Chapter 213: Zhenyuan

Source of *The Stubborn Bandits*:

In the Ru River valley east of Mount Long in Pingliang Prefecture, there stood a fortified city named Zhenyuan.

Liu Chengzong, leading a few clerks along with Yang Yao, Wei Qian'er, and others to scout the route, stood atop a high mountain and gazed toward the distant Zhenyuan county seat. The great tablelands in the mountains to the north were all cleared farmland, and the city below sealed the river valley so tightly not a crack was left.

This city leaned against the mountain range to the north and bordered the Ru River to the south, straddling the river valley. There was only one road, entering through the east gate, exiting through the west gate, and passing straight through the city.

The entire city's terrain sloped from high in the north to low in the south.

It had high walls on the east, west, and north sides, each over two zhang tall. East of the city, the Ru and Pu Rivers converged and flowed southward along the city's edge; the riverbed was very low, serving as a natural moat for Zhenyuan. For this reason, only a parapet wall was built on the south side, with no high wall.

On the south side was a single convenience gate for drawing water. Outside the east gate stood a barbican, its gate opening to the north. On the west side were two gates, one northwest and one southwest, each likewise with a barbican outside—the northern barbican gate opened north, the southern barbican gate opened south.

On the mountain there was also a north gate leading to the great tableland northeast of the city, likewise with a barbican.

South of the city flowed the Ru River. To the east and west, moats channeled Ru River water to serve as defenses; the city moat was nine zhang wide.

From the mountain, one could see the city filled with irregular, dead-end streets that did not connect through.

Outside the moat, to the southeast, southwest, and northwest, stood three small forts and several beacon towers.

This was less a city than a fortress built for war.

During the Northern Song dynasty, this area was a key stronghold on the Ru River defense line against the Western Xia. Fan Zhongyan constructed many fortifications here. Later it was called Zhenyuan Subprefecture, and this was the seat of the subprefectural administration.

Fortunately, the company had Yang Yao, who knew the way. After the Guyuan mutiny, he had fled through the mountains with his unit, lost his way for days, and had already paid his tuition in advance.

Yang Yao pointed at the great tableland northeast of the city and said, "The Qingping Park office of the Guyuan Horse Pasturage is inside this city. In summer and autumn, they all graze the horses outside."

"Isn't taking this road all about the horses?" Liu Chengzong laughed. "Then we'll put off storming the city for a bit. First use mounted troops to block the tableland road and snatch every horse."

The Zhenyuan route was not an easy one; they had to follow the river valley upstream, northwest against the Ru River's course, and the road twisted and turned along the way.

The reason Liu Chengzong took this road was precisely to replenish their warhorses.

Earlier, because they could not afford to keep them, the Lion Battalion averaged one mule-mounted infantryman per man, and the number of warhorses was less than a third of the troop count. Later, the men grew in number, but the horses did not.

Now, with battle looming and Cao Wenzhao's Guan-Ning Army as their hypothetical enemy, the Lion Battalion might not be at any particular disadvantage in troop strength, but they were desperately short of warhorses.

Moreover, with fine horse-grazing land like Ning Subprefecture, he intended to go to Guyuan to seek a bit of support from the feudatory prince, the army, and the Pasturage Office for defeating government troops.

Yang Yao said, "Commander, I still can't figure it out. Warhorses can cross Mount Long; north and south of Guyuan Subprefecture are all pasturelands. The road through Pingliang Prefectural City is far easier to travel than this one."

"It is easier. Could you keep the soldiers in check once you got there?"

Liu Chengzong raised a hand, broke off a branch on the hilltop, and swept the withered grass before him. "Right now Yang He is summoning Cao Wenzhao. Plundering Pingliang Prefectural City would be ill-timed. We continue west. Looting the Prince of Han's estate at this moment would only add to our enemies for nothing."

"Then..." Yang Yao choked the words back in his throat, exchanged glances with Wei Qian'er again and again, and finally said, "Then we just don't sack Pingliang Prefectural City? Commander, one Prince of Han estate is half of Pingliang City!"

"What's your hurry? Does the Prince of Han have the skill to strap four rings to the city wall and carry it off on his back?"

Liu Chengzong glanced at him. "He can't carry it off. He's merely the Lion Battalion's granary commissioner. We can rob him whenever we want. Right now we face a major battle—why rush for the moment?"

"Put another way, can you strap four rings to the city wall and carry it off? If you loot half a city, where are you going to put it? Hauling all that wealth around—wouldn't that just be serving meat to Cao Wenzhao on a platter?"

In truth, they already had nowhere to put the supplies they were currently carrying. Money, grain, wealth, and goods were more than a logistics outpost prepared for war could transport.

The logistics outpost doing the hauling, even counting the mules, had a carrying capacity of only nine hundred thousand jin.

Yet right now the Lion Battalion was carrying one million six hundred thousand jin of grain alone, to say nothing of weapons and equipment—and that was not even counting the Yu Battalion's supplies.

Every time Liu Chengzong thought about this, his head throbbed.

Sun Tzu's *Art of War* speaks of feeding off the enemy, but that assumes an army with a state behind it. When they burn surplus grain in enemy territory that they cannot finish or carry away, there is still enough grain waiting back home.

The Lion Battalion did not have that luxury. If they burned the grain, they could never think long-term; they would forever be led by the belly, going wherever there was grain.

Liu Chengzong used the branch to sweep clear a patch of ground and sat on a rock, troubled. He needed a base area where men would have no worries about what lay behind them.

But that was a matter for the long term. Right now, they needed to take a city.

For one thing, once past this city, Mount Long held only a few small forts, and the way west into Guyuan would be open and unobstructed.

For another, they also needed to occupy this city to serve as a transfer station for seizing horses and horse fodder from Guyuan Subprefecture.

Otherwise, this city's main defensive orientation was toward the west. If they did not hold it in their hands, getting past might not be hard, but getting back would be very troublesome.

A mule train of a dozen or so men was already swaying and bumping westward along the river valley. That was a Ning Subprefecture grain merchant caravan organized by the Yu Battalion. Ning Subprefecture's taxes were heavy, and the common people had a long tradition of carrying grain a hundred li to exchange for silver to pay their taxes.

Liu Xiangyu had exploited precisely this, organizing a team to carry a few dan of millet—first, to gather intelligence up close and observe the defensive works and garrison numbers on the wall; second, to see if they could slip soldiers into the city.

"Are the drawings done?"

Liu Chengzong turned his head. The clerks, including Song Shouzhen, were sketching on paper, tracing the outline of Zhenyuan City onto the page.

Liu Chengzong went over and examined each one. There were no professional artists in the company, and the results were poor.

He reminded them, "Draw the moat wider. Look, that river is clearly nine or ten zhang wide, and you've drawn it as a single line. Can a soldier lift his leg and step right over it?"

"And the outer forts and beacon towers—are we just not drawing those? When we begin the assault, I'll station you right there, and you'll see whether the fort you didn't draw shoots arrows at you or not."

"The east wall bends three times, and you give me a straight line?"

The Lion Battalion's clerks were all former bandit soldiers, some even old Huihui raiders. After studying at the Zuantianmao Academy, they became clerks, and they basically had no drawing skills whatsoever.

The most literate among them, Song Shouzhen, had only been taught to read by his mother and had never received systematic schooling in cultural knowledge.

In truth, this battle did not require a map. Liu Chengzong had already come in person to the city's vicinity; he could return and issue orders immediately.

But he did not wish to always lead the scouting himself, especially in this kind of mountainous, river-crossed terrain, where scouting was highly dangerous.

Besides, in his memory, a dozen or so years from now, the already-successful Brother Huangwa Li Zicheng and Brother Tutu Zhang Xianzhong had both died while scouting.

So he wanted to train a group of bold relay soldiers, scouts, and clerks capable of drawing terrain. That way, future road conditions and intelligence would be clear at a glance.

At the very least, it could reduce, to some extent, the number of times he had to personally reconnoiter the enemy's situation.

Possessing martial skill was one thing; martial skill against firearms and cannon was another.

Yet among the several clerks, he did find one who rather suited his expectations.

That clerk looked to be in his thirties, of medium height and solid build, with a pair of slanted eyes, high cheekbones, a heavy beard, and a face full of cross-grained flesh.

Judging by looks alone, you could tell people he ate children and they'd believe it.

But he drew with exceptional care. Though his skill fell far short in many ways, he very much grasped Liu Chengzong's requirements.

This man drew the mountains, rivers, and even the terraced fields in the hills, ring by ring with lines, and marked out the barbicans and the gate towers as well.

Lion Liu watched him from behind for a long time before he finally spoke. "What's your name?"

The thick-jowled clerk was startled by the voice suddenly coming from behind him — the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He turned, saw it was Liu Chengzong, and let out a breath, his heart still pounding. He hurriedly said, "Grand Commander, your subordinate, vanguard clerk Hu Shizhong."

Liu Chengzong murmured, "Hu Shizhong? What did you do before this?"

That name was far more proper than One-Two-Three-Four — could it be he'd actually had some schooling?

Hu Shizhong rose and said, "Grand Commander, I'm from Huanglong County. I started out herding cattle for others. In the second year of Tianqi, my father couldn't pay the grain tax and died in jail, so I went into Huanglong Mountain and joined Ma Guangyu. Later, Li Bei chased us all over the place, and I ended up in Lion Camp."

"Then your name?"

"Heh, my family herded cattle for others for three generations. My father couldn't read — the landlord master gave it to me."

Liu Chengzong nodded. He understood. He said, "Leave the vanguard. Go to the scout squad and join Squad Leader Wei. From now on, focus solely on this."

Hu Shizhong naturally had nothing to object to. Yang Yao was standing right beside them. He said hurriedly, "Then the Grand Commander will have to give me a replacement clerk."

"You'll get one. Look how well-drawn this map is."

Not long after, they returned to the mountain camp twenty li from the city. The commanding officers of both battalions gathered around the sketched city defense map and began planning the assault.

"This city's weakness is plainly on the south side. When it was built, a great river blocked that approach, but now with the drought, the water barely reaches the calf. A child could leap over those parapets."

Liu Chengzong pointed at the map. "The biggest problem on the south side is the river channel is too deep. We'll need to pile earth to build several ramps. And attacking only one face lets the defenders concentrate too many men — it won't be easy to take. We need to attack two, even three faces."

Liu Chengzu said, "Then we attack the east wall at the same time. The mountain forests have plenty of dead wood — we'll build scaling carts and wooden mantlets. Send one unit to the north wall to pin them down."

Liu Chengzong added, "Also dispatch a cavalry unit west of the city to cut off their route for sending word westward."

That day, every unit scattered through the mountains to fell timber and gather wood.

That evening, Liu Xiangyu, who had gone deep into the city, returned with the grain-selling party.

He brought back data on the wall height, moat depth, wall-top width, as well as the population of Zhenyuan City and the number of defending troops.

At the same time, Old Master Liu, using the wall height of two zhang and two chi, applied the gougu method to calculate the length of the siege ladders. He also drew up designs for siege carts and wooden mantlets to shield against arrows and bullets, handing them over to the two battalions' work squads for construction.

Beyond that, Old Master Liu had also discovered that the city held over two hundred civilian households, more than three thousand souls, and over six hundred garrison troops from the Qingping Court Horse Pasturage.

Yang Yao was astonished when he heard this. "Grand Elder, how can there be so many pasturage troops? I remember Qingping Court had a paper strength of just over five hundred. With desertions, there should only be one or two hundred at most!"

"The Pasturage Director, a man surnamed Cui, is capable. Word is he heard Yang He had gone to Ningzhou, so he quickly recruited refugees to serve as Favor Troops." Old Master Liu pulled his pipe stem from his mouth and smiled. "He even tried to recruit this old man as a Favor Trooper — wanted me to come eat horse-ration."

Liu Xiangyu's face was full of scorn and mockery.

Liu Chengzong privately thought that Pasturage Director was actually quite impressive.

His old man was the type who had endured bitter study in a cold window and passed the examinations in one go. Once his circumstances improved, he became just like every official under heaven — even his jailhouse meals were different from other people's.

His old man had never eaten horse-ration.

He had. His eldest brother had too. Everyone who came up through the horse troops had eaten it. Even Little Sixteen, who served as study attendant at his father's side, used to come to his place every night back at Yuhe Fort to scrounge some beans.

A handful of beans could save a life.

But he said nothing. Everyone's understanding of the world was different.

He merely said, "This Pasturage Director is decent. After we take the city, I'm taking him with me."

Calculated this way, the defenders this city could muster numbered between eight hundred and fifteen hundred. If they could capture the Favor Troops while they were out grazing horses, they could minimize the number of defenders during the assault.

All in all, that amount of troops was hardly worth looking at.

That very night, Liu Chengzong was at the work-squad camp with Shi Chengwo, Lin Wei, and the others, refining the siege carts they needed to build.

When they attacked Huo Family Fortress, they had built long ladders, but that sort of thing was only good for storming a small fort. The mainstay for attacking a walled city had to be the siege cart.

Unless you were trying to broaden the assault frontage, using long ladders alone to attack a city basically made you cannon fodder. If the wall had even one battering-ram cart, it could shove them all down in strings.

The siege cart's chassis was one zhang six chi long and seven chi wide. Wider would actually have been better, but the bridge over the moat only allowed that width.

Below, it used six one-chi-wide round wheels. The interior had two levels. The lower level's front face was sealed with wooden planks — soldiers pushed the cart from inside. The upper level had firing ports on three sides, allowing five or six soldiers to fire their guns.

The cart's sides had triangular protective panels, reaching a maximum height of one zhang six chi. It carried a two-section long ladder: one section was one zhang five chi, resting on the cart; the other section folded out, with two iron hooks at the ladder's head to catch the city wall.

Ropes connected above, and soldiers inside the cart hauled to raise the long ladder.

Of course, they could also use a few wooden bars and a large wheel as a winch to raise and lower it — that would be more secure and durable, but it would increase labor time and the chance of malfunction.

Since the city's defenders were few at the moment and had no veterans — the defenders had likely never seen a siege in their lives — Liu Chengzong decided not to fuss over it.

The wooden mantlet was a large, square, thick wooden board, connected by long beams and ropes, hoisted up using the lever principle. When soldiers scaled the wall, it was used to shield the front of the scaling ladder, blocking bullets and arrows, and also defending against defenders destroying the siege ladder.

Fortunately, materials were easy to come by. During the Jiajing era, Zhenyuan County had over fifty thousand registered commoners. Now, only the abandoned villages on the terraced hillsides reminded Liu Chengzong that these people had once lived here.

Three door planks joined together made one wooden mantlet.

Relatively speaking, the siege carts were harder to build, but both battalions had many craftsmen. With everyone working together, the progress was not slow.

By nightfall on the fifth day, Lion Camp soldiers drove mule teams out of the southern mountains, circling to the south of the city, and used the mules' backs to carry earth sacks to fill the river.

Yang Yao's cavalry unit forded the water with light packs, bypassed the southeast small fort and beacon tower, crossed past the city, and headed to the west side to regroup, cutting the roads and capturing fleeing soldiers and civilians.

Bai Liuxi's unit moved toward the mountain plateau north of the city, carrying several long ladders, ready to feign an assault come daylight to pin down the defenders. Zhang Tianlin's unit followed behind, seizing the nomadic Favor Troops scattered outside the city.

By the morning of the sixth day, the bell in the north gate tower tolled long.

An endless army came up the river valley against the current. In the blink of an eye, they stormed the southeast small fort. Immediately after, six siege carts and several thousand infantry ground across the valley floor, kicking up a sky-obscuring cloud of dust as they advanced to sixty paces east of the city, facing off against the gate tower across the moat.

By the time the county magistrate, roused from his pleasant dreams, climbed the wall, the artillery had already set up their battery across the riverbank. What greeted him were twenty-four bronze cannon, their muzzles packed with grapeshot, grinning hideously.