Batu POV
The Khotor came in fast.
He had expected them to slow at the slope's base and organize their lines before pushing. That was what a careful commander did when charging uphill against a prepared position, two minutes of organization traded for ten minutes of order halfway up the slope.
The Khotor commander didn't spend two minutes.
The coalition hit the slope's base at a full canter, the dark red banner driving straight up the center with the Ulus riders moving left and the yellow banner clan spreading to the right. Whoever commanded the center had decided that momentum was worth more than organization on a slope this short.
He wasn't wrong. It was an aggressive take of the ground and it was acceptable.
Batu noted it from the southern reserve position and turned his eyes uphill.
Torghul's line was up there. A hundred and fifty riders in a tight arc across the ridge top, facing down the slope, bows ready. The plan said they broke contact when the charge was halfway up. The plan required Torghul to read that moment correctly from inside it.
He watched the charge climb.
The first volley went down the slope at a hundred meters, the sound reaching the southern reserve a beat after the release, and men and horses went down in the front rank and the front rank reformed around them.
Second volley. Third.
The slope was grinding the canter into a trot, taking the momentum apart piece by piece, but they were so many that the mass just kept filling itself from behind.
The charge was halfway up the slope.
Torghul's line didn't move.
Batu watched uphill and felt something tighten in his chest. The timing was the hard part. Torghul had said so himself on the ridge. If the line broke too early the charge stalled and the plan had nothing. If it held too long it got cut up going over.
The Khotor front rank was seventy meters out. Sixty.
He kept his eyes on the engagement.
Senge POV
Senge was six from the outer left of Torghul's line when the Khotor hit the base.
The ground had them before the eyes could, a low percussion rising through the earth and up through his horse's legs, a feeling the animal knew and didn't like. It shifted its weight backward. He tightened the reins and watched the slope below.
They came out of the flat's lip and onto the incline in a mass. The dark red banner at the center drove highest fastest, the flanks spreading around it. They had stopped caring about formation somewhere in the canter from the flat.
"Wait," Torghul said.
A hundred meters. The line released as one.
A hundred and fifty composite bows in the same breath. The sound was a single tearing hiss and then the shafts were going downhill in a flat dark cloud.
They landed in the front rank and the front rank came apart in pieces.
A horse at the center took a shaft through the neck just below the skull. The front end dropped without any intermediate step, the legs folding at once, the full weight of the animal going straight into the ground at a canter.
The riders directly behind broke around the fallen mass, but the two on its immediate left couldn't clear in time. One horse went over the fallen animal's haunches. The rider came off at speed, hit the slope, and rolled. The horse landed on nothing and regained its feet and ran.
The other rider pulled hard right and collided with the man beside him, their horses' shoulders meeting hard, both animals lurching and staggering.
"Wait," Torghul said.
Senge drew and released for the second volley. The rhythm of the line was even around him, the way it was even when men had done this enough to stop thinking about it. The arrows went down into the reformed rank.
More went down.
A shaft came back from below. He wasn't sure when they had started returning fire uphill. The arrow passed his right ear close enough that he heard the spin of it, a sharp hiss distinct from the larger hiss of the line's release, and found the man three positions to his right through the upper arm.
The impact sound was flat and wet. The man's draw arm dropped. He made a sound through his closed teeth, the compressed sound of a body absorbing something it hadn't anticipated. He transferred the bow to his off hand and looked at the shaft where it entered the arm and looked back down the slope.
He didn't leave the line.
"Wait," Torghul said.
Seventy meters. The horses below were working visibly now, necks pumping, the slope eating the canter and turning it into something harder. Their riders were leaning forward over the necks, driving with their legs.
Sixty meters. The breathing of the horses was audible from their position, the labored pull of animals that had ridden hard to reach this slope and were still climbing it.
Fifty meters.
Then the signal came.
"Break," Torghul said.
The line turned.
Senge drove his horse north along the ridge, over the back and down the rear slope. The formation poured backward over the ridge around him, the riders finding the back slope at speed.
The arrows came over before the last of them cleared it.
The Khotor front rank was uphill before Torghul's line finished retreating. The man directly ahead of Senge took a shaft through his left shoulder from behind.
The force of it pitched him forward over his horse's neck. He clutched the mane with his right hand and held. His left arm hung. The horse ran on down the back slope carrying him and the shaft, blood running dark from around the wound and down his arm and dripping from the elbow.
The second rider to go down was to Senge's left, five paces out. The shaft caught his horse through the hindquarters, entering low on the left rump and driving forward.
The horse's back end lost its drive. It tried to keep the pace on the momentum of the front legs and the hindquarters dropped, and the animal went sideways and down. The rider rolled clear before the horse reached the ground and hit the back slope hard enough to bounce. He lay still.
Senge kept going. Torghul was already at the center of the back slope organizing the intervals, riders finding their spacing around him. The sounds above the ridge had changed.
Forty seconds.
Batu POV
The Khotor charge went uphill and found empty ground.
The front rank came over the ridge expecting a broken line in flight and found flat terrain and silence. The riders behind kept pushing from below, forcing the front rank out onto the flat, the formation compressing as men came over and spread because there was nowhere else to go.
Then Chaidu came out of the basin.
One hundred and thirty riders at a full gallop from the east. They had been still in the hidden ground for twenty minutes, horses and men both holding.
The sound of the collision reached Batu and it was not the sound of organized fighting.
It was the sound of body meeting body at full speed, horses driving into horses, a crack and compression of that much weight finding that much resistance in the space of a stride. High and immediate and then swallowed by the close work that followed.
Torghul came back over from the west.
He had reformed on the back slope in forty seconds. Batu had not thought it possible. The riders came back over the ridge in a line that was thinner than it had been but still a line, and it drove into the Khotor mass from the west while Chaidu's riders drove from the east.
The Khotor were on the ridge top with contact arriving from two sides and their own riders still pushing up the slope from below, blind to what was happening above them.
The yellow banner clan pushed out of the mess at the south. They had come up the slope offset from the main press when the trap closed.
When Chaidu's collision hit the eastern side, the riders at the yellow banner formation looked left at the close fight and looked right at an open slope running back down to flat ground and made their decision.
The banner went south.
They came past Batu's twenty-man position at a canter and then at a gallop, the horses finding speed on the downslope, the riders not looking at the twenty men who didn't pursue. Too many to stop. Moving too fast and too many to care.
The banner was already ahead of the formation, some rider having grabbed it and driven for open ground, and the yellow banner clan dissolved in under a minute and streamed down the southern slope and back onto the flat.
Batu watched them go and turned back to the ridge.
The Khotor were still fighting.
The yellow banner was gone, the trap had closed on two sides and their own men were still arriving at the mess from below with nowhere useful to go.
A rough circle in the center of the flat ground, maybe three hundred still mounted, and the circle was shrinking but the men inside it were fighting, not breaking.
The Ulus were at the northern end of the ridge on the broken rocky ground, two hundred riders with loose rock under their horses' feet. Torghul's riders were pressing them from the west. They were not running.
He looked at the twenty riders beside him.
"Push north," he said to the nearest man. "Hold position above the Ulus on the rocky ground. Don't engage, just pressure them with presence."
The twenty went.
He rode up the south slope alone.
The ridge top hit him with its smell before anything else. Blood and horse, the specific warm copper of opened bodies mixed with the animal heat of horses that had been pushed hard and were still working.
The flat ground was churned dark in the places the fighting had compressed into itself, the grass ground through to the earth below.
Chaidu's riders pressed from the east in short controlled bursts, driving into the Khotor mass, pulling back before the return could organize, hitting again. Torghul's riders were doing the same from the west. Neither side pushed for constant contact.
It was working. Slowly.
The circle was getting smaller and the men inside it were not losing their faces.
Batu found Torghul at the western side.
Torghul had a cut along his jaw from the base of the ear to the chin, not deep, already clotting in a dark line. He hadn't addressed it. His eyes were on the circle.
"Their commander," Batu said.
"At the center. Dark red deel." Torghul's voice had the compression of a man spending words carefully because he had other things to spend himself on. "I've had eyes on him twice. Every time we press a breach he's already moved enough riders to cover it before we hit it."
Batu looked at the circle. At the center of it, a man on a grey horse was moving, short controlled movements, pointing left, pointing right, closing the holes before they opened fully.
"He's not trying to win this."
Torghul looked at him.
"That circle is a fighting withdrawal. He's been directing it since the trap closed. He's waiting for something."
Batu looked north. The twenty reserve riders were visible on the high rocky ground above the Ulus riders. The Ulus had stopped pressing forward and stopped retreating. They were holding their positions on the broken slope.
Also waiting.
"Break the circle," Batu said. "I want him alive if possible. Not at serious cost, but if it's there, take it."
Torghul rode back to his force.
The press came harder than the bursts had been. Chaidu's riders drove east and didn't pull back, and Torghul hit the west at the same moment, and the circle fractured along its north-south axis.
The mass split into two smaller groups and the fighting that had been a ring engagement became close work across thirty meters of churned ground, horses crowded so tight that sabers had no room for full swings.
Men were using the crossguard, the pommel, driving their horses' shoulders into the horses beside them, fighting with whatever the distance allowed.
A Khotor rider at the fracture point took a blow across the side of the head from a pommel strike, the impact snapping his head sideways. He stayed in the saddle for two strides before his body's understanding arrived and he went off the near side into the churned ground.
The Khotor commander was visible for a moment in the gap of the split, the dark red deel, the grey horse, the man calling to riders on both sides trying to organize the two pieces back into one.
Then Torghul's riders came between Batu and that position and closed the view.
The resistance left the men in parts, one cluster of men lowering their weapons and the men beside them reading what that meant. The circle stopped fighting piece by piece from the outside inward. The ones still mounted went still. The ones on the ground stayed where they were.
Batu counted. The Khotor force had started with perhaps three hundred. A hundred and twenty still mounted, maybe fewer. The rest were on the churned ground at various distances from the fighting's center. Some still. Some not.
Gaps were visible in Chaidu's ranks and in Torghul's that hadn't been there when the trap closed.
Torghul came from the broken center with a prisoner behind him. A man in a dark red deel, mounted, his hands bound at the front with a leather strap. He was in his forties, broad through the shoulders, with the straight-backed seat of a man who had spent his entire life on horseback.
A cut above his left eye was bleeding freely down the side of his face and into his beard. He was looking at Batu across the distance between them with an expression that was not fear and was not defiance.
It was gauging him.
Batu looked back at him with the same thing.
To the north, the Ulus riders had still not moved.