Chapter 389: A Fine Place

On the third day of the sixth month, the midday sun blazed fiercely.

Inside the great Khoshut camp in the Mangla River Valley, Baatur Khong Tayiji of the Dzungar tribe tossed aside his reins and strode into the encampment, his personal guards in lamellar armor and carrying firelocks on their backs following behind.

The Khoshut tribesmen were resting and regrouping. Bare-chested and barefoot, they stood in the sand, silently and reservedly polishing armor plates and blades, or drawing notched wooden arrow tips again and again along arrow shafts.

Baatur Khong Tayiji walked toward the domed felt tent at the very center of the tribe. He saw a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a rat-tail queue tied to a wooden post.

The man had been stripped, revealing a body covered in the scars of many battles. Tall and powerfully built, he wore only a thin pair of undershorts to cover himself. His brows were tightly knit, his gaze razor-sharp — like a wild beast of the desert.

Baatur Khong Tayiji raised his head to look at the golden-glimmering snowy peaks of the mountains to the east, and let out a soft laugh as he stood before the felt tent.

The Khoshut's Güüshi Khan emerged from the felt tent. The two Oirat leaders embraced warmly, then parted. Only then did Baatur Khong Tayiji say, "This truly is a fine place."

The Mangla River Valley was indeed a fine place.

It lay at the southern edge of the Muge Sands desert, south of the Guide Battalion. The Mangla River, rising from the snowy mountains to the east, flowed westward, carving a river valley through the desert like a ribbon of silver, until it merged into the Yellow River further west — forming a peculiar natural landscape.

The river valley cut through the endless golden dunes and allowed lush, verdant forests to grow on its southern bank. The river lay so low that whether one stood in the forest or on the desert, the hidden valley below remained invisible.

Güüshi Khan smiled and invited the Dzungar Khong Tayiji into the tent, saying, "This was once the royal camp of the Tuyuhun. It is indeed a fine place… What brings the Khong Tayiji here?"

Once inside the tent, Baatur Khong Tayiji removed his round, tassel-beaded hat, tapped it in his hand, and let out a heavy breath through his nose. Only then did his expression turn solemn. "It is just as you foresaw. The Marshal's Office has mobilized its troops."

A subtle change flickered across Güüshi Khan's expression. "From the east?"

Ever since the Oirat pursued the Chahar here and Ligdan Khan fled into Eight Corner City, Güüshi Khan had judged that war between the Oirat alliance and the Marshal's Office was unavoidable.

Even sending envoys to offer tribute or arranging marriages to cultivate goodwill could only delay the outbreak of war — it could not prevent it.

Güüshi Khan had tried to avoid war. To seize the vast lands of Qinghai beyond Hehuang without shedding blood was, of course, the best possible outcome for the Khoshut tribe.

It was not that Güüshi Khan was greedy. In the course of pursuing Ligdan Khan, he had practically circled the entirety of Qinghai. The Marshal's Office had shown no sign of developing or utilizing the lands beyond the few passes at Qinghai Lake.

This place was practically uninhabited.

And on that basis, he could make many concessions — for example, becoming a tax farmer for the Marshal's Office in Qinghai, providing two or three thousand men for military service, or arranging marriages and paying tribute.

If necessary, he was even willing to call Liu Chengzong "adoptive father."

As long as he retained the reality of an independent vassal state, face meant nothing at all.

Liu Chengzong was a Han man, and the backbone of the Marshal's Office was also made up of Han men who had defected from the Great Ming. Sooner or later, they would fight their way back to the Central Plains. In Güüshi Khan's mind, Qinghai was not that important to Liu Chengzong.

But the envoys he sent never received a direct response from Liu Chengzong… This meant the Marshal's Office had no intention of negotiating with him at all.

On the other hand, the Oirat alliance's provisions were running so low they could no longer support a five-thousand-li march back to the Tianshan Mountains.

Yet the Oirat scouts could not penetrate the Marshal's Office's territory.

In truth, it was simply Güüshi Khan's bad luck. One would think Mongols blending in west of Xining would be easy, but what identity did the Oirat scouts have to disguise themselves as? They just had to disguise themselves as merchants.

Before the scouts could even board the carts and boats at Qinghai Lake, they were suspected of smuggling for lacking post-station travel permits. Then, when Western Region tapestries were discovered on them, the charge of smuggling was confirmed.

The Oirat scouts dared not admit they were scouts — so they confessed to the crime of smuggling.

As it turned out, if you don't understand the law, you absolutely must not break it.

In the two counties of Haixi and Haibei, there was no intelligence worth spying on, so being a scout was a crime whose punishment depended on luck.

Usually, it meant a month or so in jail. With good luck, if there was a labor shortage, you might be released the next day to herd lambs and dig ore. If you worked well, you'd be sent to reclaim wasteland, and once it was cleared, you'd get a plot. The next year, once you were on the household registry, you'd be considered a commoner.

Even with bad luck, locked up for three to five months, you'd be fine once the war ended. That's how it was with the scouts of Choktu Khong Tayiji before — after two months in jail, by the time they got out, Choktu Khong Tayiji's first seventh-day memorial rites had already been burned. They could go straight to sweeping their leader's grave.

Smuggling, however, was different — that was a crime whose punishment depended on skill.

Anyone who dared block the Grand Marshal's path to wealth was shot dead on the spot. If your skill was good enough, you could strive to be reborn into a rich and noble family in the next life.

To the Marshal's Office, this was a trivial matter almost no one knew about. But in Güüshi Khan's eyes, it was an omen that the Marshal's Office was preparing to march south.

If they weren't transporting supplies and preparing for war, who would seal the passes and defenses so tightly that not even a bird could fly in?

By a strange twist of fate, though Güüshi Khan's speculation was built on faulty information, he arrived at the correct conclusion — a full month before Liu Chengzong set out, he had already predicted that the Marshal's Office's army would campaign south.

It was also based on this speculation that, even though the utterly spent Ligdan Khan was hiding right in Eight Corner City, Güüshi Khan dared not immediately assault the city after a grueling three-thousand-li pursuit. Instead, he consulted with the leaders of the four tribes and agreed to rest the troops and await battle.

They dispersed their tribesmen across the vast Heka Grasslands and the Yellow River's southern bend, keeping the flanks light and the center heavy. Each tribe garrisoned key positions, strictly guarding against a southern offensive by the Marshal's Office.

In fact, at this very moment, the main forces mustered by both sides were only two hundred li apart in a straight line. But with the Yellow River and the Muge Sands desert between them, neither side knew the other's location.

Liu Chengzong's mobilization was within Güüshi Khan's expectations. But that the troops would come from the east, and that the Dzungar tribe would be the first to learn of it — that, Güüshi Khan had not anticipated.

Because the Dzungar tribe's defensive zone was in the east, guarding the mountain pass leading out from the Guide Battalion. That was not a good choice for an offensive. The moment one emerged from that pass, Oirat forces would be waiting to both the west and the east.

Attacking from there was a guaranteed beating, plain and simple.

"They didn't break through." Baatur Khong Tayiji's expression was relaxed. "The Guide Battalion commander marched out — seems his surname is also Borjigin. One of my lesser princes led the troops and fought them for a spell. Both sides gave as good as they got, and they pulled back. But they are reinforcing."

The Oirat feudal lords were divided into greater princes and lesser princes. The greater princes were, naturally, the Khans and Khong Tayijis. Each greater prince had his own ulus — that is, a fief or a body of tribesmen.

The leaders of these fiefs were all nobles, the noyans. These ulus were further divided into smaller ulus, each led by a jaisang, forming the tribe's administrative structure.

"They didn't break through?"

Güüshi Khan furrowed his brow. This didn't feel like a deliberate attempt to start a major war — more like a small-scale clash caused by an accident. He murmured to himself, "I thought they would attack from the northwest, from that mountain pass guarding the salt lake."

After a brief moment of bewilderment, Güüshi Khan collected himself. He sat down with Baatur Khong Tayiji beside the tea cauldron, poured a bowl of hot tea, pushed it over, and asked, "Their troops — how are they?"

Baatur Khong Tayiji thought for a moment, then said, "Lots of armor, high morale. Their infantry formations are very tough in a fight."

"Almost every man has a helmet, and probably every man wears armor, but the workmanship is poor. Some of the armor can be pierced right through by a heavy arrow. But they fight fiercely — a few squads fought to the death without retreating. And they have this tradition… of cutting off heads."

At these words, suspicion stirred in Güüshi Khan's heart.

Güüshi Khan had defeated remnants and stragglers from Choktu's forces under his command, and he had specifically inquired about the Marshal's Office. From what he knew, Liu Chengzong's army did not cut off heads.

The ones who cut off heads should be the Ming army.

But this Guide Battalion was indeed a battalion under the Marshal's Office's jurisdiction.

In Güüshi Khan's mind, the Marshal's Office troops encountered by the Dzungar tribe were likely a unit of the Great Ming's official army that had surrendered to Liu Chengzong, which was why they still had such a habit.

He asked, "What about their firearms?"

"They had one cannon, and a lot of firelocks. Some worked well, some didn't — a real mixed bag."

At the words "mixed bag," Baatur Khong Tayiji couldn't help but raise a hand to touch his nose. He felt a bit sheepish saying that.

It would be hard to find a more motley firearm unit in this world than the Dzungar tribe's current firelock corps.

They had large numbers of self-made firearms of wildly varying specifications, a small number of foreign-purchased firearms from several countries, and a small number of captured firearms from different places of origin.

In the long war against the Tsarist Russian expeditionary forces, the Dzungar tribe had captured several hundred firearms, and not a single one of those firearms was identical to another.

Likewise, the Tatar blacksmiths conscripted by the Dzungar could not produce more than a few identical firearms either.

But the Guide military households that Batur encountered used firearms far more varied in type than the Dzungar's, and in chaotic melees they were very formidable, very terrifying.

There were a dozen or so musketeers with long-handled short firearms with a single tube, who formed a horizontal line at the mountain pass and fired in unison. The Dzungar infantry were just preparing to charge while they reloaded, but they never expected them to pull spearheads from their lower backs, fix them onto the firearms, and then actually level them and launch a charge.

There was a firearm with a disc and multiple tubes, which fired while rotating, and when close it used the small axe that braced the firearm to hack at people.

There were relatively normal firearms, arrayed in three horizontal ranks for rotating fire; there were also things that looked like normal firearms, but after firing they loaded small iron tubes from the rear and continued shooting — strange contraptions; and there were things that appeared to be firearms on the surface, but when close, if you reversed your grip and swung them, the firearm handle actually had a blade.

There were even people carrying cabinets and pushing carts onto the battlefield — the carts released a swarm of smoking arrows; the cabinets spewed fire over a dozen paces, and once it clung to the body it kept burning.

A heap of bizarre-looking things, and when the fighting started they truly gave the Dzungar tribe's army a fright.

However, despite the terrifying display, the actual results on both sides were about the same.

The Guide military households had an enormous advantage in small-scale chaotic mountain warfare, but once the Dzungar tribe's army withdrew beyond the mountains and formed a camel-wall firearm formation on flat ground, they were at a complete loss.

None of those strange things had very long range, and their power was all designed for hitting people. They were not adept at dealing with camels draped in animal hides and bedding, and when they drew near they would be suppressed by the Dzungar firearms.

After several exchanges, not only did they fail to expand their gains, but because the trees on the mountain path behind them were set alight by the oil cabinets, they retreated in panic, leaving behind quite a few corpses.

As for why Batur was deeply impressed by the Guide military households' head-chopping behavior, it was mainly because this bunch was utterly fanatical about taking heads as trophies. Not a single dead man could keep his own head, and the gruesome sight left many of the Dzungar soldiers who participated in the battle with psychological scars.

Batur Khong Tayiji thought for a moment, searched his mind for opponents, and gave this enemy force an assessment: "Compared to Yangir's followers, their melee fighting is stronger, their field battle slightly weaker."

Yangir was the Kazakh Khan. The Kazakh Khanate was a very good reference point for the Oirat, because the war between them had already lasted a hundred years.

The Kazakh Khanate was an old and powerful tribe in the Transoxiana region. At one point they had mobilized a hundred thousand troops to occupy Aqsu, Andijan, Tashkent, Samarkand, and other places, and for most of the century-long war with the Oirat they held the upper hand.

As for the time in the sixth year of the Longqing reign, when Altan Khan's capable assistant, the Ordos tribe's Sechen Khong Tayiji, made a long-range expedition to Suyab and beat the Kazakh Khan to a pulp — and when the Khan, refusing to accept defeat, pursued them, only for Sechen Khong Tayiji to lead seven hundred men and win a fantastical, overwhelming victory — that was an anomaly in the long course of history.

As soon as he heard Batur Khong Tayiji assess that the Marshal Manor army was weaker than the Kazakh in field battle, the State Preceptor Khan slowly nodded: "We can lure them into attacking us."

After saying this, the State Preceptor Khan decided to summon the nobles of the various tribes to the Mangla River for a council.

The moment he made this decision, he said to Batur Khong Tayiji: "We will go west and fight them on the Heka Grasslands, but the Dzungar tribe will go over later."

Batur Khong Tayiji asked: "Why?"

The State Preceptor Khan raised his hand and pointed east: "In the mountain city there is a Great Khan, who must have been stifled unbearably by now. If the Marshal Manor army marches south, he will most likely come out of the city, and we will need the Khong Tayiji to ambush him for a while."

In his heart, Khong Tayiji had no objection to such an arrangement. Leading troops to ambush Ligdan Khan was far simpler than fighting those Marshal Manor soldiers with their bizarre-looking weapons.

However, he did not agree immediately. Instead, he asked: "Who is that man tied to the post outside the tent?"

"A Chahar scout, a Han from Tumut."

"A Han? I thought he was an Oirat."

At the mention of the captive tied up outside the tent, the State Preceptor Khan revealed a complex expression, as if he wanted to laugh but could not: "I also thought he was an Oirat."

That scout's disguise was too perfect. He had an Oirat hairstyle, spoke fluent Mongolian dialect, had a full set of Oirat cavalry equipment, and even the small ornaments on his queue were indistinguishable from the real thing.

Even the reason he was discovered was because his disguise was too perfect, too professional.

Among a group of Oirat soldiers who had been on campaign for half a year, every man's head had grown half an inch or even an inch of hair — and then someone with a clean-shaven pate slipped in among them.

Among a group of Oirat warriors resting in the blazing summer, all stripped to the waist and barefoot, there appeared a man in full armor, drenched in sweat.

Among a group of Oirat men generally around five chi two or three cun tall and weighing one hundred twenty or thirty jin, there appeared a burly man five chi five cun tall, covered in fat wrapped around muscle, looking at least one hundred sixty jin.

Especially the language — language was the biggest flaw.

What is Oirat?

The cost of communication among the Oirat was enormous. Mongolian was not the sole language. Not to mention now, with warriors from four great tribes gathered together, even within a single great tribe, it was difficult for people to communicate smoothly.

In the Dzungar tribe alone, there were Kazakh followers speaking Turkic dialects, Western Region Muslims teaching the Mongols firearms and cannons, Western Tibetan monks and warrior-monks preaching to everyone, and even Cossacks who had been captured and recruited.

All sorts of people living together for a long time — their languages had long since mixed together.

This was the Oirat's darkest era.

Due to years of constant warfare, even great nobles lived in constant peril, and lesser nobles found it even harder to accumulate wealth. People possessing knowledge had nearly vanished entirely in the wars.

Not to mention herders — even princes and nobles were, for the most part, illiterate.

This did not disrupt the tribe's daily life, but the impact was extraordinarily far-reaching. Their language grew increasingly chaotic, which further caused their writing system to fail.

And the result of the writing system's failure was that their history and epics, their culture and knowledge, were dying out.

People often spoke Mongolian interspersed with Turkic dialects, suddenly borrowing a couple of words from the Muslims, mixed with Western Tibetan terms learned from the monks, and in the course of any conversation there were bound to be three or five local dialect words that absolutely no one else could understand.

"You speak, I guess" was a normal and common method of communication.

At this critical juncture, suddenly there appeared a master of the Southern Desert dialect, fully armed in sweltering heat, maintaining impeccable appearance and bearing, exceptionally tall and strong?

This physical condition, this store of knowledge, this discipline — no matter how you looked at it, he did not seem like an Oirat, not even like a Chahar.

The State Preceptor Khan was still half-skeptical about whether this man was really from Tumut.

But Batur Khong Tayiji did not care about the man's origins. He merely asked: "Is he literate?"

"He says his name is Dai Daozi. He knows Han writing, and can write it too."

With a clap, Khong Tayiji applauded and said: "Give this man to me, and I will go ambush the Chahar Khan."

He wanted to create a new writing system, a script that belonged to the Oirat, that belonged to the Dzungar!