Chapter 175: Balasagun (Part 2)

Blood flowed at the breach in the east wall, forming streaks of glaring red rivulets across the churned yellow earth.

Beneath the long spears and staffs, the leaping skirmishers lay fallen in heaps — though most of them were Samanid Persians.

For although they were the elite border troops of the Samanid state, ever since their shameful defeat by Satuq four years ago, they had lost more than half their main strength, and their officers had suffered especially heavy losses.

Those here now had all been trained and promoted in the last few years, and neither their fighting strength nor their morale could compare with four years ago.

By contrast, the fighting strength of the Khotan palace guards could be called quite excellent.

These years they had been constantly locked in small-scale skirmishes with the Karakhanids, and some among them were impoverished highland Tibetans who had come down from the snowy mountains precisely to fight for the King of Khotan and win themselves wealth and rank.

What was more, a considerable portion of them were elite troops who had followed Zhang Zhao through the successive great battles at Shule and Polu Prefecture.

A cowardly soldier is one man's failing, but a cowardly general ruins the whole army. Under the command of the Grand Commandery Duke Zhang, these Khotan palace guards — who to begin with were no weaker than the armored warriors of Zhang Zhao's own Hanshan Capital — became all the more terrifying in battle once they gained the two buffs of consecutive victory and lone courage.

At the same time, the archers Ma Jirong had positioned were also playing no small part, steadily pouring heavy arrows down upon the heads of the Persian rear ranks, so that the Persian rear suffered even higher casualties than the front — which left their commander Mas'udi with no choice.

He could either pull the rear ranks back to re-form, or beat the drums and advance, letting both sides close into a melee that would cancel out the enemy archers' advantage.

But the breach had been opened only with great difficulty, and the front was still holding. If he pulled back now to re-form, to say nothing of whether the army might collapse from it, the commander Ali Dullaf himself would certainly never tolerate such an act.

"Beat the drums! Send the front ranks forward! Keep pressing in succession, and draw off thirty archers — we must suppress the enemy! Yusuf, take my personal guard and go up yourself." Mas'udi made his choice swiftly, and the drums began to boom.

"Forward! Forward!" The Persian heavy-armored spearmen in the front ranks had no choice but to advance, and as they moved forward, the Persian leaping skirmishers in front of their legs were likewise forced forward.

Pitifully, they had already been on the verge of collapse, and now they were being squeezed forward still. Their spirit sank at once; only a few dared to go up and fight desperately, while most were thinking only of how to save their own skins.

And the moment Ma Jirong saw this, he knew he had won — because with a spear thrust, you must first draw the weapon back before thrusting it out, and to strengthen armor-piercing power, the backward draw had to be made through quite a wide arc.

But a strike was different: you simply swung it up and brought it down. In this way, you gained an extra stretch of striking distance for nothing.

Sure enough, before the Persian spearmen could thrust at the necks and chests of the Khotan palace guards, they were thoroughly battered by a crackling rain of blows.

A spear of three or four meters, raised high and brought smashing down, with a great lump of refined iron at the butt end — the effect of striking a man with that was no worse than a mace.

Under the fierce hammering, the Persian heavy-armored spearmen in the front rank were beaten dizzy and dazed, some even with heads split and bleeding.

Still, they could be counted elite, and they grimly held on and kept thrusting forward — yet the effect was not particularly good. Even a long spear, when faced with two or three layers of armor, could not pierce armor as well as one might imagine.

"Thrust!" Seeing the enemy draw near, Ma Jirong nimbly adjusted his tactics. The enemy front rank had been battered into disorder; now was the time to strike the killing blow.

"Wind!" All of them roared as one and thrust together. This was far deadlier than the scattered thrusts of the Persian spears; the collective thrust of the ten men in the front rank brought down three Persian spearmen at once.

"Wind!" Another roar, and seven or eight more Persian spearmen fell.

This time so many fell not entirely because of the spearmen's thrusts, but because the Persian leaping skirmishers, scrabbling beneath the long spears, had broken.

And once they fled, the Khotan leaping skirmishers could go straight in with their short blades and stab the Persian spearmen in the thighs where no armor plates covered them, or thrust deliberately into the gaps between the plates.

Who could endure that?

Amid wretched wails and howls, the four ranks of Persian spearmen in the foremost square collapsed in an instant — but immediately after, the spearmen of the second square pressed forward to take their place.

Yet these were the very square the archers had targeted most savagely just now. They came up already understrength and with morale none too high; after holding for less than three or four minutes, and after eight or nine of their thirty-odd men had fallen, they too broke with a crash.

The drums sounded again, and the spearmen of the third square, compelled by military order, poured in through the breach. They had been at the rear and had not seen clearly what was happening inside — and the moment they entered, they were dumbstruck.

Wasn't this supposed to be spearman against spearman? Why were the enemy all crossbowmen?

Thirty cocked horn crossbows were aimed at these wretches. At such close range, no matter what armor you wore, you absolutely could not withstand a volley from horn crossbows drawing nearly three dan of force.

The Khotan palace guards, who had set down their spears and taken up crossbows, let loose a full volley. The third square had not been up for two minutes before it left behind more than a dozen corpses and fled back in rout.

"Kill!" The moment the enemy retreated, the Khotan palace guards charged out right on their heels.

The Persians of the fourth wave were first rammed by their own fleeing men, then struck by the Khotan palace guards, and they broke without even making contact with the enemy — dragging the troops behind them into collapse as well.

Six or seven hundred armored soldiers were chased and pounded hard by a few dozen Khotan palace guards, throwing away helmets and armor until the ground was littered with them.

Ding-ding-ding! The sharp clang of metal rang out, and the red signal flags signifying danger were waved frantically.

Each fire captain and deputy fire captain began reining in their own soldiers, calling back these men who had been carried away by the heat of battle.

For the enemy had already brought up large numbers of archers, and in particular their stone-throwers were already fully prepared.

A shower of arrows poured down, and several Khotan leaping skirmishers whose blood was up were shot full of arrows like hedgehogs and toppled outside the wall. Most of the men, however, followed orders and slowly withdrew into the breach.

They had just come in when howling stones came smashing down. Ma Jirong gave a smug grin, and while calling on the soldiers to dodge the stones, sent someone to notify Guo Guangsheng, Guo Dalang.

This was nothing but the Persians venting their rage. Once the trebuchets had "tired" of firing, they could get back to repairing the east wall!

"Pass on my military order! All officers of the third and fourth squares above the rank of squad captain are to be executed! Tell Mas'udi to prepare elite troops again — if he fails to break in this time, I'll make him go up himself!"

A thread of killing intent gleamed in Ali Dullaf's eyes. They had breached the wall and still could not fight their way in — then what was the point of assaulting the city at all? They might as well simply withdraw!

Yet he was also somewhat puzzled. Where had Balasagun gotten so many elite armored soldiers?

Ali Dullaf knew this sort of tribal-confederation city-state very well: they could neither obtain nor afford to maintain so many elite armored soldiers.

Even if the armor had been left behind when Satuq withdrew last time, what about the men? Surely the men could not also be Satuq's?

An armored soldier was not someone you could call an armored soldier merely by putting armor on him. From ancient times to the present, armored soldiers were a tradition passed down; they required personal instruction and example, and training from childhood.

For instance, how to distinguish the sounds of horns, drums, gongs, and iron? How to advance in formation? How should a square be fought? How should a crescent formation be arrayed? How do multiple men coordinate? All these things required someone to teach.

Only when a man had mastered all this, tempered his martial skills, and built his body on unlimited grain and flour plus great quantities of fine meat every day — only when such a man put on armor could he be called an armored soldier.

The most elite among them, those who could wear several layers of iron armor and still fight on and off, roaring, for several hours at a stretch, were the elite iron-armored soldiers.

In any country, these were an exceedingly precious asset — one might call them strategic weapons, their status almost equal to that of today's intercontinental missiles and heavy bombers.

In the present world, apart from the Great Tang in its heyday, which could use martial learning and a vast hereditary military aristocracy to raise two or three hundred thousand armored soldiers and equip them with iron armor, no other state possessed such a thing.

Summon them and they come; come and they can fight — that is an exceedingly high standard!

A farmer pulled up from the fields cannot tell left from right, advances and retreats without order, glances about in panic at the slightest stir, and after three or five minutes of fighting is breathing like a bellows. Put ten layers of armor on him and he still would not be an armored soldier.

That is why peasant rebel armies in history suffered so terribly when facing professional government troops.

Only when the elite among the government troops themselves could no longer survive, or joined out of a desire to gamble for wealth and rank, could peasant rebel armies accomplish anything.

This was also why Goguryeo of old was worth the ceaseless campaigns of the Sui and Tang sovereigns, and why they uttered the lament "leave no cause for worry to our descendants."

It was precisely because they possessed at least several thousand such strategic weapons. If they were allowed to grow strong, how could that be borne?

Goguryeo had to be uprooted entirely, from state to people.

So Ali Dulaft had reason to be puzzled, because behind these armored soldiers there must surely stand a state.

A coalition like Balasagun's—religious figures joined with tribal chieftains great and small—could never have trained armored soldiers like these.

Could it be? Could the news of Saktu's defeat be false tidings deliberately released by the Karakhanids? Or had that Jin kingdom he knew so little about intervened in this war?

But Ali Dulaft immediately had no mind to dwell on this. The messenger guard had only just left when thick smoke rose from the southwest of the army's encampment, and a clamor of shouting men and neighing horses reached his ears.

Ali Dulaft felt as though he had been struck full in the chest. That was where his great army's grain stores were stockpiled—this absolutely could not be lost!

"Quickly, raise my great banner! Amir, take my personal guard cavalry and come with me to see!"

Ali Dulaft was panicking. The grain road from the city of Ashnas to this place had been under constant harassment from the start, and several supply depots and transfer points along the way had already been stormed and burned.

If this, the largest granary, were lost, then it was all over—the entire army would go hungry.

Bai Congxin was laughing wildly. He had never imagined that the cavalry of the Samanid Persian kingdom could be this weak.

Their equipment looked fine enough, but it was all for show—they could not even manage to form a passable square formation.

Their horses were all big-rumped beasts, impressive to look at, but they ran out of strength after a charge or two.

At first, when they exchanged volleys with him, they had been quite arrogant, but the moment he charged in close, they immediately fell into disorder.

"Commandant Li, another cavalry force has come. I will take the Tiger Troop leaders and two hundred of our lads to hold the line for you. You charge them once and scatter them outright, so the Nestorian light cavalry can burn this granary."

Bai Congxin could now finally command the three hundred Yue riders led by the Tiger clan, because Zhang Zhao, without the slightest mercy, had driven off Hu Wei and the thirty-odd men close to him.

Hu Wei had at least received three beautiful, flower-like women, but the others had fared far worse.

The goods and valuables they had gotten their hands on, worth over twenty strings of cash, were all confiscated. And when they returned, who knew how Queen Cao would deal with them. After that, all the rest became obedient.

Hu Guang was even more obedient, because he knew what his father Hu Cile intended.

What his father wanted most was to return to the Guiyi Army with Zhang Erlang, because Hu Cile believed Zhang Zhao had the ability to revive the Guiyi Army. He wanted to follow Zhang Zhao back and become a "meritorious follower of the dragon," and later secure himself a grand post such as Garrison Commander of some place or even Prefect of Suzhou.

As for Hu Guang himself, he naturally had no objection either. He was only too glad to see his elder brother brought low.

For the two of them were not born of the same mother, and had fought constantly since childhood. Especially when they were young, his elder brother Hu Wei had bullied him no small amount.

Now that Hu Wei had been driven off, it suited him perfectly.

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