Chapter 107: The Widow’s Camp
Batu and Suuqai came off the road from the passes while the tumen was still day behind them, and the Orkhon valley opened ahead in the full morning light with Karakorum inside it.
He had expected something larger. Samarkand’s reconstructed walls rose from two centuries of accumulated Islamic civilization, every stone placed and replaced by tradition.
Karakorum was walled and the palace complex sat at its center with the administrative permanence of a place that ran an empire, but the city itself was modest, smaller than Urgench, smaller than Bukhara’s rebuilt perimeter, considerably smaller than Samarkand.
Here the power did not match the scale. It never had, anywhere the Mongol line had run. Standing at the valley’s edge with the city and its outer formations in view, the difference between what this place looked like and what it controlled was visible.
The tumen camps spread around the walls in the way kurultai gatherings always spread, each major line in its own section. The horse lines running out from the gers in long arcs, banners marking the faction centers, cook fires already running in the mid-morning.
The Ogedeid section was the most established, visible from this distance by its density and its placement close to the palace complex’s main road.
Suuqai was already watching it. He said nothing. He didn’t need to.
They rode toward the camp’s outer margin at the direction that would bring them through the commercial and servant sections before reaching any factional territory, and Batu watched the camp as they moved and built his picture of the ground.
Siban was at a designated point between the supply lines and the outer merchant section, sitting his horse with patience. He had a plain riding coat and no insignia and he looked like any of a dozen other men on this route who had arrived early enough to be part of the camp’s furniture.
He recognized Batu before Batu had closed the distance, and he came forward.
Batu stopped in front of him and looked at him for a moment.
He remembered it all. Siban had come to the narrows with a force built to depose him and had submitted when the ground made submission the only move that made sense.
He had served for a year in a staff role, named his position plainly in the last days before he left the Jochid camp, in terms that required no elaboration.
He had gone ahead of the tumen, watched the city for weeks, and arranged a meeting that required weeks of groundwork with the most capable political figure in the Mongol world. He was here by his own choices, one at a time.
"You look like you’ve been here long enough to have some thoughts," Batu said.
Siban almost smiled. "I have thoughts about everything at this point."
"Good," Batu said, and meant it in a way that Siban understood and that didn’t need elaboration. Then he said, "Tell me what she’s like."
Siban thought about this for a moment, and the thinking was genuine rather than performed.
"She’s been running the Toluid appanage for three years and she’s been doing it well enough that Ogedei stopped trying to absorb it through remarriage and started trying to absorb it through pressure instead. So she’s been managing that too."
He paused.
"She has no patience for approach work. She knew what I was coming to arrange before I finished the first conversation, and she agreed to the meeting on her own terms."
He paused again.
"I want you to understand that clearly. She chose this."
"Where."
Siban gave the location, a ger in the provision quarter’s northern edge, plain enough to be seen as a senior household servant’s quarters from the main Toluid section, positioned so that the approach from the outer route didn’t cross any factional ground.
He named the guard count and their positions. He said the guards were not in Toluid livery, which was intentional, and that they were better than they looked.
"How long do we have before the tumen’s dust is visible."
"Sixteen hours, maybe less," Siban said. "She knows the window."
They rode together through the outer section at a pace that matched the ordinary traffic of men going somewhere they had a reason to go.
The ger was where Siban had described, set into the provision quarter’s northern margin with the cooking-tent smell of the surrounding area providing its own cover.
The guards were at the positions Siban had named, dressed as camp retainers, and one of them had eyes trained in environments considerably more serious than a provision camp.
Suuqai watched them and said one word to Batu. "Go."
Then he took his position at the entrance’s eastern side, his horse ground-tied, and Batu went in.
The ger’s interior was plain. A low table, two cups, a lamp burning at mid-level.
A woman was already seated on the far side of the table and she looked up when Batu came through the entrance, her eyes finding him immediately.
She was older than he’d pictured from the reports, somewhere past forty.
The years on her face came from constant attention paid to things that mattered, the expression of someone who had worked that kind of work for a long time.
She wore no jewelry and nothing that marked her line. Her coat was good quality and plain.
She had the hands of a woman who worked, which in the Mongol tradition wasn’t remarkable, but there was something in how she held them that said the work had been the kind that kept you awake at night.
She didn’t rise.
"Sit down," she said, cleanly, without ceremony. The formal greeting was apparently not how she intended to use the available time.
Batu sat. The cup in front of him had been filled.
Her eyes stopped on him for a moment, working through something, arriving at a conclusion.
"I know what you’re here for," she said. "And I imagine you know what I need from it. So we can spend an hour on pleasantries and arrive at the same place, or we can start with the part that matters."
She picked up her cup.
"I don’t have much patience for pleasantries anymore. Tolui’s death cured me of them."
Batu picked up his own cup.
"Then let’s start," he said.
She nodded once, and set the cup down, and that attention focused on him with full force, the attention of a woman who had been waiting for this conversation for three years and was finally going to have it.
"Guyuk becomes Great Khan," she said, "and my sons spend the rest of their lives dealing with the consequences of that."
"I’ve spent three years making sure that doesn’t happen, and I’ve run out of ways to do it without someone who has enough votes to make the assembly go differently."
She kept her eyes on him.
"You have those votes, or you’re close enough that it comes to the same thing. And you need something from the Toluid line that you can’t have on your own."
She paused.
"So here we are. Tell me what you actually need and I’ll tell you what I actually need, and we’ll see if there’s a conversation worth having."