Chapter 366: The Tartars Are Beaten?

Outside Datong City, on the south bank of the Shili River, the black, gloomy earth was covered with shacks large and small. A low earthen wall, plus a ditch neither wide nor deep, enclosed these shacks together.

Inside the earthen wall was a world of misery.

Those penned in here were the "good subjects of the Great Ming" that Luo Yangxing had spoken of — all survivors captured from the forts and towns within Datong Prefecture that had been broken by the Qing army!

The Qing soldiers of today were still as ferocious as they had been before entering the Pass. Any fort or town that held out to the death was slaughtered once they broke through! Not killed to the last man, but half killed and half captured — those who had taken up arms to resist were killed, men too weak for physical labor were killed, and women too old to be of use were killed as well. The rest were all taken away to serve as serfs for the Eight Banners nobles, called booi aha!

Of the booi bondservants of the Eight Banners, apart from a few like Fan Wencheng and Ning Wanwo, who had voluntarily joined the banners as slaves in order to climb upward, the great majority had been forced into it. Either their land had been enclosed and they had no choice but to become serfs tilling the soil for the Eight Banners, or they were slaves seized by Eight Banners soldiers in the field or from captured towns!

And these booi, captured by the Eight Banners soldiers from enemy territory, were the lowest and least trusted of all the booi bondservants.

Because they bore a blood-deep hatred for the Great Qing!

They were seized purely to be worked to death as slaves. If they dropped from exhaustion or died of disease, another batch could simply be seized.

Over the previous dozen or so years, the Eight Banners soldiers had entered the Pass six times, and no one knew how many Han people they had carried off. And how many booi bondservants had followed the dragon into the Pass now? The number was surely not large — if it were large, why bother with the "Voluntary Enlistment Law"? So one could well imagine what had become of those Han people who had been carried off.

Just as ill-fated as these people were the Han commoners who had vanished from around Beijing because of "land enclosure" and "house seizure." In the sixteenth year of Chongzhen of the Great Ming, there had not been a single bannerman inside Beijing. Now, in the second year of Shunzhi of the Great Qing, there were not many Han people left in Beijing (not counting the booi bondservants).

How had this population replacement been accomplished? How had the several hundred thousand Han residents of Beijing been disposed of?

These Han people who vanished into the long river of history — in the year 1645 of the Common Era, many of them were still alive!

Bai Siwen, a military-register xiucai attached to Zhenlu Guard, was one such living man, about to be swallowed up by the long river of history.

He was twenty-five years old this year, and his family was a prominent one in Zhenlu Guard. Not a Guard Commander's house, but a Chiliarch's lineage — the Chiliarch Bai who made the barbarians tremble was his ancestor! His ancestor had been formidable, a Red Turban of pure and proper stock, a veteran who had risen in revolt with Liu Futong. Later he had followed the great Red Turban general Lord Guan on the northern sweep, broken the Yuan dynasty's Upper Capital on the steppe, and killed Tartars until the corpses piled like mountains and the blood ran like a sea.

Later, when the Red Turbans failed, Chiliarch Bai had gone over to Zhu Yuanzhang. Because he had submitted rather late and missed the campaigns against Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng, he went on killing Tartars, and later followed Xu Da deep into the northern desert to kill — and killed his way into a hereditary Chiliarch's commission.

It was a pity the craft of killing Tartars had not been passed down. By Bai Siwen's generation, they had all become scholars!

But the ancestral fighting spirit remained! When the Qing soldiers attacked, every son of the Bai family mounted the walls of Zhenlu Guard and fought the traitors of the Plain Red Banner for ten days and ten nights! Of eleven brothers of the same clan, only Bai Siwen remained.

It was precisely because they had resisted so stubbornly that the Qing troops who broke Zhenlu Guard unleashed a great slaughter. Of the entire city's soldiers and civilians, fewer than a thousand were left alive, and Bai Siwen was one of them. But the Qing soldiers did not let him go either — they shaved his head into an ugly queue and assigned him to the Plain Red Banner's camp-following booi. That is, the kind of booi meant to be worked to death. The Plain Red Banner's Han troops forced him to dig trenches outside Datong Prefecture to besiege the city, working day and night without rest, and with almost nothing to eat. Of the people of Zhenlu Guard captured along with him, fewer than a hundred now remained!

Yet the booi in this camp by the Shili River had not diminished, because there was an endless stream of Han slaves being escorted in from all over Datong Prefecture by the Eight Banners soldiers!

It seemed that after this great battle was over, Datong Prefecture, once fairly prosperous, would become a wasteland.

Day broke. Bai Siwen, long since numbed by suffering, dragged his weary steps out of the stinking shack where he slept and shuffled listlessly to an open stretch of ground, where he stood still. He was not the first to arrive. Before him, many Han slaves like himself, dressed in tattered rags, gaunt and hollow-eyed, had already gathered, gazing about with vacant, bewildered eyes.

Where was Lord Cao Heitan, the Plain Red Banner's company officer? Why had that living king of hell not come today? Could he have been killed by Ming troops while out on patrol last night?

And besides Cao Heitan, why had none of the other Tartars and traitors come either? Could they all have been killed by the Ming army?

Impossible, surely? Was General Jiang inside Datong City really that formidable? The Datong garrison had not even set foot outside the city gates for months — they could not have grown so capable overnight, could they?

Just as Bai Siwen and the others were puzzling over the disappearance of their Eight Banners masters, they suddenly heard someone shout: "The Tartars are beaten! The Tartars are beaten! The government troops are here! The government troops have come to save us!"

"The Tartars are beaten! The government troops are here!"

"Heaven has opened its eyes! The government troops have come to save us!"

"Long live the Great Ming!"

"Heh heh heh heh, the Tartars are nothing much after all!"

Watching the great column of soldiers in war hats and padded battle jackets march in formation into the camp that penned up tens of thousands of Han booi slaves, Jiang Xiang, Regional Commander of Datong of the Great Ming and General Who Guards the North, laughed smugly. He glanced at Wang Yongji beside him and said with a grin, "Governor-General, next we should send envoys to report the victory to the court, shouldn't we? How many should we report?"

"How many of what?" Wang Yongji did not catch on for a moment.

"Heads taken!" Jiang Xiang laughed. "How about reporting 8,818 genuine Tartars? Not too many, is it?"

More than eight thousand and still not too many? Wang Yongji frowned. "Why the odd figure?"

"It looks more real. If we report a round number, I'm afraid the higher-ups won't believe it."

"And if you report eight thousand-odd, the higher-ups will believe it?" Wang Yongji shook his head. "Report fewer. Cut it in half, and then halve it again."

"Oh, let me figure it — it doesn't divide evenly! How about reporting 2,205?"

"Report 2,505," Wang Yongji said after a moment's thought. "I'll write the memorial myself. How about I write it up as a night raid on the enemy camp?"

"Everything is at the Governor-General's discretion."

Wang Yongji asked again, "But is there a way to get the memorial to Nanjing? The road from Datong to Nanjing is blocked!"

"There is a way," Jiang Xiang said with a smile. "The gaps between Shuozhou, Jingping Post, Naihe Fort, and Jiangjunhui Fort are wide open! Once we slip through to the Lüliang Mountains, we can borrow a route through Shaanxi. I've already asked Luo Yangxing about it — the whole province of Shaanxi, plus Nanyang Prefecture in Henan, are still in the hands of the roving bandits at the moment!"

"Travel through roving bandit territory?" Wang Yongji frowned. "Will Li Zicheng agree?"

Jiang Xiang snorted. "Why wouldn't he? The Tartars being beaten — isn't that exactly the good news he's been dreaming of day and night?"

(End of Chapter)