Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 84: The Supply Tail
The ground had been changing for an hour before the signal came.
The steppe’s dry hardness was giving way beneath the horses’ feet, the soil darkening in patches where moisture worked up from channels below. Reed beds had appeared to the east of the march route an hour back, running in long dense lines that broke the flat horizon into sections.
Coming off the open channels was a smell different from the Caspian’s mineral cold, standing water, mud, a cultivated region somewhere further south. The delta was close enough to be in the air before it was in sight.
Batu had been watching the terrain change as the tumen moved through it. The reed beds were cover. Dense enough to conceal riders. Tall enough to take a man in three strides.
The channels between them provided withdrawal routes that a pursuing force would have to know in advance to block, and the channels were not on any felt map the army carried.
He was still watching the eastern approach vectors when the relay rider came at hard pace from the rear.
The man reached Penk’s nearest post rider, transferred the signal, and Penk’s rider drove forward at the pace that said what it said before the words arrived.
Contact at the supply tail.
Direction and fact. Nothing else. No count, no picture of the tail’s state.
The rearmost screen rider had passed what he could spare time to pass. The relay had moved it forward in under three minutes.
Batu looked east at the nearest reed bed. He looked back down the march route.
The supply tail was a full interval behind the van. Pack animals, spare remounts, the arrow allocation on rotation.
The screen riders covering it had been sized for administered territory. He had accepted that in theory when the tumen left the western steppe. What he had not fully accounted for was that administered territory and safe territory were two different claims and the distance between them ran in exactly this kind of terrain.
He turned to Suuqai, the man riding beside him.
Suuqai was already turning to him. The Khar Kheshig had their riding positions around Batu, the steppe fifty to the left and rear, the Norse fifty to the right and forward. Suuqai had his eyes on Batu’s face and nowhere else.
"The tail," Batu said.
Suuqai turned his horse and the guard went.
They ran back along the march route at full canter, the hundred opening from their close guard spacing into the spread of a body with purpose.
The main formation opened around them and closed again behind them as they passed through. Somewhere to the left Torghul’s voice carried a direction to the nearest mingan commander. The main body held its position without turning.
The terrain between the main body and the supply tail dropped into a shallow basin where a dry channel crossed the route before the reed beds began in earnest to the east. It was still above it that the sounds reached them.
The compressed flat sound of composite bows in short rapid intervals came first. Individual archers from multiple positions, mobile, each man shooting on his own timing.
Under that sound came what it was producing, horses in distress, the specific high noise of animals that had taken shafts, and men’s voices carrying the sharp sounds of people working with their hands at something that had a deadline.
Batu came over the rise and took in the ground below him.
The supply tail was spread across the ground, the pack animals on a tether that had been organized before the engagement and was broken now. Animals were down at the rearmost section. Several more had been cut loose and were moving east at a panicked trot, their loads dragging behind them or gone entirely, straps severed.
Load was scattered across the earth in dark patches where the bags had split or been pulled open. The rearmost section of the tail was the part they had reached first and worked the longest, and it showed.
The screen riders assigned to the tail were in the eastern section, six of them against a moving body. The attackers numbered perhaps forty, perhaps more, difficult to read at this distance with cover behind them.
They worked in pairs. One pair would draw a screen rider’s attention and hold it while another pair moved further up the column and cut loose what they could take or scatter what they couldn’t. They were fast and organized and they knew its target in the detail that came from watching it before they hit it.
The guard came over the rise.
What happened next happened at the speed of trained instinct and it happened in two different directions at once.
The steppe riders fifty moved over the position and spread. They fanned from canter into a widening arc, the riders in the outer positions pushing their horses harder to seal off the east before the attackers could clear it for cover.
No commands given aloud. Arm signals ran the length of the arc before it had finished forming, each signal landing in the next rider’s peripheral vision and producing an immediate adjustment in spacing and angle. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖
The arc was forming before Batu had reached the basin floor. These men had run this formation before in different country with different opponents.
The Norse fifty took the same initiative and moved toward the heaviest pressure.
They came off the rise in a compact body, horses driving hard toward the section where the screen riders were most pressured, the men of the Norse fifty closing their spacing as they descended, blades and axes drawn, the close-order instinct pulling them together.
The instinct was correct for what they were, a close-order fighting body whose strength was coordinated violence in tight space, each man’s position dependent on the man beside him. Against an opponent who would press in close, that body would have been exactly what the situation required.
Yet the raiders had no intention of closing to contact.
