Chapter 313: A Battle of Wits with the Air

A cold rain sent the temperature plunging.

The command tent was pitched on a twenty-foot-high earthen mound. Liu Chengzong threw on an oiled rain cape and walked into the curtain of rain, raising his telescope to look north.

He knew the enemy might have cannon, but in weather like this the chances of them dragging guns here just to bombard him were slim. What worried him more was that if this rain kept up, the earthen mound itself might collapse.

Through the fogged lens, the distant Mongol army was advancing from the north in several columns — cavalry in the middle of the river valley, infantry on the slopes to either side, winding their way forward. At the very front of the formation rode several men on white horses; the general among them wore scale armor. If it weren't raining, he'd probably look quite dashing.

Amid the army were supplies hauled by yaks — massive timbers, felt tents, and the like — and also a mobile felt-tent wagon pulled by at least twelve yaks. Liu Chengzong took a liking to that rig at first glance.

Dai Daozi's reconnaissance riders still kept a one-li distance from the enemy vanguard. Pressed by the advancing host, they fell back slowly and soon crossed the trench line.

By now the battlefield could no longer be concealed. Through his telescope Liu Chengzong saw Mongol soldiers carrying signal flags scrambling up the hillsides on both banks of the river valley in the rain, reporting intelligence on the front lines to the army below.

He could see the enemy, and the enemy could see him.

The Khalkha host bore down with overwhelming momentum. The army stretched beyond sight, making it impossible for Liu Chengzong to estimate their numbers — he only knew they outnumbered his own. He looked down at the foot of the earthen mound, where his troops had already formed up into three battle lines.

The left wing consisted of twelve mixed light-and-heavy noble cavalry companies. Every man wore armor, mostly chainmail with or without a heart-protector mirror; heavy lamellar armor and four-mirror armor were rarer. Depending on the great nobles' ability to rally men, each company varied in strength, roughly between one hundred and three hundred riders, for a total force of nearly two thousand.

The center was A Liu's eight hundred veterans. Their equipment was no different from Ming troops, though they had no firearms, relying mainly on heavy five-brace crossbows. Basang's sixteen hundred light infantry had been broken up and distributed among them as foot archers and spearmen to supplement their strength.

The right wing was six hundred heavy infantry from West of the Long River under Wa Si. They had the best equipment — by chieftain standards, armed nearly to the teeth — and were positioned near the hillside, the terrain they were most accustomed to. The right wing was also the thinnest part of the formation.

Liu Chengzong had deliberately arranged this left-heavy, right-thin formation so that the Lion Cavalry could pass through the right formation quickly.

Zhang Tianlin and Gao Yingdeng's eighteen hundred cavalry were held in reserve behind the lines, unmoving.

Most of Huang Shengxiao's gun and cannon troops were huddled under crude shelters at the second trench line because of the weather. Only a hundred gunners had brought their lynx-muzzle cannons forward, mixed into the front lines. They had rigged makeshift covers for the lynx-muzzles and could fire one volley of canister shot.

According to plan, they would fall back after firing. If things went badly, they had also undergone infantry and cavalry training at Juer Bay — they wouldn't flinch at drawing blades and joining the fight.

This was Huang Shengxiao's demand. The man had first distinguished himself under Liu Chengzong by firing a cannon in the rain; now he had seized on his old specialty.

At the sight of the Mongol army's ferocious advance, a brief disturbance rippled through the left wing and center. Zhang Tianlin, standing with him on the earthen mound observing the battlefield, narrowed his eyes and said, "Commander, the tribal troops may not be able to beat the Tartars. Down south they couldn't even handle Xie Erhu. Put them in the front line and send them out first, and I fear they'll collapse outright."

"They won't. Once the cannons fire, their fear will vanish." Liu Chengzong answered with full confidence, then asked a completely unrelated question: "General Zhang, do you know what the deadliest blade in the world is?"

Zhang Tianlin thought to himself, the tribesmen aren't even good at making blades, and even if tribal blades were good, the tribesmen under them didn't have that many blades. He shook his head. "I don't."

"The bayonet. The bayonet is the deadliest. It can defeat every sword and saber, and it can overcome the spear."

Liu Chengzong gazed at the distant battle formation. Rain mixed with sleet pelted his oiled cape — pi-li-pa-la.

He spoke in fits and starts: "Not because the bayonet's forging is exquisite, but because it's fixed on a gun."

With that, he turned his head and said, "We are the gun; they are the blade. If the Mongols stand with us, the Mongols will slaughter the tribesmen till blood runs in rivers. If the Western Tribesmen stand with us, the Western Tribesmen will beat the Tartars till they piss their pants and shit themselves... The one who can fight isn't Xie Erhu — it's us."

A bayonet is of course no match for a spear — it's not even as good as a proper single-handed blade. But fixed on a musket, the musket's performance makes it invincible under heaven.

Liu Chengzong believed fifty small cannons could bring the approaching Khalkha cavalry a little surprise.

In the end, though, the first surprise did not come from the small cannons.

The Mongol main force halted three hundred paces north of the first trench line. A Mongol thousand-man unit continued pushing forward, accelerating, fanning out toward both flanks... Perhaps because of the rain's effect on visibility, they only discovered the trench when they were a few paces away.

The unit commander immediately veered around to the flanks, but two horses had ideas of their own. Under Liu Chengzong's gaze, they plunged headfirst into the ditch, riders and all.

Laughter from his own troops surged like a landslide and tsunami. The enemy commander at the front flew into a rage, driving yaks to drag massive timbers forward, while sending flanking skirmishers and herdsman infantry to probe along the trench line on both sides, searching for a breach.

The reconnaissance riders who had withdrawn to the main camp also sallied forth again under Dai Daozi's command, clashing with Mongol scouts on the flanking hillside — only this time the weapons they used were bows and arrows.

As a result, their advantage was no longer so great.

The Khalkha's Ahai Daicing and Güyang stood side by side on a herder's cart. Ahai Daicing raised a hand, pointing at the reconnaissance riders, and said, "Rainy day. Fight for half a shichen and even the bows will be waterlogged and useless. I've prepared a treasure for them — we'll smash them to death."

Bald Qiang was feeling quite proud and wasn't the least bit angry at the sight of the trench.

Because he had mastered a technique rare among Mongols: building counterweight trebuchets.

This was an extremely outdated technology. Mastering it was simple enough, but you had to be genuinely interested in these things... because it was useless.

It was useless in Khalkha, and useless outside Khalkha — short range, heavy weight, hard to assemble and move quickly.

Whether in internal feuds with other Mongol forces, or in struggles against the Ming army or the Later Jin, it was useless. Mongol armies moved too fast; the Ming had cannons; the Later Jin both moved fast and had cannons.

But on a rainy day, this old craft found its use.

Fifty stone projectiles, each weighing six liang, could be hurled by the trebuchet to a range of one hundred fifty paces with the aid of counterweights. Supplemented by cavalry charges, what did the Han army without cannons have to fight him with?

Not to mention that there were actually trenches here!

At this moment, the two front lines were separated only by the hundred-pace gap between the two trench lines. Apart from the reconnaissance riders and scouts, both sides tacitly refrained from shooting arrows, because their bows and arrows were still in their cases — they wouldn't be taken out and strung until the real fighting began.

Liu Chengzong watched the yaks drag the great timbers to the front line. Those timbers were lifted and raised upright by men — not to fill the trench or build bridges, but seemingly to assemble something.

Then Liu Chengzong's eyes went wide. Cursing under his breath, he shooed Zhang Tianlin and his guards away: "Go, go, go — everyone but the standard-bearer get down. I'll be fine standing here. What's wrong with these Tartars? Trebuchets? Call Little Huang up here."

Ahai Daicing's two counterweight trebuchets were slowly but steadily being assembled before the first trench line.

These two things caused immense turmoil at the front. Several times the noble cavalry companies wanted to lead their men across the trench to assault the stone throwers, but none dared face the massed Mongol cavalry alone. One after another, the company commanders anxiously turned to look back at the earthen mound.

Thankfully, their commander still stood atop the earthen mound.

Huang Shengxiao ran up the mound from the gunner shelters. Liu Chengzong pointed at the trebuchets at the front and asked, "Can you reach them?"

He was somewhat fuming inside. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that the two trench lines he had dug would instead become a formidable barrier protecting the Tartars' trebuchets.

He couldn't blame Old Qijia for careless scouting either — gathering intelligence across a snow-capped mountain range demanded too much, and besides, Old Qijia had probably never even seen such a thing.

In truth, even Liu Chengzong was seeing a counterweight trebuchet for the first time. If he hadn't seen diagrams in books, he wouldn't have recognized the contraption at all.

Huang Shengxiao looked as if facing a formidable foe. Rain greatly affected gunpowder weapons, but it had no effect whatsoever on a gravity trebuchet like this.

He shook his head. "Commander, I don't know. The range is enough, but in the rain we can't see clearly — it'll be very hard to aim. And our guns can only kill men; they can't dismantle the stone throwers."

"Fire first, talk later. If we can't dismantle the throwers, then kill all the men."

As soon as Liu Chengzong's words fell, the standard-bearer guards swiftly relayed the order. Then a wave of shouted commands rose and fell inside the gunner shelters. The soldiers carrying firearms shifted positions and set up their weapons. Fifty heavy muskets were organized into five squads, aiming at the enemy troops assembling the trebuchets before the trench.

The Mongol cavalry were still parading around the two trebuchets in front of the trench, flaunting their might. They were thoroughly enjoying the terror the trebuchets inflicted on the enemy.

Two twenty-foot-tall tripods had already been erected. Herdsman soldiers standing on the side ladders shouted downward. Ropes were fitted to one end of the throwing arm, while the short arm on the other end suspended a stone chest filled with heavy counterweight rocks.

Four soldiers hauled on the ropes. One man on each side of the stone thrower turned a windlass, pulling the projectile end of the throwing arm down. An egg-shaped stone was loaded into the thick leather sling. The long throwing arm was locked in place on the frame by a trigger hook. The soldier on the ladder shouted that preparations were complete.

With a single command from the Mongol officer at the front, the trigger hook was struck open. In that instant — a hum — the heavy counterweight at the front end of the arm, long held in check, plummeted, dragging the entire throwing arm through a half-circle in the air. At the arm's highest point, the slipknot on one end of the sling released from the arm, and the hundred-plus stones within the sling shot forward in a violent burst.

Stone projectiles weighing nearly half a jin came whistling and humming through the wind and rain. Almost simultaneously, panic swept the entire front line of Liu Chengzong's formation. Men shouted in every tongue to raise shields. In that moment, those with shields raised them, those without crouched down — no one dared look straight at the sky full of flying stones.

But the flying stones would come crashing down sooner or later.

In moments, the two trebuchets hurled stones one after another. Over a hundred shot pellets arced through the air. Most of the roughly half-jin pellets landed in the second trench and on open ground, but twenty or thirty still smashed into the central army where the Tibetan nobles and A'liu Basang were stationed, sending soldiers wailing for their parents and scrambling away clutching their heads.

Those without shields were knocked flat on their backs; even those with shields were smashed to the ground. Some were struck on the head without a helmet and knocked out cold on the spot.

The first to react was A'liu, who immediately ordered his veterans to set up over a hundred heavy crossbows in front of the formation and loose a volley of bolts toward the trebuchets.

His heavy crossbows could reach that far, but at that distance the bolts carried little power.

The Kangning light troops mixed in with them also strung their tribal bows and poured out a shower of arrows, only to be stopped at once — their bows were weak and even less powerful; it was useless except to waste arrows... no, not waste arrows, because their arrows often had no fletching.

Under normal circumstances, they would have already broken by now.

The enemy can hit me, but I can't hit the enemy — if I don't run, am I supposed to stay here and get pounded?

But just then, a thunderous roar erupted from the gunner sheds behind the formation. The ten great barrels protruding from the sheds belched a cloud of smoke, and ten two-and-a-half-ounce lead lumps answered the summons of siege engines from four hundred years ago.

The Mongol general on his white horse was still craning his neck to admire the sight of flying stones sending enemy soldiers scrambling, when in the next instant a plume of smoke rose in the distant rain curtain, and a whoosh flashed past his ear.

He whipped his head around. The row of soldiers lined up beside him were all staring dumbly down at their abdomens, collapsing one after another. Blood mixed into the mud, and the pain left them too weak even to cry out.

The last soldier raised an arm that was half gone, a shattered round shield still hanging from it, blood seeping from every part of his chest leather armor. Then he let out a heart-rending scream.

"This..."

The white-horse general had not yet recovered from the sudden shock, his mind full of one thought: What was that?

Another flash of fire in the distance. He spun his head around quickly — the first puff of smoke had just been dispersed by the rain, and now another cloud rose there. Again, whooshing sounds swept across the battlefield.

This time, the enemy's attack was exceptionally clear in his eyes. Some things struck the trebuchets, embedding like pegs driven into wood. Other things skimmed past the frontline formation and tore up a huge patch of turf behind it, sending clods of wet earth and mud flying everywhere.

Still other things struck his soldiers. Wherever they passed, there was only the sound of tearing cloth and splintering wood. Whether the leather armor was studded with iron or the shield had an iron core no longer mattered.

So long as they stood in a line, shields, armor, warhorses, soldiers — all were punched straight through. Sometimes even more than one line, for the lead lumps that shattered against hard objects still flew apart and killed.

Lightning streaked across the sky. In the instant he blinked, he saw a cavalry captain raising his saber, which gleamed with the lightning's light, trying to stem his soldiers' rout.

A lead lump struck the saber. The blade shattered into three pieces from the middle. The lead shot was sliced in two — one half flew off to who knows where, the other half plowed into a warhorse's neck, throwing the captain and trampling two infantrymen as it bolted.

The front line was already in chaos. Out of the corner of his eye, another cloud of smoke rose, the sound mingling with the distant rolling thunder.

All kinds of noise crashed into the white-horse general's ears. His mind was a mess, his warhorse panicked beneath him. For a moment, he could care about nothing else. He simply turned his horse and fled back.

The thousand-man unit gathered around the trebuchets fled at once. Even the great army formation behind them was stirred to restlessness by their routing soldiers. At the same time, the Kangning nobles who made up the main force also collapsed.

For a motley mob, charging and retreating are both just forms of collapse. No order had come from the earthen hill, yet no one knows who started it — the noble cavalry units advanced one after another, leveling their lances and galloping forward.

The baffled A'liu central army followed suit, raising their banners and crossing the trenches in formation.

Liu Chengzong was dumbfounded. Thirty lead balls routing a thousand-man unit was within his expectations.

But he never imagined that this thousand-man unit would turn around and charge straight into their own position — and actually succeed in stirring them up, sweeping men along as they fled northwest.

Even more unimaginable was that the Western Tibetan nobles under his command would charge out like wild boars that had never won a battle in their lives.

He had originally intended to lead the cavalry to rein in the central army. After all, communication mostly fails in rainy weather, but what if the enemy was feigning defeat? With over ten thousand enemy troops halted behind them, just charge in like that?

But in a flash, he considered the matchup dynamics between Western Tibetans and Mongols in this era.

Perhaps charging along and turning a feigned defeat into a real rout was the correct way to wage war.

All this digging trenches, building earthen hills, two-pronged encirclement, slow and steady advance — that was just outsmarting the air.

In the end, he folded his arms on the earthen hill, sighed, glanced toward the snowy mountains to the north, and said with great disappointment: "Forget it, forget it. Have Gao Yingdeng protect the central army's flank and just follow them forward. The hell with encirclement!"

"Zhang Tianlin stays put. If it is a feigned defeat, at least we'll still have a battle line." Liu Chengzong said, then raised his telescope for another look. "Looks like we've won."