Chapter 451: Khagan, Do You Want to Crawl into a Marmot Hole Too?

Yili Pijia had finally gathered four or five thousand cavalry, but he had no idea which direction to strike from.

Because the "Karluks" opposite him were clearly trying to encircle him.

Every camp around Zetian Temple had been set ablaze, and everywhere Gaochang cavalry were being hunted down, leaving only one escape route to the southwest for Yili Pijia.

But that was not the most terrifying part. The most terrifying part was that besides the ten thousand-plus light cavalry surrounding Zetian Temple on three sides,

there were also several thousand black-robed riders on the other side who had not sped up, but were pressing forward slowly. They were clearly conserving their horses' strength.

"These aren't Saktu's Karluks! These are Zhang the traitor's cavalry! Zhang the traitor's cavalry!"

The Grand Minister of the Left, Yiliamisi, suddenly screamed in terror, and all the Gaochang Uyghur high officials and nobles outside Zetian Temple also realized in fear that something was wrong.

Because the approaching cavalry were not flying the Karluks' black banners and wolf-head great standard, but the familiar yet strange Three Stars Banner of the Great Dynasty.

Alongside the Three Stars Banner were great Zhang-character banners in red, white, and black, all clearly showing that these newcomers were not Karluks, but the Liang army from Hexi.

Lu Sanlang galloped over from the distance, reined his horse to a stop before Zhang Zhao, and cupped his hands.

"Heavenly King, let me, Lu Sanlang, be the vanguard! If not for that beast Pugu Jun, my family would not have been destroyed and my people scattered!"

"Heavenly King, I, Guo Tiance, and Guo Guangsheng, request to fight!"

Guo Guangsheng and his nephew Guo Tiance also rode over. These two had actually been serving in civil posts all along and had little experience leading troops in battle.

But what they faced now was the mortal enemy of their Guo family and the three royal families of the five clans of Anxi!

Back then, if Pugu Jun had not feared being caught between the Anxi Army descendants in Kucha and Zhang Huaishen from east and west, and falsely claimed the title of Military Governor of Yin and Xi Prefectures of the Great Tang to lure and kill the Guo brothers' ancestor Guo Dalang, the Anxi Army would not have fallen into such misery.

And after Guo Guangsheng and Guo Tiance came out, Li Qilang Li Wang, who had been helping Zhang Zhao handle religious affairs, and the monk Huixing, Zheng Tong, also rode out, and the two of them together made their plea to Zhang Zhao from horseback.

"Dharma King! Please permit us descendants of the Anxi Army to fight!"

"Good! Then let us tell Pugu Cunde openly and honestly, and make him open his eyes and see who has come to take his life!"

Following Zhang Zhao's order, several thousand light and heavy cavalry all stripped off the black robes they had worn to disguise themselves as Karluks, and a great standard of the Military Governor of the Four Garrisons of Anxi of the Great Tang was raised.

"Vengeance and the wiping away of hatred — this is the day! Not one descendant of Pugu Jun of Gaochang shall be left!"

Up on Zetian Temple, the moment Yili Pijia saw that great standard of the Military Governor of the Four Garrisons of Anxi of the Great Tang, he understood everything.

All these years, the Gaochang Uyghurs had maintained considerable wariness toward the Guiyi Army, and the root of it lay here.

Although ordinary people, and even most nobles, of both the Gaochang Uyghurs and the Guiyi Army did not know of this matter, or had forgotten it,

as Khagan of the Gaochang Uyghurs, Yili Pijia understood better than anyone how the Gaochang Uyghur Khaganate had been founded in the first place.

"They've come for revenge! They've come for revenge! In the end, they still never forgot this matter."

Cold sweat poured from his forehead in streams, and Yili Pijia kept muttering under his breath, seemingly having forgotten even to command his army.

Meanwhile, in the distance, Zhang Zhao had Li Cunxiao carry a great banner of the Military Governor of the Guiyi Army and follow behind him.

After six thousand light and heavy cavalry simultaneously shed their black robes, they revealed padded armor and mail of various colors, and at a distance of four or five hundred paces, began to slowly accelerate.

Hoofbeats thundered like rolling thunder, and the very earth trembled. When heavy cavalry entered the battlefield, they generally walked first, then trotted, and only at the end broke into a full gallop for the charge.

Moreover, the distance of the galloping charge was generally not long; very often they would only choose to gallop and charge when a quarter of the distance remained.

For charging heavy cavalry, maintaining a complete formation was more important than speed.

Of course, the fully armored cavalry of this era did not require as strict a formation as modern cuirassiers.

Because the fully armored cavalry of this era relied mainly not on impact force, but on the thickness of their armor and the power of the cavalry lance.

They were more like pressing in, relying on excellent equipment and cavalry lances to first strip away the enemy's "outer shell," and only when the enemy was about to collapse would they charge fiercely and carry them away in one wave.

From the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui and Tang, this was how they charged. Such tactics were highly effective, and often a few hundred fully armored cavalry could rout several thousand infantry.

But this tactic had one enormous limiting condition: it demanded the very best in both armor and warhorses.

At the same time, it demanded even more of the riders — only martial-aristocratic houses like the Guanlong nobility from which the Li-Tang dynasty arose could cultivate such cavalry.

But Hexi no longer had such a tradition. Murong Xinzhang and Li Cunhui were not the common case, but exceptions.

So Zhang Zhao was considering whether he could replace them with a cheaper heavy cavalry that did not require eight or ten years of bitter lance training.

The three hundred riders he personally led at his side were Zhang Zhao's test subjects.

They were not equipped with cavalry lances, but with extra-long spears designed to break easily, generally close to two zhang in length.

Their method of fighting was to use small horn crossbows when closing in, firing concentrated volleys at a single point in a dense infantry square.

Then they would charge this gap using the couched-lance charge. After the spear in their hands broke, they could turn the remaining shaft around and use the other end.

Because at the tail end of the spear there was also a blade tip, which could be thrown or used for thrusting, and after that they would fight with sabers.

At the same time, these cavalry were also equipped with stiff bows, so that when they could not break through an infantry square, they could dismount and fight as heavily armored archers.

Although the method of fighting was still complex, it had one advantage: there was no need to train from childhood.

Because this set of tactics relied more on overall coordination and proficiency than on individual martial skill.

The six thousand light and heavy cavalry first began to trot, only gradually accelerating within three hundred paces, and abruptly accelerating within one hundred paces.

The folded-ear horses that Zhang Zhao had painstakingly bred over several years displayed superb battle prowess at this moment.

Carrying one or two hundred jin, they could still burst forth with the force of an arrow leaving the bowstring.

Sixty paces!

As Zhang Zhao raised the horse spear in his hand high, the two elite cavalrymen beside him, who held the rank of Chengjielang, also raised the small red triangular flags in their hands.

This was to mark the formation for all the cavalry, so that they would close in around this center.

The new-style cavalry Zhang Zhao was testing used a line-formation charge, with six hundred men arranged in a charge formation of ten across and three deep.

Each shock wave was thirty men, divided into ten large shock lines and twenty small lines.

Before the high-speed charge, they were spread apart, but within twenty paces, at the command of the two small red triangular flags, they would converge in an extremely short time.

Then they would press tightly together, exactly as required in training — stirrup touching stirrup, cavalryman's leg touching cavalryman's leg.

The men on the outer flanks were all officers holding at least the rank of Chengxinlang. They were there to control the formation, squeezing the slightly weaker soldiers in the very center into the middle.

These six hundred men squeezed together as if they were a single body, and some of the cavalry in the middle ranks were already in so much pain that their faces had gone pale and twisted.

This was purely from being squeezed — in the past, during training, riders in the middle had actually been crushed unconscious.

On the opposite side, the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry finally moved out, though far more chaotically.

Their training intensity was not enough for riders and horses to form a tighter formation; compared to the Liang Kingdom cavalry, they were a complete rabble.

Cold sweat and fear appeared on Jieli Pijia's face. Everything today had utterly exceeded his imagination.

Never assume that heavy cavalry horses cannot run fast — on the contrary, the warhorses of heavy cavalry have extremely quick burst acceleration.

These horses were practically the Bolts of the horse world — no good for endurance, but in explosive power they were absolutely the fastest mounts in any cavalry.

Twenty paces — reached almost in an instant!

Zhang Zhao could already see the panicked look in the eyes of the opposing cavalry.

At the very moment he leveled his lance, the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry, which had still been holding some semblance of formation — even if swarming forward, at least still moving ahead — suddenly collapsed with a roar.

Countless horses whinnied and scattered in all directions. No matter how the riders tried to control them, these creatures — intelligent enough but not all that bright — simply would not obey an order that, in their eyes, meant certain death.

After all, warhorses are not humans; they have no need to kill the horses across from them.

"This could work!" Zhang Zhao shouted inwardly. This wall-charge really could work — it had actually scared the opposing cavalry into outright collapse.

In truth, cavalry head-on charges are like this: because of the horses and the training, one side will always flinch at the moment of collision.

Or, with better-trained troops, they will flinch after the first twenty or thirty riders make contact.

Even the elite French cuirassiers and the Russian Bear Guard cuirassiers of the Napoleonic era in history —

when they charged each other, one side's riders or horses would always choose to veer away or break, unable to bear the immense terror.

Of course there were exceptions. For example, in The Science of Victory it is mentioned that the French cuirassiers and the Russian elite cuirassiers charged each other many times on the battlefield.

The result was that when the two sides were only twenty or thirty meters apart, both sides' horses collectively chose to stop, leaving the two embarrassed cavalry forces staring at each other.

This eventually led to the tactic of equipping cuirassiers with carbines — first damn well opening fire and having a proper volley-firing execution line, using gunfire to rattle one side's cavalry into terror before charging in.

But all of that happened between the finest cuirassiers of the modern era. Cavalry like the ones under Zhang Zhao, still in the tenth century, facing Gaochang Uyghur cavalry without even complete iron armor, would certainly not fight that way.

Amid the sky-filling dust, an officer of the Hanhai Garrison who had just burned the Gaochang Uyghur camp reined in his horse and stared into the distance in astonishment.

In his line of sight, five or six thousand Gaochang Uyghur cavalry, under the impact of a few hundred Heavenly King's personal guard cavalry, collapsed directly like an avalanche, running all over the ground like terrified wild boars.

The battle was over!

The instant the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry broke, everything was over.

The two sides' combat strength was simply not on the same level, and one side had been caught by surprise.

Jieli Pijia stripped off the lamellar armor he had just put on and, protected by several dozen cavalrymen, fled madly from the southwest toward Gaochang City.

But he had forgotten one thing: the Chiting Garrison Fort lay exactly in his direction of travel.

Jieli Pijia, with several dozen cavalrymen and over a thousand routed soldiers scrambling behind him, had gone less than a li before running headlong into Feng Hui's force, which had broken camp and was advancing with the entire army.

War drums thundered. Feng Hui had his infantry form ranks, blocking the small road to Gaochang City, while the cavalry struck obliquely from both flanks.

Jieli Pijia, fleeing in panic, was knocked off his horse by someone's lance — he had no idea whose. He scrambled and rolled into a dirt ditch, hoping to use the ditch, the corpses in it, and the blood-soaked yellow mud to evade the search.

But then a cold laugh came: "Pugu Cunde, Heavenly King, where do you think you're running?"

Jieli Pijia shuddered all over. He looked up and met a pair of eyes gleaming with excitement — none other than that distant relative of his, the envoy sent by Pugu Cheng.

So it was he who had gone to notify Feng Hui at Chiting Garrison.

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