Chapter 104: The Elder Brother
The plateau ran flat in every direction and the tumen moved across it the way a marching force spread across open steppe. The grass was short and pale, the spring not yet far enough advanced to have given it color.
Orda’s rider came from the northeast at midmorning. He was a lean man on a good horse, traveling without insignia, and he found the forward screen and was brought through to Batu’s position without drama.
He named the location in four words, a river bend, two hours northeast, a line of three low hillocks running near the water, the second hillock. He handed over a felt strip with a mark on it that Batu recognized from the prior correspondence.
Then the rider turned and went back the way he’d come.
Batu told Torghul to continue the march and took six of the Khar Kheshig northeast.
The river bent where the rider had described, and the three low hillocks ran near it the way they’d been described. The second one had a ger on its eastern face and perhaps a dozen riders spread in a loose perimeter around the low ground.
The ger was plain, a working structure for a man who had been on campaign most of his adult life and had decided that size meant distance not covered. One banner, the White Horde’s mark, planted at the entrance.
The perimeter riders observed the Khar Kheshig banner and let them through without challenge. Someone had described them well enough in advance that steppe riders with norsemen among them came as no surprise.
A man came out of the ger as Batu dismounted.
He was perhaps over thirty, lean through the face. His riding coat was well-made and well-used, the shoulders and forearms showing the discoloration of years in the saddle.
He had Batu’s jaw, or Batu had his, the genes of Jochi’s line visible in both their faces despite their differences. He looked at Batu with familiarity and nostalgia.
Whatever he found he kept off his face.
"You came fast," Orda said. "The courier I sent to find your tumen said you were behind schedule when he left Samarkand."
"We were," Batu said.
Orda looked at the Khar Kheshig riders behind Batu, at Bjorn and Gunnar specifically, with the same systematic gaze that the Bukhara merchants had applied to them in the markets.
Then he stepped aside from the entrance.
"Come in, then. I have food that’s better than what you’ve been eating through the narrows."
The food confirmed it. It had been provisioned from the White Horde’s eastern camps and the dried lamb was better quality than anything the tumen’s supply train had carried since Bukhara.
They ate for a few minutes without performing the hospitality ritual extensively, two men who had dispensed with formality years ago and saw no reason to reintroduce it now.
"The reports I’ve been receiving," Orda said eventually, setting down his food, "have been thorough on the military and administrative side. The tribute structure, the capital site construction, the census completion, the officer framework."
He looked at Batu across the low table.
"They’ve been less thorough on the political side, which I assume is intentional."
"The political side has been moving," Batu said.
"Everything moves before a kurultai." Orda picked up his cup. "What I’ve been sitting with is the Guyuk question, and I think your plans failed to account for one variable."
Batu said nothing. He waited.
"Chaga," Orda said. "Son of Toquchar, from the Ogedeid line. He’s been running between his father’s territory and Karakorum for the past year, carrying messages, managing relationships."
He set the cup down.
"He committed this month. Privately, directly to Guyuk, in a meeting on the northern route. I know because one of his riders stopped at my outer post for water and spoke more freely than he should have to a man he didn’t recognize as mine."
That warranted Batu to think for a moment.
Chaga’s vote was in the secondary tier of the assembly’s faction counting, but secondary tier votes were how the margin was built, and Guyuk’s count had been close enough in Batu’s thoughts that Chaga’s position had mattered to it.
"How confident are you in that," Batu said.
"The rider described the meeting’s location and the approximate date. I had someone verify the location from separate sources."
Orda met his gaze with the flat steadiness of a man who did not offer intelligence he hadn’t confirmed.
"He’s committed. He won’t announce it publicly until the first session, but he’s committed."
Batu absorbed this and kept his face where it was. The problem it created in the faction count was manageable but real.
"What’s your opinion on Mongke’s timing," Batu said.
Orda raised an eyebrow very slightly.
"He’s been on the road from his appanage," Orda said. "He’ll be at Karakorum before your tumen arrives if you’re maintaining standard march pace."
He paused.
"A few days after you, if you’ve been pushing."
"We’ve been pushing."
Orda looked at him for a moment.
"You’ve more ambitious plans that I know of." He reached for his cup again.
"The Jochid line needs to arrive at that gathering with a clear position, with no division and no ambiguity."
"That’s what I’ve been telling myself through all of this," Orda said. "The question I’ve been sitting with on the ride here is whether what you’re bringing to the assembly is what the reports describe or whether the reports have been flattering it."
He set the cup down and looked at Batu directly.
"So tell me what you’re actually bringing."
The space was silent.
Outside, the wind moved across the plateau grass in the low continuous sound that wind on open steppe always made, the sound every man in this meeting had grown up inside, home ground, the heartland, the place the Mongol world had come from and would return to.
"What I’m bringing," Batu said, "is a western territory with a permanent administrative apparatus, a three-tumen army of veterans under modernization, a capital site under construction, a tributary network running through the western steppes, and a supply route from Samarkand to the Volga terminus under contract."
He kept his voice even.
"What I’m also bringing is the only clear path to a western campaign that doesn’t stall immediately, because I’m the only man on the road capable to crush the European armies and their fortresses."
Orda was silent. He absorbed it fully before producing any response.
"And the faction," he said.
"That’s the conversation we’re having later," Batu said. "Now I want to know what you know about the princes that your eastern position gives you that mine doesn’t."
Orda looked at him for a long moment.
Then he refilled both cups and leaned back with the ease of a man who had come to a meeting expecting to make a decision and had found the decision easier than the ride there had suggested.
"Then we’ll need more food," he said. "Get comfortable."