Chapter 494: The Torn Imperial Almanac

Outside Gaotai City, the fourth watch of the night was pitch-black; the villages and homesteads beyond the walls were hemmed in on all sides by trenches and ramparts.

With the Dragon Boat Festival drawing near, the nights were no longer cold. Columns of cook-smoke from the siege camp merged with the night sky, and amid the lingering scent of gunpowder, the enticing aroma of meat broth hung thick in the air.

Inside the abandoned village where the central army was stationed, dim lamplight seeped from the tent flaps of several army tents along the loess road, and stern-faced officers hurried in and out of the village.

Cao Yao, draped in a wool-lined surcoat, strode toward the courtyard and asked the guard standing post by the torch at the gate, "Where is the Grand Marshal?"

The guard saluted. "General Cao, the Grand Marshal only fell asleep half a shichen ago."

Cao Yao nodded. "Time's up. Go fetch wash water for the Grand Marshal."

In the large tent where officers held council, Brigade Commander Yang Yao and the various battalion colonels from the front lines arrived one after another, all fully dressed. They removed their helmets and sat on either side of the long table spread with a map. No one whispered to one another; they all simply stared at the map, lost in thought.

On that map, the combat positions of several battalions, down to the chiliarchy level, had been marked: Prince Sataiji with eight hundred Chahar troops west of Gaotai City; Mo Yujing with two thousand Khoshut troops watering their horses on the north bank of the Black River; Wei Qian'er's battalion, two chiliarchies south of the city and one chiliarchy setting up defenses fifteen li southeast of Gaotai.

The Marshal's Army's main assault direction was the south of the city; Hu Zhishen's Suzhou Battalion would serve as the first wave of troops to storm the city.

The crystal hourglass on the table trickled away. Soon, as a guard loudly announced, "The Grand Marshal arrives!", the officers in the tent immediately rose, helmets in hand. Then Liu Chengzong, his eyes bloodshot yet brimming with energy, strode swiftly into the tent with Cao Yao. Just as everyone was getting to their feet, he pressed his palm downward. "Sit. Have you all eaten?"

The commanders nodded one after another. Although it was only the fourth watch, the entire army had already eaten breakfast, and today's breakfast had been especially good. The fire-team leaders from every squad had stayed up all night, setting up pots to boil water and chop meat and noodles by the third watch, mixing in garlic sprouts and tofu to make saozi noodles for the whole army.

Authentic ones, at that. The technical advisor for this meal of Lanzhou saozi noodles was Yang Qi, the former Ming Regional Commander and a Lanzhou native himself; only the saozi, which should have used pork, was made with beef instead.

Yang Qi said it was for good luck — these saozi noodles, back in the Tang Dynasty, were called longevity noodles.

As for the beef, it was a gift from Ming Army Colonel Lin Chengdong. Before leading his wagon battalion in a breakout, he had eaten everything that could be eaten and taken everything that could be carried. The thirty-odd cattle and twenty-odd pigs he simply could not take with him were all slaughtered on the spot.

Brigade Commander Yang Yao, seated at the head of the long table, smiled. "Rest assured, Grand Marshal, the whole army has eaten. You're the only one left who hasn't."

"Good."

Liu Chengzong let out a short laugh. The fighting over in the Zhangye Oasis to the east had become far too chaotic. Zhang Tianlin's division had lost its organization; officers at every level in the oasis could not find their soldiers, and soldiers could not find their officers. But everyone knew the Grand Marshal's central army was besieging Gaotai, so officers at every level sent their intelligence reports straight to the central army.

He had spent the entire night buried in a sea of field reports, trying to discern the overall battlefield situation from the reports of scattered field battalions... All in all, Zhang Tianlin's division was fighting decently. The soldiers led by officers at every level were striking fast and pulling out fast amid the chaotic melee.

Very few had defected to the enemy, but there were many wounded, many deserters, and many missing in action.

On the other hand, there were also many replacements: soldiers from the same battalion but under other officers, soldiers who had come over from the Ming side, and even soldiers taken directly as prisoners.

There was even a centenar, nicknamed Azalea, who had once been a soldier under Flying Sky Monkey. Writing a field report to the Grand Marshal for the first time, he was so excited he could barely speak coherently.

Azalea reported that he had become scattered and lost contact with his direct superior, the squad commander, and was panicking when he happened to run into over three hundred Ming troops in the field. The Ming troops were also panicking; the two armies, upon seeing each other, simultaneously turned and fled.

Coming to his senses, Azalea led his troops back to charge the enemy formation and personally captured himself a commanding officer — one Wang Huaizhong, a squad commander from the Gansu Garrison.

By the time Azalea wrote his field report, the three hundred Ming troops under Wang Huaizhong had already discarded their helmets and spears. Together with Azalea's own unit, a total of four hundred and forty-two men, they had occupied an old fort southeast of Ganzhou.

There were many similar field reports. Liu Chengzong judged that Li Hongsi's army, fleeing east toward Ganzhou, had lost its organization. Morale had clearly plummeted during the successive loss of territory and the eastward retreat of the battle lines; the soldiers lacked the will to fight, and low-ranking officers showed a strong tendency to surrender.

It was obvious that in this campaign to decide the fate of Gansu, victory was tilting toward the Marshal's Mansion.

Once Gaotai was taken, the Zhangye Oasis would surely be a smooth road ahead.

Inside the central army command tent, officers of every rank reported that preparations for the assault were complete. Liu Chengzong reached across the long table, took the imperial almanac, tore off a page, and looked at it.

The torn-off page, stamped with the seal of the Imperial Directorate of Astronomy, read: the twenty-sixth day of the fourth month, seventh year of the Chongzhen reign. Suitable for burials and funerals, for sacrifices and encoffining.

"Pass on my order: take Gaotai!"

With Liu Chengzong's command, the torn page of the almanac was cast into the fire, turning to ash that rose on the heat and drifted through the felt tent's dome toward the sky.

Under the night sky, the siege camp was dotted with sparks of fire. Military music rose and fell in waves. Rows of Suzhou Battalion soldiers, torches held high, threaded through the trenches and earthen ramparts. One by one, thousand-catty red-barbarian cannons were pushed onto their designated firing platforms, protected by timber-and-earth walls. Cart after cart of ammunition was piled behind earth-and-stone fortifications. Wagon after wagon, heaped with earth and rocks, was pushed to the edges of the fields.

And on the southern wall of Gaotai City, Yang Jiamo, Regional Commander of the Gansu Garrison, like the cooks in the camp outside, had not slept all night.

Ever since yesterday morning, when the gentry of Ganzhou City came to the foot of the wall to urge surrender and brought news that Ganzhou had fallen to Liu Chengzong, Yang Jiamo had not closed his eyes again.

The movements of the besieging army outside the city could not fool him. The various actions Liu Chengzong took might not be so easy to understand in the eyes of the Marshal's Army's main-force colonels, but Yang Jiamo up on the wall understood them perfectly.

Over the past half-month and more, Yang Jiamo had not been idle inside the city. He had nearly finished demolishing the buildings within Gaotai, leaving only a few two- and three-story structures as resting places for the wounded. The timber, bricks, and stone obtained were all hastily made into defensive equipment, all for one desperate, life-or-death struggle.

Because Yang Jiamo knew very well: Liu Chengzong was building siege engines, gathering provisions and supplies, eliminating nearby strongholds, bottling up the surrounding troops, filling in the outer trenches, increasing the number of assault cannons, and waiting for reinforcements to arrive... It was impossible that he did not understand — every single move was designed to kill him.

And now, clearly, the time had come.

It began with a single signal cannon outside the city, then the sound of suona horns rose and fell in waves, followed closely by the deep, rich timbre of war drums being beaten. In the darkness of night, within the five-li gap between the two sides, the creaking and groaning of rolling wheels rose from the blackness, making one's scalp crawl.

Yang Jiamo's defending troops had set several dozen bonfires burning with oil two li outside the city, but beyond the second trench line, it was pitch-black and impossible to see.

Yet even without seeing, he could tell by the sound — it was the distinctive noise of the thick, wide little wooden wheels of siege equipment, grinding over the fields in droves.

Inside Gaotai City, signal cannons and military music likewise erupted in a cacophony. Soldiers who had been sleeping with their weapons at the ready awoke in alarm and rushed toward the city walls, assembling at the base of the wall beneath the horse-ramps, where defensive equipment was piled high.

Liu Chengzong's siege deployment was an open book. Yang Jiamo had seen it clearly during the day: there were no troops stationed outside the north gate, but that was the Black River, and Mongol cavalry still roamed beyond it — a dead end. Outside the west gate, there were enemy defensive forces, but the siege equipment was not there; it was not the main assault direction.

That left the other two gates. Outside the east gate, there were no enemy troops — a path of escape deliberately left open. To run out and flee a dozen or so li until you were dog-tired, only to have well-rested enemy troops pounce and beat you like a drowning dog, was a basic tactic.

That left the south gate. Eighteen field heavy cannons were arrayed in a single line, along with siege wagons piled up like clouds. Without a doubt, the main assault direction was the south of the city.

But since he saw that Liu Chengzong intended to use cannon fire to clear a path, Yang Jiamo could not let his soldiers mount the walls at the first moment. Moreover, Gaotai City was too small; cannonballs flying over the wall and crashing into the city would still cause casualties among troops that had not yet assembled. Therefore, he could only have his troops assemble beneath the horse-ramps on the inner side of the wall.

Only a little over two hundred men were stationed on the wall itself, but for Yang Jiamo, these soldiers were enough for now.

As he spread his arms, the retainer behind him, holding a three-eyed gun, fired a signal shot. The soldiers stationed beneath the southeast corner tower of Gaotai City immediately received the order. With a few shouts, torches were brought to a mounted-fire war-cart, and a Hundred-Tiger Salvo Launcher roared to life. Over a hundred fire-arrows shot forth in rapid succession, casting a faint glow over the fields south of the city.

In the brief illumination of the rockets' tail-flames, a long column of lele carts, heaped with earth and rocks, was driving toward the second trench line outside the city; the lead carts had already begun filling it in.

Behind those lele carts, enormous contraptions advanced slowly, casting vast shadows behind them.

Just as the Hundred-Tiger Salvo Launcher on the wall spewed a great cloud of gunpowder smoke, the siege camp five li away erupted in a burst of blinding light. A battery of six thousand-catty cannons, firing at near-maximum elevation, hurled shrieking solid shot toward the top of the wall.

Several cannonballs struck the face of the wall and the parapet, smashing several gray bricks to pieces. Two more pierced the smoke and flew into the city, though none seemed to have hit their intended target — the Hundred-Tiger Salvo Launcher.

Even so, the terrifying display made Yang Jiamo, standing atop the wall, frown involuntarily. He muttered, "They shoot rather accurately."

Although not a single shot hit the mounted-fire war-cart, the gunnery displayed by the Marshal's Army's artillerymen still seemed miraculous to the defenders on the wall — for two cannons to land a shot within a five-pace radius from seventeen hundred paces away would not be strange at all.

But for a six-gun salvo, if you excluded the shots that flew over the wall, to still land within a ten-pace radius... the impact points were a little too tightly clustered.

To the common soldier, this level of accuracy was frighteningly precise; they were merely watching the spectacle. The Ming artillerymen on the wall, however, could see the real skill behind it. This could not be explained by gunnery skill alone; in fact, gunnery skill was the least important factor in a salvo of this scale.

To put it bluntly, raising a cannon's muzzle a few inches was nothing more than a matter of a ruler; you could even prop up the angle by piling stones.

Standardized gun carriages, standardized cannons, standardized powder charges, and standardized cannonballs — these were the cornerstones that made such firing precision possible. Without them, no amount of gunnery skill could produce such accuracy from six different cannons.

Standardization in the military industry was nothing new; it had existed in every dynasty since the Qin. But equally true was that at the end of every dynasty's reign, it was something longed for but never attained.

Take the Great Ming, for example. Back when the Wanli Emperor had just ascended the throne, the artillerymen of Ji Garrison would set up two poles of unequal length and use a breech-loading Frankish-style "Invincible Great General" cannon to fire live rounds, hitting whatever they aimed at with this same kind of precision.

That contest came down entirely to the gunners' skill, because if a cannon had any problem, Lord Qi would personally go settle accounts with the gunner.

But here and now, given the Ming dynasty's military investment, only Liaodong could get whatever cannon it wanted; in Gansu, if a gunner reported a cannon had problems and couldn't shoot straight, Grand Marshal Yang Jiamo could only pat his subordinate on the shoulder and console him: "Just having something to use is good enough."

In fact, Yang Jiamo had said exactly that just half a month ago. The two of them from the Ganzhou Camp had brought field equipment and climbed up Gaotai City to find the heavy wall-defense cannons. The gunner said, Grand Marshal, these cannons built by the ancestors probably can't stand up to the reckless bandits.

Yang Jiamo looked at the Jiajing, Longqing, and Wanli emperors arrayed on the city wall. What could he say besides "ancestors protect us"?

The volley from the six thousand-jin cannons on the left wing was like a signal. Moments later, the right wing likewise flashed with firelight as the six thousand-jin cannons roared one after another, and then the six cannons at the front joined the bombardment.

In truth, however, the accuracy of the Marshal's Army's eighteen thousand-jin cannons arrayed before the formation had little to do with gunnery skill. At this hour, at this distance, before daybreak, they could not even make out the outline of Gaotai's walls.

Liu Chengzong's gunners only knew the positions where their cannons should be placed. These were firing positions determined over half a month of besieging the city. Blue bricks formed the cannon-carriage tracks, and pits were dug behind the carriages with stones laid in. They only had to push the cannon along the track, let the rear kick up and the breech sink into the pit, then check the angle with a sighting rule — and fire with their eyes shut.

What remained was the error caused by seventeen hundred paces of air and cannonballs that were not perfectly round.

The alternating salvos of the three cannon batteries thundered on, delivering a shock to the defenders that was anything but trivial, yet the gunners on the Marshal's Army's position fired with unhurried precision.

Because the fixed firing angles and positions made the firing procedure far more cumbersome than in normal field battles, they fired at only half the speed prescribed by the drill manual — five shots per quarter-hour, a rate of fire perfectly suited to a leisurely retirement.

Even so, the eighteen thousand-jin cannons operated by the Tiger Guard Camp officers still fired seven hundred and twenty rounds at three targets atop the wall throughout the entire yin hour.

When the first ray of sunlight fell upon the battlements of Gaotai City, the brick-clad southern wall was everywhere cracked and shattered, the rammed-earth layer exposed in many places, and even the corner tower on the eastern end of the south wall had, at some unknown moment, been blasted half to ruin.

Liu Chengzong stood on the position where the smell of gunpowder smoke would not disperse, holding his telescope and counting the crenellations that had been battered down — thirty-three of them. A satisfied smile appeared on his face. He turned to the gunners and gave the order: "It's light now. Prioritize suppressing the cannons on the wall, and while you're at it, knock down the rest of the crenellations."

Amid the gunners' thunderous shouts of assent, a messenger from the front line ran back to the main army and reported: "Grand Marshal, the second trench has been filled in. We can advance!"

Liu Chengzong said nothing, only beckoned lightly. Behind him, signal flags unfurled. The war wagons, each hung with thick wooden mantlets, that had halted beyond the second trench began to push forward. Their enormous shadows shielded the ladder carts and tower carts advancing behind them into the range of the Frankish cannons on the wall.

At the same moment, the Great General Cannons on the wall, still protected by the crenellations, opened fire. Solid iron shot came hurtling at the wooden mantlets on the front line, sending the thick mantlets suspended by ropes tumbling and rolling.

The cannons of both armies thundered. Hiding behind a mantlet war wagon and directing the battle, Suzhou Camp Assistant Commander Hu Zhishen shouted urgently: "Move, move, move! Forward! Shove those mantlets right in their faces!"

Good evening!