Chapter Text
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They’ve been marching, or better trekking, for weeks. They've been following the setting sun, from the wide, open steppe, across two mighty rivers, into the foothills and then along the ever-narrowing roads climbing into the inhospitable mountain range, where they’ll find the fortress guarding one of the few passes from the Western reaches. Winter arrives early, making the steep, winding roads nearly impassable, with avalanches and snowfall, blizzards and the sheer hostility of the terrain slowing them down. Rations are running low; Zhixing and his small army hunt mountain sheep and deer along the way to keep themselves fed and strong enough to press on. When they finally get there, the fortress looms stark and silent, but when they approach they’re met with a hail of arrows.
Even if Zhixing were to contemplate retreat, it’s impossible – the two dozen horses they have are tired, his soldiers exhausted, and they’d all become deserters by default. They need to rest, and for that they need to make camp. So Zhixing does the logical, reasonable thing and orders a siege. He has is men dig in just out of arrow-range. Sieges, he thinks, are some of the most wretched ways of warfare – nobody truly wins – but with such a small band he cannot do anything else.
The fortress becomes time, and time becomes an abyss that devours men.
A good commander must be a strategist, tactician, diplomat when called for, and charge ahead if a hero is needed to fire hesitant, exhausted troops into a final battle-frenzy. He must also be an efficient administrator. Zhixing manages to keep illness at bay by enforcing hygiene – latrines set apart from tents, regular washing whether with water or snow, airing clothes, picking lice. He has the tents dug into the snow and lets them snow in to keep warmer. He sets a rota of hunting parties to feed his army and sends men to collect whatever wood they can find among the sparse shrubs growing that high up the mountains. Water for drinking is boiled into tea. Wine is strictly rationed to prevent drunkenness and dissolution. He instructs them to scavenge for anything that looks edible or useful, dig for roots, and bring back pine shoots for tea to ward off lung-chills and dysentery. He keeps vigilant and they manage to fight off a dozen raids by ragged, half-starved barbarians, and a handful of sorties by the besieged garrison to break free, more desperate with each attempt. At least, action prevents boredom.
It’s still a battle by attrition, a grinding-down in agonising slow-motion – who’ll suffer more, lose more, whose morale will crack sooner?
He doesn’t know whether they have women and children with them, elders and families they might have acquired along the long long road to this forsaken place. They might have become battle-weary and gone soft. Discipline might have been eroded by exhaustion. They might have started bickering, or drawing lots and eat their dead. Beyond the long-familiar blankness in his heart, he feels compassion and pity, and steels himself into holding out, hoping they’ll break before it is too late. He’d let them leave; they’d be in no state to recover enough to fight. The mountains might claim them, or they might find help and live. He wouldn’t make it his business to punish men who’d done their duty, and he has no desire to weigh himself down with a bunch of half-dead prisoners, worthless even as slaves.
His troops haven’t suffered many casualties in the skirmishes, but winter and illness begin to take their toll. Burying people in the icy ground is labour-intensive, and soon it will become impossible. In the end, he resorts to one of the oldest, lamest stratagems in the world: He sends night patrols to churn up the snow so that tracks might become confused. After a few nights of that, the snow looks like a ploughed field, and he dresses one of his men, a young handsome lad with a pretty voice, in women’s clothes (he doesn’t ask why one of his officers has those in a pillow-bundle). He sends him running towards the fortress and has half a dozen of his troops chase after him, once or twice catch him to tear at his clothes and let him escape again, clutching at his rags that barely cover him. The youth does a good job wailing for help, the others dodge the ensuing arrows as best they can covering each other with their shields. They pretend to fall and crawl when they’re about a dozen steps from him; the arrows cease as stones are hurled from the ramparts, and the youth drops to his knees and claws at the massive gate as he pleads pitifully to be let in.
They aren’t quick enough to catch the gate when it opens just enough for him to be hauled in. A little later, his bloodied head rises over the wall, mounted atop a spear, and his naked, mutilated corpse is thrown down. It lands with a dull thump in the deep, white snow, and colours it red like cinnabar ink seeping into silk.
Zhixing has long learned that lenience kills. He has the body collected, and because the soil is frozen, he has it burned with the rituals due to a warrior, so it wouldn’t be eaten by the beasts of the mountain. It’s a signal of defiance, for once done there’ll be little firewood left, and there isn't much left to gather nearby.
After that, he just waits the garrison out. Whether they’ve been counting on him losing his army to the icy winter blizzards, to skirmishes, or to the wolf packs that howled closer every night, he doesn’t know. He keeps his men busy, and some weeks on it feels like just another war-camp, structured and disciplined, with its own grim rhythm and order. They have to start eating meat raw – frozen and thinly sliced – and he can see the merciless cold sap his soldiers’ endurance. There might never have been a more wretched siege with a five dozen hungry men outside, and who knew how many starving in there; he reckons perhaps a few handfuls if that, or they'd have been more daring. He respects their mulishness, and regrets the waste of life. After another tendays, he orders a freshly-shot goat to be dropped off by the gate, under cover of darkness. It remains there for three days, then it’s gone, a bloodied trail leading to the gate. A few days later, he lets his men put out a snow-rabbit they’ve caught in a sling. This too disappears, overnight. Then nothing until they’ve passed through the heart of winter, a full month later. He sends them a snow-partridge, skewered and shot across on an arrow that buries itself into the gate with a sharp thunk. When it stays there for three days, small and frozen, its feathers fluttering in the sharp wind, he gives orders to attack.
This time, there are neither arrows nor stones when his troops advance. They break the gate open with a wooden, bronze-tipped ram. Inside lies silence. When he passes through the gate, he finds only corpses: On the first and second yard. On the steps to the ramparts. On the walls. Huddled inside the largest building that, from its furnishings, might have been part of the commander’s quarters, converted into a communal space to share whatever shred of warmth could be had. There isn’t a living soul in that stone grave. Among the emaciated bodies are a few women but no children, no animals, not even rats, and the bronze cooking pot in the living quarters is covered in green patina. Despite the piercing cold the air is laced with a foul stench.
It’s the kind of victory that doesn’t feel like one.
It reminds him of things he’s been trying to bury where they can’t bite.
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