Chapter 73: The Rule Of One
Commander Xu watched Meishan take from the ridge east of the road.
Her cavalry had crossed the White River at the eastern shallow where Fei Liao's engineers had sunk and laid a rope-bridge that had held the horses one at a time all through the second half of the night. By the time the sun cleared the eastern hills, Fei Liao had six hundred light infantry drawn up on the northern flank of the Meishan wall, and Xu had the cavalry and the remainder of the main column pressing the southern face from the ground the wrecked bridge no longer covered.
The Meishan Gate fort was cracked from arch to base where the pig-bomb detonations had taken the portal, and a section of the wall to the east of the arch had collapsed into rubble at some point in the first hour of the assault.
Fei Liao's engineers had thrown planks across the collapsed section and Fei Liao had put his best hundred through the gap. Once they were inside, the fight had gone out of the fort in less than a quarter of an hour.
Meishan's inner wall was another matter.
Prefect Shen Yang had drawn what remained of his six hundred defenders into the southern courtyard of the prefecture keep, and they were fighting from a formation that Xu recognized as a defensive lattice her husband had drilled in the Border Campaigns nine years ago.
Shen Bao had trained his brothers on the drills of the eastern army before he had died at Ningfeng. Xu could see her husband's hand in the way the Meishan defenders were positioning themselves. It was strange, and it hurt more than she had prepared for.
She did not let it slow her.
She sent Fei Liao at the eastern gate of the inner wall with three hundred infantry, sent her cavalry captain at the western postern with two hundred horse, and held her personal guard and the remaining infantry in reserve at the southern breach.