Cooking smoke rose ceaselessly. Inside and outside the city, everyone was eating.
Mounted scouts rode back and forth through the gathering dusk, and scattered encounters soon began along both banks of the Zhanran River... but they remained only scattered encounters. This was not merely because darkness restricted them. One cruel fact was that both sides lacked cavalry.
Liu Cheng had only those few hundred horsemen, cobbled together by the entire Western Command when he set out. The Shetou Qiang Group had originally possessed plenty of cavalry and had been skilled in mounted warfare, but they had fought their way from Shetou through the battlefields of Hebei and Henan, where heaven and earth seemed lost in darkness, suffering heavy casualties. By the time they settled in Huaibei, they had virtually no organized cavalry left. Then Fu Xiong dealt them another vicious blow, putting any such hopes to rest.
It was easy to imagine that even after daybreak tomorrow, the scouts on both sides would merely be chicks pecking at each other. Much detailed intelligence would have to come from small infantry detachments advancing close enough to reconnoiter.
Still, since a night assault had been decided upon, fighting between properly organized forces would inevitably erupt. The only question was its scale.
The first thing Yao Xiang did in preparation for the night assault was inspect the camps himself, lest he suffer a night assault in return... this was not excessive caution. There had been an actual case here at Xingyang decades earlier. Thirty thousand troops of the Xiongnu Zhao had suddenly arrived beneath the walls, while Xingyang had only two thousand defenders. The defending commander had feigned surrender, sending cattle and wine during the day and promising to surrender the next day, then launched a classic night assault with eight hundred brave