Chapter 100: The Basmyl

The Red River, known in later ages as the Kashgar River, was a remarkable stream some forty meters wide but averaging less than three meters deep.

Its banks were mostly sandy ground thick with reeds, but it was only the third month now and the reeds had not yet grown tall, so the whole Red River had a bleak, desolate air about it.

Twang! A sound like a bowstring, yet somehow different from a bowstring, rang out.

Shhk! The sound of a blade sinking into flesh followed, and a bearded holy warrior pitched forward onto the ground.

The short arrow had buried itself entirely in his back, leaving only a sliver of fletching visible. This was plainly beyond any ordinary foot bow — it had to be a crossbow bolt!

Twang! That dreadful sound rang out again, and Mahmud shuddered all over in terror, though his feet did not slow in the least.

Just as he dashed past a clump of mud, another holy warrior beside him suddenly screamed and clutched his neck, blood spraying out between his fingers.

This holy warrior did not fall at once, but ran on for more than ten paces before crashing face-first into the ankle-deep water with a splash.

How could this be a crossbow? No crossbow could fire this fast!

As a veteran holy warrior who had been in the Land of Peach Blossom Stone for five years, Mahmud knew the crossbow well — it was the ranged weapon the Peach Blossom Stone Empire favored most.

Great power, high accuracy, but slow to reload, and certainly never this mobile. No man could carry a crossbow weighing over ten jin and still keep his running speed.

Unless — the Gaochang men on the other side had many crossbows!

As he turned this over in his mind, Mahmud had already reached the sandy shore. He remembered that not far ahead there was a post station and an eating house, the best resting spot before entering Jiashi City. Many traveling merchants and herdsmen passed through, and a small guard detachment was stationed there. If he could just reach the vicinity of the post station, his life would be saved.

A shrill scream came from behind him, but Mahmud did not even turn his head. He knew the holy warriors he had recruited and the ruffians and bandits of Shule were being cut down by those Gaochang men.

But every man the Gaochang men killed slowed them by a fraction. He cared nothing for the others — as long as he himself could reach the post station, that was enough.

This defeat had come out of nowhere!

It had begun in Shule, where Mahmud had bought a piece of vital intelligence from a Karluk strongman.

A noble of the Gaochang Uyghurs had sent a trusted man with three thousand strings of cash to ransom someone in Shule, and the party was resting near Jiashi City. Their escort was not large — only twenty or thirty men.

On hearing this, Mahmud began summoning holy warriors from all over. They came from many lands — from Mahdia, from the Maghreb, from Egypt.

The largest number, of course, came from Baghdad and Isfahan, many of them seasoned warriors.

But what Mahmud had never expected was this: he had gathered seventy men, absorbed another band of Tiele people with the same aim along the way, and by the time he reached the vicinity of Jiashi he had two hundred and thirty men, half of them armored. The armor was mostly ragged, but it was not entirely without defensive value.

Yet just when Mahmud thought the matter was firmly in hand and was searching the area, before dawn this morning he was ambushed by soldiers in heavy armor, the like of which he had never seen.

They had killed the sentries he had left outside under cover of darkness, then charged in. Mahmud had barely managed to organize any resistance — ah! Perhaps it would be truer to say he had never even thought of organizing resistance.

What was there to resist? Armored soldiers in gleaming heavy armor, who made no sound even when killing, silent as stone men, and capable of a night raid — was that something he could resist?

These were elite troops like the guard corps of Caliph al-Qahir. Above all, the giant wielding a great axe whom he had glimpsed in the moonlight had put enormous pressure on Mahmud's spirit. Apart from running fast, he truly could think of no better response.

Fortunately, his choice had been the right one. Mahmud looked at the thatched huts of the post station, now close at hand, and felt deeply grateful for his decision.

Only now did he glance back. Not bad — a dozen or so men were still following, and all of them were his trusted brothers. If they returned to Shule, they could still protect themselves.

"Pick up the pace, everyone! I still have a few Samanid silver coins on me. We'll have a good meal, buy some horses, and then we can go back to Shule!"

It had to be said, Mahmud was a competent leader — even at a moment like this, he knew to boost his men's morale.

And it truly worked. The panicked band, on hearing Mahmud's words, at once recovered some of their spirit.

The silver coins were few and could not buy anything good. They could only order a plate of coarse, rock-hard mixed-grain flatbread, and have the shopkeeper boil a big pot of soup with a little salt and a jumble of tiny fish and shrimp.

The men, still shaken after fleeing for over two hours, did not care what was set before them and fell to devouring it ravenously.

As he ate, Mahmud suddenly sensed something wrong. This post station, normally bustling with people coming and going, was today deserted to an unnatural degree!

Apart from them and the shopkeeper, there were only two other people eating: one wrapped in a wide cloak, and one wearing a fur hat.

And... Mahmud noticed that the one wrapped in the wide cloak was smiling at him strangely.

That smile... made Mahmud's rear tighten involuntarily. It was deeply eerie, and set his heart thumping.

"Fine weather today! I wonder if Supervisor Ashina Chuo has ever seen the might of Great Tang armored soldiers?"

Zhang Zhao finished the last piece of coarse wheat bread and turned with a smile to the barbarian lad beside him, who wore a fur hat and looked somewhat uneasy.

The surname Ashina was one that even people with little knowledge of history had heard of. It was the surname of the ruling clan of the Turks, and its fame resounded across the steppe.

Though some had learned of it from the TVB drama Can't Buy Me Love — after all, the name Ashina Shabi was truly, damnably unforgettable.

The man Zhang Zhao called Ashina Chuo looked not much different from a Han person; apart from a darker complexion, there was nothing to distinguish him as a Turk.

Strictly speaking, though, he was no longer a Turk. He should be called a Basmyl.

They were a branch of the Turks, and in history they had been called the "Basmyl Who Returned to the Tang."

When the Great Tang had sent troops against the Eastern Turks, the Basmyl chieftain Zhimi Chuo had led his men in battle under the famous Xuanzong-era general Wang Jun, and for this had received from the Great Tang the office of Supervisor of the Jinshan Circuit.

But the Basmyl had met with a rather wretched fate. They had wanted to follow the Great Tang against the Eastern Turks, yet in the end they were defeated and swallowed up by the Turks.

Later, when the Turkic state fell into chaos, the Basmyl broke away from the Turks together with the Uyghurs and Karluks. They jointly raised up the Uyghur Ozmish Khagan as their leader, and in the end chose to stand on their own.

But of those who threw in their lot with the Karluks, few ever escaped being stabbed in the back by them.

During the Tianbao era, the Karluks attacked and killed the Basmyl Khagan Ashina Shi, and swallowed the entire Basmyl tribe in one gulp.

The Ashina clan, the Basmyl chieftains who had narrowly escaped death, were relocated to the vicinity of Jiashi City, where they submitted to the Karakhanids.

Ashina Chuo was a direct descendant of Ashina Shi, the man the Karluks had killed all those years ago.

The Karluks, who had betrayed the Great Tang and brought the Heavenly Square faith into Anxi, spreading it by force — Zhang Zhao would not let them go. But the Basmyl were a tribe that could be won over.

Not only because they had been the first tribe to submit to the Great Tang, but also because these Basmyl later migrated east and settled in the region of the Liao dynasty's Southwest Pacification Commission.

In the end, most of them were absorbed into the Han people, while a small portion were led back to their homeland by Yelu Dashi and took part in the founding of the Western Liao.

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