Chapter 710: The Steppe Is One Big Messy Stew Too

The north wind howled, beginning to blow fiercely — a sign that winter was fast approaching.

Northeast of the Yanran Mountains, a "great city" with foundations of yellow clay and walls built from stone mixed with a little glutinous earth, even bound together with cattle and horse dung, stood out abruptly against the vast expanse of sky and land.

This city, which in Han lands would barely pass muster but in the Mobei steppe counted as a mighty fortress, was the original site of the Great Tang's Hanhai Protectorate and Anbei Protectorate.

After the Great Tang withdrew from Mobei, the Uyghurs rose in their place, and this became the royal court of the Uyghur khans.

Now it was occupied by the Zubu people, who called it Woluduo, also known as Woluoduo.

This was a term fixed since the Turkic period, meaning palace tent or royal tent.

Woluduo had a circumference of fifty or sixty li, with six proper gates, and in some places the walls even still bore defensive arrow towers and the like — all remnants of the old Anbei Protectorate.

But after the Han craftsmen all withdrew, and the city passed through three hundred years into the hands of the Zubu, its greatest use had shifted from military defense and displaying the Great Tang's majesty to serving as a fine shelter where herdsmen could take refuge from wind and snow.

Large numbers of Zubu nobles and even ordinary herdsmen had pitched their own tents inside the city, and the building stones had been hauled off by them in every direction, because on the Mobei steppe even regular cut stone was rather precious.

Only, in doing so, the mighty city the Great Tang had built at enormous cost was dismantled piecemeal by them. Where once one could only enter or leave through the six gates, now there were gaps everywhere.

And this destruction in turn greatly weakened Woluduo's ability to withstand wind and snow. The Zubu could not, like the Uyghur nobles of old, hold off the cold wind inside warm houses, so they moved their traditional great tents back into the city.

Seen from a height on the far spurs of the Yanran Mountains, the city was a maze, with great swathes of tents connected together.

At the very center, where the tents were largest and most numerous, stood the royal tent of Duosage, the great chieftain of the Zubu.

The other Zubu nobles each controlled a section of the city, spread around Duosage's royal tent like stars surrounding the moon. The farther out a tent stood, the lower its owner's status.

Winter had not yet arrived, but the cold wind from the far-northern Xianbei wastelands had already begun blowing into Woluduo.

Bayegusi, eldest son of the Zubu great chieftain Duosage, wrapped his white hemp robe tightly around himself and strode quickly toward Duosage's great tent.

Along the way, what the north wind stirred up most was the sandy dust on the ground mixed with urine, and the smell was enough to make him, a man who had not visited Woluduo in a long time, deeply uncomfortable.

The climate had turned somewhat milder in recent years, and the Zubu had seized the rare opportunity to raise livestock on a grand scale. The number of cattle, horses, and sheep had increased nearly tenfold compared to five or six years before.

They looked far wealthier, but the explosive growth of so many cattle, horses, and sheep in such a short time had brought unbearable ecological pressure to the area around Woluduo.

Livestock dung inside the city was piled high as small hills. Though most of it had dried in the wind, a strong stench of excrement and urine still rose whenever the wind blew, and on windy days one could even see dried dung particles swirling through the sky.

As for the pastures outside the city, the tender grass that had once stood as tall as a man had long been grazed and cut away, leaving only short, fine stubble, and in many places the yellow earth was exposed.

At the same time, the great number of livestock had severely polluted the water sources. In many of the small streams around Woluduo, one could now rarely spot small fish or crabs.

Though Bayegusi did not understand what ecological deterioration was, he could feel that the foul smell of Woluduo and the increase in sickness among both people and livestock had already brought a great threat to the seemingly mighty Zubu tribe.

Outside the royal tent, a huge fat ox had already been bled dry. Several herding slaves, wearing only animal-hide shorts and bare-chested, were butchering the ox, separating bone from meat.

The tender loin and shank meat would be seared — similar to a later-era iron griddle, except here it was placed on pottery shards heated until scorching hot.

The ox legs, once some meat had been trimmed off, were best for roasting. The stewed ox head would be the finest treat offered to guests.

On the steppe of this era, life was far cruder than in later times. A great iron cauldron capable of stewing nearly half an ox at once was, even for Duosage, extremely precious, and a symbol of his power.

As for the fat lambs being slaughtered one after another, they would of course be roasted whole to flaunt the wealth of the Zubu.

In addition, all manner of wild pheasants and wild birds were stewed together in a clay pot with various eggs, along with a haphazard mix of wild greens and mushrooms.

The moment Bayegusi saw warriors of the Mierqi tribe standing around the royal tent, he knew that envoys from the Mierqi had arrived — perhaps even the Mierqi chieftain Hulubashi himself.

Inside the royal tent, the feasting and drinking had reached its liveliest pitch. Duosage, holding up a huge bowl of fine wine, was repeatedly toasting another man dressed in a blue robe.

Duosage was very tall and broad, with a handsome full beard, and his enormous belly made one suspect it could hold an entire roast sheep.

The slightly cloudy wine in the huge bowl went glug-glug-glug down Duosage's throat, accompanied by his deliberately hearty, booming voice.

When he finished, he wiped the wine clinging to his beard with a dashing sweep of his hand, perfectly fitting the image people had of a great Mobei chieftain.

By contrast, the Mierqi chieftain Hulubashi, whom he was toasting, sounded like he should be a steppe tough like Duosage, but in reality Hulubashi looked very lean and spare.

A few wisps of a mustache, a shoehorn-shaped face dark as black earth, and a blue Tang-style scholar's robe — he looked less like a steppe chieftain than a Han village schoolteacher.

Bayegusi lifted the door curtain and walked in. Duosage saw his eldest son, and a faint, ambiguous smile appeared on his face. Then he pointed to a few seats near the door curtain and said, somewhat listlessly:

"My son has come. Pick a seat and sit down!"

An expression of extreme displeasure appeared on Bayegusi's face. He was Duosage's eldest son, yet when his own father invited the chiefs of the various tribes, he could only sit in the lowest seat.

Seeing Bayegusi's expression, anger surged across Duosage's face too, but it vanished in an instant. Because Hulubashi of the Mierqi was right beside him, he swallowed his rage and glanced at a trusted headman in the lowest seat.

The trusted headman hurried over with a chuckle, half coaxing and half pushing Bayegusi into his seat.

Though furious, Bayegusi knew he had no choice.

The root of all these problems lay in his birth. His mother was not a Zubu, but a woman of the eastern Dilie Eight Tribes.

Back when Duosage was young and could not hold the Zubu tribes together, it was with the help of the Dilie Eight Tribes' chieftain — Bayegusi's maternal grandfather — that he had finally secured his position.

For the first ten years, Duosage had acted extremely deferential. In the next ten, especially after Bayegusi's grandfather and mother died one after another, Duosage turned against the Dilie Eight Tribes.

And along with that, he no longer favored this eldest son of his, half-banishing him to pasture on lands near the Dilie Eight Tribes.

Besides this reason, there was also the long-standing enmity between the Dilie Eight Tribes and the Zubu, Mierqi, Dalimi, and other tribes. On the steppe once controlled by the Khitan, they bore deep hatred for one another.

The Zubu, Mierqi, Dalimi, and Dilie Eight Tribes were in fact originally one people — or rather, one tribe.

They all originated from the outer-surname Uyghurs, that is, small tribes subordinate to the Uyghurs, and for most of the time the Uyghurs collectively called them the Nine-Clan Tatars.

After the Uyghur Khaganate declined and the Khitan rose, the Liao emperor divided those Nine-Clan Tatars who submitted to the Khitan into eight tribes, collectively called the Dilie Eight Tribes.

Those less willing to submit to the Khitan were called the Zubu, Dalimi, and so on.

Then, in the decades of Khitan ascendancy, the sensible Dilie Eight Tribes naturally ate well and drank well, while the Zubu and the others were beaten in small fights every three days and big fights every five.

This drove the Dilie Eight Tribes and their original kinsmen further and further apart.

This policy of the Khitan gradually endowed the Dilie Eight Tribes with a strange attribute: whether willingly or not, they became the spies of the steppe.

As time went on, the Dilie Eight Tribes gradually became the tribe many people are very familiar with — the Tatar tribe that loved colluding with the emperors of the Central Plains, plundering other tribes, and seizing other tribes' chieftains to hand over to the Central Plains emperors to be ridden on the wooden donkey.

The most famous victim in history was Ambaghai, the grandfather of Temujin, and Temujin's father Yesugei was also poisoned to death by the Tatars.

Seeing Bayegusi obediently sit down, Duosage breathed a sigh of relief. There were reasons he had invited the Mierqi chieftain Hulubashi here, and even reasons he was willing to take the lead in resisting the eastward advance of the Six Dharma Sect.

One could tell from how the two were addressed: Hulubashi was the chieftain of the Mierqi, while Duosage was merely a great chieftain of the Zubu.

For among the five Zubu tribes, Duosage controlled only the three northern Zubu tribes. The remaining two pastured west of the Yanran Mountains, did not much heed this great leader's summons, and even less acknowledged him as the Zubu chieftain.

So Duosage had seized the opportunity of his northern Zubu tribes' flourishing population and thriving herds in recent years to raise the banner of resistance against the Six Dharma Sect.

Sure enough, after Duosage stepped forward, not only did the two Zubu tribes west of the Yanran Mountains answer the summons by sending envoys and riders, but even the nearby Dalimi and Yedugua tribes also indicated they were willing, to a certain extent, to follow Duosage's assignments.

What matters most on the steppe? Reputation, of course!

With reputation, small nomadic tribes will keep coming to pledge allegiance. Historically, the Turks, the Xueyantuo, the Uyghurs, and others all rose step by step in exactly this way.

In particular, Duosage had seized Oludo, which made him feel deep in his heart that his family possessed the Mandate of Heaven.

This time he invited Hulubashi, the chieftain of the Merkits, to come south in person precisely to put on a display for the envoys of the other two Zubu tribes who had only grudgingly answered the summons, as well as for the Dalimi and Yedugua tribes.

One must understand that the Merkits at this time were extremely powerful.

They had originally been part of the Mohe people east of the Great Xianbei Mountains. After the Rouran Khaganate was destroyed by the Turks, large numbers of Rouran fled north and merged with the Merkits, bringing them relatively advanced military and animal-husbandry skills.

By now, the Merkits were skilled with great bows and long arrows, herded cattle and sheep and also raised reindeer, and even had a touch of farming, fishing, and hunting about them. In battle they feared not death, making them extremely fierce light cavalry and mountain infantry.

This made them considerably stronger than the Dalimi and Yedugua tribes south of the Yanran Mountains, who were closer to Han territory.

Therefore, Duosage had invited Hulubashi here precisely so that Hulubashi and the entire Merkit tribe would stand behind him, reinforcing the illusion that his fame was spreading far and wide.

Amid the seemingly warm atmosphere, Hulubashi very discreetly cast his gaze toward the yellow-haired Shimili in the distance.

The banner of resisting the Six Dharmas Sect had originally been first raised by the Merkit tribe, but the main reason it had so quickly passed into Duosage's hands was Shimili.

Shimili took a drink of the sour, nose-stinging cloudy wine. He actually had another name, a rather Han-style name: Yaoluoge Jingyi.

He was precisely a fish that had slipped through the net of the Ganzhou Uyghurs. Compared to the Adie clan of the Karakhanid Uyghurs and the Pugu clan of the Gaochang Uyghurs, which were among the outer nine clans, Yaoluoge was the true royal clan of the Uyghur Khaganate.

On the steppe today, apart from the Dada, Zubu, and other tribes that had transformed from peripheral Uyghurs, there were still quite a few small tribes that held fast to Uyghur traditions.

The title of Great Uyghur Khagan had not yet completely vanished from the steppe tribes, and the surname Yaoluoge still carried a certain power to rally men.

Yaoluoge Jingyi had fled onto the steppe back before Zhang Zhao broke through Ganzhou, and was quickly taken up by Duosage, who was eager to raise his own prestige.

The two hit it off at once. Duosage married Yaoluoge Jingyi's paternal aunt, and Yaoluoge Jingyi married Duosage's daughter.

One of the pair had reputation, the other had strength. Compared to them, although the Merkits were fierce, on a steppe that valued bloodlines, they simply could not contend with the powerful combination of the two.

Once Yaoluoge Jingyi, known as Shimili, returned to the Yanran Mountains, the Merkit Hulubashi immediately could only serve as a foil.

Bayegusi also quietly glanced at Yaoluoge Jingyi, and his cheek twitched slightly.

Although Yaoluoge Jingyi's wife was his sister, the two were in fact not born of the same mother. On the contrary, because of the hatred between their mothers, the siblings were on very bad terms — so bad that they wished each other dead.

Now that Yaoluoge Jingyi had returned, Bayegusi immediately felt his own situation had grown even more dangerous.

At just that moment, in a flash, the gazes of two frustrated men suddenly collided as they both stole glances at Yaoluoge Jingyi!

What a fine drama — who knows who will set it off!

(End of Chapter)

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