Five days after the blood had seeped into the mud at Three Rivers Gate, the air in Yue Fei's command tent tasted of decision. The sand table was no longer a plan; it was a verdict.
The green-tasseled pins of the Song army clustered at the confluence of the three streams, a single, powerful fist. North of them, the yellow silk flags of the Jin had been pushed back, but they were not gone. They clustered thickly around two points: a fortress city named Yancheng, and the sprawling, fertile lands to the northeast known as the Jin Granary.
Yue Fei stood with his palms flat on the table's edge, his shadow falling across the territory like a hawk's. "The gate is open," he said, his voice the low rumble of millstones. "Now we walk two paths."
His finger, calloused and broad, tapped the pin marking Yancheng. The city was drawn in raised clay on the table, a perfect miniature of towering walls and a formidable gatehouse. "Yang Zaixing. This is your task. Yancheng commands the river valley. Its granaries feed ten thousand Jin troops. Take it, and we have a mailed fist pointed at their heartland. You will be the stone. You will give them a mountain to siege. Draw their gaze, their fear, their main army. Let them break upon you."
Yang Zaixing, his gaunt face a map of quiet calculation, nodded once. "Slow, heavy, and undeniable. We will be the mountain."
Yue Fei's finger then swept northeast, a slashing motion that bypassed all settlements and traced the empty spaces between the yellow flags. "Niu Gao. This is your ground. Not the cities. The spaces between. The depots at Qingzhou, the horse pastures at White Moon Lake, the conscript mustering yards."
He looked up, and his eyes, in that moment, held the cold fire of a hunting wolf. "You are the strike force. You are the sickness in the blood they cannot see. Move like smoke. Burn their future. Scatter their horses. Terrify their people. Make the land behind their lines a place of ghosts and whispers. Do not seek their army. Make their army have nowhere to go, and nothing to eat."
Niu Gao's grin was a flash of white in his dust-caked beard. "Fast, sharp, and everywhere. We will be the plague."
Censor Zhao, seated on a silk cushion in the corner where the lamplight barely reached, observed the division. He did not write. He simply watched, his eyes like chips of polished jade, missing nothing. The granting of such independent, sweeping authority to a bull like Niu Gao was, in his silent calculus, either genius or catastrophic ambition. He stored the observation away, a fact for a future report.
For Lin Wei, the strategy became a personal, exquisite fracture.
He stood before Yue Fei, Commander Xin, and the two generals, a scroll of his own in his hands—a manifest of lives, not supplies. "The Medical Corps cannot remain whole," he stated, the words feeling like a betrayal of his own creation. "The needs are antithetical."
He turned to Yang Zaixing. "Your force. Siege warfare. Predictable trauma. Crush wounds, arrow storms, infection from filth and close quarters." He assigned the bulk: the great Mobile Field Hospital wagons with their canvas roofs, the deep stores of linen and antiseptic, the surgical tables. He assigned Scholar Zhang to manage the vast, grim logistics of mass casualties. He assigned Ox Li to be the immovable object guarding it all. "You will have stability, and depth. You will need it."
Then, he faced Niu Gao. The general's impatient energy was a physical force. "The Hammer. There is no stability. There is only speed. A hospital is a death sentence for your mission." From the ranks of his best, he called forward three hundred medics. Among them was Young Kuo, his face now lean and seasoned, but his eyes still holding the ghost of the boy from the penal battalion. They carried not heavy packs, but lean leather satchels.
Lin Wei held up the contents for Niu Gao to see: a rolled leather tourniquet, a needle and gut thread, a small flask of brutal, clear liquor, a tiny wax-sealed packet of opium pills, a pouch of salt and honey. "This is not a healing kit," Lin Wei said, his voice hollow. "This is a delay. A tourniquet stops the bleed now. A stitch holds the skin today. The opium kills the pain for the next twenty li. That is all. If a man takes a spear in the belly on your raid, this kit will not save him. It will only give him a handful of hours, and a choice between a slow death alone or a quick one with his brothers."
The silence in the tent was absolute. Niu Gao's grin had vanished. He looked from the pitiful kit to Lin Wei's grave face, understanding dawning. The surgeon was giving him a tool, but also a terrible responsibility.
"Can they keep up?" Niu Gao finally growled.
"They are the fastest, toughest men I have," Lin Wei said. "But understand this, General. Your speed is their only safety, and their most potent medicine. And it is also a sentence. You leave the gravely wounded behind. My medics will do what they can for them before you move on. That is the deal."
Niu Gao held his gaze for a long moment, then gave a single, sharp nod. A soldier's understanding. He turned and strode from the tent, already barking orders. Lin Wei placed a hand on Young Kuo's shoulder. The young medic flinched, then stood straighter. "You know the protocols," Lin Wei said. "You know the things. Do the most good for the most men. That is all you can do."
Young Kuo nodded, swallowed hard, and followed Niu Gao out into the dawn.
The parting of the army was a study in opposing rhythms. The Yang Zaixing's force began to coalesce with a deep, tectonic rumble. Siege towers, disassembled into monstrous lumber burdens, were loaded onto wagons that groaned in protest. Catapults were hitched to teams of oxen. Regiments of infantry formed into vast, marching squares, their pace measured, relentless. It was the movement of continents.
Beside this behemoth, Num Gao's force was a vibration, a gathering swarm. Tents were abandoned, extra cookpots discarded. Sacks of parched grain and dried meat were redistributed. Horses stamped, feeling the coming run. Sly Liu and his scouts were already ghosting ahead, melting into the landscape. Lin Wei watched as Young Kuo and the other Riding Medics checked their gear one last time, their faces set in masks of focused dread. They looked like men preparing to jump into a raging river.
Niu Gao mounted his horse, did not look back, and raised a closed fist. Without a shout, without a drum, the swarm moved. It flowed east, a stream of men and horses that quickly blurred into a single, dust-churning entity, and then vanished into the broken ground, leaving only a fading thunder in the earth.
The others were left in a sudden, echoing silence, broken only by the creak of wood and the lowing of oxen. It began to roll north, a tidal wave of men and machines.
Censor Zhao, observing the departure from his palanquin, found a moment to walk beside Yue Fei's horse as the headquarters train began to move. His voice was a cultured murmur, lost in the rumble of wheels. "To empower a man of General Niu's… elemental passions… with such autonomy. And to gift him the semblance of imperial care with these medics. It is a bold trust, Generalissimo. Should his passion lead to… excesses… against the northern people, the court will see not the action of a lone commander, but the consequence of the authority and the tools entrusted to him." He let the poison hang. "Success will be his glory. Atrocity will be your oversight."
Yue Fei did not turn his head. "The court worries about shadows, Censor. I fight the men who cast them."
But the seed was planted. The political trap was set: victory with a taint of brutality would be laid at Yue Fei's feet.
The march of the siege aemt was a colossal, mundane hell. Lin Wei's world became the interior of the traveling Field Hospital—a rolling village of suffering in waiting. He reviewed inventories, drilled his medics on gangrene identification, debated the usage of different types of herbs with Scholar Zhang. The directive droned:
"[Logistics: Stable. Morale: Steady. Distance to Yancheng: 40 li.]"
They passed through a landscape of ghosts. Burned-out farmsteads. Fields lying fallow, choked with weeds. A silent village, its only inhabitants a few hollow-eyed elders. The Jin horsemen were always there, on the horizon—small, dark knots of movement, watching, pacing the great beast's flanks.
The attack came not at the head of the beast, but at its trailing, vulnerable gut.
They were winding through a region of low, rocky hills and dry gullies known as the Red Stone Gully. The main army was ahead, having passed through the narrowest point. The massive supply train, with Lin Wei's hospital wagons nestled in its middle, was snaking through the defile. The air was thick with dust and the shouts of teamsters.
The Jin struck from the gullies on the eastern flank. There was no thunderous charge, just a sudden, shocking eruption of violence. Fifty horsemen, light and fast, materialized as if from the bare rock itself. They swept down on the rearmost wagons, not to fight soldiers, but to kill drivers, stampede oxen, and burn grain.
Screams, not of soldiers but of terrified civilians, ripped the air. A wagon laden with barley toppled, its axle shattered by a swinging saber. An ox bellowed, an arrow in its haunch, and plunged forward, dragging its mate into chaos.
Lin Wei was in his lead hospital wagon, checking a suturing diagram. The sounds registered not as battle, but as systemic collapse.
"[Alert: Attack on Logistics Tail. Non-combatant Casualties Imminent.]"
He didn't think. He just moved. He burst from the wagon, his eyes taking in the nightmare: Jin horsemen weaving between wagons, drivers falling, a curl of smoke rising from a sack of rice.
"OX!" he roared. "The wagons! Defend the supplies!" He turned to the cluster of medics staring in horror. "You four, with me! Kits! Now! Treat anyone you can reach!"
He snatched his own bag and ran, not away from the steel and the screams, but towards them. He was a doctor, and his patients were now scattered in a killing zone.
He found his first in the lee of an overturned cart. A young teamster, no older than sixteen, was trying to hold his thigh together. Blood, shockingly bright, pulsed between his fingers with every fading heartbeat. An arterial bleed.
Lin Wei dropped to his knees, the world shrinking to the boy's white face, the slick warmth on his own hands, the precise, desperate motions of tying a tourniquet high and tight. The boy's screams were high, animal. The battle was a roar around them—the clash of steel where Ox Li and his guards had met the Jin horsemen in a swirling, desperate melee, the panicked bellowing of animals, the crackle of fire.
Lin Wei finished the tourniquet, shoved a pad of linen onto the wound, and moved on, leaving the boy gasping. He saw a Jin horseman spear a fleeing driver through the back. He saw one of his medics, a woman who had joined from a liberated village, dragging a wounded guard behind a water barrel.
His world was now three points: the next gasping mouth, the next spurt of blood he could stanch, and the roaring, metallic chaos where Ox Li fought to keep that chaos from washing over them all.
He was no longer a Surgeon-General. He was another human trying to survive in the mud, and the war had finally, personally, found him. The siege of Yancheng was still a day's march away, but the war for survival had begun here, in the dust of the Red Stone Gully, with the screams of teamsters and the taste of someone else's blood in the air.