Chapter 115: The Dawn March
The tumen stirred before the light had fully separated from the dark, and the atmosphere of the stirring was different from a march.
The standards went up first, each one placed in the order the brothers’ commands required, and the force took form around them with the pressure the moment required. Each mingan announced the same thing.
This force had come here to be seen.
Batu stood at the Jochid camp’s center and watched what had gathered around him.
Orda’s White Horde riders formed on the eastern edge of the combined camp, their colors distinct from the western tumen’s wolf’s track standard. Tangqut’s contingent were into the southern section with the riders he had brought from the Kipchak steppes.
Toqa-Timur’s men on the western face. At the outer edge, at the margin agreed on the night before, Berke’s contingent carried the minimum of standards appropriate to a mingan-scale command, present and contained, its placement in the line unambiguous.
The Khar Kheshig took their positions without instruction. Suuqai at the forward edge, the steppe riders spread to cover the flanks, the norsemen in their forward-right configuration.
Gunnar had the horn at his hip. Einar was visible three lengths ahead of the norsemen center, a full head above the riders around him, his face already toward the valley and the gathering past the river bend.
The light came up gray and then pale orange on the horizon’s eastern edge as Torghul brought the tumen into its procession order. The relay had no function here.
The men organized themselves by standing and blood and the formation of what a formal procession demanded, and when Torghul gave the order the column took its stance without correction.
Then it moved.
The noise that the Jochid faction produced in the first moments of movement was the accumulated sound of a force that had crossed the Caspian shore and the Zerafshan valley and the mountain passes and the plateau and arrived here still organized and intact.
The earth felt it before the air did, the way large formations always announced themselves before they were visible. Batu rode near the van and let himself look back.
The full Jochid line stretched behind him across the valley floor in its combined breadth. The western tumen, the White Horde’s ten thousand, the brothers’ contingents, all of it advancing together in a body that covered more of the breadth behind him than he could see end to end.
The colors above it caught the morning’s first real light at their peaks while the riders below were still in shadow, orange and gold against the pale sky, the wolf’s track standard at the center and the White Horde’s mark to the left and the other colors spread across the full width of the force.
He turned back toward the assembly ground.
Each body across the Orkhon was in motion.
From the northeast, the Chagataid advance moved in its own formation, its pennant clear at the distance where individual riders resolved into mass.
From the approach near the palace complex’s main road, the Ogedeid faction advanced in organized file, his personal pennant at the heart of the movement, the minor princes who had aligned with him in the days before the arrival spread around him.
Batu observed the distance and the density of the riders around it and noted both and set them aside. Guyuk had weeks at the gathering to give his faction a physical ease in the space, but the western body advancing from its section was clear across the Orkhon, and any commander on the field could read the influence of it.
From the northern margin, the Toluid faction arrived from its own approach. Mongke’s pennant was clear at distance, its marking distinct in the early light.
Their advance was organized and unhurried, arrayed correctly since Mongke’s arrival.
Subutai’s staff moved separately from all the blocks, coming from its own position near the outer margin. A smaller group than any tumen, unhurried, moving without needing discussion in the dark.
His mark was plain beside the dynastic marks surrounding it, and he rode in the procession’s interior space without aligning clearly with any of the bodies converging on the same field. Batu watched him across the distance.
Four days earlier, when Siban brought word of Subutai’s movement, the reasoning had been the same as it was now. A commander who had spent his working life designing campaigns was going to the only place this campaign could be authorized, and he was going to the authorization.
Ogedei’s establishment came from the palace complex as the presiding authority. It took the defining point of the gathering, around which all else oriented itself, and the shamanic caste was within it, the chief shaman’s staff carried ahead of the main body.
The noise built as the factions converged. Each body’s approach produced its own deep tone, and all of them merged into a sustained sound that had no single source.
The dust came up from the advancing bodies and merged above the plain in a rising haze that caught that light at a high direction and made the whole gathering glow against the sky.
Batu had heard his own tumen’s sound often enough that it had become ordinary. What he was inside had no distinction in the western steppe’s campaigns or the narrows or the lower river.
The empire, each Chinggisid faction on the same field under the same sky, all of it in motion.
He let the scale run through him without adding anything to it and watched the ground ahead.
The assembly ground came into view as the last bend cleared.
It was open steppe, wider than any single section, bounded on one side by the Orkhon’s course and open in all other directions to the clear air above.
The ceremonial space was marked by the stakes and ropes that the Great Khan’s entourage had set the day before, a defined area at the plain’s middle, large enough for the opening invocation and clear from every position the factions camps would occupy around it.
Each faction took the place tradition and standing required. The spatial arrangement that formed as each force arrived was the hierarchy made visible to the eye.
That placement matched the standing of the senior western prince, and it was here to stay. Any commander watching it understood the same way.
Through the afternoon, the camps went up and the ceremony plain’s outer edge filled around it. By the time the glow had left the steppe to the west, the whole Orkhon was in its designated place.
The fires rose at the ceremony ground’s center as the sky deepened, three fires set in the spots the opening invocation required, their flames clear from all directions around the plain.
The Great Khan’s chief shaman stood at the great fire, and the Eternal Blue Sky had gone from pale to the clear dark blue of a summer evening on the open steppe.
Everything that had been moving toward this moment since the summons went out was in this field now, under this sky.
The ceremony was beginning.