Chapter 178: Sweeping All Before Them

The Qin army had surrounded Xiang City for ten days now, but the city gates remained tightly shut, and Xiang Yan's great banner stood firm atop the walls, ignoring every attempt to lure them out or provoke them.

Though siege engines were being built in an orderly fashion, two probing assaults on the city had both ended in failure. The Qin commander-in-chief seemed in no hurry, and had his soldiers construct two new rampart fortifications outside the camp on the south bank of the Ying River to block the enemy. By the look of it, he intended to settle in for a long standoff with the Chu army inside Xiang City.

So in Hei Fu's eyes, this siege was far too leisurely, which only deepened his suspicion that Xiang City was not the true main axis of attack.

Sure enough, that very day, word arrived that the Qin army's "detached force" had routed the Chu army and was sweeping all before it north of the Huai River. The Qin siege camp outside Xiang City erupted in excitement.

An army is a place where good news is broadcast and bad news suppressed. Officers will do their utmost to hide word of a defeat, but if it is a victory, they want every last soldier to know. The tidings spread throughout the camp, easing the oppressive feeling of having achieved nothing in ten days of siege, and cheerful laughter and celebration filled the air.

Hei Fu was immersed in this atmosphere himself. As a personal guard, he was far better informed than the average officer, and by asking around among the other personal guard centurions, he gathered many different versions of the story.

"They say General Meng Tian personally led thirty thousand elite troops from Guanzhong and has already taken Pingyu and Qinqiu."

"At the battle of Qinqiu, they slew over ten thousand of the enemy. The Chu men broke and fled in chaos. No wonder no Chu reinforcements have come to Xiang City these past days."

"Some say General Meng Tian has already reached the lower Ying River and is preparing to strike Juyang. Those grain transports sailing by outside are headed there to support him!"

Though the accounts varied, they could still be pieced together into a single line of march. Hei Fu thought to himself, "My instincts were right. That so-called detached force is the real main attack. They've already broken through Pingyu and Qinqiu on the flank and reached the Ying River. That way they can be supplied by grain boats coming downstream — a very well-conceived plan."

But to carry out a three-hundred-li long-distance raid, that army must have been traveling light. They likely hadn't even brought enough food or arrows, let alone siege engines and the like. So expecting this detached force to take cities and seize territory was impossible; Li Xin was probably just seeking out the enemy to give battle.

In any case, with this development, the scales of victory seemed to be slowly tipping toward Qin. Some even boldly predicted that the war could be over before spring arrived...

Hei Fu, however, was not so optimistic.

It was as if Heaven itself smiled upon them, bestowing victory after victory upon the Qin army: at Dun County, at Pingyu, at Qinqiu...

Yet as the Qin army's victories mounted, Hei Fu grew more and more uneasy.

The situation on the battlefield was intricate and complex, shifting from one moment to the next, which made it even harder for Hei Fu to fathom: what exactly would happen to turn this initially triumphant campaign against Chu into a final defeat?

He had no Baidu at hand to look it up. All he could do was sharpen his blade, probe for information everywhere, and wait day and night.

…

In the arrow tower atop the walls of Xiang City, Zhou Wen had also noticed the subtle stir of activity in the Qin camp and frowned.

"The Qin troops seem more cheerful today than usual. Could some news have arrived from outside?"

As a "day-watcher" for the Chu army, he had to remain on the ramparts all day long, observing the Qin army's movements: whether new enemy forces had arrived, whether any had quietly departed. Every seemingly routine maneuver, even the number of campfires at mealtime, had to be recorded one by one. And he could not afford to fall for any ruse, for in warfare these days, they always liked to use the tricks of reducing or increasing cooking fires to mislead the enemy.

Beyond that, he had to note every disposition in the Qin camp: where the two rampart walls were weakest, the approximate location of the command tent, where the laborers were quartered, where the horses and chariots were concentrated, and in which camp the grain that streamed in endlessly from the direction of Chenying was being stockpiled.

The gates of Xiang City were tightly shut, cut off from all contact with the outside by the two rammed-earth ramparts the Qin army had built. This was the only way they could gauge the true state of the enemy camp.

Zhou Wen's observations not only helped "General Xiang" inside the city assess the enemy situation, but would also lay the groundwork for their future counterattack...

Unknowingly, night had fallen. Behind the two ramparts, campfires in the Qin encampment were slowly being lit, like the myriad starry lights of the Silver River. Zhou Wen alone could hardly count them all.

After recording the day's observations on a wooden tablet, Zhou Wen descended from the arrow tower. The walls of Xiang City were lined with Chu soldiers in red leather armor. They all lived up there, sleeping in twos and threes with their weapons at the ready. Though the Qin assaults had not been fierce, the soldiers remained vigilant.

To the men of Chu, the Qin army was an invading band of brigands. With wolves and jackals prowling just outside the city, how could they afford to slacken and sleep soundly?

The hatred between Chu and Qin had begun when King Huai of Chu was tricked into traveling to Qin and died in that foreign land. Over the decades that followed, new grievances piled upon old between the two sides, so that among the Six States, none was less reconciled to Qin or resisted more fiercely than Chu.

Zhou Wen himself was a perfect example.

His ancestors had originally been from Jiangling in Nan Commandery, serving as minor clerks in Yingdu. In his grandfather's time, Bai Qi breached Yan City, and the Zhou clan had no choice but to flee east with the King of Chu, the entire family abandoning Yingdu, where they had lived for generations.

The Grand Master of the Three Gates, Qu Yuan, had witnessed this very scene and wrote "Lament for Ying," which perfectly voiced the hearts of displaced Chu people like them.

"Heaven's decree is fickle and unjust; why are the common people shaken and stricken?"

"Families scatter, separated and lost, as we flee eastward in the second month of spring."

"Leaving our homeland, we journey far away, following the Jiang and Xia rivers into exile..."

That crushing defeat and the exodus that followed had seared a deep memory into the people of Chu.

If before this, corruption in governance and a court full of sycophants had alienated the common people, making them unwilling to risk their lives in battle — a case of "the state knowing not its people, and the people knowing not their state" — then after the accumulated scars of the eastward flight, both the nobles and the commoners of Chu had come to bitterly hate Qin, and the voices calling for war grew ever louder.

Unfortunately, successive kings of Chu had always feared Qin like a tiger. They moved the capital from Yingdu to Chen, then from Chen to Juyang, and finally to Shouchun south of the Huai. In fifty years, three generations of Chu people had seen three cowardly relocations of the capital. The kings of Chu never tired of it, but the people of Chu were utterly exhausted. Even Zhou Wen had been forced to leave his home of Chenying the year before and drift south of the Huai.

They could not imagine where they could possibly flee to if they lost this war as well.

Jiangdong? Wu and Yue?

As far as Zhou Wen was concerned, he had no desire to flee in disgrace again. Heeding the call of the Supreme Pillar of State Xiang Yan, they had resolved to stay and fight, to defend their own hamlets and villages.

With these thoughts, Zhou Wen entered the army council tent inside the city. Every day, the general listened to the reports of the "day-watchers" on the enemy situation before making the next day's defensive arrangements.

When Zhou Wen, wooden tablet in hand, stepped into the hall, quite a few Chu generals were already seated to the left and right, discussing matters in hushed voices. Their focus was on those Qin boats sailing south down the Ying River, which looked to be laden with grain. Could it be that Qin troops had already penetrated deep downstream?

Zhou Wen walked forward briskly, then bowed low and kowtowed with the utmost respect to the commander-in-chief seated in the center.

"General Xiang, day-watcher Zhou Wen, reporting on the enemy situation!"

"Speak."

A voice full of vigor rang out, but the face illuminated by the lamplight was exceptionally young — a stalwart general around thirty, with jet-black beard and hair and a tall, powerful frame. Where was the grizzled, white-templed old general Xiang Yan?

Though he did indeed look like a younger version of Xiang Yan...

The "General Xiang" inside the city was not Xiang Yan at all, but Xiang Yan's eldest son, Xiang Rong!

In the main Qin army camp, Li Xin's command flag hung high, a dragon banner with feathered tassels.

On the walls of Xiang City, Xiang Yan's tall ivory-ornamented great banner also fluttered in the wind, an awe-inspiring sight.

The two flags faced off against each other, each giving the other side the false impression that "the enemy commander-in-chief is here."

But on the chessboard, the black and red generals within the nine palaces had long since vanished without a trace...

PS: Chapters two and three will still only be up in the evening. My thesis is under review these days, and there are a lot of revisions to make — I'm nearly going crazy with the workload. I can guarantee three chapters a day, but the update times will just have to be whenever I can manage. Please understand.

(End of chapter)