Chapter 878

Outside Heyang Town, battle cries rose and fell in waves.

Bai Congxin had thrown out his entire force of thirty thousand, drawn up in formation outside the city like a boulder amid the waves, unshakably absorbing wave after wave of fierce assaults from the Persian army.

The two sides had fought from sunrise until the beginning of the shen hour in the afternoon (three o'clock in the afternoon). Only after the Persian side had paid a price of four to five thousand dead and wounded did they finally succeed in shattering the Han army's formation, splitting the Han army into three pieces.

But Bai Congxin was not alarmed in the least, because what the Persian army had shattered was not his main force.

The four thousand heavy-armored infantry who formed the main force, along with the six hundred retainers personally led by Lu Sanlang, still held together and had not yet reached their limit.

Even the weaker units that had been cut off and surrounded were more than the Persians could swallow.

Abu Yusuf began to feel uneasy, because he had never imagined the Han army could be so tenacious and endure such bitter fighting. Over a hundred thousand men had surrounded thirty thousand and fought for nearly four double-hours, yet the other side still showed no signs of collapsing.

On the contrary, it was his own side that was running into trouble.

The Samanid Persian army had never before encountered such a tenacious and troublesome opponent. Under the excellent matchmaking mechanisms of the Transoxiana region in the past, the cavalry always went in first to engage, and generally speaking that very quickly became the decisive battle.

One's own cavalry would defeat the enemy cavalry, then with a little intimidation the enemy infantry would collapse, and after that it was just a matter of pursuit.

The kind that could first endure a great cavalry battle, then infantry exchanging fire, and keep fighting for one or two double-hours — those were already considered heavenly troops in Transoxiana.

But today, after a full four double-hours of fighting, the hundred-thousand-strong Persian army was exhausted, men and horses alike, while the other side remained as firm as a rock.

Although Abu Yusuf was using rotating waves of troops, in this harsh weather the units that had already rotated through once were clearly showing low morale from exhaustion.

Seen from afar, the armored soldiers, after repeatedly donning and removing their armor, walked with unusually heavy steps once they put their armor back on. Men who normally could loose three or five arrows before closing with the enemy now went straight in to fight with blade and spear.

As for the ordinary troops without armor, their previously neat ranks had begun to look ragged and disorderly, and some men collapsed to the ground unconscious as they marched.

Advancing felt like going to their deaths — sluggish and lifeless — but the moment they heard the drums and music signaling retreat, they instantly recovered their energy and scrambled back in a swarming mob.

"Awar, the main force of the Tawghaj is those armored soldiers. They fight fiercely, but there are fewer than ten thousand of them.

I am giving you twenty thousand cavalry. The moment this wave of infantry attacks ends, charge at once. You must open a gap in their phalanx."

Abu Yusuf judged others by himself, believing the Han armored soldiers were also nearing their final breaking point, so he decided to commit his trump card: four thousand armored cavalry and sixteen thousand light-armored cavalry.

At the same time, considering that the Han army still had more than ten thousand cavalry outside, Abu Yusuf first sent out his five hundred elite riders as scouts, then summoned the four ten-thousand-man units that were resting in rotation and deployed them to the north and east to guard against a possible return of the Han cavalry.

None of these maneuvers were in themselves flawed; he had both a sharp blade for attack and a shield set for defense.

But Abu Yusuf should not have encountered an opponent he was never meant to meet.

That was the twelve thousand fanatical religious knights — devout believers of the Six Laws Sect, handpicked from the steppe, and further blessed with two buffs: quench-forged weapons and talisman-water divine soldiers.

In religious fervor, these Punishment Knights of the Six Laws Sect could only be compared to the martyr-knights of Islam's earliest days.

Of course, that was only in morale. In combat skill, even the martyr-knights could not compare with the Punishment Knights at all.

Just as Abu Yusuf changed his formation, before Awar's cavalry had even begun their attack on Bai Congxin's armored soldiers, and while the four ten-thousand-man units assigned to defend the east and north had only just begun to move and were not yet in position, urgent alarms sounded from the distance.

The Punishment Knights of the Six Laws Sect had appeared!

This was exactly the moment Luktu had been waiting for — this moment of chaos in the Persian army's maneuvers.

He took out the image of the Great Wisdom Dharma King Bodhisattva that he always wore at his chest and murmured a few prayers.

Luktu clearly remembered what bitter days the Western Zubu people had lived through, when the Supreme Heaven had not yet sent his stepfather among them, when the Supreme Heaven's compassion had not yet reached the steppe.

As the son of a tribal chief, when he ate mutton, he had to count the salt lump by lump — add one lump, taste the broth, and the moment there was any saltiness, he dared not add more.

But now, a proud light flashed across Luktu's face. There were no poor men on the steppe. Those still living in poverty simply should not exist in this world.

A man who could not take up the scimitar and fight for the Supreme Heaven deserved only to stay on the steppe gnawing grass roots like cattle and sheep!

"Eagles of the Heavenly Khagan! Punishment Knights of the Supreme Heaven, let all heretics wail forever in the Avici Hell — kill!"

In the sky, the dark clouds suddenly parted a stretch, and in the cold wind a faint but tenacious beam of sunlight pierced through layer upon layer of obstruction and shone down.

"Kill!" Amid earth-shaking war cries, twelve thousand elite riders, from five hundred paces away, began their mad gallop toward the Persians.

No one spared the horses' strength, no one felt fear. They wanted only for the enemy to die!

Arrows filled the sky, denser than raindrops, loosed amid the great blasts of bronze whistles. First the foremost chiliarchs shot whistling arrows of brilliant colors and strange sounds, then the centurions, and finally the common soldiers.

They were extremely disciplined. A centurion would only draw and shoot after seeing the direction his chiliarch shot, and the soldiers below kept their eyes fixed on the direction their centurion shot. Anyone who failed to draw after the centurion shot, or shot in the wrong direction, would face severe punishment upon return.

Thus, more than ten thousand bows loosed almost simultaneously in a single direction, with almost no deviation.

The lethality of such terrifyingly precise shooting was immense.

The Persian ten-thousand-man unit that Luktu charged at full speed looked as though a god had personally drawn a bow and shot at it from the sky. In an instant, a huge hollow appeared in the advancing Persian phalanx, and countless soldiers and officers toppled to the ground, wailing loudly.

And the shooting would not stop at one volley — it came in waves: one, two, three, until the Persian ten-thousand-man unit was cut in half and began to collapse, weeping and howling.

Then Luktu, Chen Tingxiao, and An Cunzhong each led four thousand cavalry to drive the Persian routed troops before them. They hid behind these fleeing soldiers and waited for the fugitives to throw their own army's formations into chaos before immediately falling upon them.

If some unit with stronger fighting power was not scattered by the fugitives, they immediately hammered it with powerful bows, shooting until it collapsed, and then charged.

This set of tactics would not have produced such results four double-hours ago.

But now, the Persian army — which had never experienced a full day of high-intensity fighting against a Central Plains army — was already exhausted, hungry, and thirsty to the extreme.

In such circumstances, once they encountered an enemy that felt irresistible, many low-ranking soldiers and officers would simply give up and choose to flee the battlefield.

For a few hundred coins a month, why risk your life!

Luktu and his men split into three columns and rampaged through the hundred-thousand-strong Persian army, cutting left and charging right. Countless men fell at the twang of a bowstring. After several repeated charges, Luktu finally found the greatest target of this battle.

It was not Abu Yusuf. Though he did have some ability and was a famous general of Samanid Persia, in the Great Zhou he would not stand out much. His ability was on the same level as his stepfather Lu Zhen, Lu Sanlang — no need to target him specifically.

The target Luktu sought was the twenty thousand cavalry led by Awar.

Among them, at least eight thousand were Ghulam guard cavalry from Bukhara, and more than ten thousand were iqta knights formed from the vassals of various regions, along with their retinue cavalry.

Compared to Abu Yusuf, they were the true pillars of Samanid Persia. Without them, Samanid Persia would find it very hard to hold on.

Like two people searching for each other with flashlights under a pitch-black night sky, Luktu quickly spotted these Ghulam guard cavalry, and Umar likewise spotted these Punishment Knights combining heavy and light cavalry.

In that instant, both sides' eyes lit up. The personal guards around Luktu drew the horns at their waists and blew them with long, drawn-out wails, summoning all the Punishment Knights to assemble.

"Warriors of Allah, destroy those heretics!"

"The Supreme Heaven will protect his faithful! The Heavenly Khagan's eagles are proof against blade and spear!"

The battlefield seemed to fall quiet. All around, whether Persian or Han troops, men quickly ran clear without any prior agreement, as if clearing the field for these two cavalry forces.

Horns blew, they broke into a slow trot, drew long lances and sabers, and began the mad gallop.

Both sides fought in the same fashion — they dispensed with archery entirely and went straight at each other, using the most valiant way of cavalry to end this battle.

Boom! At last they collided, countless horse heads passing one another. You needed no technique at all — a light swing, a thrust, and you were certain to hit an enemy.

White blades flashed like frost; red stars streamed with blood.

It seemed as if the battle of two hundred years ago had appeared before people's eyes once more. But this time it was different — there was no betrayal, no Han heavy infantry and heavy cavalry stripped of light-cavalry cover, left to face the charge of Persian horsemen with only weary modao glaive glaive glaives.

Instead, steppe cavalry with superior equipment, martial skill, and organization — armed by the Six Methods School — fell upon Persian cavalry inferior in every measure.

Thus, although the Persians outnumbered them by eight or nine thousand and held the advantage of waiting at ease against a weary foe, they were still battered into a sorry state, and the two sides charged and slaughtered back and forth outside Heyang Town.

Gradually, the Persian cavalry could hold no longer. The chastisement knights, bolstered by spiritual faith, seemed not to know fatigue and could even charge wildly without regard for casualties. The more the Persian cavalry fought, the more their courage failed.

At this moment, Bai Congxin ordered the silver-white banner of the decisive battle raised, and organized a wave of death-defying soldiers composed at least of the Inspection Office's vassals and their sons and nephews, who were the first to charge out from the infantry formation.

Though utterly exhausted, in their longing for victory they still erupted with tremendous fighting strength, driving back the tens of thousands of Persian infantry besieging them, forcing them into continuous retreat.

Abu Yusuf removed the iron helm from his head; cold sweat had already soaked his hair through.

"Sound the music. Order all units to draw near to me. Send messengers to the rear army and order them to prepare to receive us."

In an extremely short time, Abu Yusuf made his decision — a ruthless decision!

Right now the enemy cavalry was still locked in final combat with his own cavalry, while the enemy infantry had little strength left. Retreat was still possible. If he waited until the cavalry was defeated, there would be no way out.

Moreover, the Persian army still had a large camp five li west of Heyang Town, garrisoned by more than four thousand soldiers who, together with the laborers, could make up twenty thousand men. First retreat to the great camp and stabilize the situation, then decide.

No sooner said than done. Under Abu Yusuf's command, the Persian army began to retreat. Though disordered, the general orders were still transmitted.

On the battlefield, the Persian cavalry on the verge of collapse did not keenly notice their comrades steadily withdrawing from the field, but General Awar saw it. Not only did he see it, he faintly heard the drum and music of retreat.

However, after heaving a deep sigh, Awar made no sign of anything.

Because he knew that without them pinning down these fanatical Taohuashi cavalry, the retreating infantry would be pursued and bitten at the tail, suffering terrible casualties.

After countless thoughts whirled rapidly through his mind, Awar drew a deep breath, then once more raised his war blade high and was the first to charge at the Taohuashi cavalry.

Once men number over ten thousand, they stretch boundless; how much more so here, where there were over a hundred thousand. The many chaotic figures concealed Abu Yusuf's true purpose.

And as he had anticipated, the divided Han infantry still had the strength to hold formation and fight, but once the threat of death receded, many began to lose strength, and the pursuit was not so swift.

By the time Luktu had thoroughly defeated the Persian cavalry and personally slain the Persian army's deputy salar cavalry general Awar, he discovered that the Persian army had already begun disengaging from the battlefield.

Luktu immediately ordered pursuit, but the results were poor, because the twenty thousand Persian cavalry they had just defeated were the elite of the entire Persian army.

These slain cavalrymen left behind great quantities of iron armor, fine warhorses, and the gold and silver ornaments they carried, while their heads were also precious trophies.

Luktu's ability to lead troops in the charge and his reputation for fierce bravery were quite excellent, but in the command and arrangement of an army, he was still somewhat lacking.

Not just anyone could, like Murong Xinzhang and Li Cunhui, attend to every aspect of the battlefield at the age of just twenty or so.

Therefore, although Luktu repeatedly sounded the horn to assemble, great numbers of steppe cavalrymen still began scrambling for spoils.

And even those who came to assemble at his order were, because of the ferocious charging, reaching the limits of exhaustion, both men and horses.

Moreover, it was not only Luktu's cavalry scrambling for spoils — under Bai Congxin, large numbers of infantry composed of vassals and provincial garrison troops were also scrambling for spoils. The only ones who could be assembled were the several thousand armored soldiers Bai Congxin had recruited from the imperial guard.

If at this moment the Persians had the morale to turn back and strike a counterblow, they might well have achieved considerable results. In history, armies and battles that turned and struck such a returning blow were not few.

This was the profound reason the Zhang Zhou personal army and imperial guard could become the strongest elite: apart from their formidable fighting strength, the discipline of the Zhang Zhou personal army and imperial guard was extremely strict.

How to clear the battlefield and how to distribute merit were governed by strict and detailed regulations, so a situation like the present one simply would not occur.

In the end, Luktu barely scraped together six or seven thousand men to pursue the defeated Persian army and bite at their tail. Although they killed and wounded great numbers of the Persian army, they never managed to charge near Abu Yusuf, nor cut down the Persians' great banner, and so could not completely shatter the Persian army.

The five-li distance, in Abu Yusuf's eyes, was truly like hell itself.

Along this short five-li road, of the nearly one hundred thousand Persian soldiers and civilians fleeing with him, at least thirty thousand were killed or captured. It could truly be called a road of blood and tears.

And when he saw the great camp in sight, with the troops in camp already prepared to receive them, Abu Yusuf's heart finally steadied somewhat.

If only they could hold steady until nightfall, he could arrange for the elite troops to begin the retreat. If he could bring thirty to fifty thousand men back to the Jeddah Fortress, they could still hold the northern gate of Kangju (Samarkand).

At that very moment, at the instant his heart had just begun to settle, the rumbling of war drums sounded from the north. On either side of a silver-white banner bearing the Three Celestial Bodies, a huge banner with the character "Tiger" appeared on the distant plain, and began approaching at extreme speed.

Hu Guang had arrived!

"How can the Han army from Suyab be here? Didn't they all return to Suyab?"

Abu Yusuf let out a wretched cry. He had fought back and forth with the Han army for several years, and naturally knew what this meant.

The ten thousand infantry and cavalry under Hu Guang were not only fresh troops, but the elite of the elite. Under Hu Guang's command, before Luktu's pursuing force had even arrived, they launched a general assault on the defeated Samanid Persian army.

In less than half a shichen, the Persian great camp, containing over a hundred thousand soldiers and civilians, collapsed once more.

This time it was a complete collapse. The hundred thousand and more people, like termites whose nest had been overturned, fled in every direction toward the Yaxartes River to the south.

By evening, after an hour of desperate flight, the Persian army reached the banks of the Yaxartes, only to discover that the several thousand Persian sailors and the water fortress left there had long since been captured by the Ningyuan Army and the Jin Kingdom's vassal troops. Of their rear route, only a few dozen small boats remained.

For a time, weeping shook the heavens. The Han army attacked from three sides, and amid despair, a few of the Persian soldiers and civilians still howled and resisted, while the majority fell into shock from terror.

In the pitch-black depths of winter, they fled ceaselessly into the Yaxartes, and soon vanished after sending up splash after splash in the water.

In the eighth year of Shaoming, 953 CE, Abu Yusuf — the Samanid Persian grand salar, the great general who held military power, brother-in-law of Prince Salah, and governor of Kangju City — led an army of one hundred twenty thousand plus around one hundred thousand laborers, two hundred thirty thousand in total, proclaiming it five hundred thousand, northward in an attempt to recover the city of Shiguo.

Abu Yusuf was not an ignorant fool, nor an arrogant young noble. On the contrary, he was precisely a rare famous general of Samanid Persia.

Even Luktu's assessment of him was that he could compare with Lu Zhen, Lu Sanlang.

Although Lu Sanlang was unremarkable among the star-studded constellation of Zhang Zhou military commanders, his ability was actually not weak. To have risen to the position of a great duke of an outer vassal state amid universal disdain was still quite formidable.

It could be said that Abu Yusuf's northward campaign was not only not irrational, but could even be called somewhat well-planned, because he had precisely exploited a timing gap against Hu Guang.

One must know that Hu Guang's Anxi Army numbered twenty thousand, and Suyab faced no enemy threat. In the previous three probes, Hu Guang had always brought fifteen to twenty thousand men to aid in battle.

But in this battle, Hu Guang had come in haste with only around nine thousand five hundred men.

At the same time, because the battle had come too suddenly, the Jin Kingdom's vassal troops had only been mobilized at the very last moment.

It could be said that Abu Yusuf had keenly sensed the subtle relations among Bai Congxin, Hu Guang, and old Zhang Zhong, and he had done the best he could possibly do.

But in the end, all schemes and tricks must still be settled by strength.

Abu Yusuf had exhausted every stratagem, yet his full one hundred twenty thousand troops, facing Bai Congxin's fifty thousand and more motley soldiers, could not even shatter them — indeed, could not even drive them back to any meaningful degree.

So although he had laid his plans ingeniously, in the end he met with the total destruction of his entire army.

In this battle, of the Samanid Persians' two hundred thirty thousand, over ten thousand were slain outright, more than forty thousand captured, and over thirty thousand died of severe wounds.

Those who drowned after being driven into the water were beyond counting; even the river ran red, and no fewer than fifty thousand perished.

Of the remaining hundred thousand, at most a few thousand could be expected to cross the river safely; the rest were either overtaken by the Han army and killed or captured as slaves, or died along the escape route from one cause or another.

In the end, only a little over four thousand followed Abu Yusuf in his desperate flight to the Jeddah fortress — it could be called total annihilation.

Reckoning by Samanid Persia's population of 4.3 million, with adult males making up thirty-five percent of the total, the entire adult male population of Samanid Persia was only around 1.51 million.

In one stroke no fewer than two hundred thousand were lost — thirteen percent gone at once.

What was more terrifying was that in this era, having a certain population did not mean you could mobilize that many people. With some populations, a violent apparatus could forcibly collect a bit of tax, but to go back and conscript soldiers from them after a crushing defeat was basically wishful thinking.

Reckoned this way, the Samanid Emirate lost at least thirty percent of the men it could mobilize in this single battle.

Moreover, not every able-bodied man could become a warrior — and even if every one could, they could not be trained in a short time.

At the same time, this catastrophic defeat also cost a vast quantity of supplies. Armor, weapons, and horses accounted for at least sixty percent of the entire country's stock, and the grain and fodder stockpiled at Kangju (Samarkand) with the strength of the whole nation was likewise basically lost.

Only two or three thousand of the elite Ghulam guards remained, and the iqta noble vassals of the realm were almost entirely wiped out.

It could be said that after this disastrous defeat, the Samanid Emirate had in fact already reached the brink of national extinction.

Guo Zhou'er wore a blue lanshan robe and a gauze futou cap, with several armored guards in cloth-faced iron armor escorting her.

Everywhere she passed, the Samanid captives wallowing in blood and mud, the moment they saw an official with a gentle face approaching, frantically kowtowed on the ground, begging this official to spare them and not send them to the slave camp.

Guo Zhou'er froze. She saw a man kowtowing madly at her — once, long ago, she had seen this man at Talas: the Hakim (governor) of Samanid Persia's Herat province, and a close kinsman of the Samanid royal house.

This nobleman who had once seemed to dwell in the heavens, Hakim al-Habbad, was now as base as a wild dog rolling in a mud pit.

Guo Zhou'er slowly walked toward this Hakim. Habbad stopped kowtowing and pressed his head submissively into the ground.

Guo Zhou'er slowly raised her foot and set it at will upon Habbad's balding head, speaking in perfectly standard Khorasani-accented Persian:

"Habbad! The favored consort of the noble Emperor of Taohuashi, the Heavenly Khagan of the steppe peoples, the Shahanshah — the Samanid princess Sayfiyya — now summons you to be her loyal hound!"

The moment this standard Persian left her lips, the captives kneeling in the muddy water went wild.

They howled frantically, every one of them kneeling and trying to shuffle forward on their knees to Guo Zhou'er to kiss her shoes, not stopping even when the escorting guards beat them bloody with wooden staves.

Habbad shuddered all over, then shouted joyfully from the mud, "Princess Sayfiyya? Habbad is willing to be Princess Sayfiyya's—

No! Base Habbad is not worthy to be Princess Sayfiyya's loyal hound. It is enough for Habbad to become this Taohuashi Sahib's slave."

"Ha ha ha ha!" Guo Zhou'er laughed wildly, until tears streamed down her face. Scene after scene surged through her mind, and a thousand words gathered into a single shout:

"What worth have the Hu barbarians!"

After venting, Guo Zhou'er clasped her hands toward the captain of the Left Jinwu Guard who had escorted her all the way.

"Brother Hu, chain up this Hu barbarian. He'll be of use later. Let us go see the Tiger Grand General!"

On the battlefield where mud and blood mingled, yet which filled her with boundless glory and pride, Guo Zhou'er wiped away her tears, knowing the time had come for her to perform.

Samanid Persia was destined to be destroyed — but not now. This was why the Sage had Princess Sayfiyya acknowledge her as a sister.

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