The Leisurely Life of the Prince of the Tang Dynasty

Chapter 525: Sai Man Cavalry
After the rain, the roads here are very muddy. The army in the rear is still sixty miles away. A fast horse can get there in one day, but the army does not travel alone. It will take at least two days to transport the baggage together.

After cleaning up the place and burying the bodies on the spot, they left.

In winter, there are only two hours of daylight in the Pamir Plateau, and the remaining ten hours are dark.

In the summer now, the nights on the Pamir Plateau are very short.

After leaving here, Li Zhi and Di Renjie and his party spent the fastest day and night in the Pamir Mountains. In the warm summer, the night seemed to end in only one hour, and in a trance, the sky was bright again.

There was no time to rest, the night was so short that it caught me off guard.

The group bypassed Anguo and continued northward. In order to avoid being pursued, they kept sending out scouts and conducting investigations along the way.

The group came to a village where there were many houses built with rubble. The Hu guide was gesticulating and speaking the Hu language.

Pei Yan listened for a while before he understood what he said and translated, "He said this is where a group of Persians live."

But there are no people here. The houses here are all dilapidated and many have collapsed.

The rain fell on these dilapidated houses, and there was a lot of water puddling on the paths between the houses.

Di Renjie looked up and saw a flock of black birds flying by. He frowned and looked at the sky with a slightly confused look on his face.

Everyone stopped in front of the village. Pei Yan first sent a team of people into the village to investigate. After confirming that there was no danger, they entered.

But after entering the village, everyone saw a scene that was beyond words.

These were corpses tied to wooden racks, and there was a lot of charcoal on the ground.

Di Renjie walked on the muddy ground, leading the horse and whispering, "They must have tied the people here to wooden racks, and wanted to burn down the village and the people."

The Hu guide knelt down in front of the dried corpses and told them what had happened here.

It turned out that when the Arabs and Persians were at war, many Persians fled to the Pamir Mountains and settled there.

The Hu guide continued to tell the story while the drizzle was still falling.

His voice became louder and louder, as if angered by the scene before him. The Hu guide cursed the evil deeds of the Arabs in a sharp tone.

Everyone here is unarmed, and it would be easy for them to survive here. But after the Arabs conquered Persia, they not only did not let go of these exiled Persians, they even hunted down the Persians who fled into the Pamir Mountains.

These Persian survivors did not get far. They were found and killed by the Arabs in an inhumane manner.

After the rain stopped, Li Shen had people clean up the corpses here. He had no intention of staying here anymore.

Before leaving, Li Shen found a stone tablet here with a relief carving of a man wearing Persian armor.

Pei Yan asked the Hu guide in Hu language, "What is the relief on this stone tablet?"

The Hu guide explained it.

Pei Yan translated it for everyone: "He said this is a Persian female general."

Li Zhi became interested and asked, "Female general?"

Pei Yan listened to another story told by the Hu guide and translated: "He said this is the Persian female general Apra. The father of this female general died in the battle, so this female general replaced her father and led the troops to fight against the Arabs."

"This female general fought bravely for many years, but even so, Persia only had one city left. Apula led the last of her army to charge at the Arabs, and died in battle."

Li Zhi felt that this should be a more touching story and should not be told so blandly.

The remnants of Persia wanted to commemorate this female general, but now everyone here is dead and no one worships her. Only this stone tablet embedded in the wall is left.

The group took a simple rest outside the village for a day, and then went out at night to start killing the scattered Arabs in the surrounding area.

After the previous ambush troops were killed, many Arabs did come out to look for the Tang army. They could judge from the wounds on the corpses that they were assassins sent by the Tang army.

It doesn’t matter whether or not any traces are left, because the Tang army has already arrived.

Everyone who came here from the Anxi Protectorate was a little tanned. They had never seen any trace of the Arabs before in Dayuan or when they attacked Dongcao.

After arriving at the territory of Anguo, the closer we got to the Amu Darya River, the more Arabs we saw, and the more we realized how cruelly the Arabs treated prisoners of war.

Di Renjie and Pei Yan went to see General Liang Jianfang in person and told him about what had happened in the past few days.

Liang Jianfang had always been generous in taking care of the prince. Among the military supply carts, several were filled with fruit.

Yu Tu sat in the cart full of fruits and ate grapes.

It is the fruit harvest season in the Pamirs. There are so many fruits here that you can’t eat them all.

This resulted in almost no one eating the food sent from Talas and Dayuan.

These days, the soldiers lived on fruits and occasionally some beef and mutton.

Yu Tu looked at the An Kingdom City in the distance and asked curiously, "Uncle, are these Arabs easy to deal with?"

Li Shen put a large mulberry in his mouth and said, "There is no difference between the Arabs and the Hu people. They are all killed in the same way."

The Tang army fought differently from the Arabs. The Tang army would beat drums when fighting the enemy.

When the drums were beating loudly, it was time for the Tang army to attack.

Gao Kan and Li Mengchang each led an army and began to attack the city.

This time, the elite troops of the Tang army directly attacked the city. Although the earthen city of Anguo was high, the offensive of the Tang army was very fierce.

Gao Kan, whose hair and beard were half white, commanded the army with a loud and strong voice. He shouted, "Fire!"

Dozens of catapults lined up in a row threw fireballs together. These fireballs drew an arc in the air, leaving a trail of black smoke and fell into Anguo City.

"Let it go again!" Gao Kan yelled again with his throat stretched out and his neck stiff.

After four or five rounds of stone throwing, the top of the city wall of Anguo Kingdom was in chaos. Gao Kan sat on his horse, holding a halberd in his hand, and shouted loudly: "My sons! Follow me to take down this city!"

Gao Kan's words echoed in front of the army.

"Yes!" The army in the rear responded in unison.

When Li Mengchang's army attacked the top of the city wall, Gao Kan led his army to rush towards the gate of Anguo, and the huge wooden stakes knocked the gate open.

The Tang army saw the Arabs holding shields behind the city gate.

"Kill!" Gao Kan roared, his neck turning red.

The Tang army's war horses knocked open the Arabs in front of the city gate, and the neighing of the horses and the shouting of the crowd mixed together at the city gate.

Behind the city gate, there were more Arabs holding shields and sabers, ready to fight against the Tang army rushing into the city.

The crowd in front of the city was pushed away, and the Tang army on war horses entered the city one after another.

Li Mengchang took the city wall. Standing on it, he saw the densely populated city full of Arabs. These Arabs had demolished many houses in the city, leaving a large open space.

Li Mengchang shouted: "Shoot!"

After the Tang army took the city wall, they began to shoot arrows at the Arabs in the city. The Arabs raised their shields diagonally, and the arrows hit their shields hard.

Gao Kan rushed into the Arab army holding a halberd in one hand. The Tang army behind him arrived one after another. The cavalry of the Tang army was like a sharp blade, tearing a hole in the enemy's airtight defense.

The army in the front was attacking the city, and Liang Jianfang received military news again. Qin Ling led the Tibetan soldiers to the Huoxun Kingdom.

This young Tibetan general was quite ambitious. He wanted to destroy a country with his Tibetan soldiers by himself.

At this moment, Liang Jianfang didn't care about the Nine Zhaowu Clans, or the Congling Hu, or even how many small countries there were here. It would be enough as long as he could take them all down.

Since the expedition, the Tibetan general Qinling has been keeping to himself, and he thought that the Tibetan old man Rulaijie would take care of the young man.

But everyone just realized now that although Ru Laijie and Qin Ling were both Tibetans, the two of them seemed to have a feeling of never interacting with each other.

The Tang army was attacking the city, and behind the capital of King An, a group of Arabs were rushing from the direction of the Amu Darya River.

They actually had more than ten war elephants to provide support.

Di Renjie and Pei Yan stood on the top of the city wall and killed a group of Arabs. Then they looked up and saw Arabs in the distance rushing to support the royal city of An State.

Especially the tall war elephant, which made Di Renjie, who usually acted calmly, a little stunned.

"Damn! They have so many reinforcements!"

The pain from the wound on his shoulder brought Di Renjie back to his senses. He hurriedly said, "Brothers, hold on! Wait for General Gao to clear the city."

Li Shen adjusted his helmet, looked at the rushing Arab reinforcements and said hurriedly: "I will go and inform the general."

The number of Arabs who came to help was endless, and there were probably about 60,000 to 70,000 of them.

Di Renjie was about to shoot an arrow with his longbow in hand when he heard Pei Yan shouting.

Li Zhi looked in the direction of the sound and saw that there was also a cavalry force coming towards Anguo from the side and rear of the Anguo royal city. There were so many of them that they filled the entire mountain road.

The cavalry came out of the narrow mountain road and galloped across the plain. There were more than 20,000 black cavalrymen.

Li Zhi took out a telescope and took a look, saying: "It's the Uighurs and..."

Di Renjie asked: "Uighur cavalry? Which Uighur cavalry? What else?"

Li Zhi squinted one eye, put the telescope on the other eye and looked for a while, waited for the other party to get closer, and then said: "It's Liu Rengui! The cavalry is... Are they Sai people?"

Liu Rengui and the Sai cavalry came from the southwest. This sudden cavalry rushed in from the flank of the black-clad Arabs and defeated the Arabs' charge head-on. The Arabs who were about to rush to the west gate had to stop their charge and had to divert their forces to deal with the changes in the southwest.

Pei Yan saw the leader of the Sai cavalry, who stood on the city wall and shouted, "Tana!"

The other side could not hear the shout and instead charged into the Arab army.

Originally, Liu Rengui and Zhang Da'an were raising supplies and transporting them in the rear. Who could have imagined that they would bring a group of Sai cavalry and attack from the rear.

While he was thinking for a moment, the Arab war elephants rushed to the front of the city again.

"Kill!" Li Shen ran over in a panic, shouting loudly. Teams of Tang troops came rushing to support from behind. Within a few breaths, the west gate of Anguo Kingdom's city was filled with Tang troops.

The war elephant roared and forced open the west gate, but its huge body also blocked the gate, and the Arabs behind could not enter the city for a while.

Hearing the roar of the war elephants, Gao Kan and Li Mengchang, who were fighting in the city, were also stunned, and suddenly realized that the Arabs had reinforcements outside the city.

The Tang army, which had won victory after victory in the Pamir Mountains, almost forgot that the enemy would come to reinforce and lay ambushes.

When Liang Jianfang heard about the situation, he led his army to the west gate to provide assistance.

The siege battle surrounding the royal city of Anguo was now being fought both inside and outside the city. The Tang army had underestimated the military strength of the Arabs.

The Arabs also underestimated the Tang army's siege speed.

The city and outside the city had already been in chaos. The total number of people was 50,000 Tang troops plus 20,000 cavalry composed of Sai people and Uighurs, 70,000 people against 100,000 Arabs. Nearly 200,000 people were fighting on this battlefield.

The Serenitana rode his horse through the battlefield with a scimitar in hand until he was knocked off his horse by the crowd. He rolled on the ground, and then used his broad back to knock away three or five Arabs who were surrounding him. He roared on the battlefield like a ferocious beast, and scared away several people.

Tana's brute force was unmatched on the battlefield. He lifted up a large Arab and threw him into the distance like a light stone.

As expected, he was the undefeated war slave of the Stone Kingdom. Liu Rengui was secretly amazed.

Liang Jianfang led a large army to charge in, and the crisis at the West Gate was alleviated.

The battle lasted from morning to evening until the Tang army completely captured the royal city of Anguo.

The charge was ineffective and they were ambushed by the Serb cavalry. The Arabs who arrived later gave up the siege and began to retreat.

Li Mengchang and Gao Kan fought their way from the east gate of the King's City of Anguo to the west gate.

Behind the Tang army there were corpses everywhere, not a single enemy was standing.

If the young generals of the Tang Dynasty were brave, then the old generals of the Tang Dynasty were both brave and wise. Gao Kan said loudly: "All soldiers, listen to my order. Twenty people form a team and capture the war elephant!"

"Here!"

Li Mengchang had already led the cavalry out of the city first. Not only that, he also chased after the fleeing Arabs.

Seeing a large group of Arabs fleeing westward, the blood-thirsty Tana pulled the reins of his horse, jumped on the horse, and began to chase after them with his people, shouting loudly.

The Arabs who wanted to fight with the Tang army never thought that they, who were always so brutal, would be chased and beaten.

The Tang army has always been like this. What is this? Don't pursue desperate enemies. It is not the style of the Tang army not to pursue desperate enemies.

The setting sun is already hanging on the western horizon, and I don't know what time it is.

In the Pamir Mountains in summer, the days are exceptionally long, and the Tang army seems to have been fighting for more than ten hours.

When Liang Jianfang led his men to control more than a dozen battered war elephants, he climbed onto their backs and shouted, "Tang Dynasty will win!"

Yu Tu, who arrived late and looked a little embarrassed, also came to the city wall, looked at the cheering Tang army, and shouted: "Long live the Great Tang!"

Lou Shide felt that the prince was a very sensible child. He had always been by his side, watching the army charge silently. He would not advance rashly, and at most would just wipe out a few scattered Arab troops.

It seems that the prince knows very well what to do and what not to do, and he still maintains the strict family traditions when he is away from home.

Of course, the prince's strict family tradition was taught since childhood, and he was also watched by Xue Wanbei.

In the army, the prince listened to General Xue Wanbei the most, and Xue Wanbei was also the most loyal to the prince.

On the other side of the Pamirs battlefield, Xue Rengui and Pei Xingjian, who had been trekking for three days, along with Ru Laijie and Murong Shun, were very close to East India.

The group crossed a valley and came to an important intersection, where there were no other living people.

Xue Rengui pulled the reins of the horse and stopped, looking at the corpses on the ground.

Ru Laijie stepped over these corpses, including those of the Arabs, Indians, and Tibetans.

The war between the Arabs and India has already begun, and no one knows what Wang Xuance’s current situation is.

(End of this chapter)