Follow Me
"Careful—lower it easy!"
"The rope! Hold that rope fast!"
They laid two thick planks across the gunwale of the ship beached on the sand, set a lever to the gun carriage—lashed hard with rope, a good six hundred kilograms of timber and iron—and heaved. The carriage's two wheels climbed onto the planks and began to roll, a little at a time.
"Heave! Heave!"
Several men paid the heavy rope out slowly, and the carriage rolled down onto the riverbank without mishap. It was a ponderous thing, but it had wheels, and getting it off the ship proved simpler than anyone had expected. The barrel was another matter: nearly the same weight, far less bulk, and no wheels at all.
"Drive those posts in solid! If that thing slips, we're finished!"
"Hey, you bastard! You're doing it wrong! The iron ring has to seat properly! Why'd you take the pulley off!"
Two timber posts, fixed with solid iron bars, and a third raised against them in the shape of a tripod. This field crane was an instrument they could not do without if the 9-pounder field guns were to be worked at all. They locked the three post-heads together with an iron ring and hung a pulleied rope from it.
"Lash it tight! If it slips halfway and comes down on you, you're dead or a cripple!"
"Yes, sir!"
The six-hundred-kilogram barrel of the 9-pounder rested on the gunwale. They bound rope hard around the trunnions jutting from either side and around the breech at the rear, then hooked the lashing to the pulley.
"Haul! Haul with everything you've got!"
"Heave! Heave! Heave!"
Between the two posts sat a wooden windlass. They fitted a stout bar into its socket and pulled. Rope ran through the pulley and began to wind onto the drum, and the massive barrel rose into the air more easily than anyone had looked for.
"Careful—move it carefully!"
"Hold that rope fast!"
The gunners drew the barrel off the gunwale on the rope, paying the windlass out a little at a time, and with practiced hands settled it onto the carriage. They cast off the lashings, locked the barrel down, and the piece was whole.
"Here—shove it over here! Quickly!"
While the guns were coming ashore, the naval officer commanding the artillery had already finished his spadework. He rolled all four pieces into the position he had leveled and dressed.
"My lord! The battery is laid!"
"Good. Solid shot. Aim across the river, toward the south gate."
"Yes, sir! Solid shot! Load!"
"Aaaah!"
At the officer's command the crews of the four guns burst into motion. I shaded my eyes against the stinging sun and looked across the river at Yanping, some two hundred and fifty meters off. The quay before the south gate was so packed with moored ships that there was nowhere decent to land. Our own vessels had beached on the bank south of that quay, and soldiers were leaping from the gunwales and scrambling up the slope. I could see the naval gunners as well, groaning over their cranes as they got the pieces ashore.
A flag snapped above the bank. On the dark brown field was a white snake flicking its tongue, and the number one. The standard-bearer swung the division colors of the Garrison Army's First Division with all his strength, and beyond him the Garrison soldiers who had climbed the bank were shaking themselves into ranks.
"Hm... will they be all right..."
I had murmured it without thinking. A voice answered from right beside me.
"Do not trouble yourself, my lord. General Fang has trained the Garrison Army properly."
I nodded at the words of Dolswe, who had come ashore with me on the bank across the river.
When we planned the attack on Yanping, the decision that mattered most was who would go ashore in the first wave and secure that bridgehead. The southern bank was the only place a landing was easy, and I had meant to commit the Tiger Hunting Army to it. Their arms were better, their battle experience deeper—the finest troops I had, and they had not disappointed me once since we came to Jiangnan. Dolswe's First Division, fully armed with matchlocks, had seemed to me the force best suited to taking a bridgehead.
Fang Guozhen had set out his reasons for taking the van with perfect calm. In his eyes there was the hunger to win recognition by a real achievement, and the certainty that the Garrison Army he had trained could do this thing. That was why I had given the vanguard to Fang Guozhen and the Garrison Army's First Division—and yet...
"My lord—there! The gate! The gate is opening!"
At Dolswe's shout I looked to the gate. Yanping's south gate swung wide, and soldiers began to pour out in a mass.
"They mean to shove us off before the landing is finished. If that's the case..."
I ran forward and screamed at the crews who had only just finished loading, loud enough to tear my throat.
"Artillery! You will lay on my order! Target, the enemy forming before the gate! Range, one hundred and eighty paces!"
Thum-thum-thum-thum...
"Get out there! What are you doing? I said move! Hurry!"
Deng Zhiming bellowed until his throat was raw, swinging his sword overhead. Deng Keming and Jiang Tai's main force, fifty thousand strong, was still deep in the siege of Jianning. Word that the supply fleet bound for that army was under attack had sent him scrambling in a panic up onto the tower of the east gate. What met his eyes was the fleet, every hull taken by enemy ships that choked the river—and, on the southern bank, the enemy already beginning to land.
Yanping had steep mountains at its back to the west, and river around the other three sides, which made an attack an awkward business. Building camps and deploying men for a siege required a certain amount of open ground, and unlike Jianning there was almost none. The only stretch that would serve lay near the south gate. And that was precisely where the enemy had come ashore.
"Thousand-Commander Yang! You take the left!"
"Yes, General!"
"Move, move! There's no time! No time!"
He drove every body of troops within reach inside the city toward the south gate. The enemy ships filling the river were no small number. Let them build a bridgehead and the city would be sealed shut, and his brother Deng Keming's main force, ringing Jianning, would be rats in a trap. Deng Zhiming made up his mind to open the gate and sweep them away.
"We drive them off before any more of them land! Shove them into the river before they can build a bridgehead!"
"Yes, General!"
"Hurry! Get them into ranks!"
The men crowding through to the south gate numbered several thousand at least. The moment they were simply spread out in front of him, Deng Zhiming meant to throw them straight at—
Boom. Crash. Kra-BOOM—
"What? What is—"
A sudden roar from the left.
Eeeeeeeee—
Shhhhhhhhhhhhh—
And a whistle that raised the hair on his neck.
Thwack. Crunch. Thud...
Tonk. Crack. Thud...
Small fragments struck his face. Something wet, and a spray of liquid, went into Deng Zhiming's eyes and his open mouth.
"Ptoo—ptah! What—what is this? What—"
He spat out the fishy mess that had gone into his mouth and, blind, scrubbed at his eyes with his hand. When he opened them, screams were bursting from every side.
"Aaaaaagh! My leg!"
"What—what—what is it!"
"Grrrgh..."
The ranks had been packed tight before the gate, still shoving outward. Through the middle of them ran a long smear of blood, bone, and flesh, as if a dragon had raked the column with its claws. The carnage opened itself before Deng Zhiming's eyes. From a corpse whose head had been taken clean off, blood gulped out in thick pulses.
"Aaaagh! It hurts! It hurts, I said—"
"What—my leg, where—where did it go..."
A soldier clutched the leg that had been sheared away in front of his eyes and howled, sobbing. Another, shoulder and arm gone entirely, collapsed in a heap, panting and shuddering, and soaked the ground in blood. Something barely visible to the eye had ripped through them, and the slaughter it left was a terror with no name.
"Gh—ghosts! It's ghosts!"
In truth only a handful had actually died. What had hold of them was the fear itself—the sight, hideous and incomprehensible. Hardened soldiers who for years had not so much as blinked when comrades were cut down by swords, run through by spears, shot with arrows, or had their skulls broken by hurled stones, were seized with terror.
"Wh—what in the world was that? What went past? Did you see it?"
"It's a ghost! A curse—"
"Shut your mouth! Over there—they fired cannon from over there!"
In the instant the fear began to spread, Deng Zhiming fought to seize it back. He stabbed a finger toward the far bank and screamed.
"You cowardly bastards! Get a hold of yourselves! They fired cannon! Look across the river!"
At his roar the soldiers massed before the gate turned their eyes to the right. On the opposite bank the enemy had formed ranks, and something large and glinting was leveled in their direction.
"Not many are dead! It only looks savage! Pull yourselves together! Since when has there been a fight where nobody dies?"
"B-but..."
"A stone kills you! An arrow kills you! That's a battlefield!"
Deng Zhiming raised his sword and pointed at the enemy drawn up to their front.
"There's a thousand of them, two at most! Come on, brothers! We avenge our brothers!"
At his bellow the subordinate commanders began shouting in desperation, driving the men forward.
"Did you not hear the general's order!"
"Move! Move, now!"
Deng Zhiming glared across the river, his eyes tight with anxiety. He did not know what it was, only that it belonged to another order of things entirely from the great bombards, the bowl-mouthed mortars, and the fire-lances he knew. It smashed heads and bodies, and in the same instant maimed the men beyond them. Stay massed here in front of the gate and they would all—
KRA-KOOM. Boom-boom. CRASH—
Whump. Whick-whick. Shhhhhh. Pip-pip-pip—
"Shit! Stop—stop shooting!"
"Reload! Grapeshot—reload with grapeshot!"
Even without an order from me, the naval officer kept the fire going. I began to watch, with a colder eye, the bombardment falling on the enemy gathered before the gate. The killing power was plainly less than I had expected. Had they not been packed together just outside the gate, a single round—a kilogram of powder behind it—would have killed one man, perhaps two. The grapeshot, nine iron balls to the charge, did somewhat better. Even so, it was nothing like a sea fight, where six-hundred-gram iron shot punched clean through a hull and slaughtered men crammed together. Killing men scattered over open ground is not the same as killing men gathered on a ship. Every round burned enough powder to fire eighty matchlocks, and the number of enemy dead and wounded could not begin to compare with what those matchlocks would have done. Still, because we had raked them from the flank of their formation, the casualties were running higher, and their nerve was plainly fraying. They could neither advance nor fall back. They only strained and milled where they stood.
"My lord, General Fang is moving."
"Now? Surely he isn't—"
The Garrison vanguard had formed with only a battalion or two, enough to cover the landing. Reinforcements had kept coming ashore, and now a full regiment, some two thousand men, was beginning a slow advance.
"The range is too great to be certain... but to General Fang's eye, the enemy's spirit must have broken."
"Mm. It has, at that..."
They were milling under the guns as the pieces spat fire without pause. They would have been better off charging in a body and closing with us. The veteran Fang Guozhen had sensed the gap in an enemy that had come out through an open gate.
Boom. Crash. Kra-BOOM—
I hurried to the battery, where the crews had just finished firing, and shouted.
"Cease fire! Cease fire! Not grapeshot—load solid shot!"
"Sir? But—"
"Fire grapeshot and you may hit our own! Solid shot—rake the enemy line through from the flank!"
"Y-yes, my lord!"
"The moment our men close any further, you will cease fire at once! After that, you bombard the top of the wall! Understood?"
"Yes, sir! Solid shot! Reload!"
The naval officer roared, and the gunners scrambled to reload. I watched the Garrison Army coming on in ranks, and the brown flag snapping between them.
"Steady! Hold your ranks! Match your step! Don't surge ahead, and don't fall behind!"
"Aaaaaah!"
Tweet. Tweet. Tweeeee—
Tweet. Tweet. Tweeeee—
"Left! Left! Left..."
They had landed in such haste that there was no drum, but the officers' whistles, blown with all their breath, took its place. Fang Guozhen, division commander though he was, carried the division standard himself at the front.
"Can you see it? They've lost their nerve! Look at them giving ground! Do you see it!"
"We see iiiit!"
The officers and men of the Garrison Army roared back at the commander who had shared every hardship with them.
"Don't rush—press them! Advance on the command! Show them the colors of the Garrison Army's First Division!"
Left! Left! Left!
The follow-on troops, who had leapt from the ships and scrambled up the bank, came running in beside the comrades already advancing in ranks.
"Division Commander! We're here!"
Fang Guozhen pointed to the left, toward Yu Wenye, the regiment commander in charge of the follow-on force.
"I'll take the gate! Move your regiment to the left and squeeze them!"
"Understood! First Regiment—follow me!"
The line came on slowly, pressing in. Hammered by the field guns and unable to gather themselves, the enemy gave ground a step at a time. The interval closed before anyone quite noticed, and the cannon that had been thundering without pause fell silent all at once.
Armored soldiers in lamellar and iron helmets, bamboo shields on their arms, took the front rank and went forward with spearpoints leveled.
Thrum—
Thrum, thrummmm—
Behind them came archers wearing only helmets, drawing the strings of their bamboo bows and sending shafts away without pause.
Tunk-tunk.
Whoooosh—
The dull reports belonged to a handful of crossbowmen, loosing thick, heavy bolts. Foot braced in the stirrup, the whole body hauling the string home, their foot-drawn crossbows picked out the enemy's armored men. Set beside the Tiger Hunting Army or the akutō they were wanting, but against Chen Youliang's second-line troops their arms and their discipline were overwhelming.
"Aaaagh!"
"Kh—I... I'm hit..."
Men went down under the arrows. Where crossbow bolts punched through armor, armored soldiers dropped to their knees. Hands trembled on spears and blades. Bowstrings were drawn and loosed awry. Eyes darted, unable to fix on anything.
"D-damn it! Run!"
"D-don't run, you turtle-whelped—"
At last a man turned his back and fled. One became two, two became three, ten became dozens. Thousands of enemy soldiers broke as one and ran for the wide-open gate. Fang Guozhen sprinted to the front of the line and swung the standard.
"Garrison Army, First Division—open order!"
"We go in before they shut the gate! Sound the trumpet!"
Bwooooooo—
The ranks that had advanced with the slow certainty of an iron wall broke swiftly into sections of twenty, squads of ten, and files of five. Fang Guozhen passed the standard to the bearer and drew the steel sword his lord had given him with his own hand. From here it was momentum. Before they could recover their wits. Now, while the press of bodies kept them from closing the gate and they struggled in the crush.
"Follow me!"
"Waaaaaaaah!"
The Garrison Army's First Division roared and flung itself as one upon the fleeing enemy.