In March 199 AD, Yuan Shao's army attacked and destroyed Yijing.
Gongsun Zan's eldest son Gongsun Xu was killed by Tuge.
Gongsun Zan, the general on the white horse, had no plans and had his own plans, so he hanged his sisters and his wife, and then set himself on fire.
Only one woman and one son were left, escorted by the remnants of Baima Yi's troops, they broke out of the encirclement.
Gongsun Zan's army is destroyed!
…………
The snow in Youzhou in March has not yet melted, and the cold wind blows into the cracks of people's bones.
On the plains and wilderness, a group of defeated soldiers with broken armor and sad faces were marching hard.
Most of them were members of the White Horse Yi Cong under the White Horse General Gongsun Zan.
“Where righteousness comes, life and death follow it.”
They used to have white horses and white armor, shouting loud military bugles, following Gongsun Zan and galloping across the north, expelling the barbarians and shocking the outside world.
However, in the second year of Chuping, they were defeated by Qu Yi in the Battle of Jieqiao, and the backbone of this team was broken.
After that, in the Battle of Yijing, the commander-in-chief Gongsun Zan set himself on fire and died.
This last white horse Yi Cong, under the leadership of Gongsun Zan's general Tian Kai, reluctantly protected Gongsun Zan's orphan to break out of the encirclement.
Relying on their familiarity with the terrain and riding on good horses from western Liaoning, they broke out of the encirclement of Yuan Shao's army. After several attempts to kill and chase them, only less than 300 people remained.
The city is ruined, the family is dead, the people are trapped and the horses are exhausted.
Later, Yuan Shao's troops pursued him one after another. When they broke through, they only took two days of rations with them. This defeated army, whose morale had reached the bottom, gradually reached a dead end.
The two knights cruising in front of the team rode side by side.
One of them took out a dry and hard wheat cake from his arms. He licked his bloody lips, bit off a corner of the stone-hard wheat cake with his canine teeth, held it in his mouth and softened it with saliva.
"It won't snow tonight, will it?" His handsome face was full of fatigue in the past. He stretched his throat and struggled to swallow the cake in his mouth. Xia Houlan handed the remaining half of the cake to the knight beside him.
The tall knight shook his head and said nothing. His silver armor was cold and stiff, and his body was stained with blood. An unusually strong and elegant white horse under his crotch was half red. He didn't know how tragic he had been through following the knight.
Fight.
The knight's beard and hair were messy and his body was injured, but his expression was not at all depressed. He looked at the horizon with a solemn expression, which was incompatible with the desperate atmosphere around him.
His name is Zhao Yun, a native of Changshan Zhending.
Like many men from the remote north of Hebei, Zhao Yun's long-cherished wish was to follow benevolent government and relieve the people's danger, and to imitate Huo Piao, who sealed the wolf as a slave and shrouded his corpse in horse leather.
Therefore, before he could win the championship, he was recommended by Chang Shan's elders and Chang Shan's Prime Minister Sun Jin to join the powerful Gongsun Zan army outside the Great Wall.
However, his enthusiasm was completely chilled by the impact of reality. Gongsun Zan was completely different from the White Horse General in Zhao Yun's imagination.
The battle of Jieqiao, the battle of Longmin...
Repeated defeats caused Gongsun Zan to lose all his energy, and the weaknesses of his personal character were fully exposed under adversity.
Not caring about the people, they looted and looted. Not only the Hu people, but also the Han people were oppressed.
The entire family of Liu Yu, the shepherd of Youzhou, was executed, and Sun Jin, the prime minister of Shichang Mountain, was also implicated and beheaded.
Seeing that Gongsun Zan had deviated far from his expectation of pursuing benevolent government and had killed the governor of his hometown, Zhao Yun returned to Changshan under the pretext of his brother's death and stopped serving as an official.
Years ago, I received a letter of help from my old boss Tian Kai in Qingzhou and my friend Xia Houlan from the same town. I learned that Tian Kai had been defeated from Qingzhou and returned to Youzhou, and Gongsun Zan was besieged in Yijing.
After thinking again and again, Zhao Yun rode out of Changshan alone.
Zhao Yun was a stubborn and stubborn person. The loyalty in his heart made him rather use the excuse of his brother's death to go home and waste his time rather than join others while Gongsun Zan was still alive.
It was this sense of loyalty that led him to come to Yi Jing alone.
He took the wheat cake from Xia Houlan, but did not eat it. Instead, he turned to look at the two improvised carriages in the team.
Lying on the first carriage was his old boss Tian Kai. When he broke out of the city, Tian Kai had his arm cut off and the wound was simply bandaged, but everyone knew that the situation was not good.
The second one is the children of the late General Gongsun.
Thinking of this, Zhao Yun's expression changed slightly.
That day, he took advantage of the chaos when Yuan Shao's army entered the city, burned, killed and looted, and rushed all the way to Gongsun Zan's residence.
They killed the assailant soldier Yuan Shao in time and saved the siblings.
Although nothing unspeakable happened, my sister Gongsun Yan was still seriously injured.
When he was carried on the horse and broke through, he suffered a lot of bumps. He vomited several times in a coma and vomited out some blood clots.
At present, there is a lack of medical treatment and medicine, and it is impossible to get effective treatment and quiet recuperation. It can only depend on Mrs. Gongsun's own physical fitness and desire for survival.
But he believed that this strong woman would be able to get through it.
He still felt amazed when he recalled that Gongsun Yan was like a wolf, holding on to the neck of Sergeant Yuan who was about to commit murder.
Thinking about it, he suddenly felt a slight chill on his cheek. He raised his hand and touched it. It turned out that some snow particles had fallen from the sky.
It's going to snow.
Zhao Yun frowned, glanced at the ragged team behind him, and ordered to speed up the march to find a place to camp and rest before dark.
In fact, his judgment was very accurate.
Before the sky was getting dark, the Sentinel Cavalry found an abandoned village. The team trudged hard, and as soon as they set up camp, large clumps of snowflakes rolled down from the sky.
The village has been raided many times by barbarians and troops. The villagers have long been scattered and the village has been abandoned.
Most houses don't even have a complete wall.
Rotting corpses can be seen everywhere in the fields and beside the wells. Some of them have not even completely rotted, falling stiffly to the ground, with faces covered with black rotten flesh staring helplessly at the sky.
The knights settled their horses and searched the village again, but found nothing except a few wild dogs eating corpses.
The whirlwind howled, the dark sky pressed overhead, making people breathless, and the atmosphere of despair lingered in the camp.
The food and grass they brought with them when they broke out from Yijing were already exhausted no matter how much they were reduced.
Looking at the big men, their Baima Yicong are also elite troops with top-notch equipment and rich combat experience.
However, even they have never conducted military operations before the ice and snow in the Northern Plains melted.
The snow in the North can eat people.
They urgently searched for anything useful in the deserted village.
Wood, straw, gravel…
They lit a bonfire, set up triangular shelters beside the collapsed earth walls, and filled them with as much hay as possible, seeking a glimmer of hope in the approaching snowy night.
At this time, in a relatively intact courtyard in the center of the deserted village.
Several people who looked like middle-level officers were busy coming in and out.
This bluestone courtyard is made of solid materials. Although the walls of the houses on both sides have collapsed, the main room is well preserved. It is obvious that the owner once had a wealthy family.
Several people packed up the dead bones in the main room, lit a bonfire, hung up the felts on their horses to separate the inside and outside, and placed the two seriously injured people.
"Young Master, are you hungry?" Zhao Yun handed out half a piece of wheat cake in his hand.
The child sitting obediently on the haystack shook his head, "Brother, eat it yourself."
He is none other than Gongsun Cheng, the youngest son of the late Gongsun Zan.
After encountering a sudden change and experiencing a lot of displacement, the four-year-old Gongsun Cheng looked miserable. He refused to leave his injured and sleeping sister, holding Gongsun Yan's hand in his arms to keep her warm.
"Sister, when can I wake up?" Gongsun Cheng stretched out his small black hand and touched the face of the sleeping girl beside him.
Zhao Yun looked along his little hand and saw a skinny girl lying on a thick pile of hay. Her face was bruised and swollen, which was shocking.
"Young master, if you eat this piece of cake, your sister will wake up." Zhao Yun smiled softly and handed forward half of the wheat cake in his hand.
Gongsun Cheng glanced at the pancake, then lowered his head to look at his sister. Finally he took the pancake, thanked him, and gnawed it bit by bit like a little mouse.
Seeing that he was well-behaved, Zhao Yun couldn't help but pat his head gently, then took off the water bag from his waist and gave him some water to drink as he was stretching his neck even more due to the dry biscuits.
After taking care of Gongsun Cheng, Zhao Yun was about to turn around and go out when he heard Gongsun Cheng shouting.
