The northern military highway was choked with thousands of freezing civilian refugees dragging handcarts piled with ragged quilts, their feet wrapped in bloody burlap.
A freezing north wind blew across the open steppe. It whipped fine, crystal-clear snow across the raised gravel raised stone road. Women clutching frostbitten infants huddled against overturned farm carts. Elderly farmers collapsed into the knee-deep drifts, their stiffened hands still clutching wooden seed bowls. The post road was a frozen moving belt of human misery, stretching twenty miles south toward the castle walls of Cangzhou.
Along the roadside ditches, the casualties of winter flight lay frozen into ugly statues of ice.
Dead draft oxen, their bellies swollen with frost and their eyes picked clean by crows, blocked the drainage channels. Desperate peasants used rusty scrap iron to hack frozen strips of meat from the carcasses, eating the raw, frozen muscle simply to stop their stomachs from devouring themselves. Firewood was more precious than silver. A single bundle of dry willow twigs traded for three copper coins or a stitched silk handkerchief stripped from a dying nobleman’s concubine.
Behind the refugee columns rode the forward elements of the royal army’s cavalry advance.
“Clear the raised stone road!” a mounted royal sergeant screamed, his iron-tipped whip lashing across the shoulders of an old woman who was struggling to pull a wooden cart through a frozen rut. “Clear the road for the baggage trains! Any peasant blocking military wagons gets thrown into the ditch!”
