Chapter 93: The Tisza Problem
The steppe rider found him two streets north of the mosque, moving without direction through the outer market lanes, taking in the pace and texture of the city the way he took in terrain.
"His name is Ahmad ibn Farrukh," the rider said when he pulled up. "Persian. He’s in the northern residential quarter, working a channel restoration on the third lane east of the main road. The locals say he’s been there most of his three months. He comes every day."
"What kind of work."
"The channel feeds the northern cisterns. He’s relaying the base stones and regrading the slope. The locals say he does the measuring himself."
Batu turned north.
The residential quarter showed more of the reconstruction’s unevenness than the market district did.
Some streets were fully recovered, the houses rebuilt to two stories with plastered outer walls and functional drains. Others were still half-height, mud brick filling the gaps left by structures that had burned and never been replaced, the lower courses of old foundations visible in the lower walls where the original stone had been cannibalized and reused.
It had the aspect of a district building outward from its center with what it could afford each season, which was the honest account of every settlement trying to recover from the Mongolian expansion.
The lane was audible before it came into view, the scrape of stone on stone and the flat knock of mallets.
It ran between two building rows, open to the sky, perhaps two meters wide.
Six men were in it. Three were below the channel’s rim with tools, resetting the base stones along a graded line. Two were mixing lime and grit at the near end.
The sixth was down in it at the mid-section, on one knee in the mud, pressing the flat of his hand against a newly set stone and reading what his palm told him about it.
He was old, past sixty by a careful estimate, perhaps past seventy, with the leanness that came from continuous labor and no surplus of anything else.
His outer robe was tucked up and his forearms were gray with dust, his beard more white than gray. He looked up at the sound of the Khar Kheshig coming down the lane.
He took a moment to judge what kind of visitors those were.
Then he straightened to standing, which took him two seconds and cost him something in the left knee, and he looked at Batu and waited.
The garrison rider made the introduction. Batu watched Ahmad receive it.
Fifteen years of Mongol-line officials had flattened whatever the title and the lineage once produced in him. He received the introduction and moved past it.
"I’m in the middle of something," Ahmad said through the interpretation. "What do you want."
"Your services," Batu said. "For a future campaign."
Ahmad looked down the lane and then at Batu again.
"I’m sixty-three years old," he said. "I’ve got six weeks left on this project. I’ve spent a few seasons at Urgench and three months here and I’ve only just found a bed I don’t hate. Whatever you’re about to tell me, the answer is probably no."
"Probably," Batu said. "Tell me what changes it."
"Eh. Try something interesting," Ahmad said.
Batu told him about the Tisza.
He described it without praise or ceremony, in terms of measurements and behaviors.
A river running south through a plain so flat that the spring flood spread across a distance that would take two days to cross on horseback. The soil under the flood was black and deep and had been accumulating sediment since before anyone in this part of the world had started keeping records.
The plain it covered was larger than the Amu Darya delta and lower and the flooding was more predictable in its timing because it came from snowmelt in mountains to the north and east on a cycle that barely varied season to season.
Ahmad had gone silent.
"The problem," Batu continued, "is that nobody has ever done anything with it."
The people who live on it farm the edges. They move when the flood comes. They come back after. The main plain is grazed in summer by whoever runs their horses across it.
What it could be if someone mapped the flood cycle, put the waterways in the right places, and dug the drains to the right gradients. That question has never been asked.
Ahmad said, "How wide does the flood spread at maximum."
"Forty kilometers in the broad sections. Sometimes more."
He was already inside the problem. He needed the noise to stop.
"The Amu Darya floods differently," he said after a moment. "The bank is higher. The current finds its own direction."
He looked past Batu at the wall behind him without seeing it.
"A plain that flat, the water doesn’t know where to go. You’d have to tell it."
"That’s a decade of survey work."
"It’s a decade of this if you start when I get there. It runs longer if not."
Ahmad tilted his head slightly.
"A problem interesting enough," Ahmad said. "But only if you aren’t planning to raze it down. Like Urgench and Bukhara."
He placed the fact on the table between them so they were both looking at the same thing.
"The plain I’m describing isn’t a city," Batu said. "People also live there."
"People live everywhere."
Ahmad received that for what it was.
He had known what Batu was the moment the Khar Kheshig came down the lane. The conversation had clarified what he’d be doing if he went, and that was a separate matter.
"The pay," Batu said, and named a figure.
Ahmad blinked once. It was a number that reflected Batu’s genuine interest in the answer to the Tisza question and nothing else.
"That’s for the first year," Batu said. "What I’m describing runs longer than that."
Ahmad looked at him once more with the flat attention that had been running underneath the whole conversation.
"The plain," he said. "The Tisza. You know it well for a man who hasn’t been there."
"I’ve read accounts," Batu said.
Ahmad nodded slowly, deciding to leave that where it was.
He looked at the site. He looked at the six men there, and specifically at the one on the near end who had been watching the conversation from his position at the lime mix with the patient attention of a man who already understood he was about to become the senior figure on the project.
"Tariq," Ahmad said to the man.
The man put down his tools and came over.
Ahmad spoke to him in Persian for two minutes, pointing at three sections of the channel in turn, and the man nodded at each point without interrupting.
When Ahmad was done, Tariq went back to the lime mix and picked his tools back up.
"Two days," Ahmad said to Batu. "I need to finish what I’m in the middle of and put my things together. I’ll come to your camp before you leave."
"Good."
Ahmad nodded slowly, deciding to leave that where it was.
He lowered himself back down into it and returned to the stone he had been reading with his palm when they arrived, and the conversation was done.
Batu turned back toward the gate. The Khar Kheshig fell in around him.
The Persian official with his document case was somewhere in this city waiting for an audience before evening, and that was still the remaining business.