Chapter 620: The Ordos Loop

At the foot of Muna Mountain, north of Ordos.

Gulusiqibu, chieftain of the Kharchin tribe, reined in his horse on the riverbank, gazing across the Yellow River at the Ordos Plateau on the southern shore.

This was the fifth day since they had begun their march from Jining. Gulusiqibu had taken first place in the march, covering two hundred li a day, the first to lead his troops around the Yin Mountains and reach the area north of Ordos.

It wasn't that Gulusiqibu had mastered some black-tech method for miraculous forced marches.

The truth was, he was in rather dire straits. The Kharchin were, after all, a major tribe of Southern Mongolia — even as recently as two years ago, it would not have been an exaggeration to call them the most powerful tribe in Southern Mongolia after Ligdan Khan's westward flight.

In fact, up until a month ago, Gulusiqibu, as Kharchin chieftain, was still the uncrowned king of Southern Mongolia.

But the world had changed far too quickly. He had merely taken his own elite cavalry on a trip to Khorchin to welcome Dorgon, and by the time he returned, his tribe had been thoroughly plundered by the large-scale horse-bandits of the Southern Mongolia Commandery. This directly caused his tribe to... one couldn't even say their strength had plummeted — their very survival hung by a thread.

Originally, for this campaign, Gulusiqibu had planned to mobilize a force of 2,800 men, 3,000 warhorses, and 5,000 livestock — a force that ensured that even if they were defeated and completely annihilated, the Kharchin tribe would not be crippled.

Conversely, if they won, their army could coast along, smoothly driving their herds in a circle and grazing on their neighbors' grass.

At bottom, Gulusiqibu was a Mongol, with the blood of the Uriankhai flowing in his veins. Though loyal to Hong Taiji, he was not about to grind his own tribe into flesh and bone to daub the Later Jin throne.

But after the raid, his attitude changed completely. With a posture of near-total militarization, he conscripted every man in the tribe who could ride and fight, scraping together... eight hundred riders.

There was no other way. With such meager strength, the Kharchin could no longer hold their grazing lands after the Later Jin army withdrew. They could only stake everything they had, join the Later Jin in plundering, and try to recoup their losses as best they could.

Yet even for these eight hundred riders, Gulusiqibu could not scrape together proper provisions. The men carried only a little dry rations — no logistics, no supply lines.

So on the very first day he received the marching orders, he drove his troops forward at a breakneck pace, desperate to arrive ahead of the main force and hunt some rabbits first.

High-intensity marching naturally came at a cost — both men and horses lost condition. But they had no room to be picky. After all, moving fast not only secured first hunting rights on the Yellow River's northern bank, it also let them avoid being intercepted by the belatedly reacting Southern Mongolia Marshal's army.

Gulusiqibu certainly did not believe that Yang Qi was some great fool who could be fooled for eight days by Dorgon's letter of challenge.

So he would rather bear every risk of a forced march than be cut off by Yang Qi's hawks and hounds.

After all, being cut off... would mean the fucking annihilation of his nation.

Whether Jianzhou, Khorchin, Kharchin, or even the former Tümed — in the Ming court's eyes, they were all simply various tribes, but among themselves, they saw each other as kingdoms, and in their correspondence, they were allied states.

If the Kharchin tribe's last eight hundred elite troops were lost in this war, then the Kharchin's Uriankhai dynasty would naturally perish in its second generation.

And indeed, as he had anticipated, Yang Qi reacted very quickly.

The day after Gulusiqibu reached the Yellow River's northern bank, just as the Kharchin riders were cheerfully hunting rabbits on the north bank and catching carp in the river, reinforcements arrived from the northeast.

The reinforcements' commander was named Luoli, of the Khorchin clan. He had previously been a guard of Ligdan Khan. When the Chahar were routed, he stole a gold Buddha statue cast in the early Yuan dynasty, and together with his three brothers, led over two hundred men to defect to the Later Jin's Hong Taiji.

To demonstrate the effect of "paying a thousand gold pieces for a horse's bones," Luoli was granted an exceptionally high hereditary rank of First-Class Colonel in the Plain Yellow Banner.

His elder brother Shaji and younger brothers Wuban and Shalidai were all appointed as Mobile Corps Commanders — for a time, one family held four nominal, unassigned general posts.

But as things now appeared, Hong Taiji's "horse bones" strategy had clearly not worked well.

After Luoli, only a scattered handful of Mongols had defected to the Later Jin — no figures of any real stature whatsoever.

Ultimately, Luoli's defection to the Later Jin was not because the Northern Yuan had fallen and, as a leftover loyalist, he had nowhere else to go; it was because he himself was a Khorchin noble who did not wish to follow the Khan's court westward to Qinghai.

And at this moment, the true leftover loyalists of the Northern Yuan were all over on Liu Chengzong's side — quite a few of them had even returned with Prince Shaktu, now on the offensive.

That said, to be honest, Liu the Lion's appeal to the Northern Yuan nobility was not actually so great that they flocked to him.

It was simply that, for those Northern Yuan nobles, Liu Chengzong's Khan's court was the most desirable Khan's court to join after settling for second best.

After all, compared to the Northern Yuan's Khan's court, the only difference in Duntu Wulusi's Khan's court was a change of Great Khan.

Not to mention symbolic things like the Nine-Tailed White Banner — the court's Four Great Jaisangs were still the Four Great Jaisangs, and the nobles were still those same nobles.

Most absurdly, the consorts of the Eight Ordos were still considered those same consorts; the imperial younger brother, Prince Shaktu, and the prince, Ejei, also remained in their original positions.

One could say it was the most familiar environment possible for the Northern Yuan nobility.

Especially since the Northern Yuan dynasty was very friendly to the Mongol nobility. The one thing in that great collective that most eroded loyalty was Ligdan Khutugtu Khan sitting on the throne.

Now that the Great Khan had been possessed, though his widely known Khan-title didn't sound particularly awe-inspiring or clever, to the nobles, wasn't an un-clever Great Khan precisely a good Great Khan?

Ligdan Khan's fatal flaw was thinking himself far too clever.

If even Liu Chengzong's Khan's court was not to their liking, then there was no place left in the world they would wish to go. Those who did not defect led their followers deep into barren lands, voluntarily distancing themselves from the struggle for Southern Mongolia.

To Gulusiqibu, Luoli's presence here was in itself a very strange thing.

Because when he had left Jining, the Khorchin troops to which Luoli belonged had been assigned to the rearguard.

Moreover, Gulusiqibu also knew that in the earlier Battle of Jining, Luoli had not fared well in his rearguard duty.

He had run straight into the Chahar loyalists led by Prince Shaktu.

To be fair, as Chahar heroes who had followed Ligdan Khan in a fighting retreat all the way from Zhangjiakou, battling across the Three Frontiers and migrating five thousand li west, their numbers were limited, but their physical conditioning, will to maneuver, survival ability, cultural education, and combat skills were all outstanding — their fighting strength was arguably the finest in Southern Mongolia.

This group's biggest problem was their extremely fragile morale.

Against Ming troops, they were three parts timid before the fight even began; against Later Jin troops, half of them would raise the white flag outright.

While the Great Khan lived, facing the ill-intentioned Mongol barbarians of the Oirat, they crumbled in disarray during maneuvers; once the Great Khan was dead, facing the malicious Han barbarian Liu Chengzong, they promptly recognized the times and became men of outstanding judgment.

Only when fighting Mongol commoner rabble did this group possess a psychological advantage akin to local gentry militias suppressing peasant armies.

And on this point, nearly all Mongol armies under the Northern Yuan framework were, to them, coalitions of commoner rabble.

After all, in other people's armies of over a thousand men, there might be only two or three with surnames; whereas they, as a core component of the Khan's court, were nobles to a man.

On the battlefield, when Prince Shaktu's soldiers spotted Luoli's men, their fighting spirit soared. They punched straight through his unit and nearly stabbed all the way into Dorgon's own main camp.

Prince Shaktu's guess back at Guihua City had been correct — what he had seen then was indeed the Later Jin army's main force. However, the near-encirclement that followed was not actually Dorgon's original intent.

It was simply that the area around Jining at the time was Dorgon's main troop encampment, and the Later Jin army was accustomed to adjusting its deployments mid-field-battle. Thus, when they engaged, Dorgon improvised a redeployment, drawing reinforcements to rapidly envelop them.

But the Chahar loyalists' defining trait — bolting the moment they saw the Eight Banners troops — saved Prince Shaktu.

In a sense, mere existence could be considered a kind of success.

After all, once the Eight Banners troops, so accustomed to mobile hunting warfare, completed an encirclement with superior numbers, there were few under heaven who could escape.

In the art of bolting, Prince Shaktu could rank alongside Wu Xiang, the Supreme Commander of Liaodong currently in the imperial prison, as the best under heaven.

Luoli, on the other hand, had not fared so well. Gulusiqibu had originally thought the man would die in the rearguard action; he never imagined that this rearguard officer would now show up in second place, right behind the vanguard.

Luoli's head was wrapped in bandages, covering half his face, and his entire outfit still carried a whiff of blood. But overall, he looked quite well.

At least he was in good spirits. He had ridden over from a great distance with several hundred cavalry, and upon seeing Gulusiqibu, saluted from afar, then spread his arms wide and came in for an embrace.

Gulusiqibu was dumbstruck — since when, he wondered, had he and this fellow been on such good terms?

Puzzled as he was, he would not doubt Luoli's goodwill. After all, his own Kharchin had just suffered a crushing defeat, and as one of the Later Jin's allies on the Mobei steppe, a friendly face was painfully hard to come by right now.

"You nearly never saw me again."

Luoli's embrace had pulled at his arrow wound. He grimaced and bared his teeth for a good while, then raised a hand toward the northeast and said, "The Ming army — no, that barbarian Liu's troops reacted fast. From Wuchuan to the northern foothills of the Yin Mountains, they sent soldiers out everywhere to intercept and strike. The men behind got pinned down and tangled up — big trouble."

Only then did Gulusiqibu understand — no wonder Luoli was in such high spirits.

His own troops had originally been assigned to the rearguard, but they had been punched through in a clash with Prince Chantu, and he himself had been wounded, so someone else took over the rear.

Otherwise, with his battle-wounded body, he would have had a hard time surviving the pursuit.

He had unwittingly picked his life back up.

As for the "barbarian Liu" in Luoli's mouth, that was naturally Liu Chengzong.

Only, this "barbarian" did not mean Liu Chengzong was savage to the point of militarism — it meant "southern barbarian."

As early as the Southern Song period, when the various states fought over legitimacy in the Central Plains' battleground, the northerners' derogatory term for southerners, "barbarian," had already come into use.

By the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang and that gang of Huaixi brothers obviously fit the Mongols' definition of "southern barbarians," and the Mongols fit the Ming people's definition of barbarians perfectly well too.

So everyone entered a childish era of calling each other barbarians across the Great Wall.

All barbarians — no one had room to look down on anyone else.

After a few words of pleasantries, Luoli drew a letter from a servant's coat and handed it to Gulusiqibu, saying, "A letter from the Ninth Beile."

Gulusiqibu opened the letter and in a moment his brows knotted. "I have only eight hundred men, and I'm to split them into two routes?"

The letter bore Dorgon's command, written in Uyghur-style Mongolian script: he was to divide his forces into two routes, send a detachment ahead to cross the river first and scout the way, while Gulusiqibu himself remained on the north bank to oversee the construction of sampan pontoon bridges to aid the main army's crossing.

Gulusiqibu's expression soured. By rights, the Kharchin cavalry should have been given a brief rest; the pontoon bridge work ought to have fallen to Badali, Khan of the Nen River Khorchin, who was slightly behind.

After all, Badali had more men — even bridge-building would go more smoothly with them.

"We have no choice but to split up. The Tumed soldiers are hounding the Ninth Beile like wolves — we can't very well fight in the north. That barbarian Yang moved over ten thousand households from the north into the Ordos. The north is empty; you can't even seize grain if you try."

Luoli looked at Gulusiqibu as he spoke. "On this matter, brother, I can't help you either. My orders are to watch the east for you... Whatever happens, keep your wits about you. The enemy this time is different — they're all bloody madmen."

Speaking of what he had seen and heard along the way, Luoli was no longer merely shaken — he was ceaselessly, utterly afraid.

North of the Yin Mountains and the Wolf Mountains, what he had passed through was not just the desolate Gobi and grasslands of Mobei.

Rather, between the Gobi flats and the grasslands, along the lakes and rivers, there were irrigation channels built one after another, fields cleared one patch after another, and around those fields, signs of large contingents of people living.

They had dug wells, built a few shallow pit-dwellings, and left behind pasture fences, brick kilns, and tile kilns they had no time to dismantle.

Luoli could not identify what crops were growing in the fields; it was purely on instinct that he felt afraid of those farmlands.

Because when Ligdan Khan fled west in defeat, he had broken away from the main force just before reaching Ningxia and fled back east to defect to the Later Jin — and he had taken this very road.

He remembered it clearly: back then, this place was a barren waste, everywhere rotten river flats left by the Yellow River's shifting course. There had been no irrigation channels and no farmlands.

Clearly, these things had only been built and cultivated after that barbarian Liu's troops arrived — and they had been here barely a single year!

These changes were significant, yet in terms of the war, not so significant. What mattered more was what these "ruins" expressed: the flexible attitude of the Mobei Governor's Office.

They had poured enormous effort into clearing farmland in the wilderness and building irrigation channels between the rivers, yet the moment war approached, they abandoned it all at once, relocating every person and animal elsewhere.

They were not like the Great Ming, so obsessed with saving face that they refused to admit defeat, locking officials, armies, and populations inside a single city.

Yet their army had not withdrawn from Guihua City either; instead, they struck everywhere along the northern foothills of the Yin Mountains, slowing their advance with tremendous zeal.

And this, in turn, was unlike Ligdan Khan, so pessimistic that before battle was even joined, he simply took his khan's court and wandered off because his preparations were insufficient.

Those remnants of irrigation channels, the crops growing well in the fields, and the Mobei army striking from the northern Yin Mountains — all of it, without reason, planted a terrible conjecture in Luoli's mind, like a declaration, as if saying: You will leave in the end, but we are rooted here, and we will return.

This conjecture stirred many ominous associations in him about this campaign.

For instance, under Dorgon's command, could they seize enough grain and fodder to make it back before their supplies ran out?

Or, when they returned to Shenyang this year and came again the next, would a few more fortresses have sprouted on this land already thick with crops?

This same worry infected Gulusiqibu.

His brow furrowed, he clenched the military order tightly in his palm and slowly shook his head. "If that is so, I fear this year is the easiest year to invade Mobei that there will ever be."