Chapter 468: Riding Seven Hundred Li at Full Gallop

While his sworn brother Yelu Deguang was nearly toppled, Great King Zhang, far away in Lanzhou, was the one who truly got toppled.

A fiery beauty from the northern lands, her legs like vines twining around a great tree — Great King Zhang had drunk only a little wine before she pressed him down onto the magnificent bed.

The beauty of the frontier peoples truly had a flavor all its own. Though years of riding had given her a plump rear and legs slightly bowed,

the muscles of her legs were extremely well developed, and when they wrapped around his waist, there was a strange, burning sensation from which there was no escape.

Great King Zhang narrowed his eyes in comfort, crossed his hands behind his head, and let Yelu Abuli, like a soft white hamster, explore left and right, up and down across his body.

Still, she was a girl of sixteen after all, and the little hamster Yelu soon ran out of strength.

She pouted her tender pink lips, her watery eyes looking at Zhang Zhao with resentment.

"Uncle truly knows how to enjoy himself. This slave wants to lie down too."

Zhang Zhao laughed heartily, stroking Yelu Abuli's satin-smooth long hair, but his thoughts had long since drifted away to the battlefields of Hebei.

He wondered whether his sworn brother had, as in history, transformed into the camel war-god.

Zhang Zhao's heart was now especially conflicted. On one hand, he did not wish Yelu Deguang to be defeated too badly.

If the defeat were too crushing, and he were beaten into not daring to descend on the Central Plains, then Zhang Zhao's plans would need major revision.

But if Yelu Deguang, as in history, could still destroy the Later Jin, then the people of the Central Plains — having already suffered the four great disasters of flood, drought, locusts, and harsh governance — would suffer the Khitan soldiers' ravages of war as well. Who knew how many would die?

"How is your elder brother faring in the Central Plains? Should we bring him to Hexi?" Zhang Zhao held Yelu Abuli close, but his mind had already begun calculating.

This Yelu Ruan should originally have been sent back to the Khitan by the Later Jin after Yelu Bei's death. But for some unknown reason, only Yelu Yaliguo went back; Yelu Ruan did not.

If history remained unchanged after this, and Yelu Deguang still entered the Central Plains and then died of illness,

then Yelu Abuli's elder brother Yelu Ruan was in fact the most suitable candidate for Liao emperor.

Because the wrist-severing Empress Dowager Shulu Ping and Abaoji's third son, the brute Yelu Lihu — that mother and son pair — used methods far too cruel and harsh, and therefore most of the Khitan nobility feared them taking power.

Without Yelu Ruan, the Khitan might well fall into internal strife on their own.

And even if Yelu Lihu did take power, that would actually be fine. With that cruel, harsh, simple-minded character of his, he would be far easier to deal with than Yelu Ruan.

Yelu Lihu was practically the ancestral version of the Manchu Manggultai. Even in the old days of the Later Jin, had Huang Taiji not succeeded but Manggultai instead, they might well have been pacified by the Ming dynasty — let alone the Khitan of today.

Yelu Abuli blinked with a grin. "Does Uncle intend to contend with my second uncle for supremacy on the steppe?

If so, my elder brother would make a fine chess piece. Grandmother's methods are cruel, and many in the Khitan realm long for my father."

Fine! Zhang Zhao sighed. A girl like a white lamb lay on top of him calling him Uncle, while discussing using her elder brother as a chess piece against her uncle and grandmother.

This scene, Zhang Zhao felt from the bottom of his heart, was rather incongruous.

However, he did not yet know that in history, Yelu Abuli was ultimately married off by her elder brother, Emperor Shizong of Liao, to Xiao Han — and Xiao Han was Yelu Deguang's brother-in-law.

In other words, Yelu Abuli ultimately married her second uncle's brother-in-law — her own cousin-uncle.

Hmm, and by that reckoning he was about the same. This little girl was destined either to roll in the sheets with her uncle, or to marry her cousin-uncle.

The Liao realm, Western Capital Circuit, Fengsheng Prefecture, northwest of Swallow City, by Mandarin Duck Lake — a tall camel was leisurely eating.

What it was eating now was not grass, but black beans boiled in salt water.

A group of girls in brightly colored dress were continuously sticking fresh flowers onto the camel, adorning it beautifully.

There was even a great shaman holding a beast-bone staff, singing and dancing before the camel — the shaman was beseeching Tengri to bless this noble camel.

The reason a single camel was so revered was that it had saved the life of the Great Khitan Emperor!

Swallow City is the later Zhangbei County of Zhangjiakou in Hebei, and Mandarin Duck Lake is the now-dried-up Anguli Nur, northwest of Zhangbei County.

Yelu Deguang mounted the camel and, in one breath, rode from near Baoding all the way to Zhangbei County north of Zhangjiakou before stopping — a full seven hundred fifty li or more.

Relying on the camel's extraordinary endurance, Yelu Deguang not only shook off all his pursuers, but also shook off his own bodyguards.

By the time he raced to Weizhou — near present-day Zhoukoudian outside Beijing — Hucile and Yao Yuanfu had only just crossed the Yi River.

They could not even see the rear end of Yelu Deguang's camel. That is how outrageously dominant he was!

Impressive or not, Brother Guang?

In truth, however, Yelu Deguang was already safe by then, because Hucile and the others did not dare pursue past the Yi River.

But he still did not stop. Only after waiting briefly outside Fengsheng Prefecture (Zhuolu) for his personal guards did he continue north to Mandarin Duck Lake.

Because the tribe nomadizing here was the maternal clan of his first wife, Empress Jing'an, Xiao Wen.

After reaching Empress Xiao Wen's maternal clan, Yelu Deguang immediately gathered several thousand cavalry, and only then raised the Emperor's great banner at Mandarin Duck Lake and dispatched messengers in all directions, summoning them to come pay homage at Mandarin Duck Lake.

The reason for such extreme caution was determined by the political situation within the Khitan realm.

The danger to a Khitan emperor was, in fact, about the same as the danger to a Son of Heaven of the Central Plains in this Five Dynasties era.

A Central Plains Son of Heaven who had suffered such a defeat would most likely be finished.

A Khitan emperor was much the same.

Therefore Yelu Deguang could trust no one at this moment — not even his mother Shulu Ping.

Because Shulu Ping's most favored son was not him, Yelu Deguang, but the third son, Yelu Lihu.

So the only ones Yelu Deguang could trust were the maternal clan of his first wife Xiao Wen, because their interests were aligned.

Xiao Wen's only son, Yelu Yansage, was Yelu Deguang's rightful heir.

If Yelu Deguang were gone at this moment, Yelu Yansage certainly could not control the situation, and most likely Yelu Lihu would succeed to the throne — and then Xiao Wen's maternal clan would find it difficult to preserve their present wealth and rank.

Ten days later, the Khitan's defeated troops returned in scattered groups, and the various tribal chieftains personally arrived at Mandarin Duck Lake with their own guards to pay homage to Yelu Deguang.

Seeing that the tribal chieftains and generals had come with only their personal guards, and not with their armies, the great stone in Yelu Deguang's heart was at last set down.

But the moment his mood relaxed, Yelu Deguang immediately thought of the losses this defeat had brought.

Catastrophic! Too catastrophic! Far too catastrophic!

The Khitan host of eighty thousand had besieged Baituanwei Village, and after being defeated by the Jin army, the Jin army had pursued them to the banks of the Ru River.

They slaughtered the Khitan troops until blood flowed like a river; the Ru River was choked with corpses. The Jin army took more than three thousand heads before returning.

This caused the Liao army to lose sixty percent of its armor and weapons and forty percent of its warhorses.

Of the Left and Right Pishi Army's twenty-four thousand men, over three thousand were killed in battle alone.

The twenty-thousand-strong Shushan Army lost more than six thousand outright.

The remaining tribal armies suffered combined casualties of over ten thousand as well.

Of the eighty thousand troops, as many as twenty thousand were killed in battle or missing. Only a little over thirty thousand managed to escape and regroup, while the remaining twenty thousand or so could not yet be gathered back together.

The Khitan had lost nearly half the armor and weapons accumulated since the time of Abaoji, and a quarter of their elite palace armies — that is, the Left and Right Pishi Army and the Shushan Army — was gone.

It could be said that after this single battle, the Khitan had temporarily lost the ability to march south. Both their armor and their troop strength were beginning to run short.

More importantly, the Khitan had marched south twice and been defeated both times, each defeat worse than the last. Counting this time together with the previous one, their total battle deaths exceeded fifty thousand.

For a steppe regime as unstable as the Khitan, the Central Plains at this moment did not even need a brilliant ruler like Emperor Wu of Han or Emperor Taizong of Tang. With a ruler of the caliber of Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han or Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, the destruction of the Khitan would have been a foregone conclusion.

No! Even if it were just either Li Siyuan or Shi Jingtang — that father-in-law and son-in-law pair — the Khitan would have been driven into the forests of Liaodong to scrape out a living.

But the Khitan were not fated to die out. What they faced was Shi Chonggui, the Emperor Chu of Jin, a man whose talent for governing might not even measure up to Emperor Huizong of Song.

Just thinking of these losses, Yelu Deguang felt like slitting his own throat.

He glared viciously at the meritorious officials and tribal chieftains who had come to pay their respects, and had them dragged to the shore of Yuanyang Lake, each to receive thirty strokes of the rod.

In an instant, these great figures, so exalted in the Liao state, were beaten until their skin split and their flesh gaped, howling and weeping. Even Yelu Deguang's own uncle, Yelu Anduan, was not spared.

Yet this, which seemed like Yelu Deguang venting his rage, was in fact a form of manipulation.

Right now, I, the Taizong of Great Liao, am at my weakest. I must use my former authority, use the beating of backsides, to reawaken in these men's hearts their fear of the Yelu Deguang of old.

At the end of the second month, the Jin army marched back to court and reached Chanzhou on the banks of the Yellow River.

The ailing Shi Chonggui sent his eldest son Shi Yanxu and the Director of the Imperial Clan, Shi Guangzan, as imperial envoys to the Yellow River to congratulate the officers and men on their great achievement.

At this moment, the Jin army arriving at the Yellow River was in soaring spirits. They returned carrying more than three thousand severed heads of Khitan officers and soldiers on donkey carts and mule carts, among them dozens of Liao officials of the third rank and above.

There were also over a thousand captives, bound with ropes and paraded through the streets the whole way.

An Shenqi and the others compiled the reports and learned that the Jin army had seized two thousand two hundred suits of Khitan iron armor, over ten thousand suits of leather armor, and more than seven thousand fine horses. They had slain several thousand, while those who drowned or died of severe wounds were beyond counting — at the very least close to ten thousand.

The Jin army itself had lost a little over four thousand killed and more than ten thousand wounded. It could be called an unprecedented great victory.

Moreover, the Jin army's losses had come in the early phase, when Xue Huairang and An Shenqi were defeated. After the wind rose, casualties numbered only in the hundreds.

Shi Yanxu immediately conveyed Shi Chonggui's decree, bestowing lavish rewards on the generals. Even Hulale, a man from the Liang state whom Shi Chonggui had been wary of, received the post of Military Governor of Wuning Army in Xuzhou and was promptly sent out to a provincial command.

On the banks of the Yellow River, the Jin army was overjoyed, shouting "Long live the Emperor" until the mountains echoed. Although the court did not immediately announce rewards, which left the common soldiers somewhat disappointed, they did not mind too much, assuming the announcement would come only after returning to the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture.

But in truth, Shi Chonggui was at that very moment throwing a tantrum in the palace.

Because some time ago, Shi Chonggui had fallen gravely ill.

How could he not fall ill? Ever since this fellow felt the Khitan threat had been lifted, he had spent every day in the palace with Empress Feng and the other palace women, carousing night after night. Strong liquor and fine food he consumed with reckless abandon. Even a body of iron could not withstand such abuse.

At this moment, Shi Chonggui, his body only just beginning to recover, was about to summon Sang Weihan.

Because the army had won such a great victory — one could say that since the Five Dynasties began, the Central Plains court had never won such a victory against the Khitan — rewards were absolutely unavoidable.

But Shi Chonggui had never much cared about the state of the realm. Finances and taxes had always been Sang Weihan's domain.

Shi Chonggui did not dislike Sang Weihan. It was just that recently he had found it hard to resist the slanders of Empress Feng's elder brother, Feng Yu, and others.

Add to that the fact that Sang Weihan himself was not clean-handed, taking bribes on a grand scale, and Shi Chonggui did indeed have the intention of replacing Sang Weihan and making Feng Yu Commissioner of Military Affairs.

However, Sang Weihan was also a crafty one. Before Shi Chonggui could do anything to him, he could no longer sit still.

This fellow actually took advantage of Shi Chonggui's grave illness to go see Empress Dowager Li, and on his own initiative proposed selecting a tutor for Shi Jingtang's only son, Shi Chongrui.

This was intolerable!

Shi Chongrui was Shi Chonggui's reverse scale. The moment Sang Weihan touched it, Shi Chonggui exploded.

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