“Everyone, the moment of the decisive battle has arrived.”
On the nineteenth of April, near Mount Dalong by Kang County, the pale light of the pre-dawn moon filtered through the lattice of the log cabin’s windows, falling in onto the floor in neat squares.
Torches burned inside the cabin—not a large one—their firelight mingling with the starlight outside. Qin Shaoqian stood before the officers of the Seventh Army who had just assembled, delivering words to rally them.
“More than ten years have passed,” he said. “In these past ten-odd years, the Central Plains fell to the flames of war. Our countrymen were bullied, were slaughtered. We lost comrades too—most of you in this room have lost family. Do you still remember… what your family members looked like?”
Outside the cabin, soldiers of the Huaxia Seventh Army had already gathered around scattered bonfires.
“I still remember what my father looked like,” he said. “In those days, the Wu dynasty was a fine place. My father was a chief minister at court. To defend Bianliang, he offended the emperor, and in the end died on the road of exile. My elder brother was a bookish sort. He held Taiyuan for over a year, but the court refused to send reinforcements to save him. In the end the Jurchens hacked him to pieces and hung his head on the city wall. Someone brought his head back to me… I never saw it.”
“Just… ten-odd years, and yet I remember their faces perfectly clearly. I remember Bianliang perfectly clearly too. My brother’s posthumous son is still just a small child now, growing up in the Jin state, and the Jurchens cut off one of his fingers. Just ten-odd years… The children of my own time used to run about the city all day chasing chickens and teasing dogs, but children now have their fingers cut off, and can’t even speak properly, growing up among the Jurchens, too afraid to even say a word…”
Carts drawn by horses and mules came down from the mountainside, loaded with iron cannons and other war matériel. In the distance, some villagers had come as well, watching from the hillside.
Qin Shaoqian’s one eye swept across the assembled officers.
“Some say that to fall behind is to be beaten—and we were beaten. I remember, over ten years ago, when the Jurchens first marched south, Liheng and I were talking by the roadside. It was evening, I think—an evening of the Wu dynasty. Liheng said this nation had run up a debt. I asked him how we were to repay it. He said: with our lives. So many years, who knows how many have died, and we’ve been paying that debt back all this while, paying it even now…”
The wind blew through the bonfires outside, throwing into relief one straight-backed silhouette after another. A bracing chill was gathering in the air. Qin Shaoqian’s gaze swept across the men.
“From Xiacun… to Dongzhiyuan… the northwest… to the Xiaocang River… Dayang… and now to here… Our enemies have gone from Guo Yaoshi… to that batch of court lackeys… from the Western Xia… to Loushi, Cibushi… From the three years at Xiaocang River, to today’s Wanyan Zonghan, Wanyan Xiyin… How many men have stood beside you, charging forward alongside you, only to fall along the way…”
“Ten-odd years ago, when we spoke of the Jurchens, it was like speaking of a myth. From Chuhedian to Hubaogang, they defeated the once-invincible Liao, always winning against superior numbers, while our own Wu dynasty got a headache just hearing that the Liao were coming—let alone facing the Jurchens, of whom it was said that ten thousand could not be matched. Tong Guan once led over a hundred thousand men north, and couldn’t even beat seven thousand Liao troops. He spent tens of millions of taels of silver just to buy back four of the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun…”
He thought back on those days and gave a faint smile. “Prince Tong—back then, a man who blotted out the sky with one hand. All of us had to kneel before him, right up until the day Liheng killed Zhou Zhe. Tong Guan stood in the way, and Liheng slapped him across the head—sent him flying, his skull cracking against the steps of the throne hall. Crack—”
“Back then, we knelt and watched Prince Tong. Prince Tong knelt and watched the emperor. The emperor knelt and watched the Liao. The Liao knelt and watched the Jurchens… Why were the Jurchens so formidable? Back at Xiacun, we didn’t know. A million men mustered to defend Bianliang were routed again and again by Zongwang’s mere tens of thousands—such was the gulf between us. Many of us had trained in the martial arts our whole lives and never imagined the difference between man and man could be so vast. But today!”
Qin Shaoqian’s voice crashed down like thunder. “Does that gulf still exist? Between us and Wanyan Zonghan—who is it that should be afraid now—”
Outside the door and windows, the firelight swayed, and the night wind roared like a tiger’s cry, sweeping across mountain and ridge.
“…Our Fifth Army has just defeated them in the southwest. Mister Ning killed Zonghan’s own son. Before their very eyes, he killed Ge Lili, killed Dalai, killed Yuyu. Chen Fan killed Yinshuke at Tanzhou. Next, Yinshuke’s own brother Balishu will never walk out of Jiange alive! These men’s hands are stained with Han blood, and we are taking it back from them, drop by drop—”
“The Fifth Army has fought Zonghan under the harshest conditions and turned defeat into victory. All of you in the Huaxia Army know their strength is stretched thin. Balishu is fighting to the death to hold Jiange, refusing to let our two armies link up. Zonghan believes that as long as Jiange remains uncrossed, he holds the advantage here against us. His main force numbers nearly a hundred thousand; we number barely twenty thousand. So he wants to defeat us before Jiange falls, to give this whole campaign some kind of conclusion…”
A flash of killing intent crossed his eye. “The Jurchens in the southwest are already a defeated force. Their edge is spent—but Zonghan and Xiyin won’t admit it. So for us, there is good news and bad news. The good news: what we face is a beaten army. The bad news: the invincible force that once rose out of nowhere and carved out an empire for the Jurchens—that army no longer exists…”
“How much hardship has our Huaxia Seventh Army endured to reach today? Why is the gap between man and man so vast? We throw people into this great furnace and burn them, make them run along the blade’s edge, roll through seas of blood, eat the bitterest of hardships, endure the harshest of tempering. You’ve gone hungry, you’ve weathered pressure, you’ve swallowed burning coals, you’ve run through wind and sand, and you’ve made it here… If this were the old days, if this were Hubaogang, we would beat Wanyan Aguda to death right in front of his own battle lines…”
“But today, all we get is a bit of cold leftovers.”
When he reached this point, his voice did not rise, but each word came out measured, carrying a bloody weight held in check. The officers in the room sat up straight, fists clenched; some quietly rolled their necks, making faint sounds in the cold night air. Qin Shaoqian paused for a moment.
“Think of everyone who has died along this road! Think of the men who did these evil things! They have a hundred thousand men, and they are marching toward us right now! They think to take advantage of us while our numbers are few! Then let them try to take that advantage! We will smash their last delusions! We will grind Wanyan Zonghan’s head—that so-called Grand Marshal of All Forces beneath heaven—into the mud!”
“—Everyone, attention!”
The officers in the room rose to their feet.
Qin Shaoqian’s gaze swept over them.
Outside, the cold moonlight was likewise sweeping across the layered mountains of this mortal world. Certain influences spread outward like ripples; officers went to their men, and mobilization passed down rank by rank. Then the scout units set out first, followed by the main force, then the supply trains. The Seventh Army was unlike other armies—they carried no outward fervor; the blood simply burned within their bodies. The hour of decisive battle had come.
“We—march out.”
The army surged forward like a great river breaking its banks!
…
Zonghan seldom thought anymore of that stretch of forest and snowfield.
Huhi River knew no seasons. The snowfields there often made people feel that the four seasons described in books were an illusion. Jurchens raised there from childhood didn’t even know that in other places on this earth, the seasons might turn differently.
Knowing too much is a kind of suffering.
Zonghan was the eldest son of the State Chancellor Sagai. Though the Jurchens were a poor, small tribe, as the chancellor’s son he had always enjoyed certain privileges—learned shamans to teach him the truths of heaven and earth, and the fortune of traveling south to taste the flavor of summer in the land of Liao.
That was the taste of suffering.
There had been a time when he even felt that the Jurchens, born into such a world of ice and snow, were living under a curse from heaven. He had been young then, afraid of the snow. People who walked out into the ice and snow often failed to return by night. Others would say he was never coming back.
In that ice and snow lived wolves and bears; people taught him how to fight them, and he did not fear wolf or bear. What he feared was the ice and snow itself, unconquerable—that vast, malicious presence that filled the sky, against which his steel blade and spear could not so much as scratch. From childhood, the people of the tribe had taught him to become a warrior, but a warrior could not harm this world; no one could defeat that which could not be hurt.
Even as the strongest of warriors, in the face of this enemy, he remained a helpless ant.
Until the year he turned twelve, when he joined the adults on the second winter hunt. In the driving snow, he was separated from the others. The boundless malice pressed in on him from every direction; his hands froze stiff in the ice; his blade and spear offered him no protection at all. He pressed on through the wind and snow, and the great beast seemed ready to swallow him whole, bit by bit.
Just as the last sliver of light was fading at the horizon, he found, beneath a tree, a small hut stacked from firewood—some Jurchen hunter’s makeshift shelter. Zonghan crawled inside, huddled in that tiny space, and drank the last mouthful of liquor he carried.
Outside the woodpile the wind howled furiously; he curled up tight inside that space.
He spent the whole night like that with the wind and snow. At some point, unnoticed, the storm outside died down, and all fell silent. He crawled out of the hut, brushing away the snow. It was near dawn; above the forest, the sky was strewn with stars, the night clear and washed clean. In that moment, it felt as though he alone existed in all the world, with only this tiny woodpile shelter beside him. He seemed, then, to understand: heaven and earth were only heaven and earth. They were not some great beast.
The next morning, he set out from that shelter, took up his blade and spear, hunted down a wolf in the snowfield, drank its blood, ate its flesh, and before nightfall found another hunter’s hut and got his bearings again.
Everything became clear to him then: this world was full of danger, but the world held no malice. A person only needed to press on from one woodpile to the next, and could overcome anything. From then on, he became the finest warrior of the Jurchen people—perceiving keenly, calculating carefully, killing bravely. From one woodpile, to the next.
For generations, the Jurchens had lived this way in a harsh world; the finest warriors were always those skilled at calculation—calculating life, and calculating death.
Some years later, when Aguda sought to rise against the Liao—the Liao a colossus commanding a million troops, while Aguda himself could muster barely two thousand men to lead—most feared the might of Liao and remained cautious. Only Zonghan chose the same direction as Aguda.
If this world were an enemy, then every warrior could only sit and wait for death. But the world held no malice; no matter how mighty the dragon or the elephant, if it could be wounded, then there was surely a way to defeat it.
Not long after, Aguda used two thousand five hundred men to defeat ten thousand Balhae troops, killed Yelu Xieshi, and seized Ningjiang Prefecture, launching a glorious campaign that would last for decades to come…
Looking back now, it had all happened forty years ago.
In the years since, he had rarely thought again of that night of wind and snow. He remembered the feeling of watching that great beast running past—and afterward, the starlight like water; this world in all its vastness had gently taken him in.
Sitting on the hillside, Zonghan opened his eyes. Before him stretched the sprawling camp; the sky was woven through with stars and campfires; the warm earth and the ranged mountains showed no trace of malice at all. Here, no one needed to go from one woodpile to another, needed to find the next hut before nightfall. But out here on this pre-dawn walk, he felt again at last that howling, bitter north wind.
If a man miscalculated the distance to the next shelter, he would die in the wind and snow.
The youth of forty years ago gripped his spear tight. In this world he had seen countless magnificent sights, killed countless great dragons and primal beasts; the wind and snow had turned his hair and beard white. He thought too of the comrades who had once braved that bitter wind and snow alongside him—Helibo, Yingge, Wuyashu, Aguda, Wolugu, Zongwang, Loushi, Cibushi… By now, each of those figures had already been left behind somewhere in the raging wind and snow.
But the Jurchens would keep moving forward, seeking the next shelter from the storm, and he would kill the great beasts along the way, drink their blood, eat their flesh. This was the truth of this world.
On the morning of the nineteenth of April, scouts ahead of the army observed the Huaxia Seventh Army changing direction, seemingly attempting to flee south—but by that afternoon this judgment proved mistaken. At a quarter past the Hour of the Sheep, the large-scale scout forces of both armies clashed near Yangba, and nearby troops were drawn in to close and support.
But not long after, the Jin vanguard under Pucha made contact with the enemy near Lueyang County, a hundred li away. The main force of the First Division of the Huaxia Seventh Army advanced along the Qinling range against the Jin army, and both sides rapidly closed to combat range, launching their attacks almost simultaneously.
Zonghan had split his forces into several routes, launching a rapid encirclement against the Huaxia Seventh Army, hoping to establish local superiority outside Jianmen Pass before Ning Yi could break through it. He was the primary attacker; in theory, the Huaxia Seventh Army, facing four times its own numbers, ought to fall back and defend as best it could—but no one had expected that the Seventh Army would charge straight at them.
That afternoon, the Huaxia Army’s charging horns rang out across the hills near Lueyang County, and two great beasts tore into each other—