Chapter 99: The Seed of It
Batu looked at the objects spread before him for a long moment without speaking.
"Walk me through them," Batu said.
Gunnar put it into Chinese. The merchant looked at Batu once more, and reached for the nearest bamboo tube.
"Fire arrow," Gunnar translated as he spoke. "The compound inside burns on contact with air once the seal is broken. You fit it to a standard arrow shaft and fire it from a bow. It lights on release."
He set it down and picked up the ceramic pot.
"Fire bomb. The mixture inside is denser. You light the cord and throw it or put it in a catapult. When it breaks, whatever it touches burns."
He set the pot down.
"Both of those most of your officers already know."
Then he picked up the cast iron cylinder. It was shorter than those, thicker-walled, the aperture at one end barely wider than a finger. He turned it so the touch-hole on the side was visible.
"This one is different," Gunnar said.
"You pack material into the back of the tube. Then you pack a ball or a handful of stones or iron pieces on top of it. You touch fire to the hole."
A pause while he said something further.
"He says it’s loud and not useful at long range. Men who haven’t heard it before don’t understand what happened until they look at what it did."
Batu looked at the device.
"Yet," he said.
Gunnar said the words. He looked at Batu differently.
"He wants to know what you mean by that," Gunnar said.
"The range limitation," Batu said. "What produces it."
He set the cylinder down carefully. He answered at some length.
"The mixture," Gunnar said, working through it. "The grade that goes into the cylinder burns fast but not completely in the right direction. Most of it drives the ball. The rest disperses."
He paused, listening.
"He says the craftsmen who make it are always working on the composition."
Another pause.
"He says the casing matters too. The lighter tubes let some of the force out at the sides. The cast ones hold it but run heavy so they don’t break, which makes them, he’s trying to find the word, difficult to move."
"Too heavy for a man on horseback," Batu said.
"Yes. That’s what he said."
He said something else, looking at Batu while he said it.
"He says you know this equipment," Gunnar said. "Most of the men he sells to ask how many it kills. You’re asking about the mechanics."
Batu picked up one of the cloth bags of dark coarse powder and felt its heft in his palm without untying it.
"The compound in these bags," he said. "Is it the same type as what goes in the cylinder."
Gunnar asked. He shook his head and answered.
Gunnar said. "The bags carry the incendiary material, good for fire arrows, good for setting things burning. The propellant grade that goes in the cylinder is mixed differently, he says higher in a specific ingredient, I don’t have the word in Mongolian, something that generates force instead of flame."
Batu set the bag down.
Higher saltpeter content. The ratio between it, charcoal, and sulfur was the variable. The incendiary mixtures ran low on it to produce slow sustained burn, the propellant mixtures ran high to produce fast explosive expansion of gas.
The craftsmen in the Jin workshops had been refining that ratio empirically for generations, getting closer to the optimal without a theoretical framework to tell them they were close.
They were developing by feel and by accident and by the slow accumulation of what worked.
He knew the endpoint.
They were working toward it from the beginning without knowing the destination existed.
"The men who make the fast compound," he said. "Are they in the eastern campaign structure or are there independent ones."
He answered. Gunnar listened carefully.
"Both," Gunnar said. "He says the eastern campaign tumens have their own fire weapon crews, under the army. That crew isn’t available separately."
A pause while Gunnar caught up.
"There are independent craftsmen. Former Jin military, some of them, who left the workshops when the campaign moved through. He knows three by name. They’re working on the eastern Silk Road routes, selling to whoever needs them."
Another pause.
"He says they’re expensive."
"Where are they now."
More exchange. Gunnar’s Chinese was running at its limit, approximating in places.
"One is in Kashgar. One is somewhere east of there, he’s not certain where. The third one he saw in this city four months ago and doesn’t know where he went."
Four months ago. Well ahead of the column. Batu noted it without expressing it.
"I want a supply commitment," he said. "Future delivery. To a point on the western steppe, my designation, within two years."
He looked at him directly.
"The propellant mixture. The cylinders. Whatever quantity you can source."
He received this through Gunnar and sat with it. A large future contract from a buyer outside his network, no letters of credit, no recognized merchant.
He said something. His tone was professionally flat.
"He says he needs something to hold the commitment against," Gunnar translated. "He says future delivery is a promise. A promise is only as good as the man who makes it, and he doesn’t know who you are beyond this table."
Batu reached into his coat and took out the bone piece with the wolf’s track carved into its face. He pressed it into the soft wax on the receipt strip he had prepared for other transactions and handed the strip across.
The merchant looked at the impression. He looked at Batu.
"He recognizes the Jochid mark," Gunnar said. "He knows it runs separately from Karakorum."
"Correct," Batu said.
He said something short.
"He says that either makes it worthless or worth more," Gunnar said. "He hasn’t decided which."
"It means the western territories," Batu said. "That’s what the seal covers."
He kept his voice steady.
"What comes through those territories on its way to Europe passes under that seal. Everything moving on the northern Silk Road’s western terminus will eventually pay into that account."
He paused.
"That’s the counterparty."
Gunnar delivered it. The merchant looked at the wolf’s track impression for a long moment.
He named a figure. Gunnar conveyed it.
It was high. The premium for an unusual contract with an unusual buyer, the kind of number that tested whether the interest was real.
Batu named a counter, lower and considered, the kind of number that established he understood the pricing.
They found a number between those two in three exchanges, his face showing nothing and Batu’s face showing nothing, two who had both done this before.
He pressed his own mark into fresh wax on a second strip and handed it across.
Batu pressed the wolf’s track beside it.
Both men took the version the other had marked.
That was the deal.
Batu turned from the table and moved back.
The eastern section’s noise closed around him again.
The silk merchants, the porcelain handlers, the amber and fur of the northern routes.
He walked without direction for a while, moving through the market’s flow, the Khar Kheshig settling in around him.
He thought about what he carried.
A record with the seal beside his own. A supply commitment that would deliver nothing for two years at minimum, contingent on him being able to source the materials and on the western territories being in the condition to receive and use them by the time the delivery came.
Both of those things were contingent on everything he was riding toward still going the way it needed to go.
The kurultai. The campaign authorization. The Toluid play. Orda’s position.
All of it had to produce the western khanate before that supply commitment became more than a receipt in his pack.
The powder formula and the iron tubes and those who knew how to refine both were in the world.
He knew what they became.
Nobody else in a three-thousand kilometer radius held what he held.
The man across the table from him an hour ago had no sense of it. The Mongol generals who had been using fire arrows for twenty years had never asked the next question.
The difference between what that bamboo device was now and what it would be when he was finished with it was a difference he could close with time and the right people and the specific understanding he carried from the life before this one.
He walked west through the market toward the city gate.
The walls of Europe were still years away.
He had started early.