Nameless White Horde Rider POV

The contingent was five hundred riders working the main road north of the river, and by the fourth day the men were loose about it. They’d done this enough to know what a militia formation looked like from half a kilometer and what it meant.

The ground was flat and wet, the spring thaw still working out of the soil, the grass coming up pale through the mud. The smell of smoke from the warehouse they’d burned two hours back was still in the air when the road bent north and the militia appeared from behind a low rise.

Three hundred foot soldiers, maybe more, spread across the road and into the fields on both sides. They’d formed a block with spears pointed south.

On each flank, sixty or so riders sat their horses and watched the steppe riders coming up from the direction of the river. Someone in that group had tried to organize them.

The foot soldiers were roughly even across the front and the riders were positioned to cover both flanks. It was what a militia did when it didn’t have a better option.

The contingent spread. The riders peeled east and west until the White Horde riders extended well past both ends of the militia’s formation.

The mounted Bulgars on the flanks watched this happen and understood the inevitable. Some of the foot soldiers understood it too.

The exchange opened at one hundred twenty meters. The militia bows weren’t built for that range and their spears were considerably shorter than the distance could cover.

They tried to advance. The White Horde riders backed up at a walk, keeping the distance open, and fired continuously into the advancing mass.

Foot soldiers went down every few seconds, men dropping from the front of the formation as the arrows came in flat and fast from an army they couldn’t reach.

A man in the center of the militia block took a shaft through the upper chest and sat down in the mud, looking aimlessly to the sky. The men beside him closed the gap and kept marching forward.

The Bulgar mounted riders on the eastern flank charged.

Forty of them at a full canter, trying to close the distance before the flank of the White Horde could get around behind them. They made it to sixty meters.

A skilled Bulgar rider near the center of the charging group picked his shot at thirty meters and put an arrow through a steppe man chest. The shaft went in left of center and punched through.

The man folded forward and his horse carried him fifty meters before he fell off.

Another steppe rider at the flank of the formation had a Bulgar rider came in from his left at full speed and the collision of the two horses drove both animals sideways into each other.

The steppe rider went off the near side. The Bulgar rider rode over him and kept going for three strides before an arrow from behind caught him in the back. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

The encirclement closed after that. The Bulgar riders still inside it had nowhere to go and no time to find it, and the exchange at that range was not an exchange at all.

When it was done the enemy cavalry was down.

The foot soldiers saw the mounted flank gone. They broke north and east, scattering into the fields, dropping spears, running hard.

The White Horde riders let the northern runners go. The ones who went east were shot down one by one.

"How many got north?" a rider next to him said.

He watched the fleeing men for another moment.

"Maybe forty."

"They’ve got nowhere useful to go."

Someone behind them asked about their fellow arban companions.

He turned slightly in the saddle, listening, but no one answered immediately.

Then the same rider said, "We’ll count them at the town."

The town was two kilometers back along the road. Timber buildings around a market square, a covered dock by the river, a grain warehouse set back from the water with wide doors.

The fighting-age men had marched south with the militia. The contingent went in and neutralized them as they were doing for days.

He found two horses in a stable at the square and tied both of them on a string behind his own.

Another rider from his arban passed him carrying a bolt of gray cloth from inside one of the houses.

"Good cloth," he said.

The rider adjusted the cloth under one arm.

"It is. I’m keeping it."

A man from the next arban over was standing in the square holding a boot with a foot still in it and saying something about it.

He got a short, flat laugh from the riders nearest him. The laugh didn’t last long.

They took what they’d found and the contingent commander called them out when the grain warehouse had its fire going properly and wasn’t going to stop on its own.

Orda POV

The Kama river was high with snowmelt and brown with it.

From the elevated ground where Orda’s command camp sat above the eastern bank he could see the river wide and fast, carrying chunks of rotten ice, bark and debris from the upper reaches.

The far bank was maybe four hundred meters across. In summer that crossing was a shallow ford in three places. Not now.

Reports had been coming in for two days. He read them in the order they arrived and set each one aside.

The southernmost contingent had cleared two river crossings and destroyed a militia force of close to four hundred men.

The eastern force had burned seven settlements and taken what it could carry from the grain stores.

The western one had hit a route where someone had stacked wagons and carts as barriers across the road, which had delayed that contingent for two hours before they burned the barriers and the men who’d been standing behind them.

The numbers were what he’d expected.

The Bulgars had put their professional garrison men inside their cities. Between the cities was farmers with spears, and some mounted riders trying to get south to Bulgar before his force caught them.

His riders were faster than farmers and their bows were longer than spears.

A relay came through from the courier route he’d kept open south to Batu’s force.

The Bulgar siege was formed on three sides. The forest cavalry operation east of the city was finished.

Orda read it and set it with the others. He’d already read most of this two nights back from the signal fire that had gone up from Bulgar’s north tower.

The column of smoke had risen in the still spring air and spread at its top and received no answer from the north because he’d made sure there was nothing north of Bulgar to answer it.

The city had called for help and found nothing. The signal fire had burned itself out.

He looked at the survey felt on the camp table.

Most of the settlement marks were scratched through. One remained.

Džuketau, near the main road and the western tributary route, the largest market town in the northern territories outside the major cities.

The town wasn’t either walled or had a large garrison.

A waypoint on the road between the eastern steppe and the forest trade that had been there for longer than the Jochid clan had been thinking about this region.

He had been in this territory once before this campaign, a scouting ride in a prior season, and he remembered the town as busy even in early spring, traders moving through it in both directions.

That was what it had been.

What it was now was the place every surviving local official, every militia commander who’d slipped the White Horde, every headman with a horse had ridden to when the riders started appearing alongside the Kama river.

The region would collapse when the town was razed.

The supply stores in Džuketau were also real.

A market town existed on what the surrounding territory brought to it, and the surrounding territory hadn’t had time to move anything south. The warehouses there would be full.

He gave the relay orders out through his relay riders.

All separated contingents converge on Džuketau by dawn of the next two days for a combined assault. Then the whole force moves south together to join the Bulgar siege.

He watched the Kama river carrying its ice debris south while the riders went out.

What the northern territory looked like now, stripped of its settlements between the major cities, and what it would look like in a decade when someone rebuilt it under a different rulership, those were not the same picture.

The Kama river would carry trade again when enough time had passed. They always did.

He was thinking about how long that took, and what the administration would need to support it, because that was the planning that came after the campaign, and the planning that came after was his work as much as this was.

He told his staff to move the command camp south ten kilometers before dark.

Džuketau was a day and a half north.