Chapter Eighty-Eight: The Mule Camp

Seven days had passed.

The post stations of Jinning, Yuanyi, and Gangu in Yan'an, Ansai, and Yanchuan had all come under attack.

The roadside waystations at Ten Li, Twenty Li, and Thirty Li around the prefectural city and the three counties were all burned to the ground in a single blaze.

The fire spread across the three counties, not stopping until it reached Yanchuan and destroyed Wengan Station and every express relay station to the north.

Yanchuan was not safe.

Only because of a heavy rain had the people returned to their farms, and for a brief moment the land seemed peaceful.

Though the soil here was still bare, the laboring poor in the fields could see a future ahead of them.

In northern Shaanxi, the common people who were willing to scratch a living from the earth were never afraid of hardship.

Liuchengzong’s forces grew larger through plunder, gathering nearly two hundred promising men.

Among them were station runners who could ride and shoot, and local garrison soldiers accustomed to running ten li in three quarters of an hour.

They had also acquired more than three hundred horses and over six hundred donkeys and mules.

He did not disturb Yanchuan’s fragile calm; instead, he even did a good many good deeds.

In several villages on the South and North Plateaus, he used grain taken from Wengan Station to keep the people alive.

At places like Jingjiagou and Huoshaoyao, he helped the villagers resist taxes, surrounding and subduing the clerks and constables on the spot.

He also spent two days by Wolong Mountain south of the county seat digging a canal for the local people.

He was no great benefactor, and he did these things for two reasons.

First, to sum up and refine his own thinking.

In drought-stricken regions and non-drought regions... Liuchengzong crossed out "non-drought regions" in his little notebook and wrote in "rain-fed drought regions."

Different strategies were needed.

In drought-stricken regions, one could use armed resistance, grain distribution for recruitment, destruction of county seats, raiding the great households, and assaults on post stations to crush the government’s grassroots power.

But in rain-fed drought regions, such methods would not work.

As long as the people saw even a glimmer of hope, most would not dare stake their heads on a rebellion. Even the wealthy moneylenders could win the people’s support.

Liuchengzong wrote such words in his notes and pondered more deeply on how to respond.

Another memory told him that all things must be viewed from both sides.

In such cases, one needed to do good for the people: distribute grain, carry water, take the chance to resist taxes, repair canals. Even if one was a bandit, one had to appear in the eyes of the people as a righteous bandit.

In this way, so long as one displayed a morality just a little above the ordinary, one could still achieve the effect of destroying the government’s local power and winning the hearts of the people.

For even if the people escaped the drought, they could not escape the tax collectors and clerks that followed it, nor the lackeys sent to collect debts.

And even if by some stroke of luck they escaped all of that, wherever they were, the imperial troops would eventually come.

Drought, great households, the government, and the army.

This chained assault was immensely powerful; it had once flattened Liu the Licentiate of Black Dragon Mountain.

Liuchengzong did not believe anyone could fully withstand it.

As long as one link failed to hold, what followed would be death or rebellion.

As for the second purpose behind his good deeds, that was much simpler.

He wanted to exchange the relay horses for the donkeys and mules of the prosperous peasants.

Horses ate far too much, and Liuchengzong could not bear the grain consumption of more than three hundred of them.

Men could be raised like sons; if they ate a pound and a half a day, no one complained, and if they ate two pounds, they were delighted beyond measure.

But horses had to be treated like ancestors. Five pounds a day was only half a meal; they would not willingly carry you unless you fed them eight.

Mules, by contrast, were wonderfully easy to deal with. Feed them two pounds and they would do whatever you asked.

For Liuchengzong, one horse in exchange for two mules was an excellent bargain.

Very soon, the entire force had been remounted on mules, and Lion Battalion had become Mule Battalion.

Of course, more than eighty horses were still kept. Apart from the more than twenty reserved for officers, the remaining warhorses were assigned to the best horsemen among the station runners, forming a mounted patrol unit to screen the battlefield.

On the day Mule Battalion completed its full remounting, Liuchengzong assembled the commanders of each squad and had each of them pick up a short cudgel and tie it to his waist.

Mule Battalion’s first order: except by special command or for the wounded and sick, no one was allowed to ride pack animals while on the march.

Anyone caught doing so should be prepared to take a beating with the cudgel.

All told, until July Liuchengzong lived quite comfortably in the eastern mountains of Yanchuan.

Now that they had gathered enough grain, they simply marched through the mountains each day, wandering here and there, covering fifty li a day.

Aside from marching in column, they did no training in formation changes or the like.

Liuchengzong merely tried his best to imitate his elder brother, repeating to his subordinates some of the things his brother had once taught him to keep in mind.

For when it came to drilling troops, Liuchengzong could arrange men, but he was not truly versed in training them.

Cao Yao, on the other hand, knew how to train them, but was too lazy to do it. He felt training peasant soldiers was thankless labor; these people would die sooner or later, and if they could live through a few battles, that would be enough to make them familiar with war.

He could teach them later; there was no need to waste his feelings. It was exhausting enough to teach people properly, only to lose them in a single battle. How painful would that be?

As a result, Mule Battalion developed a gap in its military understanding.

Liu Chengzu’s oral instruction and personal example were meant to teach Liuchengzong the mistakes that ordinary people commonly made.

Liuchengzong learned that well enough.

But the mistakes ordinary people did not make, he knew nothing of.

He was busy recording mountains and terrain so that he could use guerrilla tactics in the future.

Along the way, he also took the old comrades who had never traveled more than ten li from home to see famous sights and ancient relics: old stone carvings, Helian Bobo’s White Bump Temple, and the burial grounds.

They followed the Qingjian River southeastward, walking all the way to the Snake Bend and seeing the surging Yellow River.

Farther north lay Yanshuiguan.

In the Qin dynasty it had already been a ferry crossing. From there, in just half a day, the whole force could cross the Yellow River into Shanxi.

Under the court’s existing regulations, the imperial troops of Shaanxi could only suppress the bandits of Shaanxi; once the bandits fled into Shanxi, they would have to be dealt with by Shanxi’s own suppression forces.

These ferries along the Yellow River could all serve as bridges for their movements back and forth.

Only now, the problem before Liuchengzong was that this place was called Yanshuiguan precisely because the court had established a pass there.

It was garrisoned by a battalion commander.

Liuchengzong did not dare bring his men close, and only took a few people to a hill for a distant look.

The situation here was far better than in most of northern Shaanxi, perhaps because of the convenient traffic: not only were the troops sufficient, but from the smoke rising from their cooking fires, the soldiers seemed to eat two meals a day on time.

A pass occupied, troops sufficient, bellies full.

Such imperial forces were formidable fighters.

Liuchengzong had no intention of provoking them, yet he never imagined that while the tiger meant no harm, men harbored murderous intent toward the tiger.

On the evening of July twelfth, Mule Battalion was resting in the mountains when the mounted patrols on watch sent back a rapid report by retreat signals and waving flags.

Imperial cavalry had left the main road and headed toward Yanshuiguan, as though carrying military dispatches; no sign of larger imperial movement had yet been detected.

Soon after, a second message came from the patrols: villagers previously helped at Jingjiagou in Yanchuan County had risked their lives to bring warning that a force was camping west of the county seat.

This force was led by a guerrilla general of the Lu surname, who was scattering his men among four villages to demand grain.

It was said that this imperial force had come once ten days earlier, but because the post stations and express relays had all been destroyed, they had assumed Yanchuan had fallen and had withdrawn.

This time they had brought more provisions, but they did not have many horses or mules, and still needed Yanchuan County to supply them.

The county government had already been plagued for a year by Monk Wang and could not spare a thing for them, so they could only turn to the villagers.

The villagers ran to report this, much to Liuchengzong’s delight.

In his heart he cried that the grain had not been distributed in vain, nor the water carried in vain.

Yet he had not expected the next words from the villagers to nearly make him faint:

"Great Tiger General, go wipe them out quickly. If they keep robbing us, there’ll be nothing left of the village."

This world was absurd beyond belief.

I am a bandit, the biggest bandit in Yan'an Prefecture; asking me to kill and burn is only natural.

But asking me to wipe out imperial troops?

Clearly I am the one who ought to be suppressed, and yet... why does this sound strangely tempting?

Cao Yao patted Liuchengzong and said, "Don’t listen to his nonsense. We ought to be running."

"But Brother Cao, this imperial force came looking for us. If fortune is on our side, we can hide in the mountains and let them pass; if not, they’ll catch up to us sooner or later, and we’ll still have to fight them."

Liuchengzong analyzed it. "While they’re scattered out gathering grain, we gather our strength and smash part of them. Even if we can’t crush them outright, we can ambush them once and then run."

He had a premonition that, after Li Bei’s pursuit of the Old Returner, the second marathon of the Chongzhen era in northern Shaanxi was about to begin.