Chapter 643: For the Sake of Chengjitura

August — the twenty-fourth day of the siege of Tomsk.

The morning mist had yet to lift when Governor Ivan climbed the bell tower, raised his telescope, and looked southeast beyond the city walls.

In that direction, one tall siege tower after another had been erected, all of them proclaiming the besieging army's choice.

Even with the Russian forces on the left bank of the Tom River now reinforced to over four thousand, the besieging army's resolve remained unshaken — they refused to lift the siege, and a brutal assault was about to begin.

Through his telescope, Ivan had once spotted a man on a distant hillside, his whole body wrapped in a crimson robe that left his left shoulder bare, an iron cap on his head — utterly out of place among the clustered Tatar cavalry.

One look and you knew he was a "Khitan."

Ivan had assumed this Khitan commander's unyielding will to attack must rest on something, but now it seemed those siege engines were nothing remarkable.

Nothing more than rows of earth-filled gabions, tall trebuchets, shielded carts with firing ports, sturdy battering rams, and strange carts dangling large wooden plaques — all primitive siege weapons.

Primitive, of course, did not mean useless — the fortress at Tomsk was equally primitive — but this was a siege, after all, and numbers of men and cannon would have the final say.

At this very moment, the relief force on the left bank of the Tom River was nearing five thousand — over a thousand Cossacks and hunters rushed in from nearby, plus more than two thousand conscripted Tatars.

Beyond these, a regular army unit en route from Tyumen to the Yeniseysk stockade had also arrived — seven hundred streltsy and two mercenary regiments composed mainly of German hired soldiers, a force totaling fifteen hundred men.

These motley, piecemeal units had ferried into Tomsk over seven hundred firearms, twelve cannon of various calibers, more than five hundred jin of gunpowder, and an additional seven hundred troops, bringing the garrison inside the fort to fifteen hundred men.

The besieging positions outside the city, meanwhile, had received only five or six hundred Tatar reinforcements over these days — they still had just four very light little bronze cannon, arrayed in the open fields southeast of Tomsk, which seemed to mark that as their main axis of attack.

That the scale of the engagement had, in so short a time, spiraled into such an unmanageable situation was something Tomsk's Governor Ivan had never anticipated — he was badly rattled and wanted a ceasefire.

Ivan truly wanted a ceasefire.

It was not that he thought he would lose the battle — quite the opposite; in his view, losing the battle under the present circumstances would actually be rather difficult.

Given the primitive level of the enemy siege engines in the besieging camp, Tomsk would be very hard to breach — the furthest range of those trebuchets was at most two hundred meters, the defenders held absolute superiority in artillery, and there was simply no way they would let the trebuchets get close.

But neither did he think he would win easily — or rather, winning would be very hard.

After all, once the Oirat cavalry broke into a run, as long as they stayed away from the river, the Russian troops could not catch them.

More crucially, the Oirat cavalry were encamped in their farmland, and from what Ivan knew of the Tatars, if they could not breach the city, they would certainly set fire to the rye growing in the fields when they lifted the siege.

So this decisive battle, not yet begun, was in Ivan's eyes a lose-lose for both sides.

That was how campaigns in Siberia went — everything here was constrained by the environment, and small-scale clashes were the norm.

The real reasons he wanted a ceasefire, though, were, on the one hand, that the legendary Khitan were now right before his eyes, and on the other... this whole war was simply too bewildering to him.

Even now, he still did not know what had actually ignited this battle, whose scale had grown so hard to control.

Why?

The city of Tomsk, east of the Ural Mountains, had stood for thirty years.

Russia had ruled this land for over twenty years as well — this was no frontier.

It was Kuznetsk stockade, seven hundred li to the south, that could barely be considered to border the territory the Oirats controlled.

Then, suddenly, at the end of this summer, over three thousand Oirat, Kyrgyz, and Khitan allied troops had surrounded this city as if dropping from the sky.

Ivan could not fathom why war had suddenly broken out, still less why it had suddenly broken out at Tomsk.

Most critical of all was the timing — it came just when Tyumen had dispatched six thousand reinforcements toward the Yeniseysk stockade.

Already fifteen hundred of those men had come here to support them.

He even suspected that the besieging army at Tomsk was merely a decoy, and that further east another great army of the Khitan state was preparing to destroy the forts along the Yenisei River basin.

Otherwise, it made no sense.

You say your Khitan state has suddenly come today to expand its borders, and right from the start it fights a major battle — is that logical? Was your Khitan state just founded yesterday?

It silently pushed its border all the way here?

Truth be told, at this moment Governor Ivan's head was not only full of question marks, but also brimming with the will to survive.

He did not want to die in this bizarre battle.

He wanted to go back to Moscow and brag.

This battle was simply too surreal.

Just imagine — east of the Ural Mountains, six thousand li from Moscow, on the banks of the quiet Tom River, a gunpowder khanate that had sprung out of a crack in the rocks had suddenly laid siege to a city.

The most surreal part was that Tyumen actually had reinforcements — within a single month, both sides had swelled to four or five thousand men, pushing the forces that would meet in pitched battle to ten thousand.

The very word "pitched battle" — it had absolutely nothing to do with Siberia.

To get to the bottom of why the war had started, Ivan sent two rounds of envoys to the besieging camp.

He figured that if, as in past years, it was about tribute peoples, he could perfectly well make concessions.

Those Kyrgyz and Blacksmith Tatars — altogether ten or twenty thousand people — he could just hand them all over.

A Russian governor would not, of course, be so accommodating — he simply felt that, compared to trading with the Khitan, those few Tatars meant nothing.

But the very fact that he sent two rounds of envoys showed that the first round, at least, had not gone smoothly.

The first envoy never even got to see Chokur — because he refused to be the first to salute the Tatars outside the camp, he was beaten up by Chokur's men at the main gate of the siege camp, then hauled up and dumped beneath the city walls.

Ivan gave the envoy a scolding, replaced him, and sent a second round.

The second envoy did hold his nose and salute the guards at the gate, and did enter the main camp and meet Chokur — but who knows what they talked about, because they were all killed.

In truth, they talked about nothing at all.

Ivan's envoy had barely finished the formal pleasantries — telling Chokur to withdraw his troops and submit a memorial of submission to the Tsar, and they would not pursue the matter of besieging Tomsk, and would further proceed to Chokur's territory to open negotiations.

This was pure face-saving bluster, which no one needed to take seriously — in Siberia, Russia never dared demand tribute from the great nobles; at most they asked someone to write a letter, and for most nobles, not even a letter was required, just a salute to the envoy would do.

But who was Chokur? The very Lü Bu of Central Asia — he even fought his own father; he was not about to swallow this.

If I fucking want to besiege you, I besiege you; if I want to hit you, I hit you; if I want to withdraw, I withdraw — none of your damn business!

Zhou Riqiang had originally heard that the Oros had sent an envoy and quite wanted to talk with them — after all, know the enemy and know yourself, and you will never be defeated.

But before he had even entered the tent, Chokur's men had already brought out the envoy's head, tossed it outside the camp, and the Kyrgyz soldiers took turns kicking it away.

They kicked it all the way to the foot of Tomsk's walls.

What could Zhou Riqiang do? He was helpless too — all he could do was tell Chokur, "The straw men are ready. General, go kill some people."

Old Zhou had tried casting cannons outside the city. He tried, and discovered that this cannon thing — well, it really isn't something just anyone can make.

At the very least, the craftsmen of the Kirghiz tribe couldn't produce one.

The lion cannon is cast, but the craftsmen here don't know how to cast iron; they only know how to forge.

Zhou Riqiang thought, if forging works too, then let's forge a few falconets to play with.

In the end, they forged for over ten days and produced a falconet that fired a one-catty ball. When they test-fired it with a double powder charge, it blew itself to pieces, clean and neat.

In the end, even these trebuchets, battering rams, and wooden assault screens all had to be made under his personal guidance to the craftsmen.

If he had to make anything else outside the city, it would surely drive Zhou Riqiang mad.

Fortunately, Liu Chengzu's fleet had already sailed into the mouth of the Tom River last night. Having some of these crude tools was enough — after all, they never planned to rely entirely on trebuchets to breach the city.

Zhou Riqiang then had his men start tying together straw men.

Fortunately, the Kirghiz people were quite skilled at making straw men.

His plan was to set up a great number of straw men in the siege camp, while Chuhur led the cavalry to secretly cross to the other side, transferring to the left bank by small boats in the south.

The terrain on the left bank was better suited for armored cavalry charges. He would send him to slaughter the Russian reinforcements over there.

To some extent, Zhou Riqiang's feelings about the enemy reinforcements' arrival were very complicated.

This civil official, who had not experienced much life and death, felt fear at the enemy's vast military might.

Yet beneath that very human fear lay an enormous and frenzied delight.

Zhou Riqiang thought to himself, the more Russian reinforcements gathered on the opposite bank, the closer he came to death.

But fortune favors the bold, and the closer he came to leaving his name in the annals of history.

This was no game to him. To prepare for this campaign, he had spent an entire year just sorting out the relationships between countless things he had never even heard of before.

For instance, Russia could not possibly abandon Siberia just because one or a few forts had been uprooted. Furs had already become the pillar sustaining Russia's very existence, as vital as the summer tax and autumn grain were to the Great Ming.

Therefore, this campaign was bound to be a protracted tug-of-war.

Zhou Riqiang resolved to start the war, bypassing Kuznetsk Fort and heading straight for the walls of Tomsk, precisely to choose the most suitable battlefront.

This front could not be too close to the Oirat, or it would inevitably be influenced by the Oirat nobles; at the same time, it could not be too far, or support would not arrive in time and they would lack the strength to hold it.

Tomsk was the most strategically advantageous position for the coming war of attrition.

This was something Zhou Riqiang had learned from Liu Chengzong.

It lay within the thinking Liu Chengzong had used to solve the Hami problem.

Winning this battle was the foundation, but what mattered more was winning the next battle that would break out here next year.

Only by winning the next campaign could they truly secure their hold on this place.

And to secure that hold, the first thing to deal with were the scattered Russian outposts, garrisons, and hunters spread across a thousand-li radius around Tomsk.

Now that they were all coming here, for Zhou Riqiang, there could be no better opportunity to wipe them all out in one fell swoop.

Chuhur was very interested in Zhou Riqiang's proposal, but having more military experience than Zhou Riqiang, he did not accept the proposal wholesale.

He decided to personally lead one thousand seven hundred cavalry to cross the river from the south.

In addition, he left behind the remaining one thousand armored cavalry of the Chuhur Camp specifically to guard Zhou Riqiang's safety, lest the hard-won dog-headed strategist get himself killed.

The cavalry of the Chuhur Camp were mostly armored riders, but not the kind of heavy cavalry from the Central Plains where both man and horse are fully armored. They were cavalry equipped with leather armor, chain mail, four-mirror armor, and brigandine.

Chuhur had his own plan. He did not intend to strike the enemy directly. He would simply go to the left bank to let the horses graze. He would wait for Liu Chengzu's fleet to arrive and for the enemy to prepare to cross the river in support before he attacked.

Soon, a rider came galloping from the south to relay to Zhou Riqiang that Liu Chengzu had already split his forces into two routes. The naval force had already disembarked the warhorses. The land route consisted of three hundred cavalry escorting seventy carts carrying supplies. Both forces would arrive by dawn tomorrow.

By the next morning, the horse convoy arrived, and everything was in place.

Zhou Riqiang gave the Russian defenders in the city no chance to react, immediately ordering the siege camp to sound the horns.

Over a thousand troops of the Kirghiz tribe pushed the siege engines forward, slowly pressing toward the city walls.

The urgent ringing of bells in Tomsk echoed long over the dense forest. Countless Cossacks, hunters, and Tatars rushed out from the inner city, charging toward the various arrow towers of the outer wooden fort.

In an instant, fire flashed. The well-supplied defenders of Tomsk fired their muskets in volleys toward the outside of the city, and gunpowder smoke shrouded one arrow tower after another.

The Kirghiz archers under Tabun hid behind the shield carts and discovered that these wooden-plank carts really could block the enemy's bullets. Their morale soared, and they mustered their courage to nock arrows and draw bows, returning fire at the arrow towers like a rain of feathered shafts.

However, the true attack still came from the Tianshan Army soldiers mingled among the Kirghiz troops.

Company Commander Wang Jinzhong, having received seventy carts of firearm supplies, was itching for action. He had waited far too long for this moment. Seeing the defenders all manning the wooden rampart arrow towers, he immediately gave his squad leaders the order to blow up the towers.

Under the leadership of two squad leaders, two squads rushed behind the shield carts, drove away the friendly troops hiding there, and began a nonstop rotating bombardment of the arrow towers with twenty flying-rocket launchers each.

Amid the muffled thumping sounds, one lit cylindrical powder cartridge after another flew from the barrels, tracing parabolic arcs through the air to land near the arrow towers. The continuous explosions rocked the wooden arrow towers back and forth, and left the Cossacks outside the towers wailing everywhere.

It was not until the third wave of fire that a shell finally flew through the firing window of an arrow tower.

Then, in less than two breaths, a boom sounded as the flying-rocket shell exploded inside the arrow tower, blasting out clouds of bloody mist on the upper floor.

Immediately after, another arrow tower was taken out, and the two fortifications the Cossacks relied on for counter-fire were seized.

Seizing this opportunity, Tabun shouted out his orders. Dozens of Kirghiz soldiers pushed the cumbersome battering ram forward, while over a hundred more soldiers sprinted ahead carrying earth-filled sacks on their shoulders, beginning to fill in the trench outside the palisade wall between the two silenced arrow towers.

Ivan on the bell tower saw this scene and immediately ordered the Streltsy held in reserve to fill the gaps in the two arrow towers.

Little did he know, this was exactly Company Commander Wang Jinzhong's plan.

When the two arrow towers were once again garrisoned by soldiers and erupted with gunfire toward the outside of the city, all the Kirghiz soldiers at the front line were fleeing backward.

Just as the defenders thought they had repelled the enemy, a full fifty rockets screamed into the sky from outside the city, blanketing the two arrow towers with an extremely wide coverage area.

This naturally included both the outside and the inside of the wooden palisade wall.

Over five hundred catties of gunpowder were released in a single volley. The continuous roar of explosions erupted inside and outside the palisade wall, and countless iron pellets tore into the wall and the defenders behind it like ripping cloth.

Amid the gunpowder smoke blanketing the battlefield, the fleeing Kirghiz soldiers turned back once more, mustering all their strength to push the battering ram straight to the palisade wall. The massive log hammered heavily against the wooden wall.

On the other side of the battlefield, on the left bank of the Tom River, the clamor of the siege awoke the various Russian reinforcement troops who had come from afar.

Streltsy, mercenaries, and Cossacks hurriedly packed up their supplies, pushing flat-bottomed boats one after another into the river, preparing to cross and attack the flank of the siege camp.

However, just at that moment, two earth-shaking booms echoed from the horizon, drawing everyone's gaze.

A vast and mighty fleet appeared on the broad Tom River. Those ships had enormous wheels mounted on their sides, their paddles churning the river water ceaselessly. At the prows, bare-chested, red-turbaned brawny men beat war drums, and with a sound like rolling thunder, the fleet sped straight toward them.

Before the ships even drew near, the decks of each great vessel had already set up launch racks pieced together from rocket-propelled arrow wooden boxes. In the blink of an eye, over a hundred rockets soared skyward and came crashing toward the shore with piercing, shrill howls.

The Cossacks and mercenaries swarming the shore to board their boats scattered in all directions even faster, yet still could not avoid being cut down by the iron pellets loosed when the rockets exploded.

Even the lucky ones who escaped injury no longer stood at the shore. Compared to the monsters on the river, their own boats would capsize at a touch and shatter at a graze — where was the courage left to keep boarding? They all dashed for the warhorses to seize a mount or fled on foot, scrambling to get away from the shore.

And yet, Liu Chengzu and his fleet were not the most brutal men on this land.

In the reed-filled wilds not fifteen li from the Oros reinforcement camp, over a thousand Oirat lance-cavalrymen, their heads shaved to a single queue and bodies clad in iron-plated leather armor, were walking their horses at a slow pace toward their position.

Chokur rode unhurriedly, a careless, frivolous smile on his face, cradling his stupa-style helmet covered in carved scripture in his arms atop horseback, polishing it.

As if some invisible stain marred that gleaming helmet.

Only when Chokur's camp of armored lance-cavalry spread out their great formation and drew within two or three li of the encampment did Chokur finally come back to his senses. He put on his helmet squarely and properly, drew the exquisitely crafted goose-quill saber forged by the Marshal's Manor from his waist, and looked around at his subordinates advancing slowly with leveled lances. His rugged, frivolous face was suddenly filled entirely with violent, irascible fury.

The razor-sharp tip of the goose-quill saber pointed straight ahead.

He roared.

"For Chengjitu La!"