Chapter 345: Bitter Water

Solid iron shot screamed across the battlefield. Soldiers who had not seen war in years were shaken to the core. Men dragged their soaked cotton trousers as they ran across the riverbank, yet involuntarily slowed their steps when they drew within three hundred paces of the enemy line.

Seven-catty cannonballs shrieked past them, tumbling into a square formation and almost instantly scattering half of it — dozens of soldiers fleeing in terror.

The northwest had been at peace so long that the last major battle was nearly a decade ago. Even the handpicked shock troops were mostly just stronger, more skilled recruits; they too had little experience facing cannon fire.

A cannonball slammed into the ground a dozen paces in front of Li Hua'ao's formation. Fortunately, the field had been plowed in autumn, so the shot lodged in the clods without ricocheting. Even so, the flying dirt struck Li Hua'ao's face, startling him to a halt as he slowly swallowed.

He stood stunned a moment before coming back to his senses and looking around. The three forward-most formations had all been terrified to the brink of collapse by the artillery and could no longer advance in line.

But no one retreated, because the military law on this point was brutally simple: one step back, and after the battle, your hand would be chopped off.

Li Hua'ao set his brow, gripped his Li-character banner-spear slantwise, and strode to the very front of the ranks, head high as he shouted: "Our lives, our families' fates, all rest on this battle! Sons of the Eastern Li, forward with me!"

The imperial court could lose this war, the Marshal's headquarters could lose it — but they, the collateral branches of the chieftains, absolutely could not.

Having chosen to fight, either their house head Li Tianyu died on the battlefield, or they helped the court win this battle. Otherwise, they were dead men for certain.

The Li house soldiers' fierce advance also heartened the other native troops. Their fear of clan law outweighed their fear of the screaming shot. They rallied, pushing cannon carts and rocket carts as they advanced in unison on Basang's tribal line.

The Ye house soldiers, who had been the first to charge out, were the exception. Without the pressure of a fight-to-the-death, and shaken by the shelling on both flanks, not a single man was hit, yet they were repeatedly scared into halting.

They did not retreat either, but while others advanced, they did not, and so fell to the very rear.

In the blink of an eye they closed to two hundred paces. The bayonet-tipped square formations still advanced steadily, but now at the rear of each formation, six soldiers pushed a "Captive-Destroyer" cannon cart, moving it to the formation's right flank and advancing parallel with the troops.

Liu Chengzong saw it all clearly through his telescope: twenty-four small infantry-cavalry square formations, twenty-four Captive-Destroyer cannon carts, carrying a total of seventy-two light small-bore cannons.

Originally there had also been six "Hundred-Tiger Salvo" launchers and some "Hornet's Nest" rockets, but the wind was blowing from the west, so the soldiers had left all their rockets at the position on the far bank when they crossed the river.

The firepower was formidable, and cleverly deployed.

They moved the Captive-Destroyer cannon carts to the right — the north — of their formations because Liu Chengzong's heavy artillery was to the south. The native soldiers intended to use a formation made of flesh and blood as cover for their cannon carts.

Liu Chengzong frowned slightly. They asked for it, they'll get it.

Just then, a Mongol soldier with command flags on his back galloped to the foot of the earthen hill, shouting something. A guard proficient in Mongolian called up loudly from below: "Great Commander, Xie Erhu of the Fish-Catching Camp requests permission to attack and seize their cannons!"

Liu the Lion thought to himself: Seize the cannons, my ass. Those cannons are literally called "Captive-Destroyer Cannons" — you're the captives they're meant to destroy, and you're rushing to stick your neck out. Think you've found your true calling?

Irritated, he said: "Request what battle? Hold position! Tell him: defend against cavalry. Do not attack unless the enemy formation breaks; if the enemy formation breaks and routs, do not pursue across the river."

He turned his head. At the heavy artillery position not far away, twelve cannons had finished loading, but Huang Shengxiao was not tense. Through his telescope, Liu Chengzong even saw Little Huang picking his ear with one hand while raising his right arm, sending men to wave signal flags across the front of the line.

The troops on the right wing, on the other hand, were all rolling up their sleeves and itching for a fight. One look at their manner told Liu Chengzong that Huang Shengxiao intended to break the enemy formation.

The most powerful firearm troops under Liu Chengzong's command were massed on the right wing. There were the thousand-catty heavy cannons, sixty inverted swivel-gun war carts converted from Mongol oxcarts, and eight hundred heavy musketeers adept at charging.

Although Xie Erhu was also on the right wing, he was not counted among the elite troops. His main task at the moment was to spread his men out at the foot of the hill and use their warhorses to help the common folk graze the weeds in the fields.

Basang exhaled heavily, his eyes fixed intently not far ahead. The enemy was drawing closer and closer, making him involuntarily hold his breath until he could hold it no longer.

He was waiting for the Han infantry in front of the line to fire, but he heard no musket shots. He could only watch the enemy come nearer and nearer, until he could even clearly make out those strange little carts fitted with three iron tubes.

The two armies closed to a hundred paces. Basang could wait no longer. He had never operated cannons, but he had seen them many times and knew the threat these things posed to an infantry square at close range in a volley.

So he ordered the archers in front of the formation to loose a volley of arrows at the enemy line, and commanded those slave-whelp cavalrymen of noble birth to advance obliquely from the left wing — to draw cannon fire.

To the north, Liu Chengzu had also reached the banks of the Huang River by this time. While deploying defenses along the bank to guard against a river crossing, he also, quite fittingly, conducted a bit of dream-sending-style coordinated warfare with Basang.

He had Li Wanqing bring five cannons and fire one round toward the front of Basang's left wing, and launch one Hundred-Tiger Salvo cart. What they fired, however, were not cannonballs, but smoke balls made of gunpowder wrapped around mugwort. The rockets were not meant to kill either, but to stick into the ground and spew smoke.

In an instant, gunpowder smoke billowed up in front of the left wing. Basang's cavalry seized the moment to scatter, advancing obliquely toward the enemy through the smoke. The thunder of pounding hooves immediately threw the three enemy formations on the right wing into panic.

The Liu brothers had divided their work quite clearly over the past two years. Liu the Lion tinkered with new weapons during wartime; Liu Chengzu experimented with old firearms at Xining Garrison — Xining Garrison had the facilities for it, after all.

But after testing all manner of divine-fire and poison-smoke weapons, Liu Chengzu had not manufactured any on a large scale. These things were useful, but not that useful. Poison smoke and divine fire depended on the wind, and no one could say for sure which way the wind would blow. Apart from attacking camps, they easily harmed one's own men in field battles.

So the only weapons truly mass-produced were a few types: smoke balls, rockets, and caltrop shells.

The smoke balls he fired were not particularly toxic, just somewhat choking. Their main use was to obscure vision — first, to block the soldiers' sight for launching a surprise assault; second, to block the commander's sight and make command difficult.

But as for whether they were effective or not, this was also Liu Chengzu's first time using them on a battlefield; even he could not say for sure.

When the first Western Tibetan noble cavalryman burst through the smoke, drawing his bow to shoot at the advancing native formation, a Captive-Destroyer cannon cart opened fire. Three one-catty iron balls tore through the gunpowder smoke one after another. They missed that rider, but killed the two horses behind him instead.

Battle on the flank erupted in an instant. The native soldiers' cavalry, following behind the infantry formations, also surged forward, charging into the smoke to tangle with the Western Tibetan horsemen, thereby protecting the frontal assault of the infantry formations on the enemy line.

This further quickened the native troops' pace at the front. Every formation involuntarily picked up speed until they had pushed to within seventy paces. One by one, the carts carrying the Captive-Destroyer cannons were dropped off, their angles adjusted, ready to fire.

But before they could fire, Huang Shengxiao, positioned on the right wing of the Marshal's headquarters army, suddenly slashed his hand down: "Fire!"

A bronze thousand-catty cannon roared at the native troops' flank formation. Men clutched their ears and turned aside. Amid the great burst of flame and smoke from the muzzle, the blackened wooden tompion, propelled by a sheet of red-hot grapeshot, sprayed forth, scything across a forty-pace front in a fan shape. Three hundred and seventy lead balls nearly sheared off an entire layer of the nearest hundred-man formation.

Before the men could recover from the shock of the sudden attack, a second bronze heavy cannon fired at the exact same spot. Huang Shengxiao called the interval between the two cannons' firing "the time it takes a man to fall."

Then the third cannon fired again.

In that extremely brief span, the men had no chance even to flee. In their dazed helplessness they endured three successive blasts of grapeshot. Over a thousand lead balls riddled the formation into a sieve.

The officer at the very front holding the Han-character banner, terrified by the bombardment, involuntarily launched a charge. Shouting hoarsely, he ran six or seven staggering steps, then swayed, planted his war banner beside him, and leaned on the riddled chieftain banner, looking down at his cotton armor.

Several holes had been punched through the blue armored skirt. Blood was running down the trouser legs beneath the skirt and onto his boot uppers. Somewhere on his chest, a shot had penetrated, dyeing the coiled-dragon emblem a deep crimson.

His mouth gaped wide, as if trying desperately to breathe, but this only made the pain in his body more unbearable. Every muscle in his face twitched, giving his gaze toward the enemy a savage ferocity. Stiffly, he drew the Sala knife at his waist, pointed it forcefully at the tribal soldiers' formation just fifty paces away, took one more step forward, and then crashed heavily to the ground.

Behind his corpse, a few survivors, utterly terrified, shrieked and scattered in all directions. Only one man remained in the formation surrounded by bodies, but he was crouching on the ground clutching his own hair, weeping — he had gone mad.

The smoke from the three heavy cannons gradually dispersed. Huang Shengxiao's face was expressionless, but involuntarily his hand reached up to touch the right ear, now only half an auricle remaining. He turned his head and ordered: "Two guns alternating fire. I forgot to leave time for them to rout."

Little Huang had grown up in Yulin. In his hometown, there was never a year without war, never a year without death. In his twenty-six years of life, his fixed certainties were not limited to the single fact that the sea was made of sand.

After joining Liu Chengzong, he was at first one of Feng Rang's soldiers. Having heard that Feng Rang survived the great rout at Sarhu by living off a human leg, he went and asked Feng Rang what human flesh tasted like.

Although Feng Rang did not tell him and even beat him up for it, he knew the answer.

Bitter. Huang Shengxiao was certain that human flesh was bitter. At the very least, the flesh of common folk was definitely bitter.

They were steeped in bitter water from birth; it could have no other taste.

A cannon report in the distance cut off Huang Shengxiao's train of thought. A one-catty small iron ball flew past his face, snapped the neck of a heavy musketeer, and then caved in the chest of another soldier.

It was a Captive-Destroyer cannon.

In the native soldier formation not far away, someone had taken over their Captive-Destroyer cannon cart after the flank formation was leveled by grapeshot. But the man seemed to have little artillery training; trembling, he had only managed to light one of the three cannons.

Yet that single cannon was like a bugle call to start the battle. Right after, one Captive-Destroyer cannon after another from the various formations at the front roared to life, launching a full-scale assault on Basang's line.

Only then did the native soldiers stare dumbfounded at the opposing side. The distance between them was now so close they could see clearly that the men standing across from them were not dismounted Mongols, but tribal soldiers carrying Mongol-style sabers, shields, and spears.

But these foreign soldiers were different from the foreign soldiers they had encountered before — more like famine victims on the Han lands under drought, not far from death. They were afraid, yet faced with cannon fire and their comrades falling, they remained utterly indifferent.

A volley of cannon fire was like smashing into a battle line formed of walking corpses. Not only did it fail to bring terror and rout to the enemy, it drew an even fiercer rain of arrows in return.

In truth, this cannon volley let Basang breathe a sigh of relief.

He and his soldiers lacked understanding of cannon types and firepower. People prepare to endure cannon fire and worry and fear it only on the premise of the kind they had seen before — that thousand-plus-catty bronze cannon, whose seven-catty cannonball pierced through an entire file of soldiers.

After enduring the cannon volley, the men instead relaxed. Immediately, shouts rang out from the front of the formation, followed by the muffled boom of heavy muskets. Gunsmoke billowed up at once, and swaths of feathered arrows fell upon the enemy ranks like locusts descending from the sky.

The native soldiers also used bird muskets and bows to project fire, but with seventy paces between the two sides, the threat the bird muskets posed to the foreign soldiers was not even as great as the Crouching Tiger Cannons.

Seeing this from atop the earthen mound, Liu Chengzong also set his mind at ease. He had kept his fists clenched tight the whole time. Behind the mound, the Marshal's Headquarters cavalry under Yang Yao's command was already prepared for a counter-charge once the foreign soldiers were routed.

But Basang had steadied the battle line, and even, with the help of the heavy musket corps, gained the upper hand in momentum over the enemy. This set his mind at ease — as long as the front could form a stalemate, his flank was certain to win.

Liu Shizi immediately waved the command flag. The war drums behind him boomed, and the right wing quickly received the message.

Huang Shengxiao swung himself onto his horse, took up the reins, drew his saber, and whirled it in a circle above his head, then pointed it diagonally toward the army formation that had just been bombarded: "Cannon corps, forward... prepare to receive the charge!"

He had only gotten halfway through his order when he suddenly saw the enemy's left-wing cavalry surging toward the artillery position. He immediately ordered his troops to prepare to receive the charge.

The infantry formed of heavy musketeers at once assembled into a slightly looser formation. The artillerymen pushed the big wheels of the cannon carts, took no aim, and fired a cannon blast straight at the onrushing cavalry.

In the instant before the gunsmoke gushed forth, Huang Shengxiao saw the leader of the charging cavalry's vanguard unit yank his reins to the left, turn his head and shout something, and at the same time perform a stirrup-hiding maneuver.

The next moment, men were thrown and horses toppled.

The warhorses in front either crashed to the ground or reared up. The cavalrymen behind collided into those ahead. Just as they were jammed up, bang-bang — several more cannon shots.

Facing a cavalry charge, Huang Shengxiao's artillerymen could not help but panic. At this moment, no one had the presence of mind to leave time for men to fall or flee. In the blink of an eye, the remaining heavy cannons were all discharged. The grapeshot they spewed even plowed the dirt before the artillery position into a fan-shaped zone riddled with holes.

The cavalry caught within this zone was a sight too horrible to behold. Batch after batch of warhorses collapsed, struggling to rise, but the bullet holes in their bodies let them only strain their necks and let out feeble, mournful whinnies.

The native officer who had evaded the cannon fire by stirrup-hiding leaped up, turned back, raised his blade, and called his native soldiers to advance on foot in formation. The Marshal's Headquarters artillerymen, having fired all their shells, had no time to reload either, and drew their waist sabers, preparing to form up and charge.

But to their surprise, the mere sight of them taking a stance sent that native officer, the foot soldiers, and even the native cavalry behind them fleeing in terror.

Just as they were marveling at their own fearsomeness, the sound of clattering hooves came from behind — it was the grass-guzzling little expert Xie Erhu, leading the Mongol cavalry as they galloped in with sabers raised.

Huang Shengxiao, on horseback, burst into laughter. Brandishing his waist saber, he gave the order: "Heavy muskets, advance from the flank! Musket-carts, fire from the flank! Smash their center army!"