Chapter 111: Batu Arrives
The tumen had been in march order since before the valley was visible.
Torghul had set the intervals before dawn, Penk’s signal riders moving between the mingans while the force was still pushing through the dark road east of the Orkhon.
By the time the valley opened ahead and the city’s wall-line appeared on the far side of the river plain, the army was running the way it had run through the mountain passes and the Fergana road, clean and without correction.
The civilian tail had begun separating from the column two hours out. Merchants, provisioners, and the followers that any extended march collected over months on the road peeled away from the rear in the drift of people who understood where they were permitted.
They took their place at the valley’s eastern edge, well clear of the factional encampments, and made their own there.
Batu watched the valley floor from his post near the head of the march as the column came down the slope.
The slope was long enough that the full tumen was visible on it at once. The leading riders were clearing the lower terrain while the rear screen was still on the crest above, ten thousand horses and everything that supported them strung across the incline in the ordered formation the signal system kept without being managed.
From the kurultai below, the army would have been visible for a long time before it arrived, and everyone along those outer lines would have been counting it from a distance, watching it before it came to rest.
The encampments had organized themselves in the weeks the march had been east of the passes. He studied their layout. Before, the darkness before dawn had given him a first impression, and the morning gave a different one.
The cook fires and the animal tethers and the banners showed where each faction had placed itself and how long ago. Guyuk’s territory was densest and closest to the palace complex’s main approach, with the look of a camp that had been occupying that ground for weeks.
The minor princes were at varying distances from it, some close, some at the outer periphery, and their proximity to its center carried information about where their thinking had them positioned in the weeks before the Jochid force arrived.
The Toluid quarter was farther out on the northern margin, organized and contained, showing the discipline of a camp told to wait and having waited correctly.
Penk’s signal went to the right flank as the leading riders came off the descent. The arm movement from the nearest rider reached the fifth mingan’s lead jaghun commander, brief, and the fifth mingan adjusted its interval without correction.
The rear units kept their order through the transition without compression. The rear screen maintained its route at the march’s back.
None of it needed correction because they had run these formations through the mountain passes and the Fergana country and the months before both, and what they had learned through the winter training cycles and the evaluation rounds had become entirely their own to carry.
What those watching saw was the army commanding itself, and that was its own kind of signal to any commander taking it in.
Men had come to the fronts of their factional territory when the tumen came over the outer approach. Batu watched them as he watched terrain, building a picture from what each man’s posture said about how he was receiving what he was looking at.
A cluster of riders at the nearest minor prince’s ground stopped their horses and counted the units as they descended.
Two of the Ogedeid outer guard riders stood at the front of their territory’s perimeter side by side, watching the leading riders without speaking to each other.
Near the Toluid quarter’s front a single figure had come to the entrance of a ger and stood facing the army fully, motionless.
The Khar Kheshig moved around Batu’s post at the march’s center.
The steppe riders kept their spacing and ran their perimeter routes with the efficiency of riders who had done this in city approaches from Bukhara to Samarkand.
The norsemen were forward right, and they were producing something in those watching that Batu could gauge from how the men at the outer margins stood when they looked at that part of the guard. Those observers’ counting paused on it.
These were faces from well beyond anything the eastern steppe’s political world had reached, weapons built for different countries and different fighting.
Einar at the norse side front stood a full head above every rider around him, his coat and the axe at his hip and the flat directness with which he looked at the encampment ahead combining into something none of those observers had a name for.
The full guard announced itself as what it was, a hundred men whose only affiliation ran to the man at its center, and every faction taking in the arrival understood that too.
Torghul brought the force to its place in the valley floor’s western quarter. The tethers ran from the gers in long curves. The supply train organized at the rear.
The Jochid banner went up, the wolf’s track mark on the standard’s face catching the midmorning light, and activity began with the low purposeful sound of a unit settling in after a long march and finding nothing unusual in the task.
Ahmad found his place near the supply train without guidance and was checking the terrain underfoot before anyone had directed him toward it.
By midday everything was set. The Khar Kheshig had established their perimeter around the command tent with Suuqai at the eastern face.
Batu stood and looked southward across the valley at the kurultai and the city behind it.
The wolf’s track documents were in the palace registry. Siban had submitted them before the Jochid force arrived in the valley, the western territories’ tribute tallies and documentation and the seal already in the formal record before the army raised its standard.
The physical army had come after the paper. The paper was already in the clerks’ files for the session to draw from.
The afternoon was beginning when Siban came through the outer part of the Jochid position on foot, moving without announcing himself.
He came from the inner camp’s direction and reached Batu and stopped.
"Guyuk moved an hour ago," he said. "His faction and the Chagatai faction. They went to the assembly ground together. They’re in place."
Flat and specific.
"Arghun," Batu said.
"I’m working on it," he said. "I’ll have something before evening."
He turned and went the way he came.