Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 31: The Arrows Fall

The eastern ridgeline loosed first.

Kirsa’s riders had come down the hillside and the tumen forces above them had the angle.

Bows drawing along the full upper line, the release coming in a rolling wave from the crest to the upper slope, and the arrows went down into the cut below with the sound of something tearing open the air.

The first volley hit Siban’s committed riders at the point where they had pressed deepest into the channel.

Horses were the larger targets and horses went down first in a cascading series of impacts that turned the passage’s base into something no column could move through cleanly.

A horse going down at speed takes the horse behind it. The rider goes with the horse or goes over it.

The riders behind push into the obstruction and pack further, which made them a denser target for the second volley already on its way down from the western face.

The western ridgeline’s bows released.

Plunging fire from the left slope crossed with plunging fire from the right and the arrows found the packed mass from two angles simultaneously.

From Batu’s position below the eastern crest the sound of it was continuous.

The release, the brief high sound of the flight, the impacts that carried differently depending on what they hit.

Ground. Horse. Man.

The sounds were not the same and did not need to be described to the men making them.

The base of the narrows had been clean ground an hour ago.

The mangudai element on the ground was already a hundred meters south of the channel’s midpoint, shooting backward at full gallop.

The composite bow at full draw on a galloping horse, releasing over the horse’s hindquarters. A skill that took years to build, trained from the time a rider could sit a horse.

The arrows went flat and fast into the men pressing forward, a direct line into the mass at the height of a rider.

The ridgeline volleys came steeply from above. These were two different angles of the same engagement working simultaneously.

Siban’s riders were driving into three directions of shooting at once and they did not stop.

This was what Batu had known about them from the ford probe and the thirty-rider screen and the commitment of several hundred into the passage at speed.

Siban’s riders held their pace into the arrow fall.

A stationary target in a confined space under plunging fire from two ridgelines was a dead formation, and moving at cost was the only viable read.

The return fire started within the first minute.

Siban’s horse archers in the packed mass found their angles upward and drew.

Shooting upward from a confined space at the heights was technically harder than shooting down.

The angle was steep, the target was a man who could drop below the crest between shots, and the archer below was himself a target for every bow above him while he was drawing.

Siban’s riders were capable archers and capable archers found the shots available to them.

A rider on the eastern crest above Batu’s position took an arrow through the upper arm and dropped his bow.

The man next to him did not look over. He drew, released, drew again.

Below on the ground the channel was filling with the debris of the fight.

Downed horses lying across the road, men moving on foot between them, riders navigating around the obstructions at a pace the volleys above made dangerous to slow for.

The western base was the hardest ground.

Chaidu’s sixty-one riders held the lower section of the western face against a force pressing from the entrance’s western edge.

Close-range exchange, riders on both sides drawing and releasing at distances where the arc was almost flat and the margin for error was nearly gone.

The body Chaidu held was compact by necessity, the riders drawn together tightly enough that a shaft that missed its intended target had another target immediately behind it.

Batu watched the western base from his position and tracked the shape of the held line.

It was smaller than it had been when the action opened.

Chaidu’s element was contracting.

The outer riders were going down. To shots at close range, to the press of the larger force pushing against its edge, and the riders still holding were pulling inward around what remained.

Sixty-one riders was already a thin front against a force several times their number.

The line that held the western base now was thinner than sixty-one.

Chaidu was visible at the formation’s center. Still mounted, still directing.

The line held.

In the cut above the shooting from the heights had not slowed.

Above him on the eastern crest the releases came steady and spaced.

The same rhythm carried from the far ridge in the combined sound rising from below.

The plunging fire into the dense mass below was most effective at the narrows’ narrowest point, where the two-hundred-meter width forced the riders closest together and gave each shaft the best chance of finding something before it reached the ground.

The terrain below was no longer clear ground.

Downed horses lay across the road at intervals, some still moving, most not.

Men on foot moved between them.

Some fighting, some trying to reach their own lines, some past moving.

The riders still mounted were navigating a surface that had become its own obstacle and the navigation slowed them, which made them better targets, which produced more obstructions.

The mangudai element had completed its retreat through the southern exit and anchored into the rear position.

The drive from Siban’s committed riders had followed it through the cut and hit that position on the flat ground south of the narrows.

Frontal contact on open ground, less favorable for Batu’s force than the heights, the exchange rate closer to even.

Torghul’s improvised sections held the line and the push had not broken through, but the southern point was absorbing the cost of holding it.

An arrow came off the passage’s base on a steep angle and struck the rock two meters to Batu’s left.

He did not move from his position.

The angle had been wrong for his location. A shot from a rider who had found the eastern hillside’s lower section by chance.

The ground continued to fill.

The releases from the upper ground had been running for long enough that the quivers on the eastern and western ridge tops were drawing down.

The rate of release had not changed but it would have to.

Batu tracked this in his head.

The riders on the heights carried what they had ridden with and what the supply riders had pushed up the slopes before the action opened.

That supply was finite and it was going into it at a rate that produced results but did not produce a clean end.

The end came from mathematics.

The arrow supply was drawing down and the rate would have to change.

The resolution ran on position and count, and the count favored one direction.

Inside the passage, Siban’s committed riders had been driving under plunging fire from two ridgelines for long enough that the push itself had changed character.

It had been forward movement at the opening.

Riders driving south toward the southern point’s apparent gap.

Now it was something different.

The riders at the front were still pushing but the riders behind them had slowed, because the earth between them and the front was full of what the arrow fall had produced and the horses would not move cleanly through it.

The mass had locked.

Thousands of kilograms of horse and rider packed into a narrowing space, shooting upward at the high ground they could not reach, with the surface below them accumulating.

Siban’s force had stalled.

A stalled formation under sustained plunging fire from two elevated positions was a formation that would break if given enough time.

Batu needed it to stop first.

At the western base, Chaidu’s element had contracted to perhaps forty riders holding the ground. Perhaps fewer.

The held position was a tight knot of men and horses in close contact with a force that had not been able to push through it but had not stopped trying.

The men in that knot had been in close-range exchange for the full duration of the fight and the ground around its edges showed the cost on both sides.

Batu looked at the western base for a long moment.

Then he came down the eastern slope.

The descent was steep enough to require attention to footing and he gave it that attention without hurrying. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Around him the arrow fall continued from the ridge tops above.

The sound of the battle rose up as a continuous physical presence.

The sum of several thousand men and horses in a confined space, one force that had chosen the ground and one that had entered it.

He reached the eastern base.

The dust from the base had drifted east and the air at the foot of the hillside tasted of it.

He could see the eastern wall from here, the terrain visible through the drifting haze, the shapes of horses and men moving inside it.

He looked at the rider waiting at the base.

"The signal," Batu said.

The rider went along the eastern face at a pace visible from the ground below, carrying the signal where Siban’s riders were held and where Siban himself could see it reach.

The arrow fall inside continued.

The signal did not stop thousands of men and horses in an instant.

It moved through the action.

Slowly, against the momentum of what was already in motion, finding its way to the man it needed to reach through every layer of noise and movement and the specific focused attention of men who were still fighting.

The signal was moving toward the entrance.

Whether it reached Siban before the fight finished itself was the only question left.