The main body’s lead sections crossed the ford.
Two sections, perhaps a hundred riders, moving from the northern bank onto the track south and pressing toward the channel mouth behind the forward screen already inside.
The column’s head compressed at the entrance, the riders behind stacking on the approach road by montum and proximity.
That was the threshold.
Batu looked at Torghul’s rider below him on the eastern face and moved his hand once.
The rider went.
Kirsa’s hundred and fifty-seven ca over the eastern crest in a formation that stretched the full upper length of the slope.
Controlled pace. The line held its shape from the crest down the slope, visible from the passage base for every ter of its descent.
Along the western base Chaidu’s elent ca around the lower edge in a compact group.
Along both ridgelines the tun warriors showed themselves in full.
The passage went from a corridor to a closed formation in the ti it took Siban’s forward screen to look up.
From his position below the eastern crest Batu watched Siban’s response.
The main body arrested at the ford.
The riders that had crossed pulled their horses and the column’s head closed against itself on the approach road, the riders behind pushing hard into the sudden halt.
A commander who read the situation as it ford and acted on it before the picture had fully resolved.
Then Siban committed.
A ford body from the main body’s front ranks drove into the channel mouth behind the forward screen already inside.
Several hundred riders, moving fast and in order, driving south through the base between the ridgelines.
The pace said Siban had identified the southern exit as the engagent’s deciding point in the first seconds and had moved on that read without waiting.
The bet was not wrong.
The force holding the channel floor pulled back south at the pace the plan required.
A controlled withdrawal, the riders moving through the southern exit onto the flat ground beyond the narrows, leaving the low ground open for the channel’s full length.
From within the cut, with Kirsa’s formation coming down the eastern side and Chaidu’s elent driving from the west, a path toward the exit read as the only viable direction.
Siban’s committed riders drove into it at speed.
Guyuk had built the network that gave Siban this approach. The geographic picture, the crossing conditions, the ford’s seasonal state.
The network had gone dark before the position at the narrows was established.
Siban was reading the engagent in real ti and filling that gap on his own.
The fighting withdrawal inside the cut produced contact before the southern position was fully anchored.
The tun’s main body on the flat ground behind the narrows had been in position long enough to hold a line but the forces Torghul had pulled forward to cover the southern exit were still closing their spacing when that leading body hit them.
The retreating elent stopped withdrawing and started holding.
Siban’s force hit a ford line on the flat ground and the push closed into a press of n and horses that neither side could quickly resolve.
The channel floor beca contested ground.
Batu read three things from his position simultaneously.
The southern depth position was holding but taking pressure it hadn’t been built for.
Torghul was at the western base directing the improvised anchoring, pulling two sections from the western ridgeline coverage to reinforce the depth.
Chaidu’s elent on the western side had thinned.
Siban’s riders outside the entrance had found it.
The riders Torghul pulled from the western coverage had left a gap at the western base’s lower section and Siban’s commanders outside were pushing at it with several hundred riders, driving hard against the reduced position.
Sixty-one riders from Chaidu’s rebuilt elent were holding the western approach against a force four or five tis their number.
The plan was running on its own friction.
Batu looked at the eastern face below him.
Kirsa’s line was three-quarters of the way down the slope, the descent controlled, the formation holding.
Pulling from the eastern slope to reinforce the western base would open the eastern encirclent before it completed.
The tun’s ridgeline forces couldn’t co off the crest without giving Siban’s riders inside the cut a line of escape up the ridge.
Chaidu had to hold with what he had.
A rider ca up the eastern hillside from Torghul’s position at the southern end. He reached Batu and kept his horse moving.
"The depth’s holding," the rider said. "They’re not through."
"The western base."
"Torghul knows."
The rider went back down.
The press against Chaidu’s position at the western base was visible from Batu’s post.
Sixty-one riders in a compact formation against a body pushing hard from the entrance’s western edge.
Chaidu’s elent held the lower position and didn’t give ground, but the press was continuous and the riders holding it were absorbing contact that cost with each exchange.
The eastern formation reached the lower slope.
Kirsa’s riders reached the flat ground at the channel’s eastern foot and moved inward, covering the cut’s base.
The line was complete from crest to floor on the eastern side.
Inside the cut Siban’s forward screen and the committed riders were locked between two closing ridges above them, a contested exit ahead, and no room on either side.
The sound of it filled the channel.
Thousands of horses in a two-hundred-ter channel, the ridges bearing down from both sides, the base a continuous mass of controlled movent and contact.
The dust ca up from the floor in a pale rising column that the afternoon light cut through at an angle.
Siban’s force outside the channel was still pressing.
The external riders at the western base found Chaidu’s line holding and redirected.
A section peeled from the push at the western side and drove south around the entrance’s outer edge, looking for the flat ground south of the narrows and the tun depth position’s flank.
Several hundred riders moving fast on the open ground around the narrows’ southern end.
Torghul saw it.
The improvised depth sections wheeled left and closed the flanking arc before it completed.
The section coming around the outer edge hit a ford line on the steppe and the flanking move beca a frontal press on the flat ground south of the narrows, which was exactly where the tun’s main body had been waiting since the column took its position.
Siban’s flanking riders ran into the full tun strength at close range.
The press stopped.
The channel mouth’s external force held its position, with the western base still held by Chaidu’s elent, the southern exit closed by the tun’s main body, and the heights above showing the full tun coverage.
The riders inside the cut were separated from the external body by the distance from the southern exit to the ford, with the floor contested in between and the faces above it fully occupied.
Chaidu’s elent at the western base had held.
Batu looked at the engagent’s current shape from below the eastern crest.
The encirclent was complete.
Siban’s riders inside the narrows were separated from the body outside and locked between the ridges.
The riders outside were held on the flat ground around the entrance, the tun’s main body to the south and the heights above.
The cut’s base was contested but held at both ends.
The two parts of Siban’s force could see each other across the distance of the passage.
A ford’s width of track separated them and there was no clean path between.
Sowhere in the mass of riders compressed at the channel mouth, Siban was running the logic.
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