Chapter 53: The Steed Like Lu flies fast (Part VI)

Daybreak had already arrived. The junior officer had the men find a spot for the corpses of those who had died in battle, pushing down the earthen walls to cover and bury them one by one. As the earthen walls crashed down, the bodies in the snow were solidly buried.

The junior officer squatted down, using his hands to push the scattered arrow shafts into the edge of the earth mounds as simple markers.

"Incompetent Yue can only use this wall as a coffin today to see you off. I have wronged you, brothers," he said in a very low voice, as if afraid of disturbing something. "Once the siege of Taiyuan is lifted, I will personally come to relocate your graves and let your souls return home."

A scouting cavalryman galloped back. "Report! Jurchen scouts spotted five miles to the northeast, searching this way!"

There was no time to mourn.

The junior officer stood up abruptly. "Tie them up, mount horses!"

The wounded soldiers were securely bound with hemp ropes to the backs of their comrades. Some had shattered leg bones protruding through their flesh, and arrow wounds on their abdomens oozed bloody froth with every jolt, yet they bit down hard on wooden sticks without uttering a sound. To stay meant death; to leave might still offer a chance of survival.

Sun Er’s arrow wound had just been bandaged. The tightening made him hiss in pain. The junior officer glanced back and reached out to loosen the knot on Sun Er's back by half an inch. "Endure it. Once we reach Pingding Military Prefecture, it will be better."

Hoofbeats trod upon the frost- and snow-covered official road. Old Soldier Chen’s nose tip was red with the cold. He cupped his fists and said, "Thanks to the rescue of you brothers, I haven't yet asked for your honorable names. My name is Chen Quanxuan. I've been in the army for seven years, and the comrades in the ranks just call me Old Man Chen."

He turned to Li Quanwu and the others, sighing with emotion. "Since we managed to crawl out of this pile of blood, we share a bond of life and death. From now on, if anyone is in trouble, if Old Man Chen so much as frowns, I am no mother's son!"

"Well said! In this chaotic world, only those who can entrust their backs to one another are true brothers!"

Sun Shitou chimed in boisterously from the side, "I'm Sun Shitou, from Jingle in Xinzhou. I'm the only one left in my family—once I'm full, the whole family is fed, nothing to worry about, carefree!" He smiled, revealing two rows of teeth as if his wounds did not exist at all.

Lu the Mad Tiger spat out a wad of bloody phlegm. "I'm Lu the Mad Tiger, from a mountain ravine in Daizhou. My old father and mother were killed by the Jin dogs this year, so now I'm a lone bachelor too. I just hope to take a wife sometime and leave behind a bloodline. After all, I'm considered an official of sorts now, the ancestral graves are smoking with auspicious vapor! Someone has to remember me."

"This subordinate is Zhao Daniuh..."

When it came to Li Quanwu, the old man sighed heavily, staring at the undulating Taihang Mountains, and opened the floodgates of speech. First, he introduced his background, then cursed foully: "A native of Shuzhou, Chengdu Prefecture, Li's Silk Shop! Generations of painstaking effort! Destroyed in the hands of thieves by those damn birds! That Huashang Gang, when the fleet passed through, the government levied civilian laborers and requisitioned the Li family's cargo boats! Not only were the boats gone, but even the goods were sealed and sent as tribute."

"Later, after pulling strings and greasing palms, they said they'd compensate with *qianyin*... Bullshit *qianyin*!"

The more he spoke, the more agitated he became, spittle flying. "We people of Bashu suffer too much! Back then, we used iron money, so heavy it could crush a person to death! Buying a piece of cloth required a shoulder pole to carry the coins, grinding bloody blisters onto your shoulders just going to the market!

"Just as we finally got *jiaozi*, light and practical! Yet the court insisted on starving ghosts by pushing *qianyin*... That piece of trash is too hard even for wiping one's ass! Damn their mothers! They promised thirty-six million strings of cash as capital backing, only for those corrupt officials to turn around and misappropriate it to build the Genyue!

"Building fairy palaces for their ancestors eighteen generations deep! Flying scraps of paper filled the sky, and rice prices skyrocketed! They forced the people of Shu to exchange *jiaozi* for *qianyin*, and the very next day when you went to buy rice, you couldn't even exchange it for half a pint of coarse grain!

"They pay military rations with this stuff? Are they trying to fool ghosts?! Old Thief Cai Jing! He ruthlessly turned *qianyin* into a death warrant! Because of this rotten *qianyin*, how many families in Shu had centuries of family heritage ruined in an instant! This era has been thoroughly ruined by this group of corrupt officials!"

"Pity this old man, who was already at the age to sit back and enjoy retirement, now running around in the freezing cold." The old man beat his chest and stamped his feet, cursing the imperial court to high heaven.

Listening to the old man's bitter curses, everyone felt it vent their anger, and they successively chimed in with curses of their own.

Amidst the wind and snow, the junior officer quietly listened until the end. When Li Quanwu's curses subsided slightly, he slowly spoke, his voice clearly piercing the howling wind: "Like all of you, I also come from a poor family. I am from Tangyin in Xiangzhou, surnamed Yue, given name Fei."

"I've been poor as a church mouse since I was a child, renting a few mu of lean land from the Han family to scrape by. But I was born with a huge appetite, eating enough for several others in a single meal, which scared my mother into constantly chanting Buddhist prayers, saying that if I kept growing, the bottom of the rice vat would see daylight every day. Fortunately, my strength grew along with it, so I helped the family farm more land, often herding cattle and doing odd jobs for the wealthy. But the more I ate, the poorer the family became."

"At thirteen, I could flip the village's millstone all by myself, rolling the mill axle around like an iron hoop for fun. It scared my teacher so much he said I 'have the strength of a young calf, and will eat military rations in the future.'"

He gave a self-deprecating laugh. "Last year, when the floods hit Hebei, the family couldn't even scrape together a single meal. With no other choice, I tucked three wheat cakes into my tunic and enlisted, running all the way here to Pingding Military Prefecture in Hedong to serve as a cavalry foot soldier just to earn a bite to eat. Later... by sheer luck, I was promoted to junior officer."

He paused, a rare, youthful shyness tinging his voice. "The camp cooks saw me eating the rations of five soldiers all by myself and thought a bandit had infiltrated the camp. But when I lifted the camp gate's stone lock over my head with one hand, they realized this meal money hadn't been spent in vain. To my shame, it's solely thanks to this brute strength of mine that I finally... finally haven't eaten so many meals in vain within the army."

After a brief silence, a roar of laughter suddenly exploded! Sun Shitou laughed so hard he nearly tumbled off his horse. "Brother Yue! No wonder you can fight so well; it turns out all that strength was eaten into you! Your strength isn't just not eaten in vain—a single ox wouldn't even be enough for you to eat! When slaughtering enemies, a single spear of yours is worth ten lives of ours!"

Lu the Mad Tiger slapped his thigh and laughed loudly as well. "That's right! Next time we go into battle, Brother Yue, you just charge forward! We'll just follow behind you to pick up contributions! Guaranteed to keep you well-fed!"

The tightly stretched strings snapped, and the gloom of days of bloody battles seemed to be somewhat dispelled by this bold laughter and cursing.

The laughter echoed in the cold snowy night. Brief though it was, it was like a weak flame, stubbornly leaping within everyone's hearts.

As the hoofbeats of the scouting cavalry carried a chill into the troop, Yue Fei was re-tightening the cloth bandages for a wounded soldier in a wind-sheltered mountain col.

Wang San tumbled down from his horse, ice shards from the snow piercing through the gaps in his armor straight into his flesh. "Leader Yue, the Yuci official road is covered in Jurchen horse tracks, and their wolf banners are fluttering atop the city walls. The county seat is likely gone."

The people frowned and looked toward the northeast, where the skyline was dyed a grayish-purple by the smoke of battle.

When they had arrived, the banner of the Great Song was still fluttering atop the Yuci city wall, yet within three days, it had fallen.

Yue Fei weighed the iron spear in his hand, the ice crystals on the shaft rattling down. "The road back to Pingding Military Prefecture is blocked. Either we force our way through, or we head south."

"We cannot force our way through!" Old Man Chen spoke up, straightening his body while holding onto the saddle. "There are many passes to the east. As long as the Jurchen dogs guard the vital points, we'll be turtles in a jar. Better to head south, following the Fen River down."

After a brief discussion, everyone agreed it was feasible, so they changed course southward. Along the way, they used scouting cavalry to reconnoiter the perimeter, immediately bypassing any sign of Jurchen movement.

At that time, relying on its abundant water resources, Qingyuan County was quite prosperous in agriculture, and its grape cultivation was famous far and near. The Fen River meandered through its territory, nourishing this land. Merchant vessels shuttled back and forth on the river, transporting grain, silk, and other supplies to various places.

As the troop just turned into the territory of Qingyuan County, they saw that the villages along the official road had been reduced to scorched earth. Mutilated corpses lay across the roads, and many villages had been thoroughly plundered.

Villagers hiding in remote places wept as they said the county seat had been breached the day before. The Jurchen dogs had plundered for two days and were now heading toward Jiaocheng.

The troop skirted the outer wall of the county seat. In the villages, the withered vines of the grape trenches shook snow particles into the wind. Touching the calluses on the vines and hearing hoofbeats coming from the direction of the county seat, they quickly dove deep into the trellis frames.

Passing Qingyuan, the mountain silhouettes of Jiaocheng County grew closer in the snowy mist. This place housed the Datong Supervisory Office (state-run), with craftsmen numbering two thousand households. In the second year of Baoyuan under Emperor Renzong of Song (1039), the Datong Supervisory Office was subordinated to Taiyuan Prefecture.

The Jiaocheng Datong Iron Smelting Supervisory Office was one of the four major iron offices in the country, a veritable center of iron metallurgy that provided vital iron resources to the Great Song.

The intermittent bell tolls of Tianning Temple on Guashan Mountain drifted over. Abbot Huiming stood outside the mountain gate, rubbing his hands to welcome the crowd. "The county seat is currently under attack. The miners of the Iron Smelting Trench have established a stronghold in the mountains, and they specialize in ambushing isolated Jin soldiers."

The wounded soldiers had their injuries treated here. The abbot pointed out a mountain trail that could bypass the vital roads and lead directly to Wenshui.

There were numerous mountains within Wenshui County. Zixiashan, originally named Yinquanshan, derived its name from Confucius's disciple Bu Shang teaching and resting here along the West River. Its stone cliffs stood sheer with numerous historical sites. "Shang Mountain's Layered Greenery," "Cliff Waterfall," "Hidden Spring Spring Water," and "Stone Gate Waves and Snow" were all among the eight ancient scenic views of Wenshui.

The Wenyu River outside Wenshui County was covered in a thin layer of ice, and incense smoke drifted from the Shengmu Temple of Empress Wu on the opposite bank. It was heavily shrouded by the gloom of Taiyuan under siege—like a string pulled to its absolute limit. The iron hoofs of the Jurchen soldiers had not yet broken through the city gates, but the hoofbeats of small-scale reconnaissance and the bloody news brought by refugees had already immersed the entire city in a vortex of fear and panic.

News traveled along the official road via couriers, exploding like cold water poured into hot oil.

At first, the commoners still held onto the wishful thinking that "Taiyuan's city walls are solid, the Jin soldiers cannot take it." But three days later, refugees fleeing from the outskirts of Taiyuan (mostly suburban farmers, in tattered clothes, bearing the scars of plunder) brought more specific and gruesome details: "The Jin soldiers have surrounded Taiyuan, attacking day and night with arrows like rain, and all the villages outside the city have been burned."

"Small bands of Jin soldiers are fleeing south, killing everyone they see and plundering every grain of food."

Even more alarming, militia units at the Wenyu River ferry ten miles north of the county seat had bumped into a dozen horseback-riding Jin soldiers. They weren't attacking the city; they were merely scouting the terrain along the riverbank, shooting dead two villagers who tried to approach, and galloping back north after leaving a few corpses behind.

This "exploratory slaughter" struck Wenshui like a massive boulder: "The Jin soldiers are coming" was no longer a distant rumor, but a blade hanging directly over their heads.

By day, the streets and alleys of the county seat were half as empty as usual.

In the normally bustling market, more than half of the grain shops and silk stores had their wooden shutters bolted shut. The few remaining shops had jacked up grain prices exorbitantly, and commoners buying rice clutched copper coins while cursing aloud, yet they had no choice but to bite the bullet and buy. Everyone knew that later on, even high-priced grain might become unavailable.

Toward evening, every household barred their doors early. The usual wisps of cooking smoke were sparse and scattered. Only the scraping sound of patrolling militia armor and the night watchman’s hoarse cries of "Beware of fire and candles, strictly guard against spies" sounded exceptionally grating in the silence.

The magistrate of Wenshui County was a man approaching fifty, currently caught in a pincer attack from two sides: on one side was the urgent order from the Prefect of Taiyuan—"Defend Wenshui to the death as a screen for Taiyuan; do not let the Jin soldiers advance a single step south"—and on the other were the fleeing commoners outside the county yamen.

All he could do was hastily mobilize all the able-bodied men of the county (according to the baojia system, one man for every ten households), assembling over two thousand militiamen. He distributed iron sabers, long spears, and even sharpened wooden sticks to them, sending them to reinforce the city walls. Wenshui's rammed-earth city walls were not tall to begin with, and at this moment they were being heightened by the militiamen using loess and gravel. Caltrops were piled up at the city gates, and of the four gates, only the southern gate was left open for people to enter and exit, with extremely strict inspections where anyone slightly suspicious was tied up and interrogated.

Meanwhile, county clerks and runners went door-to-door "levying grain," nominally to "support the Taiyuan garrison," but in reality, much of it was reserved as Wenshui's own stockpile. When some commoners were caught hiding grain, they were pinned to the ground and beaten on the spot, their cries echoing through the streets and alleys.

The wealthy households had long since entertained the thought of fleeing.

Gentry at the foot of Zixiashan to the west of the city hired carriages and horses overnight to send their gold, silver, valuables, and family dependents further south to Pingyao and Jiexiu, where it was further from Taiyuan and offered mountainous terrain for defense.

Middle-class families were torn between "defending" and "fleeing": to flee? Carriage fares and travel expenses weren't cheap, and what about the family lands? Besides, the official road might not be safe. To defend? Could Wenshui City actually hold?

One family running a drapery shop had the master of the house and his son go reinforce the city wall, while the mistress hid fabrics and grain in the cellar at home, crying as she concealed them: "If we can't hold out, these things will just be left for the Jin soldiers."

The most wretched were the poor households. With neither grain nor carts, they could only pin their hopes on "the city holding out." Some old men led cattle, carried bedding, and fled with their whole families into the western Zixiashan and Baimaoshan mountains. "There are cave dwellings in the mountains; the Jin soldiers can't ride horses in, so we can always survive."

For days, streams of people fleeing toward the western mountainous region were endless.

The villages at the foot of the mountains were packed with newcomers. The villagers' cave dwellings were occupied, and firewood and water sources became new sources of conflict, even leading to fights over a cave that could offer shelter.

As for the villages on the eastern plain, they appeared even more desolate. Most of the young and strong men had been conscripted to defend the city, leaving behind only the elderly, the weak, women, and children. They either locked their doors and followed the exodus into the mountains, or embraced a "resign themselves to fate" mentality, setting up incense altars outside their doors and kowtowing toward the north, praying that the Jin soldiers would detour around them.

Aside from panic, there was also sporadic, suppressed anger.

The people of Wenshui had prized martial valor since ancient times. A village west of the city called "Wujiapu" (said to be distant descendants of Wu Zetian's clan) had its clan elder summon a hundred-odd able-bodied men, who, carrying ancestral sabers and spears, erected a wooden sign at the village entrance reading "Protecting Hearth and Home."

Some old military veterans patted their chests and cursed, "The Jin soldiers also carry a head on two shoulders! If they really come, we'll risk our lives rather than let them trample our land!"

Yet such bravado was mostly self-encouragement born of despair.

More often, people simply endured in silence: the city-defending militiamen gazed north toward Taiyuan, faintly catching sight of the smoke and fire on the horizon (the flames of the Jin soldiers burning the city outskirts); at night, the occasional bark of a dog outside the city would wake the entire city, and every household would light oil lamps, daring not to blow them out again until they were certain the Jin soldiers hadn't arrived.

In the air of Wenshui County, besides the biting cold wind and the sour stench of sweat, there was a thicker scent—fear of the unknown, and powerlessness against the impending storm.

The Jin soldiers had not yet arrived, but this city had long since entered a "state of war" in advance: everyone was waiting, waiting for those ultimate hoofbeats to trample upon their last shred of wishful thinking.