Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 6: The Screen Breaks Once

They moved out before dawn on the third day.

Five hundred riders in three functional layers, spread across a front wider than any force this size would normally occupy.

The lead scouts were already a full day ahead, twelve men in pairs of two, moving fast and light with orders to map and observe and not to engage anything they found.

The middle screen was forty riders fanned across a two-mile band, far enough apart to cover ground, close enough to signal each other by mirror or fire within minutes.

The main column moved behind them, Batu riding with Torghul at the center.

The rear observation line was the piece Batu had spent the most time designing.

Twenty riders split into four groups, each covering a quarter of the back arc.

Their job was simple. Watch what follows.

The first day moved without incident.

The steppe opened up to the west in long flat rolls, grass bending in the wind, the sky enormous and gray with cloud cover that kept the temperature low but the visibility clear.

Good riding weather. The horses were fresh and the pace was steady.

Batu spent the day watching how information moved.

A middle screen rider spotted a herd of wild horses to the northwest and signaled back by mirror.

The signal reached Torghul in eleven minutes.

Torghul identified it as a false contact and signaled continue without breaking pace.

The column absorbed the information and kept moving.

Eleven minutes was too slow.

In a real engagement, eleven minutes was the difference between positioning and reacting.

But it was the first day and the men were learning the rhythm of it, so Batu filed the number and said nothing.

They made camp that evening on a low rise with clear sight lines in every direction.

Batu ate with Torghul and two of the middle screen commanders and asked each of them the same question.

What had they seen and not reported, and why.

Two of the three had answers.

Small things, terrain features, a cluster of old fire pits that suggested a seasonal camp, a stretch of churned ground that might have been a herd or might have been riders moving in column.

Neither man had reported it because neither had been certain it was significant.

"Report everything," Batu said. "Let the collection point decide what’s significant. Your job is observation, not analysis."

They understood. He moved on.

The problem arrived on the second day, midmorning.

One of the rear observation groups, the northwest quarter, sent a mirror signal to the main column.

Batu caught it before Torghul’s signal officer did because he’d been watching the rear arc.

Riders. North. Parallel movement.

He pulled out and counted the flashes.

Thirty to forty. Moving at column pace, not pursuit pace. Keeping distance.

"Ulus outriders," Torghul said, reading the same signal.

"The headman sent a rider east," Batu said.

He’d expected it as a possibility. He hadn’t expected it to materialize this cleanly on the second day.

"I want twenty riders pulled from the rear line. Send them on a wide arc north, two miles out, at a pace that will bring them even with the Ulus column in about an hour." 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"Keep weapons sheathed. Move easy. Let them see you."

Torghul looked at him.

"Show them we know they’re there."

"Show them we knew before they thought we knew. There’s a difference."

Torghul sent the riders.

Batu watched the rear arc signal traffic for the next ninety minutes from horseback, moving slowly with the main column.

The flanking group curved north.

The Ulus outriders held their parallel course for forty minutes, then the rear screen reported them slowing.

Then stopping.

Then pulling back north at an angle that took them away from the column’s path.

The column hadn’t broken stride.

The twenty riders rejoined the rear line two hours later.

Their commander, a compact young man named Chaidu, reported that the Ulus group had been watching from a ridge when his riders crested the rise and came into plain view.

The Ulus column had counted Chaidu’s riders, looked south toward the main column, done the visible arithmetic, and decided to find somewhere else to be.

Good. The message had traveled north without a word spoken.

A clan that had ridden out to watch had turned back without testing.

That report would reach the Ulus headman before nightfall.

It would tell him something about the force moving toward Tergesh territory that numbers alone wouldn’t have communicated.

But while Batu had been watching the Ulus situation, the middle screen had been running without full oversight.

And at the second hour of the Ulus contact, when Torghul’s attention and Batu’s attention were both pulled north, one of the middle screen pairs had dropped off the signal pattern.

The signal officer noticed it first.

He reported it to Torghul without urgency because a missed signal could mean a dozen ordinary things.

A horse pulling up lame. A rider stopping to study a terrain feature. A mirror angle lost in cloud shadow.

Batu heard the report and felt the specific quality of the silence that followed it.

One pair of riders. Two men.

Covering a quarter-mile section of the middle screen’s left flank.

Two hours of no contact.

That section of the left flank was the closest point of the screen to the direction the Ulus riders had been coming from.

"How long before we know if it’s a problem," Batu said.

"If they don’t signal in the next thirty minutes, I’ll send a rider to their last known position," the signal officer said.

"Send one now."

The rider went.

Twenty-five minutes later he came back with both missing scouts behind him.

They were unhurt.

Their horse had thrown a shoe on a rocky stretch and gone lame, and the rider had been focused on managing the animal and had missed two signal intervals before his partner realized and covered the gap manually.

A shoe. Two hours of blind left flank.

Batu looked at both men for a moment.

They were embarrassed in the way that competent soldiers were embarrassed by mechanical failures, not their fault exactly, but not nothing either.

"If those thirty Ulus riders had been two hundred," Batu said, "and if they’d been moving toward our flank instead of parallel to it, what would two hours of silence on that section have cost us."

Neither man answered. They didn’t need to.

"Carry a spare shoe," Batu said.

"Every scout, every movement, carry a spare and the tools to set it. If a horse goes lame, your partner signals and holds position while you fix it."

"Signal contact doesn’t break for any reason short of contact with the enemy."

He turned his horse back toward the column.

Behind him the two scouts exchanged a look that he didn’t need to see to know was there.

That was fine. Embarrassment was a good teacher.

He rode forward to where Torghul was waiting.

"The Ulus problem is handled for now," Batu said.

"They’ll report back to their headman that we were watching them before they were watching us. That’s worth something."

"And the screen."

"It broke once. In a place that could have been expensive."

He looked west toward the flat line of the horizon. The Tergesh camp was somewhere beyond it, a day’s ride out.

"It’ll break differently next time. Our job is to make sure it breaks somewhere cheaper each time until it stops breaking."

Torghul said nothing for a moment.

Then he said, "You expected it to break."

"I expected it to break. I didn’t know where."

Batu kept his eyes on the horizon.

"Now I know where. That’s what the test was for."

They made camp an hour before dark.

The fires went up in a pattern, visible from distance, positioned to suggest a force larger than five hundred.

Another small thing. Another piece of geometry.

The Tergesh headman was one day away.

He’d had two days to calculate the force moving toward him.

He’d seen the Ulus riders pull back north.

He was sitting in his camp right now building a picture from fragments, and the picture Batu had constructed for him was specifically designed to be unsettling without being obvious.

Tomorrow was the real test.

Whether calculated defiance held when the thing it hadn’t planned for arrived at its door.