Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 55: The Held Order

The fight had been running long enough that the ground between the two lines had changed.

Horses lay in the approach zone, some still moving, most past it. Men on foot threaded back through the rear of the formation, some carrying wounds, some carrying arrow bundles to the front because their horses were down but their loads were not.

The frost between the channel and the Jochid line had been opened in patches by the hooves and by what had fallen, the cold earth showing through in dark marks.

The air above the approach carried blood and broken ground and the hot breath of thousands of working horses in near-winter cold, the whole of it sharper and further-reaching than anything the summer battle had produced.

The shafts were still crossing in both directions.

The collective release from both fronts had been layering over itself for long enough that the individual sounds inside it were gone. Release, flight, impact. Each ran constantly and at the same time.

The crossing arcs above the streambed were visible when the eye found them, a continuous darkening above the distance between the two lines.

From the south bank the returns came at the slight descending angle the elevation gave them, and they found riders in the second and third ranks more often now. The angle was reaching past the leading rank into the depth behind it.

A relay rider came through from Torghul, his horse at a trot and his face tight.

"Third and fourth mingan losses are running above the first battle’s rate at this stage. Torghul asks about the drive."

Batu looked at him.

"Hold," Batu said.

The rider went.

Berke’s front had thinned across the full width of the south bank.

The depth behind it kept feeding through, riders stepping up from the second and third ranks to fill the leading edge. Those riders had been in sustained fire for the same duration as the men they replaced, and the men behind them had been too.

The supply reaching Berke’s front ran a shorter distance than Penk’s runners ran through the rear of a two-tumen formation.

The brief drop in the south bank’s outgoing volume earlier in the fight had been brief. It had recovered.

The south bank was absorbing what the two-to-one delivered, and it had the depth to keep absorbing.

This was the plan. The plan was working. The plan was expensive.

A horse in the fighting zone went down close to Batu’s left, taking two shafts through the neck in the same volley. The animal went forward and down fast, and the rider came off the back and onto his feet in the same motion.

He had his bow in his hand before he was fully upright.

An open slot had appeared in the leading rank of the mingan beside him. He was through it within four steps.

Batu watched him go in.

The ice at the channel base cracked in flat sharp bursts when the shafts struck it, distinct sounds under the sustained noise above.

Each crack ran darker across the pale surface, the lines spreading outward in thin webs from each impact point.

The channel had been clean ice when the volleys first opened.

Now sections of it were broken and refrozen in dark irregular patches, and the longer the fire ran the more of it was marked.

Torghul came himself.

He pushed through the rear of the formation at a controlled canter, found Batu’s position, and pulled his horse alongside.

"The fourth mingan has cycled its front rank twice in the last interval," Torghul said. "I want to rotate it and cover with the sixth."

"Keep it in place," Batu said.

Torghul looked at him for two seconds. He said nothing.

He went back to the line.

The fourth mingan would stay in position because Torghul’s word carried, and his men did not break what they were told.

The cost of staying would be in the accounting when Khulgen assembled the figures after the field was done.

The cost was real. The cost of driving without the signal was larger.

Batu looked north.

The steppe ran flat and pale and empty toward the river. The cold sky above it held nothing.

The allocation runner came through the rear of the formation on foot.

His horse was gone, somewhere in the approach zone, but the bundle of arrows in his arms was intact.

He ran with it, threading between the horses of the rear ranks, his breath coming white in the cold air in short hard bursts.

He reached the front of the nearest mingan and passed the bundle up, and turned back without stopping.

Nobody spoke to him. Nobody looked at him.

The doctrine was running on foot, and the doctrine kept running.

In Dorbei’s section on the right the line had contracted inward.

Riders had stepped toward each other as the men beside them went down, pulling the interval tight to maintain the density the fire required.

The line held its range, and the width of Dorbei’s right was now three men shorter than it had been when the volleys first opened.

A horse near the contracting section had been standing dead on its feet for the last several minutes, a shaft through its skull, held upright only by the press of the riders on both sides of it.

When the next rider beside it went down, the animal went with him.

The gap they left was two horses wide before the depth filled it.

On the left Kirsa’s mingan had its own cost.

The riders there watched west as much as they watched south, attention split between the fire coming down from the south bank and the open steppe behind them toward the river.

The split showed in their cycling, which ran slightly slower than Torghul’s.

The rotation between ranks took a beat longer than it should.

The mingan was functional. It was thinner than it had been.

A man in the near section of Torghul’s line took a shaft through the jaw.

The specific sound of it carried back, short and wet, different from everything around it.

He came off his horse slowly, not falling so much as leaning forward.

The horse walked out from under him as he leaned, and then he was on the ground and the horse was still moving south on its own toward the line.

A rider from the rank behind caught its reins and pulled it north, and the dead man lay in the frost without anyone looking down.

Looking down was dying at the place you stopped.

Another relay rider came from the right.

"Dorbei asks if the signal is coming before his section loses another rank."

Batu looked at Dorbei’s line. He looked at Torghul’s front.

He looked at the south bank, where Berke’s line had thinned along its western end but had not broken. The depth was still feeding through, the banners still up, the fire still coming north at its slight downward angle.

Two to one was still two to one.

The south bank was giving ground by attrition. Slowly and at cost, and in the end it would give it all.

The mathematics ran one direction.

The question was time.

"Tell him the signal is coming," Batu said. "Keep his position until it does."

The rider went.

The volleys kept running.

The sound of them had become the only sound there was, filling the flat steppe in every direction, the cold carrying it further than it had any right to travel.

The pale sky above the channel was marked by the crossing arcs of the shafts, dark lines against it, constant.

Batu looked north.

The open steppe ran back toward the river. Still. Nothing on it in any direction.

Then there was something on it.

A horse coming off the northern horizon at hard pace, pushing from a long way out.

The rider was forward over the animal’s neck, driving it across the flat ground toward the formation.