Chapter 319: Fortune

The Ulan Mountains are a paradise within the great and small Choudan deserts.

Thirty li to its west lies Keke Salt Lake; to the south are Maoniu Mountain, Dulan Lake, and the Great Wetlands; to the north stands the thickly forested Harihatu Mountain; and to the east, a hundred and forty li of mountain road leads to Chaka Salt Pool.

The region has both vast woodlands suited for grazing and large tracts of irrigable land that can be farmed.

The Mongol men pitched an enormous, unbroken camp at the foot of the mountain and built a city.

The city was built very simply: the walls, wider at the base and narrowing toward the top, stand one zhang high and form a perfect square; the wall base is six chi wide, the top of the wall is four chi wide, with a one-chi-thick parapet.

The walls are very low and narrow, and apart from a water-diverting moat, no other defensive works were built — yet that was already enough to make Arslan proud... This was a city built under his direction, a city!

In all the vast Mongol lands, those who have directed the building of a city can be counted on one hand; starting from this Ulan City, he, Arslan, must now be counted among them.

At this very moment, Arslan stood below the Ulan Mountains, gazing at this rammed-earth city, his heart nearly floating up to the heavens: the army of ten thousand his father had left behind gave him the uncanny feeling of being a Great Khan.

Arslan had never thought of himself as a chieftain.

In the past, among the Khalkha, his elders were the chieftains of the various Khalkha tribes; his father was merely one of many nobles, and as for himself, he was nothing special among those many noble warriors.

Even after they reached the borders of Gansu, with his father as chieftain, he considered himself only one of the several dozen commanders of a thousand in this Mongol army.

Even though he held troops under his command, he did not see himself as a chieftain... Traditional nomadic tribal life is not made up of warriors alone, yet all they had were exhausted, hungry warriors fleeing east and west.

Only at Ulan Mountain did that change.

Not long after Choktu Taiji launched his eastern campaign, countless Mongols came from south of the Gobi to join the Mongol heroes who had fought their way into Qinghai — not to join Choktu, but to join him, Arslan.

These newly arrived Mongols came from the right-wing Tumed, Yongshiebu, and Ordos; they were the losers of Ligdan Khan's western conquest.

When the war ended, they lost their homelands and pasturelands along the frontier, and following the messengers Choktu Taiji had sent to search for Ligdan Khan, they retraced the route all the way to Qinghai.

Arslan had considered not accepting them.

The vast majority of these people were not warriors — the strong and capable had either died or surrendered in the war, and more than half of the old and weak had perished in last spring's early frost; those who survived were mostly broken soldiers, defeated troops, women, and children, and they posed no threat.

In the month after they settled at Ulan Mountain, the place transformed with each passing day; they were no longer a defeated army of exiles from every corner of the land — now there were widely experienced elders and gentle, hardworking women, and even fine lads who could ride a young colt with skill.

On the June grasslands, beneath the junipers and green poplars, fields of rapeseed flowers bloomed brilliantly; the people who had been driven from pillar to post had at last found a place of refuge — around bonfires on the grasslands and in the forests they gave free rein to passion, and beneath the boundless night sky they dreamed of the future.

Amid the laughter and cheerful voices, Arslan found the feeling and the joy of being a chieftain.

People were grateful to him — the women and children were grateful for his generous breadth of spirit in providing a refuge for exiles; the warriors were grateful for his tolerant magnanimity in bringing wives and children to bachelors.

Someone told Arslan that he was a Borjigin, and that he could create a new Tumen — the Ulan Tribe.

It was like a flash of lightning across the sky — gone in an instant, yet it could kindle a raging blaze in the forest. Perhaps the speaker merely tossed it off in a moment of carefree pleasure, but it took root deep in Arslan's heart like an obsession.

He had a city, tens of thousands of tribespeople, farmland fit for cultivation, grasslands stretching beyond sight, inexhaustible salt lakes, ore mountains with enormous reserves, forests that could never be logged bare, and immensely powerful cannons.

Why could he not establish his own Tumen?

Only, every good thing has its downside — even as people grew more and more devoted to him, he had more than once noticed that his bravest and most battle-hardened warriors were growing slack.

The army chaplain said this was precisely the Buddha's will: a land they had dreamed of, and even women and children — they no longer needed to campaign east.

Arslan bowed before the Buddha statue and, with the utmost piety, said in his heart: Bullshit.

Born into the most illustrious family of the Khalkha, even though he himself was nothing special among his fellow nobles, he had nonetheless received an excellent education; he was no fool, and he did not buy this.

When they were eating the Gansu Grand Commandant's cannonballs in the desert beyond the Suzhou border, where was the Buddha's decree then?

But whether one believes it or not is unimportant, and whether people have a clear understanding of the doctrine and scriptures is also unimportant — what matters is identity.

The Mongol nobility set great store by the bloodline of the Golden Clan, but the Mongol tribespeople could not be united by blood, especially the Mongol tribespeople of Qinghai.

Ever since Altan Khan sent men to occupy the Kokonor region, this place had become like a losers' fair, gathering every tribe from the Tammachi Army of Central Asia to the Forest People of Lake Baikal.

Pick any two herders at random, and they might share the same grandfather — or they might be more distantly related by blood than the Chongzhen Emperor and Ligdan Khan.

From Emperor Shun of Yuan to Dayan Khan, the Mongol tribes had undergone repeated enfeoffments; the various tribes still used their old names, but their bloodlines were a complete mess — to say nothing of the fact that there had long been no powerful Great Khan capable of binding all the tribes together under the name "Mongol."

So what could maintain their identity? Religion.

The Mongols of this time were in an awkward position: they could not do without the identity that religion provided, but if they wanted to rely on it, they had no choice but to be drawn into the sectarian conflicts on the Snowy Mountains.

It was truly laughable, really — as a Mongol noble, Arslan probably wished more fervently than many U-Tsang nobles that the strife on the Snowy Mountains would quiet down.

Another iron cannon had been forged; Arslan gazed upon this divine weapon that belonged to him, his heart filled with boundless satisfaction.

The iron cannons made at Ulan Mountain were modeled on the bronze cannons the Oirats had captured from the Oros bandits, but Arslan could not copy them, because he was desperately short of copper.

Following the Ming people's line of thought — if you have no copper, just use cast-iron cannons.

Arslan would have liked to cast iron cannons... Never mind that cast-iron cannons are heavy and less durable than cast-bronze ones — by Ming standards the technique was very simple. When Liu Chengzong acquired two red-barbarian cannons in Shanxi, he kept only the bronze one and left the heavy iron cannon behind at Yan'an Guard.

Because the performance of cast-iron cannons is not particularly good; they have only one major advantage — they are cheap.

But looking across the world, the manufacturing process for cast-iron cannons was a first-tier technical challenge; even the maritime power Spain did not possess it — only a handful of countries had this technology.

During the Tianqi reign, Sweden's export of cast-iron cannons drew the attention of England, because before that, England had held a complete monopoly on cast-iron cannon exports in all of Europe.

For the Great Ming, this was a technology ready to be used at any time; for Arslan, it was a science that needed to be researched.

With a large pool of craftsmen and sufficient materials, Arslan could forge the finest curved sabers, the finest armor, the sharpest arrowheads, and could even hammer out a fine gun barrel — with ready-made fowling guns to copy, none of the various parts posed any technical difficulty.

But place a cast-iron cannon before him, and no matter how many Mongol craftsmen he was given, they could not replicate it.

However, if you cannot replicate it, you can take another path — in intelligence and ingenuity, people are not so far apart. Arslan's cannon was a wrought-iron cannon roughly the size of a crouching-tiger cannon; the bore was made from a hammered iron tube, and the outer layer, following the method used for Hami muskets, was wrapped layer by layer with wrought-iron strips — wrapped one way, then wrapped the other.

It was light and of excellent quality; apart from the high cost, excessively long production time, and relatively small caliber, it had virtually no drawbacks.

In over a month, he had mobilized many craftsmen, yet they had produced only five iron cannons and just over two hundred cannonballs.

The iron cannonballs were also hammered out by craftsmen, because they did not know how to cast iron. On the grasslands, only the Tumed Mongol craftsmen knew iron casting, but Arslan had not joined the eastern campaign, so he had no one under him who could cast iron.

Even so, because everyone who had fled from south or north of the Gobi to Ulan Mountain had extensive experience being shelled in various places, every iron cannon and every cannonball that was forged felt like a festival worth celebrating for the Mongol tribes.

However, on the day the fifth iron cannon was finished, Arslan had no time to celebrate before he received an urgent report from herders grazing in the eastern forest.

"Troops from the Han people's territory have crossed Chaka Salt Pool and built a wooden fort at the mountain pass!"

Arslan, eager to test the power of his cannons, had his galloping cavalry pour forth from outside Ulan City in a surging torrent, racing from the wetlands toward the forest.

Among the mountain paths they discovered the Han people building a mountain wooden fort with an outer palisade; seeing that the fort held only a few dozen defenders, they launched a siege without waiting for the cannons to arrive.

The siege went very smoothly — after taking several dozen heavy musket balls and losing several dozen soldiers, the Mongol army pitched camp at the foot of the solitary fort's mountain.

When Arslan reached the foot of the mountain and looked up at the wooden fort commanding the heights, he gave the herder-soldiers who had been hunting in the area a furious tongue-lashing.

The fort looked to have at most a hundred defenders. At that scale, building such a fort would take at least a month — and in a whole month they still hadn't learned that the Han army had cut the main road. Arslan considered this a dereliction of duty by the herders.

He was actually wronging the nearby hunting tribesmen. The fort had been built just three days ago, and the Mongols had discovered it on the second day of construction.

The wooden fort's commander was a Captain under Battalion Commander Zhong Hu. He had long since scouted the terrain for suitable fort-building sites, stockpiled timber to the east in advance, and requested three hundred men from Zhong Hu. Driving donkey carts, they made straight for the mountain pass and threw up the stockade overnight, allowing the main force to pull back.

His mission was to screen the enemy from probing intelligence to the east and buy two days' time, coordinating with Liu Chengzong's plan to notify Arslan.

This Captain had started as one of Liu Chengzong's personal guards and possessed superb archery. Defending the fort, he alone with two quivers of arrows, backed by a dozen or so Marshal's Residence heavy muskets, sealed off the mountain approach. When few came, he shot them; when many came, five or six heavy muskets fired a volley. The besieging Mongol troops simply could not assault their way up.

But the next day, once Arslan's iron cannons joined the fight, the situation changed.

To operate the five iron cannons, Arslan had specially formed a hundred-man cannon company. The selection criteria for cannoneers were extremely strict, and the rewards very generous — anyone chosen as a cannoneer was given a warhorse.

For Arslan, this was a move born of necessity. In terms of technical skill, any one of his ten-thousand-plus tribesmen was qualified to be a cannoneer.

Apart from the few craftsmen who had participated in test-firing, most people's understanding of cannon stood at the same starting line: they were all Mongol lads who had been shot at by cannon.

What hero galloping across the steppe hasn't dreamed that one day he too could blast others with cannon?

Under these circumstances, he couldn't just arbitrarily assign people as cannoneers — that wouldn't convince anyone. He had to set a threshold... but the threshold couldn't be too high either. Set it too high all at once — say, requiring prior hands-on experience with cannon — and over ten thousand men would be eliminated in one stroke.

Arslan racked his brains and finally devised two extremely stringent requirements, which had little to do with cannon itself yet could, under current conditions, maximize the cannon's effectiveness to the greatest extent possible.

The first: every candidate must have sustained a fatal wound in previous battles. The second: they must still be alive and kicking.

Luck. The selection criterion for cannoneers was luck.

From over two hundred paces away, a hundred or so Mongol soldiers hauled the five iron cannons up the mountain path. There was nothing you could call a cannon emplacement — the five iron cannons were simply lined up in a row facing the mountain fort.

Then several dozen monks pressed their palms together beside the cannons and brought out clay Bodhisattvas of solemn and precious aspect. Amid waves of Buddhist chants, the five cannons fired one after another. Boom—boom—the cannon reports echoed through the mountains, terrifying the soldiers on the wooden fort.

As the cannon fire was about to sound, the soldiers ducked their heads and shrank back, hastily taking cover behind the wooden palisade.

The most frightened was the Captain. As an officer, he had to stand ramrod straight with his upper body exposed above the palisade. His calves were trembling, yet he still had to glare with blazing eyes at the five cannons.

No one isn't afraid of cannon. The more seasoned a veteran who has seen a few major battles, the more he fears cannon.

Because the cannon of this era weren't explosive shells that could blast a man to pieces or kill him with concussion — they fired solid iron balls. Unless one punched straight through your chest or shattered your skull, a typical hit wouldn't send you straight to heaven, nor would it leave any chance for miraculous recovery. Odds were the battle would be over and you still wouldn't have breathed your last — a textbook case of a bad death.

The cannonade was thunderous. Beneath the brim of his helmet, the Captain's forehead broke out in a fine sweat. His eyes darted rapidly around the wooden fort. He was panicking inside — just now, staring wide-eyed, he had completely failed to see where the cannonballs landed!

His men, though, were perfectly fine. Every squad leader under him was loudly reporting no casualties. Instead, when he looked down the mountain, a large swath of the Mongol troops clustered near the cannons had pulled back, and some were even running up the mountain.

The Captain had already given the order to prepare for the enemy assault when he realized those Mongols climbing the mountain were just coming back up cradling the spent cannonballs.

The Captain was so furious he felt like hurling his helmet off and going down to fight them hand-to-hand... who the hell scares people like that?

Then came several more volleys. The soldiers garrisoning the wooden fort noticed something off about the enemy's cannon — they were finally starting to see the pattern.

The enemy had five cannons in total. Every time they fired, each cannon seemed to have a mind of its own — never did two cannonballs aim for the same spot. And when they did hit the wooden stockade, the Mongols looked even more anxious than when they missed.

Apparently, it was because after each shot, they had to send men to retrieve the cannonballs. If they were unlucky and a cannonball struck the stockade, embedding itself in the wooden palisade, they couldn't get the cannonball back.

The Lion soldiers defending the wooden fort lost even the interest to return fire. The Captain was happy to use the opportunity to train his soldiers' resistance to cannon bombardment. Pounded by five iron cannons from two hundred paces away, the men's expressions went from panic-stricken to utterly indifferent in the span of a single afternoon.

By evening, the Mongol troops gradually withdrew into the woods to rest. The Lion soldiers also burned the wooden stockade and retreated, leaving Arslan a captive and a letter before they went.

Arslan unfolded the letter and found a monk who understood Chinese to read it aloud: "Arslan, your father calls — no — Choktu Taiji commands you to immediately lead your troops with cannon and advance into Heka Grassland. Strike Liu Chengzong from east and west. Absolutely no delay. Signed..."

Having read the brief message, the monk seemed to question his own existence. He looked up at Arslan, looked down at the letter, blinked in confusion, then looked up at Arslan again: "Uh, this, this letter — the signature is Liu Chengzong. This is a letter written by Liu Chengzong."

"Ha!"

Arslan was utterly delighted. With a scoff, he glared at his attendants and said, "Does he take me for a fool? Forged military orders like this — does he think I'd actually believe them?"