Chapter 374: Finally Became What He Hated Most

"Cough, cough, cough—"

No sooner had Chen Yongxi left than Zuo Liangyu broke into a violent fit of coughing. An old servant attending him hurriedly brought over a spittoon, and Zuo Liangyu spat a wad of dark-red fluid into it before the coughing finally subsided.

"My Lord," Huang Shu, standing nearby, looked concerned. "Are you all right?"

"Not dead yet, for the time being." Zuo Liangyu smiled bitterly. "A year or so, I should still have."

"My Lord, you mustn't say that. The Great Ming still depends on you!"

"Depends on me for what?" Zuo Liangyu sneered. "To march east and purge the court?"

"My Lord." Huang Shu did not dare take up that thread either.

Historically, this man had done nothing but egg Zuo Liangyu on to march east and make trouble for the Hongguang Emperor, but the Huang Shu of the present had not brought the matter up for some time.

Because even a blind man could see that Zhu Cilang was no Hongguang!

Hongguang had fled to Nanjing in disgrace and been lifted onto the throne by the officials and ennobled houses of the auxiliary capital — he was not, in truth, a real sovereign, because nothing was ever his to decide. Zhu Cilang, by contrast, had smashed the Nanjing nobles' tens of thousands of Capital Camps troops with 9,600 musketeers and cavalry, and made himself master of Nanjing.

The Nanjing Capital Camps were famously useless, but taking the city with fewer than ten thousand men had still far exceeded the expectations of Zuo Liangyu and the rest.

So he simply holed up in Wuchang, feigned a bit of madness, and propped up Zhu Cizhao as a rival show against Nanjing — pure bluster. He had not even dared resist by force when Zhu Cilang parceled out half of Huguang to He Tengjiao and Chang Yanling to govern, let alone march east against Nanjing. Would that not be delivering his own head to their door? Though Zuo Liangyu's health was failing, he still wanted a good death. For him, living out his days comfortably as the King of Hubei would be satisfaction enough.

Nor did he worry that Zhu Cilang would come looking for trouble in Huguang, because in Huguang he was, in fact, a buffer that put every side at ease.

Li Zicheng to the north did not fear him, Zhu Cilang to the east did not dread him, and Zhang Xianzhong to the west treated him as though he were invisible.

With him planted in the middle, none of the three sides had anything to worry about. What a fine arrangement!

If he were taken by any one of the three — Zhu Cilang, Li Zicheng, or Zhang Xianzhong — the other two would surely come to contest it, and Huguang would once again be plunged into a great war.

And since Zhu Cilang, Li Zicheng, and Zhang Xianzhong were all busy at present, with no time to open a war in Huguang, Zuo Liangyu should still have a year in which to die slowly of his illness.

But Huang Shu wanted to live a good while longer. He was in fine health; he would not be dying within the year.

"My Lord," Huang Shu thought for a moment, "what if we march west into Sichuan?"

Zuo Liangyu sighed. At present he felt only drained and weary, his whole body weak, muddled all day long. Where would he find the energy to lay out a westward campaign into Sichuan?

Besides, was Zhang Xianzhong so easy to deal with? He had just proclaimed himself emperor in Chengdu and was at the height of his vigor. Given the current state of Zuo's army, going there would be suicide.

"There is still a year," Zuo Liangyu said. "We can slowly set things in order, strengthen the defenses of the three cities of Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankou. As long as the three cities of Wuhan can hold, we will have a way!"

Huang Shu sighed, thinking to himself: This is all we can do. There is still a year; we can still slowly search for a way out.

Night had long since fallen. Overhead the stars glittered, a bright moon hung in the sky, and all between heaven and earth lay still. Seeing so lovely a night, who could easily connect it with strife and slaughter?

Yet when Li Zicheng, standing on a high slope outside Tong Pass, turned his gaze from the night sky back to the earth, what met his eyes was a chain of encampments stretching on to the limit of sight. The grim air of war hung over the fields in every direction.

These encampments were all camps of the Shun army — earth dug into trenches, trees cut into palisades, camps linked row upon row, stretching from Hulu Shoal near Tong Pass along the Yellow River, past Zhaodu Town, the Luo River, and Chaoyi City, ending at the banks of the He River.

Li Zicheng's eighty thousand troops were thus deployed at the foot of Tong Pass, forming a defense along the Yellow River and blocking the path of the Qing forces under Dodo.

The Qing camps were set east of Tong Pass and on the north bank (east bank) of the Yellow River. In the darkness, Li Zicheng could faintly make out the torches on the watchtowers of the Qing camp, flickering and casting a dim light.

Compared with the linked camps of Li Zicheng's eighty thousand, the Qing encampments were far smaller. Their numbers could not exceed forty thousand — only half the Shun army. And Li Zicheng had Tong Pass to hold and the Yellow River to lean on. By any reckoning, he stood in an invincible position.

Of course, he was not entirely without hidden worries.

Two matters now troubled this Son of Heaven of the Shun. One was the lingering specter of Wu Sangui — by now Wu Sangui had completely occupied the entirety of Ningxia Garrison and Gansu Garrison; the Zhenrong, Pinglu, and Xi'an guard stations and Guyuan Department within Pingliang Prefecture; the Anbian station and Qing County within Qingyang Prefecture; the Jinglu Guard between the Yellow River and Pingliang Prefecture; and Lanzhou, Jin County, and Didao in the western part of Lintao Prefecture. He also controlled the territory between Gansu Garrison and Ningxia Garrison that had originally belonged to certain Mongol tribes.

That was a vast stretch of territory, and for more than two hundred years it had been a region where the hereditary guard-station military families clustered. When the Shun army had swept through, it had met no resistance, and naturally had carried out no purge, so the original powerful local forces all remained.

Now most of those forces had been gathered up by Wu Sangui and made accomplices of the Wu family army!

With the backing of these local strongmen and gentry, Wu Sangui had not only gained a firm footing in the northwest but also had strength to spare for a campaign eastward.

The other matter weighing on Li Zicheng was that the eighty thousand troops on the Tong Pass front consumed so much that the Shun court was finding it hard to bear.

Because the three-year grain-tax exemption was still in effect, and this time the Shun army had concentrated heavy forces at Tong Pass to fight a protracted war against the Qing. The eighty thousand at the front counted only fighting men; if one added the civilian laborers hauling grain and building fortifications for the Shun army, the number Li Zicheng had to feed exceeded two hundred thousand!

In addition, more than a hundred thousand head of various draft animals also required Li Zicheng's court to find fodder.

So Niu Jinxing, the Chancellor of the Shun court, had been nearly worried to death these days — because Li Zicheng still clung to notions of winning hearts, of the benevolent being invincible, and so was unwilling to abandon, within Guanzhong, the promise of three years without levies!

Since there were no levies, the only option was to buy with silver. But the land of Guanzhong was barren to begin with, and after years of drought and war, grain prices were exorbitant. Moreover, the expanded application of Li Zicheng's three-year exemption policy had led peasants to resist rents and repudiate debts, dealing a heavy blow to the gentry and merchants of Guanzhong, and commercial activity had rapidly withered. The Shaanxi merchant network that had once covered every part of Shaanxi no longer existed.

In other words, even with silver in hand, Niu Jinxing found it very hard to buy grain!

By the time Li Zicheng returned to his temporary palace inside Tong Pass, the Grand Chancellor Niu had already been waiting for a long while. Seeing Li Zicheng come back, he hurried forward and kowtowed.

Li Zicheng yawned and waved him to his feet. Seeing Niu Jinxing's careworn face, he asked, "Chancellor, what brings you here? Why the long face?"

"Your Majesty," Niu Jinxing said, "this subject has done all he can, but grain and fodder simply cannot be raised. If the levies are not resumed, the army, I fear, cannot be sustained past the second half of the year."

Li Zicheng fell silent at these words.

"Your Majesty," Niu Jinxing went on, "the harvests in Guanzhong these past years have not been good, and with war year after year, the common people hold their grain dear. Even at high prices, they are most unwilling to sell. And after selling, there is nothing for them to buy."

"What is to be done?" Li Zicheng asked.

"Your Majesty, levy the grain!" Niu Jinxing said. "Let us levy only a little — one million shi would be enough."

Li Zicheng sighed. "In Xiangjing and Yunyang we distributed land to the officers and men, and now Guanzhong is to begin levying again. If this goes on, what difference is there between us and the Zhu family, between us and the Tartars?"

"This..." Niu Jinxing thought to himself: Is that not so? You, Zhu Cilang, and Dorgon were always birds of a feather!

Seeing Niu Jinxing make no reply, Li Zicheng sighed again. "We had thought the Shun was a state founded for the poor and suffering common people, different from the Ming, different from the eastern barbarians. Never thought we would still end up doing the same things as the Ming and the eastern barbarians. Had we known, we should have done it back in Beijing — then we would not have come to this day!"

"Your Majesty speaks truly," Niu Jinxing said, relieved. "Fortunately, it is still not too late!"

(End of Chapter)