Chapter 787: A Fierce Tiger Enters Anxi

Below Duotan Ridge, Luktu sat astride his horse atop a hillock, brimming with satisfaction.

The ground below the hillock was strewn with corpses, most of them quite brawny, for these were the greater and lesser chieftains of the Nine Clans Oghuz and the four Karluk tribes.

Bai Congxin, Lu Sanlang, and the others on the far side of Duotan Ridge assumed Luktu must have fought a savage battle to defeat the Oghuz-Karluk coalition and achieve such a complete annihilation.

But in reality, the situation differed from what they imagined by just a tiny, tiny bit.

Luktu contentedly stroked the silver-white cloth-faced iron armor on his body, as though caressing a lover.

The steel plates lining this armor were said to be the latest product of the Heavenly Works Institute, with defensive power comparable to lamellar armor yet weighing only a bit over thirty jin; even with an inner shirt of ring-mail woven from steel wire, it came to only sixty-four or sixty-five jin.

For an ordinary warhorse, this weight was not especially heavy. Long-distance marching was certainly out of the question, but for short-range, short-duration charges, it was absolutely no problem.

Luktu's tactic for defeating the Oghuz-Karluk coalition was simple. First he sent a portion of his regulars, together with the levied men and a large number of sworn followers, to skirmish with the Oghuz-Karluk coalition in the customary steppe manner.

Once they reached the battlefield, he sent two thousand regulars plus three thousand levied men charging straight at the coalition. When the two sides were locked in a tangled melee, he then ordered his armored troops to strike.

Most of these armored troops wore lamellar armor and were extraordinarily fierce. In an instant they had the Karluks reeling, looking like the elite of the elite.

When the opposing coalition saw that Luktu had unleashed his most important killing stroke, they hurriedly sent in their own trump card to block it.

The moment came right then. It turned out Luktu had placed his most ferocious troops, the hundred-odd Guiyi lads in cloth-faced iron armor, among the charging regulars.

The moment he saw the enemy's armored cavalry move out, he immediately had the Guiyi lads don their cloth-faced iron armor.

At that point, the Guiyi lads were only a few hundred paces from the coalition commander. The armor was light and very easy to put on. In an instant, before the enemy had any time to react, they suddenly appeared.

Even though the coalition commander, the Oghuz man Awuzhe, responded at once, ordering his personal guards to block them desperately while the nearest cavalry units raced back with all their might,

the arrows they loosed, the curved sabers they swung, and even the crude horse-spears in their hands could not pierce the Guiyi lads' armor.

And so, before the eyes of tens of thousands, Luktu personally led the charge, and a single thrust carried away Awuzhe, commander of the Oghuz-Karluk coalition. After that, defeat spread like a collapsing mountain.

In truth, this tactic — first disguising oneself as common soldiers, then swiftly donning heavy armor once close to the enemy commander, and then, relying purely on thick armor and sharp blades, striking down the opposing commander — was one Luktu had tried many times before.

Whether northern Zubu, Merkit, or Mongol, those who had fallen to this tactic of his were beyond counting.

Of course, there were also tricks like ordering mounted crossbowmen to carry Divine Arm crossbows and suddenly loose bolts after galloping to about a hundred and fifty paces. In battles ranging from a few thousand men to under fifty thousand, these tactics worked extremely well.

The underlying reason was that Zhang Zhao, using weapons like the cloth-faced iron armor and the Divine Arm crossbow, had once again opened a small gap in weaponry between the Central Plains regime and the steppe tribes.

And Luktu, blessed with no small talent, had keenly seized the dividends of this improvement.

"Captain, found them, found them!" Luktu was tallying the spoils when a Guiyi lad of northern Zubu origin came galloping over in high spirits.

"Captain, we've found the man from the Oghuz Western Great Yabghu."

The Nine Clans Oghuz, you see, was not in essence an ethnic concept, but an alliance concept.

The Uyghurs, Basmyls, Naimans, Kyrgyz, and others had all once been members of the Nine Clans Oghuz. Later, some tribes left this customary alliance, and others joined it.

And over a hundred years ago, a group that used Oghuz as its tribal name left the Nine Clans Oghuz and established around the Aral Sea their own — well, a tribal confederation that barely counted as a state.

Their leader styled himself Yabghu, while others called him the Western Yabghu; history calls them the Oghuz Yabghu State.

Later, the famous Luokenudin Seljuk Khagan, and the very people who founded the Seljuk Empire, all sprang from this Oghuz Yabghu State.

And at this moment, the nearly fifty-year-old "Xiaoqiang," the former Khagan Satuq of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, was sheltering under the Oghuz Yabghu State.

Moreover, through his mediation, the Great Yabghu of the Oghuz Yabghu State and Guo Guangyi of Talas were preparing to jointly convert to Manichaeism and establish it as the state religion.

The two sides would also form an alliance and march south together, tearing a great chunk of flesh from the Samanid Persians, that weakened lion, and perhaps ultimately destroying the Samanids altogether.

What? You ask, wasn't Khagan Satuq a believer in Islam? Then your information is far too outdated.

Five years ago, Satuq had already led the mere three thousand households of herders remaining to him back into the embrace of Manichaeism. Otherwise he would never have been accepted by the Karluks again.

"Bring him at once. I will interrogate him personally!" Luktu grew even more excited. Capturing a man from the Oghuz Yabghu State was tantamount to opening the road from Lake Yixi to Talas.

Four months earlier, at the end of the fourth month, Guo Guangyi gazed at Suyab. Having dismissed all his ministers and subordinates, a rare look of despair showed in his eyes.

All his plans had been so fine, and the circumstances he faced were better than those of the old Turgesh Khagan Sulu.

He fully believed that by stripping the fields and holding the walls, he could utterly defeat the court's army. After that, he would simply wait for the full package of pacification, enfeoffment, and marriage alliance.

But what Guo Guangyi never imagined was that while he thought the court's great army was still training at Shule, Suyab would be taken by surprise.

The four thousand troops he had stationed there — including six hundred White Wolf Army men and his younger brother Guo Guangjie — were easily routed by just a few hundred men, and Suyab fell into the court's hands.

Guo Guangyi knew deeply how terrible the loss of Suyab was, because in the entire Suyab region, Talas included, the only part of real value was that long strip from Suyab to Talas.

Suyab itself was ringed by mountains on three sides, with a gap only on the western side leading toward Talas — easy to defend and hard to attack.

Moreover, this place, which could be called the Suyab Basin, possessed abundant water resources such as Hot Lake and the Suyab River, making it the region best suited to farming in the entire Suyab area.

One could say that in the Suyab-Talas Khanate Guo Guangyi envisioned, the most valuable part was the Suyab region. And this time he also needed the strong city of Suyab for defense.

Thus, the moment Guo Guangyi received word that Suyab had been seized by a court surprise attack, he immediately conscripted a full forty thousand men to "retake" Suyab.

And then this ambitious schemer — who had the look of a Han man and could speak simple Han speech, but had spent his whole life with almost no contact with Han culture — learned what Five Dynasties yabing guards truly were.

His forty thousand men surrounded Suyab and attacked from all four sides, yet not only could they not take it, they were frequently raided at night by armored soldiers lowered from the walls on ropes.

Often a mere hundred-odd of them could send a camp of two or three thousand of Guo Guangyi's troops wailing like ghosts and howling like wolves. White Wolf Army or no White Wolf Army, in these men's eyes they were no different from conscript laborers.

And they also had a kind of powerful crossbow with extraordinary range, which even from the walltops could support their men outside.

So even when Guo Guangyi mustered large forces to drive off these soldiers who descended the walls to raid, it did little good. The moment they shrank back beneath the wall, Guo Guangyi could do nothing.

After two months of siege, the more Guo Guangyi fought, the more alarmed he grew, and the more his army's morale sank.

A few days earlier, there had even been an incident where no Zhou troops had sallied out at all, yet a camp had simply exploded in panic over a small, unremarkable noise.

This forced Guo Guangyi to move his low-morale, low-combat-effectiveness troops farther west to encamp, lest their panic collapse the entire army.

Yao Yuanfu leaned against the eastern gate tower of Suyab. He even felt an impulse to lead his troops straight out and stage a great victory of two thousand routing forty thousand.

This was not really Yao Yuanfu being too arrogant; it was that the enemy was simply too trash.

He had never seen an army so utterly inept at siege warfare. Forty thousand men surrounded the city and hammered away, yet they had no battering rams, no assault towers, no siege carts, no scaling ladders, and no trebuchets, Fuyuan crossbows, or any other such weapons.

Their only method of attack was to swarm toward the wall in a mob, suppress the ramparts from below with bows, and then have close-combat troops armed with single-edged swords and great shields hook grappling hooks onto the walltop and clamber straight up.

As for the few dozen ladders they had, Yao Yuanfu refused to even acknowledge those things as siege ladders.

Oh, right! Besides that, they had one other method: piling up earth mounds until they were level with the wall. Then they would either suppress with bows as before, or lay a few planks and scramble across.

Yao Yuanfu showed not the slightest courtesy. He immediately let these fellows see what defending a city truly meant, including but not limited to boiling filth, digging pit traps on the walls, scattering caltrops, and pouring burning oil.

Guo Guangyi's forty thousand men besieged the city for a month and a half without taking so much as a single stretch of wall; instead they lost several thousand to battle casualties, and by the end it was basically just a passive encirclement, with no morale left for attacking.

Still, Yao Yuanfu gave up the idea of a large-scale sortie from the city—not because he feared he could not win, but because the city lacked horses, while the enemy had sixty or seventy thousand warhorses.

Even if they sortied, they could not achieve a rout; and even if they routed the enemy, they could not pursue and expand the victory.

In early May, Hu Guang, having seized military authority over the Golden Kingdom's great royal administration, conscripted ten thousand able-bodied men of the various peoples of Anxi and Beiting, along with forty-five thousand civilian laborers, and crossed the Tianshan Mountains.

He quickly captured the stockade Guo Guangyi had built on the banks of the Zhenzhu River (the Naryn River), and the great army was about to reach Suyab.

Guo Guangyi, for his part, could only retreat in haste from Suyab, falling back to his final stronghold—a place that was also once a heartbreak for the Anxi Army.

Talas!

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