Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 85: Clash Against Raiders

The raiders were horse archers who had already been shooting and moving for several minutes and were prepared to continue doing exactly that.

The first volley from the raider body went into the Norse compact line at sixty meters. The arcs were flat at this range, the shafts arriving fast and low with little time between release and impact.

The compact line had no space to open, the men packed tight by their own response, and tight meant every shaft that cleared the forward riders had more riders behind it to find.

The right edge took the worst of it. Two horses on the outer right went down in the span of two seconds, the men on them thrown forward and rolling across the churned floor.

A third man on the right edge stayed mounted. The shaft had gone through his upper thigh and he kept his seat, driving his horse forward because a stationary target in the open was a dead one.

Gunnar was between the two halves.

He had been watching both since the rise, his position in the center of the guard’s spread giving him the sightline to watch both groups move simultaneously and understand what was forming.

He drove his horse toward the compact line, standing in the stirrups as he rode, shouting in the northern tongue before he reached them.

The words came fast and precise. He arrived at their near edge still shouting, his horse sliding the last two strides, and they began to open.

The opening was slow.

It was the slowness of men adjusting a pattern that had been their survival for years, a pattern that said hold together, hold tight, the man beside you is what keeps you alive.

The instruction to spread went against the core of everything the close-order instinct had built in them. They spread, but they spread into something without a framework underneath it.

What had been the compact formation became a loose distribution of men with gaps between them and nothing that told each man where the next man was relative to what the threat required.

The steppe riders arc had a formation for this. The Norse fifty had the spread and nothing holding it.

Individual riders, each moving toward whatever pressure was nearest. The spread gave the raider body better angles.

The second volley came into their spread and the accuracy of it was worse than the first because the targets were moving and separated, but the spread had not given them cover and the volume of it was sustained.

A shaft went through the air past Batu’s left shoulder, close enough that he felt it pass.

He turned his horse south and drove toward the center, observing both groups as he moved.

Bjorn was in the center of what had been the compact formation. His left arm was against his body.

A shaft had gone through the outer muscle of the upper arm sometime in the last minute, driven there by a long release from an attacker already angling toward cover. The arm was against his body and he had his blade in his right hand and he was still moving.

He had been fighting two of them at close range before the spread, and both had moved. He was looking for the next one.

Gunnar turned his horse and drove back toward the steppe riders.

They were closing to the east but two of the outer riders had pulled short on the left. They could see their dispersed movement ahead and didn’t know if those were the men they should be closing around or the gap they should be filling. That outer edge ran uncertain where it met the space the Norse fifty now occupied.

Gunnar reached the nearest steppe rider and gave him the Norse positions verbally, the Mongolian coming fast and flat, the rider’s arm signal going up and running along the formation before Gunnar had finished speaking.

It adjusted. The gap closed.

Fifteen seconds behind where the situation was.

The raiders watched what was closing and began the withdrawal. Two of them drove for the last of the cut pack animals, taking one more animal and the load from another before turning east. The rest pulled back in the steady way of a force that had planned this moment in advance and knew which channels ran where.

Suuqai took his section and drove at the withdrawal’s leading edge.

He caught the first man at the basin’s eastern margin, forty meters from the near edge. The shaft came from the rider on Suuqai’s right, landing clean, and that man’s horse went down at pace and he went with it into the soft ground at the channel’s edge and did not get up.

The second man pushed his horse for the reeds and was ten meters from the near edge when the shaft found him. The impact drove him sideways off the saddle and the horse ran on into the reeds with an empty saddle, the sound of it crashing through the stems carrying back across the floor in a brief diminishing line.

The rest went into the reeds and were gone.

Suuqai called the pursuit at the near edge. He turned his riders back without pursuing further. Pursuit into that country would produce more dead in terrain the defenders had chosen and knew completely.

That half began folding back toward the center.

The sounds that remained after they cleared into the reeds were the sounds of aftermath. Horses moving without direction. Wounded men and wounded animals. Equipment on the earth. Nothing shooting.

The Norse fifty was tightening again as the pressure released, the close-order instinct reasserting itself naturally now that there was no instruction pulling against it. Men moving back toward each other, spacing closing, returning without anyone calling it.

Batu moved through the aftermath.

A man named Ulfr was in the eastern section of the floor, in the area where the first volley had hit the outer right. He had been the outermost man on that edge. The shaft had gone through his chest at a flat angle and he had come off his horse and not gotten up. He had been there since the first minute. He was dead.

Batu noted that and moved on.

He came alongside Bjorn. The shaft in the left arm was visible, in through the outer muscle, stopped at the bone, the end of the shaft still there and the arm against his body.

Bjorn looked at Batu. His eyes were flat, the pain absorbed. His right hand still held the blade. He had not sheathed it.

"Still works," Gunnar said, coming up on Batu’s other side.

He had been watching Bjorn’s arm since the engagement closed. "He’ll keep the arm."

Four pack animals were gone. One taken east with the raiders. Three running loose in the delta scrub to the east, their cut leads trailing. The load from those animals, arrow stock, dried provision, a portion of the fodder reserve, was scattered or gone.

Suuqai brought his horse alongside Batu and said nothing. His eyes were flat, reading, filing. Two of them were down at the near edge, visible from where they stood. The rest had gone into the reeds.

Batu considered the full picture for a moment.

One dead. Four animals. Bjorn’s arm and two steppe arc riders with manageable wounds.

Two attackers down. The tail intact beyond the rearmost section. The supply stolen required accounting.

The engagement had closed. The figures were what they were. Beyond them was how the guard’s two halves had each moved by its own logic when the situation needed one logic between them.

The two correct things had not added up to a single correct thing.

The reed beds ran south without visible end.

Somewhere in them the attackers were moving their withdrawal route toward territory the tumen could not follow them into.

Urgench was still ahead. The terrain between here and there was the same ground as this. The reed beds would be there and the channels would be there and whoever was watching the march would be watching it.

They still had ground to cover.