Chapter 228: Blood on the Voronezh

The White Horde had reached the battlefield.

At three hundred meters, Batu could make out the shape of events more than details. Orda’s riders were driving themselves into the Rus eastern flank, arrows flashing as dark flickers against the pale spring grass while the Rus formation lost cohesion under the pressure, its lines compressing inward as men tried to hold ground that no longer fit the numbers standing on it.

Four hundred meters west, Torghul’s dust column had become something more dangerous. The banners were visible now, no longer hidden inside the dust.

Near Batu’s position, the Rus consolidated force still held together.

The Khar Kheshig steppe riders loosed their next volley.

The druzhina cavalry absorbed it like professionals.

Horses collapsed in the leading rows with arrows buried deep in their chests and throats, blood spraying across saddles as riders spun sideways into the spring grass. The formation closed its gaps and the common infantry behind them reacted with less control, but the druzhina core remained intact, and the levies followed the cohesion holding them together.

The Rus answered with arrows of their own.

The rider on Batu’s right took a shaft through the chest. It entered below the collarbone, burst out through his back in a wet spray, and the man folded over his horse’s neck before sliding lifeless from the saddle.

Batu already had Daichin moving at a canter, his bow raised before the range became favorable.

He picked his first target.

A rider that wore a riveted iron helmet with a nose-guard. Better armor than the men around him. Slightly ahead of his group.

Some sort of field officer.

Position and equipment made the identification simple.

Batu released.

The arrow struck the man in the chest hard enough to tear through mail and drive him backward off the saddle with blood spilling down the front of his armor. The horse kept running, drifting east without him.

New target.

A standard-bearer. Blue and gold, one of the lesser principalities. His formation held together around that banner. Remove the reference point, weaken the structure.

Batu aimed for the chest and released.

The man toppled from his saddle with the arrow jutting from under his ribs, blood soaking the banner wrapped around his arm as the staff hit the grass and the formation rode over it.

Gunnar sounded the horn.

The double note of the spread signal cut through the noise of the charge as the Khar Kheshig steppe riders peeled east and west along both flanks of the Rus army, carrying out the maneuver they had drilled through dozens of time.

The center opened by design.

The norsemen stepped into it.

Leif shouted something in their language as they charged.

Einar stood at the front of the norse formation when they hit the first riders.

A druzhina horseman waited for him, mail coat swaying, sword ready, a professional making a reasonable decision. The biggest man in the formation would make the biggest difference if he fell.

The man had judged the question correctly.

He had misunderstood the answer.

Einar brought the axe up and into the downswing.

The blade smashed through the rider’s chest, burst links of mail apart, and split deep enough that blood and fragments of bone sprayed across Einar’s horse while the dead man’s sword strike went wide. The horse carried its dead rider through the position with the corpse’s hands still fixed to the reins until the body slid free and vanished into the grass.

A second Rus rider came from Einar’s right, toward the opening left by the first clash.

Bjorn entered on the way.

The attacker’s sword slashed across Bjorn’s left arm, scraping sparks from the armor and tearing through the padded cloth beneath hard enough to spill blood down to his wrist.

Bjorn answered on the return stroke.

His saber hacked across the man’s left thigh above the knee, carving deep into muscle until the leg nearly folded apart and blood poured down the horse’s flank. The rider slid sideways from the saddle and hit the ground hard enough to leave him tumbling broken through the grass while his horse continued without him.

The norsemen pushed into the Rus force.

A battle did not look clean. It never did.

One norseman took a sword cut across his right shoulder that opened the mail and left blood running down his side, but he kept fighting with the arm half trapped against his body.

Another caught the butt of a spear in the ribs when a Rus rider came too close for a proper thrust. The impact threw him sideways in the saddle and cracked something loudly enough for the men beside him to hear it over the fighting. He hit the ground, staggered back to his feet, and limped toward the battle on foot without stopping.

"More fuckers to kill!"

One norseman shouted in stripped-down Mongolian, hacking at a rider pushing too close.

"Ain’t that always the fucking way?"

The other man spat blood into the grass and shoved his spear forward again.

A breach opened between the assault as the charge forced the formations outward.

Batu saw it before Suuqai did.

A Rus rider had already seen it too.

Twenty meters out and accelerating, the man pushed past the battle toward the open ground behind the norsemen, his trot pointing straight at Batu.

Batu pulled Daichin left.

The horse responded immediately while Batu raised the bow, drew, and held until the rider reached ten meters.

Closest point. Highest certainty.

He released.

The arrow punched sideways through the attacker’s chest and burst out beneath his arm in a spray of blood, but the man’s hands stayed locked on the reins while his horse carried the corpse twenty meters beyond it.

"Close it!" Batu shouted.

"Right flank’s covered!"

Suuqai was already moving before the words finished leaving his mouth.

Behind the main Rus formation, the eastern flank was breaking apart.

One hundred meters east of Batu’s position, riders in the Rus eastern flank had stopped facing south and turned north in clusters of ten and twenty, driving their horses hard while the distance between them and the main formation widened with every heartbeat as the White Horde pushed deeper into the flank and forced the assault into plain view.

The collapse spread west through the Rus formation as the druzhina professionals in the center recognized what was happening to their right.

Some kept their group.

Those who did discovered the cost of discipline when the formation around them ceased to exist. Men were dragged from saddles, trampled beneath panicked horses, or cut down where they stood once the support around them vanished.

The ending followed the rule it always followed when forty thousand met fewer than five thousand.

Quickly.

And on the forty thousand’s terms.

The first large mass of Rus cavalry was already running north when Batu looked beyond the immediate battle.

Riders at full speed. Horses driven bloody and foaming.

The Rus army had dissolved into men making individual decision about survival. The Ryazan banner moved with them, racing north at the pace of a horse allowed its full head.

"They’ve broken."

A rider near Batu watched the collapse ripple east to west through what remained of the Rus consolidated force.