Chapter 110: The Empty Room
"One day east," she said. "He’s been there a few days. I sent him out before Guyuk’s minor princes had time to establish themselves fully in the camp."
The reason was clear without needing to be laid out. A faction that entered the gathering before the political ground was stable gave the Ogedeid line weeks to reach every arriving man first.
Every man who arrived early got visited, got drawn into conversations that ran longer than they should have and established impressions before anyone had declared a position.
Mongke had been a day’s ride east, which meant none of that had reached him.
"When do you want him here," Batu said.
"After you tell me what you want him to do when he arrives." She set her cup down. "Go ahead."
He told her.
The counter didn’t require complexity. Guyuk would call the first session within a day of Batu’s tumen arriving at the outer margin. That was what the Samarkand documents had named.
The mechanism that made an early summons the weapon. Senior representatives already present, the first vote as the baseline requiring three-quarters to reverse. All of it depended on the opposing factions sitting down. They didn’t have to do that.
"The Jochid faction doesn’t take their places when the announcement is made," Batu said. "Neither does yours. Both factions are present and visible. They don’t sit down."
She received that.
"Ogedei presides," he continued. "He looks at the Kurultai and he sees what’s there and what isn’t. An assembly without the Jochid faction and the Toluid faction isn’t something he can consider legitimate. He knows it."
"He also knows what a vote made that way would cause," she said. "And he’s not invested in that result."
"No."
She looked at him. "So Guyuk gets a room that doesn’t fill."
"Yes. And every prince watching from his own camp watches the size of what Guyuk couldn’t move."
"Without anyone saying a word in formal session," she said.
She turned her cup on the table and kept her eyes on it for a moment. The lamp had burned lower in the past hour, its circle of light tighter on the table’s surface. She was thinking.
"The uncommitted princes," she said. "Some of them will feel the pressure from both directions. A call goes out and they’re standing in the camp with Guyuk on one side and nothing visible on the other. For a man in that position the safest move is to walk toward whoever made the call."
"Their absence is passive," Batu said. "They weren’t in the tent. Guyuk can move against active opposition. He can’t move against a man who stayed in his own camp while a session was announced."
"That distinction matters, and not every one of them will make it on their own."
"So Siban makes it for them."
"Before the call goes out, yes."
She looked at him and then past him, briefly, running something through that she didn’t need to say aloud.
"Mongke comes in tomorrow morning," she said.
"If Guyuk calls the session before Mongke’s camp is properly established, the Toluid faction hasn’t had time to constitute itself for debate."
"Yes."
"And the Jochid faction."
"The tumen arrives at the outer margin," Batu said. "We’re there and we’re noticeable. We don’t present formally and we don’t move toward the session space."
She sat with that.
The silence ran a few seconds. She was checking it against what she knew about the camp and the men in it and how they would each move when the pressure arrived.
"It works," she said. "Provided Siban has done what you’re counting on him to have done in the weeks he’s been here."
"He knows every man who hasn’t committed yet," Batu said.
She stood. He stood with her.
Both parties had said what needed to be said. She didn’t extend conversations past their end for form’s sake, which had been clear since the first minutes in this room, and he had no need for it either.
"After the first session," she said. "We meet again."
"We do," he said.
She walked to the entrance and held the panel aside. He went through.
Outside, the provision quarter’s fires had burned to their lower hour and the surrounding camp sounds had dropped with them.
Suuqai was at the eastern edge where Batu had left him, on foot, observing the surrounding camp the way he always does any space he was responsible for. His eyes found Batu immediately.
Siban was a few steps south, his horse’s lead in one hand. He came forward when Batu reached him.
"Arghun first," Batu said.
"His pasture dispute gives me the entry point," Siban said. "The man he’s been in contention with in the Ogedeid administrative office has been working the northern provisioning post all week. I can reach Arghun through that."
"Tonight."
Siban nodded once and went south through the servant section, his horse moving with him in a way that kept him off every factional ground.
He moved with directness, having been mapping every path that could be of use through this camp for weeks and was now running them one at a time.
Batu walked to his horse.
They rode west through the outer merchant camps and out past Karakorum’s walls, and then the city was behind them and the plateau took them.
The sky had gone to the long pale color of a steppe evening, the sun past the horizon, the light still carrying flat across the grass in the way it carried this far east before full dark.
The Orkhon valley fell behind.
The tumen’s night camp was somewhere ahead on this ground, ten thousand men under the same sky, and tomorrow they would come over the outer margin in full march order and the whole camp would see what the Borte-Qol channel had described as a weakened force struggling through winter.
Tomorrow Guyuk would call the session.
The grass ran ahead in the last of the light and the steppe had what it had and said nothing about what came next.
Batu kept moving.