A divine healer, a general, a young marquis! Who can rival them!

On March 18th, before Liu Ye left, Yang Hu gave her a task.

"This time, we're not looking for water, people, or pits."

"Then what are you looking for?"

"Looking for a horse."

Liu Ye paused for a moment.

"General, the barbarians' horses are in their camp."

"They're not here." Yang Hu moved the circled wooden board on the ground over to face him. "Have you calculated how much grass and water 20,000 horses need to eat and drink in a day?"

Liu Ye hadn't counted.

"The amount of grass a horse grazes in a day is the size of a two-room plot of land," Yang Hu said. "If 20,000 horses were kept around the camp, they would have grazed the entire area within a ten-mile radius bare in just three days. They can't be kept in the camp; they have to be released out to places with water and grass, separated from the human camp."

How far apart are they?

"Look at the grass," Yang Hu said. "There's not enough grass nearby, and we can't take care of it if it's too far away. It's mostly between twenty and forty li away."

Liu Ye memorized these sentences.

"The general wants me to touch the horses, is it to whip them?"

"Touch him first," Yang Hu said. "We'll decide whether to fight or not after we've figured him out."

Liu Ye took twelve people with her.

Before leaving, she did something that others couldn't understand: of the eight people in the scout team who had herded sheep on the grasslands, she only took four with her, replacing the rest with hunters.

Cui Ting asked her why.

"Hunters recognize footprints, refugees recognize grass," Liu Ye said. "To find a herd of horses, you have to recognize the grass."

She was away for four days.

For the next four days, life continued as usual in the low-lying area. Blood was drawn, skin was boiled, wounded soldiers were sun-dried, and numbers were taken. On March 19th, another thirty-one soldiers in the seriously wounded battalion rose again.

On the evening of the fourth day, Liu Ye returned.

All twelve returned, not one missing, but they were all emaciated. They had only brought two days' worth of dry rations with them over the four days.

Liu Ye laid out the things she had brought back one by one on the stone.

The first thing is a handful of grass.

The grass roots still had soil attached, and the tips of the grass were even.

"This was gnawed by a horse." Liu Ye rubbed the grass in her hands. "Horses gnaw grass differently than cows. Cows use their tongues to roll the grass, and the cut is a tear. Horses use their teeth to bite, and the cut is flat. This patch of grass is all flat."

"How big is it?"

"Heading northwest, it starts from a small hollow and continues all the way to a shallow ridge." Liu Ye paused, "We walked for most of the day and still didn't finish."

Cui Ting gasped, "Half a day? How many horses would that take?"

"I don't know how many," Liu Ye said, "but half of the grass that has been grazed has started to turn green again. The half that has turned green was grazed more than ten days ago, and the half that hasn't turned green yet was grazed in the last three to five days."

"What does that mean?" Yang Hu asked.

"This means the herd of horses has been moving around in that area and hasn't gone far."

Yang Hu nodded.

"The second one."

The second item is water.

"Thirty li to the northwest, there is a spring." Liu Ye placed a small bag of water on a stone. "The spring is in a crack in the stone. The water flow is not large, but it has formed a large pool below. The ground around it is completely trampled, and there are three or four layers of hoofprints in the mud."

Are there any animal carcasses near the spring?

"no."

"Are there any dents caused by stones pressing down on them?"

"no."

Yang Hu tapped his finger on the stone.

"They didn't put anything in their horses' water."

"General, you mean..."

"They're saying they believe this spot of water is clean," Yang Hu said. "They drove the sick animals onto our road, but their own herd still needed to drink. This spot is what they left for themselves."

Cui Ting's breathing became heavy.

"The third item." Liu Ye pushed the last item over.

It was a small handful of horsehair.

Grayish-white, in clumps, with skin flakes at the base.

Yang Hu held the hair in front of his eyes, twirled it for a long time, and then scraped off a little bit of skin from the root and rubbed it on his fingertips.

His movements slowed down.

"Where did you find it?"

"About a mile east of the spring, in a sheltered depression," Liu Ye said, "there's a lot of fur on that ground, not just from one or two animals. I counted, and there are more than twenty marks where people have lain down."

"Footprints from where you lay?"

"When a horse lies down and rolls, it makes a dent. But the dent is round, with hoofprints around the edges," Liu Ye said. "Those twenty-odd dents aren't round; they're long and narrow, and there are no hoofprints around the edges."

Cui Ting didn't understand at first.

Yang Hu understood.

The horse rolled over, and then got up. Those twenty-odd long marks were made by the horse that lay down and never got up again.

"The hair fell out on its own." Yang Hu put the hair back on the stone. "It wasn't plucked or ground. There were skin flakes on the roots, so it fell out because it was sick."

No one made a sound from behind the earthen ridge.

"Their horses are sick too," Cui Ting finally said.

"They're sick," Yang Hu said. "When they were herding the sick animals, they used their own horses. After they were done, the horses followed the people back to the herd."

He held the horsehair in his hand.

The group of about twenty people who were herding the sick animal stood on the hilltop that day, with the curved side facing downwind, and not one of them touched the pole. They protected themselves very well.

But the horses they rode couldn't protect them.

"Willow leaf".

"exist."

"How many people are guarding the Quanzi area?"

"Not many," Liu Ye said. "I saw them from about two miles away. There were only about a hundred or so during the day. There were three places where they were set on fire at night."

"A hundred or so people watching 20,000 horses?"

"General, you don't need many people to watch the horses on the grasslands," the oldest of the four who came along interjected. "The horses don't stray far on their own; they just follow the lead horse. The watchers only need to keep an eye on the lead horse."

Yang Hu went over this sentence in his mind twice.

Just keep an eye on the leader.

He stood up, took a few steps to the northwest, and stood on the edge of the earthen ridge.

The March winds are already warm, and the grass has grown more than an inch tall. Looking out from here, a thin layer of green floats on the surface of the grass. The spring thirty miles away is no longer visible, nor is the patch of grass that has been gnawed flat. The wind comes from the northwest, passing the spring first, then the herd of horses, and finally reaching this earthen ridge.

But he had already pictured that image in his mind.

Sixty li to the north, in the barbarian camp, people are dying, and the fires are dying off night by night.

Thirty miles to the northwest, there is a herd of twenty thousand barbarian horses, with lush grass and plenty of water, watched over by only a hundred or so people.

The man and the horse were thirty li apart.

"General Choi."

"Your subordinate is here."

"How many players can we field right now?"

Cui Ting flipped through the booklet: "After the four thousand seven hundred were collected, some more were added. Five thousand and thirty-four are available for deployment today."

"Where's the horse?"

"The 1,100 who can run. The 600 who had their blood drawn cannot run."

"One thousand one hundred." Yang Hu kept this number in mind.

One thousand one hundred thousand to twenty thousand.

If you try to steal it, you won't succeed. Twenty thousand horses, if driven up, would be overwhelming; a thousand one hundred people couldn't drive them, nor could they bring them back.

But what he wanted was never to steal.

"General," Cui Ting observed his expression, "Does the General intend to attack the herd of horses?"

Yang Hu did not respond to this sentence.

He turned around and glanced south.

To the south lies that low-lying area. Nine pots are steaming, and over 6,100 people are lined up around them. A little further over there is the wounded soldiers' camp, where the outermost group of men are being carried out to sunbathe.

When he set off from Heishiliang a month ago, he brought 9,100 men and three days' worth of military medicine.

He currently has 6,188 men, 1,100 horses, and something he hasn't used on the journey.

That item was brought back from that waterside in February: the deaths of eleven sick livestock, their blood black and thin, not congealing, and bursting after death.

He slowly clenched the clump of horsehair in his palm. After clenching it for a while, a little dampness seeped through his fingers—the sweat from his palms.

"I won't fight," he said.

Cui Ting was taken aback: "Not fighting?"

"They'll still have people even if we beat them," Yang Hu said. "What I want is to make sure they can't move."

Cui Ting opened his mouth.

"Go and fetch Su Heng." Yang Hu spread the horsehair on the stone. "Also, have someone draw a map of the waterside marker from February for me."