Chapter 874

Five years ago, in the eighth year of Shaoming, 953 CE, four years after Bai Congxin captured the city of Shiguo.

Hezhong Province, the Bai Domain, Wanli City.

This Wanli City has nothing to do with the later Ming dynasty's Wanli Emperor; here "Wanli" means "a new calendar city ten thousand li away."

From the name alone one can tell that the lord of this city most likely came from Licheng County, Jinan Prefecture, Jiaodong Province — that is, the later Licheng District of Jinan.

And indeed so it was.

Song Heishan, wearing a brown round-collared robe with floral medallions, swaggered down the main street of Wanli City.

He was one of the six Zhenfu Commissioners under Zhang Baoyi, the Pacification Commissioner of Wanli City, and Zhang Baoyi's ancestral home was none other than Licheng County.

This fellow had originally been a yabing guard of Yang Guangyuan, and Yang Guangyuan was the old traitor who, when Yelu Deguang first attempted to enter the Central Plains, raised troops in response to the Khitan while serving as Military Governor of Pinglu-Ziqing.

Zhang Baoyi, following such a commander, naturally came to no good end.

After Yang Guangyuan was defeated and killed by Li Shouzhen, Zhang Baoyi, who had narrowly escaped with his life, fled with a hundred or so veteran yabing guards of the Pinglu Army to the Juye Marshes in the southwest and became a bandit.

Yes — the very Water Margin stronghold of Mount Liang in the later novel Outlaws of the Marsh.

Zhang Zhou's rule over the common people was, in truth, somewhat crude, the greatest reason being that Zhang Zhou had been fighting campaigns in every direction from the moment the state was founded.

Who could blame him — Emperor Zhang had no real foundation in the Central Plains, yet his ambitions were extraordinarily high.

All along his path, he had basically done nothing but fight wars, because only by fighting could he make others submit to him, this western bandit from Hexi.

And even in the rare intervals when there was no fighting, Zhang Zhao was busy employing "harsh officials" like Pei Yuan and Zhao Pu to stir up trouble everywhere.

Thus there was simply no time to set the common folk in order; the one and only large-scale mountain-and-marsh sweep had been aimed at the Buddhist establishment's large-scale sheltering of criminal elements.

Zhang Baoyi and his men happened to have no entanglement with the Buddhists; on the contrary, because they had some martial ability, they had been hired by several patrol commanders around the Juye Marshes and had taken part in battles to round up Buddhist evildoers, and had even been recommended for their merits to attend the military examinations at the county office.

But Zhang Baoyi did not dare go, because in Zhang Zhou, having served as an inside agent for the Khitan — and worse, as a yabing guard under a great traitor like Yang Guangyuan — meant that if discovered, one might well lose one's head.

So these yabing guards of the Pinglu Army settled down again at Mount Liang in the Water Margin; they seized several dozen households of commoners to farm for them on the mountain, and forced more than a hundred boatmen on the Juye Marshes to pay them protection money. Life was somewhat poor, but still bearable.

Then Yao Yuanfu, an old warhorse still full of vigor, saw a path to riches with Bai Congxin, and so sent several of his sons back to the Central Plains with their private retainers to carry on a Wagner-style recruiting operation.

Yao Yuanfu was also an old yabing officer; with him making the moves, Zhang Baoyi and his men could not stay hidden for long.

Yao Yuanfu's eldest son found a former garrison officer of the Pinglu Army to go up the mountain and persuade them, but Zhang Baoyi still did not trust him, nor did he want to go to Hezhong, ten thousand li away.

Therefore, no matter how dazzlingly Yao Yuanfu's eldest son spoke, he would not relent; he even suspected that this was the court trying to lure him down the mountain to cut him down with a single stroke.

But then, unsurprisingly, just after Yao Yuanfu's eldest son left, on the third day a du of the court's imperial navy, the Jinbo Garrison, attacked the Juye Marshes.

Guided by fishermen who deeply hated Zhang Baoyi and his men for their oppression, they quickly cornered Zhang Baoyi and the others in their mountain stronghold.

At that point, Zhang Baoyi was sensible enough not to let his men and his sons and grandsons resist, because that would have brought no second outcome other than the death of the entire family.

And captured almost at the same time as Zhang Baoyi and his men were more than four hundred mountain bandits, water bandits, and local tyrants from around the Juye Marshes — counting their families, nearly two thousand people.

Then, on a small flat-bottomed boat of the Jinbo Garrison, a minor official in a green robe who called himself the County Lieutenant of Yuncheng County took only half a cup of tea's time to briskly confirm the crimes of Zhang Baoyi and the others.

Zhang Baoyi was so shocked he gaped speechless, feeling his whole worldview shatter. What the hell — a monstrous crime warranting exile of the entire family eight thousand li, and the verdict was settled in the time it took to drink a mouthful of water?

Hmm, it was only when he saw the figure of Yao Yuanfu's eldest son among the soldiers escorting them to Hezhong that he suddenly understood.

Damn it all — they'd been targeted by a petty schemer!

Still, Song Heishan touched the brown floral brocade robe on his body, patted the hengdao saber at his side, straightened his already swelling belly, and glanced back at the red-headed servant bowing and scraping behind him. It seemed... it seemed he hadn't come out too badly after all.

Three years ago, after Song Heishan followed Zhang Baoyi to the vicinity of Shiguo City in Hezhong, he quickly found himself in his element.

Because what they had done in the Juye Marshes was exactly this — seizing commoners to farm for them. This work was their specialty! A perfect career transition, so to speak.

And so this group of a few dozen veteran yabing guards, with two or three hundred sons, grandsons, and nephews, instantly got into the swing of things.

Using armor and weapons bought on credit from Bai Congxin, they quickly beat a small tribe of over three hundred tents and two thousand people into submission.

Then, like a rolling snowball, they rolled on until now: Zhang Baoyi controlled more than seven thousand households — nearly fifty thousand local natives — southwest of Shiguo City, established his own town of Wanli City, and even became Bai Congxin's Pacification Commissioner of Wanli.

His core men, like Song Heishan, also received one thousand households of commoners and the office of Zhenfu Commissioner.

Now, Song Heishan's family was king over these one thousand households — nearly seven thousand natives. Compared to the Juye Marshes, where roughly one household of commoners had to support one of them, life was now heavenly beyond compare.

"Master, I have inquired — someone in their household is returning to Chang'an soon and can bring back ten bolts of the finest cloud-rose Shu brocade."

Behind Song Heishan, the middle-aged red-headed servant spoke in clumsy Tang-accented speech; only the word "Chang'an" was pronounced with particular accuracy, and carried an inexplicable note of envy.

The word "master" here could be considered a classic case of an export returning to the domestic market.

The Han word "yeye" was absorbed by the Northern Wei as they moved south during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, then accepted by the peoples beyond the frontier, whereupon it lost its original meaning, changing from "father" to a form of address for a person of status.

Historically, it was not until the end of the Yuan dynasty that "laoye" in Chinese took on its later meaning, but in this time and space it had already become popular in Hezhong.

Because the Han people, who had gradually seized the strategic initiative in Hezhong, felt that the local natives were unworthy of using the same forms of address as them, such as "young lord" or "master," and so terms like "laoye" and "daye" arose in response.

These were used by the natives of Hezhong specifically to address Han people; among Han people themselves, they still addressed one another with "lang."

Of course, the scope of "Han people" here was somewhat broad: besides Han people from the Central Plains, the steppe folk who believed in the Six Dharma Sect and had been summoned to Hezhong by the Heavenly Khagan to lend their strength were also called Han people in Hezhong.

Song Heishan nodded. Ten bolts of cloud-rose Shu brocade were not cheap, but this money had to be spent, and it was worth spending, because it was to be used as betrothal gifts for the engagement of his eldest son, Song Dalang.

The bride's family was the Ma clan, a great Han family of Khotan. It was said that when the Sage Son of Heaven first arrived in Khotan, it was their family's Ma Furong, then serving as Acting Grand Marshal of the Jin Kingdom, who had gone to welcome him.

Ma Furong's younger brother Ma Jirong had also followed the Sage Son of Heaven in campaigns to Suyab and Ningyuan; although he did not ultimately return east with him, he had risen to the high position of Deputy Governor-General in the Ningyuan Governor-Generalship.

Of course, Song Heishan's son could not marry a direct daughter or granddaughter of the brothers Ma Furong and Ma Jirong, but for Song Heishan's origins, being able to marry Ma Jirong's niece was already a considerable climb.

One must understand that in today's Hezhong, every Han woman was precious.

Never mind a great Anxi Han family like the Ma clan — even women of the Zubu, Kyrgyz, and other steppe peoples, as long as they could speak halting Chinese, were hot commodities.

Were it not that Li Congde, Great King of the Jin Kingdom, was preparing to move his domain to Kangju City (Samarkand) and needed the help of these Han vassals in Hezhong, even a collateral-line daughter of the Ma family would never have come around to Song Heishan's son.

This was a shop run by a Tang family; Song Heishan remembered that the head of the household seemed to be surnamed Mi, and that his granddaughter had married a great Pacification Commissioner over by Baishui City, which gave them some real influence.

In the Han territory of Hezhong formed mainly by the four Han cities of Suyab, Talas, Baishui City, and Shiguo City, they had quite the ability to move freely in both legitimate and underworld circles.

The so-called "great Pacification Commissioner" actually referred to a regional lord, but for now they could not yet be called regional lords.

Because the Sage had not yet formally enfeoffed Bai Congxin, Commander-in-Chief of the Hezhong Field Headquarters, as Great King of the Bai Domain; likewise, Lu Zhen, Lu Sanlang, in Baishui City, had not yet received the title of Grand Duke of Baishui.

Thus the current situation was still somewhat awkward: Bai Congxin could only continue to issue orders in the name of Commander-in-Chief of the Hezhong Field Headquarters, and the lords and regional lords he had promised under him could only bear the title of "great Pacification Commissioner."

Because although Pacification Commissioners and Zhenfu Commissioners were vassals, on the surface they could be described as court officials, thus providing cover.

Likewise, the minor vassals who should originally have been called junzi and junnan were now uniformly styled Pacification Commissioners and Pacification Suppression Commissioners.

At the same time, "men of Tang" was also a rather intriguing way of putting it.

According to the current customary usage, the Central Plains people in the river region were called either Han people or Zhou people, because the Central Plains was now the Great Zhou, not the Great Tang, so there was no reason for the term "men of Tang" to still exist.

Therefore, these people deliberately called "men of Tang" were in fact the Sogdians stretching from Beiting in the west to Beiping Prefecture in the east.

The Sogdian people were a very peculiar group. In the Central Plains there were estimated to be as many as one or two million of them, and they were divided into several factions.

For example, Kang Fu and An Shenqi — these men had followed Li Keyong in submitting to the Tang, and Li Cunxu in restoring the Great Tang, and were now no different from Han people.

There were also the Hexi Sogdians who had risen with Zhang Zhao, such as Kang Jinshan and Mi Guozhong of the former Hexi Merchant Guild.

But neither of these two factions was the largest. The largest consisted of the many who had long settled in the Central Plains and could speak fluent Han speech, yet were regarded as Sogdians in the Central Plains, while in the river region the local Sogdians considered them "sons of Tang" — well over a million of them.

When these people saw that Zhang Zhao was determined to make the Xia the rulers and the Yi the subjects in the river region, they immediately began to stir, wanting to ride this favorable wind and, in the land that should have been their old home, become the vanguard of "Xia rulers, Yi subjects," using the advantage of their identity to gamble for a great fortune.

Only, by the time these people reached the river region, the status of the Han people had already been raised.

The local Sogdians under rule did not want to acknowledge that these kinsmen, who resembled them but had left their homeland decades or even a century ago, were also Han masters.

At the same time, these Sogdians — fake the the Shatuo, half-Han — did not want others to treat them as Sogdians either, and insisted on holding on to their Han identity, so they gradually accepted the term "men of Tang."

There was nothing wrong with that. "Men of Tang" sounded far better than "barbarians" after all.

Only, in order to draw a complete distinction, they began to strenuously refuse to let the kinsmen they had left behind in the river region use Han surnames like An, Shi, Mi, and Kang the way they did.

Bai Congxin did not stop this, because the benefit was obvious: by doing this, these Sogdians were building a firewall between the locals and the Han people!

The Sogdians below would surely hate these east-coming Sogdians, who could no longer be considered their kinsmen, with boundless bitterness, rather than hating the Han people directly.

At the same time, there were at least around one and a half million such Sogdians in the Central Plains. Without any need for mobilization, they had their own driving force to come east on their own initiative; their way of thinking and their language were Han-style; they were an extremely useful intermediate stratum, and there were plenty of them — simply perfect!

Song Heishan was just about to go in and discuss the price with the head of the Mi family and put down a deposit, when suddenly the great bell in Wanli City began clanging loudly. The pedestrians in the market streets panicked at once, then hid along both sides of the road.

"There are bandits causing trouble at Yingchun Fort! There are bandits causing trouble at Yingchun Fort! All garrison troops, take up arms and report to the yamen for orders!"

Along with the bell, a mounted watchman was shouting as he rode along the street, beating a gong.

"Not good — Wang Liu is at Yingchun Fort!" Song Heishan shouted. Wang Liu was one of the old yabing guards who had turned bandit with them in Juye Marsh, and had been enfeoffed at Yingchun Fort as an Inspection Commissioner.

"These donkey-fucked bandits really know how to pick their moment," Song Heishan cursed right after.

The reason he said this was that at this moment, the Han army of the river region was locked in a brutal tug-of-war with the Samanid Persian army along the Jaxartes River.

What had happened in these years was exactly as Zhang Zhao and Bai Congxin had predicted.

After Bai Congxin had firmly established himself in Shiguo City, Salah, the actual ruler of Samanid Persia, could no longer hold back.

In four years, he had thrown the entire strength of his state across the Jaxartes three times, attempting to retake Shiguo City.

The force he employed grew larger each time, and this time — his fourth march north —

Salah had not only mobilized a full seventy thousand troops within Samanid Persia, but had also summoned more than forty thousand holy warriors from the Buyid dynasty controlling Iraq, the Saffarid dynasty south of Persia, and even the Ikhshidid dynasty controlling Egypt.

In all, a full one hundred twenty thousand troops, and with laborers added, without any exaggeration, it numbered as many as two hundred thousand.

To guard against Salah's offensive, Bai Congxin had also begun large-scale conscription in the four cities of the river region. Around Shiguo City alone, six thousand Han heavy infantry had been levied, and he had also requested aid from Ningyuan and Khotan.

This was the Fourth Battle of the Jaxartes — the battle that would decide the fate of the river region in history.

And now was the most agonizing moment of the Fourth Battle of the Jaxartes. Bai Congxin and Lu Sanlang had already thrown nearly all of their fifty thousand troops onto the banks of the Jaxartes.

And after three confrontations with the Zhou army of the Central Plains, the fighting ability of the Samanid Persian army had improved rapidly.

Although they still could not match the Zhou army in battle, they were no longer as easily crushed as before, and their equipment had also been greatly improved thanks to the support of a host of Islamic states in the Middle East.

As a result, although the main force led by Bai Congxin had repeatedly defeated the vanguard of the Samanid Persian Salar Abu Yusuf, it had never been able to achieve a rout — the kind of result that could inflict massive casualties on the enemy.

Instead, Abu Yusuf, with the Jeddah Fortress at his back, kept reinforcing his troops, intending to use Samanid Persia's population of as many as four million to grind down Bai Congxin, who had only a core force of a little over a hundred thousand.

This tactic of his had already begun to take effect. Under the threat of several hundred thousand men on the opposite side, the Zhou army had been forced to contract its forces, to avoid letting the standoff with the Samanid Persian army turn into a contest of "spreading out the pancake," which would lead to being defeated piecemeal.

This move was very effective, immediately turning the Samanid Persian army's numerical advantage into bloat. They were repeatedly defeated by the Zhou army at key points, and their losses were not small.

But Bai Congxin's contraction of forces had one drawback: it allowed Samanid Persian light cavalry to begin infiltrating the interior of the four Han cities. They raided everywhere and constantly incited the local Muslims to revolt.

This was a carefully planned offensive. Abu Yusuf had struck with an exquisite sense of timing, for this battle came only a little over three months after the previous one.

Half of the Zhou army's main force that had fought in the previous war had returned to Suyab City to rest and refit more than two months ago, and no one had expected Samanid Persia to complete its mobilization again so quickly.

Of course, this was not to say that the Samanid Persians held any great advantage, because the army of the four Han cities, led by Bai Congxin, still had a powerful assistant: the vassal army of the Golden Kingdom of Khotan.

The situation in Anxi now was that half of the original army of the Golden Kingdom of Khotan was controlled by Hu Guang and had become the main force of the Anxi Han army.

The other half belonged to Li Congde's control, serving as the Golden Kingdom's vassal army — roughly twenty thousand men, commanded respectively by Ma Jirong, the Deputy Commander of Ningyuan, and Xue Shouli, the Chief Troop Commander of Ningyuan.

At the same time, Old Zhang Zhong, who guarded Zhang Zhao's several million mu of private property in Ningyuan, also had under his hand a five-thousand-man imperial private army, assisted by Dang Jin, ready to be thrown onto the battlefield at any time.

So the focus now was on when the Golden Kingdom's vassal army and the Emperor's five thousand private troops could finish mobilizing and march out through Tianmen Pass.

Only if they broke through the water-fort blockade Abu Yusuf had established on the Jaxartes and stabbed straight into the Samanid Persian army's rear, cutting off the Persian army's supply route, could this great battle be won.

Song Heishan drew his hengdao saber and quickly mounted a warhorse. He was a Pacification Suppression Commissioner, and with Pacification Commissioner Zhang Baoyi and his eldest son and other able-bodied men all at the front, he could exercise a certain amount of authority on Zhang Baoyi's behalf.

By the time Song Heishan galloped to the yamen gate, more than a hundred Han soldiers had already gathered there. Each wore a hengdao saber at his waist and held a long spear, and behind each followed a servant carrying armor, bows, arrows, and other equipment.

Song Heishan saw that Zou Dalang, the other Pacification Suppression Commissioner, was there, and was greatly relieved. He quickly spurred his horse over and said:

"Zou Da, I know the road to Yingchun Fort well. Let me take two hundred men to reinforce them. You stay in the city — if the bandits are actually coming for Wanli City, there will be someone to direct the defense."

Zou Dalang nodded heavily, then said with evident confidence:

"Take all three hundred of these men! In the city, if we conscript everyone from thirteen up and forty-five and older, we can still scrape together two hundred. Ordinary bandits are no match for us."

Song Heishan considered briefly, then agreed at once. He swung into the saddle and shouted to Zhang Baoyi's thirteen-year-old eldest son:

"Lend me the silver-white banner. You stay in the city and follow Uncle Zou's arrangements. Don't be afraid."

The thirteen-year-old Zhang Dalang flushed red. He quickly pulled on a slightly smaller cloth-faced iron armor and shouted:

"How can Uncle Song still look down on me so! Though your nephew has not yet come of age, the blade at my waist has already slain five rebellious villains. A true brave man of the Great Zhou — how could I be afraid!"

"Hahaha!" Song Heishan laughed three times and praised him: "A true seed of our Han people! With you here, Wanli City will surely be safe."

Having said this, he looked at the old men behind him, whose beards and hair were, like his, turning gray, most of them around forty years old, and shouted: "Our sons and grandsons are killing bandits on the Jaxartes and cannot return. Can you old ones still fight?"

"Rest assured, Master Song. Though I am past forty, killing five or eight barbarian bandits is still no problem for me," someone immediately shouted back.

"Good! Then let those Saman thieves creeping over have a look — their grandpa may be old, but the longsword in his hand is not!"

Song Heishan swept his hand, spurring his horse out first, and at once a silver-white Three Stars banner unfurled behind him, streaming in the wind!

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