Chapter 188: Suzhou Defeat

Beneath Suzhou City, the Song army's encampment was shrouded in damp, sweltering vapor. In July's Huaibei, even the wind was sticky, as if leaking from a steamer. The camp reeked of an inescapable stench—pus from wounded soldiers, feces piled in mud, and corpses left unburied, all fermenting together.

Guo Zhuo sat inside the central command tent, sharpening a willow branch with a captured Jin dagger. He carved with fierce force, each stroke as if severing something vital. Outside, cicadas screamed incessantly, driving men mad.

"Two months," he threw the bare willow branch to the ground. "A single Suzhou. Two months."

No one in the tent answered. The aides kept their heads bowed; the officers stared at the map as if deciphering some arcane celestial secret. The map was blurred by sweat stains; the location of Suzhou City had been poked through by a finger.

Guo Zhuo rose and walked to the tent flap. The afternoon sun blazed white on the ground; the distant Suzhou city wall lay like a gray dead serpent across the horizon. On the ramparts, the Jin flag stood utterly still, as if nailed there. He knew what lay beneath it—the Jin general Heshilie Zhizhong, with his remnant force of fewer than five thousand, had held firm against two months of relentless Song assaults.

"He's not defending the city," Guo Zhuo said suddenly, his voice low, almost to himself. "He's waiting."

"Waiting for what?" asked Deputy Commander Tian Junmai.

Guo Zhuo said nothing. He remembered Xin Qiji's letter, which had been passed to him through many hands. It contained only sixteen characters: "The Jin retreat without disorder; our western forces hesitate and advance not; the grassland tigers and wolves have already formed." He had burned the letter, but the words were seared onto his eyelids—he saw them whenever he closed his eyes.

Three days later, Heshilie Zhizhong moved.

It was the dawn of the fifteenth day of the seventh month, the moon full, casting the Huaibei land in ghastly white. Song sentries on the walls noticed something strange—the Jin had set up dozens of large cauldrons atop the ramparts, flames roaring beneath, boiling something unknown. The report reached the central command; Guo Zhuo threw on his robe and stepped into the camp, gazing toward the walls. In the firelight, Jin soldiers were pouring black liquid into the cauldrons.

"What is that?" he asked.

No one could answer. But soon, an odd fragrance drifted across the battlefield, filling the Song camp. It was meat—rich, long-missed meat. After two months of siege, the Song soldiers' rations had dwindled from rice to coarse grain cakes mixed with sand. At the scent, their stomachs growled, their eyes turned red.

"They've slaughtered every cow and sheep inside the city," Tian Junmai realized. "They're going to sally out."

Before the words were out, the Suzhou city gates burst open.

What emerged were not cavalry, not infantry, but a crowd of ragged civilians. Driven by Jin soldiers, they carried clay bowls brimming with meat broth, crying out as they ran toward the Song lines. Among them were elders, women, children—all emaciated, eyes wide with terror. But in their hands, each held meat.

The Song front line stirred. Starving soldiers, drawn by the scent of meat, watched the stumbling civilians approach; their grip on their blades loosened. Some even broke from formation, rushing to snatch the clay bowls from the civilians' hands.

At that exact moment, the main Jin force surged out from both sides of the gate.

Heshilie Zhizhong had committed his last elite. He sent the civilians out with meat to lure the enemy, then personally led his death squad to flank the Song army. The Song soldiers, still dazed by the scent of meat, suddenly snapped awake at the thunder of hooves—but it was too late.

The Jin cavalry sliced through the Song lines like a red-hot knife through congealed lard; wherever they passed, the Song formation melted away. Soldiers from the shattered front fled backward; those in the rear, unaware of what had happened, turned and ran too. Panic spread like plague, faster than any order.

Guo Zhuo leapt onto his horse, trying to rally the fleeing troops. He saw Tian Junmai—Tian Junmai was frantically waving the battle flag, trying to halt the flood of retreating men, but soldiers surged past him like a broken dam. A Jin cavalryman charged from behind and side, slashing the flagpole clean off. Tian Junmai was swallowed by the crowd, vanished in an instant.

"General! Go!" His bodyguard seized Guo Zhuo's reins.

Guo Zhuo turned back to look at Suzhou City. On the ramparts, the Jin flag still stood, unmoving. Two months—he had fought two months, and still could not bring down that flag.

He spurred his horse southward. Behind him, the Song encampment had become a burning hell. Tents ignited, grain stores cracked and exploded in the flames, wounded men screamed inside their tents—but no one stopped to save them. Supply wagons, weapons, documents, banners—all abandoned beneath Suzhou City.

The Song army retreated all the way to Qixian.

When Guo Zhuo counted the survivors atop Qixian's walls, fewer than forty thousand remained of the original eighty thousand eastern force. The rest had not died in battle or been captured—they had scattered during the rout, vanishing into the reed beds along the Huaihe, never to return.

"How many reinforcements did Heshilie Zhizhong have?" Guo Zhuo asked.

A surviving scout knelt on the ground, trembling: "My general, the Jin reinforcements… no more than two thousand. Old and weak, cobbled together from Bianjing."

The tent fell into deathly silence.

Guo Zhuo closed his eyes. Two thousand reinforcements. Heshilie Zhizhong had never had more than seven thousand men total. Yet he held for two months, then used the mere threat of two thousand more to shatter the psychological defenses of eighty thousand Song troops.

"Good," Guo Zhuo opened his eyes, his voice dry as grinding stone. "A fine Heshilie Zhizhong."

He picked up his brush and began drafting the report to Lin'an. After a few lines, he paused. How should he write it? That eighty thousand troops had been routed by seven thousand? That corpses littered Suzhou's walls, staining the tributaries of the Huaihe red? That Wu Xi on the western front still held his position, waiting for something?

In the end, he wrote: "The Jin deployed elite northern reinforcements to Suzhou, numbering no less than thirty thousand. I fought valiantly but could not prevail; I have withdrawn temporarily to Qixian to regroup."

When he finished, he flung the brush onto the desk and walked to the window. On the southern horizon, summer thunderstorms brewed; black clouds rolled in, pressing down. Rain was coming. The Huaihe's water level would rise again. The bodies buried beneath Suzhou City would be washed into the river, floating southward.

And farther north, a shadow more terrible than the Jin was taking shape. The grassland beast that had devoured the Western Xia was likely now licking its paws, waiting to watch Jin and Southern Song bleed each other dry.

Guo Zhuo suddenly remembered Xin Qiji's sixteen characters—and shuddered.

The outcome of this northern expedition had been written from the start. No one simply wanted to read it.