Chapter 114: The Last Brother
Batu turned to the rider.
"Bring him to the entrance," he said.
Orda’s eyes came off the fire. He turned his cup in his hands. The rider went.
The others kept their silence. Tangqut had his hands flat on his knees. Toqa-Timur had not moved from his position by the ger’s inner wall. Siban was still at the edge where he had been for the past hour.
Berke came through alone.
He stopped when he had come far enough in to watch what he had walked into. He took in the brothers there, the food, Siban standing apart, and then his eyes found Batu first.
The brothers were there, the eldest to one side, the others ranged around the space, but he went to Batu directly. That told everyone what the walk from the outer perimeter to this ger had cost him and what he’d decided to do with it.
"You came alone," Batu said.
"Yes."
"Why."
Berke accepted the cup when it was offered by Toqa-Timur, and he held it before answering. He was considering the right version of the answer.
"Because everything I could have brought would have changed what this was," he said. "And I didn’t want it changed."
It landed where it needed to. What he’d understood on the road north was what any man understood when he ran an honest accounting of where he stood.
His territory was under Dorbei’s administration, the Karakorum record had been carrying Batu’s framing for months before he’d arrived, and whatever he might have in the southern country and brought with him would only have clarified the difference between the show of it and the reality beneath it.
Coming alone was the only move that didn’t announce that difference before he’d opened his mouth.
Batu looked at him. The streambed. The river and the frozen ground south of it, the fight on foot in the near-winter cold.
He had watched the field from the rear of his withdrawing force before he’d turned south, the long look of a commander extracting information he would carry for months from what the battle showed him, and he had carried it correctly.
"Sit down," Batu said.
He took the edge of the gathering, away from the central position, and placed himself there without being directed. He’d read where he belonged.
"The Karakorum record," Siban said. He’d said it because leaving it unspoken didn’t make it absent.
"I know what it says," Berke said evenly. "I know what I’d be going against if I tried to stand on a different perspective, and I know what that would look like from the outside."
He was still a moment. "There’s nothing useful I can do with the record from where I’m standing."
"No," Siban said.
He met his eyes. A moment held between them, clear.
Orda had been watching him since he sat down with the flat attention he brought to everything he needed to evaluate. He reached for his cup.
"The campaign goes west," he said. "We, as brothers, will ride. What are you asking for in it?"
"A command in the southern advance," he said. "I know the the steppe between the Caspian and the Volga delta. There’s no man in this gathering who knows those routes the way I do, and those routes are going to matter when the supply is extended past the Carpathian and the southern flank needs riders who don’t get lost in that country."
The offer was accurate and real. He knew the territory, the claim was sound, and someone arriving alone with a real offer was a different proposition from one who arrived with force and grievance.
Batu considered it. Tangqut’s sweep covered the Kipchak steppe to the west.
Someone with knowledge of the Caucasus routes could run the eastern sector of that movement, covering the ground between his right flank and the Caspian, which was the region that needed riders who understood the country below the lower Volga.
"The eastern flank of the advance," he said. "Below Tanggut’s line. You have the Caspian approaches and the Caucasus foothills. Your command operates inside the advance’s hierarchy."
Berke considered it against what he had prepared for on the road. It was less than commanding his own theater, which he had known it would be.
It was real authority on terrain he knew better than anyone in the gathering. He had made his move before he arrived.
"That is fine," he said.
Tangqut, who had said very little since the arrival, took in the exchange with interest.
The eastern Caspian region had always been the uncertain part of the southern sweep. Having it covered by a brother who had wintered in that country was an answer, not a problem. He gave a single nod.
"Then it’s done," he said, flat and final.
Whatever had happened between them months prior was present. The fight in the frozen dark, the shaft from the guard rider, the long ride south through his own dispersed force.
Neither man performed anything about it. The history was present. It didn’t need to be named because naming it would only make it smaller than it was.
"The kurultai starts tomorrow," Batu said. He kept his voice even. "The line presents fully constituted. You ride in that assembly as part of the Jochid faction."
"Yes," he said.
He drank from the cup.
The ger retained the atmosphere of a gathering that had done what it came to do, the Jochid line complete and together in a way it had not been complete and together since the western territories were first distributed.
Standing apart, Batu was thinking what it now contained and what it would look like from the outside when the full Jochid faction took its place at the assembly tomorrow.
The Karakorum record was in the registry, Orda’s tumen was on the northern side of the valley, the Jochid line had its commands, and the line included the man whose territory had been absorbed, sitting at the edge of the gathering and drinking from the same cup as the others.
In the morning, everything that had been built since the first night in the western steppe with three dead men on the floor and a name just known would present itself to the kurultai.
The assembly would do what it had to do. They were ready for whatever that was.