Chapter 247

If one were to rank the armies of this era by their execution, the troops under Zhang Zhao would absolutely be among the very best; probably only the already-scattered Silver Spear Effectuation Army could compare.

This de facto private army of Great King Zhang, built mainly around the Fengtian Army and over a thousand Khotan palace guards, was at this moment in its phase of surging, vigorous ascent.

Everyone was waiting for Zhang Zhao to seize the dragon throne in the Daming Palace, so they could share in the dynasty's glory and have their portraits hung in Lingyan Pavilion. All hearts pulled in one direction, and they fought for Zhang Zhao's cause as if it were their own.

So after confirming the location of the Balihara army's stockade, it took them only half a shichen to settle on a battle plan.

Then within another shichen, they broke the plan down to the level of squad-leader officers, and at the same time the whole force struck camp and advanced about twenty li, shortening the distance between them and the Balihara army's main camp to thirty li.

After that they made camp on the spot, and the seven thousand troops unhurriedly ate a full meal, then rested right where they were.

Not only did the soldiers make no excess noise, even the horses were quiet; many of the fold-eared horses had even learned to lie down to sleep, a way of saving more energy.

At the beginning of the yin hour, that is, a little past three in the morning, the seven thousand troops completed their departure preparations under the officers' organization.

At this time the moon was still hidden among dark clouds, and visibility was extremely limited. Zhang Zhao ordered that a jiang of one hundred men serve as the basic unit; the jiang leader would designate the sharpest-eyed squad leader to walk at the very front holding a torch, while the rest of the soldiers placed their hands on the shoulders of the comrade in front and advanced in sequence.

Li Zaiyuan was that squad leader walking at the very front of the entire army. After another round of careful selection, he had smoothly risen from fire leader to squad leader.

But for a former member of the Hanshan Unit, his speed of promotion was very slow.

For example, Man Xiong and Dunzhu, who could still remain at the Great King's side and were still members of the Hanshan Unit, were the Great King's personal guards whom everyone envied, the innermost of the innermost circle.

Of those who had gone out from the Hanshan Unit to become officers, there were hardly any mere Captains; most were at the level of battalion Troop Commander.

According to the military organization of the Deputy Prince's household, in terms of battalion, unit, squad, and fire, his squad leader rank was indeed somewhat beneath notice; one squad was only a hundred men, while one battalion had around a thousand.

But Li Zaiyuan was a man easily satisfied — though of course you could also say he was pragmatic. Otherwise he would not have chosen to marry a secondhand lady in an environment where all his comrades pulled up their pants and refused to acknowledge anyone.

Because he had entirely set his sights on that young lady of the Liu family, whose ancestor was a captive from Talas; she was hardworking, willing, and steady, and quite good at managing a household. Marrying her would absolutely make the family prosper.

He was also one of the few who, every time the Great King distributed rewards, carefully saved away every bit of the reward money.

Unlike Man Xiong and Wang Tongxin, who had not saved a single copper coin and had even run up a pile of debts.

Li Zaiyuan gave a soft suck at his mouth; with a copper coin held in his mouth, he always had a bit of trouble keeping his saliva in.

The hooves of the horse beside him were also wrapped in a thick layer of cotton cloth; the sounds of both man and horse had been reduced to the minimum.

In the silence of the early morning, Li Zaiyuan reckoned they had walked for a little over a shichen, because the sky was already beginning to lighten.

"Take the coin out! Eat flatbread and drink water. Whoever dares make any other sound, I'll beat his mouth crooked!"

When he saw a pile of stones at the three-way fork in the road ahead, with a red cloth strip pressed beneath the stones, this squad leader at the very front issued the order.

A squad leader daring to issue an order at such a moment for the whole army to halt, eat, and drink — this was precisely the result of Zhang Zhao's efforts to promote military democracy within the army.

In his army, even the lowest-level officers such as squad leaders could exercise a certain degree of initiative, without having to worry about being beaten or retaliated against by their superiors.

"You dog-fucked bastard! Why did you stop everyone?" The troops had just halted when battalion Troop Commander Shanzhu'er hurried to the front to see what was happening.

"Troop Commander, the marker left by the Youyi Unit people is up ahead!"

Li Zaiyuan pointed forward, and Shanzhu'er also saw the stone pile on the ground. This was a marker agreed upon before departure; seeing this kind of stone pile meant they were about ten li from the enemy's main camp.

"That fast? In just over a shichen we've covered twenty li?"

Even Shanzhu'er, a battalion Troop Commander, was shocked. This was not walking empty-handed, but advancing through the cold wind in the dark carrying sabers, spears, bows, and crossbows — and they could still move this fast.

Li Zaiyuan drank a mouthful of water, finished a flatbread, and waited a while longer before the troops behind, wearing cotton armor and other iron lamellar armor, made their way to the front.

These men, by their features, mostly bore Persian and Uyghur characteristics, and had been selected from the Shunyi Left and Right Armies.

But they were not the vanguard of this raid; rather, they were the vanguard's tool-men. Their greatest use was to transport armor specifically for the elite troops like Li Zaiyuan.

Setting out before dawn was full of inconvenience; they could not ride horses, nor could one man control three horses. So apart from each man leading one horse by hand, the rest of the horses were in the rear and would only move with a small logistics force after daybreak.

Therefore, to guarantee the fighting strength of the elite troops, the armor weighing several dozen jin had to be transported by men.

These two thousand soldiers who had marched wearing armor were already exhausted by the time they got here. Now they could take off the armor and rest properly for a while, then set out again once the fighting began, to fight a winning battle as the second echelon.

"Great King, the enemy camp is still unguarded. Only within five li are there a few sentry posts, and they're all open sentries — all dealt with!"

Ma Shacai said, panting heavily. This time he had led several dozen elite Youyi Army men as the vanguard scouts for the main force.

"Then follow the established plan. We'll strike from both ends at once and drive the enemy into the central main camp."

"Li Ruotai, prepare your six hundred armored cavalry. Once the enemy masses at the main camp, and the horse archers and heavy infantry clear away the barricades, I want you to go all out and smash through in one charge! As long as you can crash in, this battle is as good as won!"

Li Ruotai nodded, then clasped his hands in salute. "Aye! Great King, rest assured, the Iron Horse Unit guarantees completion of the mission."

The Balihara army's main camp stood beside a great river. Just as Zhang Zhao had wondered, the soldiers below also thought the Kshatriya lords and the king above must have some serious illness, otherwise they would never have thought of setting up camp here.

It was now early spring, the second month, and the weather was still bitterly cold. The damp by the river was especially heavy; often after sleeping for a shichen or so, the water mist would soak one's clothes through.

Moreover, with more than sixty thousand troops gathered here, to say nothing of firewood for drying clothes and keeping warm, there was not even much firewood left for cooking.

Yesterday a unit that had gone out to gather firewood never came back; it was said they had been attacked, and now the whole camp was in a state of panic.

The Slender Pig was just such a man, inwardly fearful and deeply dissatisfied. He had originally been a fisherman by the river; as a Shudra, his life had been passable.

The Slender Pig was not his name but his nickname — and "slender pig" did not refer to a pig at all, but to a kind of giant catfish that grew in the Ganges, the tank goonch.

For a Shudra to get such a nickname was no good thing, because the skin of the tank goonch is black-yellow.

As a mixed-blood descendant of Aryans and Dravidians, if his descendants' skin color continued to darken, who knew when they might become Dalits.

And precisely because his skin was dark, he could never escape conscription. Not only did the Kshatriya lords above look down on a black-yellow-skinned Shudra like him, even the somewhat fairer-skinned Shudras often pushed people like him aside.

"Damned! Eating peas and wild vegetables every day, not even allowed much salt, and no reward at all for the good things we've seized."

The Slender Pig had been woken by the need to piss. He rubbed his bleary eyes and began muttering under his breath.

In the original battles against the Pala dynasty, when they won, the people above grabbed and plundered on a grand scale, but the bottom-rank soldiers like them could always still get a few scraps.

But this time, in order to win over the Pala dynasty's nobles and monasteries, Krishira II had not carried out large-scale looting, and of course there was nothing to distribute to the men below.

"What is that? How can it move? And it's quite fast!" A Shudra spearman sleeping in the same dirt hollow as the Slender Pig poked his shoulder and asked in a low voice.

At this time, most of the lower-class people suffered from night blindness due to nutritional problems and a lack of vitamin A. The spearman poking the Slender Pig's arm was one such case.

In the dim moonlight at five in the morning, he could not see clearly what was in the distance at all; he only sensed that something was approaching, flickering.

This fellow had night blindness, but the Slender Pig did not!

He was a fisherman who had grown up by the river. Although the teachings forbade eating many things, the common folk below often could not fill their bellies, so who cared about all that? They ate whatever they could find, at most hiding while they ate it.

The skinny pig had eaten better than most people because of the fish innards and the big catfish that many wouldn't eat, so he had no night blindness or anything of the sort.

But the moment he raised his head, an icy chill shot through his whole body, because the skinny pig saw clearly what was approaching fast — unsheathed long swords and spearheads, reflecting the torchlight.

The skinny pig desperately wanted to shout, but sheer terror had completely paralyzed him. His mouth opened and closed, yet no sound came out, and his legs were as rigid as nails hammered into the ground, utterly unable to move.

'Twang!' Li Zaiyuan released with his right hand, and an arrow streaked through the air like a shooting star, then struck the terrified fool dead-on.

The skinny pig's throat rattled a few times, and he swayed and toppled headfirst onto the riverbank. To the very end, he never managed to let out a single scream.

Li Zaiyuan's arrow seemed to serve as the signal, for countless soldiers in padded armor suddenly surged out of the darkness.

In twos and threes, Balihar soldiers who could no longer bear the cold and had gotten up to pace around or relieve themselves kept collapsing, and the screams began to multiply.

A commotion stirred through the main camp. Some men were still asleep, but others had been jolted awake by the screams.

Many Balihar dynasty soldiers scrambled and crawled out of the earthen dugout tents where they slept, but the moment they stepped outside, they found the enemy in black-green armor already upon them.

The quick-witted ones howled and fled in every direction, while the dazed ones still rubbing their eyes were simply skewered on the spot. Howls and screams layered together, the sound growing louder and louder, until the whole camp was thrown into utter chaos.

People were running blindly everywhere, many of them stark naked from the waist down. They did not know what was happening. Many did not even know why they were running, because they had not seen the enemy.

But the collective panic and howling infected them. The howls of one or two men soon swelled into the howls of dozens, then hundreds.

The heavy infantry of the first wave pulled open the wooden palisade erected outside the camp, and the horse archers carrying pear-blossom spears charged in.

As they rode, they hurled tung-oil jars in every direction and then ignited them with their pear-blossom spears. The grain storehouses in particular instantly burst into raging flames.

The surprise attack was launched simultaneously on both sides of the Balihar army's main camp. The heavy infantry, arrayed in horizontal ranks with long spears and stiff bows, shot any who picked up weapons to resist, and stabbed any who fled in panic.

They advanced rapidly in squads as their basic unit, setting fires as they pushed forward to keep spreading chaos.

The horse archers who had already charged in were even more hateful. They darted everywhere, and whenever they came upon an earthen dugout tent, they thrust their pear-blossom spears inside and sprayed wildly, terrifying the Balihar soldiers just startled awake into fleeing in even greater panic.

In barely a quarter of an hour, the chaos had spread everywhere. These low-ranking soldiers had been deeply dissatisfied with this campaign from the start, because not only had they gained nothing, their treatment had been abysmal.

Although the Balihar dynasty was a great power in the Indian region, it was somewhat overstretched to field an army of sixty or seventy thousand men at once. Supplies could not keep up.

Add to that the extreme corruption and inequality caused by the caste system, and the lowly beasts of burden had accumulated far too much resentment in their hearts.

Many of them even wished for the king to be defeated, so that they would no longer have to fight on the lands of the Pala dynasty and could return to their homes.

Spurred on by this state of mind, countless Balihar dynasty soldiers actively fanned the chaos.

They howled with wild exaggeration. If they saw a single soldier of the Juer Khan, they would claim it was a hundred.

If they fell and hurt themselves while fleeing, they would claim they had been stabbed by the enemy, that the enemy killed everyone on sight and could not be stopped.

Soon, the long-snake-formation camp by the river was in complete chaos. Fierce flames blazed everywhere, weeping and screaming filled the air, and each camp was like a lantern set alight, until the whole riverbank glowed as one.

All the Balihar dynasty soldiers, with different feelings in their hearts, fled en masse toward the central command camp.

Some were simply afraid and thought the central command camp was safe. Some genuinely wanted to seek orders and resist the enemy. Others merely ran blindly along with the crowd.

The flames of war burned their way toward the central command of the Balihar Third Prince.

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