Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall

The tumen left Samarkand before first light.

Torghul had the column moving an hour before the sky began to change in the east, the men pulled from sleep by the watch change and the organized noise of a forced departure. Horses were brought from the lines before the animals were fully awake and the relay riders were already in their positions in the dark.

The pace was set higher than the column had been running on the southern route, and it was set from the first stride rather than being worked toward.

The city fell behind them in the dark and the agricultural land of the upper Zerafshan opened ahead, the road running northeast through fields that were still black shapes in the last hour before dawn.

The region carried its sound alongside the tumen, the river running at its spring volume, higher than it had been on the approach, fed from snowmelt further east in the mountains that were not yet visible but were present in the cold air coming off them and in the smell of the wind.

The sky found its gray. Then its pale orange at the horizon’s eastern edge.

The fields appeared under the sunrise, grain in the early stages, barley mostly, the irrigation channels that Ahmad had been watching from the road catching the new light in silver lines between the furrows.

Ahmad was three positions back from Batu’s left when the light came, upright on his horse, his posture holding against the discomfort through effort of will.

He was sixty-three years old and the march had been running him for weeks and the forced pace would cost him today. He would pay it without complaint because he had agreed to the terms.

His eyes, when Batu glanced back, were on the channels.

The mountains came into view at the second hour.

They came as a line first, darker than the sky above them, running north and south across the full eastern horizon from edge to edge.

Then the line developed depth and then height, the peaks distinguishing themselves from each other as the sun came up behind them and threw the western faces into shadow while the eastern slopes caught the early light. Snow on the upper sections, the white of it clean above the rock faces below.

The tumen moved toward them at the pace Torghul had set and the mountains grew ahead without hurrying.

Penk’s relay had been running at tighter intervals since before Samarkand.

The riders moved between the mingans at a cycle shortened by twenty minutes from the standard, which put them in constant motion rather than the periodic circuit the regular march had used.

The formation’s timing signals were precise all morning.

Penk passed Batu’s position on one of the relay exchanges without stopping, his eyes on the mingan ahead and his hand already forming the next signal, absorbed in the work. Each action flowed from the last without hesitation.

The Fergana Valley took the column in its western mouth by midday.

The mountains moved from the horizon to the flanks. The Tian Shan on the north side and the Pamir-Alay on the south, both ranges running parallel to the march route.

The valley floor between them was wide enough at its western entrance to carry the full tumen in its standard width.

The Syr Darya began running alongside from the east, coming down from the valley’s interior to meet them, cold and fast at this season, its banks cut steep where the spring flood had worked the ground.

It ran alongside the column for the rest of the afternoon, water over stone beneath the percussion of hooves on packed earth.

Torghul had the formation running without a midday halt.

Food and water moved through the column while it was moving, the supply riders threading between the mingans with efficiency.

Batu watched a supply rider find Chaidu’s leading force and complete the exchange without either formation breaking stride.

The handoff was clean. Both riders peeled away from the exchange point simultaneously.

Bayan came back from the forward screen in the late afternoon with his report and made it at a canter, matching Batu’s speed for the thirty seconds the report took.

Then he turned and went back to the forward position at the same pace.

His horse was a better animal than most of the screen horses and it showed in days like this one. It was the third extended hour at high pace and the animal was still carrying its head steady.

Bayan himself had the flat-eyed look of a man who had done this many times and would not be worn down by it faster than necessary.

The valley narrowed through the second day.

The mountains drew closer on both sides, the floor between them compressing as the route moved east into its interior.

Torghul made the adjustment through the relay without slowing.

The outer mingans pulled toward center, the column thickening through its depth as it thinned across its front.

Jaran was running his terrain role on the northern face of the upper approaches, working with the forward screen to map the route’s narrowing against the formation’s needs.

He had been reading unfamiliar mountain ground with the same attention he gave the river crossings and the delta channels, the thoroughness that had made him useful at every terrain challenge since the Tergesh incident.

The upper approaches arrived on the third day.

The floor rose, and the rising ground gave way to the passes themselves.

The terrain compressed suddenly, the mountains on both sides pressing in until the sky overhead was a narrow ribbon of pale blue above cliff faces and scree slopes and the road threading between them at the only width the ground allowed.

The tumen went from formation to file.

Ten thousand horses in single file or double file through a mountain pass made a sound that had no equivalent on open terrain.

The stone walls on both sides threw the percussion back in overlapping echoes, the hoof strikes multiplying against the rock until the sound became a continuous reverberation that moved ahead of the tumen and behind it simultaneously.

Voices carried strangely. A word spoken at normal volume at the pass’s midpoint could reach the walls and come back changed, the echo arriving with a slight difference in direction that made men turn to look for who had spoken.

The cold arrived with the altitude.

The horses’ breath rose in white columns that hung in the still air between the cliff faces before the wind from the summits dispersed them.

The men pulled their coats and the coats were not enough on the exposed sections where the wind found the path between the walls and came through it flat and sharp.

Suuqai had the Khar Kheshig running in the formation’s center, front and rear of Batu’s position, the steppe and norse riders interleaved in the column’s depth.

In the pass’s narrowest section Daichi was two lengths ahead and Bjorn was two lengths behind and the formation had adjusted to the terrain without requiring instruction, each rider finding their position in the narrows by instincts.

Bjorn’s left arm carried his pack on the incline sections without the binding it had needed back then.

He rode with both hands easy on the reins, the arm taking its full load.

He was not a small man on a mountain road and his horse was working harder than most for the altitude, but neither of them showed any inclination to slow.

Gunnar, a length ahead of him, had the felt pad put away for the first time in weeks, the mountain approaches requiring both hands for the ground, with no hand free for the mapping work.

Einar moved through the pass in his customary silence.

In the echo chamber of the cliff faces, the silence had its own volume, audible against everything the stone walls amplified back.

Leif had acquired a piece of dried fruit from somewhere in the Fergana markets and was working through it piece by piece during the climb.

The summit section was wind and cold and the exhaustion of horses that had been pushed for three days at higher than standard pace now working the steepest ground of the route.

They came through it because Torghul had managed the feed rotation correctly and the animals had the reserves for it.

The tumen came over the highest point in the late afternoon of the third day and the ground ahead began to descend.

The eastern descent was shorter and steeper than the western approach and the formation handled it at reduced pace, the footing requiring care that speed could not afford.

Then the inclination softened and the cliff faces fell away and the sky opened.

The tumen spread back into its width over the course of two hours of descent, each mingan finding its standard interval as the space became available, the formation unfolding from the mountains like something the mountains had been compressing and were now releasing.

The plateau arrived without ceremony.

The terrain simply became flat in every direction, the mountains behind and the long open ground ahead, the grass shorter and paler than the Zerafshan’s agricultural land, the kind of ground that ran to horizons without interruption.

The air was colder and cleaner than anything since the steppe.

The sky above was enormous in the way steppe sky was enormous.

The tumen spread to its full marching width for the first time in three days and the sound of it changed.

The percussion returned to its open-terrain character. The reverberation replaced itself with the open air carrying it outward in every direction and losing it in the distance.

Karakorum was ahead on this ground somewhere.

So was the meeting that had to happen before the tumen reached it.

The rider sent from the first pass had been running for two days. Whatever answer Orda sent back was coming from the east and would arrive before long, and the ground between the tumen and the assembly was where that answer would find him.

Batu looked at the plateau running ahead and kept moving.