The Pirate Empress

by Deborah Cannon

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  Altan’s armies were too numerous for the Emperor’s beleaguered troops to fight. The brigade general deployed soldiers to Datong and raised the alarm. He sent five hundred men and when it looked like they could hold Yulin no longer, he gave the order to flee.

  The warlord was already one step abreast of him. Altan employed the same strategy as Quan and sent half his men to the unwary garrison, while the other half stayed to fight. Datong was protected within a circle of walls, and Altan would still have to breach Shanxi before he could reach it. He must not be allowed to take it—after Datong, there was only the bureaucratic border town of Xuanfu and the poorly guarded Juyong pass before the path was clear to Beijing.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Datong Under Siege

  “How many fires?” Altan demanded.

  “One fire and one cannon salvo,” the mole responded.

  “Good, that means they think there are less than five hundred of us. That will make the Chinese cocky. We stay hidden and wait for the next signal. How many soldiers do they have in the garrison?”

  “A few thousand at most.”

  Altan nodded in satisfaction, and the mole left on horseback to return to his hiding spot, which was a tumble of large rocks and discarded clay bricks overgrown with dead vegetation and a spindly mulberry tree. His location was just below the wall on the north side in a section that had no guard. Altan and his fifty thousand men were well out of view of the Ming watchtowers. He had sent a small band to camp a few miles north of the wall, but the bulk of his army was seven miles behind, awaiting the conquering heroes who had remained to seize Yulin. When these troops arrived they would storm Datong.

  He could already hear the thunder of horses as the victors pounded toward his camp. Had they captured the notorious brigade general of whom he had heard so much? He would have enjoyed staying behind to finish the job himself, and meet this man of glorious story and deed, but his first priority was the demise of Datong.

  As the white crescent of the moon rose with the descent of the red sun, Altan’s troops reunited, and in one grand army marched to the arid plains outside the garrison. They approached by night, silencing their horses from a gallop to a canter, and then to a slow trot. From here, they were still distant enough to avoid raising the alarms. They had yet to meet up with the small band Altan had sent on ahead. He signalled his men to a halt, and his generals motioned the order down the lines of mounted, armed warriors. He raised his eyes to the black ridge winding along the distant horizon like a desert snake.

  The Ming expected a raid of less than five hundred. Their signal fires were lit, a single beacon at intermittent towers, winking in the dark like yellow stars from east to west. Then a second fire lit up at each tower: a warning of possible danger. The alert was still low. They had no idea that one hundred thousand horsemen awaited. Altan directed his generals to make camp. He dared no fires for fear of the watchtowers. He ordered a cold supper of dried squirrel meat and raw winter tubers, and hunkered down on the dusty ground to scratch out a plan.

  In every border district most towers were built of solid earth, and each hung a rope ladder down one side, which made access easy for the sentries. Altan’s plan was to catch the sentries off-guard so that they couldn’t climb the towers in time to light the signal fires.

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  Brigade General Chi Quan swung into the Datong garrison by way of the Shanxi pass and into the circle of walls from the south. The barbarians had not followed. Or at least showed no sign of pursuing a southern route. He alighted from his horse and handed the reins to a soldier, before meeting with the officers in charge to warn them of the impending raid.

  “It’s been six days since we received your previous warning, Brigade General,” a young officer said. “No sign of the Mongols yet. Not here. Quingshuiying warned of a sighting of a small band passing, but they have not attacked. We’ve set sentries all along the walls and doubled the watches. If they’re out there, they’re keeping low.”

  That explained why the signal had been changed from red alert to amber, but Zhu had said that he had spotted a tide of a hundred thousand. Had he been mistaken? Even those that had attacked Yulin didn’t number in the tens of thousands. What was Altan’s scheme? Where was he? Had Quan left Yulin too soon by trusting the word of an incumbent monk? He Zhu had not contributed to military strategy in several years, had not fought as a warrior or seen the havoc Altan’s barbarians had wreaked upon the Emperor’s lands. Zhu had traded in his crossbow for a monk’s gemstone; so as far as warfare was concerned, he was rusty.

  “Don’t relax your vigilance yet,” Quan ordered. “The walls are strong, but they are not impenetrable.”

  Quan turned to enter the fortress where the officers’ quarters were stationed, but before doing so, he looked to the silhouette of the Dragon Wall. He had fought the battles of the Emperor for almost his entire adult life, had conceived of the wall in the first place, and had wrestled with His Majesty’s advisors on the building and linking of the individual ramparts. Was it a mistake to have taken the project so far? The Tower for Receiving Distant Nations was now dilapidated, and to the passing Mongols was no more than a symbol of Chinese decadence and arrogance. Had he been arrogant in thinking he could keep out invading foreigners this way? The military had been a shambles and it had seemed their only hope.

  Now he questioned his own judgment and the years he had put into building this costly barricade. Calls for repair came so frequently that the wall never functioned effectively as a single unit along its entirety, and he had given up restoring the eastern ramparts north of Shanhaiguan. Now the sentries there were deserting. The Manchus were gearing up for an attack no less brutal than what Altan’s barbarians had inflicted. Quan could not be everywhere at once, and no one was taking charge in the east. What the devil was Zheng Min doing? Why wasn’t he answering Zi Shicheng’s calls for help? He had heard nothing from the commander in many months.

  The cost was huge. The stretch of wall in the east cost 65,000 ounces of silver, plus a further 25,000 to strengthen weak spots. Fortifications to the west cost 3.3 million ounces of silver over the past six years—well over the government’s annual revenue. It was no wonder the late grand secretary, Ju Jong, had discouraged the wall building. Perhaps he was right.

  Inside the fortress Quan consulted with his commanders. Men were deployed to reconnoiter the bordering plain. Nothing amiss was noted and the scouts returned. Beyond the narrow crenels of the fortress, it was quiet. “Stay on your guard,” Quan ordered. “Take turns sleeping.”

  He himself had no intention of sleeping. Something did not seem right. He slumped his head against the back of his chair, intending only to rest his eyes a moment before ensuring his orders were obeyed. But that moment of repose cost him. He fell asleep.

  Shortly after midnight, Quan woke up to the snorts of Mongol horses. He raced outside to raise the alarm, whipped about to seek his highest officers when a battle cry rang out. “Seize your bows, man your blades, we’ve been ambushed. The Mongols are here!”

  “What happened?” he demanded of one of his captains.

  The commander’s face flushed with mortification as he glanced beyond, and Quan turned to face three streams of smoke pouring from the towers. While the guards snoozed like contented hogs—even though he had explicitly ordered them not to sleep at the same time—a band of Mongols had drilled holes in the brickwork with daggers and lit torches with which they’d fanned smoke through the perforated walls to asphyxiate the slumbering guards.

  Quan grabbed a hanging rope and swung himself up to the platform where he could see the damage for himself. Hordes of Mongols were climbing the ropes to the towers and in the distance a black cloud, huge against the starry sky, flooded like a river overflowing its banks. A hundred thousand horsemen. Zhu was right.

  “Light the beacons! Five fires. Five cannon salvos! Look alive, men. We’re under siege!”

  The twang of bows whined as thou
sands of arrows slung into their enemies’ midst. It was as Quan had feared: after that first alert he had sent from Yulin, Beijing had failed to respond, and by the time he reached here, except for the five hundred he had sent himself, there were no more soldiers present than there had been before his arrival. He would have to go to the Forbidden City. The Military Governor was ignoring his messengers. If Zheng Ming would not act to save the Emperor’s walls, then Quan must go to His Majesty himself.

  Quan saddled his horse and ordered his men to stay their positions, to hold the garrison at all costs until he reached the capital. He would ride all night if he had to. If His Majesty wished to save his throne, he must rally his people, and send every peasant and farmer, labourer and merchant, fisherman and civil servant to fight at the wall. His lungs burned as he galloped into Xuanfu and hauled his horse to a stop. Sentries normally guarded the bureaucratic border town. Why were there none? He dropped from his mount and crept quietly up to the gates. He left his horse outside, tethered to a stout, standing stone. Where was everyone? This was the last outpost before the Juyong pass and the road to the Forbidden City.

  A foul coppery smell assailed his senses as his foot hit something soft. A corpse. The copper smell was the stench of blood, and the only reason the settlement was spared a host of gorging crows was because of the dark. On the ground were signs of a raid: bodies of Ming sentinels and government officials—and Mongol arrows. Altan had split his army into three: left one to take Yulin, a second to besiege Datong and sent the third to attack Xuanfu. This last was the least of the threats. Xuanfu was little more than a village filled with bureaucrats. The Mongols had hit from the north side of the walls when Quan and all of his generals had expected a southern sequence of attacks. Yulin, Datong, and then Xuanfu. The barriers were positioned to protect each outpost if one was taken, but the warlord was too smart or Quan had tried to be too clever. Altan was not Esen. Esen would have gone for a southern approach while his baby brother followed the rule that the simplest strategy, even if it was the more difficult to succeed, was the best. He had stayed on the north side of the wall even though he had infiltrated the two most critical garrisons protecting the western approach to the capital—because he knew that was the last thing the Ming military expected him to do. Quan had been outfoxed. Fool, he cursed himself, but there was no point. He couldn’t change what already was.

  And now this. He stepped over the dead bodies and sought the governor’s house. It was a smallish home, but in a small town where folk lived in tiny one-room dwellings, it was a fine and grand palace. Quan knocked on the door. He peered into a dark window and saw a white face duck out of sight. “Who’s there?” a voice whispered.

  “I am Brigade General Chi Quan. Where is your master?”

  “Fled to the capital,” the voice said. A young man in plain clothes crawled out of the shadows and peered out, then beckoned him inside.

  The trembling servant bowed, recognizing a superior. “The master evacuated his family when the Mongols attacked. They got out, but they didn’t have a horse for me, so I stayed. I’ve been hiding here for days.”

  The servant was barely visible because of the darkness in the house, but Quan dared not light a lantern. “Tell me quickly. What happened?”

  “We weren’t alerted to the raid. We saw no warning fires.”

  The beacons should have been lit!

  “We’ve had no trouble for months from the foreigners. The sentries were lax. The barbarians approached in the dead of night and climbed the ladder to the signal towers before our men could climb up themselves. The watchmen were slain before any fires could be lighted.”

  “You’re alone?” Quan asked. “The townsfolk are all dead or evacuated?”

  “I don’t know,” the servant replied. “As I said, I haven’t ventured outside for fear of the barbarians.”

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  “Chains and witchery,” Fong shouted. “The Pirate King has broken the truce!”

  Li rushed outside to see her husband on the forecastle. It had taken her two hours to quiet the sickly boy and get him to close his eyes. Baby Lao was asleep in their quarters, and his father’s shouting penetrated the thin walls and might awaken him at any moment.

  “What is your problem?” Li called to him, and followed up the question by climbing the companionway to where he stood clenching his fists and sputtering like a frothing dog afflicted with the madness.

  Fong met his wife with raging eyes. “Your pirate friends have raided a fleet of salt junks.”

  So, it had come to this. Mo Kuan-fu was not stupid and recognized an opportunity when it arose. The truce between Madam Choi and Admiral Fong meant that the Imperial Navy’s hands were tied as long as the White Tiger depended upon the pirate woman to keep his wife and their newborn alive. In Fong’s absence, the Pirate King had organized the pirate gangs into a confederation of thousands, which needed a dependable source of income to keep their loyalty. He had found it in the lucrative salt trade. Most salt fields were located near the sea, so the bulk of the freight was transported by junk. Each quarter, loaded fleets trekked the four thousand miles to Canton where their cargo was sold and distributed. Unbeknownst to Madam Choi, the pirates, under the command of Mo Kuan-fu, had sailed out of Chiang-ping with a fleet of three hundred junks and accosted the salt junks before they even left the harbour. While the salt itself was worth its weight in silver, the pirates were too lazy to sell it themselves, and instead, promised the merchants safe passage for a price.

  A seaman whistled up to the forecastle and the sailor standing watch interrupted Admiral Fong. Apparently, one of the salt merchants had come aboard to make a complaint.

  “We were promised safe seas by the Emperor. This shipment is vital to His Majesty’s trade. If we do not reach our destination without the pirates making paupers of us, His Majesty will have our heads. Already, the merchants who have refused to pay protection money to the pirates have lost their cargo.”

  “Go back to your vessel,” Fong ordered. “I will see that the problem is solved.”

  The merchant bowed and followed one of Fong’s sailors to the main deck and then to the escort boat that had brought him aboard the warship.

  Li narrowed her eyes suspiciously, studied her husband whose thoughts were masked behind his stolid expression. “What do you plan to do? You promised Madam Choi you would not attack them.”

  “I made no such promise. My promise was that I wouldn’t attack her. And so I won’t. I still need her for her doctoring skills, but I have no use for the one called Mo Kuan-fu, the Pirate King. Weigh anchor!” he shouted across the deck. “We set sail.”

  It took less than three day’s voyage to negotiate the channel between the Lei-chou peninsula and Hainan Island. Once in the Gulf of Tonkin, an astonishing scene met their eyes: hundreds of armoured junks, their ragged bamboo sails raised against the morning sky and cannons cloaked on either side, crowded the harbour. Men stripped to the waist and faces shielded by wide straw hats, some with knotted kerchiefs around their necks, worked on the decks. Aboard one of the junks, a pirate lighted firecrackers to drive off evil spirits. This particular junk, Li could tell, had more than forty cannon, and was a large and splendid vessel, with a single black flag flying from its mainmast. It was one of the freight carriers of Kwangtung, stolen in the winter and converted into a pirate junk. Built of strong ironwood, it ran one hundred and fifty feet in length. Li knew it was of Kwangtung make because of the red bands in its hull, and now it was the flagship of the Black Flag fleet.

  The pirates were obviously confident because of the size of the flotilla. No one was on watch, and Fong hove to and kept his warship out of sight. The Kwangtung junk, alone, was the size of his vessel. Capable of carrying four hundred men, it rode high in the water and would be difficult to board from sea. Fong ordered his Chief of Intelligence to the forecastle, paced the deck until the man arrived, then gave instructions for his people to infiltrate the pirates and learn exactly what target they in
tended to hit next.

  “Let me go instead,” Li interrupted.

  Fong sighed. He had, after all, married a woman whose spunk was as big as her bite. When they returned to his cabin, Li insisted again on being the scout sent out to spy on the pirates. “They know me. They won’t think I’m a spy. They know that Madam Choi is like a mother to me. I would never betray her.”

  “And yet what you propose to do is exactly that. You will betray them. I told you once before, Lotus Lily, I don’t trust you.”

  “I’ll betray them—for your sake, most honourable husband—but I won’t betray her. She’s not among them. We left her near Macao and only now will she realize that we are missing.” She paused before adding, “If you prefer, I won’t even allow them to see me. I’ll disguise myself as a pirate, infiltrate their lair and learn their plot. Then I’ll return to you my Supreme Lord Admiral.”

  Fong’s Chief of Intelligence, a flat-eyed, yellow-faced man with large hands appeared at their opened doorway. He had overheard their disagreement and sided with Fong. “We cannot send your wife. She is one of them.”

  “No longer,” Fong said. “She has vowed loyalty to me. I will take her at her word. She will blend in with the pirates. You on the other hand will stand out like a peeled lychee nut.”

  The Chief of Intelligence scowled, threw a black look at Li. “Mark my words,” he began.

  “Silence! I’ve made my decision.” Fong turned to Li before dismissing his Chief of Intelligence. “You may go. Disguised. But keep low. Do not reveal your identity. Mo Kuan-fu cannot be trusted. Stories tell of his brutal and ruthless backstabbing. He would feed you to the sharks and feast on the shark’s fin soup your body supplied before ever he placed another’s need above his own. And if you double-cross me, your punishment will not be swift. It will be slow and tortuous.”

  Costumed in a torn jacket-like blouse and frayed black trousers made of a strong cheap fabric commonly used by the peasants for garments, Li roughened her face with grime and matted her hair into a lousy topknot. She kicked off her slippers and went barefoot, like the pirates of Madam Choi’s fleet, and then slipped into a rowboat and rowed herself into the midst of the rogues and hoped that Captain Ching, also known as Mo Kuan-fu, would welcome her and take her into their pack.