1636- the China Venture Read online

  “But what of our mission?” asked Jacob Huber.

  “Give me your sample of wolframite and I will go alone to Dayu. I will meet you in a few months’ time in Hangzhou.”

  Jacob Huber dove into their baggage, and emerged with the sample. It was small, the size of a thumbnail, and kept in a small case. “Be careful with it; the next closest one is thirty thousand li away.”

  “The appearance can vary, of course,” Eva added. She held out a small painting. “So this is a picture that Judith painted for us, of wolframite crystals; it’s a copy of a photo from one of the field guides in Grantville.” The crystals were long, black and flattened, like dagger blades but without the points, and splayed out in all directions.

  “Don’t expect to actually see crystals that spectacular,” warned Jacob, “but you could see a corner of a crystal sticking out of the matrix rock. Or just a crystalline mass.”

  Xu Xiake reached out for the painting and studied it. “I know the white rock that the black crystals are growing from.”

  “It’s a mineral, actually,” said Eva Huber. “Quartz. And it’s a good one to know, because wolframite is usually found in quartz veins. And those in turn are found in an igneous rock, pegmatite.”

  “We have several pegmatite samples so we can certainly spare one,” Jacob added. He rummaged further, and produced it. “The wolframite is usually brown to black in color. If you use it to scratch a streak plate—that’s unglazed porcelain, no problem finding that in China!—it leaves a brown streak. On what we call the Mohs scale of hardness it’s between four and five point five. It’ll scratch a fingernail, but it won’t scratch glass.

  “It’s pretty dense, too. Find another rock of about the same size, and heft them in opposite hands. Wolframite’s about three times as dense as quartz, so if the rock has a substantial wolframite content, you’ll notice it.”

  When Jacob fell silent, Eva continued, “The acid test—literally—is to put it in strong sulfuric acid. I don’t know if it is made in China, but I can give you some. Anyway, the acid causes it to produce a yellow precipitate.”

  Xu Xiake always kept a diary of his travels and, as Eva spoke, he kept copious notes. “I will do my best,” he promised.

  Chapter 45

  Ninth Month, Day 8

  Tongcheng

  The situation became bleaker the next day. In the late morning, a large bandit army, perhaps forty thousand strong, marched past Tongcheng, heading south toward Anqing. While Fang Kongzhao was relieved to not have to fend this off with only a couple thousand militiamen, the force threatening Tongcheng was now increased to perhaps ten thousand men. The bandits crossed the Tongmian River south of the city and took up positions in the south and west, too. The town was now encircled and definitely under siege.

  If that weren’t bad enough, the telescopes revealed that the bandit army had a siege train with at least twenty cannon, as well as some catapults. The range was too great, however, for even Colonel von Siegroth to discern the nature of the cannon. Were they two or three century old relics, or newly forged Portuguese models, the so-called “red-barbarian cannon”?

  The silver lining in this particular cloud was that most of the siege train kept moving past Tongcheng, toward Anqing. It appeared that only five cannon, and a few catapults, had been assigned to the operations against Tongcheng.

  “This ‘far-seer’ of yours is wonderful,” Kongzhao told von Siegroth.

  “Of all the weapons and sundry military items I brought with me to Nanjing to show to the minister of war, the only item I was able to sell outright were a few telescopes. So I brought more to sell at Wuhan.”

  The terrain to the west wasn’t favorable to cavalry, and Fang Kongzhao ordered half of the men of the western division redistributed to the other quadrants.

  * * *

  Judith Leyster joined Yizhi’s aunt behind the battlements. Like the other noncombatants, they would bring supplies to the militia—food, water, torch oil, and, more militantly, arrows, stones, bricks and pottery shards.

  Liu Rushi had other ideas. Mike Song discovered that she had persuaded someone to give her a bow.

  Mike was surprised. Mike was also wary about jumping to any conclusions about whether courtesans could shoot. Back in Grantville, after all, Gretchen Richter had taken to a 9mm pistol like a fly to honey. Or so Mike had heard from a friend of a friend.

  “Shouldn’t you get in some target practice before you go up to the top?” he asked her.

  “I suppose I should,” she replied. “I am accustomed to shooting from horseback.”

  “Horseback?”

  Liu Rushi pointed at her feet. “Lotus feet are pretty, but they aren’t designed for marching. It’s too bad that a horse would probably balk at riding up the steps to the battlements.”

  “Being up on a horse would also mean that you would lose the protection of the parapet,” Mike reminded her.

  “True, true,” she said.

  They walked slowly together toward the main square; a target had been set up there.

  “How often do you ride? And shoot?”

  “I used to practice mounted archery once a week. Ultimately, it’s all Xue Susu’s fault.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A famous courtesan. Ex-courtesan, I should say; she married out of the business, lives near West Lake now. Very old now, perhaps seventy? But before she retired, she was famous for giving mounted archery demonstrations. Which of course made it acceptable for other first-class courtesans to do so. Like me.

  “It certainly wasn’t something every courtesan learned, like singing and playing an instrument, but I had a patron who was a retired general. He gave me lessons, and I would ride past targets at his country estate and shoot at them. I fancied myself a ‘female knight errant.’ He used to joke that first I would pierce his targets and then he’d pierce mine.”

  Seeing Mike’s wince, she put a hand on his arm. “I am what I am. If you meant it when you said you wanted to marry me if you could afford to buy me out, you must know what you are buying. Others will certainly remind you.”

  “Not if you come back with me to Grantville. I don’t plan to stay in China forever.”

  “We’ll see what the gods have in store for us. If our fates are intertwined, it will happen. But getting back to my explanation, while I am certainly not nationwide competition grade as Xue Susu was, I am sure I can shoot better than most of the men in the Tongcheng militia.”

  By now they had arrived at the archery butts. The hide of a wild boar had been nailed to a piece of wood to serve as a mark. The firing line was fifty yards away. This was, Liu Rushi told Mike, just as was specified by Confucius’ Book of Sentences as the proper setup for archery practice by one of the gentry who was not an official.

  “And if the archer were a mandarin?”

  “A tiger hide at seventy yards.”

  Her first set of arrows hit the target but not the center. “Shooting while standing is definitely different than shooting from horseback,” she complained.

  Mike ran to fetch her practice arrows from the butt, and handed them back to her. On her second try she did far better, and her third was consistent with her second.

  “You’re quite a good shot,” he commented.

  “Good enough to become an army officer, if I were a man.”

  “I am glad you’re not. A man, that is.”

  “To become an army officer, you must first take the district military examination. There, you shoot three arrows from horseback at a man-sized target. To pass, at least one of the arrows must hit. And, of course, you must not fall off your horse. And you must shoot five arrows when standing at fifty paces. Again, at least one must hit for a ‘pass’, but you needed four out of five to be graded ‘excellent.’ You also have to at least be able to draw an eighty-catty bow into the shape of the moon. And there are tests of swinging a halberd and lifting weights, but those I would fail, I’m afraid.

  “If you advance to the higher
levels—the prefectural and provincial military examinations—the standards are higher also. And at the national examination in Beijing, only one in five of even those with ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ scores will advance to the palace examination. The performance there determines what assignment you get.”

  “What about written tests?” asked Mike.

  “The candidates must memorize the military classics—the Sun Tzu, the Wu Tzu, and the Ssu-ma Fa—and on the examination they are given the beginning of a passage and must complete it. No big deal for a real scholar, but only the poor scholars think of taking the military examinations, so there is always a lot of cheating, I’ve heard. And the cheats make all sorts of stupid mistakes when copying characters from miniature books they smuggled into the exam hall; splitting one character into two or combining two into one.”

  “But what about questions on military tactics and strategy?”

  “There are no such questions on the military examination.”

  * * *

  There was a distant bark and a puff of smoke. The bandit artillery was firing again. The good news was that few shots had been fired into the city proper. That made sense to Eric Garlow—you can’t loot a city if you burn it down, or turn it into rubble.

  The bad news was that they were targeting the walls, and in particular the corner towers. Since these were square, not round like the towers of European fortresses, they were vulnerable to edge hits.

  More to the point, Eric was stationed on one of those towers. He felt the tower shudder slightly as a large cannonball struck it. He tried to pick up one of the enemy artillerymen in his sights, and hoped that the tower wouldn’t collapse beneath his feet.

  Ninth Month, Day 9

  Colonel von Siegroth had observed an opportunity. The bandit commander was now concentrating his artillery fire on the south gatehouse, and toward this end had massed his artillery. If he had enough experienced gunners, he could have kept his pieces well separated and thus less vulnerable to counterfire. But no doubt he had just one or two experts who had to run from piece to piece, which demanded a tightly clustered battery.

  The bandit commander was also probably confident that he did not need to fear a sally against that battery. The unbridged moat served to keep the defenders in as well as the attackers out. If the town militia boated across, they would be ridden down by the bandits, most of whom were mounted.

  Nor did he need to fear the town’s archers, or even its ballistae; the battery was out of their range. It was one thing for them to shoot three hundred yards at massed troops, because wherever the arrow fell it would hit someone. It was quite another to hit an isolated man.

  But that battery was outranged by Colonel von Siegroth’s short twelve-pounder, as well as Eric’s rifle. During the night, the European-made cannon was ever so carefully rolled around the city, taking up a new position on the mamian to the east of the south gate.

  Von Siegroth himself took command of the twelve-pounder. Eric Garlow, summoned to assist him, stood on the top deck of the nearby observation tower.

  “Solid shot for range,” the colonel commanded. The gun barked and there was a puff of smoke. The wind carried the acrid smell of the burnt gunpowder to Eric’s nose.

  “Short ten yards!” yelled Eric Garlow, watching through his rifle scope.

  The bandits were also firing and, while their individual cannon were inferior to von Siegroth’s, there were more of them. An enemy cannonball struck the south face of the mamian a few yards below von Siegroth and several yards off to one side. Eric spared a moment to look for the damage. It appeared that over a cannonball-sized patch of wall, one course of bricks had spalled.

  “Elevate one turn,” said von Siegroth. The twelve-pounder had an elevating screw, rather than quoins.

  In due course, von Siegroth’s gun fired again.

  “Nice,” Eric called out. The ball had hit the ground in between two of the enemy cannon. “You have the range, but turn a bit left or right.”

  Von Siegroth tapped on one of the cheeks of the carriage. The powder handler lifted the trail of the carriage with the handspike, and traversed it in the direction indicated until von Siegroth raised his hand.

  “Load shrapnel shell,” said the colonel. “Ten-second fuse.” Once the gun was ready to fire, he signaled for the linstock to be touched to the vent of the cannon. The primer ignited, in turn setting off the powder charge. And this in turn ignited the time fuse of the shell.

  The shell flew out of the muzzle and in due course burst in the air, perhaps ten yards up and as many ahead of the enemy cannon. That wasn’t far enough away for their crews to be safe; the little balls inside sprayed everywhere.

  “Men down, and they don’t know what hit them,” reported Eric with obvious satisfaction.

  “Another,” said the colonel. This shot went behind. By accident rather than design, it cut down those of the enemy who had thought that retreat was advisable.

  “Load explosive shell,” von Siegroth ordered. The shrapnel shell of course also contained explosive, but only enough to scatter the shot over a volume of ten or twenty yards diameter. The payload of an explosive shell, in contrast, was almost entirely explosive. “Ten-second fuse. Cut it carefully, we only have a few explosive shells!”

  The twelve-pounder spoke again. The shot sailed and landed, without exploding.

  “Dud?” Eric wondered.

  “No, wait.…”

  A curious bandit wandered over to inspect it.

  Boom! It exploded, tearing the bandit in half. The explosion also dismounted the nearest cannon from its carriage.

  “It was not a dud, just a fuse that burnt a bit too slowly,” said von Siegroth.

  A moment later, there was a second explosion. The powder for the bandit cannon had been within the shell’s blast radius.

  “There’s a reason regulations specify how far back the powder must be,” the colonel added.

  Eric was still studying the scene in his scope. “Wait, the grass has caught fire.”

  The fire spread toward another powder keg. There was a third explosion.

  “How many cannon out of commission?” von Siegroth demanded.

  Eric slowly panned the scope back and forth. “Three of the five. And I doubt if more than half of the crewmen are still alive.” Eric came down the stairs to the battlement level and joined the colonel. “Now that we’ve crippled their artillery, do you think they’ll give up?”

  “It’s possible. Or they might borrow more pieces from the force besieging Anqing. Or try an infantry assault without artillery support. Time will tell.”

  Ninth Month, Day 10

  The morning was quiet. In the afternoon, the bandits launched long-range archery and catapult fire against Tongcheng’s southern defenses. While the attackers broke off at sunset, the defenders remained watchful.

  And indeed, there was an attack that night, but it came from the north, during the Hour of the Tiger—around 3:00 a.m. By then, the moon had set. The bandits carried bamboo ladders, four zhang in length, with hooks at one end for securing the ladder to the top of Tongcheng’s parapet. The length of the ladders was such that they easily spanned Tongcheng’s moat when laid horizontally.

  The bandits carried the ladders forward as quietly as possible. Reaching the moat, they laid the ladders flat on the ground, and inched them forward until they reached the far side of the moat.

  With the ladders in place, bridging the moat, the bandits could pull themselves hand over hand along the ladder, and, if they kept their feet drawn up under their bodies, they remained clear of the water, thus avoiding a betraying splash. They only had to do this for about fifteen feet, since otherwise they were above the dry upper slope of the moat.

  They crawled off to one side or another as soon as they reached the city side of the moat, and then lay flat so as to avoid scrutiny. The reverse slope of the moat gave them some screening, of course. Their weapons had been strapped to their backs, so as not to interfere with their
movements when crossing the moat. They rolled onto their backs, undid the waist strap, and rolled off and recovered their weapons.

  The sentries on the walls did not see the bandits. The only light available was that cast from the torches in the sconces at the foot of the parapet. It was pretty dim beyond twenty or thirty feet, and the near edge of the moat was a good fifty paces from the base of the wall.

  Nor did the sentries hear them. In this regard, the weather also helped: The wind was from the south and helped carry away the sound.

  At last the quiet was broken by the firing of a rocket, from behind the bandit lines. The rocket burst in the sky, which was the bandit commander’s signal to attack.

  Some of the bandits who had crossed the moat grabbed the ladder and ran forward with it, and the others followed behind them. The bandits of this first wave were armed only with close-combat weapons: swords, axes and spears, as their commander hadn’t expected them to be able to swim or pull themselves across the moat and still keep bows and arrows dry.

  On the north wall, sentries sounded the alarm when they spotted the attackers running forward with the ladders. The warning was relayed, by trumpet calls, from post to post. The west and east division commanders also detached platoons, which ran along the battlements.

  The alarm eventually reached Fang Kongzhao at his informal command post on the central square. Learning of the surprise attack, he gave orders. “Yizhi, take half the reserves on duty to the north wall!” Yizhi splashed cold water on his face, to wake himself up, and then gave orders of his own. He and his men started marching quickly to the beleaguered wall.

  But it would take time for the reinforcements to arrive. In the first few moments of the attack, only the militiamen already on the north wall were in a position to defend it.

  One defender grabbed a Y-shaped wooden pole and used it to push a bandit ladder away from the wall; the bandits screamed as they fell. Others followed suit, or picked up bows and crossbows and began firing through the embrasures and arrow ports.