Angus finally knew who his captives were.

After enduring two days of sleepless pursuit by the Magyar cavalry, the Cuman mercenary suddenly told him that the woman was in more trouble than he had imagined.

Similar to the Cuman women of the steppe, the noble-born Pecheneg women were still accustomed to drilling holes in their skulls, and the higher their status, the earlier they tended to be drilled. The young woman had this neat round hole on the top of her head, only not as deep as the ancient Huns and Avars, closer to a ritual scar, and a serpentine pendant with a tail hanging from her chest, a sign of the old enemy of the Church.

"So, if we bring back such a woman, the Patriarch will simply burn her to death?"

The Greek interpreter fell silent, the fear and disgust in his eyes that could not be concealed.

At the other end of the plain, across the river, there were still the enemy in pursuit, and after abandoning the carts, the lightly armed cavalry had two mounts each, including the well-bred ponies captured from the herdsmen.

Angus faintly regretted at this time, if he hadn't taken this prisoner, maybe he had already completed his mission by this time, and returned to the capital from the military port of Isacia with the intelligence of reconnaissance along the way. But now he could only flee to the barren mountains of the west, praying that the local garrison had not been wiped out by the Manichaean rebels.

What was it for, was it to bring this pagan woman back to the racecourse of the capital to be charred alive?

What if the captives are released? Maybe those pursuers will suddenly be kind and let themselves go?

Dispelling all unrealistic illusions, Angus whispered to the Cumans: "We divide our troops. ”

Seeing that the other side was expressionless, Angus continued to explain: "We have tried to ambush them, but the vigilance of those riders is too high, and with those falcons here, our whereabouts cannot be hidden, so I plan to continue to show weakness, only by annihilating this striker, we can completely get rid of the tail behind." ”

The Magyar cavalry, which had bitten the Latins, refused to approach or flee, and seemed to be bent on dragging the brigade to arrive, which was very unfavorable to Angus's party.

Wearing magyar and pecheneg style pointed helmets, or Gentile pot helmets, and their weapons were horrific in their hands, ranging from extra-long Hungarian broadswords to short-handled Cuman knives, and after a few rounds of fighting, the Latins found that they were completely different from the convoy guards they had been in contact with, their bows and arrows were sharper, and their tactics were more flexible, and if the Latins began to try to make a detour, these knights would return to their horses and retreat, while constantly shooting arrows at any Latin knight who dared to pursue.

Their horses were light and fast horses bred in the Carpathian Basin, but most of Angus's soldiers rode heavy horses, with less than twenty Syrian light horses and steppe ponies of the kind usually used by the Greek army, most of which were not suitable for such hunting.

The stock of weapons is also decreasing, and after the last conflict, some knights can only start using the reed spears collected on the battlefield, and in addition, the attrition of the horseshoe is not negligible, and if they flee as they do now, most of the army will be reduced to infantry by the time they reach the Troy Gorge.

The Greek translator was actually a Wallachian shepherd in a sheepskin robe, who could only use a short bow and a javelin, and Angus decided that he should not be of much use in the rest of the battle, so he decided to let him go with the Cumans, but the fellow refused to go with the female captive.

"Please, my lord, if we didn't know how to fight cavalry in my hometown, we would have been shackled and swords around our necks, and we would have become nomadic slaves."

So Angus let him stay, and he repeatedly promised that he was a Christian who had sucked the bone marrow of a black bear and would never run away.

The whole thing was silent, and the girl wrapped her hair in silk cloth to decorate the hair of the hairnet, and carefully removed the full quiver from the saddle.

On the night before leaving, the Cumans climbed to the nearest peak and stood under the slightly glowing sky, always observing the movement on the other side of the river. Although baptized, the mercenary still possessed the instinct of a steppe herdsman to endure hunger, thirst and fatigue, and as a Cuman, he had a sense of superiority over all other steppe peoples, whether they were Magyars or Pechenegs, who suffered greatly in the pursuit of the Cumans, who were more accustomed to using captured slaves to open up forests and expand their territory, and had long forgotten the tent life in the depths of the steppe. The Magyars, who had settled in the west, tried to aid the brothers who remained on the other side of the Carpathians, but eventually pursued them to the steppe, but could not find a single Polok until they fell into an ambush by the steppe cavalry, and their bodies were pecked by crows. Such a lesson alarmed the other peoples, and gave the Cuman wolf every reason to be proud, even if it was in the service of the king of Constantinople.

Solomon had learned of the fugitive's whereabouts, and while secretly glad that they had not made it north to Bachi, he rewarded his men with Kutaisk's gold.

Although he was in the middle of the wilderness, he was still dressed in a purple-trimmed black robe, with the air of a monarch who gave orders in the golden palace, and after the sentinel left, sorrow climbed back to his eyebrows. His gold was running out of money, and spending his wife's dowry was itself a debt, and he had hoped to make up for it from the land of the Greeks, but now he was caught in an unstoppable pursuit.

"My Lord has mercy on ......" Greek prayer almost pleads for the infinite mystical power.

In the middle of the night, the scout brought news from the east.

"Are the Romans coming?" Solomon, who had just fallen asleep, wiped his cheek with water, digesting the information.

Kutaisk already learned of his daughter's capture, and it is said that Berg had split his golden bowl in two with a saber. He planned to return to the army to save people in person, and by the way, he asked his son-in-law Xingshi for his guilt, but it was the movements of the Romans who saved Solomon's life.

Since a big war may break out at any time, a beloved daughter may not be comparable to Solomon's Hungarian elite, after all, Kutaiskberg has more than one daughter.

Solomon hardly knew whether he should thank the Emperor Alexios, who was said to have just stabilized the situation in the east, and began to return to the west without even resting, simply to relieve himself.

Sure enough, God had mercy on him—Solomon sighed and prayed, and couldn't help but hold the cross on his chest and kiss it.

When the Roman Emperor was defeated, Kutaisk's daughter was nothing, and Solomon did not think that the horseback lords had any hope of breaking Constantinople, but he was more interested in recruiting a large army with Greek gold to fight back to Esztergom, and he had not seen the sunset reflected in the window of the church for a long time. Intelligence within the kingdom revealed that Ladislau, the son of his uncle Bella, was attacking the Croats, and that two Western popes, Clement III and Urban II, had claimed to shelter Croatia, meaning that he could invade in the name of the Church.

Before he could get the gold, he first had to provide his own army to his father-in-law of Pecheneg, and as for his wife, he could perhaps leave it to a select group of cavalrymen, and saving people was no longer the most urgent priority, but it might be better to stab the kidnapper who had brought him disgrace with a spear and break a broken bone.

No one can dishonor the heir of St. Stefan, no one can humiliate the king.