Valley of Death
Just as Wang Yangming had predicted, a portion of the army under Adiya began to swing around Liangshan under the command of Noyon Khasan Khan.
Khasan Khan was a Noyon of the pure fighting type, still in the blood-hot years of his late thirties. Obsessed with the thought of racing into Kunming as fast as possible so that his own ulus banner might fly over the city, he drove his men mercilessly.
“Lash the gers to the warhorses and ride! When a horse collapses from exhaustion, slaughter it. We cut through this damned mountain range as fast as humanly possible!”
Even Mongol ponies, small-framed and bred for distance, could not keep running mountain paths forever without dropping. The mounts the soldiers rode might manage, but the beasts hauling gers and carts collapsed almost daily.
Among nomads a horse was precious property, and no household kept only one; the losses were still within the range they could bear. Even so, the forced march was so brutal that Khasan Khan’s host covered nearly half the remaining distance in a mere three days—an impressive feat by any measure.
Yet the smooth advance gave him no pure joy.
“Halt.”
Barbed wire stretched across the road ahead. A newly cut highway and a railway line gaped open as if inviting them in. The anti-cavalry barriers that should have blocked the way had been deliberately cleared aside.
He felt exactly as Sima Zhongda must have felt when he first saw Zhuge Liang’s empty-city stratagem—deeply, unpleasantly unsettled.
“Send scouts. Check for ambushes.”
At his order several men dismounted and approached the Noksan outpost with careful steps. A short while later they returned.
“Nothing, my Khan. The buildings are empty. No one left a thing behind.”
Neither the mysterious powder weapons, nor provisions, nor even the strange cultivated plots laid out between the wire remained. Only the wire itself—too troublesome to tear out—and the reservoir that once supplied the post with drinking water.
This was the fifth such place.
At first he had thought they had stripped the garrisons to block the Ye River. Next he had decided the enemy had simply fled. Meeting one empty outpost after another, however, began to raise a cold unease he could not shake.
Where did all the soldiers who held these posts go?
In the worst case the enemy was lying in wait. Yet if he ordered a full search of the surrounding mountains, the advance would stop cold and his entire column would be pinned in place for the day. Finding an ambush in layered ranges was hard enough for people born in the hills of Bashu; for sons of the steppe it was nearly impossible. Even their vaunted horsemanship counted for nothing on these treacherous slopes. Off the suspiciously well-made road, a warhorse could scarcely manage a proper canter.
And that same well-made road itself felt ominous.
Does it not look exactly like an invitation to walk right in?
In the end he could only give the order he hated.
“…We rest. Slaughter the horses that have fallen, cook a meal, and hitch fresh mounts to the gers and carts.”
Weary soldiers drew water from the reservoir, butchered meat, and set cauldrons boiling. Khasan would have preferred to drive straight through to Kunming without pause, but the rear of the column was falling farther and farther behind.
His hundred-thousand-strong host already stretched through the Bashu mountains like a single long serpent—the classic long-snake formation—so that the head of the column could no longer know what was happening at the tail. He swallowed his frustration and told himself they would wait for the rear to catch up, rest, then move again.
What he failed to grasp was that this method let the vanguard rest while the rearguard, arriving just as the front started off again, never truly rested at all. On open steppe, where head and tail advanced at nearly the same speed, the problem never appeared. In these narrow, twisting mountains, where the column lengthened and marching rates diverged, the difficulty was entirely new to him.
And watching them from a distance were other eyes.
Dang Ji-u, commander of the Sakpungdae, lowered his telescope after studying the stragglers at the enemy’s rear—men dragging their feet, horses foaming white and collapsing as soldiers cut them free of the gers.
“They’re falling farther behind by the hour.”
Dang Hui-yeom had already ridden ahead to Kunming and was even now preparing, together with the Yunnan Regional Military Commissioner, to receive Khasan Khan’s army.
Just then the Sakpungdae operatives who had carried out their orders returned and bowed.
“Commander, the reservoirs at the outposts have been breached as ordered.”
“Good. You only dismantled the sluice gates so repairs will be easy later, correct?”
“Of course.”
“And the Musinpo?”
“Prepared and set in the gravel bed of Falling Horse Valley, roughly thirty li ahead.”
“Excellent. We move.”
“Yes, sir.”
True to their name—Winter Wind—the Sakpungdae melted away with ghostly silence.
A short time later Khasan Khan finished the rest, waited only until the rear arrived, and set the host moving again. Half a day brought them to the next outpost—and there the trouble began.
Steep hillsides followed one after another. He had expected an ambush this time and advanced with care, only to find not enemies but a road thoroughly soaked into deep mud.
“They breached the reservoirs?”
The water stored at a few lonely outposts could never have become a proper flood capable of sweeping an army away. Still, the released streams had poured down the slopes and turned the trench fields into quagmires. Even though a well-paved road ran through the center of those fields, the mud and slurry now sliding down the incline like a river made the climb nearly impossible for man or beast.
Khasan Khan ground his teeth.
“The bastards and their petty tricks.”
Climbing the hills would now be far harder. Water itself became a problem as well. Exhausted by continuous mountain marching, the soldiers had been lightening their loads by leaving their water skins empty. Under ordinary circumstances they would never have done so, but the regular appearance of abandoned outposts with full reservoirs had taught them they need not bother carrying water.
Now they faced a forty-degree slope of slick mud with not a mouthful of water among them. Thirst clawed at every throat.
“Hiiiiiiing!”
One horse, foam flying from its muzzle as it strained upward, stepped wrong on the mud and slid. The ger it was hitched to, and the three horses hitched to that ger, all went skidding backward together.
“Watch out!”
“Aaaaah!”
Because gers traveled mounted on carts, the effect was exactly like the rear half of a camping wagon rolling back down a slope. Men were injured; the wrecked ger blocked the road. Clearing it would cost precious time. All the rage that had been building in Khasan Khan finally erupted.
“Damn it all! Leave the rear behind! The vanguard charges alone!”
“Khan! Is that wise?”
One of his Noyan adjutants asked the question with open worry. Khasan answered without hesitation.
“They breached the reservoirs and fled—that means the distance between us is already short. They’re running in panic. We drive our swiftest mounts, smash their rear, then wait for our own tail to catch up, recover our strength, and strike Kunming. If we let them slip away here they will simply join the city’s defenders!”
It was not an entirely foolish conclusion. The resistance at the Noksan outposts had been fierce and had inflicted real damage. Yet the damage had never come from sheer numbers. The placement of the posts, the barbed wire and anti-cavalry barriers, and above all the powder weapons—those wicked combinations had done the real work. And then there had been the overwhelming firepower poured down at the Ye River.
Khasan Khan was certain the enemy’s main strength—or at least a large part of it—had gone to the Ye River. That, he told himself, explained the empty outposts. The very fact that the enemy had destroyed their own reservoirs now gave him the conviction he needed: only desperation would make them wreck something so valuable merely to delay him rather than try to inflict heavy casualties.
At his order the leading riders remounted. They had just clawed their way up a mud-slick hill, yet their eyes still burned bright.
“Ride! We go to butcher these soft pigs of the Central Plains!”
“Yes, Khan!”
They abandoned the rear and thundered forward.
Watching through his telescope, Dang Ji-u of the Sakpungdae murmured, “They’re running.”
“They should reach the valley in roughly half an hour.”
“Signal them. Light the fuses the moment the enemy enters the valley.”
“Yes!”
One operative scrambled onto a high boulder and began to wave a signal flag. Khasan Khan racing below never saw it, but the ambush team waiting on the opposite slope saw it clearly.
“Three waves… half an hour. Unspool the fuses.”
“Understood!”
The ambush team moved with practiced speed. The Musinpo Dang Hui-yeom had designed could be stacked like crates, braced at an angle on a slope, or simply set into shallow scrapes of earth; everything had already been prepared. All that remained was to drop powder bags into the empty rectangular casings, tear open the waxed paper packets inside, and draw out the long, carefully coiled fuses.
Colored knots marked measured burn times along each fuse. The team stretched each fuse to the third red knot—exactly half an hour of burn—cut it there, and set the end alight.
—chiiiiisss…
The fuses hissed quietly. As a final courtesy the operatives heaped loose gravel and stones atop the powder bags for extra shrapnel, then slipped away the instant they heard hoofbeats approaching the mouth of the valley.
Khasan Khan felt a prickle of tension the moment he entered the valley. The terrain favored ambush, and the gravel underfoot would make a full gallop treacherous. Yet no sign of the enemy appeared. Grateful for the luck, he decided to clear the unpleasant stretch as quickly as possible.
“Yah! Hyaah!”
“Chaa!”
They spurred hard; the vanguard thundered through. Khasan Khan and his personal Keshik bodyguard were roughly midway when something odd caught his eye.
“What is that?”
Ahead, at the far end of the valley where the slope rose again, ladder-like frames lay beneath large boulders on either side. Stacked in tiers, they looked almost like open cabinets. Inside the compartments sat rough hemp bags. Someone had tried to cover them with gravel but had not finished the work.
“What in the world…?”
“Hard to say, my Khan. Central Plains folk sometimes build shrines or Buddha images at the edge of a village. Perhaps some religious structure?”
One of the better-educated Keshik offered the guess, but no one truly knew.
The world, however, was about to give them the answer.
Just before the leading riders cleared the far mouth of the valley, the flames racing along the fuses finally kissed the powder inside the bags.
Then the earth itself seemed to explode.
—TU-KWA-KWA-KWANG!!!
The black powder’s shockwave did not completely shatter the concrete casings; the blast vented naturally forward through the open faces. The caltrops packed inside the bags flew like throwing stars cast by a martial master. The gravel piled on top became a dense volley of sling stones.
Those nearest the blast were torn apart. Farther back, riders took caltrops through chest or gut or had their skulls caved in by flying stone and toppled from the saddle. The horses fared no better. After the long mountain ordeal, the poor beasts finally found rest.
The survivors were little better off. Half-maddened by the thunderclap and the carnage before their eyes, the mounts reared and bolted; even Mongol horsemen could not stay seated. Men who fell landed on the caltrops carpeting the valley floor and were pierced through. Hooves smashed ribs and crushed skulls. The panicked horses themselves stepped on caltrops, shattered their own hooves, and went down thrashing to their deaths.
And while the vanguard died in that slaughterhouse, the supply column still struggling far to the rear was about to meet a nightmare of its own.