Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 8: Bad Ground

The signal came from Chaidu’s rear line at midmorning on the second day.

Batu was riding near the front of the column when the mirror flash caught his eye. He turned his horse without waiting for the signal officer to read it and rode back through the column at a canter, counting flashes as he moved.

Pursuit. Northwest. Column formation. Distance uncertain.

He reached Chaidu’s position at the rear of the main element and found the man already facing northwest with his eyes on the horizon.

"How long ago," Batu said.

"The observation pair sent the first flash eight minutes back," Chaidu said. "Second flash came three minutes later with the column confirmation. They’re still reading the numbers."

"Where’s the pair now."

"Two miles back, on the rise we crossed this morning."

Batu looked northwest. The steppe was flat in every direction, grass running in long pale rolls under a low gray sky. Nothing visible yet. But the rise was there, a dark line against the horizon, and somewhere beyond it two men were counting riders and running their mirrors.

The third flash came while he was watching.

Chaidu’s signal officer read it fast. "Eight hundred. Possibly more. Moving at pace."

Eight hundred.

Batu ran the numbers without showing it on his face. Five hundred Jochid riders. One hundred penalty horses distributed through the rear element, each one tethered to a lead rider, cutting the rear’s effective pace by a third.

The column was strung out over almost a mile of ground because of those horses, and it would stay strung out until he changed something.

Eight hundred riders moving at pace on an intercept from the northwest would catch the rear element before the main camp. The terrain between here and home was flat for the next six hours of riding, nothing to use, nowhere to anchor.

If the pursuit caught them strung out on open ground with the rear element slowed by tethered horses, the engagement would happen on the worst possible terms.

He didn’t need to think about it long.

"Cut the penalty horses loose," he said. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Chaidu looked at him.

"All of them. Now. Leave four riders to drive them northeast and rejoin us if they can. The rest of the rear element forms up tight behind the main column."

Chaidu was already turning his horse to pass the order.

"And send a rider forward to Torghul," Batu said. "Tell him we’re pushing for the Sarat ridge system. I want the column at a canter in five minutes."

Torghul had the column moving before the rider finished delivering the message. Batu rode the length of the column from rear to front, reading pace and condition as he went.

The horses were two days out from the Tergesh camp, well-rested when they’d left but carrying the fatigue of steady movement. The speed was there but it wouldn’t last the full two hours.

He reached Torghul at the front.

"The Sarat ridges," Batu said. "How far."

"Two hours at canter. Maybe less if the ground stays firm." Torghul looked north. "The northwest face has a broken slope. Loose rock on the lower third."

"That’s the face they’d come up if they try to flank us from the north."

"Yes."

"Good." Batu looked back down the column. It had tightened since the penalty horses were cut. Cleaner shape now, faster. "Send Jaran to me."

Torghul raised an eyebrow but sent the rider.

Jaran arrived from the rear of the column two minutes later, still dusty, reading Batu’s expression as he pulled alongside.

"You know the Sarat ridges," Batu said. It wasn’t a question. Jaran was Tergesh, born on the western steppe.

"I’ve wintered near them twice," Jaran said.

"The eastern approach. Is there dead ground behind the second ridge line."

Jaran thought for a moment. He didn’t rush it.

"There’s a shallow basin between the first and second ridges on the eastern side. Maybe three hundred meters wide. You can’t see it from the flat until you’re on top of the first crest."

"How deep."

"Deep enough to hide a hundred riders if they’re not moving."

Batu looked at Torghul. Torghul was already seeing it.

"Get back to the rear element," Batu told Jaran. "Ride with Chaidu. If the pursuit closes to within a mile before we reach the ridges, I want to know immediately."

Jaran went.

The pursuit closed faster than the screen’s initial reading suggested.

Forty minutes into the canter, Chaidu’s rear pair signaled again. The column had a lead, but it was shrinking.

The pursuing force wasn’t moving at a sustainable pace. They were pushing their horses hard, which meant they’d planned for a short pursuit. They’d expected to catch the column before it reached any useful ground.

That told Batu something.

Whoever had organized this knew the terrain well enough to know the Sarat ridges were the only defensible feature within two hours of the Tergesh camp. They’d timed the intercept to cut the column off before it got there.

They were almost right.

The first ridge line came into view fifty minutes later, a dark irregular line rising out of the flat. Behind it, the second ridge. Between them, the basin Jaran had described.

Batu called the column to a trot and turned to Torghul. "How much lead do we have."

Chaidu’s signal officer had been counting. "Last flash put them at ninety minutes back. Maybe less."

Ninety minutes. Enough to deploy, but not enough to be comfortable about it.

"Take the column to the ridge," Batu said. "I’m going up first with Jaran."

He and Jaran rode ahead at a gallop and crested the first ridge in four minutes. Batu pulled up at the top and looked east, then north, then back west across the flat.

The ground was what Jaran had described.

The ridge ran roughly north to south for about half a mile before breaking into loose rock on the northern end. The eastern face dropped into the shallow basin, hidden from the flat below. The second ridge behind it was lower but provided a clean sight line back over the first.

He spent three minutes reading it. Then he had what he needed.

He turned to Jaran. "Ride back down and bring Torghul up. Tell him to leave fifty riders with the horses at the base."

Torghul listened to the deployment plan without interrupting.

Four hundred riders split into three elements.

One hundred and fifty on the ridge crest, visible, forming the bait line. One hundred in the eastern basin, completely hidden until called. One hundred and fifty split between the northern anchor on the rocky ground and a small reserve at the southern end of the ridge.

Torghul would command the main line on the crest. Chaidu would hold the basin element and wait for the signal.

"The pursuit will see the crest line and read four hundred riders on high ground," Batu said. "That’s a defensible position, but not an overwhelming one."

"A force of eight hundred on flat ground has numbers and momentum. A commander who’s been chasing us for ninety minutes and thinks he has us cornered will see those odds and like them."

"He’ll commit to a charge up the slope," Torghul said.

"He’ll commit to a charge up the slope. When his front element is halfway up and his formation is stretched, the crest line retreats over the ridge."

"He follows. He comes over the crest expecting to hit a broken force and finds flat ground and no one on it." Batu looked at the basin.

"Then Chaidu comes out of the basin from the east and Torghul’s element turns and hits them from the west. They’re on the crest with broken momentum, no formation, and contact on two sides."

Torghul looked at the basin. Then at the ridge crest. Then at the flat ground below where the pursuing force would come from.

"The fifty reserve at the south," he said.

"If their left flank tries to go around the southern end of the ridge, the reserve stops them. If they don’t, the reserve joins the close once the basin element engages."

Torghul nodded once. He had the look of a man who’d been handed something new and was turning it over to find the edges.

"It requires the crest line to hold long enough for the charge to commit and then break contact cleanly," he said. "If they break too early the charge doesn’t crest. If they hold too long they get cut up on the slope."

"That’s the hard part."

"I’ll hold the crest line myself."

"Good."

Batu looked back west across the flat. The horizon was still empty. But the signal from Chaidu’s pair was overdue by two minutes.

Then it came.

Chaidu’s signal officer read it fast, and his expression shifted in the way expressions shifted when numbers were larger than expected.

"Revised count," he said. "Nine hundred and forty. Possibly more."

Nearly a thousand riders.

Torghul said nothing. He looked at Batu.

Batu looked at the ridge. The basin. The broken rock on the northern end. The geometry of the ground he’d chosen and the force he had to hold it with.

Nine hundred and forty against five hundred on a ridge was worse than eight hundred against five hundred on a ridge.

The basin element was the plan’s thinnest point now. One hundred riders coming out of the east needed the crest engagement to be deep enough to hold the pursuing force’s attention fully.

With nine hundred and forty, some of that force might hold back.

If twenty riders peeled off to cover the eastern approach while the main charge went up the slope, Chaidu’s element would hit a wall instead of an open flank.

He looked at the basin. Then he looked at the reserve at the southern end.

"Change," he said.

Torghul looked at him.

"Pull thirty riders from the southern reserve and add them to Chaidu’s element. The south point holds with twenty."

"If their left flank goes around the southern end with serious numbers, twenty won’t stop them anyway. But Chaidu needs the depth more than the south needs the coverage."

Torghul absorbed it. "If the south point breaks."

"Then we have a problem on the south. But the basin element is the kill. That’s where the plan closes."

Torghul nodded and rode down to the column.

Batu stayed on the crest a moment longer. The flat below was still empty. The pursuing force was maybe forty minutes out now, pushing hard, their horses probably showing the cost of it.

He looked at the basin where Chaidu’s hundred and thirty would be invisible until they moved. He looked at the northern point where the loose rock would slow any flanking attempt. He looked at the slope the charge would have to climb.

Then he looked west again and waited.

The first shapes appeared on the horizon ten minutes later. Dark against the pale grass, spreading across the flat in the loose mass of a large force that had stopped trying to maintain formation and was just moving.

He counted banners as they resolved.

Three.

A green banner on the left flank. The Ulus mark. The same clan whose outriders he’d sent home two days ago with a lesson about warfare.

That lesson hadn’t held. Someone had convinced them the calculation had changed.

In the center, a banner he didn’t recognize immediately, dark red with a horizontal stripe. On the right flank, a smaller banner, yellow, one of the minor western clans.

He looked at the center banner for a long moment.

Dark red. Horizontal stripe.

He knew it. He’d seen it in the records from Jochi’s time.

The Merkid remnant clan, the Khotor branch, who’d been pushed west thirty years ago after Genghis shattered their main line and had spent a generation nursing the kind of grievance that didn’t fade with time.

The banner didn’t give him a name.

He didn’t know who commanded the Khotor now or how long they’d been building toward something like this. That was a gap he couldn’t close from a ridge with forty minutes before contact.

The Ulus hadn’t organized this. The Khotor had.

And whoever led them had managed to pull the Ulus back into motion after Batu had already sent them home.

That required either leverage or persuasion, and neither option made the Khotor commander look like a small problem.

He filed that away and rode down to find his position in the reserve.

Below on the flat, nine hundred and forty riders were coming on, and the man who’d organized them had reasons that went back thirty years.