Chapter 507: The First Day of the Dog Days

A difficult problem had arrived.

Liu Shizi had been utterly disgusted by Hong Chengchou.

He had just led the army past Yongchang Guard, and the forward scouts had gone beyond Rouyuan Post Station, when they came galloping back in a fluster to tell him the fields had all been burned, leaving nothing but piles of ash from scorched stalks on the ground.

His heart sank — what Yang Jiamo had failed to accomplish at Gaotai, Hong Chengchou defending Liangzhou had managed to pull off.

At this, Liu Shizi was in no hurry to advance any further. As it happened, the main army was just reaching Tanshankou Fort, so he simply dispatched messengers to order every camp to halt the advance and garrison the surrounding forts, to question surrendered troops about the locations of iron mines and kilns, and for the brigade commanders of each camp to assemble at Tanshankou Fort the next day for a council of war.

Wang Ziyong had no need to search for mineral deposits; his sole task was to contact members of the Three Tribulations Society in the forts around Liangzhou Guard and find out just what Liangzhou Guard had been up to all this time.

The twenty-fourth day of the fifth month, the first day of the dog days.

Inside the garrison commander's office at Tanshankou Fort, a crowd of Marshal's Headquarters brigade commanders of military-han origin had shed their armor and sat in the government hall gnashing their teeth — they had come to thoroughly loathe Hong Chengchou.

The dog days signify the arrival of the scorching season, when yin energy is forced by yang energy to hide concealed underground; for people, it is a time suited to lying low, not to exertion.

Across the Gansu territories Liu Chengzong had conquered, Song Xian the commander at Suzhou, Yin Ruyue the magistrate at Gaotai, and Cao Yao at Ganzhou had all sent word to the front that the wheat harvest had begun in earnest, with peasants laboring day and night without rest.

But for the military men under Liu Chengzong, this time was even more grueling — armor could no longer be worn, and having finally reached the vicinity of Liangzhou in the dog days, they discovered that that bastard Hong Chengchou had chopped down even the trees... a real pleasant surprise.

The commanders were already itching with fury to begin with, and after rushing urgently to Tanshankou Fort, the council of war still could not convene properly because Wang Ziyong had not arrived. They waited another two full days before Wang Ziyong finally showed up at his leisure.

Wang Ziyong entered the yamen, swept his gaze across the commanders' faces, and finally fixed it on Liu Chengzong. He drew a small booklet from inside his robes, presented it to Liu Chengzong, and said, "Commander, Liangzhou... I fear it cannot be taken."

Liu Shizi was so hot that sweat beaded on his forehead and he was already irritable. Hearing Wang Ziyong's words, he felt a surge of anger rise from his heart. He forcibly suppressed it, slowly grunting an "Mm" through his nose, and opened the woodblock-printed booklet. The more he read, the deeper his frown became. "Regulations for the Defense of a City — where did you get this thing?"

"Liangzhou city."

The words had barely left Wang Ziyong's mouth when Liu Chengzong looked up in surprise and asked, "You got inside?"

"No. Liangzhou's defenses are extremely tight. Since they began defending the city ten days ago, the gates shut and after that no one gets in, no exceptions. Not only can outsiders not enter, even the local commoners can't get in."

Wang Ziyong looked at the booklet in Liu Chengzong's hands. "This was passed by the Three Tribulations Society members inside the city to the local cell leader outside before the gates closed. As it turned out, he himself couldn't get back in either."

As he spoke, he shook his head. "There are none of our own people left in the city."

The Three Tribulations Society had suffered a devastating blow in Liangzhou. When Hong Chengchou prepared the city's defense, he issued an order: to guard against White Lotus Sect infiltration, all hired laborers, helpers, idlers, the old, and the weak who had come into the city within the past three years were to be driven out en masse.

This profile, aside from the fact that they had no understanding whatsoever of White Lotus Sect doctrine, framed the Three Tribulations Society members with devastating precision.

Wang Ziyong was furious about this order. You're driving out the White Lotus Sect, damn it — what are you throwing all of us from the Three Tribulations Society out for?

Liu Chengzong had only read a few pages of the booklet before he looked up, pointed at it, and said to Wang Ziyong with delight, "Elder Brother, this is a deed of great merit."

Hong Chengchou's city defense manual was extraordinarily comprehensive.

From pre-siege preparations to remove all useful resources and fortify defenses, the allocation of personnel and supplies, to grain loans between rich and poor households during the siege, the manufacture and use of various implements and devices, the opening and closing of gates, the defense of all four sides, the selection and deployment of ghost troops at night — it even included a city's routine peacetime preparations.

On the matter of ghost troops alone, Liu Chengzong could foresee an enormous impact on him. In the manual, Hong Chengchou required that the drawbridges on all four sides not be raised, the inner gates be kept tightly shut, and the barbican gates be opened and closed at irregular intervals, in order to confuse the besieging army.

At the same time, six hundred elite fighters were to be selected from within the city, led by a squad commander, required to dress identically to Liu Chengzong's troops, each with their own secret signals. They were to exit the city at the third watch, fall upon the camp with blades, while the city walls fired cannons, startling the entire besieging encampment into cutting each other down in the chaos.

Liu Chengzong could foresee that if he had not obtained this booklet, these ghost troops would have worked exceptionally well against his army... because his surrendered troops dressed almost exactly like Ming troops, and the vanguard for the assault would certainly be the Ganzhou Camp — the moment the ghost troops emerged, the plan would have succeeded.

There were, moreover, many other details, such as hanging lanterns eight chi below the top of the wall to prevent the besieging army from using the darkness to strike those illuminated; hanging felt blankets and cotton quilts over the battlements to shield against cannonballs, lead shot, and arrows, to serve as coverings for the defenders at night, and during an assault to yank the quilts and overturn the attackers, or to defend against scaling ladders and iron hooks... these were all things Liu Shizi had not known.

He had nothing more to say about the manual. He called for a bodyguard, handed it over, and said, "All of you take a look at this, then burn oil to make ink, carve woodblocks, and print it. Remember to change the words that need changing — call it the Marshal's City Defense Manual, distribute it to all army officers, one copy per man."

Those details were not things a man who had never defended a city could have thought up; they were lessons written in blood. He reckoned this manual was something Hong Chengchou had copied from elsewhere as well, and he felt not the slightest compunction about taking it for his own use.

Burning oil to make ink was a local specialty of their old Shaanxi homeland, called Yanchuan Rock Fluid, and its originator was the Northern Song official Shen Kuo.

Because pine-soot ink destroyed mountain forests, when Shen Kuo governed Yanzhou, he discovered that the soot from burning petroleum was exceptionally black and dense, producing an ink that was fine, smooth, glossy, and black as lacquer — even better than pine soot — and it did not harm the forest environment. He predicted at the time that Yanchuan Rock Fluid would surely become widely used throughout the world.

But this technique was not widely adopted later, because petroleum is not available everywhere. Not long after Shen Kuo's death, the Song dynasty lost the petroleum-producing regions, and even where it was available, its cost was actually far higher than pine-soot ink.

Petroleum is indeed inexhaustible and has many uses — aside from fiery oil that might not be needed once in over a decade, it can be made into candles, used to lubricate cart axles, preserve objects, treat scabies and ringworm medicinally, and when heated and filtered through a screen, yield asphalt... but all of these things are highly replaceable.

Thus the extraction and use of petroleum was always local — if you had it, you used it; if not, no one went out of their way for it, you just used something else.

The brigade commanders of the seven camps watched Liu Chengzong's expression, each lost in silent thought, reckoning that this city would be rather difficult to take. In the end, it was Bee-Tail Needle, brigade commander of the Ganzhou Camp, who ventured cautiously, "Commander, so we... are not advancing?"

Liu Chengzong laughed aloud at that.

Bee-Tail Needle had been under enormous pressure lately, because his Ganzhou Camp was the one most eager to take the field and assault the city, but all along the march, every guard city and military fort they had wanted to attack had turned out to be their own people. The surrendered troops counting on a battle to loot a fortune were nearly dying of frustration.

Liu Chengzong shook his head and smiled. "Of course we advance. We've come all this way — what, just because his Excellency Governor Hong strips the countryside and fortifies the city, I'm supposed to stop moving forward? Then what did I come to Gansu for? But we must think this through thoroughly. That city has a blood feud with us; the siege will inevitably be a bitter fight."

Ever since the Jingnan Campaign of the Ming dynasty, for over two hundred years, the place called Liangzhou had borne the surname Yang. Three branches of the Yang family, with different ancestral homes, had rotated in and out of the position of Guard Commander, as close as if they were one family.

Yang Jiamo had died at Liu Shizi's hands, which practically meant the entire city of Liangzhou had a blood feud with him. The fury of shared hatred would make the Liangzhou garrison fight to the death... For a frontline commander, naturally, it would be enough to consider only the assault on the city.

But Liu Chengzong could not consider it that way, because he had already guessed Hong Chengchou's strategic intent.

"Hong Chengchou came up through the ranks as a grain supply intendant. Though I have never dealt with him personally, a man who rises to Supreme Commander of the Three Borders must have his strengths. I believe his move here is not merely to use Liangzhou's stripped defenses to delay me for a time, but to drag the campaign into winter."

As Liu Chengzong spoke, he looked at the assembled commanders, an involuntary proud smile spreading across his face. He raised a hand and said, "All thanks to your valiant efforts, gentlemen. I imagine he has by now realized that defeating us in open battle is the delusion of a fool."

The commanders roared with laughter, laughing with immense satisfaction, a sense of a great vengeance finally being repaid.

Because the men sitting in this government office hall — add a few more and they would be the entire core of the Marshal's Headquarters that had carved out a domain in the northwest — and every one of them had once been an officer or soldier of the Great Ming.

Liu Chengzong, Yang Yao, He Huchen, Yang Qi, Zhang Tianlin, Gao Yingdeng, Wei Qian'er, Mo Yujing, Han Shipan, Feng Rang, Ding Guodong, Bee-Tail Needle Zhang Zhen, Purple-Gold Beam Wang Ziyong... name any one of them, and at some point in his life, he had been a Ming soldier.

To see a figure like the Supreme Commander of the Three Borders driven by them to strip the land and fortify the city, not daring to fight in the open — how could they not feel that a great vengeance had been repaid?

Once the laughter had subsided, Liu Chengzong's expression turned solemn. He motioned for a bodyguard to unfurl the map of Gansu behind him, turned his head, and asked Wang Ziyong, "How many soldiers and civilians are inside Liangzhou city?"

Wang Ziyong had only just taken his seat and hurriedly rose again. "Reporting to the Commander, over ten thousand troops, over twenty thousand commoners — the entire city holds fewer than forty thousand people."

"That few?"

Liu Chengzong could not help asking, frowning. "Where are the rest?"

Gansu Garrison, also known as the Shaanxi Regional Command, had its seat of governance at Ganzhou. Liu Chengzong had stayed at Ganzhou for fifteen days, and aside from reorganizing three large camps, he had devoted all his energy to examining official documents.

The entire Shaanxi Regional Command had a population of around a million, more than half of it concentrated in the Hehuang and Zhuanglang area. North of Gulang, neither Suzhou nor Ganzhou had large populations; Liangzhou was the most populous place, with fewer than thirty thousand commoners inside the city and over a hundred seventy or eighty thousand outside.

This was already the result of efforts since the founding of the Ming dynasty, and it still had not recovered to the population level of the Han dynasty. The numbers were pitifully small — the entirety of Gansu north of Gulang Gorge added up to fewer than three hundred thousand people. What kind of concept was that?

Liu Chengzong's home region, Yan'an Prefecture, a harsh land of countless ravines on the Loess Plateau — before the drought struck, just the grain-tax-paying population alone was five hundred ninety thousand.

Now Wang Ziyong was saying that Liangzhou's in-city population was under forty thousand — that meant some of the residents from outside the city must have entered. So where were the remaining hundred-some thousand?

Hearing Liu Shizi's question, Wang Ziyong said quietly, "Hong Chengchou moved them away."

To be honest, everyone knew Liu Chengzong had a good temper, but likewise every commander present also knew that upon hearing this news, Liu Chengzong would surely fly into a towering rage.

Because they had all entered together from outside Jiayu Pass, they knew all too well what Liu Chengzong was dissatisfied with in Gansu — too few people.

In Hehuang, Liu Chengzong had complained about the lack of people, the lack of Han people. Now that they had finally entered Gansu, the people living here didn't need to worry about where anyone came from.

Over two hundred years, the Great Ming had applied countless sinicization patches to the Yuan dynasty's Gansu and Other Places Branch Secretariat. Now it all benefited Liu Chengzong — with a wave of his hand after seizing territory, he could recompile the Yellow Registers, and everyone would simply be Han. Done.

But now this bastard had moved the people away... Liu Chengzong's face was ashen. His hand resting on the table's edge tapped lightly, involuntarily, as he fought to suppress the helpless fury in his heart. Only after a long while did he force out a single question: "Moved them where?"

"Songshan, Zhuanglang, Jinglu, Zhongwei."

Liu Chengzong said nothing. He rose from his chair, turned, and stared blankly at the Gansu map hanging behind him.

By now, Hong Chengchou's strategic objective was crystal clear in his eyes — not only to drag the war into winter, but also to starve his army of provisions.

Liu Shizi suddenly saw the light. This was why Hong Chengchou had not set up a second defensive line at the Shandan and Yongchang Garrisons — he had deliberately gifted Liu Chengzong over ten thousand extra mouths to feed.

His military provisions were already extremely limited. Taking Gaotai and Ganzhou had relied on the sixty thousand dan from Suzhou. Even after capturing Ganzhou, the grain and fodder would only last until the eighth month. After the eighth month, they would have to depend on the corn intercropped with wheat and the rice from places like Gaotai and Ganzhou... This had originally been a barely adequate winter preparation; only by taking Liangzhou could they steadily store up some grain.

But now the problem had arrived — the fields of Liangzhou had been seized by Hong Chengchou, and the corn originally intercropped there, meant to mature in the eighth month, had been burned by Hong Chengchou.

The path Hong Chengchou had left him was to fight a desperate, bloody battle against forty thousand men inside the impregnable fortress of Liangzhou City. Forty thousand inside the city, while the army he led numbered just over thirty thousand.

To the surprise of all the commanders in the government hall, Liu Chengzong stared at the map for a long moment, then suddenly shook his head with immense satisfaction, even clicking his tongue twice in apparent delight.

As everyone looked on in bewilderment, Liu Chengzong turned around and smiled. "This Hong fellow is full of wicked schemes. Fortunately, Liu here has good luck."

In truth, he felt a twinge of lingering fear at this moment. If he had not been so deeply focused on army building and completed the reorganization in Ganzhou, he would now have no choice but to follow Hong Chengchou's script and batter himself bloody against Liangzhou City.

At Liangzhou City, where everything within a hundred li had been stripped bare, all their provisions, equipment, and siege engines would have to be transported first to Yongchang Garrison, then forwarded from Yongchang to the front lines. For an unreorganized army, this kind of supply-line attrition and pressure meant that any minor setback would foreseeably lead to a massive, catastrophic rout.

But now, the various battalions under Liu Chengzong's command had complete organizational structures, so even a setback would not be a major problem. On the other hand, only a small number of the military households at Shandan and Yongchang had been conscripted for the campaign; most remained at the garrisons to farm, which would slightly ease the subsequent pressure on provisions.

Provisions, however, remained a huge problem. After all, the fields of Liangzhou had been destroyed, creating a massive gap from Liu Shizi's original estimates, not to mention that Liangzhou City itself was a hurdle that could not be bypassed.

Judging by the meticulousness of Hong Chengchou's plan, Liu Shizi estimated that the grain inside Liangzhou City was also very limited — calculated precisely for forty thousand people to last until next spring, with soldiers fed fully and civilians kept just barely above starvation, and not a single grain more.

Unless he slaughtered everyone inside Liangzhou City, even capturing it would still make it very difficult to close the food gap.

"He wants me to batter myself bloody against Liangzhou. I will not grant his wish. Liangzhou will be encircled but not assaulted — all commanders, attend my orders."

As he spoke, Liu Chengzong turned, unbuckled his saber, and pointed at the map. The commanders behind him all rose and voiced their assent. They heard him say: "Ma Xiang's reconnaissance cavalry, from the moment you receive this order, disperse into the Wuwei oasis and scout for enemy forces... I estimate there are no enemy forces in the oasis. Also, take a look at Zhenfan Garrison north of Liangzhou. If they can be persuaded to surrender, persuade them."

"Feng Rang's wagon battalion, upon receiving this order, move toward the Gulang Defense Battalion, seize Gulang Gorge, and hold the enemy forces from the direction of the Zhuanglang River valley. They should be hungrier than us this winter."

"Wei Qian'er's grand battalion, garrison Dahe Post Station on the border wall southeast of Liangzhou, occupy the border wall, and support Feng Rang. Zhang Tianlin's grand battalion, garrison Zhenfan Garrison north of Liangzhou. If they surrender, accept it; if not, the Ganzhou and Suzhou battalions will assault the city."

"If they surrender, Gao Yingdeng's grand battalion and the two Gansu battalions will encircle Liangzhou without assaulting. If they come out of the city, we fight; if they don't, let them stay inside the city. All three grand battalions have artisan teams. First, construct a field cannon foundry and make the clay molds. Beyond that, when there's nothing else to do, persuade them to surrender often."

"The persuasion likely won't have much effect, but Heaven cherishes all living things, so we should still try to persuade them. Proclaim to all soldiers and civilians that the Marshal's Headquarters bears no ill will. From Shaanxi to Qinghai, and from Qinghai into Gansu, the people everywhere we have passed have remained secure in their homes. We have never taken pleasure in destroying fields and dwellings. In this year of disaster, Hong Chengchou's destruction of fields and dwellings is a heinous crime. Once the war is over, the Marshal's Headquarters will rebuild Liangzhou."

After Liu Chengzong finished speaking, he looked at Wang Ziyong and the others. "As for the rest of us, we farm. Those of you encircling the city, farm together with us. Have Yongchang and Shandan provide seeds — plant corn, plant beans. The farming season is a bit late anyway, so the yield probably won't be great, but every bit counts, especially for you who are besieging the city."

Liu Chengzong emphatically singled out the besieging army: "On the premise of ensuring preparedness against the Liangzhou army sallying forth, put all the surrounding farmland to use. How much grain you grow isn't important, but you absolutely must make the people in the city green with envy."

"Hong Chengchou wants to use politics to solve a military problem. We'll use politics to solve him. Even if I can't take Liangzhou City, he can forget about ever returning to Gansu for the rest of his life!"

Good evening!