Chapter 759: White Robe, Silver Saddle, the Righteous Young Lord

Everything that happened at the farewell banquet passed quickly, but Zhang Zhao's statement that day was still of the utmost importance.

In this world, nothing can escape the word "reason."

This is especially true in China, where since ancient times one has had to have a just cause for war, to attack the unrighteous in the name of the righteous.

Never underestimate this — even if it is only a fabricated justification, it must still exist.

Now the Southern Tang is so deferential, and Li Jing is even more respectful toward Zhang Zhao than toward his own elder brother, treating Zhang Zhao's legal mother and birth mother the same as his own mother.

In the eyes of the world, not even a vassal, but a true son or younger brother, could do more than this.

Under such circumstances, if Zhang Zhao still attacked the Southern Tang, he would in truth not win the hearts of his soldiers.

The soldiers were perfectly content at home with their families, living easy little lives. The Southern Tang was so deferential and had not provoked you, yet you insisted on dragging the soldiers from their hometowns and the embrace of their loved ones, conscripting them by force to fight bloody battles far away against people they did not even know.

Could they feel good about that? Could they give eight or ten parts of their strength fighting for you?

I fear three or five parts would already be good enough — unless Zhang Zhao was willing to stoke morale with the promise of plunder.

This state of mind was actually visible at the banquet.

Of the nearly hundred people at the banquet that day, those who sympathized with the Southern Tang were absolutely in the majority. Even Lady Cao Sanniang, who had always been of one mind with Zhang Zhao, could not help but nearly shed tears on the spot.

At the same time, from the perspective of the Southern Tang's soldiers and even its common people: our sovereign is already this deferential, yet you still come to attack us, still come to kill us — this is truly bullying beyond endurance!

They would very easily turn this war, from one of Zhou destroying Tang, into one of the Central Plains' Zhou people coming to bully us Jiangnan people.

Once that mentality forms, what the attacker faces is an endless quagmire of war.

In history, when Guo Rong campaigned in Huainan, his advantage was so great that he practically ground the Southern Tang army into the dirt, yet after three repeated campaigns he still could not fully control Huainan — precisely because the Southern Tang people, faced with the brutality of the Later Zhou army, developed this mindset of swearing to resist.

Zhang Zhao had learned from Guo Rong's historical lesson, and naturally paid great attention to this aspect.

Therefore he used the great cause of national unification and securing peace for the common people to seize the moral high ground, transforming this war from the so-called Zhou-Tang conflict into a righteous war of grand unification!

On the twenty-fifth day of the first month, after the snowfall gradually lessened, Zhang Zhao set out from Chengde Prefecture and returned to Beiping Prefecture, taking up residence in the Nanjing palace city built by the Khitan.

At the same time, large numbers of people who had participated in this rebellion were escorted to Beiping Prefecture to await Zhang Zhao's judgment.

But when Zhang Zhao looked over the list, he saw that Pei Yuan was still very tactful, for among these names there were basically none of the old Guiyi Army faction who had been captured, and certainly not Yin Yuande, who was still alive.

These people were Zhang Zhao's relatives, and Yin Yuande was even Zhang Zhao's own maternal cousin-uncle. It truly would not be fitting to drag them before Zhang Zhao and cut them down — though of course this did not mean they could escape death.

On the twenty-sixth day of the first month, Zhang Zhao ordered Cao Yuanzhong to prepare to return soon to the divine capital Luoyang to deal with Yin Yuande and the others.

The punishment Zhang Zhao handed down was: Yin Yuande was sentenced to immediate beheading; of the remaining forty-odd people, seven were to be hanged, more than thirty exiled to Ningyuan, and only a few were sentenced to hard labor.

On the first day of the second month, Fu Zhaoxu sent Zhang Deqing, and Li Cunhui sent Zhu Yuan, north to meet with Zhang Zhao. Zhang Deqing also brought news that Fu Zhaoxu had recovered Haozhou.

That day, after Liu Renzhan abandoned all his baggage and retreated from beneath the walls of Sizhou, Fu Zhaoxu and Zhang Deqing personally led three hundred elite cavalry out of the city in pursuit and annihilated all four hundred riders of the Iron Horse Company under Liu Renzhan.

However, since Liu Renzhan's army had not collapsed, the two did not dare pursue further, and so returned to Sizhou.

In this battle, Liu Renzhan's Qinghuai Army and the prefectural and county troops from various places around Shouzhou suffered grievous losses. Though the dead numbered no more than a thousand, they were all the elite of the Qinghuai Army, and the lost baggage was most of what Liu Renzhan had accumulated over three years. To say his vitality was badly damaged would be no exaggeration at all.

And at Xuzhou, after Zhu Yuan had escorted Zhao Kuangzan out of the city that day, the great armies of Li Cunhui and Liu Zaisheng entered the city directly.

Before that, the low-ranking officers and yabing guards whom Zhu Yuan had stirred up also immediately began to act.

By the time Li Cunhui took control of Xuzhou, most of the officers from the former Wuning garrison's Left Battalion Commander Li Yuanzai on down had been killed or captured by yabing guards desperate to atone for their deeds.

Only afterward did Zhang Liecheng enter the city. Zhu Yuan had already done more than half his work for him, and what remained was simple. Zhang Liecheng at once used the pretext that his shops in Xuzhou had been looted to hack to death the remaining seven or eight Wuning garrison officers.

Naturally, he was soon stripped by Zhang Zhao of his post as Commander of the Brocade Guard and likewise came to Beiping Prefecture to await judgment.

As for Xue Huairang and Pan Huan, they were truly tough. After Li Cunhui's great army entered the city, the fiercest resistance it met came from these two and the thousand-odd veteran yabing guards they had recruited.

They gathered at the Xuzhou prefectural office and held out against Li Cunhui's fierce assault for two full hours, until at last their arrows were spent and their blades dulled, and only then did Li Cunhui fight his way in.

Xue Huairang was killed in the melee, while Pan Huan ended his own life with the short blade he carried.

When Zhang Zhao received word of the two men's deaths, he did not know what he felt in his heart.

In history, when these two governed their territories, they were both notorious for cruelty and greed, and it was much the same now.

But at the same time, in resisting foreign invasion, both had repeatedly won merit. Whether it was Liu Zhiyuan raising troops in history, or Zhang Zhao marching on the Central Plains in this time, both had risen up on their own initiative, killing Khitan soldiers and officers in response.

Yet once everything had returned to peace, they were full of resentment, unable to adapt to the new order Zhang Zhao had brought, still longing in their hearts to return to that society of old where carrying a hengdao saber was truth itself.

They deeply resented that Military Governors could no longer act like local tyrants and throw their weight around.

They did not die of ambition — at least not chiefly of ambition — but of failing to keep pace with the times, abandoned by the age.

Zhang Zhao sighed twice, then ordered that Xue Huairang and Pan Huan be given proper burials. He did not pursue the guilt of their children, parents, or brothers, nor did he confiscate their already pitifully meager family property. He merely chose to banish their families to Jinzhou in Liaoxi.

Outside the walls of Beiping Prefecture, the more than one hundred members of the Xue and Pan households still knelt in the deep snow, facing the direction of the palace city, and kowtowed three times to Zhang Zhao, by way of thanking him for sparing their lives.

But toward Wang Jun, who had actively gone about making contacts everywhere — one might even call him the mastermind of the Hexi rebel ministers, the Buddhist clergy, and the Wuning Army — Zhang Zhao showed no good face at all.

He personally issued an edict sentencing Wang Jun to death by slow slicing, commonly known as "death by a thousand cuts."

Wang Jun's two sons were sentenced to immediate beheading, his grandsons were forced to change their surname and exiled to Shuofang to guard the frontier, and all the women and landed property were confiscated.

Li Ye, the uncle of Liu Chengyou, along with Zhao Zaili of Hebei and Liu Jixun, were subjected to the cruel punishment of being torn apart by chariots. All their property was confiscated, and their descendants were likewise exiled to Shuofang to guard the frontier.

In the end Zhang Zhao still left a crack open. After Zhao Zaili offered up his entire family fortune, he asked Gao Xingzhou to plead with Zhang Zhao, hoping to let his grandson Zhao Yanxun live.

Zhang Zhao finally, reluctantly, agreed. He ordered Zhao Yanxun to change his surname to Gao and be called Gao Huaixun, and he was taken in as Gao Xingzhou's adopted son.

Gao Huaide was at Zhang Zhao's side at the time, and at his father Gao Xingzhou's utterly politically brainless move, he was speechless and could only roll his eyes.

Now it was just wonderful — if this Gao Huaixun ever caused any trouble in the future, the Gao family would not be able to escape responsibility either.

At the same time, Gao Huaide also understood why Zhang Zhao had done this. With Gao Xingzhou's experience as a precedent, no one would dare come pleading for such things again.

As for the Wuning garrison at Xuzhou, Zhang Zhao had originally indeed intended to deal with them fairly and impartially according to law. But who could have imagined that they would do something so outrageous in Xuzhou as to provoke the wrath of both heaven and the people?

In this great city of forty to fifty thousand people, the dead from this upheaval ultimately numbered as many as five or six thousand, and the Xuzhou marketplace, which had with such difficulty grown prosperous, was battered into lasting depression.

For a moment, Zhang Zhao wanted to dig a pit outside Xuzhou and bury all those bastards in it.

Murong Xinzhang rode a white horse. The horse was in its prime, with only its four hooves jet black, and it looked very much like his former mount, Snow-Threaded Dust.

Of course it looked alike — this white horse was Snow-Threaded Dust's half-brother by the same sire, both bred at the Shandan army horse farm.

As for the original Snow-Threaded Dust, it was no longer fit for the battlefield and was now living out its retirement in Shenyang.

Thinking of Snow-Threaded Dust, Murong Xinzhang felt a touch of emotion. Horses are much like men — on the battlefield they look incomparably heroic, but in truth it still takes a toll on their lifespan.

Xue Li Yanchen's father was already thirty-three years old—advanced age for a horse—yet he could still serve as a stud in the Shandan military horse farm, mating seven or eight times a week and successfully impregnating more than fifteen young mares in a single year.

What a degenerate!

One must remember that a typical warhorse lives only to about thirty, so Xue Li Yanchen's father was the human equivalent of seventy or eighty years old—and still playing bridegroom every night. You have to respect that.

And Xue Li Yanchen himself was only eighteen, yet Murong Xinzhang was already reluctant to send him into battle, afraid that one day he might ruin this life-and-death companion of his.

This also made Murong Xinzhang think of himself. He was about to turn thirty, and with years of constant campaigning—running all over deserts, snow mountains, and the pine wastes—the good son was a little worried whether he could even live to sixty.

If he did not hurry up and press the campaign against Goryeo, he might find himself at the end of his life before he had even pacified Wa—what would be the point of that?

In the distance, the city of Beiping Prefecture was already in sight. At the thought of soon seeing his adoptive father the Emperor, and especially of seeing his mother, Murong Xinzhang felt a surge of warmth in his heart and could not help gently squeezing his horse's flanks to pick up speed.

But before he had galloped more than a few steps, Murong Xinzhang's attention was caught by a Buddhist invocation.

The good son raised his eyes and saw an emaciated Indian monk, accompanied by three men in black robes who were nevertheless quite powerfully built, standing by the roadside.

Murong Xinzhang's heart stirred, and he recognized who this monk was. "Master Cixian, what brings you here? Have you come specifically to wait for me?"

As he spoke, Murong Xinzhang gave a light cough, and the several dozen riders behind him immediately moved to surround the group.

Master Cixian's head and body were covered in white snowflakes, yet his expression was quite composed. The three big men behind him, however, immediately tensed up as if facing a formidable enemy.

These several dozen riders all wore white robes with attached hoods, their saddles decorated with silver, and the hengdao sabers and bows at their horses' sides were all painted with white lacquer.

This was the personal guard cavalry that Murong Xinzhang had formed after the Left Yulin Guard's Wind-Fire Raider Battalion returned to the Central Plains, with Zhang Zhao's approval and bestowed name.

They were called the White-Robed Silver-Saddled Zhaoyi Gentlemen—six hundred riders in all. Mounted, they were elite cavalry; dismounted, they were fierce infantry. In light armor they could serve as top-class skirmishers; in heavy armor they were invincible armored warriors.

Although the three men beside Master Cixian were all fierce warriors and famed generals, being surrounded by such elite troops still made them very anxious.

(End of Chapter)

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