The Battle of Red Cliffs: The Preliminary Skirmish (3)
The ship shattered and debris scattered through the air, but fortunately it was not the vessel I was aboard that had taken the collision.
In the instant before impact, one of our mengchong—an assault ship built for ramming—had come charging in and slammed broadside into the enemy hull. The enemy ship, its flank torn open by a gaping wound, was shoved sideways in a long, grinding slide before it finally ground to a halt.
On the deck of our mengchong, a general wrapped in a red headscarf and a matching war cloak was swinging his sword and barking orders.
"Board them! Sweep the lot of them off!"
Soldiers dressed in the same red headscarves and cloaks moved with sharp, practiced agility, vaulting onto the enemy ship and throwing themselves into close combat.
Gan Ning shaded his eyes with one hand, watched for a moment, then put on a show of delighted recognition.
"Ahh. Ling Tong and his elite troops. Always a pleasure to watch them fight."
He waved toward Ling Tong and bellowed across the water.
"Yo!"
At the shout, Ling Tong glanced our way. But then—
"Tch!"
—he shot Gan Ning a single sidelong look, scowled, and snapped his head back around, returning at once to directing his men.
Gan Ning scratched his cheek with an awkward little smile.
I could guess well enough why Ling Tong reacted that way. Years ago, Gan Ning had killed Ling Tong's father, Ling Cao. In plain terms, he was the man who had murdered Ling Tong's father. That icy response was only natural. For now, though, it seemed Ling Tong was putting the needs of allied support ahead of old grudges.
Still, the elite troops Ling Tong had trained himself were genuinely worth watching. If Gan Ning's men gave off the air of rough-and-tumble brawlers, Ling Tong's elites looked like a properly drilled army.
Even fighting on the cramped deck of a ship, their paths never tangled and their formation never broke.
They held their ranks and drove their weapons straight ahead; enemy soldiers dropped one after another. Like a red tide sweeping a beach, they shoved the enemy back into the corners of the ship in a matter of moments.
While Gan Ning prepared to get our own ship moving again, I took the brief lull to look back over our rear lines. In the center of our fleet stood a cluster of fighting ships, and rising among them was a single enormous tower ship—Zhou Yu's flagship, the very heart of our command.
There, clad in red armor, the handsome man himself was directing the entire allied force.
Zhou Yu surveyed the battle from the deck of his tower ship. The tide of the fight was turning steadily in their favor. Cao Cao's forces outnumbered them, yet several factors kept the advantage with the allies.
The first was the gap in training and morale. Cao Cao's army was formidable on land, but naval warfare was unfamiliar ground. Jingzhou's navy had joined them, true, but those men had only recently been absorbed into Cao Cao's ranks, and as an expeditionary force their spirits were far from high.
Coordination with Cao Cao's own troops was poor as well—nothing like the seamless unity of the allied fleet.
The second reason was familiarity with the terrain. To Wu's navy, these waters of the Yangtze were as well known as the yard in front of their own homes. Cao Cao's forces had no such advantage.
With every passing moment, Cao Cao's fleet was becoming little more than a sacrifice upon the stage Zhou Yu had prepared.
The Jiangdong navy played a near-perfect harmony and danced in ordered ranks; Cao Cao's navy, by contrast, produced only growing dissonance and an increasingly clumsy performance.
The stage lights fell upon one stretch of the battlefield where the chaos had reached its peak—a knot of enemy ships tangled together, milling in confusion. Unfamiliar waters, reckless maneuvers, and Zhou Yu's navy hammering them from both flanks in turn had piled disorder upon disorder.
They struggled not to collide with one another, but ships that had once lost their momentum could barely move at all, groaning and straining in place.
The third reason: Zhou Yu's own command. In naval warfare, he would take second place to no one—and he never failed to exploit an enemy's weakness.
He raised one hand and called out.
"Prepare for massed fire!"
While the enemy ships floundered in disarray, he began aligning formations and firing angles.
The order passed from ship to ship; mid-level officers directed their soldiers to ready their bows.
The moment a concave formation took shape, thousands of arrows were leveled toward the enemy fleet.
It was a movement that deserved the word perfection. Anyone watching from the heavens would have said a delicate, immaculate group dance was unfolding across the water.
"Firing preparations complete!"
"Firing preparations complete!"
By the time the allies were fully ready to shoot, the enemy ships still had not managed to open proper distance between themselves.
"Commence fire!"
Zhou Yu's hand swept forward, and the order to deliver a killing blow rippled out through the fleet.
"Commence fire—!"
Under the mid-level officers' direction, arrows rained down on the enemy ships like a hailstorm.
"First rank, fall back—second rank, advance… First rank, advance again…"
Archers arranged in two ranks, alternating fire and reload to maximize their rate of shot—under that tactic the arrows came like a gale, punching holes through enemy chests.
"Damn it! Return fire!"
The enemy ships did not simply stand still, but their shots were so poorly aimed that the arrows either dropped weakly into the river or merely slapped against the sides of the hulls.
Having dealt a heavy blow with the massed volley, Zhou Yu issued his next command.
"From this moment, we move to defeat them in detail! Each commander is authorized to use ramming tactics and archery at his own discretion."
The instant the order fell, the oars of nearly the entire Eastern Wu fleet struck the water as one.
"Row hard and fast!"
"Don't fall behind the other ships!"
Wu's fleet surged forward together and drove their rams into the enemy hulls.
Crash! Crash!
Then generals and soldiers swarmed aboard and began seizing the ships. More and more enemy vessels, their flanks stove in, fell to boarding actions and close combat.
"This Pan Zhang has taken an enemy ship!"
The fourth reason the allies held the advantage: the valor of the generals who led from the front.
Cao Cao had not committed his full strength, so most of his principal generals still remained in the rear. Many of those present were also still unaccustomed to naval fighting.
Among them all, one figure caught Zhou Yu's eye—a young girl general. For some reason she had cast off her helmet, yet she was racing from enemy ship to enemy ship with nothing but a spear in her hands.
When Jin Cheong had first been introduced to him, his assessment had been this:
Sending a child like that onto a battlefield—what kind of man is this Liu Bei!?
In his eyes she had been nothing more than a pretty little girl, and he had assumed the rumors about her were exaggerated.
But watching her performance with his own eyes flipped his evaluation as easily as turning over a hand.
A talent like that is a waste not to use.
He already knew the courage of men like Gan Ning, Ling Tong, and Pan Zhang, so their feats were no great surprise. That a girl so young could display such valor, however, was something he could scarcely believe.
Cao Cao's banners fell; allied banners rose on more and more ships.
"The enemy is withdrawing."
From the far side, drums sounded, and at last the enemy fleet began to retreat. It was the signal of victory in the preliminary skirmish fought at Red Cliffs.
I watched the retreating enemy ships and lowered my spear.
We won.
Truth be told, this had been my first fight on the water, and I had been more tense than I cared to admit. I was glad it had ended well.
But in that very moment, a general appeared on one of the vanishing enemy ships—and loosed an arrow straight at me.
"Wha—?"
I ducked. The arrow buried itself in the mast directly behind me and quivered there.
"You who killed Sun Guan! I will repay this grudge one day. Wipe your neck clean and wait for me—my name is Zhang Pai!"
With that, the general turned his ship and vanished toward the far bank of the Yangtze.
Well. I had made myself an enemy. Living as a general in an age like this, I supposed such things were an unavoidable fate. Thinking that, I let the ship carry me back toward the main force.
Allied cheers and the thunder of victory drums filled my ears.
But the real fighting had only just begun.
After our first engagement, we moored the ships along the riverbank and returned to our respective camps. I told Gan Ning where I was going and stepped out of the camp for a while.
I was more or less a guest officer here, with no subordinates of my own to manage and little real business to handle. Put generously, that made me relatively free; put less generously, it meant I had neither authority nor real power. Since I would be returning to Liu Bei's army once this war was over, the lack of power hardly mattered.
Leaving Gan Ning's camp, I headed for Ling Tong's. Getting better acquainted with the other generals seemed worthwhile, and I wanted to thank him for the help he had given us earlier.
Along the way, however, I ran into someone I had not expected.
"Well, if it isn't Lord Jin Cheong! A pleasure to meet you again like this. Haha."
"Ah… General Pan Zhang. We meet again."
I could not figure out why I kept running into this man. He waved cheerfully; I hid my true feelings and bowed my head in polite greeting.
"Meeting like this must be fate—why not come by my camp for a bit?"
"Well… I'd like to, but I have somewhere I need to go."
"Oh, don't be like that. Just stop by for a moment. I've got something good to show you."
He was not exactly the sort of man who inspired warm feelings, so I tried to decline with proper courtesy. He refused to give up, though, and after several more rounds of persuasion I found myself following him. In the end I had given in—and the reason was this:
"I've set up a market inside our camp. Come take a look around. If anything catches your eye, you're free to take it."
A market. And inside a military camp, no less. Honestly, my curiosity was piqued. Come to think of it, I had read that in actual history Pan Zhang would set up markets whenever he had the time—and that other armies used to buy their supplies from his.
The sun was already sinking behind the western hills, but Pan Zhang's camp blazed with so many bonfires it might as well have been broad daylight.
And there, just like a real marketplace, stalls stood everywhere, while officers and soldiers from other units milled about buying whatever they needed.
This felt less like an army and more like an actual bazaar. If anything, it seemed livelier now than it had during the battle.
Not a bad idea, I thought. No organization on earth depends on supplies quite the way an army does. Something worth trying myself, later on.
I picked up some tea there. Visiting Ling Tong's camp empty-handed would have felt wrong somehow.
I tried to pay, but Pan Zhang waved me off and told me to just take it. Given how famously greedy the man was, it seemed a little strange that he would so readily hand over fine tea—a luxury in this era—but I did not refuse.
Especially coming from Pan Zhang, who was notorious for his foul temper. Did I need to revise my opinion of him a little? Or was this simply the benefit of being a woman with a certain face?
In my previous life I had never enjoyed any advantage from looks at all. Receiving it here was pleasant and a little bitter at the same time. Still—good was good.
"Thank you. I'll see you again another time, then."
Leaving Pan Zhang waving me off with an open invitation to return whenever I liked, I made my way to Ling Tong's camp.
"Would it be possible to see General Ling Tong for a moment?"
The soldier at the main gate went to deliver my message, and a short while later Ling Tong himself came out.
He was a remarkably young general. If my memory served, Ling Tong was about twenty at this time—perhaps not even that.
"I know you must be busy, so thank you for receiving me. I am Jin Cheong. I hold the rank of Duwei in Liu Bei's army."
"Ah. Yes… I am Ling Tong."
"I wanted to thank you for your help in the battle just now. Our side was exhausted—if you hadn't come to our aid, General, we would have taken heavy losses. I came by to express my gratitude in person."
When I offered my thanks, Ling Tong hesitated a moment before answering.
"Mm. It… it was nothing so great as all that."
He said it with a slight bow of his head. The light had faded enough that I could not make out his face clearly, but his manner toward me was thoroughly courteous—the complete opposite of the cold shoulder he had given Gan Ning.
Then again, for a man whose father's killer stood on the same side, coming to our aid in a crisis was already the act of someone with a generous heart.
"Standing out here talking is a bit awkward. Come inside for now."
Following Ling Tong's lead, I stepped into his camp.