The sound of the formation going into motion ca up through the frozen ground before it covered the first hundred ters.
Thousands of horses stepping from stationary to a forward advance simultaneously, the mass of it transmitting through the earth as a vibration that built and did not drop. It moved through the horses’ legs and up through the riders’ seats and settled in every chest across the full width of the line.
Torghul’s nine mingans moved in the center. Dorbei’s tun ca with them on the right, holding its spacing with the habit of a force that had run its intervals until they were bone-deep.
Kirsa’s mingan advanced on the left, eight hundred riders with the western steppe open at their backs. Chaidu’s mingan back in the line now, dressed into the front.
The full Jochid line advanced to exchange range and the fight opened at its full scale.
The collective release of that many bows at once did not resolve into individual shots. It was a single continuous tearing that the air produced and then maintained as the cycling kept the volu constant.
Rank after rank released and pulled back to reload while the next rank ca forward, the shafts going south in a mass that darkened the winter sky above the channel for the full length of their arc and fell into Berke’s front across its entire width.
The south bank absorbed it.
Horses went down all along Berke’s front in those first seconds, animals collapsing or lurching sideways where the shafts found them. n went with their horses or ca off and fought on foot until they were ridden down or pulled back into the depth behind them.
The dead lay on the frost-hard earth where they fell, and the living closed over them and the shooting continued.
Along portions of the south bank the leading rank thinned visibly, the depth moving through with greater frequency to fill what the volleys were removing.
The return ca simultaneously.
Berke’s full front released and the shafts ca north at the descending angle the bank gave them, falling across the Jochid line at a density the two-to-one did not erase, only offset.
The slight elevation converted each of Berke’s shafts into sothing that covered marginally more ground on arrival, and across a front of thousands that margin was real.
The Jochid leading rank absorbed the first return and closed its gaps.
The second rank released over their heads while the return was still falling, and the fight ran in both directions at once across the channel, the shafts crossing in the air above it traveling opposite ways.
The noise of it was not separable into parts, the collective release, the collective impact, the cry of n and animals, all of it rging into a continuous thing that covered the flat steppe in every direction.
It sat in the chest differently from the sumr battles, the cold carrying it further and sharpening it, the dust that had muffled the first engagent replaced by near-winter air that carried every sound clean and hard.
A rider in Torghul’s second mingan ahead of Batu’s position took a shaft through the chest and ca off his horse in a slow forward fold. The animal carried him three strides before the body gave away.
The man behind closed the gap.
Another took one through the upper leg and held his seat, leaning hard to the opposite side, blood running fast and dark down the animal’s flank and dripping to the frozen steppe in a steady line.
In Dorbei’s force on the right a horse went down in the second rank and the rider behind it ca over with it.
Both of them went down together in a heap that the n around them pressed through without stopping.
The thin ice at the channel base shattered in expanding patches where the fighting drove shafts into it, the flat crack of it distinct under the sustained noise above.
The dark marks of each impact spread outward from where the shafts stood or broke through.
Where several had clustered the ice had given way entirely and the dark earth of the channel bed showed through.
The cold air carried the sll of the fight across the whole approach, blood on frost-hardened ground, the hot breath of thousands of working horses in near-winter cold.
There was the specific sll of broken earth where the frost was opened under hooves near the channel’s near bank.
Penk’s runners moved through the rear of both tuns at the relay intervals, bundles of arrows going forward to the mingan commanders.
The supply doctrine from the narrows running on flat open ground for the first ti. It was running.
Batu held his position between the two tuns.
He could read Torghul’s front to the left and Dorbei’s line extending right and Kirsa’s mingan at the western edge. He could see north through the rear of the formation to the open steppe running back toward the river.
The fight ran. The sun moved in the pale sky.
The dead accumulated on both banks where they had fallen and the living worked around them and through them and the shooting did not stop.
Batu looked north.
The steppe behind the formation was empty. Nothing moved on it.
He looked south.
Berke’s front was thinner than it had been when the fight opened. The two-to-one in deliveries was telling now, the leading rank visibly reduced along portions of the south bank.
The depth moved through with a frequency that ant the reserve behind it was drawing down.
The south bank would hold a while yet. A force built with enough margin for a sustained fight at those odds, with slight elevation behind it, had room to absorb before it failed.
Berke had prepared for what this cost.
The question ran on timing.
The western contingent had entered the march before the two tuns left the camp. It was at the river approach now, a one-third force on the deeper and slower ford in near-winter conditions.
The ti it took to cross was the window. When Bayan’s rider arrived, the window was open.
When the window closed, those riders would be on the north bank and moving toward the camp’s unfortified western face.
Everything between those two monts depended on a rider carrying word through the full width of the fight.
That rider had never done it before.
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