From Lingzhou to Mangzhou was about five days.
But Ning Chen was racing the Grand Tutor for time, so it was a forced march the whole way, and with the men marching light they were there in under four days.
The army made camp in a valley nine miles from the city of Mangzhou.
“General Ning, the gates of Mangzhou are locked fast and the wall is heavily manned…”
Inside one of the tents, a scout was reporting on the state of Mangzhou.
Yuan Long, Pan Yucheng and the rest could not help frowning.
Ning Chen was not surprised.
The men the Xuan Emperor had sent to Mangzhou had already beaten the grass and startled the snake. It was only natural that Chang Chengyun would be on his guard.
The Left Chancellor’s full name was Chang Chengyun. It was just that everyone had fallen into the habit of calling him the Left Chancellor… even the Xuan Emperor could not break it right away.
Yuan Long asked, “When can the baggage train get here?”
The baggage train had charge of the grain and fodder, the siege carts, the scaling ladders and the rest of it.
All of it was heavy and it moved slowly. Waiting on the baggage train meant two more days at the very least.
Ning Chen stood. “Wait here for orders. I’m going to go have a word with his lordship the Left Chancellor.”
Pan Yucheng was appalled. “You can’t. The Left Chancellor hates you into his bones. You can’t go.”
“Relax! I’ll take the musketeers I had before, light horse and fast… nothing is going to happen.”
“The thing is, the baggage train is still two days out, and even once it comes up we don’t have the men, and we may not be able to break the gate at all… I have to go and see whether there’s another way into Mangzhou.”
Pan Yucheng said, “Then I’ll go with you!”
Ning Chen nodded.
“I’m going too!” said Feng Qizheng.
Ning Chen had no objection.
Mu Anbang and Yuan Long stayed behind.
Ning Chen, Pan Yucheng and Feng Qizheng took a thousand musketeers, light horse and fast, and rode straight for Mangzhou.
From a long way off they could already see the great gate-fortress of Mangzhou.
“They really can build!”
Ning Chen griped.
The great gate had walls running out to either side of it… and the walls butted straight up against the mountains on both sides, the rock face smooth, sheer cliff the whole way, so there was no getting over the mountains into Mangzhou either.
Ning Chen honestly admired the craftsmen of this world. With nothing but rammed earth they had raised a wall ten-odd meters high.
And the thing was, the wall was a good twenty or thirty meters thick. It was practically a mountain.
To take a city you either broke the gate and killed your way in, or you put up scaling ladders and killed your way onto the wall. There was no third way.
Because against a wall like that, cannon were useless.
As Ning Chen and his men came on, horns went up along the wall… a warning. Enemy attack.
Ning Chen brought the column to a halt five or six hundred paces from the gate.
That was outside the range of a bow.
And even if an arrow carried that far, there would be next to nothing behind it.
Ning Chen looked at the great gate-fortress in front of him and felt his scalp prickle. How was anyone supposed to get in?
To get in you would have to pile up the heads.
And he had only two thousand-odd men. There was no chance at all.
Just then a fat shape came up onto the wall.
It was a long way off, but Ning Chen knew the Left Chancellor at once.
“Old Feng, you’ve got the voice. Give the Left Chancellor my regards, see if he can hear you.”
Feng Qizheng nodded, rode forward a few steps, gathered his breath up from his belly and bellowed at the top of his lungs, “Chang Chengyun! Ning Chen sends his regards to your mother!”
Ning Chen’s expression froze on the spot, his forehead full of black lines.
“Ning Chen, you little mongrel, one of these days this old man will cut you into ten thousand pieces.”
Several voices came back across the distance, all of them together.
These were the criers.
There were no loudspeakers in this world. Word got passed, basically, by yelling.
You picked out a few soldiers with big lungs and high voices, had them shout together, and whatever the two commanders wanted to say could be carried back and forth.
Ning Chen had not brought criers this time, but he had Feng Qizheng, and that great loudspeaker was enough… the man was strong, he was loud, he had lungs like a bellows, and by himself he was worth several criers.
Ning Chen’s face darkened. “Tell him to come out and fight if he has the guts, instead of hiding inside like a turtle with its head pulled in.”
Feng Qizheng roared, “You turtle with your head pulled in! Come out and fight if you’ve got the guts, don’t hide in your shell!”
Chang Chengyun’s criers shouted back, “Ning Chen, don’t push your luck! In a few days you’ll be dead with nowhere left to bury you.”
Feng Qizheng looked back. “What should I say to that?”
Ning Chen laughed. “Improvise. If you can needle the old fellow out of there, I’ll count it the first credit.”
Feng Qizheng grinned wide and let fly at the wall. “Chang Chengyun, you miserable old bastard, you turtle-head… your daddy has no respect for you at all. Every last one of your Chang family is dead and gone and you’re the one that’s left, one dead fat pig, and you’ve still got the face to go on living?”
“If I were you I’d have found a crooked-neck tree somewhere with nobody around and hanged myself long ago.”
“Chang the Fat Pig! The men who killed your whole family are standing right here. Come and kill us if you’ve got it in you — your daddy is waiting.”
“Your daddy will give you a chance. Come out and surrender, and be quick about it… your daddy can still make it quick for you. Otherwise, when you fall into your daddy’s hands, I’ll have you cut by a thousand cuts and render you down, you dead fat pig, into a pot of lard.”
“Chang the Fat Pig, I’ll fuck your mother… you thousand-cut piece of filth with no son to bury you, come out if you’ve got it in you and go three hundred rounds with your grandfather, and see if I don’t whittle you down into a human stick.”
Feng Qizheng warmed to it the longer he went on, and it got about as filthy as filthy gets.
Up on the wall Chang Chengyun was so angry his nose went crooked, and every ounce of fat on him shook.
“You — are you dead men? Curse them back for this old man…”
The criers looked at one another. Curse them back how?
The Left Chancellor was shaking with rage. “Curse them! Send Ning Chen’s mother my regards — tell him his mother died a horrible death…”
The criers opened their mouths, and a second later shut them again.
The Left Chancellor’s vision went black with fury and his fat body swayed. He nearly pitched over in a dead faint.
Because before he could get a word of it out, Ning Chen had already taken his men and gone, off in his own dust.
A classic case of curse them out and run.
“Little mongrel! Little mongrel… this old man will cut you into ten thousand pieces, grind your bones and scatter the ash…”
The Left Chancellor’s eyes had gone red with rage, and he bellowed until his voice tore.
“Ning Chen, what did we run for? I hadn’t cursed my fill… cough, cough cough…”
Feng Qizheng did not get to the end of it before he broke into violent coughing.
He had cursed himself hoarse, and now every word he said scraped and itched.
“You all right?”
Feng Qizheng shook his head.
Ning Chen laughed. “What, stay and wait for him to curse us back?”
Pan Yucheng frowned and said, low, “The Left Chancellor has led armies himself. Needling him like that won’t work. But he’s holed up in the city and won’t come out — what do we do?”
Ning Chen smiled slightly. “Relax. I have a way!”
Pan Yucheng’s eyes lit up. “You’ve thought of something? What is it?”
“Gamble our lives!”
Pan Yucheng’s face went blank. “Meaning what?”
Ning Chen smiled bitterly. “Meaning I have a way into the city, but how many of us are alive at the end of it is up to heaven!”
Getting inside on siege carts and scaling ladders, with the men they had, was nothing but a fool talking in his sleep.
Pan Yucheng said, “You mean to go up the mountain and come down the cliff face?”
Ning Chen shook his head. “Never mind whether the men can climb a sheer cliff at all — even if they could, we don’t have rope that long… and even with the rope, I’m afraid we’d be shot dead before our feet touched the ground.”
“Then how do you plan to get in?”
Ning Chen sighed. “I told you. Gamble our lives! Whoever wants to get in alive — it comes down to whose life is hardest to take.”
(End of Chapter 242)