Chapter 644: Collision

Thunderous hoofbeats resounded along the riverbank, mingled with the deep, low war cries of the Mongols.

The muffled crack of muskets rang out chaotically in all directions, but the swirling gunsmoke was pierced through by arrow after arrow.

Then warhorses burst through the haze; Dzungar cavalry in crude armor, clutching wooden lances and churning up clods of mud, swept forward — the Streltsy who had dropped their muskets and raised battle axes never got the chance to swing before they were impaled by the charred, blackened lance heads.

The Cossacks were fleeing.

The cavalry of Chokur's camp split into skirmishing squadrons across the wilderness, pursuing the scattered Cossacks and hunters; after a brief chase and slaughter, the battle gradually settled into a standoff.

The routed Cossack squads rallied as they fled, forming small groups of a dozen, several dozen, or even over a hundred men, using boulders and earthen slopes on the steppe, or the wooden palisades and wagon forts of the shore camp, to counterattack the swarming Oirat cavalry.

At this stage, the Oirat cavalry showed a slight decline in momentum.

The cavalry Chokur led had been only a third the size of the Cossack force from the start; in the initial contact, aided by the chaos caused by the ships' rockets, they had successfully reaped a great harvest of kills.

But once the enemy found fortifications, even if only an earthen slope, the pastoral cavalry's nature as shepherds and hunters revealed itself.

The men were unwilling to press their advantage; such was their tactic — they would rather chase down enemies still fleeing, or watch over the enemy behind fortifications like sheepdogs, than charge into the sheepfold to slaughter indiscriminately.

Several dozen riders circled beyond the range of the wagon fort, unable to do anything to the Cossacks inside, and likewise the Cossacks and Streltsy within the wagon fort could not suppress them.

What followed was a protracted standoff.

Until the entire left-bank battlefield was carved by Chokur's thousand-strong cavalry into over a dozen small encirclement battlefields.

Chokur himself led a small band of riders charging back and forth across the field, cutting down the scattered enemy troops who had fled to the periphery until not a single piece of armor remained.

He was like a fierce tiger, swiftly defeating as many opponents as possible; even the enemy troops who had ducked behind fortifications were playthings in his palm.

Chokur had ample experience fighting firearms with cold weapons; he directed his cavalry to loose dense showers of arrows in arcing volleys from beyond musket range time and again, but forbade them from scattering their shots aimlessly.

From time to time he dispatched cavalry squads to harass the camp, launching feint after feint.

A hunter always possesses extraordinary patience, and Chokur was not impatient for quick results like most of the Marshal's Office generals.

In his mind, the fighting on the left bank should end at dawn tomorrow at the earliest; he had at least an entire day and night to waste the enemy's gunpowder.

Because for Chokur, who excelled at fighting outnumbered, slaughter was not the meaning of battle, nor was it the key to victory in a campaign.

Fear was.

He wanted the enemy behind their wagon forts and earthen mounds to tremble with plummeting morale; only then would a cavalry charge to shatter their position carry its greatest power, and only then would victory carry its greatest shock.

As for Centurion Levando, besieged in the camp, his mind had been pierced through by the spiritual contamination Liu Chengzu brought the moment the Tianshan Army fleet arrived.

Bizarre — too damn bizarre!

For the widely traveled Levando, who had mastered three languages, explosive projectiles like rockets and flying-rocket cannons were nothing unfamiliar.

If one were to say this era's world had three most prosperous centers of civilization, then they would surely be the Holy Roman Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Great Ming Empire.

The Crimean Khanate, where Levando had sojourned for six long years, was an Ottoman vassal, and there, much like in the Great Ming, they possessed many advanced firearms of great experimental significance.

Take the ceramic-pot grenade, for example — it was first brought to the Middle East by Arab merchants from the Song Dynasty, and adapted into glass incendiary bottles suited to local conditions; of course, they also had something like the flying-rocket cannon, a type of hand-held mortar.

The Ottomans also had rockets, but compared to the Great Ming's rockets, theirs were more like Japan's bō hiya — non-explosive, with gunpowder packed at the tail and fins fitted to the shaft, attacking ships with sheer weight.

Though the sheer number of rockets was terrifyingly powerful and panic-inducing, it would never strike Levando as novel.

But Liu Chengzu's Tianshan Army was different.

The decorations on those great ships, the armor, even the men wearing the armor — to Levando, everything was bizarre to the extreme.

It was not exoticism; the Rus people were familiar with Mongol styles, armor, and script, but the most bizarre part lay precisely here.

Those blades somewhere between straight and curved, the military banners so similar to the Mongols', the armor resembling Mongol riveted coats — even the soldiers inside that armor, with skin tones identical to Mongols — all drove him mad with cognitive dissonance.

The blade shape was very familiar, yet he had absolutely never seen it before; the military banners looked the same, yet he could not recognize the "drawings" on them; the armor seemed identical, yet clearly belonged to no Mongol power he had ever encountered.

Even the soldiers — their skin tone was the same as Mongols, they wore thick beards, but their facial bone structure lacked the excessively robust look of Mongol skulls; their brows, eyes, and features were squarer, as if they came from some other alien realm.

It was like a person standing right before your eyes, a wave of familiarity washing over you from head to toe, yet when you looked closely, utterly strange.

This feeling was terrifying, the uncanny valley effect cranked to the maximum.

An army that seemed to rewrite your very cognition was almost unbearable to look upon directly!

Fortunately, those people seemed to have no intention of landing to annihilate them; the fleet merely loosed rockets like a whirlwind on the left bank, left two ships behind, and then turned toward the right bank.

The two ships left behind did not land; they merely cruised the river a hundred-odd paces from shore, lowered two small sampans like laying eggs, placed crate after crate of munitions onto the sampans, then loaded them back onto the big ships, and finally used ropes to suspend two small cannons with their ammunition and deliver them to the shore.

Liu Chengzu had originally intended for these two ships to deliver some rockets and flying-rocket cannons to the shore, but the Centurion in charge of the big ships thought it over: the friendly forces on the left bank were all Chokur's soldiers, and they wouldn't know how to use firearms anyway.

What if the rockets ended up blanketing their own men, or the flying-rocket cannons exploded right in their hands?

So they might as well just deliver two cannons and be done with it.

Liu Chengzu's main attention was still focused on Tomsk city on the right bank.

This longest voyage in the history of the Marshal's Office had left this Grand General of the Tianshan Mountains stewing with a bellyful of rage.

To put it this way: ever since he began his career as a border defense squad leader, he had always been very confident in his ability to lead troops.

Whether leading a small squad, a large company, or a battalion or regiment of horse and foot, he had never felt it was particularly troublesome.

But he had never commanded a naval fleet, and damn it, navigating on a river was far harder than leading troops across the desert.

The fleet ran aground on sandbars three times, ships collided with each other seven times; soldiers who fell overboard had to be fished out, ships that ran aground had to be hauled free, and when they crashed together, they had to figure out how to pry them apart.

The key issue was that the sense of effortless command he had with land forces — like using his own arm and fingers — was gone.

The lead ship would signal with flags: sandbar ahead.

By the time the message was relayed to the flagship, it had become: enemy ships ahead.

The sailors aboard Liu Chengzu's flagship rowed furiously and drove the vessel straight onto the sandbar with a lurch.

It was only because the Ob River basin had no opponent capable of fighting them in a naval battle that this fleet, which looked immensely powerful and massive, didn't simply cease to exist.

Fortunately, they ultimately managed to reach Tomsk.

When the fleet arrived, the siege of Tomsk was locked in a stalemate.

In this castle siege, Zhou Riqiang was unable to provide any help to the front lines, while the Kirghiz chieftains like Tabin possessed only a wealth of experience in failing at sieges.

So the true commander on the front line was Centurion Wang Jinzhong.

The problem was, Wang Jinzhong had never assaulted a city either; he was born a household servant on the estate of Regional Commander Wang Chengen, had trained since childhood, and had mastered a full set of mounted archery and martial skills.

In terms of martial skill, he had been selected for the Tiger Guard Camp very early on, naturally making him an outstanding figure in the army, but his combat experience was not rich — he had fought only four battles in total.

His first time on the battlefield was at Shandan County, fighting invading marauding Tatars; his second was pursuing roving bandits in northern Shaanxi; his third was following Wang Cheng'en to fight Liu Chengzong; his fourth was following Liu Chengzong to fight the Oirat coalition.

All told, this was his fifth battle.

Never mind commanding a siege — he did not even have experience being commanded in a siege.

Therefore, although the equipment was complete, Wang Jinzhong's tactics were crude to the bone, focused solely on attacking one side.

The besieging troops, using rocket volleys for cover, did manage to drive back the enemy behind the wooden palisade between the two arrow towers, and even brought a battering ram up to the wall, very smoothly breaching the palisade and opening a gap.

But in the fierce close-quarters slaughter, the Kyrgyz soldiers, though brave enough, simply could not fight their way into the stockade no matter what.

The gap was too small, and the tactic of attacking only one side was fully observed by the overseers on the bell tower, who had long since reinforced the defenses on that side; with Cossacks and hunters wielding hand cannons and bracing long spears, they simply could not break in.

The reason the Russians chose to build so many of these crude wooden forts in Siberia was precisely that such forts were already sufficient to deal with conventional tactics here.

Fortunately, at this moment, Liu Chengzu's fleet sailed to the riverbank west of Tomsk.

The fleet's landing was not orderly, but it was stunning.

Over twenty vessels, large and small, in the time it takes a stick of incense to burn, raced and jostled straight for the riverbank and the shoals.

First, the flat-bottomed small boats, pushing the river water before them, rushed ashore in unison, plowing furrow after furrow into the soft riverbank; the soldiers aboard, jolting and colliding with one another, leaped off before the boats had even steadied.

Some led horses, some raised banners; the company commanders, clutching their heads, drew their goose-quill sabers and shouted for the troops to check their equipment and form ranks.

There were no enemies on the bank, and the flat-bottomed boats had no anchors — they had to be dragged ashore anyway, so this was a slightly unorthodox but still understandable method of landing.

But the larger ships behind were a different story. From the squad commanders down to the soldiers, this thousand-li voyage had given them ample experience in sailing — only... they were still somewhat lacking when it came to stopping.

The centurions handling the large ships, none of them having properly planned their speed, could not stop at the bank, and dared not hurl the anchors down while the ships were still moving fast, so they simply had the sailors back-pedal to slow down and executed a hard landing.

The sound of hull planks making intimate contact with the earth was like thunder, and the clang of metal from soldiers' armor and gear colliding let them seize attention across the entire battlefield before anyone else.

They even forgot to fire the cannons and guns.

Every last Cossack in the arrow towers, with their extensive experience in water combat, could never have imagined such a reckless way of coming ashore.

Yet the scene on the riverbank left no one with the heart to mock.

Because although the fleet had been knocked senseless, the enraged Tianshan soldiers looked even more murderously ferocious.

They carried off crates of firearms and pushed iron cannons down the gangplanks; many staggered on unsteady legs, looking ready to drop to their knees, yet in an extremely short time they laid out a spread of fine equipment in the open ground.

The Cossacks were dumbfounded — weren't these sailors? How could there be sailors clad in heavy armor?

They were not lavishly equipped Boyar nobles, and they were long accustomed to bullying the Siberian Khanate and the native Kyrgyz; faced with Tianshan troops, every man clad in cloth-faced iron armor, they were utterly stupefied.

But Liu Chengzu gave them no chance to stand there gawking.

Liu Chengzu, who had stewed with pent-up fury during the voyage on the great river, recovered his confidence as a land commander the moment he disembarked, casting an appraising gaze toward Tomsk not far away.

Immediately after, the soldiers beat the war drums, and on a small rise not far from the landing site, five or six hundred paces from the fort, they set up an artillery position of three thousand-jin cannons, with crates of cannonballs piled mountain-high beside them.

Before the rest of the troop formations had completed deployment, the three thousand-jin cannons roared and boomed, firing in alternation toward the fort.

The troop formations advanced further; four hundred paces from the fort, crate after crate of rockets was unloaded and unpacked, assembled into over a hundred launch racks, and right on the heels of the cannonballs' thunder, the most brilliant fireworks of the Siberian day rose into the sky.

Finally came the twenty lion cannons. When the first wave of rockets had blasted the fort into a haze of smoke, they advanced rapidly alongside the infantry toward the stockade wall, pressing right up to a hundred paces outside the wall before the manpower-dragged gun carriages were at last arrayed.

Then a single volley — a swath of cannonballs uniformly embedded themselves an inch or two into the stockade wall, some even punching a hole through the joint between two logs and flying into the fort.

The lion cannon, a field artillery piece, was not that effective against wooden ramparts, but it made up for it with its reloading speed.

Before the Cossacks inside the fort who had luckily survived the rocket volley could make any proper deployment, the artillerymen outside had already fired their second volley.

Twenty one-jin iron balls tore through the smoke and again embedded themselves one after another into the log stockade wall; this time, one even cleanly snapped a log in the middle, revealing a gap nearly a foot wide.

Right after, another heavy boom hammered at the hearts of the soldiers behind the wall.

It was the thousand-jin cannon.

A seven-jin iron ball grazed the top of the stockade wall, ripping away the awning of thin logs set with barbs, and cleanly smashed one of the thin wooden pillars to splinters, sending a mess of broken wood chips and fibers exploding outward like gun smoke.

The Cossacks and hunters inside Tomsk had never in their lives endured such a savage beating.

Behind the wooden wall, after enduring only two rounds of shelling, the troops who had just come as reinforcements collapsed in turn.

They lost their will to fight, defied the order to defend the fort, and swarmed toward the water gate on the west side of the fort, fighting fiercely over spots on the flat-bottomed small boats, hoping to row their way to safety.

By contrast, a seemingly unreliable four-hundred-man company of German mercenaries inside the fort proved more tenacious, actually taking over the defense at this moment and pushing four small iron cannons forward, intending to plug the gap.

But even the highest fighting spirit cannot overcome a disparity in gunpowder volume.

During the time they moved from the inner fort to the outer fort, the twenty lion cannons had already carved the outer palisade into a breastwork with over a hundred cannonballs.

They had just marched out of the inner fort gate in formation when the Tianshan troops, set up behind the breastwork with heavy muskets on stands, fired a volley.

Amid the billowing smoke, the large lead bullets, capable of piercing men and horses alike, laid a full third of the formation flat.

Amid earth-shaking battle cries, planks used for repairing ships were carried by soldiers to the outside of the wall, forming ramp after ramp for scaling; the Tianshan troops, helmets on and armor clad, drew their golden-melon hammers and goose-quill sabers and lunged into the smoke-wreathed Tomsk.

Just as they had when they drove their warships crashing ashore, they plowed bloody furrows through the fort.