Chapter 66: Master Huang

Wu Mingjin's expression darkened with genuine sorrow. He knew Master Huang well—a man of unwavering public spirit who had rallied clansmen and militia against bandits whenever threats arose in the region. The old man had already lost several nephews and cousins to such conflicts over the years. That this latest battle had claimed a son struck the magistrate deeply.

"Please accept my condolences, Elder. Once the pirates withdraw, I will personally petition my superiors to secure posthumous honors for your son." Though Huang Shoutong held no scholarly degree himself, his son had been enrolled at the county school. Magistrate Wu, in a deliberate show of respect, always addressed him as "Elder."

"My foolish son died defending our homeland. The Huang family has long enjoyed the nation's grace, and we stand ready to repay that debt to court and country, even if it means being ground to dust. We do not covet such honors." Huang Shoutong's voice was steady, but he did not wish to linger on the subject. True, the boy had been born of a concubine and never earned scholarly status—he was just one of three sons. Yet the loss tore at him all the same, a grief that clawed at his heart.

"I have come to warn Your Honor," he continued, his tone turning urgent. "These pirates are unlike any we have faced before. Great disaster threatens Lingao."

"What do you mean, Elder?" Wu Mingjin leaned forward, alarmed. He knew this old man to be calm and measured—not given to exaggeration or empty warnings.

Huang Shoutong recounted the events of the previous day. His son had led a dozen militia to ambush three pirate scouts near Bairrentou Beach. Though he had not participated himself, the survivors' reports had shaken him to the core. The initial volley of arrows had felled only one man. The old saying held that "three arrows are not worth one blade," and the militia's bows were indeed of poor quality. Yet the pirates wore no armor—and still, two of them had absorbed seven or eight arrows each and fought their way through, killing several men before escaping. His son had been among the dead.

He closed his eyes, the image of his son's corpse returning unbidden. When the militia had carried the body home, half the face had been shattered, one eye socket a gaping ruin. According to the survivors, one of the pirates—despite being riddled with arrows and surrounded—had killed his son in a single exchange. The boy had trained in martial arts since childhood. For a man to cut him down so easily, while grievously wounded himself... such a warrior would be considered a fierce general even among regular army troops.

But individual prowess, however remarkable, was not what truly concerned him. What the militia had brought back troubled him far more.

"Their firearms are extraordinarily formidable. One of the pirates wielded a small hand-cannon that killed several men—without once loading powder or shot." He produced a cloth bundle and handed it over. "Please examine it, Your Honor."

Wu Mingjin unwrapped the bundle to reveal a compact piece of bluish-black iron. The design bore a passing resemblance to European hand-cannons, but with clean, simple lines. He could see no matchlock mechanism anywhere.

"This is a hand-cannon?"

"Indeed." Seeing the magistrate's confusion, Huang Shoutong explained that the militia had recovered it from the battlefield afterward—apparently dropped by one of the pirates during the chaos of the fight.

"Is the militia's account reliable?" The magistrate remained skeptical. Though a scholar by training, he had followed the recent fashion among literati for discussing military matters and firearms. He had not personally examined every type of fire-cannon in existence, but he had studied illustrations in various treatises. This object resembled nothing he recognized—nothing beyond a barrel and a trigger.

(Note: The late Ming saw a surge of firearms discourse among intellectuals. Most were armchair strategists. Song Yingxing criticized this trend in Tiangong Kaiwu.)

"Entirely reliable. This weapon requires no loading of powder. One simply pulls the trigger and it fires." Huang Shoutong stroked his beard thoughtfully. "After it was brought back to me, I test-fired a single shot. The power was considerable—it penetrated thick wooden boards at five zhang. But a second pull of the trigger produced nothing. I believe it must store multiple charges internally, each trigger pull releasing one."

"A formidable weapon indeed." Wu Mingjin stared at the small bluish-black object, his worry deepening. If the pirates possessed many such weapons, how could militia archers hope to stand against them in open battle? Defending from the walls with cannon seemed the only viable strategy.

"I have come to the county for two reasons," Huang Shoutong continued. "First, to deliver this warning. Second, to request weapons."

As commander of the six-village mutual-defense alliance, he had several hundred able-bodied men at his disposal but precious few arms to equip them. Beyond the leaders and some household retainers who carried blades and spears, the ordinary militia had nothing but wooden poles. Lingao had always suffered from a shortage of iron, and weapons were scarcer still. Even the blades and spears his family's retainers carried had been passed down from ancestors several generations back. They possessed many bows, but Hainan's humid climate was unkind to archery equipment—the weapons could not be relied upon.

Wu Mingjin could not refuse such a request. From the county armory, he allocated twenty waist-sabers, ten shield-boards, forty tiger-forks, and five iron spears. He also provided gunpowder and shot—the Huang family fortress possessed some iron cannons and blunderbusses, but gunpowder remained a government monopoly and was difficult to obtain through normal channels.

As Huang Shoutong was preparing to take his leave and rest, a runner burst in with news: the scouts dispatched that morning had returned. Since the pirates' landing, the county had been sending out daily reconnaissance parties to gather intelligence—all local men familiar with the roads and terrain.

The gates could not be opened, so a large basket had been prepared to haul people up and over the walls. The scouts had been going out without incident for days, but today's group had returned in a state of visible alarm. Citizens gathered on the walls, buzzing with speculation.

"What—they're building a road?" The magistrate's voice cracked with disbelief.

"Yes, Your Honor." The scout knelt before him, stealing a nervous glance upward.

"From Bopu toward Bairrentou Beach. They've placed markers all along the route. The pirates are heaping up soil to form a roadbed. They've already completed five or six li."

"Five or six li—are you certain?" Huang Shoutong surged forward, seizing the scout's arm.

"I am certain." The man shrank back from the famous figure's intensity.

Huang Shoutong stood stunned. He turned and bowed to the magistrate. "Your Honor, our village militia fought them only yesterday. On our way there, there was no road..."

Wu Mingjin nodded gravely. "This road-building you witnessed—you are not exaggerating anything? If there is the slightest falsehood in your report, you will answer for it."

The scout pressed his forehead to the floor repeatedly. "I would not dare deceive Your Honor. They have indeed completed five or six li of road." He added, his voice dropping to an awed whisper, that the pirates seemed to possess sorcery: carts without wheels that moved on their own, with giant iron arms that scooped up soil using massive blades. Mountains of earth were excavated and moved as if it were nothing...

Sorcery again. The magistrate did not believe in supernatural explanations, but evidence of inexplicable capabilities kept accumulating. The pirates' resources and methods seemed to grow more formidable with each report. Take road-building as an example: he himself had considered repairing bridges and roads in the county, but obstacles always intervened. Funds to mobilize laborers were never available. Landlords quarreled endlessly, refusing to cede land. Even with everything proceeding smoothly, he could not possibly construct five or six li of highway in two days—certainly not by heaping up soil. What manner of men were these pirates?

Yet the immediate problem was not the road itself. The question was why they were building it. As bandits, they could not be earning merit with the court. Their purpose was plunder—and road construction was entirely unnecessary for that. Besides, what was there to plunder at Bairrentou Beach? Nothing but a few stonemason families, who had likely fled long ago.

Uncertain how to proceed, the magistrate hastily summoned his yamen officials, the jinshi Liu Dalin, and the reinforcement Captain to discuss countermeasures. After hearing testimony from both the scout and Master Huang, the assembled officials and gentry fell into uneasy silence. They had assumed that however dire a pirate landing might be, the worst outcome would be plundered commoners and a few burned villages and markets. Since the Song Dynasty, neither Li-people uprisings nor pirate raids had ever succeeded in taking this county. Some had even felt a grim relief that the pirates had landed after mid-autumn—if they had arrived before winter, when the grain harvest was still in the fields, the losses would have been far worse.

But the bad news kept mounting. First, scouts reported that the pirates had established a large camp at Bopu and were unloading cargo day and night. Then the famously fierce Huang family militia had been routed. Now the pirates were building roads. No one could fathom what these shaven-headed bandits intended.

Wu Mingjin turned to his trusted advisor. "Elder Liu, what do you make of this?"

The jinshi sat with his head propped on one hand, deep in thought. After a long pause, he spoke. "Your Honor, this bodes great peril."

Both Magistrate Wu and Vice-Magistrate Wu started in their seats. The magistrate quickly bowed. "Please enlighten me, Elder."

"I fear these shaven-headed pirates intend to attack the city."

"How do you reach that conclusion?"

"Mountain and sea bandits travel light for their raids. Why would they build roads? If they are building roads, the only explanation is that they mean to assault our walls. I believe the pirates must possess siege equipment—extremely heavy equipment—that requires proper roads to transport to the city."

Siege equipment so heavy it required roads to move—how massive must such weapons be? The entire hall fell silent. Wu Mingjin's voice trembled when he finally spoke. "Could it be... the Red-Barbarian Cannon..."

"I can think of no other explanation."

Hainan lay near Guangdong and Macau; European ships occasionally passed through these waters. It was known in official circles that the court had purchased cannons from the Europeans in Guangzhou. Wu Mingjin knew these weapons to be extraordinarily heavy yet devastatingly powerful—the court deployed them for the defense of Liaodong. Just last year, the siege at Guangning had been held thanks to these very cannons. They were truly military treasures.

If such a weapon were dragged to the walls of Lingao—the magistrate dared not imagine the consequences.

"What can possibly be done? This is just a small county." Vice-Magistrate Wu had already cried out in alarm. What he left unspoken was clear to everyone present: what could this remote backwater possibly possess that would justify such massive pirate effort? What offense had Lingao committed to attract such devastating force?

They did not yet know they faced something even more terrifying than Red-Barbarian Cannons. As the storytellers in Lingao's teahouses would later say: "Tragedy!"

All eyes turned to Captain Sun in his mandarin-duck coat. This hereditary centurion had originally thought this assignment would be an easy posting. Upon arriving, he had collected ten taels of silver as a reward and had skimmed half the soldiers' bonuses for himself as well. These past two days had meant wine and meat at every meal—far more comfortable than the half-dead existence of garrison life. As for pirates actually attacking the city—he had thought it impossible.

Now, finding the entire hall staring at him expectantly, he felt panic rising in his chest. He knew perfectly well that despite his hereditary centurion title, he was really just a small landlord playing soldier. The thirty men he had brought spent more time holding hoes than weapons. Their only real military asset was a single Frankish cannon. How could he possibly produce a strategy? Besides, if the pirates truly dragged Red-Barbarian Cannons to these walls, he would be too busy fleeing to fight. Knowing that anything he said would be wrong, he simply assumed an expression of thoughtful composure and said nothing at all.

Magistrate Wu silently cursed Captain Sun as useless—but then again, he had never expected much from garrison troops in the first place. This matter would likely require petitioning General Tang to send reinforcements.

"The only viable strategy at present is harassment," Liu Dalin finally offered. "These shaven-headed pirates building roads cannot remain clustered together at all times. We should dispatch more militia and offer substantial rewards. Harass them with arrows, seize opportunities to set fires, disrupt their work day and night. That should obstruct their road-building efforts."

(End of Chapter)