions emerged now and then from the forest, helping wounded comrades along or carrying the injured on stretchers, only to head back into the mountains again in wave after wave once they’d rested.
To ease the strain on the roads, wounded soldiers from the front were, by this point, essentially no longer being transported back to the rear at all. The dead were cremated together near the battlefield itself, and the wounded were kept and treated right there at the front.
On clear days, hot-air balloons would rise high into the sky; on days of rain and strong winds, people instead kept watch for the possibility of small-scale surprise attacks from within the tree line.
The Huaxia Army launched ambushes against the Jin forces; the Jin scouts, in turn, sometimes launched surprise raids of their own against the Huaxia Army.
This chaotic road stretched on for fifty li. On the battlefield a bit further south, in front of the small city called Huangming County, wreckage and scattered body parts lay everywhere; cannon fire had pockmarked the earth into a cratered field, the wreckage of broken catapults left scattered traces across the ground, and the remains of every kind of siege engine, even cannon fragments, lay strewn among the corpses stretching ever onward.
Several massive siege carts, built to withstand cannon fire, lay collapsed here and there across the battlefield. These siege carts had the shape of a right triangle standing as tall as the city walls, with a thick, cannon-resistant surface at the front and a sloped incline at the rear gentle enough for men to climb. Attacking soldiers would push the cart up against the wall, then a whole group of soldiers could climb up the slope and scale the walls together, gaining the advantage of numbers and formation. Now, though, these siege carts too lay in wreckage across the battlefield.
Over the past month and more, the Jurchens had launched several assaults using various siege engines to scale the walls, but with little real effect. Scattered soldiers scaling the walls would simply be picked off by concentrated Huaxia Army fire, while those charging up in tight groups would only run headlong into grenades hurled down at them.
Until every last Huaxia Army soldier on the walls lay dead, the notion of scaling the walls and winning the day in a single decisive strike had become an utterly unrealistic ambition. Throughout this whole stretch of fighting, the only things that seemed able to inflict real damage on the defenders atop the walls were arrows, fire bombs, catapults, or cannons hauled forcibly to the front and fired point-blank at the walls—and even in this regard, the Huaxia Army still held an overwhelming advantage.
For Balishu, who was overseeing the fighting here, there was an even more maddening development taking shape ahead of him.
The assault on Huangming County had begun at the start of November, and throughout this process, both sides had been using hot-air balloons every day to observe movement on the opposing lines. The assault had only just begun when the soldiers manning the balloon reported back to Balishu on a change taking shape within the enemy’s own city: within that small settlement, a new wall was being constructed several dozen zhang behind the existing one.
The Huaxia Army had organized a large engineering workforce and, at an astonishing pace, dismantled buildings within the city—some of the preparatory work, in truth, had already been done in advance, with the existing buildings simply serving as camouflage all along. They rapidly erected iron-and-wood frameworks, laid the foundations, filled them in with earth and stone already salvaged from other demolished buildings, and poured in gray “mortar”… In the span of a mere half-month, even as Huangming County withstood wave after wave of furious Jurchen assault out front, a new, dust-gray wall several zhang high had risen up behind it.
During the construction of this new wall, Ning Yi, the head of the Huaxia Army, had even appeared on-site several times in person, gesturing and offering pointed input on certain critical stages of the work.
For Balishu, this was nothing short of a devastating slap in the face.
But it also forced this famed Jurchen general to steady himself and abandon a great many of his illusions. He began trading lives and materiel for lives and materiel on the wall, and by mid-December, the first wall of Huangming County had already been pounded full of holes, teetering on the verge of collapse. Balishu’s forces, cycling through wave after wave of assault, had suffered casualties numbering in the tens of thousands, with even his own core Jurchen troops—those he considered his true main force—suffering losses exceeding five thousand.
Feeding troops into the wall piecemeal, one wave after another under continuous cannon fire, would naturally produce higher casualties. But if one instead relied on sheer numerical advantage to sustain a continuous, saturated series of assaults, the exchange ratio could be narrowed considerably. Over the course of a month and a half, Balishu organized several rounds of rotating assaults lasting as long as eight or nine days at a stretch, blanketing the battlefield with wave after wave of scattered Han troops to reduce the efficiency of enemy artillery fire as much as possible, interspersing feints with genuine full assaults. In the early stages, large numbers of captured Han civilians were also driven forward in successive waves, keeping the Black Banner troops atop the walls in a state of constant, unrelenting tension.
In the early stages of this great battle, the Black Banner troops atop the walls had clearly maintained a high, unbroken fighting spirit, but as time wore on, the defenders on the walls gradually fell into a grim silence, absorbing wave after wave of Balishu’s fierce assault. Even as the Jurchens paid an enormous price in casualties, the number of dead and wounded atop the walls, too, kept steadily climbing. Balishu would organize his artillery and catapults for the occasional concentrated barrage against the wall, then order his troops to seize the city—but every single time, the Huaxia Army soldiers managed to retake it.
At the northern battlefield of Rainwater Creek, the terrain sat comparatively low-lying, and the ground where the assault was taking place had by now turned into a sea of mud; the Jurchens often had to cross bloodstained, muddy ground before they could even engage the Huaxia Army in direct combat. But the surrounding forest was, comparatively, easier to move through, which stretched the defensive line out considerably and gave the whole rhythm of assault and defense here a rather strange, unpredictable character.
The defense here did not rest on any single unbroken wall, but rather on a handful of high ground positions holding several key points, controlling the main routes back to the rear, with three defensive lines set up one behind another. The nearby streams and forests, in truth, held many small paths, and the position here was never entirely sealed off either. But anyone who tried to force their way through without regard for the consequences risked being trapped later on some narrow mountain path, stepping on landmines, and then caught in a pincer attack by the Huaxia Army’s mobile forces—a fate that would only get them killed all the faster.
Because of this situation, the surrounding hills had become something like a vast maze of confusion, where the Huaxia Army generally had to pick its moment carefully to strike out and create real results, while the Jurchens found themselves with an ever-growing range of tactical options available to them. Over the course of a month and more, the two sides traded blows back and forth; the Jurchens suffered a few setbacks, but also managed, through sheer brute force, to pull one forward Huaxia Army position out entirely.
Guarding that particular position was Yu Zhongdao of the Fifth Division, Fifth Army of the Huaxia Army. In a battle in early December, the two sides clashed in close combat amid the freezing, muddy ground, with heavy casualties on both sides. Qu Zhengyan of the Fourth Division led a unit of fewer than five hundred men—barely half a regiment—on a counter-raid through the mountains, striking directly at the outer perimeter of the Jurchen camp at Rainwater Creek. At that moment, the Jurchen general commanding the fighting at Rainwater Creek, Elili, was just about to lead men out on a raid of his own; Qu Zhengyan, seizing the opening, intercepted him and very nearly cut him down on the spot.
Word of the disturbance in the rear reached the front, throwing the Jurchen front line into chaos and inflicting heavy casualties. Seeing that he couldn’t manage to kill Elili himself, Qu Zhengyan immediately redirected his men to push straight toward the Rainwater Creek position.
His advance was ferocious and utterly resolute; he even had one of his men carry a severed head and shout: “Elili is dead! Attack from front and back, wipe them out!” Several thousand Jurchen troops who had already pulled back from the front line, intending to go rescue their commander, saw this show of a coordinated pincer attack and, taking it at face value, hesitated for just a moment—which was all the opening Qu Zhengyan needed to break straight through the middle of their formation and out the other side.
The stench of blood filled the winter air, and this kind of clashing, back-and-forth slaughter continued to spread across these hills, day after day.
Further southwest, past Rainwater Creek and Huangming County, the mountain roads soon revealed stretcher teams and reinforcement columns constantly moving back and forth. Pack horses carried supplies on their backs—hauling shells, gunpowder, grain, and every other kind of provision—sending it all toward the battlefield day after day. From the wounded-soldier camp built in a mountain hollow, cries of agony and shouting drifted out now and then; steam and black smoke from boiling water in the makeshift shelters hung over the camp like some strange, ghostly fog.
Ning Ji dashed out of a tent, dumping a basin of bloody water into the ditch beside the camp, and without a moment’s rest turned right back to the shelter to refill the basin with boiling water before hurrying back inside. In theory, the wounded-soldier camp behind the front lines was not a particularly safe place to be—the Jurchens were no pushovers, and it was, in fact, entirely possible—even quite likely—that the front line could suddenly collapse on any given day. And yet young Ning Ji had still stubbornly insisted on coming here.
In some sense, this too represented the very bottom line of what he could bring himself to accept.
Not far from the wounded-soldier camp lay a sprawling prisoner camp as well. In November, this prisoner camp had mostly held civilians who had survived the battlefield; by December, gradually, Han army units that had broken through toward Rainwater Creek only to be surrounded and forced to surrender had begun arriving here as well.
These men were not to be trusted. Any Han army unit that Zonghan had selected to take part in this campaign was one that either boasted outstanding fighting ability or was, at least in the Jurchens’ eyes, considered relatively “reliable.” They were nothing like the sort of troops driven en masse into the mountains during the Battle of Xiaocang River, and there was essentially no way to absorb them into the Huaxia Army’s ranks in any short span of time.
These men would not remain in this camp for long; the greatest obstacle to transferring them quickly onward was, once again, the state of the roads. The Huaxia Army personnel responsible for guarding them would put them through a quick round of screening, and political education work would also begin right away. Hou Wu, who had earlier left the main army to take up rear security work, was one of the officers in charge here, and thanks to this, his son Hou Yuanyong, now working in battlefield intelligence, had gotten the chance to visit his father here several times.
The winding roads stretched on toward Zizhou, spreading out across the Chengdu Plain in the southwest. In winter, the clouds over the Chengdu Plain hung very low; looking out across the sky, it seemed as though the whole world lay beneath a heavy, oppressive lid of leaden gray. Workshops of every kind operated at full capacity across one town after another, blast furnaces large and small breathing out flame and light beneath the somber sky, while men driving ox-carts, pushing wheelbarrows, or carrying goods on shoulder poles kept a steady stream of supplies flowing toward Zizhou and toward Jiange—much the same scene playing out here as beyond Jiange itself.
This too was the sight of two great beasts locked in mortal combat beneath the winter sky…
On the nineteenth of December, with the Minor New Year still a few days off, a steady, drizzling rain fell without pause.
Over this past month, every fall of rain had brought with it some of the most brutal fighting of all, since the Jurchens believed that rain would help close the gap in firepower between the two sides—this was, for them, currently their single best window of opportunity.
Near a fork in the road by Rainwater Creek, along the narrow route toward Eagle Beak Crag, Mao Yishan breathed hot air onto his hands and clenched his fists. Ahead of him, a dark, dense mass of figures was pressing steadily forward.
A decisive battle was about to break out at this very moment…