Chapter 508: Seed

Three days.

The Marshal's army spent three days in total — all nine battalions fanned out to seize and overrun thirty-two fortresses around Liangzhou Garrison.

But by this stage of the war, Liangzhou City had gathered scattered remnants and routed troops from every direction and was determined to hold out to the death. The surrounding fortresses either surrendered at the mere rumor of their approach or had already withdrawn their garrisons into the city — hardly any military achievement to speak of.

As the entire Liangzhou Circuit defense system collapsed, only the solitary ancient city of Liangzhou remained, still bristling with arms and full of vigilance, standing upon the Wuwei oasis.

Although the Han-dynasty city of Wuwei had long since been destroyed by war, Liangzhou City, rebuilt during the Tang dynasty, remained a key stronghold of the Hexi Corridor.

Yongchang City west of Liangzhou had walls seven li and two hundred thirty paces in circumference, three zhang six chi high, and two zhang nine chi thick. Gulang Post to the south was a tiny fortress with walls only two hundred thirty paces around. Zhenfan City to the north was neither large nor small, its walls six li, three fen, and twenty-three paces in circumference.

But Liangzhou City — its walls were eleven li and one hundred eighty paces around, five zhang and one chi high. Upon the walls stood five great gate towers and thirty-six arrow towers and patrol stations. The moat was two zhang deep and three zhang wide, with four pontoon bridges. Outside were crescent walls, inside were barbicans, and the eastern wall also held a gate-fortress. The entire wall had been faced with brick in the second year of the Wanli reign.

At high noon on the twenty-eighth day of the fifth month, the sun hung overhead like a ball of fire, baking the whole oasis until it seemed to smoke.

In the barbican arrow tower on Liangzhou's western wall, Gu Tianshou, head of the West Gate patrol, sat leaning against the second-floor window ledge. On the surface he gripped his chain whip tightly, eyes fixed unblinkingly as he observed the enemy's movements — but in truth his gaze was vacant, his thoughts long since drifted beyond the highest heavens.

If not for this war, Gu Tianshou should have gone to take the military examinations this year.

He was not from Liangzhou but from Lintao — a somewhat awkward detail. His father, Gu Huai, held the unassigned title of Commander in Lintao, but his actual substantive posting was Liangzhou Squad-Leading Defense Vice Commander.

It was a post roughly equivalent in scale to Squad Commander or Defense Commandant, and the duty was to lead soldiers back and forth to work: they reported for duty in Liangzhou in the autumn and returned to Lintao when their shift ended in the spring.

These were what common parlance called shift troops — specifically, frontier-defense shift troops. Those who entered the capital were under Mobile Corps Commanders; these supported key frontier garrisons during the autumn defense. There were two such squad-leading defense commands on the Ganzhou Circuit and two on the Liangzhou Circuit. Of Liangzhou's two squad leaders, one came from Lintao and one from Gongchang.

It was grueling work to begin with, and the ability it demanded had little to do with martial prowess. There were three requirements: first, able-bodied vigor; second, service in person; third, full complement.

"Able-bodied vigor" meant being able to draw a sixty-catty bow. "Service in person" required that every guardsman perform the corvée himself and not hire a substitute. "Full complement" meant that however many shift troops were required, exactly that many had to be provided.

And the difficulties of the job likewise numbered three: first, pressing for muster; second, paperwork; third, arranging the march route — work that relied entirely on brains.

Pressing for muster was necessary because guard battalion troops were scattered across their stations, and timely assembly and reporting for duty had to be ensured. The paperwork was also extremely complex, covering troop strength, departure dates, arrival dates, and the facial features and physical description of every single shift soldier.

The last — arranging the march route — was where chaos was most likely to erupt. In theory, shift troops, from capital-bound units down to internal frontier-defense units, were all supposed to move collectively by Vice Commander and Guard. In practice, however, the troops always traveled separately, and they paid their own way both coming and going.

So it was perfectly normal for military households, en route to duty, to engage in forced sales, extortion, picking quarrels and stirring up trouble, even outright crimes.

For a squad-leading defense officer, all of this was scored. Each year was calculated out of ten points: a two-point deduction brought a reprimand; a five-point deduction stopped his salary; an eight-point deduction meant demotion and consignment to the ranks.

Last year — a small problem cropped up. Gu Tianshou's father, Gu Huai, arrived in Liangzhou leading one hundred twenty shift troops. The journey had been made in fear and trembling, but in any case they had arrived on time… The shift troops he was supposed to lead numbered three hundred men.

But the problem was not the troop count, because when the previous shift had ended the year before, one hundred eighty guardsmen had not returned to Lintao at all. They had simply sought a livelihood right there in Liangzhou and waited for autumn to report for duty again — so the troop count was sufficient.

This kind of practice, from small frontier shifts all the way up to capital shifts, was widespread.

Every year when shift troops were due to return home, many in every garrison stayed behind in the capital to seek a living. Later this spread to the frontier garrisons and became a habit there too.

The guard battalions generally turned a blind eye. Was a shortfall of a few soldiers even a problem for a guard battalion? It saved military households from stirring up trouble on the road, and the guardsmen could earn a bit of extra money — everyone was spared the worry.

The autumn defense was a resounding success. The year ended and it was time to go home. Gu Huai's eyes bulged: Lanzhou and Lintao had been taken by Liu Chengzong's subordinate, the false Regional Commander Wang Wenxiu.

He'd damn well gone off to work, and his home was gone. Where was he supposed to go to get justice?

Fortunately, they had their own people in Liangzhou. The one hundred eighty Lintao guardsmen who had stayed behind earlier busied themselves introducing jobs to everyone. In name they were off duty; in reality, not a single one went home. They simply all sought a livelihood right there in Liangzhou.

At first Gu Tianshou didn't think too much of it — just considered himself unlucky. He wasn't a shift soldier; he was purely serving as his father's bodyguard and took the chance to visit friends and relatives in Liangzhou, using the opportunity to meet senior Gansu military officers and get his face known, so that once he passed the military exams it would be easier to get things done.

One war, and it was all a complete waste.

In any case, even if he couldn't take the military exams, that didn't stop him from earning merit on the battlefield. At the time, they all figured the court would surely retake Lanzhou, and recovering Lintao was a matter of two or three months at most.

Never in their wildest dreams did they imagine — Yang Yanchang, Zhang Yingchang, He Renlong, all of them quite formidable generals: the God of War of Yan'an, the Scion of a General's House, the Local Power of Mizhi. Three battalions of elite troops encamped at Lintao, and every day they did nothing but sabotage themselves — not a single bit of proper business did they attend to!

To this day, they haven't so much as cracked a single brick of Lanzhou's city wall.

In the blink of an eye, Liu Chengzong had broken through Jiayu Pass from the west. From Liu Chengzong's perspective, this was a matter of impregnable fortresses and fierce generals, all posing difficulties — though his eastern campaign moved fast, the fighting was not easy.

But in the eyes of Gu Tianshou inside Liangzhou City — nothing but a pack of incompetents.

Liangzhou was the rear area for both fronts of this war. Its troop strength had been drained from the very start; all combat-capable soldiers had been taken by Commander Ding Shaoyin into the Zhuanglang theater. Left to hold the city were civilian conscripts and the shift troops from Lintao and Gongchang — total strength barely over two thousand, with Vice Regional Commander Liu Shaozong in command.

But ever since fighting erupted in the west, wave after wave of broken remnants came swarming into Liangzhou. Gu Tianshou felt he had seen more officials in this stretch than he would meet in a lifetime.

Vice Regional Commander Li Hongsi, defeated in the chaotic fighting at Ganzhou; Zhao Zhirui, the bare-pole Assistant Regional Commander routed at Suzhou; Lin Chengdong, the Ganzhou Assistant Regional Commander who had lost his wagon-fort heavy equipment; Mobile Corps Commander Tang Mingshi of Zhenyi — and countless Vice Commanders, Brigade Commanders, Commanders, Squad Commanders, Battalion Commanders… Officials were everywhere underfoot, and troop strength had ballooned to over sixteen thousand.

These nearly twenty thousand broken remnants owed no allegiance to one another. Only because Hong Chengchou's rank was high enough and his authority broad enough was he able to keep them all meekly in line. He assigned each a sector of trust atop the walls, treated all with equal impartiality, averted the internal chaos that might have erupted in the city, and completed the scorched-earth preparations.

But now Hong Chengchou had run off to Ningxia Central Garrison, and Gu Tianshou could not help but worry over the fate of Liangzhou City.

Just then, his thoughts were suddenly yanked back. In the heat-shimmering mirage on the far horizon, a faint glint seemed to flash across his eyes. But when he looked closely, he could make out nothing at all.

Only then did Gu Tianshou realize that even he had let his mind wander, let alone the other defenders. The endless waiting had made every one of them unavoidably slack.

Strictly speaking, Liangzhou City had been on high alert for nearly three months.

Ever since the beacon smoke rose at Jiayu Pass on the seventh day of the third month, the shift troops and civilian conscripts then stationed at Liangzhou had been drilling and reorganizing in the encampment outside the city, and with every report of the Marshal's Mansion breaching border walls and seizing cities and territory, the tension had mounted day by day.

It was like a bow. Drawn from the moment Liu Chengzong broke through the pass, it was pulled to its absolute limit by fear amid the news of Yang Jiamo's death in battle and the successive falls of Gaotai and Ganzhou.

Under that extreme pressure, whatever order Hong Chengchou issued would fly forth like an arrow. But no one can keep a fully drawn bow forever stretched, taut as a bowstring — if it snaps from over-tension, the bow will flip and break.

During that half-month when Liu Chengzong was feasting on fine food and drink in Ganzhou City, the soldiers and civilians of Liangzhou City had not been idle. Never mind the complex scorched-earth measures and relocations — every single crenellation bore the names of the soldiers and civilians assigned to guard that sector. They ate, drank, shat, and slept on the walls, and by now it had been a full month.

People had gone through extreme tension, and then, seeing no enemy in that tension, had gradually grown slack. This was something Gu Tianshou, as patrol head, could plainly see.

On the western wall were one thousand four hundred defenders, six hundred shift troops, one thousand civilian conscripts, and sixty patrol officers — and Gu Tianshou was the head of those sixty patrol officers.

"Patrol officer" was not a standing post. They were neither camp soldiers nor guard troops nor civilian conscripts, but a functional designation: "patrol" meant to patrol, and "officer" meant to stand guard. It was commonly seen when the gentry faced bandits and defended a city, a unit temporarily selected for the purpose.

For every fifty defenders on the wall, two patrol officers were assigned to watch them. The defenders rotated day and night; the patrol officers likewise alternated day and night patrols. Their duty was to report directly to the sector commander of each wall section whenever they saw defenders being idle or slack, spreading strange talk, or behaving oddly.

In selecting patrol officers, Hong Chengchou's little handbook stressed two requirements. First, physically robust and of a diligent, cautious nature. Second — and most important — having property and family to lose.

Hong Chengchou was extremely targeted against the peasant armies. He knew full well that people with nothing to lose were far too easily subverted by Liu Chengzong. Even ordinary landowning farmers were unreliable, let alone corvée laborers, artisans, yamen runners, civilian conscripts, and soldiers who drew wages or rations.

Thus, although Gu Tianshou had sixty men under him nominally called patrol officers, in reality they were all shopkeeping merchants and tradesmen from West Street, East Street, and South Street in Liangzhou City.

There was no North Street because the northwest of Liangzhou City held the Broad Stores Granary for grain taxes and the Great Meadow for army horse fodder. North Street was also inhabited by military households — small cart inns and peddlers and porters hardly counted as having property and family to lose.

They were all well-to-do households — rounding off, the equivalent of sixty small-time Ximen Qings.

Gradually, the glints in the distant shimmering mirage grew clearer and more numerous. Soon, horns sounded simultaneously from three sides of the wall. Gu Tianshou knew he had not been mistaken, but he said nothing, for the shouts rising one after another along the wall had already said everything he wanted to say.

"Rebel troops at the walls!"

At a distance of four or five li, not only were men and horses mere specks in the field of view, even the columns looked like tiny worms. Yet the dense black cloud, like a swarm of insects, still set the whole of Liangzhou City on edge.

Gu Tianshou was no exception. He hastily snatched up his chain whip and ran down from the arrow tower to find his father, Gu Huai, who was responsible for defending that section of the wall.

On the northern section of the west city wall, there was a defense zone a hundred paces wide, with seventy-four crenels in all. The officer in charge of these crenels was Gu Huai.

When Gu Tianshou ran to his father's defense zone, Gu Huai had a telescope in one hand and was gently patting a crenel with the other, his face showing an indescribable excitement and gratification, and he was muttering to himself, "They've finally come, they've finally come."

This greatly surprised the young patrol chief, who asked in bewilderment, "Dad, what are you talking about?"

"Ah." Gu Huai sighed, raised his hand, and pointed at the Marshal's Manor army beginning to set up camp four or five li away. With gratification, he said, "I'm talking about the enemy. We've been waiting a whole month, and they've finally come... I was only afraid they wouldn't come."

Among defending officers like Gu Huai, there was almost a consensus: now that Hong Chengchou had left, the soldiers and civilians of Liangzhou had been under the strain of defending the city for a solid month. To be honest, they were nearly unable to withstand the pressure of this battle of wits against thin air any longer.

If another five or six days passed and Liu Chengzong's army still did not appear near Liangzhou, this city very likely could not hold. They needed an enemy.

The autumn grain had been burned, the houses and courtyards demolished, everything that could be moved into the city had been moved in. The soldiers had slept on the walls for an entire month, and the common people in the city were rationed just enough food each day to keep from starving — if there was no enemy, what was the reason for all this?

Just to torment people?

Most critically, when the soldiers complained, the generals thought it over and figured this wasn't their fault either — they were among the tormented too. When the poor commoners complained, the gentry masters thought to themselves that their own younger family members couldn't eat their fill and were losing weight every day.

In the end, everyone's gaze turned, by unspoken agreement, to the little city-defense booklet in their hands. It was him who tormented us, and he ran off.

There was indeed no rule that the Supreme Commander of the Three Frontiers had to stay in Liangzhou City, but for you to run off at a time like this — that was more than a little contemptible.

What was most unbearable was that everyone in the city, soldiers and civilians alike, knew the booklet was absolutely right, and that defending the city really did require doing all this. But there was no enemy!

Now the enemy had come, and the problem was solved.

Gu Tianshou took the telescope from his father and only then saw the appearance of the enemy's main camp. After looking it over, he asked in confusion, "Dad, why is there only one camp?"

In his field of view, he saw only one camp, and even that one camp was split and stationed in two separate encampments. Very few people were busy setting up camp inside; most were riding horses and hurrying off into the fields.

"Stop looking. A disorderly mob." Gu Huai glanced at his son and said, "Bandits are bandits. Never mind those riding cattle because they have no horses — some are even carrying hoes and pushing plows. How did rabble like this beat General Yang to death at Gaotai?"

As he spoke, he shook his head in involuntary puzzlement, then declared with certainty, "No, this is them feigning weakness to us, a blatant lure, trying to entice us out of the city to fight."

"I'd estimate that those setting up camp now are all surrendered troops. They must have ambush soldiers lying in wait nearby. The moment we leave the city and the protection of the moat and defensive guns, the oasis is flat everywhere, and battle would inevitably be unfavorable for us."

Having said this, Gu Huai turned his head and said with ease, "But there is one upside. I can see they're all wearing garrison battalion surcoats. Tonight, we'll send the ghost troops out to strike them once, which will be just the thing to draw out their ambush soldiers and make them kill each other — let them know our Liangzhou City is no soft persimmon!"

"But Dad, they seem to be, they seem to be..."

Gu Tianshou did not listen to his father's words. He still held the telescope and gazed out, his expression extremely complicated. "They seem to really be here to farm. They've already started planting!"

Good evening!