Chapter 672

Wu Shouqian returned in utter defeat. Whether he was truly gravely wounded or simply too ashamed to face Gao Yanchou, after fleeing back to his supervisory headquarters he was not seen coming out again.

Gao Yanchou directed the crossbowmen on the wall to shoot back the Zhou troops pursuing Wu Shouqian's defeated force, and then he saw the Shu army's great banner atop White Emperor City come crashing down.

Gao Yanchou had no other recourse. He could only order the four gates shut tight and fall back to defend Kuizhou.

Kuizhou was built against the mountains, facing the Yangtze. Though it was said to have four gates, in practice only the two southern gates were commonly used for coming and going.

The one to the southwest was called the Lesser South Gate, and the one to the southeast was the Yidou Gate, named after Du Fu's famous line composed here, "Each night I lean on the Dipper and gaze toward the capital," and commonly known as the Great South Gate.

Outside the Greater and Lesser South Gates lay a broad stretch of shore called Zhutoupu, where merchants and travelers gathered in droves on ordinary days, making it the best place to disembark and come ashore.

Gao Yanchou had intended to use the buildings of Zhutoupu to entangle the Zhou army in close fighting, but how would Ma Zhaoyuan fall for such a trick? The Zhou warships lingered off Zhutoupu for a long while, and when the southeast wind rose, they simply set fire downwind.

The buildings of Zhutoupu were mostly commercial, and so were basically built of planks, branches, and the like. On ordinary days guarding against fire was the most important matter of all, so how could they withstand deliberate arson?

Before long the flames blazed skyward beyond all saving, and Gao Yanchou could only order the Shu army back inside the city.

Ma Zhaoyuan, meanwhile, took advantage of the great fire at Zhutoupu and personally led a hundred warships to surround the Ningjiang Army's naval harbor east of Kuizhou.

And even before Ma Zhaoyuan came to surround them, the quick-witted Ningjiang Army sailors had already caught the wind and sailed upstream, fleeing to Yun'an Jian and Wanzhou.

The rest were bottled up and lost the ability to leave port. They had no choice but to abandon their ships and flee ashore, watching helplessly as the Zhou army sealed the harbor and trapped the warships completely.

Gao Yanchou still had more than four thousand men in hand. After the sailors came ashore there were still over a thousand, and Wu Shouqian's defeated remnants numbered another five or six hundred.

Thus the entire city of Kuizhou had close to six thousand men fit for battle, with complete armor and weapons, and even a small cavalry force. They were not entirely without the power to strike back.

But Gao Yanchou had lost the confidence to contend with the Zhou army. All he wanted was to hold Kuizhou grimly and force the Zhou army to come assault the walls.

As long as he held Kuizhou for a single day, the Zhou army could not safely push upstream.

For one must know that past Kuizhou, the upstream towns of Yun'an Jian, Wanzhou, and Zhongzhou all had no troops, and one would have to go all the way to Fuzhou (Fuling) before finding the six thousand yabing guards of the Wutai Army.

If Kuizhou were not defended, the Zhou host could easily fight its way to the vicinity of Yuzhou (Chongqing).

Ma Zhaoyuan naturally understood the importance of taking Kuizhou. So he waited only for the fires at Zhutoupu to die down, then immediately pressed the craftsmen to dismantle the stone catapults the Shu army had set up at White Emperor City and White Salt Mountain and haul them over.

In ancient China, because metal parts were scarce, dismantling and reassembling a catapult was an extremely difficult undertaking.

Most of the time, once a battle was over, these catapults were basically burned on the spot, and it was exceedingly rare for any to be taken apart and used again.

But the Zhou army happened to have exactly that capability. Playing with catapults, one might say, was a Zhou army tradition. From the little camel whirlwind cannons to large counterweight trebuchets, the Ministry of War alone had several great rooms full of diagrams and manuals.

On every campaign, craftsmen from the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Works inevitably accompanied the army, and so the Zhou troops quickly dismantled two of the Shu catapults and began setting them up at Zhutoupu.

Gao Yanchou saw this from the wall and felt his soul take flight. If those great catapults were finished being assembled, battering down the weak points of Kuizhou's walls would be only a matter of time.

The Military Governor's Administrative Assistant Luo Ji said to Gao Yanchou, "The last time the Supervisor sallied out, he returned defeated, and White Emperor City was swiftly taken. The hearts of the people in the city are already in panic.

If we allow the northern troops to hurl stones at the city, the army's morale will likely collapse. Why not, while the soldiers still dare to risk their lives, rouse the whole host and fight one desperate battle?"

In defending a city, the hardest thing is not the enemy, but the hearts of men.

As Luo Ji said, the Ningjiang Army had been defeated again and again. Given the current spirit of the yabing guards, they could still manage a sally, but if they huddled inside taking catapult stones, within four or five days at most their hearts would turn.

Of course, if the sally failed, those yabing guards would turn on them even faster, but that was still better than sitting and waiting to die.

Gao Yanchou had no other way either. He could only steel his heart, summon the officers great and small of the Ningjiang Army, empty the Kuizhou treasury in rewards to the troops, and order cattle and sheep slaughtered so the yabing guards could eat their fill, then prepare to sally forth.

Kuizhou was the throat of the Sichuan river route, and through every dynasty it had been the key place for blocking the Yangtze and collecting taxes. During the Manchu Qing period, the commercial taxes of the Kuizhou customs station even exceeded those of Chengdu Prefecture. Though it was not quite so exaggerated now, they were still considerable.

Therefore, with the rewards Gao Yanchou handed out, the several thousand yabing guards of the Ningjiang Army each received no small amount, and for a time their morale actually rose.

Ma Zhaoyuan, aboard his warship, naturally could not see the movements of Kuizhou, which was built against the mountains and stood far higher than the ships. But he knew he absolutely had to protect those few catapults that had been so laboriously assembled.

So he simply ordered Shi Yanchao and Lin Renzhao to lead two thousand troops to guard them, and sent several thousand more up along the Yangtze to seize Meng Shu's Yun'an Jian, Wanzhou, and other prefectures and counties.

In the city, Gao Yanchou let the soldiers eat their fill, and then at the very start of the mao hour he assembled forty-five hundred yabing guards of the Ningjiang Army, seven hundred horse and foot auxiliaries from Yun'an Jian, the six hundred men of the Xiaorui Army that Wu Shouqian had brought from Chengdu, and several thousand laborers and able-bodied men from within the city — more than ten thousand in all. Raising the Military Governor's yamen banner and the war flags, with drums and gongs clamoring to heaven, they marched out the gate.

This did indeed take Ma Zhaoyuan slightly by surprise. He had originally expected the Shu army to wait until he had finished setting up the catapults and could no longer endure the bombardment before coming out to fight to the death. He had not expected them to be so resolute.

The deep wail of conch horns sounded. Meng Shu, like Hedong, was far from the sea, and so the Zhou army often used conch horns to distinguish its military calls.

For this invasion of Shu, Ma Zhaoyuan had brought a total of twenty-one thousand men of the land and water forces for pacifying Shu. After entering Shu, five hundred men were left at the Wushan military stockade, and five hundred each were left inside and outside White Emperor City.

Wen Chongle had already led more than a hundred warships and over three thousand soldiers upstream. The remaining warships still needed men left aboard to guard them, so in the end Ma Zhaoyuan could call on only around ten thousand men.

But those ten thousand men of his were not something Gao Yanchou's Ningjiang Army — which only reached ten thousand by counting laborers — could compare with.

Ma Zhaoyuan's men were all elite Zhou troops. His personal army and the imperial guard alone numbered over six thousand, and the rest, the Jiangling Left and Right Guards and the Yiling Left Guard, were picked warriors he had selected in Huguang Province, who had just been allotted land. Apart from slightly inferior equipment, their fighting strength was by no means poor.

And this inferior equipment was only in comparison to the Zhou state's personal army and imperial guard. Against the Shu army, the equipment of these three guard units was basically on par with the Shu army's.

After the Shu army came out of the city, it did not form up and stand still. Instead, Gao Yanchou placed all the Ningjiang Army's crossbowmen in the front ranks.

And behind the crossbowmen, a glint of blades flashed; a great number of heavily armored spearmen were already prepared.

The laborers and able-bodied men who did not belong to the Ningjiang Army were placed by Gao Yanchou on the hillside directly ahead. Through the haze, Ma Zhaoyuan could make out that those laborers and able-bodied men all held bows in their hands.

This was a distinctive feature of the Shu army. Shu produced bamboo and timber in abundance, suited for making bows and crossbows, and so the proportion of bows and crossbows in the Shu army had always been very high, ever since the time of Marquis Zhuge Wu.

Even as late as the end of the Ming dynasty, the armies of Shu still habitually equipped large numbers of crossbows. That famous and awe-inspiring divine-crossbow general Zhang Ling — who was so badly used by the Ming court that at over seventy he still had to roll up his armor and rush about putting out fires, and was finally killed by a single arrow from Li Dingguo — was a typical example.

Ma Zhaoyuan saw it all clearly from the ship and could not help saying to those around him, "I took this Gao Yanchou for a fool, thinking he would mix the laborers in with the yabing guards to swell his numbers. I did not expect him to use the terrain and have the laborers shoot down at our army from the hillside."

Du Lun Chixin chimed in, "Kuizhou lies where Mount Wu and the Daba Mountains meet. The people live off the mountains and the water, and in every dynasty it has been a superb place for recruiting naval forces.

And since those laborers carry bows, they must be hunters from Mount Wu and the Daba Mountains. Many of them should be fine archers.

The Sage has already ordered the Governor-General to establish guard units here to defend this place. Why not recruit them after the battle? We would gain a strong force at once!"

The battle had not even begun, and these two were already making arrangements for afterward, completely disregarding Gao Yanchou and his several thousand Ningjiang troops.

This confidence came from the all-around gap between the two states, from sovereign to generals to soldiers. Of those three points, Meng Shu held none, and so it could only bring the Zhou army trouble, never danger.

Zhutoupu was not wide, able to hold only a little over ten thousand men in all. Gao Yanchou had committed his entire force precisely because he wanted to use his numerical advantage to drive the Zhou army down from above into the Yangtze.

Ma Zhaoyuan was not alarmed in the least. He merely ordered Guo Rong to take three thousand men to reinforce Lin Renzhao and Shi Yanchao, and had a hundred or more small boats lowered from the great ships as support.

Finally Ma Zhaoyuan summoned Hou Renbao. Hou Renbao had in his hands a force of Hedong cavalry brought from the Yun and Dai prefectures of Hedong.

"Take the horse troops around to the left side of Zhutoupu. I have observed that the Lesser South Gate must see much coming and going of merchants and travelers on ordinary days, and its great gate closes somewhat slowly. The moment the battle begins and the Shu army is thrown back, lead the cavalry in a sudden charge, be the first to fight your way into the city, and it will count as a great feat of first ascent."

Hou Renbao was overjoyed. To tell the truth, his position was somewhat awkward, because his father Hou Yi had once gone over to the Khitan.

And moreover, trusting his instincts, he had wagered that Sage Zhang could not defeat the Khitan, and had ended up making a fool of himself.

The only reason the Hou family still had offices to hold was that Hou Renbao, playing the filial son in Shanzhou, had turned coat in time together with Zhao Kuangzan.

Also because Hou Yi in his youth was loyal and brave, one of the Thirteen Loyalists of the Xingjiao Gate, Sage Zhang therefore held his nose and did not pursue Hou Yi's crimes.

Hou Renbao had always desperately wished to wash away the stain of his father having gone over to the Khitan, and so he fought at the front in every battle, heedless of life and death.

Drums and music sounded, horns blared in waves, and the Shu army's Ningjiang troops, shoulder to shoulder, surged out of Kuizhou's city in overwhelming numbers; the Shu army's low- and mid-ranking officers were also extremely diligent, constantly coordinating the orderliness of the soldiers' advance.

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Every fifteen paces they walked, they heard the great drum on the wall sound twice, and the Shu troops would inevitably shout in response to hold their formation, and at the same time to intimidate the enemy.

Guo Rong, holding the ceremonial horse-chopping saber bestowed by Zhang Zhao, spurred his horse and galloped before the formation, and wherever he passed, the Zhou soldiers all cheered in response.

Since the Shu army had assumed the posture of crossbowmen advancing to shoot, then forming up and charging fiercely, Guo Rong simply met force with force: the Zhou army likewise placed crossbowmen in front, and once they had loosed their bolts, drew their blades and charged.

Zhao Kuangyin wore next to his skin a light, fine-ringed mail shirt, over that a silk garment, over that a fine-steel ring-lock armor, and outermost a cotton armor; with these three layers of armor on, the total weight was over seventy jin.

It looked cumbersome, but in fact with these three layers on, even if the enemy hacked with axes and pounded with hammers, they would not easily wound Zhao Kuangyin.

Moreover, a mighty warrior like him could fully bear sixty-seven jin of armor; it was no great burden, only that he could not sprint at full speed.

Around Zhao Kuangyin were all such heavily armored stalwarts; they too carried no bows, and under the cover of their own crossbowmen, they donned their armor in the formation with the help of auxiliaries.

And while they were donning armor, they heard roll after roll of drums: the vanguards of both sides began to make contact, and the crossbowmen of both sides began shooting at each other with bolts that swiftly reaped lives.

On the hillside outside Kuizhou, those able-bodied men also howled like apes, and wave after wave of arrows rained down in arcs from the slope.

Though these arrows had little force, with the advantage of terrain, they were still quite lethal.

For fully armored soldiers, they were mere tickles, but for the lightly armored troops in the formation, the threat was considerable.

The Shu army's advantage lay in having many crossbows, but they had few standard arm-drawn crossbows; most were bamboo crossbows, fast-firing but somewhat lacking in armor-piercing power.

The Zhou army's advantage lay in extremely fine crossbows: not only did they have monsters like the Divine Arm Bow with its rapid rate of fire, but arm-drawn crossbows were also issued in great numbers.

There were also powerful crossbows like the wooden single-bolt crossbow and the Fuyuan crossbow; often a single shot would send the Shu troops opposite tumbling, men and horses alike.

Of course, on the Shu army's walls there were also very powerful great bamboo-pole crossbows, which required winching to draw; every shot they fired, even the Zhou army's heavy armored soldiers could not withstand, but unfortunately there were too few of them and their rate of fire too slow to form fire superiority.

After seven or eight rounds of cruel and bloody exchange of fire, a great number of the front-rank crossbowmen on both sides had fallen, but the fortunes of the two sides were very different.

In recent years, the Shu state's investment in equipment had not even matched what Meng Chang spent on building the Qionghua Palace, the Xuanhua Palace, and the Moke Pool.

But in the Zhou state, the building of the Jinshan Palace, the Ziwei Palace, and the Jinyang Palace had all been paid for out of Zhang Zhao's own pocket, and not a single share of what the court finances should allocate to the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Works had been shorted.

Therefore the Shu army's crossbowmen mostly wore only a breastplate of bamboo-slat armor, cut from nan bamboo into strips, repeatedly boiled and then oiled.

The Zhou crossbowmen, by contrast, almost to a man wore a ring-lock hauberk without arm guards, shoulder flaps, or shoulder pieces.

Combined with the difference in crossbows, once a Shu crossbowman was hit, it was one shot to the soul, and he collapsed to the ground shrieking in agony.

Most of the Zhou soldiers who were shot could still hold back their screams, and were then dragged to the rear by auxiliaries for treatment.

The longer the two sides exchanged fire, the more panicked the Shu troops became; by the seventh round, the Shu front line had already caved inward, and the battlefield was full of howling and shouting, on the verge of collapse.

At that very moment, Gao Yanchou arrived with three hundred heavily armored personal guards, and he ordered his personal officers to raise high his great banner bearing the character Gao, of the Ningjiang Military Governor, and lead the charge.

When the Ningjiang troops saw Gao Yanchou personally take the field, their howls at once turned to cheers, and they regrouped and pressed forward with all their strength.

Guo Rong likewise ordered his great banner brought out — silver-white border, great gold field, black character Guo — a reward Zhang Zhao had given in past years when Guo Rong, Murong Xinzhang, and others first shattered the Khitan Pishi Army by the Hun River.

This banner was practically Guo Rong's lifeblood; the Hedong-born personal soldiers around him, who had originally followed Guo Rong and later come over to the Zhou state, all knew Guo Rong's habit.

When this banner was raised, it meant the man lived while the banner stood, and the man died when the banner fell.

Zhao Kuangyin was not far from Guo Rong's side, and he looked at Guo Rong's recognition banner with extreme envy.

The Great Zhou belonged to the virtue of metal and honored white; a great banner of silver-white border and gold field was a symbol of power — at the least, one sent out with it would be a garrison commander guarding one or two prefectures. He, Zhao Kuangyin, was genuinely envious; he truly wanted one.

At that thought, Zhao Kuangyin roared furiously, savagely shoved aside the crossbowmen in front, and the heavily armored soldiers in three layers behind him charged out with him.

Right beside Zhao Kuangyin, a red-faced stalwart from Qingtang roared, raised a great shield covered with iron plating, and at once smashed a gap in the Shu army's spear formation opposite.

Of course, the stalwart's legs were also stabbed bloody by the Shu army's spears; after crashing in, countless blades, spears, swords, and halberds came at the stalwart all at once, and no one knew whether he could survive.

But the gap he smashed open immediately became the Zhou army's key point of attack; Guo Rong saw it too, and swiftly directed the personal officers beside him to charge toward that spot as well.

Elsewhere the two sides were still stabbing at each other with spears, but here it had already become the most brutal close-quarters melee, because Gao Yanchou's three hundred armored soldiers happened to be heading for this very direction.

Zhao Kuangyin felt force striking him all over his body; he knew it was the thrust of enemy weapons landing on him.

But by now, he no longer had the strength to distinguish which blows were fatal and which were mere scratches.

The red-faced Qingtang man who had first broken through the Shu army's great spear formation died in battle; around his corpse lay a ring of Shu soldiers.

This stalwart in three layers of armor had been tripped by the Shu troops, his neck guard flipped open, and killed with a short sword thrust into his throat.

Zhao Kuangyin grew even more enraged; he roared three times, and suddenly felt that the wrought-copper great staff in his hands had never felt so perfectly responsive.

It was no longer a great staff, but a hand he had suddenly grown.

A Shu heavy armored soldier came at him, and Zhao Kuangyin thrust repeatedly with both hands; every strike landed precisely on the Shu soldier's face guard.

At last, on the third thrust, came the sound of nasal bone shattering, and a spray of unknown liquid shot out from the gaps of the Shu soldier's face guard.

Zhao Kuangyin had shattered the bridge of his nose, and the deformed face guard squeezed his eyeballs directly out of their sockets.

Another heavy armored soldier attacked, and Zhao Kuangyin changed from thrusting to sweeping, sweeping directly into the soldier's thigh.

Zhao Kuangyin keenly noticed that he wore no thigh guards; under the heavy blow, the leg bone snapped, and the heavy armored soldier screamed and fell, instantly trampled by countless legs.

At that very moment, the valiant generals Bai Chongzan, Wang Yan, and Hou Zhang also arrived as reinforcements; the Shu troops could not hold, and the gap grew wider and wider, far more than Gao Yanchou's three hundred armored soldiers could fill.

Though Gao Yanchou himself wielded a mace and bore nine wounds, he still could not stop the Shu army's collapse.

As if that were not enough, Hou Renbao seized the opportunity and led three hundred cavalry in a fierce attack on the Small South Gate from Zhutoupu's left; the able-bodied men guarding the gate could not hold, and Hou Renbao's three hundred men fought their way into the city.

The Shu army erupted in uproar, and the battle line became even harder to hold; the personal officers around Gao Yanchou seized him and hurriedly retreated into the city, while the Zhou troops pressed the advantage and entered the city, throwing the Shu army into chaos.

The battle raged until noon, when Gao Yanchou was cornered atop a gate tower on the city's east side, with only a few dozen personal followers left; the Zhou army had by then entirely entered the city, and the cause was lost.

His trusted Administrative Assistant Luo Ji, having somehow led over a yellow horse, said to Gao Yanchou: "The Zhou army has not yet encircled the East Gate. Marshal, please mount and ride back to Chengdu to seek the imperial army, and plan for the future."

Gao Yanchou, bearing more than ten wounds and drenched in blood, shook his head and replied: "In the past, when I entered Guanzhong, I could not serve the royal cause to the utmost; now I cannot hold Kuizhou. Even if the Sage were lenient, what face would I have left before the elders of Shu?"

Luo Ji then urged again: "Now the Central Plains are stable, and the Zhou state shows signs of uniting all under heaven. It is said the Lord of Zhou is a sage Son of Heaven who appears once in five hundred years. Marshal, better to surrender to Zhou, lead the Zhou army west, and pacify Shu as quickly as possible, so that the people of Shu do not suffer. Though your personal virtue would be blemished, the greater righteousness would be preserved."

Gao Yanchou was silent for a long while, then resolutely shook his head and refused: "I followed the late emperor from Hedong in my youth, and have received the deep favor of two generations of sovereigns. How could I bend the knee to a powerful enemy? Moreover, more than a hundred members of the Gao family are still in Chengdu; in the end, I cannot do what Ma Mengqi did."

Luo Ji, helpless, did not press further, but Gao Yanchou looked at the personal followers around him, all brothers who had followed him for years, and could not bear to have them follow him to their deaths; he therefore took off the golden seal of the Kuizhou Ningjiang Military Governor and handed it to Luo Ji.

"I have received great kindness from the Meng clan, and now I must die. Though you have eaten the Meng clan's wages, today's bloody battle is enough to repay them.

In the past, in Guanzhong, I learned that the Zhou army's commander, Ma Zhaoyuan, is magnanimous and does not kill loyal and righteous men. Go down from the tower and surrender—you will surely keep your lives."

Having said this, Gao Yanchou drove Administrative Assistant Luo Ji and his close personal officers down from the city tower. He himself straightened his robes and cap on the tower, bowed toward the west, and then, in the eastern tower of Kuizhou, walked into the flames and took his own life.

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