Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 53: Battle at the Streambed

The column crossed the first battle ground in the middle of the morning.

The marks were still there under the frost. The patches where the summer drive had worked the steppe down to bare soil had not recovered before the cold came in, pale and distinct against the dead grass, the surface torn too deep to heal in a single season.

The horses moved through without guidance, reading the uneven ground through their feet, and the column passed over what the summer had left and kept going south.

Batu crossed the same approach he had crossed weeks before, moving in the opposite direction. The junction was to the east of the march line, unmarked now except by what the ground still showed.

He did not look for it. The streambed was ahead.

Kirsa’s screen came back as the distance dropped to visual range.

"He’s on the south bank," the rider said. "Spread across the full width. Formed. He hasn’t moved."

The dark line resolved on its own as the column closed. It came up out of the pale southern horizon running east to west across the full approach, and it kept running east and west past the point where a force of that size would stop if it were built at standard depth.

The front extended further than the numbers behind it could fill in concentrated ranks. Berke had spread his men, trading depth for width, covering the open ground between the natural flanking distances on both sides.

A commander who spread his riders to the full approach width had committed to a fight that ran on endurance. He would absorb the press. He would hold the slight elevation of the south bank.

He was waiting for the other half of his arrangement to work for him.

The channel’s slight elevation came up as the column closed further. The streambed’s cut ran east to west across the full approach, both banks raised fractionally above the floor, the far bank a low step that put Berke’s archers above anything approaching from the north.

Small. Chosen. Enough to put a slight downward angle on every shaft released from the south, and a slight upward angle on every shaft going that direction. Over the length of a sustained fight those angles accumulated.

The channel base carried thin ice. In summer it had been dried bare earth, invisible on every planning felt.

Now a pale flat sheen ran east to west where the cold had found the moisture in the channel bed and locked it. Horses would break through it. The sound of breaking ice would carry to both lines when the crossing came.

The plan ran from these observations. Spread front, slight elevation, ice in the streambed.

Berke’s center had the task to hold the south bank, give the western contingent time to cross the river to the north, come up the far bank, and reach the camp’s unfortified western face. The center did not need to win the fight. It needed to outlast the window.

The two-to-one in numbers was the instrument against it. The elevation gave Berke a marginal advantage per shaft.

The count at double the bows, sustained long enough, overcame it. Penk’s allocation runners would keep the Jochid supply moving forward.

And when the signal came from Bayan at the river, when the western contingent entered the water, everything went through the channel at once. Full commitment, both tumens, the crossing forced before those riders could clear the ford and reach dry ground. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The liaison rider had not carried a signal through a live engagement before today.

Batu took note of that and gave the deployment order.

Torghul’s nine mingans took the center. Dorbei’s tumen went right.

Kirsa’s mingan went to the far left, the open steppe toward the river visible over the riders’ shoulders as they dressed into position. Chaidu’s mingan went forward of the main body, facing the channel.

Penk’s riders spread through the full formation width and found their intervals.

Chaidu went south.

Eight hundred riders advanced at a canter and the frost-hardened steppe gave back the percussion of them sharply, each hoof impact distinct against the compressed soil, the sound carrying ahead of the horses into Berke’s leading rank.

At long range Chaidu’s front loosed in a rolling wave, the shafts going up in a dark arc against the pale winter sky and hanging for a moment at the top before the angle brought them down.

The return came within the same breath, the two arcs crossing each other in the air above the distance between the two forces.

The shafts arrived in Chaidu’s front. A horse at the left edge went down, legs folding mid-stride, the rider thrown forward across the frozen steppe and rolling.

The man behind him cut his horse around the fallen animal and kept his pace. A shaft buried itself in a rider’s shoulder and he stayed in the saddle, leaning into the impact, blood starting down across the horse’s shoulder and along the foreleg.

Chaidu pushed them to the near bank.

At that range the arcs flattened and the shafts arrived fast. Both forces releasing across the channel width, the thin ice at the base cracking in flat sharp reports where the errant shots struck it, brief and specific, the ice splintering in dark patches at each impact point.

Three more of Chaidu’s riders came off their horses in the space of a dozen heartbeats. One went down with the animal, the horse rolling, and he was still when the horse stopped moving. Two came off clean and moved back through the advancing mingan on foot.

Chaidu turned them.

Eight hundred horses reversing at once, north-facing and running before Berke’s leading rank had fully read what it saw.

The riders loosed backward as they ran, the mangudai shafts going south over the horses’ hindquarters in a flat continuous stream, each release from a horse at full pace, the shafts arriving in Berke’s leading rank fast and flat with no arc to read in advance.

Berke’s forward riders surged.

Twenty, thirty, their horses pressing to the channel’s near bank, some of them onto the ice itself, the cracking of it loud under the hooves.

Commands carried from the south bank, the pitch of them clear through the noise even when the words were not, and the effect arrived immediately.

The riders who had pressed forward pulled back to the far bank. Every man who had gone forward returned to the elevation and the front closed without a gap.

Chaidu brought his mingan back through the main body.

The feigned withdrawal had run exactly as it was built to run. Berke’s center had its orders and it had them clearly, and it had shown that clearly.

Everything Batu had built the plan around was confirmed on the ground in the space of a few minutes. Siban had said this was how it would run. It had run that way.

Batu looked at Torghul.

Torghul was already looking back.

The signal went across both tumens simultaneously through Penk’s relay.

The full formation stepped south toward the streambed and Berke’s held line.