The nineteenth day of the twelfth month, the eleventh year of Jianshuo.
A dislocation in time would, across the mountains sprawling through the northwest, create scenes of dramatic contrast.
The fighting near Rainwater Creek had begun tentatively probing at each other from the very dawn of this day.
Approaching noon, Elili committed a large force to the battlefield, launching a fierce assault on the front lines, an action meant to cover his intention to lead his personal guard in a hard strike against Eagle Beak Rock.
Past midday, the rear road from Rainwater Creek to Yellowhead Rock was cut off by Chen Tian, and whistling arrows carried word back to Rainwater Creek. Qu Zhengyan ordered his elite troops to burst out from every side path, launching a counterattack across the entire Rainwater Creek position.
With Eagle Beak Rock blasted apart, the duel between Elili and Mao Yishan instantly reached its white-hot climax.
As midday passed, the Jurchen frontline commander Yuyu led a highly mobile scout force in a counterattack toward the mountain road that Chen Tian had cut off, coordinating with Dalai’s forces garrisoned at Yellowhead Rock in the rear.
Yuyu was lean and wiry, a scout by trade, moving across mountains and ridges as if on level ground, his iron arms and steel fingers strong enough to snap rock apart; Dalai was of middling height but powerfully built, having killed countless men on the battlefield, looking, from a distance, like some enormous wild boar. The two veteran Jurchen commanders looked out over the rugged mountain road, their hearts already sinking.
The scouts sent back with word were still running along the muddy, slippery roads, still nearly thirty li from Grand Marshal Wanyan Zonghan, who at this moment held position at Shili Market.
As the winter rain drizzled down, Shili Market remained abuzz with lively commotion. The small transit market that had once stood here was now buried beneath layer upon layer of army camps; even in the rain, the transport of every kind of supply and the deployment of various forces continued without pause. Column after column of troops waiting to depart clogged the area before the camps, and impatient officers and soldiers bellowed even under clear skies—let alone in the rain, where all manner of shouting and cursing rang out. Were it not for the suppression exerted by men like Han Qixian, outright brawls might sometimes have broken out.
This state of affairs had already persisted for more than two months.
Zonghan found this comfortable in some ways, yet it also made him frown. What troubled him was not merely the stalemate at the front and the wretched conditions of the roads in between—pressure from the rear was also gradually making itself felt. On this nineteenth day, as fighting broke out at the front, he received a letter from Jin Emperor Wuqimai.
Wuqimai had been paralyzed by a stroke for over a year now. This southern campaign of the Jurchens had, from the start, been a course chosen through the last remnants of restraint maintained by a court of aging ministers still holding sway in both the eastern and western courts. But while Zongfu and Zongwang aimed merely to compete for merit, Zonghan and Xiyin hoped that this campaign could resolve the Jin state’s last great scourge—the Huaxia Army’s power in the southwest.
Wuqimai’s collapse had, from the start, been a dire situation—more than a year now with most of his body paralyzed, only occasionally lucid, and his condition had by now grown extremely poor. Back in the tenth month, as preparations for war were underway, Zonghan had sent a letter home; Wuqimai, in the palace, during a brief moment of lucidity, had dictated a reply to be written by those at his side. The letter recalled the lifetime the two of them had spent on horseback and in battle, and expressed the hope that Zonghan and Xiyin could settle the state of the realm within half a year, because the situation within the Jin state still required their return to hold the reins.
Over all these years, Wuqimai’s temperament had always combined firmness with a certain gentleness, and his will had proven extraordinarily resilient. That he named a period of half a year might well have been because he sensed that even if he forced himself to cling to life, that was all the time he had left.
The recollections of the past within the letter stirred a wistful sorrow, and Wanyan Zonghan, his hair now half white, could not help but feel moved. The rift between the eastern and western Jurchen courts did indeed involve the younger generation jockeying for power—since the tenth month, on the eastern front, Zongfu and Zongbi had already arranged for troops to escort over a hundred thousand captured slaves back north, and in the eleventh month, another hundred thousand or so had been driven to set out as well.
By that time, snow had already begun falling across the lands of Jiangnan, and no one could say how many of these Han slaves, driven north like livestock, would actually survive the journey to reach the Jin state.
Zonghan and Xiyin, of course, understood perfectly well that these actions by Zongfu and Zongbi were meant to seize the chance, while the western army remained bogged down in the southwest, to be the first to haul spoils of war back home, placate the various factions, and claim credit and rewards.
These maneuvers by the two younger men filled Zonghan with contempt. Xiyin had proposed certain countermeasures, but Zonghan simply let him proceed as he wished, unwilling to involve himself: only once the southwest was broken would everything else fall into place. If the campaign in the southwest failed, there would be nothing worth saying upon their return in any case—he wished only to focus wholly on the southwestern campaign, leaving all other minor matters to Gushen’s discretion.
This was how he wrote to Xiyin, and as for Xiyin’s suggestion that he himself write letters to placate and win over the various elder factions back home, Zonghan had no wish to take part in it. Now, receiving this reply from the ailing Wuqimai, a surge of heroic feeling naturally rose within Zonghan’s chest—he and Aguda had spent a lifetime at war together building the Jin state, and even now, in his twilight years, he gave no weight to the petty schemes of a few younger men.
He walked out of his command tent to make his rounds of the camp. By the time dusk approached, the rain had gradually eased. Only now, after crossing more than thirty li, did news of the changing situation at the front finally reach Shili Market.
At this same moment, more than forty li away at Rainwater Creek, blood was pooling in the puddles, and corpses already covered the hillsides.
After two months of grinding battle at Rainwater Creek, this marked the first time the Huaxia Army had launched a full-scale counteroffensive. Some fourteen thousand men took part in the operation, drawn primarily from the Fourth Division under Qu Zhengyan and the Fifth Division under Yu Zhongdao.
When the Huaxia Army’s elite troops under Qu Zhengyan’s command burst forth from every mountain path, the Han forces scattered across the battlefield were the first to be crushed by this sudden counterattack. Some of the core Jin forces made up of Jurchens, Bohai, and Liaodong men held on for a time through sheer ferocity amid the chaotic slaughter, but as casualties climbed past ten percent, most of these units, too, began to show signs of collapse, either routing outright afterward or choosing to withdraw.
For this very operation, over the course of two months, Qu Zhengyan had secretly studied Elili’s patterns of attack, recording the recurring problems that appeared again and again among the various units rotating through Rainwater Creek—he had long since prepared for this moment. But the so-called first step of any battle still came down, in the end, to having the raw strength ready for hammer to meet anvil.
That very afternoon, the frontline strength of both sides was, for the first time, weighed formally against each other in a fair collision.
The initial engagement was also the most brutally costly.
To cover Elili’s hard assault on Eagle Beak Rock, several positions across the battlefield that day faced attacks of enormous scale, the Jurchens forming up in the mud and water. At Position Two near Eagle Beak Rock, where the fighting was fiercest, the defending Huaxia Army was at one point actually broken through, nearly failing to retake the position.
But as Qu Zhengyan’s forces charged out with fierce resolve, while the surrendered Han troops taking part in the assault may have shown some timidity, the main Jin forces—already weary of two months of fruitless attacks—felt only exhilaration at the sense that their chance had finally come.
Troops that had been led by a valiant commander like Elili were themselves no strangers to head-on decisive battle; in the eyes of the mid-level officers throughout the army, if they could simply crush the enemy’s assault head-on, everything else would fall into place.
Amid the rain and the treacherous mud, the terrain around Rainwater Creek was complex, and in the initial clash with Qu Zhengyan’s forces, the Jin troops met them eagerly, forming eight or nine points of small- and medium-scale engagement across a battlefield spanning several li. Both sides, whether holding steady or pressing urgently, attacking or defending, formed shield-wall front lines of a dozen or several dozen men each, which in an instant crashed and surged against one another.
The clash of metal and iron sent a heart-shaking, muffled din echoing through the mountain rain, the roars of battle howling out across the surrounding ridges. Along the clashing front lines, the slaughter devoured advancing lives like some meat-grinding machine—before one soldier who charged forward had even fallen, the comrade behind him had already stepped up to take his place, the froth of men’s roaring shouts all tinged with the smell of blood. In this uncompromising collision, the Huaxia Army was thus, and the Jurchen soldiers were thus as well.
There was little room for cleverness in such a weighing of strength. Across twenty years of contention throughout this realm, in nearly every such head-on collision in the past, the Jurchens had emerged victorious.
But this time, the Jurchen formation was falling back.
In such a collision, the initial display of strength was fierce and overwhelming, but the shift that followed was, to many eyes, remarkably swift and evident. The front line edged back slightly; some of the most senior, most battle-hardened mid-level Jurchen officers, men who had killed without count, led their personal guards forward in a renewed push, and their charge did lift the army’s spirits for a moment—but before long, these officers and the veterans under them were likewise swallowed up along the grinding front line.
In the span of time between first contact and one side’s collapse, men’s hearts were seized by terror or feverish excitement, and many thoughts never even had time to resolve into any clear conclusion. The Jurchen officers had thrown themselves in according to established practice—because in battle after battle in the past, such a choice had always been the best one. By the time they, too, were swallowed up, the front line had shifted from trembling to outright avalanche, and the change left barely a trace in people’s minds. The survivors could only turn and flee along with the fleeing soldiers.
That was simply how a battlefield worked—individual ability could rarely sway the course of the fighting; men were swept along by the tide, the resolute doing what needed to be done, the faint-hearted only able to follow in their comrades’ footsteps. In this brief afternoon clash, both sides suffered enormous losses, and before long, the Jurchen position was torn open along its front.
Rout, slaughter, and fighting then surged like a tide toward the surrounding ridges and valleys.
The terrain of Rainwater Creek was, after all, not especially open, and as the Jurchen main force was forcibly pushed back in this fierce assault, the Han troops collapsed all the more completely. Though their numbers across the whole battlefield were not especially large, because many of the mountain paths were narrow, the mass of routing soldiers still created a scene of pileup and collapse in the crowding, their retreat blocking the path for part of the Jin main force, who then cut them down without hesitation. In some places, the Jin troops formed shield walls, not only defending against any possible Huaxia Army assault but also blocking these Han troops from fleeing.
This blazing furnace of a battlefield instantly became a nightmare for the weak.
Some of the routed Han troops were caught and slaughtered between the pincers of the Huaxia Army and the Jin forces; others, finding their escape routes cut off, chose relatively open ground and knelt down, heads in their hands, in surrender. By this point, the Fifth Division troops who had originally been holding their position had also joined the full offensive, and Qu Zhengyan, along with his staff officers, moved swiftly to gather up the Han troops surrendering in the pouring rain.
“…The rear road from Rainwater Creek to Yellowhead Rock has been cut off! Dalai’s army won’t be able to gain a foothold at Rainwater Creek for ten days or half a month! The Jurchens—including all of you—your fifty thousand men at the front have already been split apart and crushed by me! Tonight, the moment this rain stops, I will break open the Jurchen main camp! Some of you will stubbornly refuse to yield, some will fight to the last in desperate resistance! We will spare no cost to bury them here at Rainwater Creek!”
“And you! Men of Han blood, raising your blades against your own kin! The Huaxia Army will show no mercy for such a grave crime—here in the southwest, you deserve nothing but to be thrown into the mountains to dig ore! Some of you will be publicly tried and cut to pieces! What are you doing? Kneeling here in regret? Regretting how quickly you threw down your blades? Our Huaxia Army does not fear that you hold a blade! Even the most vicious Jurchen troops—today, we’ve crushed them head-on! If you don’t surrender, we will crush you too! But if you lay down your blades, on this battlefield today, I am giving you one chance!”
“Only this one chance!” Qu Zhengyan bellowed through the rain. “Some of you can take up your blades again and go back into the Jurchen camp! Use Jurchen heads to atone for your past sins! Some others among you, we will also give blades to—there are still men up in these surrounding hills right now, still fleeing, still resisting to the last—I want you to bring them down! If you’re a man, go earn yourself a life!”
Staff officers, carrying out finer detailed work, moved among the surrendered troops, pulling out the ranking officers among them, registering their information, giving them instructions, and returning blades and spears to some of the soldiers.
At this moment, fighting had not yet ceased across the various parts of the mountains; some Jurchen soldiers, driven into dead ends within the hills, resisted to the last. Meanwhile, Qu Zhengyan’s voice rang out, “…We’re not afraid of your false compliance! Nor are we afraid of you fighting us again! The moment the rain stops today, our cannons will erase the Rainwater Creek position from existence! And when that happens, we will settle today’s account together with you! There is no other road left! Take up your blades, and be a Han man standing tall! Be a real man! Otherwise—then all of you can just die right here—”
By a quarter past the Hour of Wei, the first batch of Han soldiers near Rainwater Creek had already been turned in the small woods nearby, joining the counterattack against the Jurchens. Because the Jurchen forces had chosen to commit to the offensive from the very start of the engagement, by this point most of their fighting units still had not found their way back to camp.
—Owing to the terrain at Rainwater Creek, the Jurchen camp here was not, as at Huangming County, set up directly before the city walls; because it needed to be able to launch attacks in several directions at once, the Jurchen main camp had been placed on a hillside more than three li away, with the road to Yellowhead Rock guarded behind it.
Within this stretch of mountain forest and lowland—less than four li in a straight line, yet with genuinely complex and varied terrain—the Huaxia Army units, having long since worked out their plan of attack, had selected several key points. The heaviest burden fell to the Fourth Division’s Second Brigade, First Regiment, led by Regiment Commander Shen Changye, who, after easily breaking through two units of low-quality resistance, struck directly into the most critical valley along the Jurchens’ retreat route.
This valley, ordinarily just a quiet, unnamed feature of the mountains, saw Shen Changye’s regiment of a thousand men form a defensive line in the rain. When he broke through, the Jurchens on the battlefield had not yet given serious thought to retreating, but before long, that very afternoon, Shen Changye’s unit would face as many as eleven separate waves of attack in this gorge, each surging in like the tide.
Corpses piled up into small hills within the gorge, thick blood staining the stream beneath their feet red. After this day, the gorge was named “Victory Gorge.”
The Second Brigade, First Regiment, under Qu Zhengyan’s command, also became the unit that suffered the heaviest losses across the entire battlefield—nearly fifty percent of its soldiers would sleep forever in that blood-red gorge.
As the Hour of Shen drew to a close, the rain had gradually stopped, and the sounds of last-ditch resistance scattered across the mountains gradually faded. By now, news of Elili’s death had spread across the whole of Rainwater Creek; the road from the main camp to Yellowhead Rock had already been destroyed, meaning Dalai’s reinforcements from the rear could not easily arrive. The two main routes back to camp were being repeatedly contested between the Huaxia Army and the Jurchens—some men circled back to camp along side paths, but many units found themselves driven into dead ends. Some of the toughest Jurchen units formed up to hold their ground, while the great majority of the surviving forces chose to surrender.
Counting both the Jin main force and the Han troops fighting for them, the number of Jin soldiers killed or wounded directly in this battle approached eight thousand; beyond that, some fifteen thousand or so were captured on the spot, disarmed, and marched to the rear.
The Huaxia Army’s own losses were likewise considerable, but as the rain gradually eased, Qu Zhengyan had men haul the last still-usable cannons up into the mountains—some to be used against the stubbornly resisting Jurchen elites, others hauled toward the Jurchen main camp.
Pack horses laden with dry firewood crossed the blood-soaked battlefield, and upon reaching the outskirts of the Jurchen camp, Qu Zhengyan had his soldiers light bonfire after bonfire on the windward side. As the fires were arranged and damp wood added to them, column after column of black smoke crept up the slope toward the Jurchen camp.
This Jurchen camp had gone unattacked in the two months since it was established, and much of its structure remained largely intact—wooden palisades, sheds stacked with ammunition beneath the rain covers—but Qu Zhengyan had no fear of it. At the height of the fighting at Rainwater Creek, some of the “routed troops” had already been “retreating” back toward this very camp, and now, as the black smoke curled upward, the horse trains loaded with explosive charges had also begun arriving one after another.
So long as Dalai’s reinforcements could not arrive in time, fear would ferment through the night within that camp ahead. Tonight, or at the very latest tomorrow, he would break open these wooden walls and, savagely and completely, sever this serpent’s head that the Jurchens had extended toward Rainwater Creek!