Batu POV

Dorbei’s rider came in before midday. The message was short, the total push had been repelled and the forest cavalry couldn’t repeat the effort.

The eastern perimeter would not break.

Batu read it and told Torghul to move.

The army had been staged on the open ground west of the ford for two days, the formations resting and the horses eating the spring grass. When the order went through the relay the movement was immediate.

Torghul’s tumen took the lead. The brothers’ contingents spread to the south and west wings, and Batu rode north with the column.

Bulgar came into view from the low ground two hours out.

The city sat on raised earth above the floodplain, with the Volga river along its eastern wall. The walls were packed dirt banks, taller than Suvar’s, with a timber palisade along the top built from thick logs set close together. Towers stood at the corners and along the walls, each one taller than the walkway between them.

The garrison was on the walkways already, visible at this distance as dark shadows moving along the palisade.

The army spread around south and west as each mingan found its position. The relay riders moved between the formations, the signals working through the system. The encirclement was not complete. The north was open.

Orda was still north, and until he sealed the Kama river routes and arrived from the same direction the perimeter would hold only three sides. Three sides was enough to begin.

Batu set it aside. There was a city in front of him. He watched Torghul take his position at the south wall and turned his horse to follow.

Torghul POV

The south wall was close enough from two hundred meters that Torghul could read the construction clearly. The earthwork bank was four or five meters high, packed hard. On top of it the timber palisade added another three meters of thick logs.

Below the earthwork base, cut in the open ground in front of it, was a ditch six meters wide and two meters deep, the bottom flat and the sides cut steep. Anyone approaching the wall on foot or horseback had to cross the ditch first.

On horseback the ditch was a significant problem.

Chaidu was at his side. He looked at the ditch without speaking for a moment.

"I don’t want the assault riders going at that ditch straight on," he said.

"They won’t," Torghul said. "That’s what Zhao is for."

Zhao and his corps were working nearby, and Torghul turned and watched them. Eleven men from the corps and a work party of thirty riders who had set their horses aside and were using picks and timber planks.

What they were building was a simple low wall of packed dirt, two arm-spans high, fifty meters east to west at the right direction against the south gate. When it was done the assault riders could shelter behind it from the walkway archers while the fire projectors worked.

Without it the riders waiting to assault were open to every archer on the south wall. With it they were covered until the moment they moved.

Zhao walked the berm line with a long pole in his hand, checking where the fill was low and calling men to pack it higher. He was watching the towers as he worked, placing the berm where the towers’ firing range couldn’t reach below it.

"How long?" Torghul called out to him.

Zhao looked at the section of berm still incomplete. "It won’t be done tonight," he said.

Torghul accepted that and turned back to the wall.

The fire projectors were positioned one hundred and fifty meters from the south gate, on the near side of the incomplete berm. Two of them, mounted on low wooden frames that could be turned left or right.

The reservoir on each one was a sealed ceramic cylinder connected to the nozzle by a leather tube, and each was loaded on a pack horse standing to the rear. Wei’s assistant, a man named Fang, crouched at the near projector making a small adjustment to the nozzle’s tilt. He had been at this for twenty minutes since the formation stopped into position.

He looked at the gate, looked at the nozzle, made another adjustment, and stood.

Torghul rode over. "Ready to test it?"

Fang said it was. He took the ignition torch from the rider holding it.

The first shot was a ranging shot, aimed at the timber section of the palisade east of the main gate. The compound caught at the tip of the nozzle and came out as a stream of burning material that crossed the open ground in a flat arc, fell short of the palisade by thirty meters, and hit the earthwork face.

A small fire burned in the packed dirt for a few seconds and went out, having found nothing to keep it going.

Fang adjusted the frame and loaded a second charge.

The second shot reached the palisade. The stream hit the lower section of the timber logs left of the gate and the compound spread across the wood and burned. A small fire, tight and orange against the pale timber. Smoke from it rose straight up in the still spring air.

Voices from inside the wall. Men calling to each other, short and urgent.

Movement on the walkway above the burn point. Within two minutes multiple buckets came over the palisade top and dropped onto the fire, and the fire went out.

A tower archer released at the projector position from the near corner tower. The arrow fell short of Fang’s position. The archer released again. Same result.

A rider next to Torghul watched the second short arrow hit the ground.

"We out-range them."

"They know it now," Torghul said.

One fire the garrison could put out quickly with a bucket chain. What they couldn’t do was put out multiple fires at different points on the wall at the same time, two projectors firing from two directions, the compound spreading faster than bucket water could chase it. That was what the assault plan relied on.

What the test shot confirmed was that the projectors reached the wall and nothing coming off the wall could touch them.

Torghul was still looking at the wall when the signal fire went up from the north tower.

The Bulgars lit it from the tower platform, a prepared stack of fuel, and it caught all at once and rose in a column of orange and black smoke that climbed straight in the windless air and spread wide at the top. A signal fire asking for help.

The smoke rose and rose, but nothing would answer it from the north. Whatever path a relief force might have come from, it was through territory the White Horde was covering.

The fire burned and the smoke spread above the city and the spring sky stayed clear on every side. After a while the signal fire went out. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Batu POV

He watched the signal fire from the rise east of the encirclement. He watched it go up and burn and receive no answer from any direction.

The siege was set on three sides. The south wall was under siege, the east and west encircled. The north was open, but the routes north of here were Orda’s, and a city couldn’t be supplied from the air.

The garrison inside had food and water for some number of weeks. When those ran out, the choice became surrender or the assault.

It wouldn’t run out today or tomorrow.

What wore a city down was not a single assault. It was the knowledge that the siege didn’t move, that fires against the wall restarted every time they were put out, that the archers on the walkways had to stay at their posts instead of sleeping, and that the supply inside was limited and would run out.

All of that was happening now.

Batu sat on Daichin and looked at the city.

When Orda arrived the north would close and the encirclement would be complete. The city wasn’t going anywhere before that happened, and Torghul’s berm would be done by them.