Chapter 448: The Crimson Cloak

It was mid-June, the hottest time of year beyond the northern frontier. The warhorses swished their tails impatiently, slapping their bodies to drive off flies and gnats, heads lowered as they chewed the wilting grass and scrub. The Xiongnu could no longer bear wearing their fur coats either; they had stripped them off and wrapped them around their waists, torsos bared. As they drank water drawn from the Oil River, they grumbled and cursed, gazing into the distance at White Goat Mountain, which was besieged so tightly not a crack showed. A probing assault had just ended, once again concluding with the Qin army loosing a thousand crossbows in unison and the Xiongnu, unable to bear the losses, retreating…

"Horses, cattle, and sheep will grow weak if they go six days without water. Could these Qin men all be tuotuo?" The Xiongnu found this exceedingly strange.

Tuotuo meant camels — the most thirst-enduring livestock the Xiongnu had ever seen. After drinking their fill once, camels could go as long as ten days or half a month without water and suffer no harm.

The siege of White Goat Mountain had entered its sixth day. According to the Grand Danghu, there was no drinking water on the mountain. Even if the ten thousand or so Qin soldiers still had rations, in this scorching summer heat, the final outcome would be that thirst robbed them of their fighting strength, and the Xiongnu would break them with ease.

The Xiongnu were calculating hunters. They loved a victory that cost them nothing. Let them wait — they had patience in abundance. Like jackals and wolves stalking prey, they would bite viciously once, then trail far behind, following until the quarry had utterly lost its strength, then pounce and tear flesh to shreds.

Yet this batch of Qin troops from Shang Commandery proved more resolute than Touman Chanyu had imagined. The Xiongnu strategy of besieging and exhausting the enemy did not seem to be producing very good results.

"The Qin have a skill — they dig open the ground and forcibly create a spring."

Wulan the Eagle-shooter, blind in one eye, was crafting his own bow and arrows. He had no liking for this patience-grinding siege warfare; opportunities to shoot and kill Qin men were few. But he had once gone with a band of riders, by the Chanyu's order, to an old Qin encampment and had seen a rare thing called a "well." The steppe peoples had yet to master this technique.

The Xiongnu were intensely curious about wells, but before Wulan could explain in detail, the Grand Danghu Xubu Sheng came over, his face dark and grim, and called his name.

"Wulan! Mount up at once and sortie with me!"

Indeed, the Qin troops on White Goat Mountain were not going a single drop without water, as the Xiongnu imagined. With no rivers or streams, they had set their craftsmen and soldiers to digging wells to reach the springs. Though the wells were few, so that each soldier received only a small mouthful a day, and the crossbowmen most critical to defending the camp got half a gourd dipper daily. Most men were so parched their lips blistered. Every dawn, they would rise eagerly to suck the dew from the grass and trees, and had even come to blows over it.

But the troops of Shang Commandery were, after all, the Qin dynasty's most elite force. The soldiers all hailed from the Guanzhong heartland, and many had experienced the campaigns that swept through the Six Kingdoms. Though they had suffered setbacks, military law and discipline still held, and they could still organize a proper defense.

As for breaking out of the encirclement, however, Feng Jie lacked the courage to do so. Once they left the hills and woods and lost the advantage of powerful crossbows and wagon-barricades, ten thousand or so Qin troops would easily be split apart and annihilated by tens of thousands of Xiongnu…

Now, with a bitter face, he could only stand atop White Goat Mountain each day and gaze out, desperately hoping that the northern and southern armies would detect the Xiongnu's intent to concentrate their forces, realize his own unit was in danger, and dispatch troops to relieve him…

Achieving great merit had gone down the drain. What Feng Jie now hoped for was simply not to suffer a crushing defeat, lose his army, and disgrace the military.

But the Commandant under him chose this very moment to deliver a piece of extremely dire news.

"General, our army's crossbow bolts are nearly spent!"

Feng Jie jolted as if shocked, pressing for details: "How many days' use remain?"

"Four days at most. If we reuse the arrows the enemy has shot in and send men a hundred paces out to pick up shafts, we might manage six or seven days…"

By Qin army regulations, each bow and crossbow was allotted one hundred arrows. The entire army had three thousand bowmen and crossbowmen, totaling three hundred thousand arrows. But one hundred arrows weighed close to twenty or thirty jin; that many arrows could not all be carried on one's person. Thus, on the march, there were dedicated supply wagons to transport the arrows.

Fortunately, Feng Jie had not abandoned all his baggage when he encountered the Xiongnu troops.

But a problem followed. To repel the Xiongnu's incessant attacks, they had loosed a vast number of arrows — tens of thousands each day. When night fell, the Xiongnu would send half-grown boys to creep within a hundred paces or so and pick the ground clean of crossbow bolts. The bolts were rather short and did not fit well on the Xiongnu's composite bows or self bows, so they would take them back, knock off the arrowheads, and fit them onto Xiongnu arrows.

Thus, as the siege dragged on, Feng Jie was alarmed to discover that the proportion of bronze and iron in the Xiongnu's arrows had risen considerably. When they drew near and loosed a thousand arrows in a volley, Qin casualties were mounting as well.

They could hold their ground solely by relying on long-range firepower. If the enemy broke in and melee ensued, the Qin army, fighting outnumbered, would likely be in dire straits.

"Alas! Is Heaven bent on destroying me?"

Feng Jie's face was gaunt and haggard. He heaved a long sigh. Never, since he had entered the army, had he met with such a great defeat.

Fortunately, the sentries watching the Xiongnu's movements reported another curious matter.

"General, a Xiongnu force has suddenly split off and headed north!"

That Xiongnu force numbered at least ten thousand riders. Feng Jie was overjoyed. The Xiongnu could only organize their incessant attacks by concentrating their entire force. Detaching ten thousand riders meant that, until they returned, the Xiongnu could only slow the pace of their assaults.

But the Xiongnu were cunning, and Feng Jie could not be certain this was not a ruse to lure his own forces into breaking out.

"But if it is not, why would the Xiongnu split off ten thousand riders and leave? Is there a rift between a tribal lord and the Chanyu, or could it be…"

A gleam of hope flickered in Feng Jie's eyes: "To the north… could it be that Generals Qiang and Meng have already come from Beijia to the lands south of the river!?"

…

Feng Jie was mistaken. What forced the Xiongnu to split their forces and rush north was not Meng Tian, but Li Xin — bold yet meticulous, who had exploited the gap between the Xiongnu vanguard and their livestock, and with his chariots, cavalry, and boats, had thrust dozens of li north of White Goat Mountain in a single burst!

Tiger Mountain was an outlying ridge of the Helan Mountains east of the great river, named for the tigers that roamed there. These tigers were a branch of the North China tiger, their coat and stripes both very pale, yet not white — well suited to the steppe environment.

Beneath Tiger Mountain, the grass grew lush and green — a fine grazing ground, and it commanded the mountain pass leading to the Ordos Loop. Touman Chanyu had assigned a Chiliarch to graze over ten thousand cattle and sheep here, along with ten thousand spare horses. Just like people, if all the livestock were concentrated in one place, the local grass would be nowhere near enough to gnaw.

The Xiongnu had intended to besiege a point and strike the reinforcements, but Li Xin favored winning by surprise in his use of troops. He had actually ignored his allied forces and charged straight for the Xiongnu rear. This move truly gave Touman Chanyu a great fright. The thousand scouts he had placed to the west could not stop them in time and could only watch helplessly as the Qin cavalry boats sailed downstream. After they reported back to the Chanyu, the Chanyu ordered Xubu Sheng to take fifteen thousand riders and go to the rescue…

With this, the Xiongnu's offensive against White Goat Mountain could only halt. Li Xin's strategy of besieging Wei to rescue Zhao was indeed effective.

Xubu Sheng was still several hours too slow. By the time he led his troops galloping to Tiger Mountain, only a scene of devastation remained. The felt tents billowed thick, roiling smoke. The grazing Xiongnu lay dead on the ground, bellies slit open, their corpses mingled with the slaughtered livestock. The herds of cattle, sheep, and horses were nowhere to be seen — either scattered and driven off, or herded away by the Qin troops.

When they followed the hoofprints and reached the riverbank at the foot of Tiger Mountain, they beheld a startling sight: wooden boats had been linked into a pontoon bridge, and the last batch of Qin troops was driving the captured horses across the great river. On the opposite bank, a huge banner snapped and fluttered in the wind…

Wulan stared at the symbol on that banner, his single eye glaring as though it would bleed!

The previous autumn, when Wulan had followed the Grand Danghu on an eastern campaign, an army numbering only a few hundred men had brought nightmare and calamity to the tribes south of Green Mountain Gorge. Over a thousand Xiongnu herders had met violent deaths. Another hundred had their eyes gouged out. After they were rescued, weeping tears of blood, they had dipped their fingers in blood and written down the symbol on the banner of the Qin men who had attacked them…

It was the seal-script character "Li"!

And it was the very banner before Wulan's eyes. He knew — the foe who had slaughtered his tribe was right across the river!

Under the Qin soldiers' operation, the pontoon bridge broke apart, and the boats gradually drew toward the western bank. The river was not shallow. If the Xiongnu tried to cross now, they would likely be met head-on and dealt a painful blow by the Qin army. Even if they made it ashore, the western bank was a place dense with marshes named Eternal Stream and Cattail Spring. Cavalry, even if they charged through, could not maneuver easily, and the Qin army, besides light cavalry, still had no small number of fully armed foot soldiers…

The white-haired general in the crimson cloak seemed well aware of this. He stood on the opposite bank, coldly watching the Xiongnu who had arrived too late. With a raise of his hand, his soldiers marched over a hundred captured Xiongnu to the riverbank. All of them were forced to the ground, their braids dangling down.

As the crimson-cloaked general's arm swept down, axes and battle-axes severed the heads of over a hundred men! Blood gushed like a waterfall, tumbling into the water along with the round, rolling heads, dyeing this stretch of river a pale red…

Over ten thousand Xiongnu watched this scene. Wulan the Eagle-shooter, in towering rage, was on the verge of spurring his horse to charge across, but the Grand Danghu Xubu Sheng held him back.

"Don't fall for it. He is deliberately provoking the Xiongnu."

Xubu Sheng stared at that crimson-cloaked commander and felt only a surge of horror.

Among the Xiongnu, he was the one who had fought the Qin army the most times. The Qin troops from Beidi Commandery he had encountered the previous year had a commander whose fighting style was steady to the point of cowardice — he simply guarded his ramparts, never revealing the slightest opening, and only turned the enemy's tactics against them when the Xiongnu grew impatient and made a mistake.

Xubu Sheng had assumed this was the way the Central Plains people waged war. But today, that crimson-cloaked general on the opposite bank had completely upended his understanding.

He liked to use cavalry to penetrate deep alone, not meeting the enemy head-on, but aiming for the Xiongnu's soft underbelly, slaughtering their livestock, and withdrawing the moment he had won, so that Xubu Sheng could not catch his tail — yet dared not let down his guard, because he never knew when this man would launch another unexpected attack, each move lethal…

Xubu Sheng's dread of the Qin deepened. He thought to himself, "Light cavalry sweeping like a gale — when it profits him, he advances a thousand li; when it does not, he decisively flees. And he is ruthless and merciless. This crimson-cloaked Qin general's way of fighting does not resemble a Qin general's at all. Rather, he is like… a Xiongnu!"

…

While Li Xin, adept at cavalry warfare, used the strategy of besieging Wei to rescue Zhao to pin down over ten thousand Xiongnu riders by the great river, the General Heifu — whom the Xiongnu Grand Danghu deemed to have a fighting style "steady to the point of cowardice" — had also raised over twenty thousand foot soldiers and advanced slowly, reaching the mouth of the Dusi Tu River, where he encamped on the spot. This so alarmed the Xiongnu scouts that they once again flew on horseback to report back to Touman Chanyu…

The knot between the Qin and Xiongnu armies was about to be pulled tight within this hundred-li radius. A great battle was on the verge of erupting!

(End of chapter)