The Khotanese army should be a slightly weaker part of the garrison of the four towns of Anxi, with a total strength of 5,000 cities, garrisons, garrisons, and beacons in the ten prefectures under its jurisdiction, and the war horses are just approaching more than 1,000. However, the area under the jurisdiction of this town in the west of the Silk Road is very large, and the entire southern Silk Road west out of Yangguan, stretching for thousands of miles, is the southern end of the Tulun Moraine West Desert, all within the jurisdiction of Khotan.

However, most of these areas are Gobi no man's land, and the oases are scattered like pearls in the vast Gobi, and the pearls are connected by the desert post station on the edge of the Gobi.

The oasis where Khotanese is located has a clear boundary with the Gobi, often separated by a river, the north bank of the river is desert gravel, but the south bank of the river is covered with poplar forests and green grass.

Li Siye arrived at Khotanese in the afternoon, the current Khotanese king, the right Weiwei general, the governor of the Bisha Governor's Mansion Chi Sheng greeted him outside the city, Li Siye dismounted and went directly to the Governor's Mansion as a guest, and the two sides were familiar with each other.

Since he served as the envoy of the two towns, the Tang army in Khotan was left unmanaged for a year. The deputy envoy Li Zan is over fifty years old, and the old general has frosty temples, and has been working hard in the town for almost 30 years, from the team leader to the brigade commander to the captain, and then the guard envoy, the officer, the vanguard and finally the deputy military envoy, which can be regarded as a living fossil in the Tang army.

Li Siye naturally can't do that to others, calling and drinking to the veteran, and only holding it in one gulp. After all, he lacks skills, and the focus of his business is Shule, so he can only ask this old man to wear a few more high hats so that he can continue to grind.

When General Li Zan saw the new town envoy, his mood was also extremely complicated, and he sighed that the senior officials of the Tang Army were getting younger and younger, and the previous town envoy Gao Xianzhi was young enough, and this Li Siye was younger than him.

Wei Chisheng specially held a welcome dinner, lit a brazier in his own hall, and sat in front of the stone case with Li Siye, with local officials in Khotan lined up on the left, and high-ranking officials in Khotan on the right, holding high jade cups and frequently urging wine.

"General Lee, please."

"Captain Chi Du please."

"Generals, please!"

A row of Khotanese maids carrying pots of melons and fruits on their heads were presented to the stone table, and several women wearing narrow-sleeved silk skirts danced. The Buddhist atmosphere in Khotan is very prosperous, and the accompanying music played also has the taste of Sanskrit music, and the dance danced by several women is light and peaceful, dancing with crimson curtains like the flying sky rising from the Dunhuang murals.

After the banquet, the entourage retired one after another, and Wei Chisheng, Li Siye, and Li Zan came to the stone room next to them to talk about the tax revenue, military expenses, and the amount paid to the capital protectorate in Khotan Town during the year.

The ten prefectures under the town of Khotan are all feudal states, and the local nobles are hereditary as state commanders for self-government, and the Bishadu Governorate is responsible for administering these states.

Compared with the other three towns of the four towns of Anxi, Khotanese is considered to be highly autonomous, which may be related to the resistance and geographical situation encountered when the capital was established in the early Tang Dynasty. Tough ones such as Gaochang Ju Wentai, Yanqi, Qiuzi and so on were directly destroyed by the country, but the royal families of Shule and Khotan, who actively returned to obedience, were preserved, and after accepting the reward, they still managed the local area.

This is very light for Li Siye, there is no need to meddle in local affairs, he only needs to manage the army well, and jointly manage the commercial tax and the rent of the tuntian with Wei Chisheng, part of it will be handed over to the capital protectorate, part of it will be used as military expenses, and the rest of the share will be distributed by the local government.

When the Anxi Protectorate was first established, it needed to be maintained by the central government to allocate grain, and now the 24,000 Anxi troops are completely self-sufficient, which also reflects the barrenness of the city from another side. The narrow Hexi Corridor has 70,000 Xiliang troops, and the gap between them is not ordinarily large.

In the past few days, accompanied by the veteran Li Zan, Li Siye inspected several major strongholds of the Tang army, and the situation exposed was no different from that of Shule, which was nothing more than that the logistics were too poor and the food was too bad.

On the fifteenth day of coming to Khotan, Li Siye handed over all the burdens to Li Zan again, although the old general Li held a breath of arrogance in his stomach, but he was still stable and knowledgeable, and when Fu Meng Lingcha promoted him to deputy military envoy, it may also be out of this consideration.

After all, he still had to go back to Shule, which was the strategic place to raise a town and hold Siyi hostage.

"Old general, you should be old and strong, while your body is still healthy, you have to hold on for me for a little longer."

This is not beautiful, Li Zan choked for a long time but couldn't refute it, he dared to let me finish the last part of my life here. He had no choice but to pout the vicissitudes of life on his chin and stand stubbornly at the city gate, crossing his hands and neither nodding nor answering.

"Goodbye."

Li Siye solemnly hugged his fist, turned his horse's head and led the pro-soldiers to leave along the Gobi Desert.

Li Zan looked at the horse team in the distance and sighed faintly: "I'm afraid I won't be able to sit in the right position even when I die." ”

……

On the way home, it was already November, the north wind swept the grass and frost, the horses' hooves stepped on the hard Gobi bare rock, the mouths and noses of people and animals were spewing white gas, and a layer of white snow was piled up on the female wall battlements of Shule City.

At first glance, it looked like snowflakes were floating in the sky, but when it fell into the palm of people's hands, it was gray-white ashes.

Last night, there was a fire in the city, and the shed where the herdsmen in the west of the city piled up hay burned, and the fire suddenly raged and rose and burned half of the sky, but fortunately, the Tang army organized people to put out the fire, and it was extinguished at dawn.

Several dwellings were burned down, but the greater loss was the forage that the herders had worked hard to gather in the autumn, and most of it was burned in the fire.

The shepherds are choked with tears and empty buckets in the north wind, their sheep and their yaks will starve to death because they can't eat, and the wealth they have worked so hard for years will eventually come to naught.

And that's just the beginning......

Pei Guoliang, the governor of Shule, was furious and sent people to investigate the cause of the fire, whether someone deliberately set it on fire or who committed the fire

The cause of the fire was quickly clarified, and the officials found a charcoal pot in the grass ash pile, and according to the location of the charcoal pot, they called the herdsmen to identify it.

"Whose hay shed is this! Stand up for me! If we waste our tongues and tongues to find out, there will be no good fruit for you to eat!"

In addition to being frightened, the herdsmen speculated with each other, and soon someone identified that this was the forage pile of the Bu Laosan family, so the culprit stood up with his shoulders stracted.

The herdsmen were silent for only a few seconds, and then rushed forward: "Kill him!" This thing didn't grow!"

"Forget the bastard! You're fucking killing us! ”

Bu Laosan's lady howled and rushed into the crowd to drag her beloved, while reaching out to block everyone's fists: "Don't fight!" Don't hit him, he didn't mean to! Our grass has burned out!"

The officials of the Governor's Mansion snatched the prisoners out of the herdsmen's pile and took them to the main hall of the Governor's Mansion.

Pei Guoliang himself was so angry that he was about to order someone to beat the culprit to death, but after asking the reason, he found out that he was just a confused honest ghost, drunk during the day and didn't have time to feed the sheep, and at night he went to pick up hay with a lamp and a charcoal basin, and as a result, he left the charcoal basin in the grass pile and ignited the fire.

Pei Dudu was furious, but when he calmed down and thought about it, the herdsman's unintentional mistake was not worthy of death.

"Come on, lock up this old man with seventy rods!"

The two officials dragged Bu Laosan out and put him in a cell in the governor's mansion.

The culprit of the crime has been dealt with, but the follow-up matter gave Pei Guoliang a headache. The herders have no fodder for the winter, their cattle and sheep are starving to death, and the people are in despair, which if left unchecked, it will cause chaos.

The herdsmen, who were lucky enough not to be affected by the flames, were also in trepidation, and slept in the haystacks all day long.

It is easy for people who have suffered great disasters to break down and go crazy, will these herdsmen come to grab forage, will they set fire again on impulse, and everyone will have fun together. The human heart is unpredictable.

Pei Guoliang knew that he should have made a decision earlier, and the more he waited, the worse the situation would become, but he was helpless what he could do now. I wanted to ask Li Siye to come forward to find a solution, but Li Zhen's envoy had been to Khotan for a month and had not returned, and there was no backbone in the Tang army who could take responsibility.

He had no choice but to go to Zhao Chongyu to borrow some forage first, Zhou Jiguo said it now, and after explaining the situation to the other party, General Zhao also twisted his beard and frowned: "If you want to borrow the forage of the Tang Army to appease the people, it's not that you can't borrow it, it's just that General Li is not here, and I don't dare to make a claim." ”

"General Zhao! Can't wait! When Li Siye came back, the cattle and sheep were all starving to death, and these herdsmen were in chaos! Pei Guoliang stomped his feet anxiously and said.

"But the forage of my Tang Army is just enough for the consumption of the war horses in a winter, you take it to feed the sheep, what do the Tang Army's war horses eat!"

"So what do I do now?"

Zhao Chongxuan pondered for a while, gritted his teeth and said fiercely: "There is only one way, and that is to kill the sheep!" You go and tell the herdsmen that the Tang army can give them a small part, but they must kill half of the sheep. ”