Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 60: What It Cost

Berke came forward with his saber in a low guard, his breathing hard from the fall, and Batu met him.

The first exchange was fast. Berke’s blade came across from the left and Batu turned it and drove a cut at his shoulder and Berke pulled back and the cut found nothing.

They separated by two steps and came together again.

The second exchange produced a collision of crossguards at close range, both men pressing into it, and Batu felt the strength in Berke’s grip and read what it told him.

A man who had spent a lifetime on horseback building that grip, the same grip that had held a bow at full draw ten thousand times, still present through the full day’s fighting.

They broke apart.

Around them the group melee kept running.

The sounds of it on both sides came through the cold air as a steady underlayer beneath the specific sounds of the two men on foot.

Kirsa’s riders were pressing Berke’s remaining men against the channel bank.

The channel’s thin ice cracked periodically under the horses pressing to the near bank’s edge.

Batu watched Berke’s lead shoulder.

In the third exchange Berke pressed hard right and Batu covered it.

The press ran into a bind at the crossguards again, both men’s blades locked, and at that distance with no room for a cut Berke drove his forearm into Batu’s guard arm and the impact pushed Batu’s blade offline.

Batu stepped left before the follow cut could find him.

He felt the step in his legs. The tiredness there from the full day’s work, the crossing, the south bank fight, the pursuit.

Berke felt it too. He came forward.

The next exchange ran longer than any of the previous ones.

Berke pressing the attack, Batu giving ground one step at a time, taking each cut on his guard and reading the tempo, not fighting back at full commitment because the right moment had not arrived and using the energy before it arrived was the thing that lost a fight at this stage of a full day.

"You’re tired," Berke said.

He said it between cuts, his breath controlled despite everything, the words coming with the economy of a man who has nothing to waste.

"So are you," Batu said.

Berke’s next cut came fast and hard and Batu covered it and in the coverage his left arm was a half-beat slow from the fatigue in it.

Berke read the slowness and drove the follow cut at the same arm before Batu had reset his guard.

The blade found the left forearm.

Not deep. The angle was wrong for a clean cut.

Berke was already committed to the swing when the opening appeared and the delivery was off-center.

The blade opened a gash across the outside of the forearm and the cold air found the cut immediately.

Batu kept his footing. He did not step back.

He stepped forward.

Berke had not expected that and the step cost him the distance he needed to reset, and for two seconds both men were inside each other’s guard range and neither had a clean cut available and both of them knew it.

They broke apart.

Batu held his left arm and felt the cut and assessed it without looking at it.

The forearm still worked. He adjusted his grip on the saber and came forward.

Berke watched him come, a glint of recognition in his eyes.

Four more exchanges.

Batu holding slightly more back each time, giving Berke the small advantages that kept him pressing forward, reading the lead shoulder in each exchange and waiting.

The shoulder dropped a fraction before the rightward cut.

It had dropped the same way in every rightward cut since the fight began.

A trained pattern that Berke’s body produced without his mind being involved in it, the habit of ten thousand hours of practice.

In the seventh exchange the shoulder dropped.

Batu was already moving when the rightward cut came.

Inside the angle, the blade going past him on the left, his own cut driving down and across at Berke’s wrapped forearm, the one that had taken a cut on the south bank hours ago and been wrapped before the flight.

The blade went through the wrap and into the flesh below it.

Berke’s grip broke.

The saber hit the frozen earth. Berke stepped back and had nothing in his hand.

Batu’s blade came up to Berke’s throat.

Both men breathing hard.

The sounds of the group melee at the edges, the channel’s ice cracking somewhere behind Berke’s position, the cold air coming in and going out of both their lungs in visible white bursts.

Berke looked at him across the blade’s width.

His face was composed. Whatever he was reading in Batu’s expression he was reading it straight.

"Finish it," he said.

The shaft came from the right, from somewhere beyond Batu’s field of sight, from one of Berke’s remaining riders at the edge of the group melee who had found the angle and taken it.

It went into Batu’s right shoulder from behind and to the right, the point going into the muscle and stopping there, not through.

The shoulder muscle seized around the impact before his mind had registered what had happened.

His sword arm dropped.

The blade was no longer at Berke’s throat.

Batu kept his footing.

He held the saber in a grip that the shoulder was no longer fully supporting and he kept his eyes on Berke and the two men stood there for a moment on the frozen earth with one of them disarmed and the other with an arrow in his shoulder and neither of them in a position to finish anything.

Then a rider came in from the south at a canter, coming fast through the outer edge of the melee with a led horse beside him, one of Berke’s men who had cleared the group fighting.

The rider reached Berke in seconds.

Berke took the led horse without looking back at Batu and went up into the saddle in a single motion and both of them went south at a full gallop.

Kirsa shouted something.

His nearest riders were engaged at the bank and could not turn in time.

By the time any of Batu’s group had a clear line south, Berke and his man were past the secondary channel’s edge and opening distance fast.

Batu watched them go.

Kirsa arrived at his position on horseback and looked at the arrow and looked at Batu’s face and said nothing for a moment.

"Get the riders north," Batu said.

Kirsa went.

The two men going south were visible for a long time on the flat pale steppe.

The near-winter light was flat and even across the open ground, no shadows to interrupt it, nothing between here and the horizon except the frost-stiff grass and the cold air.

They got smaller. The pale ground swallowed them.

Then they were gone.

Batu looked at the secondary channel.

The thin ice at its floor was broken in places from the horses that had crossed it and gone into the bed.

The frozen earth on the near bank showed the marks of everything that had happened there over the past hour.

Churned ground, dark patches where the frost had been opened, the shapes that a close fight left on flat terrain when there was no wind to erase them.

He had taken the south bank of the streambed.

He had taken the ground between the lower river and the streambed in fact.

He had broken Berke’s center, driven his force south, pressed it with Dorbei’s tumen, and chased its commander to a secondary drainage channel southeast of the main battle and fought him to a disarmament.

Berke had a cut through the wrap on his forearm and a rider who had known where to be at the right moment, and he was south in his own territory with a reduced force and no position north of his current ground from which to threaten anything.

The next problem was the arrow in his right shoulder and the distance north to the camp.

He turned and started walking.