Chapter 109: The Quda
"A marriage alliance," Batu said. "Between the Jochid line and the Toluid house."
The silence that followed was brief. She let it settle before she answered, the way a careful person let something settle before deciding what to do with it.
"That’s not what I came here to discuss."
"No."
She looked at him steadily. The lamp between them threw its light across the low table and left the ger’s corners dark. In that light her face had the perspective of someone who had been reading political situations for decades and was reading this one now, fast and without sentiment.
"The previous deal already gives you what you need from this meeting," she said. "So why the marriage on top of it?"
"Because that deal only lasts as long as our mutual interests last," Batu said. "Which may be a long time and may not be. What I’m asking for lasts longer than mutual interests."
"How much longer."
"A generation."
She set the cup down slowly. Her eyes went to the lamp for a moment and then came back to him.
"You’re not talking about a ceremony to mark an alliance." She said it as an observation, not a conclusion she needed him to confirm. "You’re talking about something political."
"Yes."
"Then tell me what that is for," she said. "Because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that when a man asks for a marriage in addition to everything else he’s already been given, it’s not because he wants the woman. It’s because he wants something the woman can give him that nothing else can. So name it."
Batu looked at her directly.
"The Jochi debate."
She was still for a moment, as if the words had landed in a place that her eyes acknowledged before she suppressed it.
"Say it plainly."
"Every prince knows it, even if most don’t dare to say it out loud. My father’s legitimacy has been in question since before he died and nothing I do will change that, because the question doesn’t live in what I do. It lives in what my blood is."
Batu looked at her firmly, "What changes is the generation after me. A child who carries Toluid blood doesn’t have the question asked about him. Genghis’s line through Tolui is unimpeachable to anyone under the Great SKy, and it stays unimpeachable regardless of what anyone says about Jochi or his sons."
She received this without reaction for a moment. He had expected her to find the admission noteworthy. A vulnerability named plainly was a vulnerability she could use at her discretion.
But what moved across her face was not a scheme. She had spent three years in the most dangerous political position in the Mongol world and she understood what it cost to name weakness plainly rather than hide it inside something that looked like strength.
"And who," she said, "is the intended husband."
"I am."
That stopped her in a way the rest of the conversation hadn’t. She looked at him with attention, as if she had to revise a picture she had already finished painting, finding that one thing was in the wrong position and that moving it changed the meaning of the whole.
She had been thinking of this as a marriage brokered through the Jochid line in the general sense. A nephew, a younger prince, a political connection made through someone close to Batu.
A man sitting across from her and naming himself as the party on the Jochid side was something categorically different. It meant she was being asked to give a woman of her household directly to the most consequential political figure in the Mongol world’s western half.
Any children born of that marriage would be Batu’s children and Toluid-blood children simultaneously. Which meant they were the heirs to the western territories and the undeniable grandchildren of Genghis through Tolui’s line at the same time.
"You’ve thought about this for a long time," she said.
"Yes."
She was quiet, and this time the quiet had a different texture to it. She was letting herself follow the full implication forward.
"The child who inherits the western khanate would be Jochid by line and Toluid by blood," she said.
"Yes."
"Which means any challenge to that child’s legitimacy is simultaneously a challenge to Tolui’s blood in the line. Any prince who wants to attack the western khanate from the east has to argue against a claim that runs through the blood they’re carrying."
She looked at him.
"You’re turning this vulnerability into something that works for you."
"Eventually," Batu said. "The protection lives in the generation after this one."
She picked up her cup and turned it in her hands without drinking from it, the way she had through much of the conversation. Thinking with her hands the way some people thought with their feet or their voices.
Then she set it down with a finality that said she had reached the end of what she needed to consider.
"Tolui had four daughters who are unmarried and of age," she said. "Two are mine. Two are from his other wives, but they are of his house and they’re under my authority."
She looked at him evenly and her voice carried no performance of generosity in it.
"They’re not tokens and I won’t present them as such. You’ll meet them when the first session is concluded and the situation is clear enough that a decision of this kind can be made with no issues."
She was stating facts, not offering gifts, "If one of them is acceptable to you, we proceed. If none of them suit, we find another way to accomplish what needs to be accomplished."
She paused.
"But I won’t arrange a meeting until I know the Kurultai results are what we expect them to be. I’m not introducing my household to a man whose political position might look different in a week than it does today. That’s my condition."
"Agreed," Batu said.
She nodded once. Neither party performed anything about what had just been concluded.
The ger had the atmosphere that enclosed spaces had after a long negotiation. The air slightly different than when the conversation had started, the feeling of words that had been waiting to be said for a long time having finally been said.
Batu looked at the lamp for a moment.
Outside, the camp ran its daily tasks, the distant sounds of horses and men who had no idea what had been agreed in a plain ger in the provision camp’s northern margin.
The tumen would be close now, the dust rising over the eastern approach where Torghul was driving the formation forward at the pace Batu had set before leaving.
He looked at Sorghaghtani.
"Where is Mongke," he said.