Torghul POV

The earthwork was a standard outer position, raised earth embankment, timber palisade on the crown, a single gate in the south face, a dry ditch cut in front of it.

Torghul observed it from three hundred meters in the time it took his leading jaghun to spread into encirclement formation. The garrison had come alive after the signal fire. Men were on the palisade walkway, archers among them, arrows already beginning at extreme range though nothing reached his riders at this distance.

He gave the arm signal, and the formation spread without further instruction.

The riders fanned around the earthwork’s full perimeter, and inside a few minutes the position was ringed at two hundred meters from every side. Thousands of riders divided around a position that three hundred men could not hold regardless of their will or their weapons.

He looked at the gate. Timber, dry, pitch at the joints. Then he turned to the nearest relay rider.

"Fire on the gate. Suppression on the palisade."

The fire arrows came in from the south, the riders advancing to eighty meters before releasing. A third of the first volley stuck, the pitch-tipped heads driving into the timber and burning small, tight orange points against dark wood.

The defenders on the south palisade shot back. An arrow from above came down through the shoulder of a rider in the advancing line, and he pulled his horse east, out of position, the shaft still punctured through his shoulder. Two more riders closed to fill the gap.

The second volley went into the gate at sixty meters, and the pitch caught properly, the lower half of the gate taking the heat from the first volley and the fire from the second and spreading. The suppression riders were working the palisade simultaneously, flat-trajectory shots at men standing upright with no cover.

A man on the walkway raised his head above the rail to aim and took a shaft through the face. He dropped straight down onto the walkway, and the man beside him did not look at him, loosed once, and then an arrow came through his chest from below and he folded backward off the rail into the compound interior.

A third man on the palisade took a shaft through the thigh and grabbed the rail with both hands. He went to one knee. Another arrow found his lower back and he let go of the rail and went over it, dropping into the dry ditch in front of the embankment. He did not come up.

By the time the walkway defense had been reduced to two men still working, the gate’s lower half was burning fully. Torghul had his assault wedge formed at forty meters south of the gate, eighty riders waiting. He looked at the burning gate one more time and gave the signal.

Nameless Rider POV

He was eight back from the front when the wedge moved, and the horses ahead of him were already going, so he went.

The smoke from the gate hit at thirty meters, thicker than it had looked from far away, and his horse shortened its stride for one step. He drove his heels in and it pushed through. At twenty meters the heat was across his face and the backs of his hands.

The breach in the gate was the lower section, the timber burned away from the left-side hinges and collapsed inward, a rough opening wide enough for a horse going straight through without being pulled sideways.

The first rider went through at a full canter. The burning frame on the left side caught his horse’s shoulder and the horse screamed and veered hard right, and the second rider’s horse collided with it just past the threshold and both animals went sideways into the compound dirt, both riders staying mounted.

He went third, taking the gap left of where they had gone, and he was inside.

The compound was smaller than it had looked from outside. The barrack block was fifteen meters to his left, low and timber, three men standing at its entrance with spears leveled. The grain store was to his right, doors open, a man running for its far corner. Near the north wall’s stable, a mounted Bulgar rider was turning his horse for the embankment slope. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

The three at the barrack block were directly ahead, and his horse was already committed to that direction. The leftmost man had his spear set, and the point went into his horse’s chest at the neck. The horse did not stop. It pushed spear through until the shaft hit the man holding it, and the man went over backward into the doorframe and the shaft broke.

His horse kept going with the spearhead buried in its chest, still moving on what it had. He cut down at the man on the right as the barrack block reached him, the saber opening the man’s shoulder and neck and he went into the doorframe.

The middle man had his spear raised and no space to set it, and the horse hit him at speed and drove him backward through the door and into the barrack block interior.

He rode past and pulled his horse around and went back in after the man on the floor. The doorway was wide enough, the horse ducking slightly for the lintel. The man was on the floor and still moving, and the horse’s near foreleg came down on him coming off, and after that he became a smudge on the ground.

Outside, the compound was filling. The mounted Bulgar rider had gotten his horse up the embankment’s inner slope, the animal scrabbling on the packed earth, and made it over the palisade rail. He dropped down the outer face and went north at a run.

No rider followed him past the palisade. The man who had gone for the grain store’s far corner was found there by two riders behind the breach, and the sabers did the work and left him in the corner.

The riders who had surrendered from the open-ground skirmish were still outside at the field under guard. A rider came back through the gate with the order, and the guards received it and applied it. Garrison soldiers who had fought and then surrendered. The execution took less time than the gate had taken to burn.

Torghul POV

Torghul entered the compound during the aftermath.

The grain store was burning from the roof, the fire arrows someone had put into the thatch doing what fire did to dry autumn thatch. The watchtower was catching along the palisade walkway from the gate fire spreading east. He moved through the compound and watched what was there.

His riders had taken what the loads could hold from the grain store before the roof caught, millet sacks, two barrels of salted fish, the best of the fodder bales. The rest was burning.

He looked at eleven men pressed against the east wall, the ones who had thrown down their weapons inside the compound. He looked at the nearest guard rider.

"Kill them," he said.

The guard rider did it. The others in the group received the same. It was done before Torghul had finished walking to the gate.

He came back through the breach, the timber still smoking at the edges, the heat off the grain store substantial at ten meters. The compound would burn itself out from three points. The earthwork’s south palisade had caught from the gate fire and was working east and west along the walkway.

The second outer position was visible to the north, another earthwork rise, another column of smoke already rising from it, its garrison having seen the signal and been ready since dawn.

He mounted and looked north.

"We move."