Chapter 96: One Fire
The flat country between the two cities was easy marching ground, the road worn smooth by centuries of traffic, the Zerafshan’s irrigation channels running silver in the last of the light to the south.
The tumen had come off a long day at a steady pace and the camp was settling into the evening without friction. Fires going up in the right positions. Horse lines running clean. The men eating or sleeping already, the ones sleeping flat on their backs with the specific collapsed quality of men who had nothing left to prove to the day.
Batu moved through it and read what he needed to read and kept walking.
The Khar Kheshig section was at the camp’s southern edge, between the tumen proper and the supply train. The fire there was larger than a standard cook fire. Someone had found additional wood along the route, which was its own small skill, and it gave real heat, the kind that campaign fires rarely produced.
Eight or nine men around it. The rest on rotation or already down.
Bjorn was standing with a composite bow in his hands, and everything about the way he was standing was wrong.
He had the bow up, string drawn, his left arm extended. His left arm was the one that had taken the shaft in the reed beds. The wrapping had come off the previous week and the arm was fine again.
The problem was in the draw. He was pulling with his shoulder and chest, leaning back into it, forcing the motion. The bow’s frame was torquing visibly under the uneven load.
Chotan watched from across the fire. His face showed it plainly. He was a compact steppe rider who had been shooting composite bows since he could sit a horse, and what Bjorn was doing to the bow was not something he had words for in any language.
Gunnar stood beside Bjorn.
"Your back," he said, first in the northern tongue, then in Mongolian aimed at Chotan. "I told him to use his back."
"He’s using his arm," Chotan said.
"I know he’s using his arm. I told him not to."
Bjorn released at two-thirds draw. The arrow went away at a poor angle.
From the right side of the fire, Leif said something in the northern tongue without looking up from his food bowl.
Gunnar translated without being asked. "He says you shit better than you shoot."
"I’ll shit over him next time."
"That’s his point," Gunnar said.
Daichi, sitting cross-legged near Chotan, said something short in Mongolian. Two of the Mongol riders responded with sounds close enough to laughter that the distinction barely mattered.
Bjorn looked at them and then at Gunnar. "What did he say."
"He said the bow is in pain."
Bjorn looked at the bow. He looked at Chotan.
"Show me again."
Chotan took the bow back. He drew it in one fluid pull, thumb draw, string beside his ear, the rear shoulder flat and pulled, the whole thing taking the time it took to exhale, and released clean into the air.
He lowered the bow and turned his back to Bjorn. He pointed at his own back, at the blade. He pulled the blade back in slow demonstration, isolating the motion.
Bjorn watched. He nodded once with more confidence than the nod deserved.
Batu sat down at the fire’s edge.
The steppe rider nearest him, Daichi, gave a chin-lift and went back to watching Bjorn. Nobody stood. The fire kept burning.
Gunnar glanced over, noticed Batu, and held out a cup without ceremony. Batu took it. Mare’s milk, camp-temperature. Someone had been carrying a skin of it since before Bukhara.
Bjorn had the bow again. He set his feet. His grip found its place.
He began to draw, and his left arm came up, and his chest engaged, and the bow torqued.
"He’s pulling with his arm again," Batu said.
Chotan made a short sharp sound and pointed at Batu. The meaning was plain.
Gunnar said something brief. Bjorn turned and looked at Batu. He hadn’t loved the last twenty minutes and loved this particular addition less.
He looked at the bow. He looked at his own arm. He handed the bow back to Chotan with a gesture that communicated something between surrender and renewed interest and sat back down on his log.
"It’s the same movement," Bjorn said to Gunnar.
"It isn’t."
"It feels the same."
"It isn’t," Gunnar said again. "The bow isn’t made to be forced. You’re forcing it."
Bjorn said nothing for a moment.
Then he said, "My bow I force."
"Your bow’s fine to be forced. This one doesn’t."
Leif said something from his side of the fire.
Bjorn pointed at him without looking over. "Don’t."
Leif said it anyway.
Gunnar laughed first, which meant he’d understood it before he’d even finished hearing it, which meant the delay was intentional.
"He says you fought better with a shaft in your arm than you shoot with it healed."
Bjorn stared into the fire. "That’s because the shaft didn’t make me use a bow."
Daichi said something to Chotan. Chotan answered.
Daichi looked at Bjorn and held up two fingers.
"Two tries," Gunnar said. "He’s giving you two more tries before he declares the bow a casualty."
Bjorn looked at Daichi. Daichi’s face was serious in the way that required effort to maintain.
Bjorn took the bow back from Chotan and stood again. He looked at his own arm. He tried to find that position, pulling from behind the way Chotan had demonstrated.
The draw had changed. Still off. The torque was less. The string came back further.
Chotan said something short and flat.
"He says that’s better," Gunnar said.
"Still wrong," Bjorn said.
"Less wrong than before."
Bjorn released. The arrow went out again but on a different arc, flatter, with more of the bow’s force behind it.
He lowered the bow and looked at it and said nothing for a moment.
Then Gunnar made one of the four signal calls.
It came out as a short double note, the spread call, the one both halves had been drilling on the march. Unmistakable. Also completely out of place at a campfire in the Zerafshan plain with no threat in any direction and food in everyone’s hands.
Three of the steppe riders moved. Two of them caught themselves after a half-step and looked at each other.
Daichi completed two full strides before stopping and standing in the dark at the fire’s edge, blinking.
Leif pushed himself halfway off his log and then froze there, balanced on one arm, looking at Gunnar.
Daichi looked down at his own feet. He said one word in Mongolian. The feeling behind it needed no translation. Every man at the fire had been there.
Bjorn’s laughter came first, from somewhere below the chest.
Leif sat back down on his log and covered his face with one hand.
The two who had taken the half-step looked at each other and then at Daichi still at the fire’s edge and both of them were laughing too.
Gunnar looked very pleased with himself and said nothing.
Daichi came back to the fire with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not much.
He sat down and took his food bowl back and said something brief to Chotan in a flat tone and did not explain himself.
Batu stayed until the fire had burned down a level.
Nobody asked him anything. Nobody performed.
The evening ran its own course around him, Chotan eventually showing the technique again to Daichi because Daichi was asking something about the thumb position out of what appeared to be real curiosity.
Bjorn’s left hand moved on his knee, extending the fingers, testing the grip without looking like he was testing it. Whatever he found he kept to himself.
Batu stood and moved off through the camp without marking the departure.
The road ran ahead into the flat dark. Samarkand was three days out.
The stars were enormous above the valley.
He kept his eyes on the road ahead.