Blood-Soaked Qilian Mountains (1)
Noyon Mongke Khan—who shared a name with the Mongke Khan of the Yuan Empire—had crossed the Kunlun Mountains through every hardship imaginable, and when he finally reached the wastelands of Qinghai Province, he felt close to tears.
Of his hundred thousand cavalry, a full twenty thousand had perished during the crossing.
Compared to Hannibal losing nearly half his infantry over the Alps, it was an impressive performance. The elite quality of the horsemen and Mongke Khan’s superb command had produced that feat.
Of course, for every two men dead, the number of ruined horses was greater still.
Roughly forty to fifty thousand Mongol mounts had failed to conquer the high country—collapsing from exhaustion, snapping their legs, or plunging from cliffs to their deaths.
Even so, those losses counted as remarkably light.
Mongol horses were bred for cold, content to graze on weeds, and raised on a plateau averaging over a thousand meters; their mountain hardiness put every other breed to shame.
Mongols customarily rode to war with two or three remounts apiece, so not every man who lost a horse became an infantryman—yet a great many cavalrymen were reduced to foot, and the army’s surplus of mounts had clearly dwindled.
After a march that could not be heard without tears, Mongke Khan at last stood on a height that overlooked Delingha, the outer gateway city of Qinghai. Fire kindled in his eyes.
“Rest thoroughly. Give the Central Plains dogs no chance to ready themselves, then strike in one blow. Cooking smoke will alert them, so eat only jerky and airag. Let the horses recover, but leave the tack on so they can gallop at any moment.”
The order went out.
The men fed their mounts the carefully hoarded hay that would restore their strength, then quieted their own hunger with airag, mare’s milk, dried curds, and jerky.
They slept one night in that state, and at the first light of dawn they crashed down on Delingha like a furious tide.
Delingha was a fortified war-city that had weathered Demonic Cult raids before and was reasonably prepared—but Chagatai’s surprise attack caught them completely off guard.
Despite Hui-yeom’s warning, the Provincial Military Commissioner had dismissed the idea with a scoff—“A horse people crossing the Kunlun to invade? That’s as absurd as the Demonic Cult converting to Buddhism”—and when the morning beacon fires told him Delingha had fallen, he could only stare in horror.
“Summon the entire army at once! Now!”
He assumed, of course, that the Demonic Cult had risen again, not Chagatai cavalry.
Either way, the army had to be mustered.
Messengers spurred in every direction under the military orders, and along the border the beacons that signaled invasion flared skyward.
The Chagatai host advanced with unstoppable force, as if determined to vent every humiliation of past defeats.
Delingha burned. The magistrate of Daliu saw the flames and frantically begged for relief, yet within three days his head was hanging from a Chagatai spearpoint.
Having looted Daliu for provisions and filled their bellies, Mongke Khan’s forces swung southeast some fifty li toward Chaka.
Chaka County—famous salt works on the northwestern shore of the great Qinghai Lake—lay close to Daliu.
The magistrate managed to scrape together garrison troops and throw up a defense, but against seventy thousand enraged cavalry the ten thousand peasant levies he had mustered looked pitifully thin.
If Chaka fell, a hard ride would put Xining—the provincial capital—only a week away.
With fire already licking his heels, the Provincial Military Commissioner of Qinghai effectively abandoned Chaka’s defense and scrambled every available soldier to hold Xining.
The one mercy was a courier’s report that the central White Tiger Army, which had set out two months earlier, would soon reach Qinghai.
The commissioner prostrated himself in praise of Emperor Sungui’s foresight for dispatching the Heavenly Host before the barbarians could even begin their rampage.
Pi Se-ha, overall commander of the White Tiger Army and Associate Commander of the Left Army (second rank), had fully intended to dawdle in Qinghai before pushing into Sichuan. Now he felt thoroughly dazed.
I’m supposed to fight seventy thousand Mongol cavalry for real? With a hundred thousand infantry?
A hundred thousand foot soldiers was an enormous force, true.
Scraping together every Qinghai unit would push the total past two hundred thousand; with walls and terrain on the defender’s side, that should more than suffice against seventy thousand horse.
But only if they arrived first and waited for the enemy.
Was it not said that a weary army is doomed?
While Chagatai cavalry looted villages, smashed undefended towns, and ate and rested their fill, infantry that had marched without pause from Beijing to the far western edge of Qinghai stood almost no chance of victory against horsemen.
Pi Se-ha himself was more political general than battlefield veteran; he was unprepared for a war of this scale.
The moment he crossed into Qinghai he refused to ride straight for Xining. Citing the need to rest exhausted troops, he dithered and watched events unfold.
If the situation looked hopeless he meant to bolt for Sichuan or Guizhou and fight from behind those walls.
Qinghai, which had waited so desperately, had been abandoned by the Heavenly Host.
And at last, just as Mongke Khan’s host thundered toward Xining, passed through Dongba, crossed the broad wasteland, and prepared to thread the mountain ranges that led once more to the capital—
the ones who would become the legend of Qinghai began to move.
Qinghai Province, with its many plains, deserts, and open ground, favored cavalry—but that did not mean it lacked mountains.
Xining, the provincial capital, was ringed on three sides—north, west, and south—by ranges, so that any western invasion had to cross mountains first.
Yet to a Chagatai army that had already conquered the infamous Kunlun, the Qilian Mountains that girdled Xining seemed a trifle.
They entered the Qilian without hesitation.
That was where their misfortune began.
“They’re… coming.”
Somewhere among the countless peaks and valleys of the Qilian Mountains.
The special operations unit of the Sichuan Dang Family—the Dokgyo—had been dug in and waiting for days.
Even armed with the “ace in the hole” their young master had bestowed, a mere hundred men could not face seventy thousand cavalry head-on. That would have been pure folly.
So they had chosen a vital choke point in the Qilian—ground where horses would struggle yet which the enemy must pass—and finished every preparation for the ambush.
They had also linked up with Yu-baek and Dang Su-jeong, who had recently come up from Yunnan, and now operated under Su-jeong’s command.
Without the slightest warning Yu-baek had murmured at the sky, yet no one doubted his word.
Dang Su-jeong’s somewhat mistaken introduction—“roughly a former hermit master of the Dang Family”—had already made the rounds, and Yu-baek’s friendly manner toward Dang people plus his green eyes only strengthened the guess.
Dang Su-jeong asked respectfully,
“How long until they arrive, Elder?”
“Hmm…”
Yu-baek tilted his head for a moment.
“About… when the sun climbs… to there.”
One or two shichen, roughly.
Dang Su-jeong’s face twisted at the superhuman senses that could track an army so far away; then she shook it off and ordered the Dokgyo to ready themselves.
The Dokgyo’s weapons diverged sharply from traditional Dang Family arms.
Every man carried a sturdy bamboo frame pack holding something like a small tube. At Su-jeong’s signal they opened the tubes at once.
Out came objects that looked like long-barreled cannons pieced together—things that would make any modern observer gasp, “A Gatling?!”
And they were exactly that: Gatling guns.
In ordinary hands these were devilish weapons meant to melt infantry from fixed trench mounts, so heavy they had to be hauled on wheeled carriages like artillery.
But Dang Family martial artists, trained in internal power, lifted them as casually as slightly heavy wolf-tooth clubs or iron maces, set them down, tore open oil-cloth ammunition pouches, and fed the linked paper cartridges of the stacked belts into the feed ports.
Loaded and ready, the Dokgyo moved under Su-jeong’s orders to every key firing point.
Their role was simple.
When the signal came, hose the enemy until the ammunition ran dry, then fall back to prearranged rally points.
A hundred men could never bottle up seventy thousand crossing a mountain range; that would be like trying to stop rain with an open palm.
So they would pour every round they had carried into the foe, leave the rest of the fighting to the Qinghai army, and return to Sichuan.
If they blunted the enemy’s spearhead in the mountains, Qinghai ought to hold until Sichuan reinforcements arrived.
The promised two shichen passed, and Mongke Khan’s host finally reached the Qilian Mountains.
Instead of threading the range in one long column, they broke into smaller detachments to cross all at once.
That was a gift to the Dang people. Mongke Khan had reasoned, “Surely no one would hide an ambush against seventy thousand in the Qilian when they barely have time to prepare Xining’s defenses,” and devised the plan for a swift breakthrough. His judgment was not especially poor.
How could he have imagined that martial artists with Gatling guns would be waiting in this era?
The signal flare for the slaughter was fired by Yu-baek.
At the mouth of a broad hill-path—the largest road through the Qilian—Mongke Khan, holding his horse to a light walking gait because of the terrain, spotted a single stooped figure standing far ahead on the pass.
With a Mongol’s keen eyes he saw the man at once and knew he was no ordinary traveler.
Anyone who simply stood in the road while a cavalry host approached was one of two things: a madman, or a monster of monstrous strength.
“Who dares block our path?”
One of the noyan under him spurred forward.
“He neither kneels nor pays homage before the Khan, and shows no fear—clearly some Central Plains ruffian confident in his skill. With your leave I will ride him down in a single charge and lay his head at your feet.”
“Do it.”
Permission granted, the noyan believed he had seized a chance to shine; he whooped and drove his warhorse forward, great saber flashing as he roared,
“You dog! Who do you think you are, insolently barring the way? Know that I am Samaktur, noyan of the Choros tribe—!”
“?”
Yu-baek tilted his head.
In his clear eyes the Mongol horseman came on in high dudgeon.
At that pace they would collide in moments.
So Yu-baek simply… cleared him away.
—Slaaash!!
No one grasped what had happened.
At best Mongke Khan and Dang Su-jeong caught the faintest tail of the shadow.
“Sword qi?”
Mongke Khan muttered uncertainly. Dang Su-jeong bit her lip.
“It wasn’t sword qi. His arm stretched.”
She had seen it clearly.
When Yu-baek’s limp arm swung, something pale and indistinct uncoiled from it like an extension of the limb itself.
The motion was too fast to register properly, yet the afterimage remained—exactly like a giant mantis lashing out a foreleg to snatch a cicada.
As if the reaching arm split and a second, folded arm shot free, it scythed straight down.
The bold noyan was sliced vertically—from iron helmet through his own horse—and the leftover momentum of the charge carried the two halves sliding past Yu-baek on either side.
Yu-baek licked the blood—human or horse, who could say—from his fingertips and murmured,
“Aren’t… you shooting?”
Only then did the stunned Dokgyo snap into motion.