Chapter 179: The Capture of Sixian

Forty li northwest of Sizhou lies Hongxian.

This small county town squats at the bend of the old Bian River channel. Its walls are rammed earth, long neglected; a section on the east side has collapsed halfway. The Jurchens plugged the gap with woven willow fences, calling it repair. The garrison numbers fewer than fifteen hundred men—some are remnants retreating from Sizhou, still shaken, having lost half their armor in the flight. But the Hongxian commander is an exception: his name is Wanyan Sala, a Jurchen veteran who fought hard battles against the Western Xia in Shaanxi back in the day. A sword scar slashes diagonally from his forehead to his chin; his left eye went blind in that battle, leaving only the right, which pierces people like an awl when he looks at them.

Wanyan Sala does not want to flee. Losing Sizhou did not surprise him, but Hongxian is the southern gate of Suzhou; if Hongxian falls, Suzhou stands exposed to the Song army's blade. He has only fifteen hundred men, while the Song vanguard reportedly numbers eight thousand, with more to follow. Fifteen hundred against eight thousand—any normal person knows it cannot be fought. But Wanyan Sala is not normal—he spent a lifetime fighting the Western Xia in Shaanxi, surrounded, ambushed, cut off from supplies, yet survived every time. His experience tells him: holding a city relies not on numbers, but on ruthlessness.

On the nineteenth of the third month, the Song army arrived beneath Hongxian's walls.

Guo Zhuo did not lead personally this time—Sizhou needed his presence to stabilize matters; rear logistics, prisoner handling, and coordination with newly occupied villages all required unified command. He handed vanguard command to his deputy, Tian Junmai. Tian Junmai arrived first with three thousand men, tasked with probing Hongxian's strength. If the Jurchen forces fled at the sight as they had at Sizhou, they would take the town immediately. If the Jurchens dug in to defend to the death, they would encircle and wait for reinforcements before attacking.

Tian Junmai rode his horse and glanced at Hongxian from afar, and his heart gave a sudden thud. Banners stood orderly atop the walls; behind the battlements, shadows swarmed; every wall section was packed with soldiers, their blades and spears gleaming coldly in the sun. This was a completely different scene from Sizhou—the Jurchen soldiers at Sizhou were soft; those at Hongxian were hard.

"My lord, shall we attack?" the Vanguard Camp Commander rode up and asked.

Tian Junmai hesitated. He was a veteran, having fought in the northern expedition at the end of the Shaoxing era; he knew the greatest taboo in siege warfare was throwing the vanguard against a prepared defense. Yet he also wanted to fight—Sizhou had fallen too easily, and the entire army was pent up with frustration, convinced the Jurchen soldiers were made of paper, ready to burst at a poke. If that spirit drained away, future battles would be harder. Besides, Hongxian was a small town, its walls low, lacking even a moat; three thousand men charging once might well take it.

"Attack," Tian Junmai decided. "First, test their mettle."

The battle sounded at noon. The Song army's first assault was probing—five hundred infantrymen carried scaling ladders toward the south wall, flanked by two hundred archers and crossbowmen on each side. The formation spread wide, war cries shook the heavens, and momentum was strong.

Wanyan Sala crouched on the south gate tower, his single eye fixed on the Song army below like an old snake coiled on a rock. He waited until the Song troops reached the wall's base and the ladders were propped up before squeezing out a single word from between his teeth.

"Strike."

Suddenly, a dense mass of heads appeared atop Hongxian's walls. These were not the old and weak who had fled at the sight of the enemy at Sizhou earlier—these men rose simultaneously from concealed positions pre-prepared along the walls, their ranks orderly, movements unified. The first row of Jurchen soldiers held bundles of dry grass soaked in oil; they ignited them and hurled them down. The grass bundles landed on the ladders, at the wall's base, and on the armor of Song soldiers; flames shot up with a whoosh, turning the entire southern wall base into a trench of fire. The second row followed immediately, hurling boulders and rolling logs. Stones smashed the ladders; ladders cracked in two with a crack, and the men atop screamed as they fell. The third row consisted of archers and crossbowmen, aiming specifically at the Song troops below whose ranks had been thrown into chaos by the fire.

In less than a quarter-hour, the Song army's first assault was beaten back. Dozens of charred corpses lay at the base of the south wall, along with more than a dozen broken ladders leaning crookedly against the wall, smoking greenish. Wounded soldiers were dragged away by comrades, their screams audible from far off.

Tian Junmai's expression changed. He remembered the words Xin Qiji had spoken to Guo Zhuo on the Zhenjiang parade ground before the campaign: "Do not underestimate the Jurchens. The Jurchens were terrified by the steppe peoples in the north; that was because the steppe peoples were too strong, not because the Jurchens were too weak."

Wanyan Sala stood on the tower, his single eye coldly watching the retreating Song army. He did not laugh, shout, or raise his blade in a triumphant cry. He simply turned slowly and said one sentence to the messenger: "Tell Suzhou that Hongxian still holds. But not for long. Have them prepare."

That night, Tian Junmai did not sleep. He spread the map on the ground, stuck torches into the mud, and crouched watching for half the night. The day's probe had taught him one thing: the Jurchen soldiers at Hongxian and those at Sizhou were two completely different creatures. The Jurchen soldiers at Sizhou were water, flowing at a push. The Jurchen soldiers at Hongxian were stone; a head-on clash would leave one's head bloodied. He could not throw three thousand vanguard troops against this stone—even if they broke it, half his teeth would shatter; the cost would outweigh the gain.

"Surround," Tian Junmai ordered. "Encircle but do not attack. Wait until the heavy artillery arrives, then strike."

The siege lasted a full four days. During these four days, Song reinforcements arrived successively, swelling the force from three thousand to six thousand. More importantly, Guo Zhuo dispatched three heavy trebuchets from Sizhou—not the light portable crossbows, but genuine machines dismantled and hauled by more than ten large wagons. The largest could hurl an eighty-pound stone projectile four hundred paces. A batch of oil jars originally prepared by the Jurchens for defense had been captured in the Sizhou granary; now Guo Zhuo had men send them over overnight.

Wanyan Sala saw the Song trebuchets being assembled in the distance from the tower. He did not recognize this new weapon—the heavy trebuchets the Great Song had improved over recent years. But he recognized the silhouette. Twenty years ago in Shaanxi, the Huihui cannons of the Western Xia had once pounded his troops until they could not lift their heads. The light in his single eye dimmed slightly, then he turned to look at the soldiers on the wall. Those soldiers were also staring at the distant trebuchets, eyes fixed, throats bobbing up and down.

"What are you afraid of?" Wanyan Sala's voice suddenly exploded, hoarse and violent. "Stones cannot kill everyone! When the stones stop, they will still climb the walls! Only then will cutting down men be true skill!" The soldiers, startled by the scolding, quickly averted their gazes. But Wanyan Sala knew clearly in his heart—these soldiers were not the elite of the northern frontier; most had never been struck by a trebuchet in their lives. When the stones truly began to fall, whether they feared or not was no longer within his control.

On the sixth day at dawn, the general assault began.

The three trebuchets fired simultaneously. The first volley of stone projectiles sliced through the sky with a sharp whistling sound. One smashed into the wall, sending debris flying and tearing a three-foot-wide gap in the rammed earth. Another flew over the wall, collapsing a civilian house inside, shattering tiles with a clatter. A third struck the battlements squarely, blasting the battlements along with two Jurchen soldiers behind them into the air; bloodied corpses tumbled from the wall, landing at the base with a dull thud.

The second and third volleys followed immediately. The trebuchet operators were veteran craftsmen summoned from the rear, their hands extremely steady; nearly every shot landed on the wall. Hongxian's rammed earth walls began to crumble under the continuous bombardment. The section on the east, originally patched with willow fences, was the first to fail; struck squarely by a stone projectile, it collapsed entirely, opening a two-zhang-wide breach. The Jurchen soldiers on the walls began to panic. They could fight men to the death, but they could not fight stones.

Wanyan Sala ran back and forth on the tower, his voice already hoarse from shouting. He personally grabbed a bow and stood behind the battlements, firing arrows down at the city. One arrow pierced the shoulder of a Song crossbowman; a second arrow grazed past Tian Junmai's helmet. But the trebuchets kept pounding, the walls kept collapsing, and his soldiers kept dwindling. On the first day, when he repelled the assault, he had fifteen hundred men. After four days of siege and a morning of bombardment, fewer than eight hundred could still wield a blade.

Tian Junmai saw the figure of that one-eyed Jurchen general on the wall from the front lines. He lowered the command flag in his hand and asked the Crossbow Camp Commander beside him: "Who is that man?"

"The Hongxian commander, Wanyan Sala. An old general; it is said he fought the Western Xia in Shaanxi for twenty years."

Tian Junmai fell silent for a moment, raised his hand, and prepared to order a surrender demand.

But before his hand could fall, a change suddenly erupted on the wall—not the Song army had stormed up, but the Jurchen soldiers themselves had broken into chaos. At the eastern breach, a Song vanguard unit had already charged through the gap and engaged the Jurchen soldiers in hand-to-hand combat inside the wall. Amidst the clashing of blades and spears came screams and roars; the fighting at the breach was extremely fierce. Wanyan Sala led his last dozen personal guards down from the tower and ran straight into that Song unit. He swung his blade, felling the foremost Song soldier, but before he could withdraw the weapon, three spears simultaneously pierced his chest.

As Wanyan Sala fell, his single eye remained open; the scar twisted into a grotesque centipede in the firelight. The spot where he fell was exactly the pile of rubble from the collapsed east wall. His corpse mingled with the debris, making it impossible to distinguish where the wall ended and the man began.

With their commander lost, the remaining Jurchen resistance instantly collapsed. Some remnants fled through the north gate, sprinting along the imperial road toward Suzhou. More dropped their weapons and knelt in the streets and alleys to surrender. Hongxian had fallen.

When Tian Junmai rode through the eastern breach into the city, things had mostly quieted down. Song soldiers were extinguishing the remaining fires in the streets and herding the surrendered troops to the parade ground in the city center for containment. The air was thick with the smell of burnt wood, blood, and dust. He paused before Wanyan Sala's corpse, looking down at the face pierced by the scar. The final expression frozen on that face was not fear, but rage—the rage of having given everything and still lost.

"Bury him," Tian Junmai told his personal guard. "Bury him beneath the east wall. He held for six days; he deserves that wall."

Then he led his men into the Hongxian yamen. Just as at Sizhou, he smashed the Great Jin plaque and replaced it with a Great Song sign. Thus, the entire line from Sizhou to Hongxian was cleared; between the Huaihe River and Suzhou, no organized Jurchen defensive force remained. The first strategic objective of the northern expedition—tearing open the southern gate of the Jurchen Huaihe defense line—had been accomplished.

The victory report was sent by swift horse to Lin'an once more.

This victory report had been personally polished by Guo Ni. Guo Ni did not go to the Hongxian front, but he was well-versed in the politics of victory reports. He added seven characters to Tian Junmai's original battle report: "One thousand heads severed, the Jurchen general beheaded."

As for how much exaggeration lay in the figure "one thousand heads severed," Tian Junmai knew best. The total Jurchen force at Hongxian was fewer than fifteen hundred; several hundred fled, several hundred surrendered; the Jurchen soldiers truly killed numbered at most three or four hundred. But Tian Junmai did not correct it. When he saw Guo Ni's polished victory report in his tent, he merely frowned, then set the paper down. Having fought for thirty years, he knew victory reports were never written for their own side to read, but for Lin'an, for the world, and for history.

No one cared about the true state of battle. In Lin'an's teahouses, storytellers had already turned the "Great Victory at Sizhou" and the "Great Victory at Hongxian" into a continuous series of tales; when they reached "one thousand heads severed," the hall erupted in applause. Headlines in the official gazettes grew ever grander, from "Sizhou Recaptured" to "Great Victory at Hongxian," then to "Huaihe Region Shaken, Jurchens Terrified." In streets and alleys, rumors spread that the northern expeditionary army had already slain over ten thousand Jurchen soldiers, recaptured dozens of cities, and that the Jurchen southern front had completely collapsed.

In reality, the northern expeditionary army had just taken the second city.

Sizhou and Hongxian combined were merely two inconspicuous small towns on the banks of the Huaihe River. The distance to the true targets—Suzhou, Xuzhou, Kaifeng—remained very, very far. The main Jurchen force on the southern front had not yet appeared; the northern elite had not yet moved south; Wanyan Honglie had not yet returned from Lin'an. The Jurchen response was far slower than the Song army's advance, but also far deeper than the Song army imagined.

On the twenty-seventh day of the third month of the second year of Kaixi, Hongxian was recaptured. Song casualties numbered just over one hundred; Jurchen casualties totaled three to four hundred, with over five hundred captured. Guo Ni reported "one thousand heads severed." The first phase of the northern expedition concluded amidst a wave of jubilation.

But the true war had not yet begun.