Chapter 638: Freak

Ten thousand three hundred li west of Chang'an, on the Balabin Steppe northwest of the Heavenly Mountains.

By the Tom River, a grove of white birches clusters around the Russians' Kuznetsk Fort.

Twenty years ago, the masters here were still the Blacksmith Tatar tribe subordinate to the Oirat; they and the Kirghiz repeatedly routed the fur-collection parties the Russians sent from Tomsk.

The Tatars' resistance to violent oppression — they even besieged Tomsk itself, once forcing the merchant leaders pushing east to abandon their plans to build a fort in this region.

But the profits from fur were simply too alluring; the Stroganov family could not possibly give up this piece of fat meat.

To tighten their grip on the Tatars and Kirghiz, they made up their minds, drawing troops from Tobolsk, Tyumen, and Tomsk to establish this forward wooden stockade.

Virtually all Russian strongholds east of the Ural Mountains were wooden stockades.

They rarely fired bricks; at this time even the Kremlin was built of oak logs and limestone, and the few stone churches in the country were only constructed under the direction of Italian craftsmen hired at great expense after the marriage alliance with a Byzantine princess.

But a wooden stockade did not mean weak defenses.

Because Russia's Time of Troubles had just ended, the troops dispatched eastward included no shortage of seasoned veterans, and in the course of their eastward expansion they had already developed an effective set of fort-building methods.

They would first throw up a crude little wooden redoubt to guard against sudden Tatar attacks; then build a larger wooden fort around the outside, and afterward fill and pack the space between with earth, tree roots, grass ash, and the like, adding polygonal bastions for crossfire.

Once these several stages were complete, the crude little redoubt became a tightly defended artillery stockade.

Kuznetsk Fort by the Tom River was just such an artillery stockade.

Cavalry centurion Lewandowski woke in the stables with a head full of horse dung, fished out his flintlock pistol and tipped it toward his mouth, drinking down two drops of the murky sweet wine left over from the previous night's revelry, then leaned listlessly against the fence rail, gazing drunkenly at the wooden fort in the early morning.

He was thirty-nine years old, born in a small village on Poland's southeastern border.

When he was ten, the army of the Crimean Khanate passed through his homeland and seized him as a white slave.

Though falling into slavery was certainly miserable, Lewando's boyhood years had actually been tolerable enough.

After all, the Crimean Khanate's plundering of the Eastern European states was on such a massive scale — seizing slaves village by village, whole families of relatives captured together — that there was never any talk of demanding ransom, and even if there had been, a small peasant could never have paid it.

And those very years happened to be when the Khanate's slave-raiding was at its peak; too many slaves were stuck on their hands, hard to sell off completely.

So for this batch of slaves, apart from the portion who were especially unlucky and got bought, the rest more or less just switched to a different way of life.

They were all people they knew anyway — from parents to the sweetheart they'd grown up with to even the village head, all were there.

He spent six years raising horses as a slave for a chieftain on the Crimean Peninsula, and just as he was coming of age — adult white slaves could fetch a good price — to avoid being sold, Lewando seized the chance of war to flee back to his homeland, where he had no kin left.

At that time the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was fighting a war of succession against the Grand Duchy of Moscow; to make a living, Lewando joined Lisowski's hussar regiment as an armed retainer.

Lisowski was a shrewd, cunning, ruthless, and battle-hardened commander, wearing the distinctive Hungarian-style lobster-plate armor with enormous wings fixed to his saddle, leading small bands of cavalry through the Grand Duchy of Moscow as if entering uninhabited land, plundering at will wherever he passed, his talents for burning, killing, and looting exceptionally outstanding.

The hussars he led were like a pack of madmen — they killed everyone they could kill, looted everything they could loot, burned everything they could burn.

To be precise, they were a pack of bloodthirsty madmen.

Because after discovering there was nothing left to plunder in the Grand Duchy of Moscow, they turned right around and went on burning, killing, and looting inside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Later this hussar regiment found enemies on every side and was quickly finished off.

Lewando narrowly escaped; his status had gone from slave to soldier to renegade, and the choices left to him were few — turning bandit seemed the only viable path.

And so he found a mountain stronghold — that is, a Cossack sich — to throw in with.

Out in the world, your identity is whatever you make it.

Though earlier he had been merely an armed retainer, that did not stop Lewando from claiming he had been an officer in the hussar regiment, using that to secure himself a leadership post in this distinctly Eastern European bandit gang, responsible for drilling the underlings.

For many years after that, right up until their bandit gang disbanded for taking part in a rebellion, Lewando never lacked for fighting and plundering.

In any case, his whole life he had either been robbed by others or robbed others; he had absolutely no idea what a settled life was, and naturally could never have lived such a life.

And so, having spent the better part of his life wielding blades and guns, Lewando, in pursuit of wealth, accepted the Stroganov family's hire and, like half of Europe's desperadoes, charged into the frozen wastes of Siberia.

The Stroganov family had its origins as salt merchants.

They rendered great service to Ivan IV in the conquest of the Kazan Khanate, rising in one leap to become the wealthiest merchant house in Russia, acting as the Tsar's white glove in converting the resources of the eastern frontier — fur, salt, timber, minerals, honey, and more — into wealth.

In the eastward-pushing expeditions they directed, proper Russian nobles and their retainers were actually few in number.

The claim that the Tsar dispatched eight hundred Cossack gods of war to conquer Siberia in one stroke is utterly irresponsible; in reality, the number who froze or starved to death in Siberia each year was more than eight hundred.

This far-eastern journey belonging to the Stroganov family was a great enterprise that would last several centuries; the family's prosperity as Russia's wealthiest would likewise endure all the way into the twentieth century, following the White Army in the Russian Civil War and going into exile in Europe after defeat — perishing with the dynasty.

Their conquest of Siberia was no easy matter; the conquest of the Kazan Khanate alone took three generations of rulers and multiple campaigns, and the final decisive battle saw sixty-five thousand troops committed to the front at one point, with reinforcements later swelling the force to a staggering one hundred fifty thousand.

Every year more than six thousand military and logistical personnel flooded into Siberia on hire, and of those, the streltsy and similar units sent by the Tsar amounted to less than a tenth.

The greater part were men like Lewando — desperadoes, deserters, ruffians, mountain bandits, and grass-roots outlaws recruited by the Stroganov family.

When these sorts of characters gathered together, they were Cossacks.

Cossacks are the same thing as Song Jiang's Water Margin stronghold at Liangshan Marsh.

A veteran Swedish artilleryman, a seasoned Polish cavalryman, a Scottish Highland swordsman, a Tatar groom who had converted to Orthodoxy, an escaped Ottoman slave turned sailor — these were the Heaven-Spirits and Earth-Fiends.

The ordinary Cossacks were the small-fry underlings of the mountain and water strongholds, who, under the command of the Heaven-Spirits and Earth-Fiends, carried English-made firelocks, Holy Roman-cast cannon, Bohemian-made powder, and Dutch-forged rapiers, rowing small boats as they rampaged through the riverways of Siberia, building forts and stockades and collecting fur tribute.

July at Kuznetsk Fort brought warm weather — the rare fine season of the year.

Every year at this time, the rear base at Tyumen would send supplies, troops, ordnance... though of course no one wanted any damned ordnance.

In this godforsaken place they lacked everything except guns and cannon, so they wanted everything.

The courier from Tyumen had already arrived to tell them that within a few days two columns of troops, over three thousand men in total, would pass through here and could reinforce them with twenty-four men; the remaining troops would continue eastward, reinforcing the forts and outposts along the Ob, the Yenisei, and even the west bank of the Lena.

Of these two columns, one was meant to support Centurion Pyotr Beketov at Yeniseysk Fort.

Pyotr was a middle-aged man in his thirties; before coming to Siberia he had been one of the Tsar's streltsy and had volunteered for transfer to the forts in the Yenisei basin, and over the past two years his name had risen rapidly in Siberia.

He was a low-ranking official with considerable resourcefulness — taking thirty soldiers and a dozen hunters on a mission lasting two and a half years, he brought the Buryat Mongols of the Angara River basin to swear allegiance to the Tsar, and furthermore established the wooden fort of Yakutsk.

Most importantly, he brought back two thousand four hundred and seventy-one sable pelts and twenty-five sable coats.

His method was simple: tell those small tribes of forest folk that all the lands to the west had already submitted to the Tsar, and that whatever taxes the Khalkha Mongols levied on the forest folk, the Tsar would levy only one-third of that.

Then invite the tribe's shaman or elders to the fort and place them under house arrest as hostages, to prevent the tribe from refusing to pay taxes.

After that, request military support from the west.

A wooden stockade would be erected, and the military governor, tax officials, and civil officials dispatched by Moscow, along with the mercenaries sent by the Stroganov family, would arrive shortly after to reinforce and expand the fort.

Once they had a firm foothold, they would then begin levying heavy taxes on the native peoples who had already submitted, and dispatch troops to attack the tribes who had not — killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.

This whole process is something every official the Tsar sends to Siberia ought to learn.

And the other army that came this year, numbering over three thousand, is here to handle the Oirat.

Handle, not deal with.

Tsarist Russia's dealings with the Oirat go back thirty years.

They understand the Oirat far better than the Marshal's Office does, and they are equally well aware that the Oirat are vastly more powerful than the Khanate of Kazan with its mere twenty thousand fighting men — not an enemy that a few hundred or even a thousand expeditionary troops can deal with.

Tsarist Russia's method of handling the Oirat is to be the fly that lands in the pot: on one hand, they send officials to negotiate peace with each chieftain of the various Oirat tribes, the condition being nominal submission to the Tsar, and no other conditions whatsoever.

On the other hand, they dispatch small squads into the north to deal with the minor tribes that serve as Oirat tribute peoples, demanding furs from them.

When necessary, they can open Tyumen City as a trading post, supplying them with old matchlock firelocks, handicrafts, food, and intelligence on the Kazakh Khanate, in exchange for furs.

Although over these thirty years Tsarist Russia's small outposts have often been raided and burned by the Oirat, private contacts between the Tyumen authorities and the nobles of the various Oirat tribes have never been severed.

Because the two sides are hardly mortal enemies to begin with: Tsarist Russia's goal is the furs and minerals of northern Siberia, while the Oirat's number one enemy has always been the Kazakh Khanate.

There was never any major conflict of interest between the two sides to begin with; furs are not scarce for the Oirat.

As for the so-called submission to Tsar Mikhail of Moscow, to the Oirat nobles it ranks as the number one of the Three Great Jokes of the Oirat.

To the Oirat, this bizarre and bewildering age produces freaks every year.

The second of their Three Great Jokes is submission to the Tiancong Khan Hong Taiji in Shenyang.

The comedic value of these two great jokes far surpasses submission to the Khitan Khan Liu Chengzong in Qinghai.

The White Khan in Moscow six thousand li away, the Tiancong Khan in Shenyang five thousand li away, the Khitan Khan in Qinghai three thousand li away — three freaks with not the slightest connection to the Mongols, each convinced he is the one true Khan under heaven and earth.

After their earliest clashes, Tsarist Russia has consistently maintained an attitude of smoothing things over toward the Oirat alliance, building up strength and waiting for the right moment.

Especially after Baatur Khong Tayiji became the leader of the Oirat alliance, the Russian side was very pleased to see him as leader.

Because although Baatur Khong Tayiji is like a tiger, in reality he is a moderate among the Oirat nobles who values honor and pays more attention to production than to war; during this period, in the official documents of Tyumen, he is referred to as the 'Shepherd Prince.'

This state of peaceful coexistence lasted until last year.

Last summer, many tribes that had long been paying fur tribute to Tsarist Russia failed to deliver their furs on time.

And when Tsarist Russia's tax-collecting squads went to their settlements, those minor tribes had long since bundled up their livestock and fled far away, with no one knowing where they had gone.

It appeared they had no intention of handing over any more furs going forward.

This situation at one point led the military governor of Tyumen to suspect that smallpox had broken out in the east.

But between last winter and this spring, reports came in from the lightly garrisoned stockades between the Tom River, the Ob River, and the Yenisei River: in the freezing wilderness, scattered Mongol cavalry had been spotted watching from afar, scouting their positions.

The situation this summer has been even stranger.

Someone on the upper reaches of the Ob River saw Oirat soldiers moving along the river in small boats fitted with wheels.

And Russian officials traveling to Ili discovered that many Oirat nobles had vanished, and that the Shepherd Prince now had many soldiers armed with fine muskets around him.

These are unusual signals.

Yet in actual dealings, it seems Baatur Khong Tayiji has no intention of going to war with Tsarist Russia; he is indeed mustering troops, but the direction of the muster is westward... and to the west, the Kazakh Khanate is likewise preparing to move against the Oirat.

The Russians have been left utterly baffled.

On one hand, they are transferring troops from the rear to reinforce the forts along the rivers; on the other, they are frantically trying to figure out what the Oirat actually want.

Until three days ago, when an official returned from the Oirat, passed through Kuznetsk Fortress, and told the three hundred garrison troops inside, including Lewandowski, that the crisis was over.

The Oirat league leader Baatur Khong Tayiji had already marched his army west to attack the Kazakh Khanate; those troops were never meant for them.

This happy news sent the anxious garrison of Kuznetsk Fortress into wild celebration; people drank themselves dizzy, and even the shortage of cups in the fortress posed no obstacle at all.

Lewandowski, for instance, simply poured his liquor straight into the barrel of his pistol and drank with even greater gusto.

As for the little bit that leaked out the touch hole — who cares? Drink fast enough, and it won't leak out at all!

Yet just as the garrison of Kuznetsk Fortress thought this would be a peaceful summer, a few riders at full gallop shattered the calm inside the fortress.

"Tomsk Fortress is besieged! Thousands — thousands of enemy troops surrounding the fortress, with firelocks and cannons, and bombs that fly over the walls!"