Chapter 116: Under the Sky
The plain was flat in every direction, its extent enormous, dark as when the last trace of summer light had gone entirely from the western horizon and the stars had come fully into their own. From where Batu stood, what he saw felt as mass, as the compressed density of tens of thousands of bodies and animals around a center point, firelight catching in fragments at the nearest faces and dying before it reached the rows behind them.
The ground under his boots was summer steppe grass, the blades dry and pressed flat by the footfall of all that had moved across this plain since dawn. Wood smoke rose from above and carried with it the sweetness of dried dung fuel burning slow and low, and underneath that the animal heat of horses standing at its outer margin by the tens of thousands, their breath rising in pale columns in the cooler air that came off the steppe after full dark.
He had been to gatherings like this before. In this body, he had stood at the center of two of them and understood with precision what each one did to those around him.
The shaman began.
The word arrived to Batu a half-beat after it left the shaman’s mouth. The distance between that fire and where the Jochid princes stood was wide enough that the sound traveled across it in a perceptible span, the open air adding a fraction of time between the speaking and the receiving.
The words went out in the Mongolian ceremonial dialect, older in its form than the spoken tongue of the camp. They reached the full circumference of what stood there at different moments, each section receiving them in the sequence the distance required, the invocation moving outward until the dark took them.
The shaman’s attendants went to the vessels. The libation for the south went first, the airag poured out onto the ground in a long slow motion, and it sharpened in the warm air and mixed with the fire smoke.
The mass lived through it.
Above, the crackling went across all of it with a clarity that would not have been possible inside a normal camp’s noise.
The shaman’s invocation rose toward its close. The ancestral names came in their order.
The princes were named in their line, each addressed in their collective role, the body gathered there consecrated for the work ahead.
Then the shaman held his arms at his sides and waited.
Tens of thousands of voices in the same instant, the collective acknowledgment of a full kurultai rising from its full circumference simultaneously, arriving from all sides at the same moment, the sound doubling back on itself from all points. Standing inside it, what reached Batu surrounded him from all directions, sourceless, the medium itself changed by what was moving through it.
The faith it required of him remained where it had always been, unreachable as it had always been. That had been the case since the first night in this body and had stayed the case.
What he could watch was what the invocation did in those around him.
The scale pressed through the air around him and the earth under his feet, the vibration of tens of thousands of voices moving through the steppe grass and upward.
Ogedei came forward from the Great Khan’s position when the acknowledgment had flew out across the steppe and the night had received it.
Eternal Blue Sky has witnessed this gathering. The empire of the Great Mongol people is here. The ancestral mandate is ours. The western territories await what this assembly will send against them.
He stopped there. The proclamation was complete.
The fires burned at the ceremony ground’s center, the smoke rising straight in the still summer air toward the stars above the Orkhon plain, and the empire stood around them without moving, the night settling across the breadth of it.