Chapter 655: The Unlucky Prince

Since the Wanli era, the realm has slid step by step toward the abyss.

Human life worth nothing — that is the keynote of this age.

By now, in the north, only Liu Chengzong has both the standing and the ability to treat human life as something that matters.

Zhang Yichuan does not have Liu Chengzong's capabilities, but Sweeping King has ideals that belong to Sweeping King — he saves people in his own way.

Henan is the Central Plain, a land of boundless flat fields, yet in the western Henan region where the Loess Plateau transitions into the North China Plain, the terrain remains dominated by mountains and hills.

The old saying here calls it: five parts mountain, four parts hill, one part flatland.

There is no level ground.

Plague-ridden deserters and routed soldiers, starving refugee peasants pushing wheelbarrows, drift and wander along the mountain paths, spreading pestilence to every place they pass, because no one will take them in.

The fortresses and stockades that dot the Henan landscape were not built solely to guard against soldiers and bandits.

The origin of these fortresses lies in the two great floods that struck the Henan region in the fifth and sixth years of the Chongzhen reign.

Those who survived the deluge rebuilt their homes on high ground, just as the peasant armies that had surged into the North China Plain were beaten back to Shaanxi, crossing through Henan.

People raised high walls around their villages, took up arms to protect themselves, and in the lean season between harvests followed the fiercest men of the stockade to safeguard their families and grain stores, hoping to endure the hard years.

But each year grew harder than the last. As the floods receded, the outside world deteriorated sharply — plague and bandits everywhere. What had been temporary clan and neighbor self-defense stockades gradually became permanent armed forces of autonomous mountain wilderness.

And then they split, as clearly divided as the Jing and Wei rivers, into gentry stockades and strongman stockades.

But no matter what kind of stockade, none would accept outsiders.

Starving folk, bandits, roving outlaws, rebel soldiers, government troops — whoever came, the only way into a stockade was to storm it.

Because in these years, the people of Henan were not as lucky as the people of Shaanxi.

In the birthplace of the drought, it is hard to say old Shaanxi folk had good luck.

The terror of a flood disaster is no less than that of a drought — in some ways it even faintly surpasses it.

For the threat brought by a vast drought is bone-deep but slow; turning lush hills and clear streams into barren peaks and bald ridges takes time — a very long time.

A drought is like a dull knife, slicing cut after cut into the tender society built by mankind in years of peace, until it collapses completely.

When the flesh of tenderness is stripped away, all that remains is a brutal skeleton of the strong devouring the weak.

Shaanxi society was forcibly downgraded; people turned from pets back into wild beasts.

Gentleness, kindness, courtesy, restraint, humility — those traits bred from being well-fed as pets — were no longer needed.

Ferocity, cunning, ruthlessness — the wild nature hidden in the bones surfaced, helping people stay alive.

Then order was rebuilt anew.

But the harm a flood brings is instantaneous and short-term.

The heavens change in a flash, torrential rain pours down, floodwaters surge, sweeping away mountains and gorges, gales uproot trees, sudden downpours flatten seedlings, roof tiles fly through the air, houses drift and villages drown.

Between day and night, one opens one's eyes to find oneself in a watery realm, with nothing left at all.

People did not need to become like wild beasts, because wild beasts too would die in the deluge. It was entirely a matter of luck — all depending on whether one stood on high ground or low ground when the flood struck.

Standing low, even with peerless valor, unmatched wisdom, and leadership rivaling the gods, one could hardly escape death.

What followed was a short-term plague.

After a great drought, locusts are certain; after a great flood, plague is certain.

The former is because locusts lay eggs in saline-alkali soil; drought intensifies soil salinization, and when humans stop tending the dry land, locusts gain an ideal breeding ground.

The latter is because after the floodwaters recede, every surviving creature — shelled, scaled, furred, feathered, and insect — all flee to the high ground and come into contact with one another; the dead things float on the water, corpses piling into mounds, rotting and bursting.

So plague, these past few years in Henan, has been a very common thing.

Whether a stockade was built by bad men or good, one consensus formed: outsiders might carry plague, and they might be spies for government troops or roving bandits.

In short, keep them outside the stockade. If they come close and try to force their way in, shoot them dead with bird guns, shoot them dead with bows and arrows — that was the safest course.

But Zhang Yichuan could take them in.

What others feared — roving bandits, government troops — Zhang Yichuan did not fear.

Roving bandits, government troops — that sort of thing, he only needed to piss on the ground and look at his reflection to see one.

Zhang Yichuan was one of the most powerful roving bandit chieftains in Shaanxi, and now he had also received the title of Henan Commander-in-Chief from the Grand Marshal's headquarters. Among all those things others feared, he was the most terrifying one.

The only thing that could make him wary was the plague, which could neither be seen nor touched.

That thing was truly fearsome, but for Zhang Yichuan, who had spent years on the run, it was only worth a measure of wariness.

Because it could not be seen, could not be touched, could not be killed, could not be guarded against, could not be evaded — one could only steel oneself and charge through.

Charging through plague-ridden territory was a process he had to endure.

In the course of this, thanks to the Henan Five Battalions' accustomed peasant-army organizational form, he could gather up and sweep along, to the greatest extent possible, every routed soldier, refugee, bandit, robber, and even the old, weak, women, and children he saw, and rapidly organize them by clan, trade, and region into a new roving bandit force that moved in coordination.

The peasant army's organizational structure was also very tight. Zhang Yichuan, as the chieftain, took the Henan Five Battalions as his core force; below them, he recruited and organized on the move, forming twenty or thirty large brigades.

Each brigade commander, besides his own core battalion, also commanded several large brigades — some as small as two or three hundred men, some as large as five or six hundred. From his core force he would dispatch a dozen or so veteran roving bandits to serve as grand squad leaders, recruiting able-bodied men and issuing them bows, horses, sabers, and spears to form the backbone of each large brigade.

Below the large brigade, seven or eight small squads were further divided out, sweeping up all manner of people they encountered. Every order was obeyed by the grand squad leaders, all grand squad leaders obeyed their respective brigade commander, and the five brigade commanders obeyed Zhang Yichuan.

Thus this kind of command would not, like Liu Chengzong commanding tens of thousands of troops, hit the bottleneck of command capacity.

Because Zhang Yichuan did not manage that much. He had no need to manage a garrison, nor to manage troop provisions, because they had more than enough logistics personnel.

No one wanted to stop. To stop was to die. They could only follow the main force, scaling mountains and crossing ridges in western Henan.

Every level of unit knew only the exact position of the unit above it. Each morning and evening, they sent a man to report once. They marched when told to march, halted when told to halt.

When marching, they focused solely on the march. When halted, each large brigade, and even each small squad, minded its own business, making camp wherever they were — those who needed to cut horse fodder cut horse fodder, those who needed to forage for grain foraged for grain.

The infected were formed into a separate small squad under each large brigade. If they could keep up, they walked out a path to survival; if they could not, they fell behind, the ranks thinned, and they lay on the ground to await death.

For a time, under the five brigade commanders, several dozen large brigades spread out across the mountains and plains in a swath dozens of li wide. The entire force swelled like a rolling snowball, howling as it swept past one rural village after another, one mountain stockade after another.

Every place they passed was lit with beacon fires, like a mobile fortress grown with four legs. They stormed the stockades that had once shut them out, slaughtered and plundered the rich households, swept up the poor households, and then pressed on toward the next county seat.

If they could take a walled city, they took it.

If they could not take it, they stopped after a brief taste, withdrew when they should, and kept moving.

A defining characteristic of peasant armies as an organizational form is that they must stay on the move.

When numbers are few, you have to move — nowhere is safe to stop; when numbers are many, you have to move even more — if you stop, people's hearts will scatter.

If you can't take a city, you have to move — stop and there's no grain to eat; if you do take a city, you have to move even more — because one place's grain isn't enough to feed them.

Of course, Zhang Yichuan wasn't idle on the march either. He frantically pored over the Grand Marshal's Book of Famine Relief and Plague Control, ordering his army to raid forts and cities along the way, focusing on searching for physicians and medicinal supplies. Peasant soldiers infected with the plague were left behind in captured forts, along with physicians and medicine, and taught to save themselves.

As for attacking Luoyang, it was because the Prince of Fu's reputation as one of the realm's richest men had long spread across the land. Zhang Yichuan reckoned that the Fu estate had drawn the envy of heaven and the resentment of men, so attacking it should be easy.

Zhang Yichuan's forces first attacked Yongning County in Henan Prefecture, attempting to raise military funds for the assault on Luoyang and establish a secure rear supply route, so that after the plague ended, he could seek personnel support from Liu Chengzong in Shaanxi.

Inside Yongning City was a retired gentry scholar named Zhang Lun, who was especially versed in military matters.

This man served as Inspector of Sichuan from the first to the fourth year of the Tianqi reign, during which the She-An Rebellion broke out; he defended Chengdu Prefecture alongside the Provincial Governor's garrison. In the second year of the Chongzhen reign, he became Governor of Sichuan, and for his merits in suppressing the rebellion, he received a hereditary honorific title as Commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard.

Outside the city, he had built several forts and settled a group of wounded and disabled veteran soldiers from his old Sichuan command there. As soon as he heard news of the bandits' approach outside the city, he brought the veterans inside the walls.

At the same time, he discussed defense with the county magistrate Wu Dalie and the military officer Ma Youyi, and also donated his family wealth to recruit troops and hold the city firmly.

So much so that although this small city contained a Prince of Wan'an estate, the estate merely refused to contribute money or effort and did not cause any real negative effect.

In truth, among the princes of the Great Ming, the first-rank virtuous princes were naturally like the Prince of Su — doing no evil locally, daring to contribute money and effort in a crisis, and ordinarily performing some good deeds.

But that sort is something you can seek but not count on finding.

The normal princes are like the Prince of Qin, Prince of Han, Prince of Fu, and Prince of Lu — their estates produce a bunch of villains, they themselves are muddled and ignore affairs, and when they do handle affairs they are out of touch with human decency. Facing major events, they have no sense of responsibility, contribute no money, contribute no effort. Basically, whether the city has such a princely estate or not, it's the same rotten character.

No positive effect whatsoever.

The lowest rank of princes is the current Prince of Tang, the likes of Zhu Yujian.

Although the Tang estate is the most zealous in donating silver to the court, casually giving three thousand taels at a time, it can't offset the fact that Zhu Yujian as a person is practically a princely version of the Chongzhen Emperor — self-righteous and dogmatic.

The magistrate of Neixiang County, Ai Yuchu, had rendered meritorious service defending the city when the roving bandits approached, but because he failed to pay his respects morning and evening, Zhu Yujian impeached him using ancestral regulations, and had him thrown into prison.

The same went for the Prefect of Nanyang, Chen Zhenhao.

In the fifth year of the Chongzhen reign, the Prince of Tang gave a thousand taels of silver for the prefect to repair the city walls.

Chen Zhenhao was extremely displeased by this, believing it was not a prince's duty, so he did not dispatch corvée laborers to provide support.

When the roving bandits came in the sixth year of the Chongzhen reign, Chen Zhenhao, to defend the city, transferred the Tang estate's ceremonial guards to the walls of Nanyang to defend the parapets. After the battle, the Prince of Tang sued him again, accusing him of arbitrarily taking the ceremonial guards to defend the battlements.

Right now, the Prefect of Nanyang, Chen Zhenhao, is lying in a cell in the Ministry of Justice's prison.

A princely vassal interfering in court politics and causing local officials to be punished — since the start of the Chongzhen reign, the Prince of Tang is the only one. It can be said to have shocked the entire court and country.

Among the Prince of Tang's many inventive impeachments, the sole survivor was Lu Xiangsheng.

Lu Xiangsheng led troops to suppress rebels and passed through Nanyang Prefecture, but did not enter the city to pay his respects. The Prince of Tang filed a complaint, accusing him of failing in the ritual duty of a subject.

By this time, the Chongzhen Emperor had finally caught on — the Prince of Tang had simply been locked up in the Fengcheng Bureau until he went stupid.

He had been imprisoned by his grandfather in the Fengcheng Bureau for sixteen years. His understanding of all the world's rules came not from actual life, but from the imperial clan management regulations in the Great Ming legal code.

So much so that after he inherited the princely title, all his attention-seeking actions produced a truly genuine negative effect on the locality.

The local officials were all done in by him, yet he himself, as a prince, could not take over their work. When faced with warfare, all he knew was to file lawsuits. What else could be done?

So in fact, in all of Henan right now, the easiest place to strike is not Henan Prefecture where the Prince of Fu is, but Nanyang Prefecture where the Prince of Tang is.

And just as Zhang Yichuan was attacking Yongning County, the government offices in Luoyang, the seat of Henan Prefecture, had already sprung into action.

The Grand Coordinator Chen Biqian stationed there, the Prince of Fu, the Administration Vice Commissioner, the Assistant Regional Commander, and other officials jointly issued a proclamation across the entire prefecture, ordering every county to defend to the death, requesting reinforcements from the court, and telling Kaifeng to take precautions.

At the same time, wealthy households from outside Luoyang County and even all of Henan Prefecture, along with refugees, fort militias, and local armed forces, flooded into Luoyang City by the thousands. The city's temples and Daoist abbeys were all packed with refugees.

The government and merchants began setting up porridge stations throughout the city to distribute congee, issued identification tags to the refugees and commoners inside the city, and deployed trained militiamen to patrol the city, guarding against petty theft, open robbery, and covert debauchery, maintaining public order.

Yamen runners escorted hundreds of prisoners to haul stones from the Luo River flats outside the city up onto the walls, while firearms, cannon, and ammunition were also transported onto the walls.

Zhang Yichuan received word on the fourth day of besieging Yongning and sent small squads disguised as refugees to infiltrate Luoyang.

But the window of opportunity when Luoyang's gates were open had already passed. Only a few of the scouts he sent managed to slip in before Luoyang shut all four gates.

And posted notices declaring that all men and women in the city between the ages of fifteen and fifty must participate in defending the city — the men to the walls, the women to prepare food. Any who disobeyed would be executed on the spot.

Afterward, Luoyang completed its defensive deployment: the menfolk drilled in city defense on the walls, while the womenfolk set up sheds and stoves in the streets, ground flour and picked vegetables.

And on the seventh day of the siege of Yongning, Zhang Yichuan also met with a turning point.

For seven days, he had fought methodically, sending his subordinate small battalions to attack the city in rotation each day, interspersed with his own main force attacking in successive waves. Even at night, he bombarded with cannon, rising from time to time to harass them, hoping to deny the defenders any chance to rotate and rest, so they would have no food by day and no sleep by night.

But Yongning County's defenders were also extremely tenacious. Henan, after all, was not Shaanxi, where the grain shortage was absolute. The government opened its granaries, the defending soldiers ate their fill, and defending a small city with elite troops was, on the contrary, easier than defending a large one.

Yet no one expected that Zhang Lun, who was directing the city's defense, had contracted the plague on the road while withdrawing from the outer forts into the city. The strain of directing the defense inside the city was too great, and at this critical juncture, he died of illness.

Once he was dead, the defensive will of the troops inside the city immediately began to waver.

Zhang Yichuan outside the city also detected this change. He halted the attack at once and sent men to the foot of the walls to call for surrender for a full half-day.

The purpose of calling for surrender was not to make them surrender, but to intensify the wavering of their will and make the defenders let down their guard.

By the evening of the eighth day, the military officer inside the city, Ma Youyi, abandoned the city and fled, only to be captured by the Conquer Heaven Tiger contingent besieging the city.

Zhang Yichuan immediately ordered a general assault on the east and west sides. A company of peasant soldiers newly recruited from Henan stormed the western wall. Inside the city, chaos ensued, and people scrambled to flee south toward the Luo River. Yongning City fell soon after.

On the ninth day, news of Yongning's fall and the killing of the Prince of Wan'an reached Yiyang first. Waves of Yiyang's commoners fled toward Luoyang, with Zhang Yichuan's army following on their heels. They arrived at Luoyang by evening and set up camp outside the city, the shouts of men and neighs of horses stretching in an unbroken line for over ten li.

For a moment, Luoyang was shaken, and the defenders on the walls grew even more tense.

Even the heir of the Fu estate, the Prince of Dechang Zhu Yousong, dispatched estate guards to purchase large quantities of wine, livestock, cloth, clothing, hats, and other goods in the city, in preparation for rewarding the troops during the coming battle.

Outside the city, amid the vast, earth-spanning layers of great tents, campfires blazed up heap by heap, dyeing the night sky blood-red.