Chapter 179

Forty li northwest of Sizhoucheng lies Hongxian.

This small county sat crookedly at a bend of the old Bian River, its walls built of rammed earth, long neglected; a section on the east had collapsed halfway, and the Jin soldiers had patched it with woven willow fences, calling it repair. The garrison inside numbered fewer than fifteen hundred men—some were remnants who had fled from Sizhoucheng, still shaken, half their armor lost. But Hongxian’s commander was an exception—he was Wanyan Salar, a veteran Jurchen soldier who had fought hard battles against the Western Xia in Shaanxi, his face bearing a deep scar slanting from forehead to chin, his left eye lost in that battle, leaving only his right eye, which fixed on men like a needle.

Wanyan Salar had no intention of fleeing. He was not surprised that Sizhoucheng had fallen, but Hongxian was the southern gateway to Suzhou; if Hongxian fell, Suzhou would lie bare before the Song army’s blades. He had only fifteen hundred men; the Song vanguard was said to number eight thousand, with more coming. Fifteen hundred against eight thousand—any normal man knew it was unwinnable. But Wanyan Salar was no normal man—he had spent his life fighting the Western Xia in Shaanxi, surrounded, ambushed, cut off from supplies, and always survived. His experience told him: defending a city did not depend on numbers, but on ruthlessness.

On the nineteenth of March, the Song army arrived before Hongxian’s walls.

Guo Zhuo did not lead this advance himself—Sizhoucheng needed him to hold the rear, coordinating grain transport, prisoner handling, and communication with newly captured villages. He handed command of the vanguard to his deputy, Tian Junmai. Tian Junmai arrived first with three thousand men, ordered to probe Hongxian’s strength: if the Jin troops fled as they had in Sizhoucheng, he was to seize the city outright; if they held firm, he was to encircle it and wait for reinforcements.

Tian Junmai glanced from horseback at Hongxian’s walls—and his heart sank. The battlements flew neat banners; shadows lined every parapet; every wall bristled with soldiers, blades and spears glinting in the sun. This was nothing like Sizhoucheng—Sizhoucheng’s Jin troops had been soft; Hongxian’s were hard.

“My lord, do we attack?” The vanguard commander rode up.

Tian Junmai hesitated. He was a veteran, having fought in the final years of the Shaoxing northern campaign; he knew the cardinal sin of assaulting a prepared defense with the vanguard. But he wanted to fight—Sizhoucheng had been too easy; the entire army was brimming with arrogance, convinced the Jin were paper tigers, one poke away from collapse. If that spirit broke, the battles ahead would be harder. Besides, Hongxian was a small town, its walls low, no moat—three thousand men might break through in one charge.

“Attack,” Tian Junmai decided. “Let’s test their mettle.”

The battle began at noon. The Song army’s first assault was tentative—five hundred infantry charged the southern wall with scaling ladders, two hundred archers on each flank providing cover. The formation spread wide, shouts deafening, with formidable momentum.

Wanyan Salar crouched on the southern gate tower, his single eye fixed on the Song troops below like a serpent coiled on stone. He waited until the Song soldiers reached the wall’s base, ladders planted, before squeezing out a single word.

“Fire.”

Suddenly, heads surged from every hidden crevice along Hongxian’s walls. These were not the weak, fleeing Jin troops of Sizhoucheng—they rose in unison from concealed positions, ranks tight, movements synchronized. The first row hurled bundles of dry grass soaked in oil, ignited; they landed on ladders, at the wall’s foot, on Song soldiers’ armor—flames erupted instantly, turning the southern wall’s base into a moat of fire. The second row followed with boulders and rolling logs; stones shattered ladders, men screamed as they tumbled down. The third row were archers, picking off the Song troops thrown into chaos by the flames.

In less than a quarter-hour, the first Song assault was repelled. Dozens of charred corpses lay at the southern wall’s base; over a dozen broken ladders leaned crookedly against the wall, smoking. Wounded soldiers were dragged back by comrades, their screams audible from afar.

Tian Junmai’s face darkened. He remembered Xin Qiji’s words to Guo Zhuo before the campaign, spoken on the training ground in Zhenjiang: “Don’t underestimate the Jin. They fear the steppe nomads because the nomads are strong—not because the Jin are weak.”

Wanyan Salar stood on the tower, his single eye coldly watching the retreating Song troops. He did not smile, did not shout, did not raise his sword. He simply turned slowly to the messenger and said: “Tell Suzhou: Hongxian still holds. But not for long. Prepare.”

That night, Tian Junmai did not sleep. He spread the map on the ground, stuck torches in the dirt, crouched and stared all night. The day’s probe had taught him one thing: Hongxian’s Jin troops and Sizhoucheng’s were entirely different creatures. Sizhoucheng’s Jin were water—pushed, they flowed. Hongxian’s were stone—crash into them, and you break your head. He could not use his three-thousand-man vanguard to chew this stone—it would cost him half his teeth, and gain nothing.

“Encircle,” Tian Junmai ordered. “Do not attack. Wait for the siege engines.”

The siege lasted four full days. During those days, Song reinforcements arrived in waves, swelling the force from three thousand to six thousand. More importantly, Guo Zhuo had sent three heavy trebuchets from Sizhoucheng—not the portable field catapults, but the real ones, dismantled and hauled by over a dozen carts. The largest could hurl an eighty-pound stone four hundred paces. They had also seized from Sizhoucheng’s Jin granaries a stockpile of oil jars—originally meant for Jin defense, now delivered overnight by Guo Zhuo’s men.

Wanyan Salar watched from the tower as the Song trebuchets were assembled in the distance. He did not recognize this new weapon—the Song’s recent heavy trebuchet design. But he knew its silhouette. Twenty years ago in Shaanxi, the Western Xia’s Huihui trebuchets had crushed his troops into the ground. His eye dimmed. He turned and looked at his soldiers. They too stared at the distant machines, eyes fixed, throats bobbing.

“What’s to fear?” Wanyan Salar’s voice exploded, hoarse and savage. “Stones won’t kill everyone! When the stones stop, they’ll still climb the walls! Then it’s the sword that matters!” The soldiers flinched, snapping their gazes away. But Wanyan Salar knew—these were not northern elite troops; most had never faced trebuchets. When the stones fell, fear would be beyond his control.

On the sixth morning, the final assault began.

All three trebuchets fired at once. First volleys screamed through the sky—one struck the wall, shattering rammed earth into a three-foot-wide gap; one flew over, collapsing a civilian house, tiles crashing down; one hit a parapet dead-on, blasting two Jin soldiers into the air, their mangled bodies tumbling down to thud against the wall’s base.

Second and third volleys followed. The operators were veteran craftsmen from the rear, hands steady; nearly every stone struck the wall. Hongxian’s rammed earth ramparts began to crumble. The eastern section—already patched with willow fences—could not hold. A single stone struck its center, and the entire stretch collapsed, leaving a two-zhang-wide breach. The Jin soldiers on the wall panicked. They could fight men—but not stones.

Wanyan Salar ran the length of the tower, voice hoarse. He seized a bow himself, firing from behind the parapet. One arrow pierced a Song archer’s shoulder; the next grazed Tian Junmai’s helmet. But the trebuchets kept pounding; the wall kept falling; his men kept dying. When he repelled the first assault, he had fifteen hundred. After four days of siege and one morning of bombardment, fewer than eight hundred could still hold a blade.

Tian Junmai saw the one-eyed Jin general on the wall. He lowered his flag and asked the archery commander beside him: “Who is that man?”

“Hongxian’s commander—Wanyan Salar. A veteran, fought the Western Xia in Shaanxi for twenty years.”

Tian Junmai fell silent, raised his hand—about to order surrender.

But before his hand fell, the wall changed—not because the Song had scaled it, but because the Jin broke. At the eastern breach, a Song vanguard unit had surged through, engaging the Jin in close combat within the city. Clashing blades mixed with screams and roars; the fighting at the breach was savage. Wanyan Salar charged down from the tower with his last dozen personal guards—and ran straight into the Song unit. He slashed down the lead Song soldier, but before he could pull his blade free, three spears pierced his chest.

As Wanyan Salar fell, his single eye remained open, the scar on his face twisting in the firelight into a grotesque centipede. He fell exactly where the eastern wall had collapsed—his body mingled with the rubble, indistinguishable from the wall itself.

With their commander dead, the Jin resistance collapsed instantly. Some survivors fled north through the northern gate, racing down the road toward Suzhou. Most dropped their weapons and knelt in the alleys, surrendering. Hongxian had fallen.

As Tian Junmai rode through the eastern breach into the city, it was already quiet. Song soldiers extinguished smoldering fires, herding prisoners to the central parade ground. The air reeked of charred wood, blood, and dust. He stopped before Wanyan Salar’s corpse, looked down at the face split by the scar. The final expression was not fear—but fury: the fury of one who gave everything and still lost.

“Bury him,” Tian Junmai told his personal guard. “Beneath the eastern wall. He held for six days. He deserves that wall.”

Then he entered the Hongxian magistrate’s office. As in Sizhoucheng, he smashed the Jin plaque and replaced it with a Song one. Thus, the line from Sizhoucheng to Hongxian was fully opened; between the Huai River and Suzhou, no organized Jin defense remained. The first strategic objective of the northern campaign—shattering the southern gate of the Jin’s Huai defenses—was accomplished.

The victory report flew again to Lin’an.

This time, the report was polished by Guo Ni himself. Guo Ni had not gone to the Hongxian front, but he understood the politics of victory reports. He added seven words to Tian Junmai’s raw account: “One thousand heads taken, Jin commander slain.”

Tian Junmai knew better than anyone how much of that “one thousand heads” was fiction. Hongxian’s Jin garrison had numbered fewer than fifteen hundred; hundreds had fled, hundreds surrendered; the true dead barely reached three or four hundred. But Tian Junmai said nothing. When he saw Guo Ni’s revised report in his tent, he merely frowned, then set the paper down. He had fought for thirty years—he knew victory reports were never meant for his own men. They were written for Lin’an, for the world, for history.

No one cared about the truth. In Lin’an’s teahouses, storytellers had turned “Great Victory at Sizhoucheng” and “Great Victory at Hongxian” into a serial tale; when they reached “one thousand heads taken,” the crowd roared. Official bulletins grew bolder: from “Sizhoucheng Recaptured” to “Hongxian Great Victory,” then “The Huai Front Shakes, the Jin Tremble.” Streets buzzed with rumors: the northern army had slain ten thousand Jin, reclaimed dozens of cities, and the Jin southern line had collapsed entirely.

In truth, the northern army had just taken its second city.

Sizhoucheng and Hongxian together were merely two obscure towns on the Huai River’s edge. The true targets—Suzhou, Xuzhou, Kaifeng—lay far, far ahead. The Jin’s southern main force had not yet appeared; the northern elite had not yet marched south; Wanyan Honglie had not yet returned from Lin’an. The Jin’s response was slower than the Song’s advance—but deeper than the Song could imagine.

On the twenty-seventh of March, Kai Xi Year Two, Hongxian was retaken. Song casualties: barely a hundred. Jin casualties: three to four hundred, five hundred captured. Guo Ni reported: “One thousand heads taken.” The first phase of the northern campaign ended in jubilation.

But the real war had not yet begun.