At sunset on the second day, the camp of the fifty thousand Great Yan Royal Tax Soldiers half a mile east of Silver-Fork Port was a picture of pure misery.
Inside Tent #42, a nineteen-year-old recruit named Little Stone stared down at his chipped wooden bowl in despair.
In the bowl floated a ladle of gray, sour-smelling millet gruel. Half of the grains had black weevils floating in them, and the bottom of the bowl was covered in a thick layer of fine river sand that Eunuch Cao’s quartermasters had mixed into the grain sacks to pocket the difference.
“Sergeant Ma,” Little Stone whispered, his stomach growling so loudly that three other soldiers in the tent winced. “I bit down on a pebble in my gruel yesterday and cracked my back tooth. The Royal Court hasn’t paid our two-tael monthly soldier wages in six months! My old mother back in Willow-Creek County is probably eating tree bark right now, and Eunuch Cao lives in that fancy guesthouse inside the city while telling us we’ll get paid after we storm the port tomorrow...”
Sergeant Ma, a grizzled thirty-year-old veteran with a scar across his chin and a patched leather chest-plate held together by boot-strings, spat a mouthful of gritty sand onto the dirt floor.
