All or Nothing (1)
Adiya Khan had to make a choice.
Their food stores were running low, and frost had begun to form on the river. If they held out much longer, they would face winter in enemy territory with empty granaries. Mongol horses were hardy against the cold, true enough—but there was scarcely any grass left for them to graze. The sparse meadows nearby had already been stripped bare, forcing soldiers to venture into the woods to cut whatever forage they could find. Even that was withering as winter approached, and the men themselves had no means of surviving the season without provisions.
News from Qinghai Province was equally grim. Adiya Khan had been counting on victory when he first heard that Mongke Khan’s forces were sweeping through Qinghai like a storm. Then the reports arrived: Mongke had fallen into an ambush and been assassinated by some monstrous figure presumed to be a murim master; the elite troops of the Keshik and their officers had been wiped out with him; and the remaining army, unable to break the defenses of the Qinghai Regional Commander and the central White Tiger Army, was locked in a futile, grinding stalemate. Adiya nearly coughed blood when he read it.
Should he withdraw the army?
If he retreated now, his own position would no longer be secure. The Chagatai Khanate bore the name of a state, yet it was less a unified polity with shared history and institutions than a loose confederation of large and small tribes. They all professed the ideal of being “descendants of the Great Chinggis Khan”—but that same creed meant, inverted, that any man who could topple the Great Khan and take his seat had every right to do so.
If I fall back like this, I cannot guarantee my own life.
After long deliberation he reached a conclusion.
If retreat means the knives will come out for me, why not simply have those same men die as heroes on this field?
Adiya Khan was no fool who believed an all-or-nothing offensive would automatically yield good results. Precisely because he was competent, he resolved instead to purge, in advance, the disloyal elements most likely to demand his head once the war was over—and so he declared a final decisive battle.
“Our spies have brought word. While we have been sitting quietly here, our forces in Qinghai have begun hammering at the enemy’s gates. Their vigilance has slackened, and they have even shifted some of the weapons from this front to Qinghai.”
It was not entirely false. The Sichuan Dang Family had indeed sent additional arms to Qinghai to support the Demonic Cult’s ongoing guerrilla campaign, and enemy spies had witnessed the convoy. What Adiya did not know was that further matériel had also been dispatched from Sichuan to Yunnan Province. Supplies bound for Yunnan traveled by the linked railways, loaded onto trains whose contents the spies could never see; those bound for Qinghai, where no rails ran, still moved along the traditional roads and were therefore spotted. Even that, of course, was the work of Minjeongwon, which held every strand of Sichuan’s intelligence net and had deliberately arranged for the outsiders to “discover” the shipment—though Adiya never dreamed of it.
“Therefore the enemy’s defenses here must be considerably weakened. Our men have rested long; their fatigue is low and their strength high. We will raise the army at once, smash Dali in a single stroke, and, before the enemy can reorganize, race all the way to Kunming and batter its gates.”
The optimism was burning at forge-level intensity, yet the soldiers—worn down by the long wait—erupted in cheers. Adiya had shrewdly whipped the ranks into fervor first; a few skeptical noyons still doubted the intelligence, but in the end they had no choice but to follow.
When he drew up the battle order, Adiya placed the khans and noyons of the uluses most hostile or uncooperative toward him in the van. Some failed to grasp the intent; those who did still could not refuse. Protest and demand a rear position, and Adiya would simply stir their own victory-hungry tribes against them, branding their khan a coward who refused to fight—and pull him down. The scheme was transparent.
He went further. Still suffering the aftereffects of a fall from his horse, he could not lead the charge himself; instead he placed his second son, Hitai, at the head of the vanguard. The thought that he would sacrifice even his own son as a pawn seemed so extreme that the other khans and noyons had no choice but to walk into the trap.
Every current and undercurrent within Adiya Khan’s camp and the Chagatai Khanate itself was being read by Hwi-yeom. Not because Hwi-yeom possessed some preternatural military genius, but because the machinery of politics turned the same way in a twenty-first-century capital as on a sixteenth-century battlefield.
“Unlike the settled states, a khanate that is essentially a nomadic tribal confederation exacts a far heavier price for defeat.”
Hwi-yeom had spread a map and was explaining. Four months into the war, no one any longer questioned his presence at the head of the table, analyzing the field and issuing operational plans.
“If he leads a war of this scale and returns in defeat, Adiya Khan will at minimum lose the seat of Great Khan. In most cases he will simply be killed, and his ulus will be torn apart by the others and reduced to slavery.”
“Just like barbarian packs—never helping one another, only watching for the chance to stab a back…”
The Yunnan Regional Commander, steeped in the Chinese worldview, snorted. To him it was only the inevitable level of uncivilized savages. Hwi-yeom, rather than point out that Central Plains men were no different and history proved they had done far dirtier things, merely smiled and added a practical note.
“There is a material problem as well, not merely a matter of face. They have already consumed vast stores of grain and livestock preparing for this war. Without raiding the granaries of the Jiangnan region for a massive new supply, they cannot survive. To keep from starving this winter, they will choose to carve up, amicably among themselves, the clan that must ‘take responsibility.’”
Whenever a militarist state gambled everything on war and lost, if an outside army did not smash it first, nine times out of ten it met exactly that fate at the hands of internal traitors—future or past made no difference.
“In any case, the certainty is this: for those reasons the next offensive will come, and its focus will be here at Dali—unless they intend the madness of driving the entire army over the Kunlun Mountains in the face of winter.”
“That much is clear.”
“We have already resupplied Noksan and our own Dokwadae with additional weapons.”
At the phrase “additional weapons,” the Yunnan Regional Commander naturally pictured things in the category of Shingijeon rockets or cannon. The bombardment of the Shingijeon, the Musinpo mines employed like claymores, and the unexpectedly devastating performance of the chlorine and mustard poison gases had left such an impression that “weapons” automatically meant that class of armament. He was only partly right. Fresh ammunition for the expended Shingijeon and artillery had indeed been sent, but the bulk of the new shipment consisted of rifles, cartridges—and one particular weapon.
The rifles were the Gatling guns left over after the Qinghai allocation, crates of ammunition, and the closely guarded Dreyse needle guns that had never before been revealed. Long ago Hwi-yeom had manufactured these breech-loading paper-cartridge weapons and then sealed them away; he had even gone to the trouble of traveling to Beijing with the Dang-chong simply to plant the necessary cover story in case they ever had to be shown. With a total enemy offensive expected, there was no longer any point in husbanding them.
Naturally the Dreyse needle guns were issued only to the Dang Family’s Dokwadae and Sakpungdae. Whatever happened, they would claim they were merely Dang-chong. The same applied to the Gatling guns. Within the Sakpungdae, a handful of men especially skilled in light-body techniques would shoulder the Gatlings and race about the battlefield as mobile machine-gun teams. The ammunition, of course, was paper-cased. As for the final “particular weapon,” it had already been installed on the walls with the Regional Commander’s full cooperation.
A knock sounded at the conference-room door.
“Young Master, it is Secretary Han Ye-eun.”
In front of anyone outside the Dang Family, Ye-eun never once mentioned Minjeongwon.
“Enter.”
The Regional Commander, who still regarded her as merely a capable civil clerk, had long grown used to her presence in the operations room and raised no objection. Ye-eun reported to Hwi-yeom.
“Word from the agents outside the walls. The enemy host has begun to move. Their numbers… the entire army.”
Hwi-yeom grinned.
“Inform the whole army. The final battle is about to begin.”
From a hill overlooking Dali City, the Chagatai host advanced. It was not a swift cavalry thrust; the horsemen walked, the infantry followed at a deliberate pace. Between their ranks, enormous wagons that looked like excavators creaked and groaned along.
The Chagatai were no fools. After being tormented by barbed wire and trenches through repeated advances and retreats, they had brought forward their traditional siege engines—the catapults Westerners called trebuchets. Nomads had long used them to smash the walls of settled cities. Until now the wire and trenches had kept them from ever approaching close enough to batter the walls themselves; so they had simply reassigned the engines from wall-breaking to trench-breaking. Instead of great stones they loaded the buckets with mud, gravel, or sheepskin sacks packed with the same, and hurled them with full force. The flying sand and stones rained down upon the wire and the trenches. Had rifle companies been lying in wait between the trenches as at Yeogang, many would have had their skulls cracked open by the hail of gravel. Where the earth-filled sacks struck the wire, they simply crushed it flat and buried it. If the thorny tangle was too hard to cut or clear, simply smother it with dirt and leap over on horseback—enemy or not, the idea was excellent.
If they’d thought of it any sooner, we might have taken casualties.
Watching, Hwi-yeom reminded himself once more that the people of this age were not deficient in intelligence. Even as the enemy gradually buried the wire under earth, no ready countermeasure yet existed. They were still outside the range of the Shingijeon and the cannon. The enemy was simply doing to them what they themselves had done. And as the hated wire and trenches disappeared under mounds of soil without a single sacrifice, the Chagatai soldiers wept with joy.
“The hour of vengeance is at hand…!”
“Those dog bastards—I’ll tear them apart alive!”
“It’s still too early to celebrate! Throw the oil jars!”
The Chagatai clearly had no intention of repeating even a fraction of the disaster at Yeogang. They lofted flaming oil jars into the spaces between the trenches where Musinpo might still lie buried. The method worked; many of the mines began detonating on every side. Cheers rose from the enemy ranks.
Sweat beaded on the brows of Dali’s defenders as they watched.
“H-hey, the defensive line is breaking…”
“It’ll be all right, won’t it? They say our general is another Zhuge Liang.”
“Right—the Crouching Dragon of Sichuan. He must have prepared for this exact situation.”
“And we’ve got the secret weapon installed, don’t we!”
They glanced toward the great casks arrayed along the lower wall and the long pipes that ran from them.
“Damn it, we can win—we can live!”
“Long live the Crouching Dragon of Sichuan! Long live Yunnan Province!”
While the soldiers steeled their courage instead of panicking, the moment finally came.
“Charge!!”
With the approach cleared, the Chagatai host set the earth trembling under a storm of hooves.