Chapter 641: Mad Dog

On the broad Ob River.

Six oar-sail ships and twenty-one flat-bottomed boats formed a vast, dense Cossack fleet, sailing downstream northward, heading straight for Tomsk.

The commander of this fleet was Levando, a mounted centurion from Kuznetsk Fortress.

Nine days ago, upon receiving word that Tomsk was under siege, Levando had set out to rush to its aid, summoning three expeditionary detachments along the way and assembling a fleet of four hundred and eighty men to relieve Tomsk.

Although the alarm reported that Tomsk was besieged by several thousand enemy troops, Levando was brimming with confidence about lifting the siege.

His crewmen were all the most common Cossacks and hunters of Siberia, carrying four small field iron cannons, over six hundred long and short firearms, one hundred and thirty-three horses, and more than two hundred jin of gunpowder — enough to handle any number of Tatars on the water.

The Siberian expeditions of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, in terms of pistol and long gun equipment, especially flintlock pistols, were in a class of their own worldwide.

Although the flintlock first appeared in France and was first mass-equipped for war by Spain, in this period, the country using them on the largest scale was the Grand Duchy of Moscow.

There were two main reasons for this.

The Grand Duchy of Moscow's firearm manufacturing capability was very mediocre; its largest arsenal produced only two thousand firearms a year, and those were matchlocks, roughly equivalent to the output of one Guard Armory Bureau in the Great Ming.

Their firearms came mostly from annual imports; in the fourth year of the Chongzhen reign alone, Moscow imported nineteen thousand firearms of various types from Europe.

The imported firearms were of many kinds — whether old guns used by Spanish colonizers a hundred years ago, or the latest flintlocks freshly forged in Sweden, Moscow refused none. If you dared sell, they would definitely buy them back.

After buying them back, they rarely equipped their troops; the firing regiments of the various regular battalions were still issued large numbers of heavy, durable leather-nitrate matchlocks.

The imported firearms were basically all sold off.

The biggest buyers were the Siberian expeditions, who loved flintlock pistols the most.

Almost every Cossack and hunter entering Siberia would be equipped with one; some of those from a cavalry background would even carry two.

Conversely, whether matchlock-ignited or flintlock-mechanism, not many in the expeditions used long guns; those who used long firearms were the firing troops sent by the Tsar to support Siberia.

Because matchlocks without priming-pan covers and wheel-lock guns with their complex mechanisms were both unsuitable for Siberia's cold, damp environment; only flintlocks were appropriate.

And regarding flintlocks, on one hand, the Cossacks and hunters had no use for long guns; on the other hand, the flintlock pistols were of better quality and more accurate.

There was a reason for this.

Generally speaking, long guns were harder to make, required more man-hours, had longer range, and were naturally more accurate.

But Tsarist Russia imported firearms in huge quantities, and this was not yet the post-Industrial Revolution era; every nation's military supplies were already in short supply, and arms were an absolute seller's market. No matter which country, if you dared sell, they dared buy.

No one could guarantee whether the firearm they bought came from a royal armory or from the hands of some unknown old blacksmith in a mountain village.

Even new guns varied wildly in quality, let alone the old guns that were imported.

So pistols were more reliable than long guns.

And the mass equipping of flintlock mechanisms had only been a matter of the last ten or twenty years, so the probability of getting a new gun was higher; even if it was a matchlock barrel refitted with a new lock, at least it meant the barrel was still fairly good.

Matchlock long guns were a different story — they could even end up buying heavy muskets made in Spain a hundred years ago.

That was the source of the firearms.

The second reason was that Siberia's unique economic foundation created these conditions for the expeditions.

Sable pelts.

Sable pelts were precious the world over. In the Great Ming, a sable coat made from thirty to forty pelts could fetch a high price of twenty taels of silver in earlier years.

Due to the Liaodong war affecting the production areas, one such sable coat now commanded an astronomical price of sixty taels of silver.

The price in Europe was even higher.

Sables west of the Ural Mountains were basically extinct. The raw sable pelts sold from Siberia to Europe were priced at each fortress according to quality, each worth between one and two rubles.

Roughly two to four taels of silver.

Just the raw material, and priced with the scissors-differential imposed by the Siberian tax office on raw materials, was already comparable to the price of a finished sable coat in the Great Ming after its price hike.

Calling it soft gold would not be an exaggeration.

And a Tsarist Russian hunter coming from the west, in a single hunting season in the Yenisei River basin, could obtain one hundred and twenty of the finest sable pelts, worth at least one hundred and twenty rubles.

At the fortress, they had to surrender one of the finest pelts out of every ten as tax, and pay another ten percent at the time of sale; on top of that were the fortress's residence tax, departure tax, and other exorbitant levies.

Yet even so, the remaining harvest still allowed them to return to the outskirts of the Grand Duchy of Moscow with twenty years' worth of savings for an ordinary European commoner.

This sum was enough to buy fifty Russian desyatins — that is, eight hundred mu of land — plus five horses, twenty head of cattle, twenty sheep, several dozen chickens and ducks, marry a wife, hire a group of serfs, and rise to become a landowner.

The enormous returns dictated that it required not only bearing enormous risks, but also enormous investment.

The harsh natural environment here determined that the truly destitute could only remain in the Grand Duchy of Moscow proper as serfs and trench-fillers. Siberia had no shortage of ice sculptures; the merciless cold air never welcomed bare-assed paupers.

The threshold for expeditions was very high; ordinary commoners could hardly afford the cost of entering Siberia. The cost of exploration equipment for every hundred-man expedition exceeded six hundred rubles.

The value of their equipment was no less than that of a hundred-man squadron under the three great battalions of Liu Chengzong's command, and might even be slightly higher.

This was quite normal; expeditionary armies inherently had higher material requirements than regular troops.

At the Marshal's Manor, the highest-cost unit was also the Tianshan Army, who bundled themselves in all kinds of leather coats, velvet armor, and fur robes.

Such economic and environmental foundations determined that every Cossack and hunter had a flintlock pistol, and beyond that, a large force of nearly five hundred men also possessed over a hundred matchlock long guns.

This equipment organization, which placed such exceptional emphasis on individual firepower, was unique in the entire world.

After all, on the Eastern European plains, no army dared to advance armed entirely with firearms.

That was simply not a combat formation.

Routing them would be easier than breaking wind.

But this was Siberia, crisscrossed with rivers.

Fifty years of Tsarist Russia's eastward push into Siberia had given Levando courage born of rich experience: on this frozen tundra, as long as they did not leave the rivers, the Cossacks were invincible under heaven!

To be precise, Levando had no intention of staying ashore for long. Tomsk was a riverside fort, and his plan was to rely on boats and firearms to launch harassing raids against the Tatars on the bank.

Just like Yermak, the first Cossack chieftain to enter Siberia, they would even sleep on the river's shoals — this was the foundation of their invincibility against the Tatars.

Kuznetsk Fortress was a full seven hundred li from Tomsk.

After spending nine days, Levando's fleet of twenty-seven vessels, large and small, finally sailed into the Tom River, and in half a day they would be able to see Tomsk, heavily besieged on the right bank, in the distance.

He concealed the fleet among the river's sandbars and took two small flat-bottomed boats to scout ahead. The intelligence he gathered was a mix of good and bad.

In the dense forests and marshes outside Tomsk, the ground was everywhere dotted with small camps of eighty or a hundred Tatar riders; there were dozens of such camps.

The enemy's vast troop strength was intimidating.

The good news was that, despite their formidable numbers, the Tatars seemed to have no effective way to deal with Tomsk itself, and could only fell timber in the dense forest and hurriedly build siege equipment.

And although Tomsk looked rather battered, its outer palisade walls blackened everywhere by smoke, its defensive capability was in fact still tenacious.

What puzzled Lewandowski was that the defenders had actually added wooden planks to the outside of the blockhouse arrow towers... by all logic, Tatar bows shouldn't have been able to penetrate the blockhouses.

He thought the commandant of Tomsk, Ivan, ought to retire — a coward, and this was completely unnecessary.

When night fell, Lewandowski moved away from the riverbank and had several soldiers infiltrate the hillsides on the outer perimeter of the siege camp, spending a full day figuring out the enemy's force composition.

He himself rowed a small boat back and forth on the Tom River, searching for any submerged stake traps or wooden spikes the Tatars might have planted in the river.

Two days after arriving outside Tomsk, Lewandowski summed up the enemy's situation: this was merely a motley mob hastily assembled for plunder.

Although over two thousand of them were the Oirat's iconic armored cavalry, all deployed in the farmland southeast of Tomsk.

The Russians weren't fools — if this were flat plains favorable for cavalry charges, they would never have built a fortress here in the first place.

For a hundred kilometers around Tomsk, the terrain was mostly hills and marshland, and the flat areas were dense forest.

And the Oirats weren't fools either — their armored cavalry could only be deployed in the fields to the southeast to avoid the predicament of getting hung up in the trees the moment battle began.

As for the marshland to the north and the woodland to the south of the siege camp, those were handled by the poorly equipped and less organized Kyrgyz, who were mostly hunters with few horses and could adapt to foot combat.

But for Lewandowski, none of this intelligence was the most important news.

The most important thing was that on the Tom River, he had not found a single submerged stake trap laid in advance by the Mongols, nor any river-blocking chain.

This was undoubtedly the most heartening good news.

The greatest advantage of the Tsarist expeditionary force was using rivers for rapid mobility, firing dense volleys from the riverbank with a musket in every man's hand — striking fast and leaving fast, catching the besieging enemy off guard and leaving them no choice but to lift the siege in frustration.

And what they feared most, naturally, was the Tatars laying ambushes and defenses on both banks of the river.

When Yermak attacked the Khanate of Sibir, he had relied on river warfare to force a vast khanate into migration, but he also suffered devastating losses when Kuchum Khan ambushed him from both banks and laid river-blocking chains across the channel.

In the past, when the Oirats and Kyrgyz besieged forts, they too would use river-blocking chains to stop Tsarist reinforcements.

If they had the resources, they'd use winch-driven iron chains or even weighted stones, making the river impassable for the entire summer.

If they lacked resources, they'd use winch-driven ropes combined with submerged stake traps driven into the riverbed as a one-time ambush, halting the boats — or even pulling from both banks simultaneously to capsize and collide the flat-bottomed vessels.

This time, however, the Tatars had clearly besieged the city in haste and hadn't been able to make so many preparations.

For Lewandowski, this was tremendously good news.

Of course, even if there had been underwater stake traps and river-blocking chains, that didn't mean Lewandowski would have been helpless.

Tsarist Russia's incursions into Siberia had gone on for so many years that their experience was extremely rich: against underwater stake traps, they could fell trees on the bank and use logs to smash through the ropes and stakes; against river-blocking iron chains, they could bring a furnace onto the boat, heat the chains red-hot, and then cut them.

It just meant taking greater risks.

Overjoyed, Lewandowski immediately decided to land at night and catch the besieging army off guard with muskets.

He made meticulous plans, dividing his four hundred and eighty men into five detachments. The target of the raid was the three Kyrgyz camps south of the siege lines, where there were roughly three to five hundred enemies.

When night fell, the five Cossack detachments beached their boats, slipped into the forest, and three detachments headed straight for the three camps.

The other two detachments lay in ambush — one watching the outer perimeter, ready to intercept any enemy reinforcements drawn by the noise; the other, led by Lewandowski himself, followed behind the three main assault detachments, waiting for the right moment to join the fight.

The three detachments were each led by an expedition centurion. At first they advanced toward the camps in formation, but once they used the cover of night to close the distance to one or two hundred paces and had alerted the Kyrgyz night sentries, they simply charged forward with war cries from every direction.

The first to close in on the camps were always the detachment's streltsy squads, ten to twenty men. They came from the Tsarist regular army, the burning matchcords on their arms glowing like fireflies in the night. Resting their long-barreled muskets on axe-hafts as supports, they fired with rock-steady composure at the Tatars illuminated by the campfires.

The greater number of Cossack warriors and hunters joined the battle as skirmishers after the streltsy had fired their volleys.

In the darkness, the Cossacks were like a pack of mad dogs, charging into the camps with pistols. At twenty to thirty paces, they shot down the nearest enemies with their pistols, then drew sabers and axes and began hacking, giving the Kyrgyz no chance to form ranks.

In an extremely short time, the three camps caught off guard were routed in the first clash by the sheer number of pistols the Cossacks carried, and the herder-soldiers scrambled to seize horses and flee eastward.

Nearby Kyrgyz reinforcement squads that rushed over upon hearing the commotion were also ambushed by the waiting Cossack detachment and were sent scurrying away with their tails between their legs on the spot.

For Lewandowski, had this night raid ended right there, then thanks to his thorough preparation, meticulous planning, and valiant command, it could have been called a complete victory.

Unfortunately, because the Kyrgyz collapsed so quickly, one of his centurions concluded that the Tatars were utterly worthless. After eating his fill and looting the captured camp, stuffing himself with bundles large and small yet still unsatisfied, he reloaded, reformed his troops, and then led them further east.

And then that fine gentleman was no more.

Lewandowski, waiting for his return at the riverbank, heard only thunderous war cries and hoofbeats from the east.

When the night returned to silence, neither that detachment nor the imagined Tatar army appeared at the riverbank.

The Cossacks moored their boats at the bank and waited in fearful uncertainty for two full hours, until finally, as the first faint light of dawn shone into the birch forest and the reeds along the river, they saw a staggering figure.

Out of a detachment of ninety-eight men, only one came back. Under interrogation, his hair had been shorn, his ears cut off, his nose sliced away, after which medicine was applied, he was bandaged, given good care, and released.

He said he was alive because he was originally from the Torghut tribe. Everyone else in the detachment had either been trampled to death by warhorses or speared to death by Chokur's soldiers in the fields — all of them dead.

He told Lewandowski that Chokur had sent him back to deliver a message.

"He said he is the Taishi's general, and soon you will know how the Taishi's army retaliates, and you will spread the Taishi's fearsome name throughout all the Rus'."

Lewandowski felt a chill at Chokur's ferocity, but found the wretch before him's words hard to understand: "Taishi? Isn't that just an Oirat noble?"

"No, not Oirat. Chokur said it is the Khagan of the Khitan Khanate, also called Taishi. He said we had best flee right now."

Lewandowski dismissed this. Despite the losses, the victory in the night raid at least proved his tactics were sound.

As long as they stayed out of the fields.

"We hold the rivers. We hold the boats. We hold the muskets. No matter if he's some Oirat Taishi or some Khitan Taishi, if he wants revenge..."

Lewandowski laughed and shook his head: "Let him try riding his horse into the river if he's got the guts!"