River of Stars
Page 39
PART FOUR
CHAPTER XX
He felt the wind when it rose. He’d been waiting for it. Dawn was close, which meant battle was.
It was one thing, Zhao Ziji was thinking, to defeat poorly organized and badly armed rebels in marshlands he and Daiyan understood. It was another to hold a line against massed Altai horsemen. The Altai were not allies against the Xiaolu any more but invaders.
Spring and summer had gone catastrophically wrong.
They were in open country—bad for them, ideal for the steppe riders. They’d had to fall back from the Golden River because their forces farther west, near Shuquian and charged with defending it, had been overrun with terrifying ease, even with the river as a defence.
That meant that if Daiyan had stayed up there, using the river as a barrier, his army would have been encircled and destroyed. The Altai could then have ridden to Yenling, which would have been open, undefended.
Daiyan had sworn bitterly (which was pretty much what Ziji had done) when a messenger had come racing from the west with the news of Shuquian—then he’d ordered his sixty thousand to pull back.
How did commanders with over seventy-five thousand men, facing far fewer than that among the barbarians, and with the river ahead of them that the horsemen had to cross ... how did they lose that ground so quickly?
Ziji did have an idea. Two, in fact. One was that the generals in command were stunningly incompetent. One of them had been expecting to retire this summer, not to prepare himself and his men to fight an invasion. He’d been building, it was said, a handsome property south of the Wai.
The other reason had to do with terror. Raw fear in the face of the dreaded steppe riders, the tendency of frightened men with open space behind them to break their line and run for that open space.
Ziji didn’t want to think about Shuquian, what might be happening there now. The Altai were savage in taken cities and towns. That was how they created fear. Fear was a weapon.
And here they were, halfway back from the river towards Yenling, trying to guard it, blunt the thrust of this part of the invading force. To the east, in the plain above the capital ... well, they had no way of knowing for certain, but given their commanders there, knowledge, when it came, was unlikely to reassure.
Cursing the gods and nine heavens was no help. Cursing the emperor and his advisers was treason, and equally useless. They were where they were. Historians, Ziji thought, could debate how it had come to this. There would undoubtedly be conflicting views, sharp words exchanged over cups of tea. He wanted to kill someone. He would have a chance soon. He might die here.
Grey in the east, and a hint of more than that, stars gone there. Ziji peered forward, squinting to see. The Altai would wait for light, they could ride faster.
Daiyan had done what he could. They had low hills to either side rising into higher ones behind, and on those elevations he’d placed his best archers, defended by men with their new two-handed swords, the ones he’d devised himself last summer. They worked, once you learned how to use them. You attacked the horses, chopping at their front legs, crouching low. If a rider’s horse went down, the rider was likely dead.
Daiyan had been saying this, and making his officers repeat it, right down to leaders of fifty men, drilling and drilling. This morning was real, however. It was one thing to practise in a barracks, or hold the bank of a wide river, knowing the enemy would have to cross through a rain of arrows. It was another to be in the open, waiting for horsemen to appear with the first light.
Daiyan had the left side and Ziji the right. They were all on foot, their horses well back with the handlers. There was no point, none at all, trying to match cavalry with steppe riders.
Their archers were just behind them. From the time of his promotion, Daiyan had begun recruiting and training bowmen. Archers were disdained, within an army that was itself disdained. Daiyan called it folly. There was more than enough folly to go around, Ziji thought.
He looked east again. A pale light now. A few clouds on the horizon, quite beautiful. Then the sun. He heard hoofbeats, like the ending of the world.
The prime minister of Kitai knew himself to be shrewd, experienced, not in any way a fool. He’d shaped a triumphant career in the intricate civil service of Kitai, and had arrived at the very summit. That said a great deal about a man.
Accordingly, awake in his bed in the middle of a night in Hanjin, he struggled to retrace the steps that had led them to this point. People were fleeing the city, large numbers of them, abandoning their homes, taking only what they could carry or load on carts. The gates were still open. They might have to be closed soon, and people knew it.
Others, mostly jinshi students so far, were speaking openly, recklessly, in turbulent streets, of killing him and the other principal advisers of the emperor. Killing them!
The emperor was terrified. Wenzong never left his suite of rooms. He didn’t even walk in his garden these days, although it had been a wet autumn, and cold, to be sure.
How had it come to this? You made a decision that seemed wise, on reflection, after consultation. (Consultation protected you.) Then another decision was suggested, even compelled, by the first. And then a third was guided by that second, like a dancer’s steps by music. Perhaps you then made demands in late summer that carried a risk, but one that could be managed, you judged, and which fit like a gold-link belt with the emperor’s desires regarding the lost prefectures.
When his emperor expressed desires, a prime minister had to address them, didn’t he?
So you initiated diplomatic action, advanced stern conditions in pursuit of those desires. Surely that had been proper? Especially when you considered the long glory of Kitai against crude, untutored tribesmen from the northeast.
It was possible, just, that a milder tone, more limited claims of territory, might have been wiser. But really, who wasn’t wiser after the event?
So you ended up where you were now, awake and cold and afraid in an autumn night. He wondered how late it was, or how early. When morning would come.
He missed his wives. He missed Wu Tong, though for different reasons, naturally. Actually, the prime minister realized, sitting up in bed but keeping the blanket over him in a cold room, for some of the same reasons.
There were women in his household who could address his physical needs (more or less). But his wives and his long-time ally had all been very good at listening to his thinking aloud, then bringing their own cleverness to what they heard.
One wife had killed herself. He had killed the second. Wu Tong had been executed—for uprooting a tree. An action that would never have been known if an old blind man had let it remain hidden. There was always an old man somewhere. There was always someone.
Too easy to feel sorry for himself tonight, thought the prime minister of Kitai. Darkness and solitude, the bleak time before dawn. Here he was, doing the best he could to satisfy his emperor and empire, but doing it alone, without confidants, and helplessly awake on a moonless night with the Altai coming. Coming down upon them like a plague. Past the ruined Long Wall, across the rivers, through the grasslands and the harvest fields. Horsemen of night.
The Kitan armies over by Shuquian had broken and fled. Already! They had learned that this morning, an ice-cold message on wings. The army defending Yenling—under that commander he didn’t like—was at grave risk of being encircled. The prime minister had no idea how the commander would deal with that, or if he even could. The prime minister wasn’t a military man, he’d never pretended to be.
And their army north of here, defending the capital and the emperor and more than a million people, was the same force that had failed in spring to take the isolated Southern Capital of a leaderless, crumbling Xiaolu empire. That failure had set all of this in motion. A boulder tumbling down a hill, he thought, gaining speed.
He still didn’t understand how they had failed there. They’d had ninety thousand men! Couldn’t any of them fight any more?
/> And right after that failure, the Altai, with a smaller army, had ridden south in early summer, appearing before the gates of the Southern Capital at sunrise one morning. So it was reported.
Their arrival had so terrified the inhabitants that the city had been opened to them before the sun went down. Not even a fight! This, after the Xiaolu had ridden out, twice, and defeated Kitan forces with an ease (by report) that was humiliating.
It was their hopeless commanders, Kai Zhen thought bitterly, in darkness. He thought there was a hint of light in the east, through his window. (It was only dawn, he thought, not hope.) What had happened to the army of Kitai?
He was aware, but tried not to dwell upon, how many elements came together in that question. It was too late for irony. He was too cold. He was afraid.
Wu Tong would have known what to do up north, he thought. Although that was probably an exercise in deceiving himself. His old ally had been capable of dealing with upheavals within Kitai, routing peasant rebels, executing them in large numbers to send necessary messages through the countryside. But he had never achieved a real triumph against barbarians. There was Erighaya and, truthfully, there was everything leading up to Erighaya.
And tonight, out there under the stars, the soldiers of three commanders who had (of course) survived the rout of their armies—racing at the front of the retreat from the Southern Capital—were all that stood between the capital and disaster. Wan’yen, war-leader of the Altai, leading the eastern part of his forces himself, might be about to descend upon the imperial city of Kitai. What, thought Kai Zhen suddenly, would historians make of him?
If they were fortunate here, if they were profoundly fortunate, the barbarians would demand only treasure: silver, silk, jade, gold, jewellery, certainly Kitans to bring north as slaves. Depending on how much they wanted, taxes and extortion could probably deal with it. Given enough time, they could rebuild.
But if the Altai were coming for more ... if this was going to go beyond a teach-a-lesson raid for Kitan arrogance in demanding so much land, then ruin wasn’t the word for what lay ahead of them.
He looked to the window. Greyness. Pale light. Morning.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the front line of a battle. Daiyan knew it. Not since the Third Dynasty had commanders led their men in the field, and back then it had been ... well, it had been the great heroes, hadn’t it? The men of legend.
He didn’t see himself as one of those. He saw himself as trying to stay alive right now, and hold this field. Kill as many of the horsemen—and their horses—as he could. He heard himself swearing as he hacked and dodged amid the screaming of men and horses. The smell was bad with entrails spilling.
The Altai were upon them, above them on their horses. But they weren’t breaking through them. Daiyan wanted to look over, see how Ziji’s right side was holding, judge how his archers were doing from the elevations on both sides, but there was no time to step back. A horse loomed, lathered in sweat, teeth bared. Daiyan dodged right, dropped to one knee and hacked at its near front leg. He felt the curved blade bite, heard a new scream over screaming. The animal buckled; the rider, who had been leaning left to slash at Daiyan, went over the horse’s neck.
The man landed on his head. Daiyan saw his neck snap, though there was too much noise for him to hear the sound. That one didn’t need killing, though. He’d seen enough broken necks.
He chopped at the horse’s throat and it died. You needed to do that. He stood up quickly. A lull in front of him. A space. He wiped at blood on his face, looked left and right, breathing hard. His gloves were slippery. The ground was slippery. Intestines and blood.
The archers in back had to be careful, with the front ranks of the two armies intermingled in hacking gore. The bowmen were supposed to aim towards the back of the Altai forces, at the horsemen stopped—for now—by the Kitan foot soldiers standing their ground.
It was too hard to see anything clearly from down here among his men and the enemy and the downed, thrashing horses. You could be killed or maimed by a fallen horse. That’s why you dispatched them.
You needed luck in battle, he thought, as much as anything else. Almost as much. Men could shape their own fortunes, fates, lives, if only in narrow ways. A battle might be one of those. Perhaps a war. Their swords were an example, the ones he’d designed last year. They worked. Were you allowed, amid the reek of ripped-open bodies, to take pride in that?
You held the lengthened grip in both hands. You crouched to the right, putting yourself in a difficult position for a rider trying to strike downwards on his wrong side, and you chopped at the horse. If a rider fell, you killed him, and then you killed the horse so its legs would be still. It was ugly, it was savage. There was a kind of pain in Daiyan, a sense of waste and loss, killing animals so beautiful. But they were carrying the riders of the steppe, and those riders were trying to destroy Kitai.
You did what you needed to do when that was so. He thought of his mother suddenly, safely far away, then he thought of Shan, who wasn’t safe at all.
He wiped at his face again. He’d been cut on the forehead, he didn’t know when. There was blood in his eyes, he had to keep wiping it away. He could imagine how he looked. Good, he thought. Let him appear a savage today.
A moving shadow overhead. He looked up. Arrows, another black, sky-blocking wave of them arcing north. His archers from behind, and those posted to either side, aiming properly, trained properly. A year of that and more. That was how you changed a war from being a matter of fortune and the gods.
The riders had bows, too, but they loosed at close range in a fight like this, not with vast curtains of arrows. The barbarian triumphs were on horseback, they didn’t think about setting footarchers behind an army. (How would they keep up?) They raced over grasslands, the best horsemen in the world, and—just about always—foot soldiers and bowmen and any feeble opposing cavalry broke before them, or they died.
It might happen here. Daiyan had no way of judging the ebb and buckle of this as the sun rose on his right. They hadn’t retreated yet, he knew that much. He was standing where he’d begun, men to either side of him. There was still a space in front. He plunged his sword in the earth beside him and drew his bow. Childhood weapon. Outlaw weapon.
He started shooting, arrow after arrow. Release, notch, release, at speed. He was known for this, he had a gift. Altai riders fell where he aimed. He went for their faces. That frightened men. An arrow in the eye, in the mouth, out the back of the head.
Two riders saw him, turned their mounts to charge. He killed them both. He was still cursing without stopping, his voice loud and raw. He was still wiping at blood running down to his right eye. The men beside him were using their bows, too, now. He’d drilled them in this. A year and more. You trained an army.
He’d thought they’d be the ones invading. He’d thought they’d be in Xiaolu lands this summer. Fighting north of the river. The long, bright dream.
Instead they were desperately defending Yenling with no clear idea what was happening to the west, where their other army had crumbled, and with no news of the capital either. Wasted thoughts. Nothing he could do about any of that. Right now you fought to drive them back, to break them. To kill as many as you could. What followed would follow.
Two truths of being where he was: your men saw you beside them, heard you scream in fury, watched you with sword and bow. Followed your lead. Soldiers fought more bravely when a commander was with them, not poised to flee from some ridge well back. But from down here that same leader couldn’t see what was happening, make judgments and adjustments.
He’d posted four officers he trusted on the two ridges. They had drummers and flag signals with them to send commands. Trusted men weren’t invariably strategists, but how skilled would he have been himself? This was his first battle. You didn’t count fights against peasant rebels.
You didn’t count bamboo swords wielded against imaginary foes in a wood by your village on mornings long ago.
Weary as he’d ever been, but uninjured, Ziji started moving forward, waving and shouting to his men. They went past downed horses and riders. He killed anything that moved.
On his left he saw Daiyan doing the same, leading his own men on. Daiyan was bleeding from his head. It would need tending to. Not now. Not if he could stand and hold a sword or bow.
Arrows were being loosed from behind and on both sides, in long, carrying, killing arcs. The Altai had turned right around, he saw now—they were trying to get away from that deadly rain. They were retreating, they really were. Those who had advanced farthest were stumbling amid the dead and downed of their army and the fallen of Kitai. The trampled ground was ugly and wet. The arrows kept coming. They blotted the sky, a moving darkness each time they were loosed, then light again. Ziji was surprised to see how high the sun had climbed.
Ahead of him, the Altai were fleeing across the wide expanse of the battlefield. This had never happened to them, Ziji thought. Not against the other eastern tribes, not against the Xiaolu, not in Kitai.
You were permitted to exult, but only briefly. This was one battle, and others had been lost, and would be.
And this one wasn’t over yet.
DAIYAN WAS READY to move into the open space before him but he waited for the signal. Then they heard it from the drums. Hu Yen on the right and scarred Ting Pao on the left both knew what was to come next. They had spoken of it as recently as last night, they had prepared it.
The drums were steady, carrying their message. He saw the Altai in flight before them, picking their way past and over bodies. They couldn’t be chased at speed, not riders fleeing foot soldiers. But they could be ambushed.