Chapter 563: Who Is the Fool?

What a fine book...

The Han clan head and the Chen clan head were specially summoned before Li Cunhui, because Taizhou could not be attacked for the time being, and the city-gate betrayal scheme the two had so carefully plotted could not yet be carried out.

So, to avoid dampening others' eagerness to serve, Li Cunhui did not begrudge lowering himself to receive Han and Chen, and even bestowed twenty bolts of white cotton cloth on each as a reward.

As for why they could not attack? The reason was simple: what Li Cunhui and Murong Xinzhang had agreed upon was to use the Yang Wu imperial clan in Taizhou as bait, to lure the Southern Tang army into crossing the river quickly.

But who could have expected that the Southern Tang court would move so slowly?

Li Cunhui had deliberately let people cross the river to remind them, yet after he slowly assembled his forces and was on the verge of taking Taizhou, the Southern Tang army still had not arrived.

This... directly left His Grace Li stuck in an awkward spot. If he took Taizhou now, the Southern Tang army would very likely give up on crossing the river out of despair, or at least would not be in such a hurry to cross.

So Li Cunhui, on one hand, reported to Murong Xinzhang and advised abandoning the plan to take Taizhou, while on the other hand doing his utmost to placate his subordinates who wanted to take Taizhou and win merit.

The moment Murong Xinzhang saw Li Cunhui's report, he immediately understood what was going on.

So he deliberately launched a massive mobilization in Yangzhou of the prefectural and county troops and fishermen who had already defected, putting on the appearance of sending the entire army out to assault Taizhou.

Sure enough, Murong Xinzhang's actions immediately "gave a reminder" to the Southern Tang court, and they began to speed up their river crossing.

At this point, on both banks of the great river, those whose hearts inclined toward the Southern Tang and those loyal to it were still the mainstream.

Moreover, the southerners excelled with boats and ships. Although the Zhou army had occupied Yangzhou, it could not maintain strict control for long; the moment it slackened even slightly, the Southern Tang court across the Yangtze could very easily obtain intelligence on Yangzhou.

So Murong Xinzhang simply turned their own trick against them.

In early May, Murong Xinzhang forcibly conscripted around ten thousand men from Yangzhou, added the seven thousand Zhou garrison troops in Yangzhou, and called it a host of fifty thousand, then began slowly advancing on Taizhou.

Yangzhou was left to Zhao Kuangyin with three thousand men to defend it, making the garrison look utterly hollow.

Li Jing instantly set his clever brain spinning at full speed, and felt that this time he had surely caught the Zhou army commander's blunder.

Hmph! You never expected it, did you? So what if you took the Eastern Capital? I have thousands upon thousands of righteous subjects feeding me intelligence.

So just as Murong Xinzhang led his army out of Yangzhou, and the soldiers and civilians loyal to the Southern Tang inside and outside the city were frantically reporting Yangzhou's emptiness to the Southern Tang court, Li Jing asserted sole authority and sped up the dispatch of the imperial guard.

Two days later, the Southern Tang Jiangyin Army's Supply Commissioner arrived at Jiangning with four thousand troops and seventy warships.

A day after that, Yao Yanhong, the Southern Tang Jinghai Army Commander who had originally planned to go by land to reinforce Taizhou, also arrived with seven thousand soldiers and one hundred warships.

Li Jing then sent out all the imperial guards in Jiangning, and even scraped clean the prefectural and county troops of Hezhou upstream, barely mustering twenty thousand men.

These imperial guards, together with the Jiangyin Army and Jinghai Army that had come upstream, totaled thirty-one thousand men, and with more than ten thousand laborers and fishermen added, they again reached a scale of nearly fifty thousand.

And these fifty thousand men gathered on the river near Jiangning, men shouting and horses neighing, soldiers in motley armor jostling shoulder to shoulder, hundreds of warships linked bow to stern on the river, and Li Jing finally felt considerably more at ease.

The officials of the Southern Tang court were also buoyed by this display, each of them looking full of fighting spirit.

Only Bian Gao hesitated beside him, wanting to speak, because the Zhou army's movements were far too abnormal!

Who ever penetrates several hundred li into enemy territory, seizes a key city, and instead of holding it firmly while awaiting reinforcements or looting and leaving, sends the entire army out without even sealing off news, straight off to attack a small neighboring town?

This did not look like going to control the Yang Wu imperial clan; rather, it looked like deliberately exposing a weakness to lure their own side into crossing the river.

Bian Gao very much wanted to advise Li Jing to wait, to wait until Wei Jian, the Military Governor of Wuchang in Ezhou, arrived with his ten thousand soldiers, and until Chen Jue, the Commissioner of Military Affairs and Military Governor of Zhaowu in Fuzhou, arrived with his twenty thousand elite troops, before crossing the river.

But Bian Gao opened his mouth and then closed it. At this time, he was not yet the great Southern Tang general who would destroy Ma Chu in history; he was merely an officer with some military merit who had been promoted by leaps and bounds to the central court.

Nor was he a confidant of the Southern Tang ruler Li Jing, so how would he dare speak such discouraging words at a time like this?

More importantly, crossing the river as soon as possible to prevent the Zhou army from gaining a firm foothold north of the river had been his proposal.

Now that the Emperor had accepted your suggestion and was sending a great army across the river, if you now said the crossing should be delayed or undertaken cautiously, would that not be making a fool of the sovereign?

So even though Bian Gao had clearly seen the problem, he did not speak up to advise. He could only console himself inwardly: everything else might be fake, but the fact that the Zhou army had only ten thousand men could not be fake.

And they really had gone to attack Taizhou. Even if there was a trick, by the time they marched back over a hundred li, Yangzhou might well have already changed hands.

So that very day, Li Jing built an altar at Bailuzhou upstream from Stone City and appointed his third brother, the Deputy Marshal of All Armies and Prince of Yan, Li Jingda, as Supreme Commander of the North Bank, with the Shenwei Army's Commander-in-Chief Bian Gao and the Jinghai Army Commander Yao Yanhong as Left and Right Commanders, leading a great host of fifty thousand, proclaimed as one hundred thousand, to cross the river and recover Yangzhou.

At this moment, Zhao Kuangyin, acting alone on a major front for the first time, could not help feeling somewhat nervous. Murong Xinzhang had left him to hold Yangzhou with deliberation.

Because, considering the enthusiasm of the Yangzhou people for feeding intelligence to the Southern Tang, their own strength could certainly not be kept secret, so if they wanted to feign weakness, only Zhao Kuangyin was the most suitable.

Among the Zhou army's highest-ranking generals, Murong Xinzhang, Li Cunhui, and Yao Yuanfu were clearly not men to be trifled with at a glance.

Gao Huaide, though as young as Zhao Kuangyin, had the reputation of the Gao father and son, especially the father Gao Xingzhou's renown, which resounded across north and south.

Even the Southern Tang people knew of it; no one would take such a tiger cub of a general's household for a soft persimmon.

Only Zhao Kuangyin was not only the youngest, barely nineteen years old now, but also fair-skinned and tender-looking, a little bit plump, and had not yet grown a beard. At a glance, he looked like some good-for-nothing from who-knows-which family, sent to gild his resume.

So leaving such a seemingly useless general to defend Yangzhou would further stoke the Southern Tang army's desire to attack.

And so it proved. Before the Southern Tang army had even set out, it received a flood of reports that the Zhou army's commander in Yangzhou was a pale-faced scholar.

Li Jingda was therefore immensely pleased with himself, feeling that the strategy he had proposed — ignoring Taizhou, first recovering Yangzhou, then sealing off the Zhou army's retreat from Taizhou and attacking fiercely — was a great success.

But the officers below were not all as confident as Li Jingda. They still knew how formidable the Yongliang iron cavalry was; if the Zhou army quickly marched back and struck them mid-crossing, that would still be quite a threat.

However, when the Southern Tang vanguard's Chief Supervisor led two thousand men ashore at Guabu without meeting any resistance, the Southern Tang generals on the ships all broke into delighted grins.

By the time the great army had smoothly come ashore, dozens of righteous Yangzhou citizens came to report that the Zhou army's pale-faced commander, in his arrogance, had not stayed tightly within Yangzhou city, but had led his troops west to Yizheng, only forty-some li away from here.

Even eating shit, he can't get it while it's hot!

If the Zhou army had come quickly, they might have caused some trouble for the landing, but instead he had only gotten as far as Yizheng.

Not only was Yizheng a small city, its walls were incomplete; it was nothing like the strong fortress of the Eastern Capital, Yangzhou.

For three thousand men to hold such a small city against an attack by fifty thousand was simply a fantasy.

I'm afraid those three thousand men could not even fit inside Yizheng city, could they?

When Li Jingda heard this, he suddenly felt the sky was wide and the earth broad, and could not help throwing back his head and laughing three times.

"How swiftly the Zhou army came, and how swiftly it departs!

I have heard that Murong Xinzhang is reputed to be Xue Youzhou reborn, yet I never expected him to be so poor a judge of men as to send a general not yet twenty to hold the Eastern Capital. Does he truly think any random man can be a Champion Marquis? Hahahaha!"

The surrounding Southern Tang generals all grinned and laughed along, their confidence in defeating the Zhou army growing even stronger.

Bian Gao once again hesitated, wanting to speak. By now he was almost certain that the Zhou state's Duke of Qinghai Commandery, Murong Xinzhang, was definitely playing a trick.

A man's name is like a tree's shadow; a man who had fought his way from Hexi to the Central Plains and won such renown could not possibly be the fool Li Jingda took him for.

But then... what was the Zhou army waiting for? They had only ten thousand men to begin with, and had split their forces into two routes; now they had even given up Yangzhou entirely.

Once the court's troops entered the city, relying on the Hangou Canal and the rivers all around that connect to the great river, they could move troops at will and strike out in every direction. The Zhou army would be finished sooner or later.

Could it be that they really only intended to take away the Yang-Wu imperial clan?

The more Bian Gao thought about it, the more baffled he became. It was not that he had failed to consider the possibility that Murong Xinzhang might launch a surprise attack on them.

But Taizhou was two hundred li from either Guabu or Yizheng, and the surrounding area was full of loyal subjects of the court, making it impossible to conceal any movement.

Unless their warhorses could cover those two hundred li at full speed without rest or sleep, and still have the strength left to fight.

Or perhaps the Zhou army believed that these three thousand men at Yizheng could hold off an enemy ten times their number for several days.

Thinking of all this, even the ever-cautious Bian Gao felt the Zhou army had been far too reckless.

He strode toward Li Jingda. He was going to advise the Prince of Yan to richly reward the loyal subjects around Yangzhou, so that they would come and assist in the siege.

They absolutely had to devour the Zhou army's three thousand men at Yizheng as quickly as possible, and at the same time send men to retake Yangzhou, thereby cutting off the Zhou army's route of retreat along the canal.