Chapter 113: Blood and Position
The three days ran at the pace of a camp that had decided to be patient.
Each morning Batu walked the southern face and watched the valley. The Guyuk faction was still. The Chagatai faction reorganized into a waiting posture that communicated nothing.
The Toluid banners on the northern margin were unmoved. The minor princes who had gone to the assembly ground on the first day were being very careful about what their camps looked like from the outside.
No movement toward the Jochid section, no visible realignment. It was the neutrality of men who had committed to something before the room showed them whether they’d committed correctly.
Siban moved through the spaces between the camps at hours when foot traffic was ordinary. He came back in the evenings with reports that were specific and brief.
Arghun was watching from where he was and he was watching carefully.
That was what Siban’s work had produced. A neutrality that Guyuk couldn’t count as a passive default vote. It was the most Siban could have done and Batu took it for what it was.
The Shatar board stayed on its felt square through the three days, the pieces in the middle position they’d reached on the first evening. Neither player returning to it. There was enough else to observe.
On the morning of the fourth day, Orda’s tumen came over the northeastern approach.
They were visible before they reached the valley floor. The dust column rose over the hills to the northeast in the profile of a formation at march pace.
The watching camps observed it the same way they had read the western tumen four days prior.
What came over the northeastern ridge was another ten thousand riders in White Horde colors. Orda’s force had the organized weight of a tumen that had been running campaigns on the northern steppe for years. It showed in how they marched without correction.
Batu was at the camp’s northern edge when the advance riders cleared the last rise.
Orda came with the van, which was where Orda had always been on a march. He found Batu without searching, the way a man found a position he had already mapped from a distance.
He came off his horse and looked at the Jochid camp’s size. He did not say anything for a moment.
"You arrived early," he said finally.
"We made a push for it."
Orda looked at the valley and at what the two camps now occupied together. The pressure was visible from where they were standing.
"Good," he said, and went to see to his horse.
Tangqut arrived before the afternoon had run out with his contingent. The Jochid faction expanded along the valley’s western face as the lines were staked and the horses cared for.
Toqa-Timur came an hour behind them on the same northern road.
By evening the Jochid camp was the largest external-territory camp at the assembly. Every prince with eyes could see what that meant before anyone said a word in formal session.
Batu had food brought to the central ger at the Jochid camp’s heart and sent word to his brothers.
They came without ceremony because none of them needed it.
Orda sat to Batu’s left as he always had, with the ease of a man who had made his decisions and was done making them.
Tangqut came and sat slightly apart, the way a man sat when he had not yet decided what it was required of him.
Toqa-Timur sat near the entrance with his own cup and the patience of someone who had come for a thing and intended to wait until it was named.
Siban was at the ger’s edge, present and unhurried.
They ate for a while without the formality the occasion could have demanded, which was correct. This was not a formal meeting.
This was brothers who shared blood and the complicated history that blood had, sitting in a ger in the Mongol heartland the night before the assembly that would determine the next decade of what that blood meant.
Orda broke the first silence of consequence.
"The command distribution. Let’s name it so it’s named."
Batu looked at Tangqut.
"The southern Kipchak sweep. You clear the steppe south before the main body crosses west. It runs ahead of the advance and it’s the largest single contingent in the opening movement."
He paused.
"It’s a position with real command. The whole southern approach depends on it running correctly."
Tangqut looked at the table for a moment.
He had been looking at the Jochid camp since he arrived. At the size of what the western tumen was. The formation discipline visible from any direction of the camp. The quality of a force that had been in campaign and had come through it intact and larger than it started.
He had seen what could not be clearly than words.
"That works," he said.
Toqa-Timur moved slightly from his position at the entrance.
Batu looked at him.
"The Crimean territories and the northern Caucasus mountains. When the campaign claims them and the administration is established, they run under your authority."
He kept his voice even.
"That’s what you came for and it’s what you’ll have."
"I want it in writing before the formal session," Toqa-Timur said.
He was a direct man. One that had been in enough rooms to know that spoken promises had a way of becoming complicated once the discussion ended.
"You’ll have it before morning," Batu said.
Toqa-Timur nodded back.
Orda looked across the table at Siban. Something passed between them, the recognition of two men who had been in contact for months.
"The advance intelligence role," Orda said. "That’s yours."
Siban received this without performance.
"Yes," he said.
The ger had the atmosphere of a gathering that had completed its essential work. The positions were given and the internal disagreements absorbed or resolved by evidence.
The faction would arrive at the formal session with nothing left to argue about from within itself.
Batu looked at his brothers and at Siban and understood what the room really was. The Jochid faction constituted in full and aligned.
That was when the runner arrived at the outer entrance.
He stopped at the perimeter and gave his report to the nearest Khar Kheshig rider, who brought it forward.
"A man at the camp’s outer edge," the rider said. "He’s asking to join."
"His name," Batu said.
"Berke," the rider said. "He came alone."
The ger went quiet, as if the arrival was both expected and feared the same.
Orda looked at the fire. Tangqut looked at his hands. Toqa-Timur looked at the entrance. Siban looked at Batu.
Batu sat with the news.