Chapter 436: The Sky Is High, Let the Birds Fly Free

On the eighteenth day of the eleventh month of the sixth year of the Chongzhen reign, at the eastern foothills of the Taihang Mountains, in Wu'an County, Zhangde Prefecture, Henan.

The sky was cold and the ground frozen solid. Among the mountains, the various camp banners and great standards, soaked with dew, had frozen into icicles. The Shaanxi-Shanxi Peasant Army had established fifty-seven camps in the Taihang Mountains. Fine horses galloped back and forth along the crisscrossing mountain paths, and from time to time a shout in the northern Shaanxi dialect would carry far across the empty valleys.

Li Zicheng stood by the lake, clutching a fur robe. The cold wind swept in, blowing up the hem of his military tunic and revealing the tall cotton boots on his feet. Using the hand that held his felt hat, he shooed his mount forward, driving the horse toward the frozen surface of the lake.

The felt hat in his hand was not a Fanyang-style broad-brimmed hat, but a military cap once popular in ancient times. Because its chin strap kept it from being shaken off, it was convenient for use on horseback. However, during the Wanli reign, it had been replaced by the Confucian scholar's cap and had disappeared from common use.

It was not until the Tianqi and Chongzhen reigns that this hat became popular again in Xuanfu. It came in various materials, such as black gauze and lacquered gauze, and could be decorated with gold foil on the crown or adorned with hanging horsetail or egret feathers.

It was the military cap worn by military officers, thief-catchers, and ceremonial guards in Xuanfu when meeting their superiors. It carried the meaning of winning rank and fame on horseback, and for this reason it was called the Xuan cap.

As the peasant armies had been fighting across Shanxi, Henan, and Northern Zhili for a full year, the Chuang Camp—the most strictly disciplined of the fifty-seven camps—had fought government forces from every route without a month's respite, killing generals and routing armies in succession, and had built up unparalleled prestige.

This cap was Li Zicheng's war trophy, and a symbol of swaggering triumph for the officers of the Chuang Camp, great and small.

Li Zicheng watched his warhorse walk across the ice, then turned and cast his gaze southward, slowly exhaling a cloud of white mist. This year's winter had come earlier and was harsher than in years past. Jingniang Lake had frozen solid, and the Yellow River was not far off.

They were going to break through the encirclement.

Returning to the camp at the Changuo Temple on Dingjin Cliff, Li Zicheng led his horse along a mountain path flanked by stone statues. He heard a soldier behind him report: "General, the King Across the Sky has persuaded Zhang Miaoshou and Ma Huihui and the others. They are resolved to jointly send a feigned surrender to the Wu'an garrison."

Li Zicheng paused for a moment, then nodded heavily and said, "Good!"

Across the vast battlefield stretching five hundred li within the Taihang Mountains, the court had summoned all manner of battle-hardened, capable generals and fierce commanders to form an elite corps, creating a massive encirclement around the righteous armies.

Regional Commander Liang Fu was stationed at Baoding. Lu Xiangsheng led the Tianxiong Army from the three prefectures of Daming, Guangping, and Shunde. Zuo Liangyu led the Changping Army, encamped in Henan. Assistant Suppression Commander Tang Jiuzhou campaigned everywhere. The Sichuan troops under Reinforcement Suppression Commander Deng Qi gave their all on the battlefield. And there were also Ma Xianglin, the Shizhu Tusi chieftain and son of Qin Liangyu, and his wife, Assistant Regional Commander Zhang Fengyi, leading the Shizhu Army—all of them crack troops and fierce commanders.

But as time passed, the righteous army's advantages grew greater and greater.

In this year of warfare, for both the government forces and the righteous armies, the government commanders worked together seamlessly, exhausting their courage and resources.

The seven thousand tribal and local militia troops of the Henan provincial command were defeated in every battle, until they would surrender at the mere sight of the enemy. Zuo Liangyu led his troops to their aid, fighting as an isolated force across Henan. Afterward, Ma Xianglin led the Shizhu Army into Henan to assist in the fighting, while his wife Zhang Fengyi remained in Zhangde Prefecture to suppress the rebellion.

Later, Zhang Fengyi was killed by the righteous army at Liuming Pass in Yongnian, and the greater part of the Shizhu Army under her command was annihilated.

The rebel army besieged Tangyin. The Sichuan commander Deng Qi was heavily encircled by the rebels at a place outside the city called Tuchaowo and was nearly wiped out as a unit. Zuo Liangyu led his isolated force to the rescue, risking life and limb to pull him out of the heavy encirclement.

But after this, the situation turned sharply against the government forces.

First, Ma Xianglin, grieving the loss of his wife, blamed the Baoding provincial command's central army commanders Sun Hongmo and Yang Fang, who had been close by with their troops but did not come to her rescue when she was besieged and isolated.

Then, the Sichuan troops under Deng Qi had already been away from Sichuan for four years. Deng Qi's promise that they could return home after the fighting was over had not been fulfilled. The court owed them back pay, and they had suffered heavy losses at Tangyin. Military law could no longer restrain the soldiers, and discipline deteriorated.

Liang Fu, Zuo Liangyu, and Tang Jiuzhou fought quite well, but just as the encirclement was about to succeed, the court dispatched Ni Chong and Wang Pu of the Capital Camp, along with the eunuchs Yang Jinchao and Lu Jiude, to come and claim the victory.

Claiming the victory was one thing, but these Capital Camp troops actually caused them a great deal of trouble.

Because of bandit unrest around Handan, Yongnian, and Liuming Pass, Baoding Regional Commander Liang Fu moved his camp to Shunde Prefecture to assist in the suppression. The common people in the western hills of Handan sacrificed their family fortunes, and fathers, sons, and brothers formed righteous volunteer militias, asking to be allowed to kill the bandits themselves.

Ding Kuichu, the Grand Coordinator of Baoding, who had come with the Baoding Army, had originally wanted to greatly commend these volunteers, only to discover that the bandits the Handan people wanted to kill were not the likes of Li Zicheng, but the Capital Camp troops.

This was because within the Capital Camp there was a small battalion, the Liao troops under Wang Pu's father, Wang Wei—over eight hundred men. By all rights, these veteran elite soldiers should have received good care and treatment, but Wang Wei had exploited them excessively. As a result, when this small battalion was transferred to the Zhangde Prefecture area, they mutinied on the spot and all became bandits.

The commanders exhausted every effort to pacify them and recall them, but in the end only one hundred and ninety men returned. As for the rest who did not return, not only did they stay away, but after years of harsh abuse by their officers, once they had plundered the common people's property, their combat effectiveness more than doubled. Liang Fu's eight thousand Baoding troops simply could not wipe out these six hundred men.

As for Zuo Liangyu, the valiant and helpful Zuo Liangyu voiced no complaints. It was just that the battle at Tuchaowo outside Tangyin was the last time in his life he would ever risk life and limb to rescue an allied force.

All commanders outside the Capital Camp—no, all armies, including the Capital Camp—after autumn, never again led their troops to sweep the mountains.

It was not only the government forces who were exhausted. The righteous army had paid a price several times greater than the government forces. Dozens of chieftains had died in battle, and they were trapped in the Taihang Mountains with their provisions cut off, subsisting on nothing but thin gruel made from tree bark and grass roots.

By the coming year, without the court even needing to launch a general offensive, their morale would collapse on its own.

Therefore, crossing the river was, for Li Zicheng, imperative.

Moreover, crossing the Yellow River offered three advantages. First, floods, droughts, and locust plagues had struck Henan simultaneously, causing terrible suffering and making life unbearable for the people. Entering Henan could make up for the manpower losses they had suffered in the war.

Second, once they crossed the Yellow River, the siege they faced would naturally be lifted.

As for the third, the contradictions among the rebel army's fifty-seven camps had already become unprecedentedly sharp. If they stayed together any longer, sooner or later they would end up killing each other.

By this stage, the rebellion had grown increasingly complex. Their origins varied widely: there were men from northern Shaanxi, Guanzhong, Hexi, Shanxi, Hebei, Henan, Liaodong, and Mongols.

There were frontier soldiers, licentiates, garrison troops, peasants, landlords, vagrants, sedentary bandits, robbers, scholars, merchants, grooms, and more—every walk of life.

Some had risen in arms to achieve great things; some had risen in fury out of desperation; some were full of rage and burning for revenge; some slaughtered the innocent and treated human life as grass; some upheld justice and walked the path of righteousness; some wanted to accept amnesty in exchange for an official post; and still others wanted to kill everyone and make a clean sweep of it all.

Among these fifty-seven great chieftains alone, apart from being court rebels hunted by government troops, they shared almost nothing in common.

Li Zicheng had led his own Chuang Camp in many difficult campaigns under the King Across the Sky, Wang Jiayin. Men learned warfare in war, and having suffered many bitter lessons in head-on clashes with government forces, they had now devised a mature set of tactics centered on ambush and enticement.

His repeated efforts to rescue and aid allied forces, and his repeated ambushes that defeated government troops, had earned him great prestige among the many chieftains.

But even Wang Jiayin could no longer suppress those chieftains who could not stand the sight of each other. At the same time, Li Zicheng also found it hard to suppress his own loathing for many of the chieftains.

Only by separating was there any way to temporarily avoid conflict.

Very soon, the fifty-seven allied chieftains drafted a joint letter in the Taihang Mountains. Zhang Miaoshou personally delivered it to the Capital Camp troops stationed at Wu'an, presenting it before Ni Chong and Wang Pu.

At the same time, over a hundred thousand righteous troops hiding in the mountains were using the Taihang range's overlapping peaks and ridges to conceal their movements, urgently migrating southward.

From She County they traveled south along mountain roads into Zezhou, then moved en masse into the Wangwu Mountains to regroup.

Men hurried to saw planks. In Li Zicheng's Chuang Camp in particular, they set up smelting furnaces and melted down the twelve lion cannons in their possession into copper ingots, which were distributed to the troops.

These cannons were ones he had earlier traded for with money and grain from Gao Yingxiang at Lion's Gulch. They were all fine copper cannons weighing two hundred jin. Li Zicheng's heart ached when he gave the order, but the four-hundred-jin weight of cannon and carriage together made them too difficult to move quickly across the ice. He could only bear the pain and have them melted down, to be recast someday if the opportunity arose.

But whether the opportunity to recast them would ever come, Li Zicheng did not know.

On the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month, at a Temple of Guan Yu in a ravine in the Wangwu Mountains, the officers of the Chuang Camp gathered together. Every man wore a Xuan cap and was dressed in gaudy finery.

In truth, Li Zicheng demanded very high military discipline. Many of the old brothers around him were former frontier soldiers themselves. After he gradually made a name for himself in the uprising, he had followed Wang Jiayin, whose force was practically a regular army, and had also received guidance from Gao Yingxiang through trade with Lion's Gulch.

To these two veterans, Wang Jiayin and Gao Yingxiang, their advice to Li Zicheng was a platitude: discipline.

Wang Jiayin was the great chieftain of the rebel armies in Shaanxi and Shanxi, while Gao Yingxiang was more like a guardian deity in a great temple of northern Shaanxi—his cannons and his organizational structure would bless every child who left northern Shaanxi to venture out into the world.

The chieftains Li Zicheng was now closest to were the Heaven-Mixing King Zhang Yingjin, the Floor-Sweeping King Zhang Yichuan, the Troubled-Times King Guo Yingpin, and the Scorpion Block Tuo Yangkun. They were known as the Five Camps of the Chuang Army, and all used the early Lion Camp organizational system devised by Gao Yingxiang.

These men formed the most combat-effective contingent under Wang Jiayin's command. Each had a camp of twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred men, and in addition there were smaller camps that included female dependents, all on a scale of seven or eight hundred people.

This was because they had all left their families at Lion's Gulch.

This organizational structure, derived from the mobile warfare tactics Liu Chengzong had summarized back in the day, was very useful. It greatly increased the chieftains' efficiency and survivability when raiding for provisions.

In truth, Li Zicheng did not ask much of the chieftains who joined camps with him. Combat strength, strong or weak, did not matter. He only demanded obedience: do not panic during an ambush, do not flee during an assault, and on the march, each man may bring at most one woman.

At this stage of the war, all the other demands were simple. Only the rule about women—only these few men could manage it.

They also had uniform requirements for officers and soldiers' dress, but the problem was it was winter now.

The Chuang Camp, trapped in the Taihang Mountains for nearly half a year, could not get enough winter clothes. To ward off the cold, people wrapped themselves in almost every scrap of fabric they could find.

In the flickering candlelight of the half-burned Guan Di Temple, Li Zicheng said to the group: "The Mianchi garrison commander is called Yuan Daquan. We'll cross the river there. Once we cross the Yellow River, we won't stay with them anymore — just our five camps."

Zhang Yingjin and Zhang Yichuan were both old hands among the rebel forces. Mixed King Zhang Yingjin, in particular, had extremely deep seniority; in the early years, he had merged camps with Liu Chengzong and Gao Yingxiang.

Zhang Yichuan was a bit less seasoned — he had never met Liu Chengzong face to face. He was one of Gao Yingxiang's junior brothers. But after Wang Zuogua was amnestied, Zhang Yichuan led his troops and followed right behind Wang Zuogua. Many of Zuogua's seasoned, battle-hardened veterans who refused amnesty all defected to Zhang Yichuan.

Zhang Yingjin said nothing, only nodding. Zhang Yichuan spat and said, "I've been sick of them for a while. After we finish off this Yuan Daquan, where do we go? Henan's gone from drought to flood to locusts — we can't stay there. Do we enter Huguang, or go find the Dashing King?"

Li Zicheng asked, "Back to northern Shaanxi?"

Zhang Yichuan shook his head and said mysteriously, "No. I heard the Dashing King has come out of Lion Valley. He had an internal feud with the government troops at Yan'an, pulled over a hundred cannons, and is heading south. He might be going to attack Xi'an City."

Internal feud?

That was a rather peculiar word. Li Zicheng blinked, not quite understanding.

Zhang Yichuan smiled and said, "Hey, anyway, the Dashing King is out now. It wasn't allowed to be talked about before, but it should be fine now. Truth is, the soldiers and bandits in Yan'an are all one family — all surnamed Liu."

Li Zicheng asked, puzzled, "Liu is a major surname in Yan'an Prefecture. Plenty of people in the Yan'an Guard and Yan'an Battalion are surnamed Liu — I know that. But there aren't that many Lius on the Dashing King's side, are there?"

He had risen later than the others, and in Mizhi at that. He hadn't stayed long in his hometown, basically fighting a mobile war in Shanxi the whole time. When he went back to northern Shaanxi, it was only to Lion Valley to find Gao Yingxiang.

Because apart from Lion Valley, the lands along both banks of the Yan River were a zone of absolute chaos. The villages there had an extremely high degree of organization, and the villagers were poor and fierce — they paid no grain tax to the court, and they allowed no army to stay overnight.

The people who remained there couldn't be distinguished by the simple labels of soldier or bandit, because they fought everyone. Under normal circumstances, whether soldier or bandit, a small squad that entered simply became a missing persons case. The common folk would bring out their gun teams and cannon teams, lay minefields, and blow them to bits.

As for powerful rebel or government forces, they were useless too. No grain could be gathered along the Yan River's banks. No one could station there permanently.

You didn't know that, did you!

Zhang Yichuan shook his head, rather pleased with himself, and raised a hand. "Those are all Lius of the Northwest King."

He thought to himself: this is precious intelligence on the early development of the Yan'an fierce general. If I don't tell them, could you juniors possibly know?

Zhang Yingjin was far more composed than him, never one to tell people such things. But at this moment, he spoke up: "Whichever Liu it is doesn't matter. They're all feudal lords this far away, and now they're fighting each other. Let's drop what comes after. Where are we going?"

Li Zicheng was dumbstruck. From Zhang Yichuan's words, he sensed — was Yan'an Regional Commander Yang Yanchang also one of Liu Chengzong's men?

Then he composed himself, shook his head, and said, "I originally wanted to go to Huguang. But if what you say is true, I don't think it's necessarily a real fight."

"It should be real. I heard that the Yan'an Guard Commander Ren Quan'er handed over Zhong Douxing's head. They also suffered heavy losses."

Zhang Yichuan had just finished when Li Zicheng cut him off. "No. No one at court has ever seen Zhong Douxing."

"But some of those amnestied bastards have seen—" Zhang Yichuan stopped halfway, the implication dawning on him. "Commander Yang has a man called Du Wu by his side. He can disguise corpses' faces."

"That settles it. The Dashing King Gao came out of the mountains because there wasn't enough grain. We were surrounded, and no one transported grain to Lion Valley this year. He needs to find grain, and to find grain he must enter Guanzhong. If he enters Guanzhong, the court will inevitably transfer the Yan'an army south to suppress the rebellion."

Li Zicheng analyzed, "They had to fight one battle first, so the Yan'an army would be too weakened to march south and suppress the rebellion. Tong Pass is impassable. Nanyang — we'll go to Nanyang, then advance toward Hanzhong, and inquire about the Dashing King's news along the way."

Just then, a scout rode up to the Guan Di Temple and reported: "General Chuang, the Horizontal King has sent word — the Yellow River is frozen over!"

"Frozen over?"

Li Zicheng stood, brushed the dust from his clothes, took a deep breath, and said to the group: "Tell the brothers to bring their door planks. We cross the river. From this day on, the sky is wide and the birds fly free!"

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Good evening!