The sky in Liangzhou City was covered with dark clouds and the sky was extremely dark.
Ren Duoyading was writing on a piece of parchment with pen and ink in his palace.
Xixia characters are very difficult to write. In the past, Ren Duoyading asked Dangxiang Renshi to write specifically, but this time the matter was urgent, so he wrote in Chinese characters.
Renduo Yading was writing while listening to the sound of artillery fire from the Song army resuming, and he couldn't help but frown.
He picked up the golden goblet and poured a glass of wine into it. The wine was bright red like blood, as if brewed from the mountains of corpses and sea of blood outside the city. He drank a glass of it.
Ren Duoyading looked out the window, heavy clouds were slanting low, pressing down on the city tower, as if it was foreshadowing something.
"I have also wasted a lot of time in this Liangzhou city."
Ren Duoyading stroked his long gray beard, and his wrinkled face showed a hint of vicissitudes of life.
Immediately, there was a loud bang, interrupting Ren Duoyading's memories, and he suddenly returned to his eyes. A soldier hurriedly entered: "Lord Commander, south of the city! South of the city!"
Renduoyading said: "Why are you panicking? The Song army will not climb the city when it is attacking the city!"
After the soldiers saluted, they left in a hurry.
Immediately, the sound of hurried horse hooves was heard on the street outside the Tongjun Mansion.
Renduoyading calmed down and continued to write to Li Bingchang, the leader of the Dangxiang Kingdom. This was also his last letter.
So far, the Song army in Liangzhou has been besieging the city for five days, and the Song army has been attacking the city for twenty-five days. By this day, the city's defeat is already in sight.
But the party's reinforcements have not yet arrived!
It can be described as silent.
Originally, the city was broken yesterday, but a heavy rain happened to fall yesterday, making it impossible for the Song army to advance their siege equipment.
Ren Duoyading continued to write letters to Li Bingchang, the leader of the party.
"Xuanhua, there is no news of the reinforcements from Guasha. In the past ten days or so, the Han army has been very anxious to attack the city."
Renduoyading remembered that the Song army spent five days digging an internal and external trench inside and outside the city. The Song army was not anxious at all, and it was obvious that they had plenty of food and grass.
Within five days, the Song army built more than 100 artillery positions in the southwest and southeast of the city to blast the wall. On the day of the siege, the cannons were thundering.
You must know that the city is square or rectangular, so at the four corners of the city, gun mounts can often be deployed on both sides to attack the city. In order to cope with the Song army's artillery and stone siege, Ren Duoyading built city oars and enemy tents at the four corners. , still could not withstand the bombardment of the Song Army's artillery stones.
But as soon as the Song army's artillery stones fell, it seemed as if the sky and the earth were overwhelming.
The two three-story city oars were carefully built by Renduoyading. He expected that the corners of the city would be attacked by the Song army as a weak point, so he reinforced the city oars.
However, during more than ten days of bombardment, the two city oars were successively destroyed by the Song army's giant artillery. When the city oars collapsed, sawdust flew and smoke billowed. Party troops at the head of the city panicked and scattered like birds and beasts.
Forget about the artillery positions, hundreds of eight-niu crossbows and artillery carriages were distributed on three walls for bombardment. The Song Army's artillery carriages caused great trouble to the defenders. Fortunately, the range was very short, only fifty Step. Only the north exit was left for the defenders to escape.
The Song army even sometimes allowed people to leave the city to collect wood and water, and even allowed the women and children who had been driven in to leave the city.
This made Renduoyading puzzled by the contradictory behavior of the Song army.
However, this does not hinder Ren Duoyading's management of Liangzhou City.
Fortunately, Liangzhou City was an important town that had been operating since the Han and Tang Dynasties. In the seventh year of Xining, when Zhang Yue captured Hezhou and killed Gui Zhang, the entire Dangxiang Kingdom foresaw the Song people's intention to capture Liangzhou in advance, so they started to attack Liangzhou at that time. Reinforce Liangzhou city defense.
After the Song army captured Huangzhou, Dangxiang began to know that a battle in Liangzhou was inevitable.
So they focused on managing the defense line around Liangzhou until the Song army successively attacked Zhenwu Army City, Renduoquan City and Tong'an City, and wiped out the outside of Liangzhou.
A few months ago, Ren Duoyading made some arrangements for Liangzhou City.
They added powerful crossbows and cannon stones to the city, dug deep for cellars, and added more troops and generals. The latter was an unprecedented move in history. The Song Dynasty had never attacked Liangzhou City in history, but the Qingtang Dynasty did so once. .
There are now five leaders in Liangzhou City and nearly 20,000 soldiers and horses.
Ren Duoyading was a very diligent and effective general. When the Song army climbed the city, he used boiling water, rolling logs, and stones to fight back, causing heavy casualties to the Song army who climbed the city.
In addition to artillery carriages and crossbows, and rushing carriages to bombard and hammer the city gates, Renduoyading also prepared a large number of igniting objects to throw into the city and ordered the Song army to be burned to death by fire.
Although the Song army repeatedly attacked the city and was defeated by Ren Duoyading, he was not very happy when he wrote the letter.
Seven days ago, the defenders were killed and wounded countless times by cannons and rocks every day. Several Liangzhou party soldiers were afraid of the Song army's methods and were afraid of breaking the city and being massacred, so they secretly fell into the city and surrendered to the Song army.
As a result, these guards revealed that a wall on the east side of Liangzhou City collapsed during city construction.
As a result, after the Song Army found out the next day, they mobilized all artillery vehicles to attack the city wall here. When the city wall showed signs of collapse, the defenders climbed over the sheep and horse wall and tried to leave the city to destroy the artillery vehicles, but were defeated by the Song Army. The shooting of eight oxen crossbows and powerful crossbows caused countless casualties.
Under the Song army's volley of thousands of artillery fire, within half a day, the east wall collapsed, leaving a gap of fifty or sixty steps.
However, Renduoyading was well prepared and built a temporary wall with wooden ramparts inside the inner wall and dug pits. Hundreds of Song soldiers who took the opportunity to break into the wall were killed, half of them were killed, and they were driven out.
Although they managed to hold on this time, people in Liangzhou City were already panicking.
Ren Duoyading directly drew the situation map of the four cities on the wall of the military mansion every day, and laid out how to defend the city.
It can be said to be a very exhausting effort.
Now Ren Duoyading also knew clearly that Liangzhou could not hold out for a few days. The Song army's cannons and rocks were extremely fierce and caused heavy casualties on the city. Moreover, the attack was so urgent that the city almost fell several times during the siege in the past few days. The manpower and material resources in the city have reached their limits.
At night, the reformed soldiers of the Song army outside the city kept using Dangxiang dialect or playing Dangxiang music to lure the defenders to surrender. Even the soldiers of the Song army deliberately ate and drank under the city wall, setting the banquet in front of Dangxiang. The soldiers punched and ate meat. , to indicate sufficient food and grass.
The Dangxiang soldiers used to wait for the Song army to run out of food and retreat, but smelling the smell of wine and meat below the city and the sound of fist fights, their hopes were shattered little by little.
There were more than 200,000 Song troops surrounding the city, but there were only 20,000 soldiers in the city.
Tens of thousands of people died in the siege in one month, more than half of whom were killed by artillery stones. Ren Duoyading even asked his wife, children and women from the city to come out to carry stones for cooking.
However, the Song army under the city not only had sufficient food and clothing, but also was well-equipped, and their troops and horses seemed to be endless.
Unable to withstand the Song army's cannon and stone attack on the city day and night, at first there were only a few people, dozens of people, but now there are dozens or even hundreds of people who fled down the city and surrendered to the Song army.
The troops on the city wall are already stretched thin.
Renduoyading finally wrote the letter to the end. He wrote some words to make the king of the country love his virtuous ministers and stay away from the villain. He wanted to write down all his loyalty and loyalty in the letter, but unfortunately he couldn't convey the meaning because of his poor writing skills.
But Ren Duoyading finally learned how to write.
At the end of the letter, it is signed by Chen Renduoyading.
After Ren Duoyading finished writing, he stood up. He suddenly thought of Ren Duo Xizhong, who had died in the battle before the city.
Renduoyading stood up and walked to the supervisory office.
Each military supervision department in the party has a military commander and a military supervisor.
Either the commander of the army was a relative or the supervisor was from the Dangxiang royal family. The supervisor of the Chaoshun Army Supervision Department was Ali, a member of the royal family.
When Renduoyading walked to Weiming Ali's house, he saw that the other party was ordering people to burn letters and some important documents.
Weiming Ami glanced at Renduoyading and continued to order people to burn the documents. Renduoyading wanted to discuss the big plan with him, but that was all.
Amid the cannon fire and shouts of death from the Song army, Wei Ming A Mian calmly ordered someone to bring drinks, and the two of them talked about riding horses and hunting while drinking.
After chatting for a while, the sound of gunfire outside suddenly stopped.
The two stopped talking and laughing, and Weiming Ali said seriously: "The matter has come to this, and the only way to repay the late emperor is to die."
Weiming Ali was Li Yuanhao's nephew. The two of them couldn't help but think of Li Yuanhao's control over the world and the embarrassment of Song and Liao Dynasties.
Renduoyading nodded when he saw it, and the two of them drank another drink together.
Weiming Ali said: "The army will leave first, I will be here a step later."
Renduoyading nodded and walked out of the house, but suddenly he heard a woman's cry coming from the door of the house. After a while, someone came to report: "Weiming Ali committed suicide with a knife."
Renduoyading showed an expected expression, then placed the letter he had just written in his arms into the hands of his subordinates and said: "After you risked your life to release Baozhong, you took this letter and fought your way out of the city to Xingqing Mansion. See His Majesty."
…
Outside the city, the Song Army's artillery stopped, and the soldiers of the three armies immediately pushed the cart and the ladder straight to the city gate.
Wang Hou, Cai Bian and other generals looked at the crumbling Liangzhou City.
After a month of siege, it was finally time for the final attack.
Wang Hou has already issued a reward, and the first one to climb will be rewarded with thousands of dollars!
Therefore, everyone in the Song army tried their best to climb onto the city. In fact, the city would have been defeated in just one or two days. However, Wang Hou's temperament completely inherited the caution of his teacher Zhang Yue.
The Dangxiang army at the top of the city weakly counterattacked with crossbows, but in front of the Song army's crowd, they couldn't even stir up any waves.
Liangzhou City was attacked by the Song army on three sides, and every side seemed to be crumbling.
Especially in the direction of the gap opened by the stone throw, at this moment the three armies shouted.
The flaming flag of the Song army was planted on a wall in the south of the city, and the Song army cheered in unison.
Wang Hou and others will be so excited that they cannot control themselves.
But after seeing Wang Hou ascending high, he said:
"Send an order to go down and destroy the city and then plunder a piece of money from the people! Kill! Anyone who destroys a piece of wood from the people! Kill!"
"In addition, the Buddhist temple must be protected, and the monks must be treated with great respect!"
"After entering the city, go directly to the government office. Don't do anything else. Just search out all the documents!"
The troops took the order with a roar.
Immediately, the Song army invaded Liangzhou City from three sides. Ren Duoyading and his followers were defeated in a street battle and were eventually wounded by arrows.
In the end, Ren Duoyading, who was seriously injured, walked to the north gate toward Xingqing Mansion, jumped from the high top of Liangzhou City, and fell to his death.
More than two hundred of his confidants, including his wives and concubines, fell into the city and died.
His son Renduo Baozhong and several cavalry escaped before Liangzhou city was broken.
In August of the fourth year of Yuanfeng, the Song army regained Liangzhou!