Chapter 642: He Who Stays Near Vermilion Becomes Red

Southeast of the siege camp, inside a felt tent pitched on the open plain.

Zhou Riqiang felt a twinge of pity for the Kyrgyz tribal chief before him, named Taben.

In this era, the Kyrgyz people had lived in the forests for generations, making their living by hunting. Whenever they encountered a stronger power, they paid tribute and taxes — it had always been this way.

And they themselves were very weak, which made their living conditions extraordinarily harsh.

To the east, they had to pay tribute to the numerous and powerful Khotogoid branch of the Khalkha; to the southwest, to the notoriously brutal Dzungars; and to the northwest, they had to deliver furs to the Russians.

Yet none of these three powers wanted them paying tribute to anyone else while paying tribute to themselves.

Living in such a vortex of gravitational pull, they were either being attacked and forced to pay tribute, or after paying tribute, being forced to serve as pawns and charge at others.

This campaign was no different. The Kyrgyz actually no longer wanted to fight the Russians — those people had no martial ethics. Several times, the Kyrgyz tribes had mounted massive counterattacks, only to have more than half their people slaughtered, and what few knowledgeable elders they had were also killed.

In the transport-starved forests of Siberia, the elders were the tribe's future.

But they had no choice. Chokur's brutal reputation was known to everyone from Lake Balkhash to the Sayan Mountains. When that bastard ordered the Kyrgyz to join his campaign, no one dared refuse to send troops.

Otherwise, that scoundrel really would first slaughter any tribe that refused to march, and only then go fight his own war.

Taben deeply resented Zhou Riqiang. On the very first day of the siege, he had proposed to Chokur that they plant submerged stakes in the Tom River and rig cable barriers across it.

As a tribe that had fought the Russians for many years, Taben had brought two ancestral iron chains and large winches when he mustered his troops — extremely effective against the flat-bottomed boats of the Tsarist expeditionary forces.

It was this Colonel, who had appeared from who-knows-where, who stopped Chokur from planting the stakes and stretching the river cables, merely telling Taben to guard the riverbank carefully.

This was not the kind of thing you could handle just by being careful.

Eight hundred Kyrgyz were deployed outside the north and south suburbs, their flanks bordering the river. I am in the open, the enemy in the dark — there is no principle of guarding against thieves every single day.

Taben's tribe had just over four hundred households in total. They had sent three hundred able-bodied men on this campaign, and during the siege had only lost four wounded — at that time, he had been secretly quite pleased with himself.

Who could have known that a single night raid would leave over a hundred dead and wounded? This could not even be called heavy losses — it directly shook the very lifeblood of the tribe.

But at this point, he absolutely dared not blame Zhou Riqiang. On the contrary, he had come to boost Zhou Riqiang's morale, begging him to make sure Chokur did not withdraw the army.

After more than ten days of siege, he had already seen clearly that although Chokur was formidable, it was this Zhou Riqiang who truly made the decisions.

If they, like himself, grew fearful of Cossack raids and lifted the siege to withdraw, then the retaliation Taben's tribe would face next would be the true utter ruin from which there was no recovery.

He had also tried seeking out Chokur, but Chokur was an utterly selfish man who could not be bothered to deal with a defeated Taben.

Besides, the taijis of the Dzungar tribe had always treated the Kyrgyz with exactly that kind of attitude.

They only cared that the Forest People, as tribute subjects, delivered their tribute. They paid no attention to anything else.

The several Dzungar taijis could not even manage their own tribesmen properly — where would they find the extra energy to care about others?

But Zhou Riqiang was different.

In the felt tent, he toyed with a flintlock pistol captured in the night raid and said to the Mongol interpreter beside him: "Tell him to set his mind at ease. Fighting for the Grand Marshal, his tribesmen will not have died in vain. Soon the Heavenly Army will avenge them, and after the battle, the Marshal's headquarters will provide compensation for the fallen soldiers."

Flintlock firearms were nothing new to Zhou Riqiang.

As early as when the Marshal's headquarters first reached Qinghai, Shi Chengwo of the Armaments Bureau had already compared in detail the merits of flintlock versus matchlock mechanisms, and had also produced a batch of flintlock pistols for Liu Chengzong's bodyguards.

After comprehensively considering all conditions at the time, their final choice was to equip heavy muskets with the simpler-to-manufacture matchlock mechanism, in order to reduce work hours and achieve mass production.

The relatively more complex flintlock mechanism was equipped only on jingal guns, which were heavier and needed in smaller numbers, to reduce the impact of windblown sand.

In this first engagement, the Kyrgyz had suffered many wounded, but all the wounded who fled eastward received treatment. Meanwhile, a Russian company of a hundred men had been surrounded by Chokur and stabbed to death to the last man. The death tolls on both sides roughly canceled each other out.

Yet in his heart, Zhou Riqiang still felt he had come out the loser, that he had lost this round.

Because he truly had never fought a war in Siberia, and his considerations had not been thorough. For one, he had grossly overestimated the enemy reinforcements' speed, thinking they would arrive in two or three days, and later let his guard down.

For another, he was unaccustomed to the climate here, and his understanding of the weapons, equipment, and combat methods used by the Russians was limited.

He genuinely had not expected the Russian expeditionary force to have such a high rate of flintlock pistol equipment.

This made Zhou Riqiang unable to help pondering whether the Tianshan Army's equipment ought to be adapted to local conditions as well.

After all, in the siege battle, the troops led by Company Commander Wang Jinzhong had not brought heavy muskets using matchlock mechanisms, because the priming powder in the flash pan was easily blown away by the wind.

What they carried were all wide-area-of-effect firearms like flying cannon bombs and rockets, specifically prepared for assaulting wooden forts.

However, Zhou Riqiang had no intention of having the Hehuang Armaments Bureau add another production line to equip the Tianshan Army with flintlock pistols — weapons that were clearly more "advanced."

It was not that flintlock pistols were unsuitable, nor that there were any technical difficulties, and still less a matter of cost.

He simply felt that making them was not as good as…

Zhou Riqiang had just thought of the fourth word when he was already reflecting. How could he, a high-caliber talent of the Great Ming Empire with his honest, upstanding look, have naturally arrived at such a solution?

It must be because there had been no decent people around him these past few years.

It was like there existed very clearly defined career trees.

A veteran bandit, upon leveling up, became Gansu Grand Commander Cao Yao. A Gobi desert robber, upon leveling up, became Mongol Brigade Commander Xie Erhu. A Central Plains horse bandit, upon leveling up, became Grand Camp Assistant Regional Commander Zhang Tianlin.

And of course, there were things like Tibetan slaves, mutinying veterans, and bare-stick generals.

Surrounded by such characters, influenced by what he constantly saw and heard, Zhou Riqiang felt that he who stayed near vermilion became red, near ink became black — it was perfectly normal for his thinking to gradually become Liu-Chengzong-ified.

Liu Chengzong never had the Armaments Bureau make him military tents, because the Ming army would send them over — couldn't use them all up, simply couldn't use them all up.

Zhou Riqiang also felt that flintlock pistols were very good, but there was no need to make them himself.

Making them was not as good as seizing them.

Since the Russian expeditionary force was equipped with so many, simply taking their pistols would suffice.

The first prerequisite of military thought is adapting to local conditions — you fight with whatever weapons you have.

The Cossacks' use of this weapon determined that their combat style could never fight the Tianshan Army in an open, formation-based battle.

The Marshal's Army's heavy muskets, used for dense formations, were overly cumbersome, dependent on formation, and required a long preparation time — clearly unsuitable for the occasion.

And equipping themselves with flintlock pistols as well would not suppress flintlock pistols; that would just be trading pieces.

What Zhou Riqiang wanted was suppression. He not only wanted to take the flintlock pistols from the enemy, but also to have an individual firearm capable of suppressing flintlock pistols.

At this moment, in the mind of a standard Ming civil official, a certain world-renowned, time-honored firearm was on the tip of his tongue: the three-eyed gun.

In the Marshal's headquarters, where organization and weaponry pursued the cutting edge, this idea was one hundred percent a case of turning back the clock of history.

Because the three-eyed gun had no firing mechanism, no flash pan — structurally, it was two generations behind the flintlock, a mere touch-hole gun that could be fired with a fuse.

And it was also very hard to upgrade.

Its firing posture was to clamp the barrel between the right arm and the ribs, while the left hand held the match cord to ignite the touch hole for firing.

In hip-fire posture, roughly aligning with the direction was enough; attempting more precise aiming made the posture extremely uncomfortable.

This in turn determined its form — the barrel should not be too long, as length would make it too heavy, and on the other hand, rough aiming probably did not require a long barrel anyway.

The Great Ming did consider upgrading the ignition mechanism of the three-eye gun. They made a matchlock version called the Three-Victory Divine Engine, and also made the Rotating-Wing Winged-Tiger Gun, where the barrel and breech were connected by a pivot for rotating fire.

But on the three-eye gun, these ingenious designs were like a bright pearl cast into darkness — utterly useless.

The Ming army in the north liked the three-eye gun not because it was so good it was irreplaceable, but simply because it was convenient.

Apart from the Frankish cannon, when the garrison soldiers in the frontier watchtowers faced Mongol cavalry several times their number, there was no weapon that gave them a greater sense of security than the three-eye gun.

Facing feathered arrows lofted from beyond a hundred paces, the garrison soldiers fired their cannons without the slightest fear — they even felt like laughing.

Once the enemy closed to twenty or thirty paces, the garrison soldier would clamp the barrel, spin and fire, able to send out three lead balls within three seconds — something no other weapon could replace.

Simple and reliable, with an integrated triple-barrel, the hand could still grip the match cord, thrust it into the touch hole for a guaranteed discharge, absolutely no chance of error.

Modify it with a matchlock mechanism, and you still have to turn the lever to align with the priming pan. Modify it into a Rotating-Wing Winged-Tiger Gun — it is indeed clever and convenient, but adds five or six more parts and triples the cost.

Accuracy did improve.

But the garrison soldiers' choice was to stuff three lead balls into a single barrel.

This thing was never a battlefield weapon worth bleeding money to upgrade, but a portable weapon for specific scenarios — close range, one-on-one or one-against-many.

On the battlefield, wasn't it better to just use cannons?

So its advantages were immense — so immense the Ming army could not bear to discard it; and its disadvantages were also immense — so immense the Ming army suffered no shortage of defeats while wielding it.

And the reason Zhou Riqiang had this idea was actually still because of the Cossacks' fighting style.

Any officer of the Marshal's Manor would find the way the Cossacks charged into the Kirghiz camp and slaughtered on all sides familiar.

They lurked on the water, biding their time, retreating at any moment if outmatched. Compared to formal formation fighting and maneuvering, they excelled at chaotic melee — seizing an opportunity, they would charge in with individual firepower superiority, strike fast and leave fast.

Wasn't this just pond cavalry with reduced firepower, extended combat preparation time, and horses swapped for boats?

Pond cavalry used long three-eye guns with two-chi barrels, three tubes holding nine lead balls — invincible in single combat, and not at a disadvantage even one against two.

The gun's mechanism only determined the accuracy brought by convenient aiming; power was determined by the barrel and the gunpowder.

If the barrel of a matchlock gun was the same as that of a flintlock gun, firing the same ammunition, then their power was the same.

And the Marshal's Manor pond-cavalry-style three-eye gun, with its two-chi-long barrel, was far longer than a flintlock pistol — greater power, faster rate of fire.

Most importantly, it was cheap and easy to use.

Zhou Riqiang's gaze shifted to the Kirghiz tribal chief Tabun before him. If those three camps that were ambushed had been equipped with three-eye guns, each man firing a three-round burst, they wouldn't be standing here with long, mournful faces.

At this moment, Tabun was completely dumbfounded.

He was repeatedly questioning the interpreter beside Zhou Riqiang — a man built like a young ox, of sailor origin: "Good warrior, what is compensation? What is compensation?"

The first time he asked, he wanted to know the concept of the word 'compensation.'

After receiving the answer, the second time he asked, he wanted to know the specific amount of 'compensation.'

Tabun's worldview suffered a hammer blow — fuck my granny, you mean if you die fighting on campaign, there's actually compensation?

Compensation... that word was too wonderful.

So wonderful that the resentment toward Zhou Riqiang in his heart vanished completely.

The most crucial thing was that Tabun knew Zhou Riqiang and Khukhur would still persist in fighting this battle — that was enough for him.

In all of Siberia, he was the person who most wanted the Marshal's Manor to win at Tomsk.

Zhou Riqiang used compensation to pacify the panicked Tabun and redeployed the defenses of the riverside camps.

He did not pull the various Kirghiz groups back. The mountain forests were the terrain they excelled in most, and besides, the besieging army could not simply ignore the riverbank.

All they could do was draw some veterans from Khukhur's camp to set traps along the riverbank and in the woods, making preparations for the Cossacks' next raid.

For seven consecutive days after that, the Oirat cavalry patrolling the shore could see Rus reinforcements continuously arriving on the river, but none were as recklessly fierce as Levandov, and none dared to come raid again.

Those reinforcements all merely moored their boats on the left bank of the Tom River and built wooden stockade camps.

It seemed both sides had a tacit understanding: this campaign would either end with Khukhur's camp lifting the siege, or the decisive battle would be fought when the siege camps launched their assault on the city.

Zhou Riqiang was quite nervous at first, because by his calculations, Liu Chengzu's fleet should have already entered the Tom River by now.

Khukhur, a veteran of a hundred battles, had better mental fortitude. Accustomed to fighting alone, he neither took Liu Chengzu's fleet being overdue seriously, nor did he take the Cossacks across the river, whose numbers had steadily grown to two or three thousand, seriously.

He simply smiled and patted Siberia's number-one armchair strategist on the shoulder, saying, "No need to panic. If their reinforcements exceed five thousand, we'll just come back next year."

"Warfare in the marshlands is just like that — fight if you can, retreat if you can't. No one can catch anyone anyway."

In truth, only Khukhur alone could remain so unruffled. The conscripted Kirghiz soldiers had begun deserting after the night raid, with over forty fleeing in just three days.

But when the Rus reinforcements appeared on the left bank of the Tom River, the four tribal chiefs, in their terror, sent riders galloping back to their tribes and brought back over six hundred more men.

Clearly, they understood Khukhur's irresponsible style very well. Khukhur could flee back to the Altai, but their tribes lay right between these two rivers. Since the Rus reinforcements had come anyway, they might not slaughter everyone for the furs, but most of the tribe's possessions would likely be eaten up and looted clean.

They might as well be slaughtered.

Fortunately, news from the rear soon arrived. Liu Chengzu had personally verified a truth: the rivers here were all broad and great, so why didn't the Rus build large boats on them?

Because the upper reaches of the Ob River were dotted with too many sandbars. When they set out, the spring floods had just ended, and the river water, swollen by summer snowmelt from the mountains, was slowly receding. The fleet ran aground three times over a thousand li of waterway.

However, by the time the cavalry messenger delivered the letter, Liu Chengzu had almost pulled the boats free.

Only this gave Zhou Riqiang a real calming pill.

What he feared most was Liu Chengzu being unable to get through — not that they couldn't fight without Liu Chengzu.

It was just that Zhou Riqiang felt, if this entire campaign was won relying on Khukhur, then in the future this guard unit should not be called Taimeng Guard.

It should be called Khukhur Guard.

And the name Taimeng Guard happened to be very important.

It had absolutely nothing to do with any auspicious sign sprouting forth, or a land of endless vitality.

It was simply that the Provincial Graduate from Li County in Baoding Prefecture, Zhou Riqiang, had the courtesy name Taimeng.