The Khotor ca in fast.
Batu had expected them to slow at the base of the slope and dress their lines before committing. That was what a careful commander did when charging uphill against a prepared position. You spent two minutes organizing because two minutes of formation saved you ten minutes of chaos halfway up.
The Khotor commander didn’t spend two minutes.
The coalition hit the base of the slope at a canter and kept the pace, the dark red banner driving straight up the center with the Ulus elent angling left and the yellow banner clan spreading right. No pause. No redress.
Whoever was leading the center had decided that montum was worth more than formation on a slope this short.
He wasn’t wrong. It was the aggressive read of the ground and it was correct.
Batu watched from the southern reserve position and filed that away.
On the crest, Torghul’s line held still. One hundred and fifty riders in a tight arc across the ridge top, facing down the slope, bows up.
They waited until the leading Khotor riders were a hundred ters out before the first volley went down the slope.
It hit the front rank hard. The horses that took arrows in the chest went down hard, rolling on the slope and carrying riders with them.
A falling horse on a short slope didn’t stop where it landed. The riders behind broke around the tumbling mass or went through it, and the ones who broke lost their line and the ones who went through lost their horses.
The sound of it reached him at the southern position a half-second after the visual. A flat irregular crack, then the high sustained noise of horses that had taken wounds and weren’t yet down, the formation already fracturing at the point of the charge.
But the Khotor kept coming.
The ones who went down were simply ridden around and the mass of the charge absorbed the gaps and pressed on.
Second volley. Third.
The slope was slowing them now, horses laboring, the pace dropping from canter to trot, but there were so many of them that the ones still moving filled the spaces left by the ones who’d stopped.
Torghul’s line was supposed to break contact when the charge was halfway up.
The charge was halfway up.
Torghul didn’t move.
Batu saw it from the southern position and felt sothing tighten in his chest. The timing was the hard part. Torghul had said so himself on the ridge.
But the signal hadn’t co and the Khotor front rank was seventy ters out now and closing.
Sixty ters.
Then the signal ca. Torghul’s line turned as one and dropped over the crest.
It was late. Later than the plan called for.
The Khotor front rank was close enough that the last of Torghul’s riders going over the crest drew arrows from below, and two of them went down on the back slope before they cleared the line.
But the charge crested.
The Khotor front rank ca over the ridge expecting to find a broken line running. They found flat ground and silence and nothing in front of them.
The riders behind pressed forward from below, pushing the front rank out onto the flat, the formation compressing as n ca over the crest in a mass and spread because there was nowhere else to go.
Thirty seconds of confusion. Forty.
The Khotor commander was sowhere in that mass trying to read what had happened and find the n who’d been there.
Then Chaidu ca out of the basin.
One hundred and thirty riders at a full gallop from the east, hitting the Khotor mass on its right side before the front rank had finished spreading onto the flat.
The collision was loud enough to hear from the southern position. Horses and n, the high sharp noise of the impact, the right side of the Khotor mass buckled inward along the line of the charge.
The forces at the point of contact went down in a compressed line and the riders behind them drove forward into the space before they could read what had made it, and then the sustained ugly sound of close fighting.
Batu looked at Torghul’s position.
Torghul had reford on the back slope in the forty seconds of the Khotor’s confusion, faster than Batu had thought possible, and now he brought his elent back over the crest from the west and hit the mass from behind.
The Khotor were on the ridge top with Chaidu driving in from the east and Torghul from the west and the press of their own riders still coming up the slope from below.
The ones at the front had nowhere to go. The ones in the middle were trying to turn in both directions. The ones still on the slope had no idea what was happening above them.
The yellow banner clan was on the right flank of the original charge, which put them on the southern end of the ridge when the trap closed.
They’d co up the slope at an angle that left them partially outside the main press.
When Chaidu hit from the east, the yellow banner riders at the edge of the formation looked left at the mass of the close fight and looked right at open slope and made the calculation that n made when they had an option.
They ran.
Half of them, roughly. The banner went with them, which ant the formation went with the banner, and the right flank of the coalition dissolved in under a minute and stread back down the southern slope past Batu’s twenty-man anchor, too many to stop, moving too fast to care about twenty riders who didn’t pursue.
Batu watched them go and turned his attention back to the ridge.
The Khotor were still fighting.
That was the thing that stood out.
With the right flank gone and the trap closed on two sides and their own n pressing up the slope from below with nowhere useful to go, the Khotor center was holding.
They fought with the specific organized energy of n who’d decided sothing before the fight started.
That was different from a rout.
The Ulus elent was on the left flank of the ridge, which put them on the northern end where the rocky ground began.
Torghul’s elent was pressing from the west and Chaidu from the east and the Ulus had maybe two hundred riders on broken ground with loose rock under their horses’ feet.
They weren’t running either.
Batu turned to the rider beside him. "Take the reserve north. Stay off the Ulus flank. Arc around it. Get above them on the rocky ground and hold. Hold position. Let them count you."
The rider went with the twenty.
Batu rode up the southern slope alone.
The ridge top had been flat ground an hour ago.
Horses were down in the positions they had fallen, so still working their legs against the dirt. n were in the spaces between them, so sitting, so not moving, so managing wounds that hadn’t finished deciding what they would do.
The ground was dark in patches where the bleeding had gone into the dry soil.
He pushed through the outer edge of the fight toward Torghul’s position, reading the shape of it as he moved.
The Khotor mass had compressed into a rough circle in the center of the flat ground, maybe three hundred n still mounted and fighting, the rest down or pushed to the edges.
Chaidu’s elent was pressing from the east in short controlled bursts, hitting and pulling back, not committing to a sustained push because a sustained push into a compressed mass was how you lost n faster than necessary.
Torghul had seen the sa thing.
His elent was doing the sa from the west. Pressure, pull back, pressure. Letting the circle get smaller on its own.
It was working. Slowly.
The Khotor circle wasn’t collapsing the way a broken formation collapsed.
It was shrinking because n were going down but the ones still up were holding their ground and their faces.
That was different from a rout.
That was n who’d decided sothing before the fight started.
Batu found Torghul at the western edge of the fight.
"Their commander," Batu said.
"Center of the circle. Dark red deel. I’ve seen him twice." Torghul’s face was cut along the jaw, not deep, already clotting.
"He’s been directing the close the whole ti. Every ti we’ve pressed he’s moved two riders to cover the gap before we hit it."
"He’s buying ti," Batu said.
Torghul looked at him.
"He’s not trying to win this. He’s been inside that circle directing a fighting withdrawal and waiting for sothing."
Batu looked at the Ulus position to the north. The twenty reserve riders were visible on the high rocky ground above the Ulus elent.
The Ulus had stopped pressing forward and stopped running. They were holding ground on the broken slope.
Also waiting.
"Break the circle," Batu said. "I want his commander alive if possible. Not at serious cost. But if there’s a clean path, take it."
Torghul rode back to his elent.
Batu stayed where he was and watched.
The next press from both sides was harder than the controlled bursts had been.
Chaidu’s elent drove into the eastern face of the circle and didn’t pull back, and Torghul hit the western face at the sa mont, and the circle didn’t hold that.
It fractured along the north-south axis, the mass splitting into two smaller groups, and the fighting got louder and more specific as it broke from a mass engagent into individual close fights across thirty ters of ground.
The Khotor commander was visible for a mont in the split, the dark red deel, directing riders left and right, and then Torghul’s elent was between Batu and that position and he lost the view.
Forty seconds.
Then it was over.
The mass stopped fighting the way masses stopped fighting, in sections, the resistance leaving it piece by piece, the n who were still up lowering their weapons and the n who weren’t up staying down.
Batu counted.
The Khotor circle had started with maybe three hundred. Perhaps a hundred and twenty were still mounted. The rest were on the ground.
The flat space the Khotor circle had occupied was dense with them, n and horses in the positions they had ended in.
The ridge top in the seconds after the resistance left it had its own specific sound. Horses were the loudest part of it. n gave it less.
His own force had taken losses he hadn’t fully tracked yet. He could see gaps in Chaidu’s elent and Torghul’s that hadn’t been there before the close.
Torghul rode toward him from the broken center with a prisoner behind him.
A man in a dark red deel, mounted, hands bound at the front. He was in his forties, broad through the shoulders, with the straight back of soone who’d spent his life on horseback.
He had a cut above his eye that was bleeding freely and he was looking at Batu with an expression that wasn’t fear and wasn’t defiance.
It was assessnt.
Batu looked back at him with the sa thing.
To the north, the Ulus elent had still not moved.
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