Chapter 5 — Pyokje

  Three months after the fall of Pyongyang, the Japanese counterattacked.

  It was not a raid. It was not a probe designed to test a defensive line or gather intelligence on dispositions. Forty-three thousand soldiers of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Korean expeditionary army turned north in a coordinated advance, moving in the disciplined column formation of a force that had been given a clear objective and sufficient logistical support to reach it. Their purpose was simple: reclaim what had been lost. Recover the river crossings. Drive the Ming force back to the Yalu and hold Korea as it had been held since the first landings.

  Wei heard about it from the Korean vedettes — fast riders who came north at midnight with no announcement beyond the urgent hoofbeats in the dark and the sealed dispatch that the lead rider handed directly to the guard post officer rather than going through the normal message chain. The guard post officer brought it to Gao. Gao brought it to Wei.

  Wei read it by lamplight in the command building and then set it down.

  *They are coming. All of them. Estimated three days to contact.*

  He sat with that for a moment. The lamp flame moved in the draft from the building's damaged wall. Outside, Pyongyang was quiet — the deep quiet of a city under occupation, its surviving population maintaining the specific silence of people who had learned that silence was the safest posture.

  Three days.

  He went back to work.

  ---

  *The First Day: Choosing Ground.*

  Wei left Pyongyang before dawn with Gao, Han Rui, and a Korean guide supplied by Yi Yeongno — a young officer named Park Seongjun who knew every li of terrain between the Han River and Pyongyang with the intimate specificity of a man who had retreated across it twice and reconnoitered it once more in the aftermath. Park spoke some Chinese; what he could not express in speech he expressed through gesture and the practiced sketching of a man who had spent months conveying terrain to people who did not know it.

  They rode south for four hours.

  Wei did not look for ground that would allow him to defeat forty-three thousand soldiers. He did not have the force for that, and the objective did not require it. He looked for ground that would allow him to hold forty-three thousand soldiers for four days — long enough for the reinforcement column from Liaodong to arrive, long enough to deny the Japanese the river crossing that they needed to anchor a renewed occupation north of the Han.

  He found it at Pyokje.

  The plain opened south of a long ridge that ran roughly east-west — a natural artillery platform, elevated eight meters above the flat fighting ground, commanding two hundred degrees of visibility over the approach from the south. Below the ridge, the plain ran flat for eight hundred meters before rising slightly at the southern edge, which was where the Japanese advance would emerge. The left flank of any defensive line positioned in the plain was bounded by a shallow stream, its banks steep enough to make cavalry crossing difficult and infantry crossing slow. The right flank was open, which was a problem — but an open right flank was a problem Wei could use.

  He stood on the ridge and looked south for a long time.

  "Here," he said.

  Park Seongjun, beside him, looked at the plain and then at Wei. "The ground between the stream and the ridge — my army fought here, Commander. In the second month of the war. The Japanese had the ridge."

  "How did that go?"

  "Badly."

  "Then we take the ridge," Wei said. "Artillery on the high ground, main battle line on the flat, refused left flank angled back toward the stream." He turned to Gao. "Draw it."

  Gao was already drawing.

  ---

  *The Second Day: Positioning.*

  The five Ming battalions — the Iron Crane and four supporting units from the Liaodong and Shandong commands — moved to their assigned positions through the morning of the second day. The Korean infantry, three thousand strong, took the extreme left flank along the stream bank, which was the correct use of them: the stream terrain was their ground, they knew its crossing points and its dead zones, and placing them there meant they were fighting in conditions that partially compensated for their exhaustion.

  Wei stood on the ridge and watched the line form below him.

  "Artillery placement," Gao said, beside him. He was reading from his notes. "Eight li cannon on the ridge crest — elevation confirmed, range markers staked at two hundred, four hundred, and six hundred meters. The short-barrel guns in the secondary position at the ridge's eastern end, angled to cover the right-flank open ground."

  "Good. The right flank." Wei looked east. Open ground, barely bounded, an inviting route for any cavalry force trying to swing wide around the main line. "I want the cavalry screen positioned there during the battle — not to fight, to watch. The moment Japanese cavalry begins moving to exploit the open right, I want to know about it before they've committed."

  "Flag signal?"

  "Signal two — green square, advance-pace — from the cavalry screen to my position means Japanese cavalry moving right. I respond with signal four — yellow horizontal, flank right — to redirect the reserve." Wei looked at the plain below. "The Japanese will probe the right. When they see the cavalry screen and the short-barrel guns at the ridge's east end, they will decide the right flank is too costly and commit to the left instead."

  "Where you want them."

  "Where I want them." He turned to the map Gao was holding. "The refused left flank is the mechanism. I draw the Japanese to commit a major force to what they believe is a collapsing flank — the diagonal line back toward the stream looks like a weakness, a place where our line is thinner and less organized. They will send a brigade there, possibly two, to fold that flank and get behind us."

  "And when they commit?"

  "Zhao hits their left flank while they're extended." Wei traced the counterattack route with his finger. "Partial envelopment. Not a full double — we don't have the numbers. But enough to force the Japanese command to divide their attention between the collapsing center, the left flank push, and the right-flank threat on their own left." He folded the map. "Four days. We do not need to win this battle. We need to not lose it for four days."

  Gao was silent for a moment.

  "The men will fight better knowing the objective," he said. It was the same thing he had said three days ago, and would say again before the battle began.

  "Tell them," Wei said. "Tell every company commander to tell every squad leader to tell every man: the objective is four days. Not a hundred miles of advance. Not a famous victory. Four days, the line holds, and the reinforcements arrive."

  ---

  *The Third Day: Drilling.*

  The third day before the Japanese arrived was spent on the plain below the ridge, in the cold morning air, drilling the formations that would need to work when the morning after next arrived with an army behind it.

  Wei stood at the center of the practice ground and watched.

  The pike square drill was the foundation. Eight hundred men in each of the four squares, pikes at carry, the squares arranged in the checkerboard pattern that allowed each one to support its neighbors and prevented any single square from being isolated and surrounded. The drill began with the squares in position and ran through the standard set: receive advance, hold against pressure, contract when penetrated, expand to restore the line.

  What Wei was watching for specifically was the transition.

  "Shield wall to spear hedge," he called. "Ten seconds. Begin."

  Two beats on the drum — the transition signal, the same two beats that had been the battalion's drill signal since Liaodong and that every man in the formation could hear and respond to without thinking about it.

  The front ranks of the nearest pike square moved.

  The first rank dropped to half-crouch simultaneously — a hundred men going to the same knee-bend in the same second, pike shafts swinging from the carry angle down to the forty-five-degree engagement angle. The motion was not perfectly synchronized — two men on the left end were a half-second late — but it was close, and as the first rank settled, the second rank brought their shafts forward over the first rank's shoulders and the geometry of the hedge established itself.

  Wei counted the seconds.

  Seven. Eight.

  "Dress the left end!" Gao called. "You're ragged on the left!"

  Nine. Ten.

  The hedge was in position. Not perfect on the left end, but in position.

  "Again," Wei said.

  They ran the transition six more times. By the fourth repetition the left end was dressing in eight seconds. By the sixth, the entire front was settling into hedge position in nine seconds flat — one second of margin before the limit. The margin mattered because the limit of ten seconds was derived from the time a Japanese arquebus volley rotation needed to reload and step forward for the second volley. If the transition took eleven seconds, the second volley caught the formation mid-transition, when the front rank was in half-crouch and the pikes had not yet settled and the geometry was wrong.

  At nine seconds, the hedge was solid before the second volley arrived.

  "Acceptable," Wei said. He did not say good. He would say good when it was seven seconds.

  The next drill was the full transition sequence: shield wall receiving fire, absorbing the first volley, two-beat signal, ten-second transition to spear hedge, hedge advancing to close distance, four-beat signal — Wei added the fourth beat to the drum code specifically for this — hedge transitioning to pike square for sustained holding.

  This chained transition was harder. It required each rank to know what the rank ahead of it was doing, to move in response to that movement rather than in response to the drum alone, because the drum could only carry so much information and the rest had to be carried in the drill.

  They ran it four times. By the fourth, it was starting to look like something that could happen in a battle.

  "Zhao," Wei said. "Reserve Company — counterattack movement from the right flank. I want to see the timing."

  Zhao's company broke from its waiting position on the right and swept around the practice line's eastern end, moving at the controlled run that wasn't a sprint but wasn't a march — the pace that covered ground while keeping formation. The cavalry troop ahead of them hit the far end of the practice line and split, the wedge formation opening and closing in the space of thirty meters. The mounted men wheeled and came back. The infantry followed them through.

  Sixty-three seconds from the first movement to the return of the cavalry through the far end of the line.

  "Too slow," Wei said. "The Japanese left flank will be organized by sixty-three seconds. I need forty-five."

  Zhao looked at him with the expression of a man who does not argue with a timeline, only accepts or rejects it. "I can give you fifty. Not forty-five with the cavalry wedge leading."

  "Fifty."

  "If the cavalry leads by thirty meters — enough to force the flank to react to them before the infantry arrives — fifty seconds is achievable."

  Wei considered. "Drill it with the thirty-meter cavalry gap."

  They drilled it five more times. By the third, the cavalry was clearing the end of the line in thirty-three seconds and the infantry following in forty-eight. Zhao accepted forty-eight as workable.

  The afternoon was spent on the lesser drills: the signal reading under noise, the flag acknowledgment chain, the drum-code relay from the artillery observer on the ridge to Wei's command element in the center of the main line. Liang Bo ran through the full code sequence twice until every officer in the chain could recite it without hesitation.

  Three beats: advance to contact.

  Five beats: cross or close to engagement distance.

  Two beats: reform or redress the line.

  Four beats: transition formation — execute the ten-second drill.

  One long roll: push forward, full commitment.

  And the two subsidiary signals that Wei had added for Pyokje specifically:

  Single horn blast from the cavalry screen: Japanese cavalry moving to exploit the right.

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  Double horn blast: Japanese cavalry committed, threat level critical.

  "Know these," Wei told his assembled company commanders at the end of the afternoon. "If you hesitate on a drum signal in this battle, you have wasted the ten seconds we spent six hours earning. The drum speaks, you move. Your body moves before your mind decides."

  He dismissed them to their men.

  ---

  *POV: Park Seongjun — the Korean vedette, midnight before the battle*

  Park Seongjun was not a man who prayed at regular intervals. He had been raised to observe the correct forms — the seasonal ceremonies, the ancestral rites — and he observed them, but private prayer in moments of personal fear had never been part of his practice. He had been afraid many times in this war and he had dealt with the fear by moving, by doing the next thing that needed to be done, by the discipline of motion.

  Tonight he did not move. He sat in the vedette post — a hollow in the ridge's southern face, barely large enough for two men, lined with old grass — and watched the dark southern plain with his companion, a senior vedette rider named Choe Mansik, who had been in the war since the beginning and who had survived things that Park did not entirely believe when Choe described them.

  They had been in position for three hours. The night was cold and getting colder. Below them, eight hundred meters of dark plain ran south to where the Japanese army was encamped — its fires visible as a low orange smear at the horizon, dozens of fires merging at this distance into a single continuous light.

  "How many do you think?" Park asked quietly. He knew the answer from the dispatches. He asked because asking gave the number somewhere to go.

  "More than should be allowed in one place," Choe said. He was looking south with the steady, patient attention of a man who had been watching for threats for three years and had learned to read darkness the way a farmer reads weather.

  "The Chinese commander," Park said. "Wei Zhongxian."

  "What about him?"

  "He asked me where my army fought here. I told him it went badly. He said: then we take the ridge." Park paused. "He said it the way you say the obvious thing."

  Choe was quiet for a moment. "And did he take the ridge?"

  "Yes."

  Another silence.

  "The Chinese know how to fight in formation," Choe said. He said it without particular feeling — an observation, not a compliment. "Whether they know how to hold for four days is different." He looked at the distant fires. "We held for three days at the Imjin crossing and then we didn't. Formation knowledge didn't save us."

  "He said four days," Park said. "He said the reinforcements arrive in four days."

  "Then I hope they arrive in four days."

  Park looked at the fires. They had not moved. The Japanese army was settled for the night — the distant, enormous stillness of an army confident in its numbers, in no hurry, waiting for morning.

  He thought: *Tomorrow will be a thing to remember.*

  He thought: *I hope I am alive to remember it.*

  He pulled his coat tighter against the cold and resumed watching, and Choe watched beside him, and the fires to the south remained where they had been all night, patient and enormous, and the darkness held.

  ---

  *The Fourth Day: The Battle.*

  The Japanese army came at the Iron Crane Battalion's position at dawn.

  They came in exactly the formation Wei had expected — arquebusiers in three-rank rotation at the front, ashigaru spear infantry behind them in dense columns, samurai shock troops ranged on the flanks, cavalry screening the advance on both sides to prevent repositioning. The formation was textbook. It was also the formation Wei had spent three days preparing his specific counter for, and the fact that they came exactly as expected was neither satisfying nor worrying — it was simply information, confirming that the preparation had been correctly targeted.

  Wei stood on the ridge behind his main battle line and watched eight hundred meters of ground begin to close.

  They were not rushing. They had the numbers and they knew it, and men who have the numbers do not rush because rushing is a concession — an acknowledgment that you cannot afford to give the enemy time. The Japanese army could afford time. It advanced at a walking pace, drums sounding a slow, steady cadence, banners moving in the morning air above the columns.

  The sound of forty-three thousand men walking reached the ridge before the formation was clearly visible. It was a low, continuous percussion — boots on cold earth, the creak of equipment, the muffled sound of thousands of bodies moving together. It built as the distance closed. By the time the Japanese arquebusier front was clearly visible at eight hundred meters it was loud enough that Liang Bo had to lean close to Wei's ear to be heard without raising his voice.

  "They will reach four hundred meters in approximately twelve minutes," Liang said.

  "I know." Wei was watching the flanks. The Japanese cavalry screen on the right was ranging toward the eastern open ground, exactly as he had anticipated — probing for the gap that wasn't quite there, assessing the ridge's eastern end where the short-barrel guns were positioned. "Signal from the cavalry screen yet?"

  "Nothing yet, Commander."

  The artillery on the ridge above and behind him — Commander Ru Xiang's battery, eight li cannon and four short-barrel guns — had been silent since dawn. Wei had ordered them to hold fire until his command. Not because the range was wrong but because a premature barrage told the enemy the battery's exact position and elevation before the battle was set. Let the Japanese commit to their approach before the ridge guns spoke.

  Six hundred meters. The arquebusier formation was fully visible now — the three ranks, the spacing between them designed to allow the rotation, each rank of men carrying their weapons at the carry position, not yet raised. At the head of each rank, the rotation commanders — men responsible for the timing, for the step-forward and step-back that kept the fire continuous.

  Wei studied the front-rank spacing.

  *Sixty to the rank. Three ranks active, one reforming. One hundred and eighty guns cycling.*

  "Gao. Formation status."

  "Main line in pike square — all four formations, intervals correct. Shield companies forward at fifty meters. Refused left flank — angle confirmed, Korean infantry anchoring the stream end." Gao looked at him steadily. "Ready, Commander."

  "Sound the advance to receive."

  One beat: steady, even, the drum voice of a formation moving into position. Then another, and another — not a rapid signal but a sustaining pulse, the heartbeat of a defensive line bracing itself.

  The four pike squares moved from their staging positions to their battle positions — the checkerboard arrangement on the plain, each square two hundred meters from its neighbor, the gaps between them covered by the shield companies. The movement took ninety seconds and it was orderly. Wei watched it and approved of it without saying so.

  Five hundred meters. The Japanese drums increased their tempo slightly.

  "Artillery — begin firing."

  The ridge guns spoke all at once.

  Ru Xiang had organized his battery for a coordinated first volley — all eight li cannon discharging simultaneously, at the elevation he had confirmed against the range markers the previous day. The sound of it from Wei's position on the ridge was enormous, a single compressed concussion that rolled south across the plain and echoed off the low hills at the plain's edge. The shells fell in a tight group at the center of the Japanese arquebusier formation, five hundred meters out.

  Wei saw the front rank shudder. Men going down — he could not count the individual casualties at this distance but the effect on the formation was visible, the organized front rank disrupted, gaps appearing, men on either side of the impacts stepping away instinctively. The second rank, close behind, compressed into the gaps.

  The formation flexed. Then it contracted. Then it kept coming.

  *As expected.* A forty-three-thousand-man army absorbed an artillery volley the way an ocean absorbed a stone — the local disturbance was real, but the mass continued.

  Four hundred meters.

  The Japanese front rank stopped.

  It was a signal Wei had been waiting for — the stopping was itself information, the moment when the rotation commander judged the range correct and gave the order to deploy. The front rank went from the march position to the firing position in a single practiced motion: weapons raised, the line dressing itself, the rotation commander's flag dropping.

  "Hold the shield line!" Wei's voice, carrying down the slope. "Hold! Do not flinch!"

  The first Japanese volley came as a rolling wave — not all at once, but in the fast sequential discharge of the rotation system, left to right across the front rank, each man firing as the one beside him fired, the volley beginning at the eastern end of the line and completing at the western end in under two seconds. The effect at four hundred meters was like a horizontal rain of iron striking wood — the shield companies took it full on, the sound of hundreds of simultaneous impacts carrying up to the ridge as a single dense percussion.

  The shield line wavered. He could see it from the ridge — the slight backward lean of a hundred men absorbing simultaneous impact, the individual shields rocking on their bearers' arms. Three gaps appeared. Officers' voices closed them.

  "Hold!"

  The second Japanese rank stepped forward. Their front rank had already stepped back and was reloading — Wei could hear the rhythm of it faintly at this distance, the sound of trained hands moving through the reload sequence.

  The second volley hit.

  "Artillery — direct fire on the arquebusier front. Drop elevation. Grapeshot!"

  Ru Xiang's crew made the adjustment in fifteen seconds — the crew training paying in exactly the circumstance it had been designed for, the elevation screws turned with rapid precision, the canister shot loaded in place of the standard shell. The eight li cannon fired again, at a flatter angle, the shot dispersing as it crossed the four-hundred-meter gap between the ridge and the Japanese front.

  The effect on the rotating line was different from the first volley's effect. Where the first volley had created point impacts — shells striking particular points and killing the men at those points — the grapeshot spread across the whole front rank in a dense, overlapping pattern. The organized rotation, which depended on each rank's integrity and spacing, suddenly had too many gaps to maintain. The third Japanese volley was ragged — individual guns firing at different moments, the line's left end firing before the right end had leveled its weapons.

  "Pike squares — advance!"

  The drums doubled their tempo. Two beats, then two beats again, the signal code for advance at pressure pace — not a charge, not yet, but the full-weight movement of heavy infantry that had been standing still and was now moving, mass and momentum building with each step.

  The four pike squares moved forward in unison. Eight hundred men each, thirty-two hundred total, pikes horizontal at the carry, the front rank of each square locked behind the shield companies that had taken two volleys and were still on their feet. The rear ranks of each square were pushing — not from panic but from the trained pressure of men who knew that the mass behind them was the weapon, that the individual pike shaft was only useful as part of the mass that the square created.

  Wei came off the ridge and moved down the slope to the plain, Han Rui at his shoulder, Gao beside him. Command visibility. This was the moment when the line needed to see a figure at the center that was not running.

  Three hundred meters. Two fifty.

  The Japanese arquebusiers fell back — not breaking, not routing, but performing the prescribed withdrawal of a volley formation that had been closed to the distance where reloading was no longer possible before contact. They stepped back in rank order, maintaining the rotation's discipline even in retreat.

  Behind them, the samurai shock troops came forward.

  Wei saw them emerge from the main body — the heavy infantry, full lamellar and lamellar-over-chain, their nodachi and katachi held across the body in the carry position, their movement the controlled purposeful walk of men who were not afraid of the force approaching them because they had spent their lives training for exactly this distance and this kind of collision.

  "Two beats!" Wei called to Liang.

  Transition signal.

  The front ranks of the pike squares dropped to half-crouch — the ten-second drill, the movement that had been trained into the muscle memory of every man in the battalion until it happened faster than decision. One rank, then two, then three, the overlapping shafts of the hedge settling into position, the geometry of the formation changing from the standing mass of the square to the low, dense, projecting wall of the hedge.

  Seven seconds.

  The samurai hit it.

  The collision was not the collision of the cavalry wedge against ashigaru — soft, breakable. This was the collision of trained individual fighters against an organized formation, and it had a different quality. A samurai officer — a large man, black armor, the nodachi already deployed — struck the hedge at the point where two pike shafts overlapped and cut through both of them with a single diagonal stroke that Wei heard from thirty meters away. He drove into the gap before the men on either side of it could close. Three men got to him before he could use the gap to widen it. What happened in the next five seconds Wei could not fully see through the bodies and the smoke.

  But the hedge closed.

  It closed because that was what it did — because the men in it had trained to close gaps faster than individuals could exploit them, because the density of the formation was the answer to the quality of the individual, because a pike hedge is not a collection of fighters but a single organism that absorbs damage and continues to be itself.

  It held. It bent back a step under the samurai weight, then another step. Then it held.

  "Left flank!"

  The shout came from the left end of the line — an officer's voice, high and urgent. Wei turned.

  The refused flank — the diagonal line drawn back toward the stream, the deliberate appearance of a weakness — was under the pressure he had designed it to attract. A Japanese brigade, perhaps four thousand ashigaru spear infantry, was pressing the left angle hard, pushing the refused line backward toward the stream, the folding motion that would, if it succeeded, wrap around the Ming rear and end the battle.

  The refused line was holding. Barely. He could see the compression — the angle becoming steeper, the arc of the crescent narrowing.

  *Now.*

  "Zhao." He did not shout it. Zhao was five meters behind him, had been five meters behind him since the squares began their advance, had been watching the battle with the specific patience of a man waiting for the precise moment that he has been told will come.

  "Ready, Commander."

  "Right flank counterattack. Hit their left flank while they're committed. Fifty seconds."

  Zhao was already moving as Wei finished the sentence.

  The reserve company — five hundred of the battalion's best, Zhao's shock element that had been held in reserve for this exact moment — swept around the right end of the engaged line at the controlled run. The cavalry troop ahead of them by thirty meters, the wedge forming as they cleared the end of the line, the lead horses accelerating toward the exposed Japanese left flank.

  What happened at the Japanese left flank was a repetition at larger scale of what had happened in Pyongyang's street: a force that had committed to a direction and could not quickly change it, struck from an unexpected angle by cavalry and then by heavy infantry, the formation's coherence disrupted before it could brace.

  The Japanese left flank buckled.

  For forty minutes the battle held that shape — a thing suspended between two outcomes, either of which remained possible throughout. The Japanese pressure on the Ming left was constant and heavy, the refused flank compressing by degrees, the arc of the crescent narrowing like a closing hand. The Ming counterattack on the Japanese left was fierce and disruptive but could not achieve a breakthrough against a force twenty times its size — it could threaten, wound, force the Japanese command to divide its attention, but it could not break the mass.

  Then Ru Xiang's battery found the reserve.

  The Japanese reserve formation — cavalry and fresh ashigaru held behind the main advance, bunched at the eight-hundred-meter line waiting for the breakthrough that had not materialized — had been stationary for an hour. Stationary meant visible. Visible, at this range, meant targetable. Ru Xiang had been watching them through his elevation observer's glass for thirty minutes and had already done the range calculations before Wei's single-horn signal reached him.

  Four volleys. Standard shell, maximum elevation, the arc dropping into the bunched formation.

  The sound of screaming horses reached the Ming line from eight hundred meters. The reserve cavalry — the formation that represented the Japanese commander's reserve commitment, the force he would use to exploit any breakthrough — began to come apart. Not routing. Being reduced. But the reduction happened in full view of the main Japanese advance, and watching your reserve reduced from behind while you are engaged in front is not a thing that improves an army's cohesion.

  The Japanese advance paused.

  Wei felt it in the sound before he could see it — the drums from the south falling from their advance cadence to a different rhythm, a holding pattern, the recalibration that happens when a command element is absorbing unexpected information.

  One minute. Two.

  "Drums — hold the line," Wei said. "Do not advance. Do not pursue. Hold."

  "They're pulling back," Gao said. He was looking south with the glass, following the Japanese rear elements. "Their reserve formation is withdrawing. The main advance is pausing." A pause. "Commander — they are not routing. They're pulling back in order."

  "I know." Wei kept his eyes on the middle ground. "They're withdrawing the damaged reserve. They'll reform it and come back tomorrow." He turned from the battle line and looked at his own casualties. The shield companies had taken the heaviest: the front-rank bearers who had absorbed three volleys before the pike advance had closed the distance. The refused left flank was compressed to half its original depth — not broken, but reduced. Three of the four pike squares had lost between ten and fifteen percent of their strength. "Tonight we repair what we can. Tomorrow we hold again."

  Gao looked at him. "Did we buy the four days?"

  "We bought one." Wei said it flatly. It was the truth, and the truth was the only thing that served. "Tomorrow they come back with fresh arquebusiers and what remains of the reserve. They will not make the same errors." He turned away. "Tonight: shield repairs, casualty assessment, ammunition count. The artillery line needs fresh powder and the breach in the left flank's depth needs to be filled before morning." He looked at each officer in turn. "Get me those reports within two hours."

  "And the day after tomorrow?" Gao asked — the question he had asked in the original briefing and would ask until the reinforcements arrived or didn't.

  Wei did not answer.

  Three days to go.