Besieged on All Sides
"Waaaaaaah!"
Across the river, on the tower of Yanping's south gate, a black banner snapped hard in the wind. The Garrison Army soldiers who had taken the gate roared and cheered, wild with it.
I shook my head at the sight.
"Well. Huindungi's going to be sour over this. He was bellowing that he'd stand at the front and smash the gate open with his artillery..."
"General Fang's improvisation was extraordinary," Dolswe said, clicking his tongue. "The moment he felt them waver, he drove straight in and broke the gate."
I nodded. The enemy commander's judgment in holding Yanping had not been without its timely side. The trouble was that, at that very moment, the field guns across the river had finished deploying.
Thousands had poured out through the opened gate and were just trying to dress their ranks when round shot screamed through the wind, pulped men into bloody mash, and punched clean through the formation. Grapeshot followed in a hail, and the enemy, milling in confusion, lost the drive of their sally. They could not stop the Garrison Army's 1st Division on the bridgehead from growing steadily thicker. Fang Guozhen abandoned a passive defense of that bridgehead and went over to the attack, and the moment the enemy, broken in spirit, collapsed and ran for the only road left to the living—the gate—that narrow throat became a living hell of hundreds, then thousands. Men trampled men and crushed them dead, and in that press, shutting the gate was a physical impossibility.
"More of them will have died under their own boots than under cannon or spear."
"My lord, it would be best to cross the river now."
"Right. Let's move."
The siege had ended almost anticlimactically, and our troops entered the city. I went in under the grim escort of the Tiger Hunting Army while scattered fighting still sputtered through Yanping. Fang Guozhen had already led the Garrison Army in seizing the government offices and sweeping the surroundings clean, and he was waiting.
"Division Commander Fang! A fine day's work. Truly."
"Thank you, my lord! It was nothing but luck."
"No. No, it wasn't. Luck? In the end, you didn't miss the opening, and you broke the gate. That was your skill."
"If you say so, my lord, I can only be grateful."
I took the hands of Fang Guozhen, Yeo Munyeop, and the other officers of the Garrison Army's 1st Division, clapped their shoulders, and praised them one by one before stepping into the main hall. Before long the senior officers had all gathered: Makdong, who had been choking off the waterway, and even Huindungi, who had landed at the head of the gunners only to find himself with nothing at all to do.
"What became of the enemy commander?"
"Forgive me, my lord. That is..."
Fang Guozhen and Yeo Munyeop bowed their heads, faces awkward.
"The enemy commander's name is Deng Zhiming. He is the younger brother of Deng Keming, the ringleader of the troops attacking Jianning. The moment the gate opened and his men broke, he fled at once through a postern to the northwest, the Small North Gate, and we lost him."
"He'll have run for Jianning, where his brother is."
"Forgive me, my lord."
"No. The thing blew open before we could even seal the city properly. What were you to do?"
The original plan had been to swing part of the Tiger Hunting Army north and cut the mountain paths. But the gate had opened too quickly, and the enemy had slipped west before the roads could be blocked. Northwest of Yanping, behind the city, rose the sheer range called Mount Mangdang. He had already fled that way with a remnant. Pursuit now would be too late.
"Well then. Let us discuss the next move."
"Yes, my lord!"
I had expected Yanping to cost us dearly. I had left only a single navy regiment—two thousand men—at Fuzhou and thrown everything else into the push, and it had ended in nothing. Easier than expected, which meant it was time to send strength back to Fuzhou.
"Leave two thousand of the navy here to hold the place. Makdong, you take the rest of the navy, and the prisoners, and return to Fuzhou."
"What? Then I..."
Huindungi stared at me, eyes round.
"You have the artillery to look after. You stay."
"Yes, my lord!"
Two divisions of the Tiger Hunting Army, twelve thousand. One division of the Garrison Army, six thousand, and two thousand navy. The force that would move against besieged Jianning came to twenty thousand in all. By now Kagetora's twelve thousand should have crossed the Wuyi Mountains from the north, and the Garrison troops of Ho Sim and O Jideok, sent ahead from the northeast, another twelve thousand. Forty-four thousand men would seal Jianning from three sides.
I studied the map of Jianning Circuit and traced the lines by which our forces were expected to close.
"What matters from here is coordination with our own. Done right, we can bag the lot of them. Done wrong, and a numerically superior enemy can isolate each of us and wipe us out."
I looked at the man standing silent at my side.
"Garshakan. Your turn. It's strange country. Can you manage it properly?"
Garshakan twisted those fierce, rough eyes into a smile.
"Did you not give us guides? Threading hard mountains is work we are long worn into."
"Good. Split your roads. You must make contact with Kagetora in the north and with Ho Sim in the east. Leave at once, and carry my orders."
"Yes, my lord."
When Garshakan had gone, I looked at the map again. The place where the three columns would draw tight. The position of Jianning, where a siege ought to be in full swing even now.
Boom. Crack.
In the instant flame and smoke burst free, a heavy stone leapt from the mouth of the piece. Roughly hewn round shot climbed high, then began to fall.
Whoooooom—crash—crack!
By luck, a stone ball dropped onto the wall and struck the second-story watchtower, where crossbowmen had been shooting without pause.
"Kh—ghrk..."
A crossbowman took a splinter through the throat and blew blood-foam.
"Ah—aaaagh!"
A soldier whose footing shattered under him staggered, pitched from the tower, and plunged headlong down the face of the wall.
"The stone-throwers! What are the stone-throwers doing?! Can you not see that cloud ladder coming?!"
On the northern wall of Jianning, Lianfang Qianshi Jie Hong swung his command baton and raised his voice. A comparatively small trebuchet sat atop the wall. A dozen men hauled on the ropes with all their strength, and a stone the size of a baby's head cut the sky. One of the stones that kept flying in struck a ladder-cart closing on the wall and smashed it. But that was not the only siege engine coming on.
"Shoot the great crossbows! I said aim at the men pushing the flying carts!"
Thrum.
Whiiiiiiine.
The heavy bowstring of a great crossbow, laid across the merlon, sang deep. Beside it the smaller heavy crossbows poured bolts down the wall like rain.
Boom. Crash.
Whiiiiine—crack.
Every time the bowl-mouth guns and the general cannons spat fire, stones great and small, and iron balls, came arcing in. They hammered the wall, smashed the bricks of the merlons, and on an unlucky day struck a defensive tower or a watchtower dead on.
An iron fortress, never once taken in more than ten years of war. That was not only because the walls were solid and the defenses tight. Above all, it was because the commanders and soldiers who held them were long past green at the work of keeping a city. But the enemies they had faced until now had been nothing but ignorant peasant rebels, bandits, and barbarous clan warriors. Meeting the assault of a great army with proper siege equipment and a real chain of command was a thing they had never experienced.
"Another one—another one's coming!"
"Heads down! Down!"
The defenders of Jianning ducked and screamed. Jie Hong glared with bloodshot eyes at the enemy, who seemed to have lost a step and begun to falter, then turned his head.
"The head-cart that closed on the right-hand wall! What of the head-cart? Is the thing still intact?"
"Lord Puyan Buka has been straining every nerve to smash the head-cart, but..."
"Damn it! Move!"
Jie Hong resettled a helmet that did not suit him. The old official ran the top of the wall, white beard flying, biting down hard on the pain in his knees. Great stones and small kept coming, and from below a storm of crossbow bolts as well. The defenders on the wall hardly dared show their heads. They hid beneath the merlons and panted.
"The head-cart! What has become of the head-cart?"
"Not yet, not yet, Commissioner! Their bombardment is so fierce we can hardly throw stones!"
Jinglüeshi Puyan Buka had the defense of the right-hand wall. At his shout, Jie Hong ground his teeth. A great wagon had come right up against the wall: a head-cart. Huge shield-boards wrapped every side of it, and its roof, bamboo woven like a house, could not be pierced even by a crossbow bolt. It had already been days since the cart had closed so near that striking it with a trebuchet was impossible.
"From the look of the earth heaped beside it like a mountain..."
"I understand! I'll go down and see for myself! Jinglüeshi, hold the wall fast!"
"Yes, Commissioner!"
Jie Hong hurried down from the wall with his guards. He had not sat idle while the enemy set head-carts against the wall, dug trenches under cover of dark, raised a palisade around them, and held. Opposite the carts they had driven galleries and set jars at measured points along the wall face, a man to each jar, ear pressed to the clay, so they could fix exactly where the enemy was digging a mine—a tunnel—in toward them.
"Are the shafts all dug? The sound? Which side is the sound coming from?"
"Here, my lord! The sound was here. Since then we have been boring a hole in ourselves."
"The thunderclap fire-balls?"
"We have them ready. What are your orders?"
Jie Hong stared hard at the men digging the hole with picks and shovels. One of them drove a shovel in with all his strength, and suddenly the face collapsed inward and the blade sank through. A light glimmered in the dark hole.
"Now! Now! Light them!"
At Jie Hong's shout, the men who had been waiting tense set fire to the paper joined to a large bamboo ball.
Hsssssss.
The bomb was called a thunderclap fire-ball. Inside it were some thirty shards of broken porcelain and three catties of gunpowder—nearly four pounds.
"Hurry! Throw it in!"
At his urgent bark they shoved the burning ball into the hole.
"Wh-what is that! Out of the way!"
"Back! Fall back!"
Desperate voices from inside the hole—voices bursting with panic and terror.
BOOOOOOM.
With a roar fit to split the ears, smoke belched from the hole.
"Ugh..."
"What—cough, cough..."
Set against the noise, the force was not great. What mattered was the groaning and coughing from inside the hole, and the white smoke pouring out. Jie Hong shouted at once.
"The fans! Work the fans! Don't stop—feed the charcoal in! Hurry!"
Men snatched burning lumps of charcoal from a brazier set ready beside them and flung them, one after another, into the widened hole. Others pumped great fans with all their strength, driving wind down the shaft.
"Cough, cough... khaaagh..."
"Huuurk! S-save us..."
Wretched screams echoed out of a hole thick with scorch and smoke. Jie Hong clenched his teeth and shouted.
"Do not stop! We have to kill every last one of them! Only then can this city hold! What are you doing if you aren't feeding in the charcoal?!"
"Yes, Commissioner!"
Deng. Deng. Deng.
The gong of retreat rang, and the great host that had been hammering the wall fell back in good order. Dressing its ranks as it withdrew, the army passed the well-built palisades and entered a vast camp raised on a low hill—hardly more than a rise. The camp had been named Ganlan Hill Fort, after what the locals called the hill. In the command tent at its center, a huge man exploded.
"Damn it! It was done! We were through! We dug the mine all the way under that cursed wall, and then the thing goes like this..."
Deng Keming, commander of the assault on Jianning, tore off his helmet, hurled it, and bellowed. Cannon, trebuchets, and heavy crossbows had poured their fire. Cloud ladders and flying carts had pressed the enemy until they could not think, while furious attacks struck on every side at once. And while their wits were gone, the mine had gone in under the wall...
"Marshal, no need to take it so hard. The dead are only a few dozen miners, aren't they?"
"That's right. Half the watchtowers and merlons up on that wall are already wrecked. Push a little more and they'll break for certain."
At the comfort of sworn brothers who had been with him for years, and of the generals close to him, Deng Keming let the heat sink. Tunneling beneath a wall, setting props, and burning them out to bring the wall down had been only one of the plans he had prepared. After the cannon, the trebuchets, the cloud ladders, and the flying carts, a great wooden tower was being built as well.
"Right! We only have to wait a little! The moment that wooden tower is finished, from up there the crossbows and the cannon, right on their heads..."
He was grinding his teeth and growling when a frantic voice hit his ear.
"B-brother! Brother! Disaster! I said disaster!"
"You—you're Zhiming? You, who ought to be at Yanping—what are you doing here?"
"It... Yanping... Yanping has fallen. To the Duke of Yueguo. To him."
Deng Keming seized the shoulders of his brother Deng Zhiming, who looked like a beggar, and snarled.
"What? When? How?!"
"It's all my fault, brother! Waaaah, because of this worthless wretch..."
"You little bastard! Stop crying and talk! When did the city fall? How did it fall?!"
Deng Keming heard out every word of his sobbing brother's account. He dropped into a chair. Shoulders slumped, he let out a sigh.
"A damned day. A thoroughly damned day..."
"Brother, I'm sorry. I..."
"Shut your mouth! I said shut it! What did a fool like you ever do right that you're still talking?!"
Crushed by Deng Keming glaring with fire in his eyes, Deng Zhiming hung his head.
"Where is Marshal Deng?"
"General, now is—"
"Out of the way! I must see the marshal!"
At the sight of Army Supervisor Kang Tae coming into the tent, Deng Keming squeezed his eyes shut. The thought of eating a tongue-lashing from that green boy was humiliation itself...
"Marshal Deng! Grave news! The enemy has come to no great distance!"
"I already know. Yanping has been taken, so—"
"The troops we sent north to Jianyang County have met the enemy. And the troops sent east to Songxi County have been blocked and turned back as well... Wait. What did you say?"
Deng Keming and Kang Tae stared at each other, faces gone pale.
"Yanping—Yanping has fallen? What do you mean?"
"An enemy has appeared in the north? And in the east as well?"
It was a bolt from a clear sky. The two of them grasped the situation at once.
"How large is the force that took Yanping?"
"By my brother's account, twenty thousand at the least, perhaps thirty. And a navy enough to choke the river—so the water route is lost."
The strongest enemy, to the south, held the Min River along which they themselves had advanced, and now held Yanping, the impregnable city that was the throat of that road.
"The enemy to the east, they say, is holding a narrow pass hard. Palisades up, the mountain paths on both sides of the water blocked, and men posted even on the side trails. No gap, they say..."
"How many did they say?"
"Not certain, but more than ten thousand, it seems."
"Damn it..."
Grinding his teeth, Deng Keming spread the map of Jianning Circuit taken at Yanping.
"If we can't go back by water, we have to go by land... To reach Shaowu Circuit, we have to cross that vicious range."
"Is there a road?"
At Kang Tae's question, Deng Keming pointed to two places.
"The side path from Jianyang County straight into Shaowu is the fastest. If not that, a little farther south there's also the road southwest to Shunchang County..."
He indicated the Shaojian Road, which ran from Jianyang straight through to Shaowu County, and, by comparison with it, the narrower and rougher Shunyang Road, and he scratched his head hard.
"But that damned army that showed up in the north is sitting square across the way, isn't it?"
"Mm. It seems they came over the Wuyi Mountains, hard as they are. The Duke of Yueguo must have called in the army holding Xinzhou..."
Even with Yanping fallen and the river stopped, the army of Deng Keming and Kang Tae was still no small force. Fall back by the mountain roads, and they could hope to rise again from the ashes. But the enemy had appeared where the blow was least expected and sealed every line of retreat. It was, in the fullest sense, a siege with Chu songs on every side—no different from the fate of the Hegemon of Chu, ringed in at Gaixia.
"M-Marshal! What do we do?"
"If they push in from all sides at once, isn't it the end?"
Deng Keming was already irritated to death, and at the whining of his subordinates his temper burst.
"You worthless bastards..."
"Wait! Marshal Deng!"
Kang Tae was green with youth, but he was not without a gift for command. He looked at the map Deng Keming had spread, and his eyes flashed.
"The enemies enclosing us on three sides are still sixty or seventy li off—a little more than twenty miles. And our own troops stand between, so it will not be easy for them to get word to one another."
"Ho... that's true enough. And the mountains hereabouts are vicious country!"
"Suppose they mean to strike us together from three sides. What if, instead, we throw everything at once against one of the three?"
Hearing him, Deng Keming twisted his mouth into a smile.
"They said a little over ten thousand at most... If it isn't the main body under the Duke of Yueguo, we could overwhelm them completely, couldn't we?"
"Massed, they would match our strength. One by one, they are no match for us."
"Then where do we aim first?"
They had ranged the battlefields of Fujian together, and Deng Keming knew well that this youngster was no lightweight. He asked for wisdom.
"First, the south—the Duke of Yueguo's army—is the strongest. And for us, who have been using the navy that was dug in holding Yanping, they are an awkward opponent."
"The east isn't worth thinking about..."
"Yes. Even if we win there, nothing is left to us. If they fall back, we only drive deeper into their territory..."
"So what remains is the north."
An enemy that, like themselves, had crossed the steep Wuyi and come boldly into the middle of hostile ground.
"If we can annihilate these men, the balance turns in our favor. If the worst comes, we cross the mountain road west of Jianyang and run for Shaowu. If the balance favors us, we can fight a decisive battle with the Duke of Yueguo's main body and take Yanping back."
"Good. Very good."
The two of them, having recovered a thread of hope out of the worst, nodded.
"Give me troops. If all of us move, they will hit us from behind."
"Understood. I'll support you handsomely."
The two clasped hands and nodded. To break a four-sided siege and seize a chance to turn the war, they joined as one heart.
1) The siege depicted in this work draws on the methods of attacking a city and the methods of defending a city in the Northern Song military manual Wujing Zongyao, the Essentials of the Military Classics.