Chapter 174: Balasagun (Part One)

Dark clouds hung low and a cold wind cut sharp. Below the walls of Balasagun, the bitter assault continued. Though it was one of the great cities of the Anxi and Transoxiana region, Balasagun's defenses could not compare with Shule's at all.

Shule's walls were founded on dressed stone, and everything below two meters was rammed lime-and-clay. On top of that, it had a full set of defensive works: barbican, moat, and bastions.

It had been built at the height of the Great Tang's power, expanded from the Han-dynasty city of Shule with sixty thousand corvée laborers conscripted from the four kingdoms of Anxi over three years.

Balasagun, however, was a city built out of necessity after Suyab Garrison, founded by the Great Tang, had been wrecked in repeated wars. Its predecessor had been no more than a satellite town of Suyab Garrison.

And neither the Sogdians who oversaw its construction nor Pang Tegin, the first Khagan of the later Kara-Khanids, possessed the manpower and resources of the Great Tang's Anxi Protectorate.

So compared with small cities like Talas and Kulan, Balasagun was passable enough, but against Shule it fell far short.

What was more worrying was that the Persians were not Kara-Khanids. The Kara-Khanids could not even build trebuchets; their army was almost entirely cavalry and desperately lacked siege methods.

Historically, they could not even break the Khotanese infantry square, let alone storm a city.

That was why Balasagun had held out for four months. But the Kara-Khanids might not know how to besiege a city — the Samanid Persians did!

Compared with a nearly pure nomadic state like the Kara-Khanid Khaganate, the Samanid Persian base was actually sedentary.

Although there were quite a few nomads within its borders, its core region, headed by Bukhara and Samarkand, belonged to agrarian civilization.

To a large extent, this state was in truth an enlarged version of Khotan.

Cold sweat dripped from Guo Xuanli's forehead. He was congratulating himself for having heeded the advice of young lord Zhang Erlang.

Zhang Zhao had told him that the Persians knew how to build siege engines such as trebuchets and battering rams, and had him send men to cut down every tall tree within ten li of Balasagun — and where there was no time to cut, to burn them.

Boom — boom — the crash of impacts carried over. It was the Persians' three trebuchets pounding the eastern wall of Balasagun.

Balasagun had a natural moat, the Chu River, but the Chu flowed only along the western and southern sides, while the northern side stood on very high ground.

The east therefore became the low-lying weak point of the entire city's defenses, and attacks on Balasagun had almost always concentrated on the east.

The trebuchets on the east side had now been pounding away without pause for more than two hours since early morning.

Even standing on the southern side of the city, Guo Xuanli could feel the eastern wall trembling and weakening. There was no telling when it would be battered down.

"Guo Guangsheng!" Guo Xuanli called out his eldest son's name.

"Your officer is here!" Guo Guangsheng wore a leather cuirass. He was now a squad general in charge of the city's mobile reserve.

"I had you tear down houses and gather stone and timber. How are the preparations?"

"Everything is fully ready. Troop Commander Ma has also personally led the Khotan palace guard warriors to the east wall!" Guo Guangsheng's mouth twitched. He had never seen before that his father could be so hard-hearted.

A full thirty percent of the dwellings inside the city had been torn down by him. Whether they belonged to common residents or to the various Yabghus and begs, whoever's house had the most material was torn down. But the Guo family's reputation had turned foul along with it.

Seeing his eldest son's twitching mouth, Guo Xuanli patted him on the shoulder.

"On the battlefield there is no room for the slightest mercy. Take two hundred of the Guo family's sons to reinforce the east wall shortly. If Balasagun cannot be held, all is lost — what does reputation matter then?"

Outside the city, Ali Dulaaf had also ridden to the east side to direct the assault. The reports from the Zoroastrians in Transoxiana had been essentially accurate.

For this campaign, Ali Dulaaf had recruited roughly eleven thousand ghazis from Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, plus five thousand Mustafa troops.

His core force was the twelve thousand Ersalia of his own Tashkent province.

The Mustafa were roughly equivalent to the Great Tang's fubing militia. They were a non-standing force made up of petty feudal lords and large and mid-sized landowners.

In peacetime they organized themselves in the countryside to keep order; in wartime they answered the call to arms, and they drew no pay — though after a campaign they were given some compensation in the form of tax remission.

The Ersalia were the standing armed force of Samanid Persia, equivalent to the Ming dynasty's mercenary recruits — regular local troops who drew pay.

These two types of troops, together with the Ghulam guards stationed in important cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand, and the Iqta cavalry of the nomadic tribes subject to the kingdom, formed the military foundation of the Samanid Persian kingdom.

However, because Ali Dulaaf's expedition against Balasagun — and even his support for the Muslims of Talas — was his own private undertaking, he had no elite Ghulam guards or Iqta cavalry to support him.

This, though, also reflected the situation within Samanid Persia. It was already much like the Great Tang in the last years of Tianbao!

The royal house in Bukhara could no longer really control the great border generals.

"Lord Wazir, the infidels' east wall has half collapsed! The archers organized by the ghazis have already sealed off the wall-top, so they cannot send laborers to repair the breach. Soon the warriors will be able to charge in!"

Masudi, the general commanding the left-wing corps, rode up beside Dulaaf and reported in a loud voice.

Wazir was the Samanid Persian term for chief minister, normally a body of three — one chief and two deputies — but by the late reign of Nasr II, the title of Wazir was also often granted to powerful frontier officials.

It was a title only, not a substantive post, somewhat like the Great Tang's practice of commissioning someone as acting governor of a province or minister of a board.

Dulaaf nodded gravely. The great stone in his heart finally settled somewhat.

These accursed infidels — they had cut down and burned every tree in the vicinity that could be used to build tall siege engines, and the dwellings with large amounts of timber had long since been completely destroyed.

This forced Dulaaf's great army to haul timber from more than ten li away to build trebuchets, and the round trip had cost at least ten-odd days.

When besieging a city, trebuchets pounding one spot continuously — especially against walls of rammed loess like these — could easily batter them down. But once a section collapsed, the defenders would repair it.

That required dumping earth and stone down from the wall on both sides of the breach, the fastest way to restore it.

Now the ghazi archers had sealed off the wall-top, preventing the infidels' laborers from repairing the wall, so they should be able to break in very soon.

Ma Jirong took a small sip of water and ate a small piece of sesame flatbread. It was not that they could not outshoot the ghazi archers outside; there was simply no need to spend their strength trading arrows with them. Their own side had few elite troops, and those should be saved for the critical point.

And the east wall, about to collapse, was that critical point — because the first to charge in would inevitably be the finest troops in the Samanid Persian army.

If they could be smashed, it would deal a huge blow to the enemy's morale and confidence. As for those ghazis who did not even have much leather armor, once the main force collapsed, they could be ridden down at will.

"Reporting to the Troop Commander: the enemy numbers about seven hundred, all armored. The first hundred are equipped with one-piece helmets with neck guards and Persian mail, and they have already formed up outside the city!"

The scout on the wall responsible for observing the outside situation came running over in a rush. Ma Jirong immediately tossed the sesame flatbread in his hand into the wicker basket beside him.

"Armor on! Armor on! Spearmen to the front, archers up the low wall, skirmishers take round shields and short blades!"

The so-called low wall was a half-meter-high, half-meter-thick earthen wall that Ma Jirong had ordered piled up behind this section of wall that was about to be battered down.

Its purpose was to let the archers behind climb up, so they could shoot over their own melee troops at the enemy's rear ranks pouring through the breach.

Boom! Just as both sides had nearly finished preparing, the east wall collapsed with a thunderous crash amid everyone's anticipation. After the dust settled, there was a breach about two meters wide.

"Heave-ho! Heave-ho!"

"Heave-ho! Heave-ho!"

Both sides advanced with much the same chanted cadence, and every few steps, under their officers' barked orders, they checked the spacing to front, rear, left, and right.

They could not spread too wide, nor could some be ahead and others behind, so officers generally positioned themselves on both flanks of the formation, where it was easier to control it.

This kind of regular-army battle formation isn't like the ones in TV dramas where everyone charges forward howling together — that kind of charge is no different from feeding the enemy free kills.

Heh! With spears four or five meters long, you'd run over carrying just a saber and shield? What, you want to end up as a kebab or something?

After the dust settled, the Persians seemed to appear out of nowhere. They wore one-piece helmets with aventails that fully protected the neck — this combination of helmet and aventail was the ancestor of the later Chichak helmet.

The lamellar armor on their bodies was also of the typical Arab-Persian style, clearly distinct from the Chinese-style chainmail ring armor.

The Khotan palace guards, by contrast, were equipped with large quantities of Great Tang lamellar armor. Though the craftsmanship came down in a direct line from Great Tang artisans, the style leaned closer to that of the Tibetans.

This was because when Khotan was restored, the bulk of the armor it obtained was Tibetan lamellar armor, which deeply influenced Khotan's equipment.

Crack-crack-crack — the sound rang out as the two sides' spear phalanxes began to make contact. But they didn't start thrusting right away; instead, they struck.

Both sides raised spears three or four meters long and kept striking at the opposing spearmen's heads, shoulders, even their spear-gripping hands. Whoever flinched from the pain and lost their grip, letting the spear drop — well, they could just wait to die.

While the spears clashed back and forth, the lightly armored skirmishers on both sides, carrying short swords and round shields, slipped through between the spearmen.

At that moment the spearmen were busy striking at each other, and neither side dared lower their spears to stab at the skirmishers below.

And hemmed in by the dense thicket of spear shafts overhead, the skirmishers fighting beneath the spear formation faced an even more brutal contest.

In order to move bent over, they could only wear light armor and carry short swords, which meant the fighting distance between them was extremely close, and their protection was very poor.

Shrill howls mingled with agonized screams. The spearmen had yet to take casualties, but below them, a dozen or more skirmishers had already collapsed in an instant.

In this kind of fighting, it was almost one-for-one. The moment you stabbed one opponent dead, the next enemy was already on you. If you managed to kill a second, a third would be bearing down on you face-to-face in the crush of bodies.

No time to rest, no time to dodge — until one side could no longer hold and broke.

The bloodiness of cold-weapon combat — this gives you a glimpse of it!

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