Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 44: The Count

Khulgen had assembled the count through the night.

The field camp was still dark when the last relay rider came in with his unit’s tallies and the sorted counts from the healer’s line. Khulgen had the totals arranged on the felt by the time the light came up, and he arrived at the camp table without ceremony and set it in front of Batu.

The morning was cold. The camp sounds came through from every direction, the horse lines and the men moving between them, the low activity of a formation that had fought the day before and was not done yet.

The air still carried the dry smell of churned ground from the south, faint now but present.

Khulgen read the junction numbers first.

Chaidu’s riders had lost one hundred and eighty dead. Ninety more were wounded badly enough that they couldn’t ride under field conditions. A hundred and twenty had wounds they could manage from the saddle.

The three totals together accounted for more than half the force that had held the position when the flanking force came in from the east with Chaidu’s horses not yet recovered from the withdrawal.

Toqar and Segen were in that count. The accounting named them as it named everyone else, the same flat register, each man the same figure on the felt.

Batu read the junction ratio without comment.

A fixed-point fight concentrated its dead proportionally heavier than an open collision did, because a formation with nowhere to move the pressure off absorbed all of it at the point of contact.

The junction riders had taken what came at them with their horses blown and their backs against the rear of the main body. The distribution showed it. It was its own record of what that position had cost.

Khulgen set the center drive numbers beside them.

Four hundred and twenty dead across the nine mingans. A hundred and eighty too badly wounded to ride. Three hundred and forty with wounds they could manage from the saddle.

The center collision had run longer and with more room on both sides. Men who went down in the arrow exchange had depth behind them to fall back into. The fixed position had no such room. The count showed that too.

The enemy estimate came last. More than eight hundred on the field north of the streambed and east of the contact point. Khulgen noted it as an estimate from a withdrawal in order.

One that came off contact in formation took its dead and wounded south where the accounting couldn’t follow. The true figure was probably higher.

Total Jochid dead was six hundred.

Batu looked at both sides of the accounting. The field was Jochid and the cost was recorded, and what it left open was what the position was worth going forward. He had the answer to that already.

Torghul arrived before the morning had moved far.

He had his own tallies with him, the relay counts from Penk’s system, the cycle intervals and the signal timing. He set his felt on the table and came directly to his point.

"Widen the interval," he said. "Give the cycle more room before it runs. The signal went out to tighten inward when the mingan was already south of where the tightening would reach it. A wider interval catches that."

Batu let him finish.

"The relay carries timing," Batu said. "When the arc came wider and faster than the plan assumed, the cycle kept running the plan.

A wider interval still runs the same plan, at a slower pace."

Torghul looked at the table.

"The gap came from what the relay carried. The right flank needed a read of what Kirsa was seeing in the moment Kirsa was seeing it. The cycle gave them a signal at an interval instead.

A rider whose function is to carry what the commander sees to the riders that need it, in the moment they need it."

Torghul was still for a moment. His eyes went back to the tallies, to those numbers and the ratio that sat at the top of them. It was all there if you read it correctly.

The junction riders had absorbed what they absorbed because there was no way to get a read to them in time, and widening the relay interval would not have changed that. Torghul didn’t argue. He said he’d have a proposal on felt before the column moved, and he went.

Khulgen returned from the supply lines before midday.

The window had been ten to fourteen days from the war council. The force had consumed nearly all of it. Crossing days, the days held before the engagement, the battle day, the days in position since.

What remained was little.

The resupply line ran north through the corridor. Through three clans, recently placed and not yet tested under pressure from the other direction. The run north to the main camp and back would take time, and while it was on that road the field camp would be drawing down the last of what it had with no way to accelerate the return.

Khulgen laid out the risk plainly. Moving openly through recently sealed territory was visible to anyone watching those roads.

If anything on that road changed while it was moving, the field camp would learn about it after the fact.

Berke’s riders probing the corridor from the east. A clan that had taken the seal without yet having had time to make it real. Either one, and it could be well north of the river when it happened.

"The alternative," Khulgen said, "is the crossing. North of the river before it fails. The position here goes with it."

The field south of the streambed, the territory the force had taken and held, the crossing now under their control, all of it went with a withdrawal.

Whatever the hold could generate on Berke’s side of the river, whatever it cost him to have a Jochid formation sitting on the territory his supply lines ran through, had no time to work. The second engagement required the hold to continue long enough for the pressure to run. Without it, the position lasted days.

"Send it," Batu said. "Full load. Today. Back before what remained ran out."

Khulgen noted the order and went.

The camp held its shape after that. Relay riders moved at their intervals between the mingans. Those who could ride were back in the formation.

Those who couldn’t were behind the line, being moved in stages as the camp’s numbers settled into what they were now.

A resupply column moving openly through sealed territory was logistics in plain sight. The three seals had held under the conditions that existed when the column first passed through.

Those conditions were about to change. What it told about the field camp’s intentions was visible to anyone watching from a distance.

Berke would have riders watching the corridor approaches. He’d see the column and read it correctly.

The field camp would learn what the corridor was actually worth while it moved through.