The signal reached Batu at midmorning on the second day.
Three flashes from the rear observation pair. A gap. Then the formation signal.
He turned his horse and rode back through the column at a canter, counting what the mirror told him as he moved. Pursuit. Northwest. Column formation. He reached Chaidu's position at the rear of the main force as the third set of flashes resolved.
"Eight minutes on the first flash," Chaidu said.
His eyes were already on the northwest horizon.
"Formation confirmation three minutes after."
"Numbers."
Chaidu did not look away.
"Still reading."
The steppe ran flat in every direction, grass in long pale rolls under a low gray sky. Nothing visible yet.
The rise they had crossed that morning was somewhere behind them, a dark line against the horizon, and beyond it two men were counting riders and working their mirrors.
The next flash came.
"Eight hundred," the signal officer said. "Possibly more. Moving at pace."
Eight hundred riders at pace against a column strung out over a mile.
Batu pondered without showing it. Five hundred Jochid riders. One hundred penalty horses distributed through the rear, each one tethered to a lead rider, each one cutting the rear's effective pace by a third. Six hours of flat steppe between here and anything worth holding. No rise, no feature worth calling ground.
Eight hundred riders moving hard from the northwest would close that before the land changed.
"Cut the penalty horses loose," he said.
Chaidu looked at him.
"All of them. Now. Four riders drive them northeast and rejoin if they can. Everyone else forms tight behind the main column."
He turned.
"And send a rider forward to Torghul. Tell him we're pushing for the Sarat ridge. I want the column at a canter in five minutes."
Chaidu was already turning before Batu finished.
Altu POV
The command reached Altu while his tethered horse was still pulling.
He was tied to a Tergesh bay that had been fighting the lead rein since the first hour of the march, the leather creasing into his palm from the constant tension. He pulled his short blade and cut the tether at the leather fitting.
The bay stood still for one breath.
Then it felt the tension release and saw the horses going free around it and the herd instinct made the decision. It bolted east and drove its shoulder straight into the column's left flank, two hundred kilos of panicked horse forcing itself between riders.
The man beside Altu hauled hard on his reins. His horse spun sideways, one leg crossing the other, nearly going over.
The bay pushed through the gap and kept running until the grass took it.
Down the rear the same scene ran in different forms.
A grey penalty horse panicked the moment its tether was cut and drove hard into the nearest column horse. Both animals lurched. The grey broke away to the west at a flat run, nostrils flared, head thrown high, moving on fear alone.
A compact roan went two hundred meters northeast before company-instinct brought it back around, and it slowed to a confused trot until one of the drive riders caught it and turned it northeast.
Three positions to Altu's left, a rider cut his tether a beat too slow. The penalty horse behind him bolted north while still half-connected, the severed end of the rein whipping loose and catching the man's forearm hard enough to raise a welt through his sleeve.
He held his seat. The horse went, trailing the stripped leather across the grass, shrinking and then to nothing.
Four riders broke off to drive them northeast.
Their calls went out into the wind.
The rear closed in on itself and found the canter.
Batu POV
Batu rode from rear to front and watched what the horses told him.
Two days out from the Tergesh camp. The canter was in them but not without effort. He could see it in the way the riders sat slightly forward, urging animals that wanted to settle back.
The horses' necks were dark with sweat. Their mouths worked against the bits in a way they hadn't been doing that morning. The speed was there. Holding it for two hours was the question.
He reached Torghul at the front. Torghul had the column moving before the rider from Chaidu had finished delivering the message.
"The Sarat ridges. How far."
"Two hours at canter." Torghul looked north. The lines at the corners of his eyes were tight. "Less if the land holds firm. The northwest face has a broken slope. Loose rock on the lower third."
"That's the place they'd come up if they try to flank us from the north."
"Yes."
"Good."
Batu looked back down the column. Tighter now without the penalty horses.
"Send Jaran to me."
Torghul raised an eyebrow but sent the rider.
Jaran POV
Jaran came from the rear of the column at a gallop and pulled alongside, already reading Batu's expression. He had learned to do that in the weeks since the Tergesh submission.
"The Sarat ridges. The eastern side. Behind the second ridge."
"Basin," Jaran said.
No hesitation. He had run his father's winter herds through that country since he was twelve.
"Between the first and second ridges on the eastern face. Maybe three hundred meters wide. You can't see it from the flat below until you're on the top."
"Depth."
He thought about the basin. The long grass growing thick in sheltered ground. The way sound died in it.
"A man could lie flat there and not be seen from twenty paces."
Batu looked at Torghul. Torghul was already seeing it.
"Get back to the rear," Batu said. "Ride with Chaidu. If the pursuit closes to within a mile before we reach the ridges, I want word immediately."
Jaran went.
Torghul POV
The pursuit closed faster than the screen's reading had suggested.
Forty minutes into the canter, Chaidu's rear pair signaled again. The lead was shrinking. The pursuing force was pushing its horses harder than a sustained pace could hold, which meant they had planned for a short chase. They expected to catch the column before the land changed.
They were almost right.
The first ridge line came into view fifty minutes later, dark and irregular against the flat, real rise after hours of nothing. Batu called the column to a trot.
"How much lead do we have."
Chaidu's signal officer had been counting.
"Last flash put them at ninety minutes back. Maybe less."
"Take the column to the ridge," Batu said. "I'm going up first with Jaran."
They rode ahead at a gallop and crested the first ridge in four minutes. Torghul waited below with the main body.
When Batu came back down his face carried the look of who had found what he was looking for.
Torghul crested the ridge and took the ground in at once. 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 a shallow basin, invisible from the flat below. The second ridge behind it was lower but gave a clean sight line back over the first.
Torghul listened to the plan without interrupting.
Four hundred riders split three ways. A hundred and fifty on the ridge crest, visible, forming the line the pursuing force would see. A hundred in the eastern basin, completely hidden until called. A hundred and fifty split between the northern position on the rocky ground and a small reserve at the southern end.
He worked through it while Batu spoke.
The crest line holds until the charge is halfway up the slope, then breaks back over the ridge. The charge follows, cresting to find flat ground and no one on it, their formation already broken from the slope and their own speed. Then Chaidu comes from the east out of the basin. The crest line turns from the west. The pursuing force ends up on the ridge top with no momentum, no formation, and contact arriving from two directions.
"It requires the line to hold long enough for the charge to fully commit," he said. "Break too early and the charge stalls on the slope. Hold too long and we get cut up going over."
"That's the hard part."
"I'll hold the crest line myself."
He said it as a statement of fact. Batu took it that way.
Then the revised signal came.
He watched the signal officer's face change.
"Revised count," the man said. "Nine hundred and forty. Possibly more."
Torghul said nothing. He looked at Batu.
Nine hundred and forty changed the problem at the basin. A hundred riders coming out of the east needed the engagement to hold the full attention of the pursuing force. With nine hundred and forty, some of that force could hold back. Twenty riders sent to cover the eastern side would close Chaidu's element before it reached the fight.
Batu was already looking at the basin and then at the south reserve.
"Change," he said. "Pull thirty from the south and add them to Chaidu's riders. The south holds with twenty. If their left flank goes around the south end with real numbers, twenty won't stop them anyway. But Chaidu needs the depth more than the south needs the coverage."
"If the south breaks."
"Then we have a problem on the south. But the basin is the kill. That's where the plan closes."
Torghul nodded once and rode down to the column.
Batu POV
He stayed on the crest and watched the flat.
Below the ridge the formation was taking its positions. The sounds of it reached him from both sides, riders moving into the basin, others spreading along the rocky northern point, the muffled purposeful noise of men finding where they needed to be before something arrived.
His horse stood without moving, its ears turned northwest.
Then the ears shifted.
The pursuing force appeared on the horizon before Batu could read any detail in them. A dark line first, thickening as it spread, the front edge of a mass moving across the pale grass. They were not in formation anymore. The ninety minutes of hard riding had taken that. What remained was riders moving in the same direction, pushed by the same intent.
He counted the banners as they resolved.
Green on the left flank. The Ulus mark. He had sent their outriders home two days ago with a lesson that no longer held. Someone had convinced them the lesson no longer applied.
Dark red with a horizontal stripe at the center. He looked at it for a long moment.
In the weeks after the reincarnation he had read through every record from Jochi's time he could find, building his picture of the western territories from the ground up. The dark red horizontal stripe was in those records. The Khotor branch of the Merkid line, pushed west thirty years ago after Genghis shattered their main body.
A generation raised on the story of what had been taken. That kind of inheritance didn't lose its edge with the men who first carried it. It passed to the sons and became the certainty that moved armies.
A smaller yellow banner on the right flank. One of the minor western clans.
The Ulus hadn't built this. The Khotor had. Whoever commanded that center banner had reached the Ulus after Batu had sent them home and had found the argument that changed their decision. That required either leverage or persuasion, and neither made the Khotor commander a small problem.
He noted the banner and rode down to find his position in the reserve.
Below on the flat, nine hundred and forty riders were still coming, and the man who had organized them had reasons that went back thirty years.