Chapter 275: Naval Force

The course of the war had finally returned to the phase Liu Chengzong and his men knew best.

Dai Daozi stopped looking for boats too, and led the reconnaissance riders in a wild gallop across the upper west bank of the Jinsha River, spreading three layers of scout horses over eighty li in every direction to blanket the entire battlefield.

The chiliarchs under Liu Chengzong seized the hilltops and, using several noble estates, created the illusion of a desperate last stand with no way out, while Zhang Tianlin's cavalry contingent served as the outer line, hidden within the valleys.

Of course, the search for boats could not be neglected either — that task was handed to the nobles under Monk Gama, ordering them to collect ferry boats along the river.

In truth, Liu Chengzong had always held a measured limit in his heart regarding the reform of the slave system.

On the broad principle, guaranteeing the slaves' right to live was his baseline requirement as a human being; in his view, only by treating oneself as human and treating others as human could one truly be called a person.

But that did not mean exterminating every last noble. That limit was nothing other than the degree of submission shown by the nobles who had surrendered.

If, after surrendering, they gave money when money was needed and strength when strength was needed, following him with all their heart, how could he confiscate all their territories?

Besides, even if he did confiscate everything, putting himself in their shoes, he still had to consider a good place for them to live out their lives free of want.

But incidents like the one with the Lincong Kingdom — Liu Chengzong had no intention of experiencing a second time. A tusi who had clearly already paid him tribute had, at the moment he was needed, cut the bridge and acted with reckless impunity. It was an immense crime.

Of course, guarding the iron-chain bridge over the Jinsha River did indeed provide formidable leverage. This river was full of hidden reefs and impassable to boats; even ferries could only cross at a few sections, and the main traffic relied entirely on the iron-chain bridge.

Hold the fortifications at the bridgehead, and one could force the opponent to gaze at the river and sigh, utterly helpless.

Gama's nobles were quite efficient. That very afternoon they found an old, small ferry boat that could carry a dozen or so people to the opposite bank at a time.

But their discovery of the boat was likewise grasped by the Lincong army on the other side. Wherever the ferry was dragged along the shore, a hundred-man squad with firearms and bows followed along on the opposite bank.

Liu Chengzong stood on the hilltop, lowered his telescope, pointed at a figure on the opposite bank, and asked Monk Wang: "Ask Gama, who is that man? He's got a mirror tucked in his robes."

It was very strange — he had actually seen a telescope here, and on the person of a headman under a noble tusi, no less.

Gama, beside him, said that was Headman Along, a brave general under the King of Lincong.

As for the telescope, Gama clearly recognized it too, and explained: "They all came in decades ago. Baili has them, Lincong has them. Baili's came from Sichuan, Lincong's came from Ü-Tsang."

To Liu Chengzong, this was a novelty. In the most isolated corner of the world, one could find all the most advanced things of the age in the hands of tusi nobles.

The King of Lincong's telescope probably came from about ten years ago.

On the western border of Ü-Tsang there was a small kingdom called Guge, now no longer in existence, but in the past, cultural exchange there had been extremely frequent; the place had both monks and missionaries.

To put it bluntly, the king brought in outside forces to oppose the local religion led by his younger brother, and civil war erupted as a result.

The king and his entire family were captured and taken to a prison in the neighboring country of Ladakh, and this small kingdom, under successive attacks from Ladakh and Tsangpa, vanished into the long river of history.

People who fled the chaos of war came to Lincong, and among the belongings they carried with them was a telescope.

The Kham-Ü-Tsang region does not lack crystal, but it lacks the motivation to make such things... just as Gama said, this thing is merely a noble's toy.

The terrain here is not very suited to telescopes.

There are mountains everywhere, and high mountains at that. With the naked eye you can see from this mountain to that one. There are some extraordinarily tall peaks, but climbing them is far too arduous, and the significance for surveying terrain is minimal.

Moreover, craftsmen have virtually no social status, and private workshops are extremely rare, leading to material scarcity and low productivity. So the slaves of Lincong merely managed to grind out a few lenses.

When anyone first tries their hand at it, the craftsmanship is never going to be very good.

But the king had no interest in continuing the work to improve the technology, and the craftsmen had no means of obtaining raw materials. Therefore, although this thing had existed for a long time, it still held no significance to this day.

Liu Chengzong shook his head in reflection. Money can make the devil turn the millstone, and it can also make any novel object cross high mountains to be delivered into the hands of a noble tusi.

"Marshal!"

Hearing the call from behind, Liu Chengzong turned his head, and his eyes were met with a patch of gaudy colors of excellent texture — the general with the most nouveau-riche aura in the Lion Army had arrived.

Luo Rucai was still wearing strange clothes. In the past, he had always liked to wear whatever he looted, so much so that he often wore three or four silk satin robes tied together at once.

The bitter cold of Qinghai had not cured him of this habit; instead, it made him wrap himself up even more tightly. A thin unlined garment of Lu silk, and the satin-faced jacket over it was quite fine.

This jacket of Luo Rucai's was famous in Ju'erwan. When he commissioned a weaver to make the garment, the man was stunned speechless just listening to the specifications.

The lining was rabbit fur; the interlining had two layers of cotton, one layer of cotton cloth, and two layers of silk, all finely pressed and stitched together; the exterior was fine twill satin; the hem was adorned with the multicolored cloth strips commonly used on the armored coats of frontier troops — but this fellow used multicolored satin strips, and he even added leopard-fur trim along the lapels.

The whole man looked like a harlequin ladybug.

Liu Chengzong had told him before: dressed like that, you'll easily be shot dead by random arrows on the battlefield.

Luo Rucai didn't care at all. He raised a fist and knocked on his chest, producing the clang of iron armor. He had added heart-protecting mirrors to the front and back of his jacket, and riveted chainmail covered his ribs, inner thighs, and rear — areas not easily protected by outer armor.

The rear had nothing to do with outer armor; Liu Chengzong guessed it was because Luo Rucai had been stabbed in the buttocks by Aimu, so he had specially added chainmail there.

In any case, if everyone in the Lion Army took off their armor, Luo Rucai would definitely be the one with the highest defense.

After all, he and Yang Chengzu were the wealthiest generals in the Lion Army.

During the incitement of the Pingliang uprising, the two had reaped considerable rewards. Aside from gold, silver, and grain, all implements, curios, copper coins, and cloth had been bestowed by Liu Chengzong upon the soldiers who had participated in the incitement, and they had practically bought out Zhenyuan County through barter.

In Liu Chengzong's view, although Dunyue Duoji's army was somewhat inferior in firearms, its troop strength was twice his own. If they wanted to fight a decisive battle, the Lion Army would need to maneuver on a large scale within a hundred-li radius, and they could not allow the King of Lincong to sit idly by and watch the excitement from the north bank of the Jinsha River.

He could not keep sending men to guard the bridgehead indefinitely. Therefore, before the decisive battle, they still needed to seize the iron-chain bridge and give the King of Lincong a minor thrashing, to make him recognize the difficulty and retreat.

The general he assigned to cross the river and seize the iron-chain bridge was Luo Rucai.

"Marshal!"

Luo Rucai came running over eagerly, rubbing his fists and wiping his palms: "One ferry boat, three Yellow River ferrymen, and two hundred sailors born by the Yellow River — the naval force is ready!"

Liu Chengzong burst out laughing at this.

But a single ferry boat was nothing. What would truly serve as the nascent 'naval force' born on the upper Jinsha River, and what would establish its future dominance over the river basin, was not the ferry boat, but the sheepskin rafts currently being made.

As the saying goes, a fall into a pit, a gain in your wit. This obstruction at the Jinsha River made Liu the Lion identify yet another weakness of his army: they relied heavily on bridges and lacked means of crossing rivers.

Faced with such great rivers barring the way, as long as the enemy held the bridges, they would fall into a passive situation with their hands tied.

Therefore, to prevent this from happening, Liu Chengzong ordered that soldiers who knew how to make skin rafts be gathered from the army to rush the production of sheepskin rafts, completing the anti-corrosion treatment and sun-drying.

They wouldn't be ready in time for this river crossing, but once dried, the sheepskins were light and easy to carry. Next time, such a river would not be able to stop them.

"The enemy has driven stakes at the spots along the bank where boats can land." Liu Chengzong asked, "How do you plan to cross?"

Luo Rucai said, "Cross at night. As long as the boat can make one trip over, we can swim across."

Swim across?

Liu Chengzong frowned and asked, "What about weapons?"

"Armor and weapons all go on the boat. I've looked — they don't have many men patrolling the bank. Three hundred paces downstream goes quickly too. Kill one squad of theirs and you've got a squad's worth of weapons. As long as the men can get across, we'll have everything."

Luo Rucai was a desperado who had always lived on the edge of life and death. He raised a hand, pointing at the iron-chain bridge, and said, "Hold the bridgehead for a quarter of an hour, and the Grand Marshal can move a hundred-odd men to the far bank. With a hundred-odd reinforcements, we can hold it for another half a shichen."

Liu Chengzong said, "How do you plan to swim across?"

"What's there to plan about swimming across? The ones in front take the boats, the ones who can't fit hang on to the boats and swim, and if that doesn't work, they just swim."

"Hold on, hold on." Liu Chengzong raised a hand. "You tie a rope to the stern. In the dead of night, so dark you can't see a thing, you make the soldiers swim through bone-chilling water — how many men will that kill?"

"Grand Marshal, this is the situation we're in. A forced crossing always costs lives. It's nothing!"

Luo Rucai shook his head as if it were nothing. "I'll be swimming at the back. If I sink to the bottom, Grand Marshal, when you take Lincong in the future, remember — ah, forget it, don't bother fishing me out. Just build me a grave."

"No."

Liu Chengzong shook his head. He admired this attitude of facing death as if going home, but he could not let soldiers throw their lives away into the river. This was too reckless.

He pointed at the iron-chain bridge and said, "Do you know how this iron-chain bridge was made? Monk Wang told me — they used boats to tie ropes to the far bank, then ran the iron chains along the ropes, sliding them across through the air."

"You take a boat and carry a rope to the far bank — set it high, make it sturdy. This side high, the far side low. Bundle the weapons and armor into packs, tie them tight, and slide them across on the rope."

Liu Chengzong gestured as he spoke. "Also tie a few ropes to the stern. Run them across the river to the far bank. Have the soldiers tie the ropes around their waists and clip onto the river rope, pulling themselves across hand over hand. Even if they lose their grip, at least there's some protection — others can help haul them over."

"Besides, we've got those inflated sheepskins. Tie them up, hug them across first. Who cares if they rot? We're not short on sheepskins — if they break, we just make more."

Luo Rucai froze. He took off his helmet and scratched his head. At first his eyes were full of confusion, then suddenly it clicked. He laughed and said, "Alright, then I'll prepare it that way. We cross the river tonight!"

He hadn't understood at first. He thought there was no need to make things so complicated — just swim straight across. The two hundred men were already chosen, all soldiers who knew their way around water.

What made him come around was this: in this army, all the sheepskins, everything — it all belonged to Liu Chengzong. If the Grand Marshal himself didn't mind the trouble, what was there for him to be stubborn about? It wasn't like he was the one supplying the sheepskins.

Night fell. Campfires dotted both banks of the Jinsha River.

The well-rested soldiers of Lion Battalion dragged the ferryboats toward the bank. Heavy ropes were carried onto the deck in the dark. Luo Rucai stood at the bank, gazing into the black river. He took a deep breath, stripped off his armor, and jumped into motion.

He copied the water-savvy soldiers, bending over at the river's edge and splashing water onto his own body.

On the iron-chain bridge side, the five hundred bridge-assault infantry Wang Wenxiu had prepared also woke from their sleep, checking their weapons and armor. Monk Wang went over the weight limits the bridge could bear at once with each squad leader, again and again.

Liu Chengzong, wrapped in a thick robe, stood on a hilltop, watching the hilltop on the far bank. The campfires there went dark for a moment, then lit up again.

Soon, his bodyguards raised woolen blankets beside him, facing that direction to screen the campfire.

He took a deep breath. The forced crossing was about to begin.

The lone ferryboat was pushed into the current. On board, soldiers without armor gripped their bird guns as the surging river pushed them toward the far bank.

The soldiers at the stern paid out the rope bit by bit. The thick hemp rope drifted across the river. Under the control of the helmsman and oarsmen, the ferryboat angled diagonally toward the far bank.

Liu Chengzong could not see the ferryboat. His eyes were locked dead on the camp on the far bank. Time slipped away in the river's roar.

A soldier came running to report: "Grand Marshal, the ferryboat has set sail."

Almost at the same moment the soldier reported, Liu Chengzong heard a distant thud. The sound was very faint, but it carried far in the night.

The ferryboat had struck a rock. The soldiers on board were thrown off balance, and some fell into the water, but no one dared make a sound. Their eyes stared dead ahead at the blurry campfires not far away.

No reaction. The oarsmen hauled the fallen soldiers out of the water. The seasoned helmsman checked the ferryboat — a crack had been gouged into the hull. The men on board hurriedly poled away from the reef. Water seeped steadily into the boat. Using the rope they had paid out, the soldiers at the stern reported the distance to the far bank, step by step, closer and closer.

Not long after, another soft sound.

To Liu Chengzong's ears, this sound was even smaller and fainter than the last, but it made him even more worried — because the ferryboat was even closer to the far bank now.

In truth, the soldiers had already reached the far bank.

That soft sound was a thunderclap to the soldiers on the boat. Their ferryboat had struck, at an angle, the wooden stakes the Lincong army had driven into the bank. The hull was punctured through.

Those stakes were there for exactly this purpose. They could not stop boats from crossing the river, but they could ensure that any boat that crossed the river was wrecked on arrival.

In their view, completely preventing the enemy from crossing the river was wishful thinking. But with the iron-chain bridge and the stakes on the bank, they could limit the number of enemies who crossed to the greatest extent possible. As long as the numbers were small, they would hold an absolute advantage in troop strength.

After all, in this world, desperados like Luo Rucai who would force a swim across were few.

Traveling light, the Lion soldiers clutched the rope and carefully entered the river, using their arms and legs to feel for the stakes beneath them. At last, their feet touched the sandy shore. They suppressed cries of startled joy.

Twenty soldiers, holding their clothes and weapons above their heads, waded through the river and onto the bank. The night wind hit them, and every man shivered uncontrollably from the cold. They hurriedly dried themselves, dressed, and together dragged the rope — now heavy with water — toward the bank, searching for a suitable tree stump.

Soon, a suspended cableway and a water-level rope were fixed across the Jinsha River.

On the bank, large numbers of soldiers leaped into the water, clutching the rope as the surging current pushed them diagonally toward the far bank.

Pack after pack of weapons and armor slid down from the hilltop through the air, delivered to the far bank the same way.

At that very moment, Liu Chengzong saw, in the camp on the far bank, a unit marching with torches — like a serpent of fire, winding down from the hill.

"Go tell Wang Wenxiu — the fight for the iron-chain bridge is about to begin."