The Mongols named Kozelsk (located about 140 miles SW of Moscow) "the City of Woe" because of the difficulty they had conquering it relative to the other Russian cities. The Kozelski even managed to defeat a Mongol vanguard army, something that had been rarely done up until that time. In the end, of course, the city was overwhelmed and its inhabitants subjected to genocide...
But this being Alternate History, what if...
I don't know what made the Kozelski so special in the real world, but what if we bump them up a further notch? I'll imagine a character named Mal (meaning "small), a humble streltsi (mounted archer). Diminutive but strong enough to wield an effective bow, Mal had accompanied his boyar among a mercenary group that experienced engagements in Hungary, Anatolia, and the Caucasus.
Much of what made the Mongols so effective was the development of new cavalry tactics by Genghis Khan; I'm going to assume Mal is his western equal, although Mal is more of an inventive genius than a military one. Although a peasant, Mal is bright enough to have taught himself to read by carefully observing the correlation between the utterances of priests and written symbols. He also gained an understanding of the astrology and alchemy practiced by the Greek and Muslim intelligensia...
If you can make cyanide, you can hollow out an arrowhead so that the liquid is delivered into the wound. Cynaide is actually easy enough to make, but as with gunpowder, there's no reason to just randomly toss the ingredients together (you also have to worry about accidentally killing yourself by breathing in the vapors). In the real world, I think the first synthetic cyanide doses were developed in the 18th century.
A sponge (or the medieval equivalent, maybe felt) is soaked in the toxic liquid and placed in a notch behind the arrowhead; when the arrow strikes a target, the cyanide slowly seeps into the body. Mal's deadly arrows can deliver a whopping two grams of the poison, but human victims usually black out within 20-30 seconds. For a horse the effects take 1-2 minutes.
But this being Alternate History, what if...
I don't know what made the Kozelski so special in the real world, but what if we bump them up a further notch? I'll imagine a character named Mal (meaning "small), a humble streltsi (mounted archer). Diminutive but strong enough to wield an effective bow, Mal had accompanied his boyar among a mercenary group that experienced engagements in Hungary, Anatolia, and the Caucasus.
Much of what made the Mongols so effective was the development of new cavalry tactics by Genghis Khan; I'm going to assume Mal is his western equal, although Mal is more of an inventive genius than a military one. Although a peasant, Mal is bright enough to have taught himself to read by carefully observing the correlation between the utterances of priests and written symbols. He also gained an understanding of the astrology and alchemy practiced by the Greek and Muslim intelligensia...
If you can make cyanide, you can hollow out an arrowhead so that the liquid is delivered into the wound. Cynaide is actually easy enough to make, but as with gunpowder, there's no reason to just randomly toss the ingredients together (you also have to worry about accidentally killing yourself by breathing in the vapors). In the real world, I think the first synthetic cyanide doses were developed in the 18th century.
A sponge (or the medieval equivalent, maybe felt) is soaked in the toxic liquid and placed in a notch behind the arrowhead; when the arrow strikes a target, the cyanide slowly seeps into the body. Mal's deadly arrows can deliver a whopping two grams of the poison, but human victims usually black out within 20-30 seconds. For a horse the effects take 1-2 minutes.
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