Chapter 98: What the Markets Know
The camp had been running for a day by the time Batu was ready to enter the city.
The provisioning had gone through Torghul’s office and the darughachi’s station without requiring Batu’s direct involvement, which was the correct way for it to work. The supply officers knew their role.
The stay here would be longer than the previous stops, and the tumen had its position outside the western walls with the organized ease of a formation that had done this several times now.
Batu found Suuqai at the guard section’s eastern edge before the morning was far along.
"The courier," Batu said. He kept his voice low without performing the lowness of it. "He bought paper in Bukhara. Three months’ worth in a single purchase, paid above rate, loaded his own cart and moved east."
He looked at Suuqai.
"He came through this city ahead of us. If he stopped here the way he stopped in Bukhara, there’s a record of it somewhere."
Suuqai was already working through the search approach.
"Paper vendors first," Batu said. "Anyone handling administrative materials in bulk. Correspondence brokers, scribes-for-hire."
He paused.
"Go without any markings. Use the seal if you need identification, not before."
"How many."
"Your judgment."
Suuqai took three steppe riders and went through the northern gate without further exchange. He would find what was there or confirm there was nothing to find, and he would do it more efficiently without anyone explaining to him how.
The remaining Khar Kheshig detail fell in around Batu as he moved toward the western entrance. Four steppe riders and two norse, Gunnar among the latter, his felt pad inside his coat where it always lived now.
The six of them entered Samarkand, and the city received them the way the Silk Road’s central trading hub received everything that came through its gates, with indifference.
The reconstruction showed in Bukhara in its gaps and patched walls, the careful management of resources that hadn’t yet become abundance.
Samarkand had moved past that stage, or had been pushed through it faster.
The walls along the approach were restored to full height and the plasterwork was recent. The streets past the entrance were swept.
The market district began within three hundred meters, and it was dense and active.
The market had moved past recovery into ongoing function, running at this volume long enough that the volume was normal.
The smell was the first information.
Spices before anything else, the sharp sweetness of cinnamon and the dry heat of black pepper in quantities that indicated a full district of vendors, the full weight of the trade.
Under that, animal and leather and the faint mineral smell of metalwork.
And something from the eastern quarter that had no parallel in anything west of the Zerafshan.
Batu moved through the western market lanes at a walking pace that told the Khar Kheshig riders this was an observation, not a destination. They adjusted without instruction.
The Persian metalwork quarter ran along the northern edge of the first district.
The Khorasan school’s output was recognizable even without the prior-life archive to identify it. The inlay work on the bronze vessels was too precise and too regular to be anything else, patterns running across the surfaces of ewers and basins and lamp stands with the accumulated refinement of a tradition that had been developing for two centuries.
A craftsman behind a stall of astrolabes was adjusting a setting on one of them with a small tool, his attention on the instrument, the market ignored.
The astrolabe was brass, finely divided around its limb, and the craftsman’s casual treatment of it said this was an ordinary stock item, priced for the open market.
Batu looked at the instruments for a moment.
Islamic mathematical and astronomical learning in physical form, available for purchase in an open market. Celestial navigation concentrated in an object that could be carried on horseback.
In the other life he had read about its westward transmission into Europe. The translation movement, the slow diffusion of Islamic science through Spain and Sicily into Latin Christendom.
He was looking at one of the nodes of that transmission.
A Venetian merchant buying one of those astrolabes in this market and carrying it home would introduce its principles to a monastery or a court that would build on them for three hundred years.
He kept moving.
The Indian goods occupied a full lane near the market’s center.
Black pepper in sacks with the dark staining of long transport, the smell of it cutting through everything else within ten meters.
Cinnamon bark in bundles. Cardamom in small cloth bags sold by the measure.
Beside the spices, cotton textiles in bolts of white and undyed cloth, coarser than silk but in quantities that indicated mass production.
The kind of volume organized for export, at a scale that domestic use would never absorb.
A stone dealer at the lane’s end had a tray of cut gems that caught the morning light, deep red stones that were rubies from the Burmese mines, moving north through India and west through Afghanistan and arriving here still bloody in color under the flat Central Asian sky.
The northern goods were in the western quarter, closest to the entrance Batu had come through.
Furs in stacked bales, the top layers opened to show the quality.
Sable from the Rus river territories, the pelts long and dense with the winter growth, their value per unit higher than almost anything else in the district by mass.
Baltic amber on a low table, pale yellow pieces the size of a fist, the trapped inclusions visible when held to the light.
Walrus ivory from further north than most men in this market had ever traveled, the tusks curved and yellowish, sitting among goods from three other continents.
The distance they had traveled was ordinary.
That was the point.
It was ordinary.
Every object here had traveled a distance measured in months or years of travel, and it had arrived and been priced and sold in a transaction that took minutes.
In the eastern quarter the Chinese goods were concentrated, and the concentration was dense.
Silk in bolts under oilcloth, the weave patterns visible at the edges where the cloth had been unrolled for display.
The fine Jiangnan weave, the thread count visible to the eye as an evenness the Persian and Indian textiles didn’t match.
Ceramics in crated sections, the packing straw showing at the corners where it had been opened and inspected.
Bronze mirrors in stacks, the backs decorated in the style of the Song period, facing down for display.
And then further east, behind the cloth and the ceramics, in a space that had a different atmosphere from the surrounding stalls, with less traffic.
A Chinese merchant sat behind a low table with a selection of items that did not fit the commercial pattern of what surrounded him.
The objects on the table were small.
Metal cylinders, some of bamboo reinforced with cord binding, some of what appeared to be cast iron in a short thick form.
Beside them, a ceramic pot no larger than a man’s fist, sealed with wax and fitted with a short cord at the top.
A tube, longer, with a narrow aperture at one end and a touch-hole at the side.
Several cloth bags of a dark coarse material, tied tightly, set apart from the cylinders.
The merchant was compact and past fifty, dressed in a coat built for long travel. He watched Batu approach and read him in two seconds.
Batu stopped at the table.
He looked at the objects.
The cloth bags of dark material occupied his attention next, and then the ceramic pot with its sealed cord.
He was looking at the earliest forms of something that in three hundred years would reduce every city wall in Europe to rubble.
And in its current form it was sitting on a low table between the ceramics and the cloth, priced for sale to whoever could use it.
He looked at the merchant.
"Where does this come from," Batu said through Gunnar, who had learned enough Mongolian-inflected Chinese in the trading years to handle basic exchange.
The merchant looked at Batu for a moment, running his own observation.
"Jin workshops originally," Gunnar translated back. "He says the formula moves faster than the armies. He’s been selling to Mongol officers since before Zhongdu fell."
Batu looked at what was on it.
He already knew what it was.
What he was watching was the difference between what it was now and what it could become in the hands of someone who understood the distance between a bamboo cylinder and a stone-splitting siege piece.
And what it would take to close that difference.
And how long.
And what that meant for walls that had never seen anything like it arriving outside them.