Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 43: After the Push

The eastern dust changed direction.

Batu was on the open ground between the center collision and the junction when the column that had been moving north and west along the line’s outer edge began moving south. He watched it for the seconds it took to confirm. The arc was off the junction. Dorbei’s wheel was pressing behind it without closing on open flat terrain against a force already committed to withdrawal.

It would make it south in order.

The pressure on Chaidu’s riders let go.

The eastern sound had been a sustained press against the main body’s rear, the noise of a fight running against a fixed point with nowhere to fall back. Now it dropped. The remaining sounds from the east were horses moving and men calling intervals, the sounds of a body pulling off contact and reforming.

The incoming fire from the arc’s riders stopped as the range opened and the distance between the two sides became something that arrows could not close.

To the west, the fighting at center was changing too.

The grinding push Torghul had run into Berke’s center had been there for a long time. Two forces in a locked contact, both absorbing what the other sent and continuing to push, rank behind rank, the whole mass moving south by degrees as Torghul gained territory.

Now Berke’s center turned. The resistance came off all at once, and Torghul’s front came forward into the space it had occupied a moment before.

Then it became a chase on open ground.

His center was moving south at a canter, the depth intact, the ranks pressing south in column. Torghul’s front went after it, but Torghul’s horses had been through the full morning and the drive and the collision and the sustained close fight.

The animals under them did not have a full chase remaining. The cover of the dust ahead was readable. Two forces moving south, one pulling away from the other, the gap between their columns widening with each stride.

Torghul pulled back.

The field opened. The sound from the west dropped through its levels, from the noise of a close fight to the noise of a pursuit, from the noise of a pursuit to the noise of a formation stopping and reorganizing.

Individual fights ran on at the edges for another minute where riders from Berke’s rear had been cut off from the retreat. Then they stopped too.

What was left was the field.

The dry steppe ran in every direction under a sky that had gone brown with the dust still hanging at the height of a rider’s head, dense enough that the sun above it was a flat pale disc with no edge. There was no wind to move it.

The smell was blood and kicked earth and the wet heat coming off thousands of animals pushed past what they had left.

The grass underfoot was churned and dark where the drive had run through it, the surface torn to the root and trampled under hooves until the soil showed through. North of that torn ground the Jochid line was pulling back into its intervals, the relay riders already moving between the mingans.

South of it that torn terrain ran to a ragged line of dead horses and dead men that marked the furthest point of contact before Berke’s center had turned.

That column had moved through it.

Batu rode east to the junction.

The bodies there were concentrated at the outer edge of where the main body’s rear had stood. A fight running along a managed front spread its dead evenly.

A fight pressing against a fixed point with nowhere to go concentrated them at the point of contact.

The flanking column had pushed Chaidu’s riders against the rear of the main body and the contact had nowhere to resolve. The distribution of the dead showed it.

Clustered at the eastern edge, tight, some with arrows and some with saber cuts, the saber cuts telling him it had closed to contact at that position before Dorbei’s wheel made the situation unworkable.

Toqar was on the ground near the eastern edge, on his back with one arm out and the other across his chest, a shaft through his upper body, the angle of it saying close range from the east during the press.

Segen was ten meters north of him, his horse still standing beside him with its head down and a saber cut across its shoulder that had bled into the grass and dried. Segen had a cut across his neck and had not moved far from where he fell.

Chaidu was on his horse at the edge, looking south. He turned when Batu arrived.

"My riders are holding," he said. "Wounded count is still assembling. Some can ride and some can’t."

Batu looked at the space between Toqar and Segen. He held it long enough to fix it. Then he looked south.

Berke’s withdrawal was past the dry streambed. The feature was visible from there as a low depression running east-west across the flat steppe, that mass having crossed it and continuing south.

The streambed had not been on any planning felt. It was just a feature in the terrain, a seasonal channel dried to bare earth, and Berke’s force had crossed it without choosing it as a boundary. It had become one regardless because stopping north of it in pursuit was the wrong calculation and both sides knew it.

The retreating mass was formed. Wide across the full southern approach, depth behind its leading rank, banners still moving above it.

A body that had been in contact with a full push and a closing wheel on its flanking riders and had pulled both off in order.

Then one rider stopped.

He was in the rear position of the retreating mass, the last formed rank. While every rider around him continued south, he turned his horse and stopped, facing north.

At that distance he was a shape in the dust. A horse and a man, the banner above, turned back to read the field he was leaving. The field had a specific look from where he was.

Torn terrain from the drive. The eastern concentration of dead at the junction. The Jochid formation reforming north of it, the relay riders moving between the mingans, the line finding its shape again.

Batu looked at him across the distance between them.

The retreating mass flowed past the stopped rider on both sides, men continuing south around him, the riders opening around his position and closing again past it.

He read the field for a long time. Long enough that the riders around him had moved well ahead and he was standing alone at the rear of the men moving south.

Then he turned and was gone.

The dust took him. The mass kept moving south. The distance grew until the retreat was a dark line against the pale horizon and then only the dust above it was visible, rising and running south.

Then the horizon was flat and empty in every direction.

Batu looked north at his own line.

The field was Jochid. The territory from the river crossing to the streambed, including the position where Toqar and Segen lay and the torn terrain where the drive had pushed Berke’s front south, was Jochid ground now.

The wolf’s track seal controlled the corridor behind them. The river was behind that.

Berke was past the streambed with his position intact and his supply lines two days behind him and his animals on ground he had managed for years. The supply window was running.

The corridor seals were recent. The relay timing gap had put its cost on the junction and that cost was visible in the distribution of the dead.

The first engagement had produced a field and a lesson. The problem was still south of the streambed with its position intact.

There would be a second engagement. Berke had not lost badly enough to recalculate.

He would not accept what this field produced as a boundary. He would wait for the second opportunity or make it.

Batu turned his horse north.

The field needed work before that second opportunity came. The junction gap needed a solution that the relay timing cycle did not already contain.

Whatever the accounting of the dead produced would go into the next plan and it would not produce the same gap twice. The streambed to the south was a feature that ran across the full approach. Berke would use it if he chose to hold.

All of that was the next problem.

It was sitting on the field in plain view and it was not going anywhere.

He rode north without looking at it again.