Qinghai Guerrillas
Adiya Khan had been thrown from his horse, yet whether by misfortune or fortune he had escaped any serious injury.
He barely managed to restore order among the army thrown into chaos by the unspeakable carnage that had unfolded before their eyes, and pulled the host back thirty li.
Between Lijiang and the outpost, in the only stretch of somewhat open grassland that broke the narrow mountain defiles, he pitched camp and reorganized his forces. Only then did the reckoning arrive: some twenty thousand soldiers had been sacrificed in the hellfire of the outer outpost of Dali.
Adiya Khan nearly laughed in disbelief.
Twenty thousand was an enormous number. Even packing men shoulder to shoulder into the confined space of that trench line would scarcely have produced such a figure. That was how desperately they had fought, how fiercely they had burned with martial spirit as they charged to crush the enemy.
Yet even that had been the enemy’s trap.
Adiya Khan had reached the point where he could no longer trust his own judgment. It was less that he himself was incompetent than that Hui-yeom and the forces of Yunnan under Noksan’s command kept producing unforeseen new weapons. Who could say where they might next plant some outrageous, game-breaking ambush, or what new curse of a weapon they were preparing?
The sacrifices had been too great.
Roughly ten thousand to take Baoshan, some thirty thousand at Lijiang, another ten thousand at Liangshan, and now twenty thousand more lost before they had even set foot in Dali. Altogether, seventy thousand of a great host. That was a force comparable in strength and numbers to the entire military power of a mid-sized province of the Central Plains—elite troops that should have overwhelmed any opponent in open battle—snuffed out for nothing.
Had his warriors fallen after clashing blade to blade in fierce struggle, he could at least have accepted it. Instead they had inhaled poison mist and clawed at their chests until they died like insects, or been pulped into dung amid explosions and flying steel, or been trapped in flames and roasted like meat.
And even now, the survivors—bodies covered in hideous mustard-yellow blisters—were rotting while still alive.
“Kill me….”
“Khuh-huk…!”
A soldier thrashing in the hideous agony of full-body burns and infection wept tears from eyes so swollen with blisters that their original shape could scarcely be discerned, and begged. A comrade who could bear it no longer raised his sword and pierced the man’s throat.
Adiya Khan suddenly wondered whether they were merely receiving the karmic retribution of their ancestors. When settled peoples sealed their gates and shut themselves inside, hurling dung or enemy corpses over the walls with catapults to break their spirit and breed pestilence had long been one of the Mongols’ traditional strategies.
“How much grain remains?”
The noyan in charge of supply answered Adiya Khan’s question.
“If we cease combat, rest, and husband every scrap… we can hold out for two months at most.”
“And if we abandon the sick?”
“….”
Some three thousand patients were dying from mustard-gas exposure. Though they had already lost all combat ability, the cold judgment of abandoning their own made the noyans bite their lips. The supply officer squeezed his eyes shut with a desolate expression.
“…We would gain only another week to ten days.”
“It cannot be helped.”
Adiya Khan spoke.
“We cannot treat them anyway, can we? The patients themselves will want their suffering ended quickly. Give them wine… and ease their passing.”
“…Yes.”
One could not simply curse Adiya Khan’s decision as cruel. Soldiers wearing grim faces carried poisoned kumiss to the cots. The patients on them smiled as if they understood everything. Gasping for breath through the blisters that filled their lungs, lips turned purple with cyanosis, they forced out faint smiles.
“Th… ank….”
“…Kkeuk….”
One soldier could not restrain a choked sob, and a solemn silence settled over the surroundings. The patients stretched out their own hands, drank the kumiss, and then simply fell asleep, never to groan in pain again.
Mongol custom was originally sky burial, and the Chagatai shared that culture. Yet leaving so many corpses exposed in the mountains and rivers now would only create a hotbed of plague. In the end Adiya Khan had no choice but to order the bodies burned.
At the merciless price of abandoning the wounded, Adiya Khan had bought ten more days of grace. He stared at the map and brooded.
Coldly considered, our host still outnumbers the entire military strength of Yunnan by more than two to one.
To halt the attack and withdraw would be a waste. And he still held one hope.
If we can just hold for about a month… the army that went to Qinghai will cross the Kunlun. Once they begin striking Sichuan’s rear, the Sichuan forces will have no choice but to rush home in panic. Yunnan will be left an empty husk. The enemy cannot possibly have expected us to come over the Kunlun Mountains, so they will not have prepared defenses there. If we simply drive straight ahead without fortifications in our path, our larger numbers and cavalry will guarantee Chagatai victory.
So he decided to endure.
“Fell the trees of the surrounding forest, dry them, and stockpile firewood.”
Securing fuel while at the same time clearing lines of sight against possible enemy raids.
“Give the men rest, but do not neglect the perimeter watch.”
Soothing the exhausted men and horses. As he thus steadied his army and began the standoff with Dali, Hui-yeom, the Lijiang garrison commander, and the Dali garrison commander all nodded.
“They must be hard-pressed for supply, yet they do not come. It seems they truly are aiming for our rear after all.”
“…Should we not still guard Kunming? However hard we struck them on the Liangshan detour, there is no law that says they will never try again….”
At the Dali commander’s words Hui-yeom shook his head.
“Kunming already holds a thousand cannons, poison-smoke shells, vast stores of Dabal-shingin, and flintlock muskets, with the Yunnan Regional Military Commission itself waiting for the enemy. Further fortification is unnecessary.”
Wang Yangming agreed and added his own explanation.
“If they attempt another offensive through Liangshan and fail, their supply will be finished for good this time. From everything we have observed, Adiya Khan is not a reckless general who stakes everything on a gamble; he is a cool-headed strategist who calmly controls the situation. If he chooses a detour, he is likely to pick a third route we cannot easily predict.”
The Dali commander replied, “If they swing south… they would have to pass through the jungle, and that is difficult.”
The jungle held the Southern Savage Beast Palace. Dragging horses through dense forest was exceedingly hard. In the worst case, only the jungle’s beasts and venomous insects would feast.
“Then north—there truly might be a road over the Kunlun Mountains.”
“Hah, that place?”
The Lijiang commander shook his head. Having grown up looking at the Kunlun range forever cloaked in eternal snow, he simply could not imagine an army crossing it.
“That place is….”
Hui-yeom’s brow furrowed slightly. He had ordered a hundred special-unit Poison Sect soldiers, armed with Gatling guns, to defend it. Yet even he wondered whether that choice held any real strategic weight. No matter how perfectly sited a machine-gun nest became a meat grinder for infantry, a hundred men holding off tens of thousands at minimum was….
“…We can only hope the Qinghai forces perform well.”
He had already sent warning. The rest was simply to trust and wait. Even in the worst case, if Qinghai fell there would still be attrition on the enemy; Sichuan’s defensive posture could handle the rest. They might have believed only Noksan’s outpost existed on the western approaches, yet Hui-yeom had long ago dotted the complex mountain country of Sichuan with outposts, precisely against the possibility that the Gyeong court itself might turn enemy. Frankly, he was confident he could stop even the enemy’s main force of three hundred thousand if it marched straight into Sichuan.
Just then a presence was heard outside the door.
“Young Master, it is Sama Yun, Head of the Inner Hall. May I enter?”
Though they were husband and wife, she used titles because outsiders were present at the conference. Hui-yeom granted her permission to enter. Sama Yun stepped inside and held out a dispatch.
“Word from Beijing. The Pi Clan of the War Ministry has ordered the Five Armies Commandery to detach a portion of the central White Tiger Army to Qinghai. The number reaches one hundred thousand.”
The Pi Clan? To Qinghai? Troops? Now?
Hui-yeom tilted his head, wondering what on earth had possessed the man to make a correct decision for once, then soon gave a bitter smile.
“It seems the post of Minister of War was not obtained by bloodline alone.”
“It will not be a dispatch made for the rational reasons Young Master is thinking. He probably tried to send troops to Sichuan or Yunnan, was blocked, and so is parking them in Qinghai for now, intending later to invent some pretext and move the army into Sichuan.”
Sama Yun spoke as if she could see straight into Pi Jae-hyeon’s heart. Hui-yeom nodded.
“Thank you. Whatever the intention, for us it is good news.”
“Indeed.”
If Qinghai’s defenses grew solid, they too could forget worry over their rear and concentrate on the standoff with the enemy. Pi Jae-hyeon had, against his own will, ended up helping Hui-yeom.
Yet after finishing her report Sama Yun did not leave. From her sleeve she drew out another letter.
“And this is a personal letter from Secretary Ye-eun.”
“A personal letter? To me? Have you read the contents?”
“It is a personal letter, so I have not.”
The playful smile on Sama Yun’s face, eyes saying You know married couples keep no secrets, made Hui-yeom smile wryly; if he failed to share the contents, something dreadful would surely follow. Sama Yun was a woman of rather intense possessiveness. From the beginning she had shown signs of wariness toward Ye-eun, and that attitude had not faded even after their marriage.
Hui-yeom took Ye-eun’s letter, unfolded it, and soon wore an odd expression.
“What is this? A recommendation of a person….”
Seeing him tilt his head after reading, Sama Yun asked, “Young Master, may I look as well?”
“Yes, please do, Hall Head.”
Receiving the letter and reading it, Sama Yun tilted her head in exactly the same way. Summarized, the letter’s contents were as follows:
A man named Yu-baek may come seeking you.
He is an eccentric difficult to judge by ordinary worldly standards, yet the ability he carries in his person is outstanding.
Accept him and keep him at your side. Then he will rampage freely in all directions like Guan Yu who obtained the Red Hare.
— Ye-eun
“What… is this supposed to mean?”
That it was a letter of recommendation for a person was clear enough. But could one really call this content a recommendation? Moreover, Ye-eun was not the sort to toss out such an abrupt, baseless statement and leave it at that. Hui-yeom soon nodded.
“Well… we’ll understand when we see him.”
Having some inkling of Ye-eun’s “true nature,” Hui-yeom already had a hunch about the identity of this Yu-baek connected to her.
At that very moment, as if timed on purpose, an officer sought out the conference chamber.
“Commanders, a report.”
“What is it?”
“Yes. A strange man who appears to be a figure of the martial world has appeared. He calls himself Yu-baek and says he must meet the Young Master of the Dang Family….”
“What impeccable timing.”
Hui-yeom grinned.
“Let’s meet him. That man.”