Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 37: The Clans

The camp on the second fold broke before light.

The column had held position through the night, fires spread wide across the fold’s upper ground to read larger than they were. The screen had run its overnight circuit without contact.

The screen came back clean from both directions.

Jaran came in from the eastern track as the horse lines ran their first morning feed.

His forty riders moved at a steady pace. A screen auxiliary returning with a completed report moved like that.

Jaran left his men at the eastern edge and came forward on foot. He stopped in front of Batu and gave the report without framing it.

"Berke’s riders were at the first clan two days ago," he said. "They used the eastern track, spent a day there, and left on the lower approach road."

Batu looked at him. "The Ulus riders."

"Arrived the following morning. Still there when I came through." Jaran’s eyes moved to the ground for a moment, ordering the detail.

"The headman received both groups. Berke’s men came first."

"What did Berke’s men offer."

"Grazing access for the winter season. South of the river crossing, through his territory." Jaran looked up.

"The clan moves south every winter. Their herds cross the lower river and graze the southern pasture through the cold months. They’ve done it every year. Berke’s offer was terms for something they already do."

The picture assembled from that.

Berke had found the structure of the dependency and offered to formalize it. The clan’s animals needed southern pasture to survive winter.

That pasture sat in Berke’s territory. The offer had cost him nothing because the obligation it named was already written into the ground. It had been there before either of them arrived.

"The terrain south of the second fold," Batu said.

"It opens," Jaran said. "The folds end after this one. Open terrain from there to the clan camp and past it.

The lower river is south of the camp. The track runs across open ground with nothing on either flank."

Batu sent him back to the formation and told Torghul to move the column out within the hour.

The terrain changed the way Jaran had described. The corridor country’s long rolls ended.

The steppe opened in every direction, flat to the horizon, the grass shorter and dryer than the ground north of the Ulus pasture line.

The flanks were open. Nothing on either side to use. A formed force on this terrain had mass and presence and that was all it had.

The northeast had given Batu the narrows, ridgelines on both sides, a passage that channeled a moving force into a prepared position.

The south was open terrain between two forces. Whatever happened here would be decided by numbers and horses and whoever had the fresher animals.

That was Berke’s country. This was its edge.

To the south, the lower river ran as a darker band against the flat horizon, the near bank catching the late morning light.

The column’s objective was well short of it.

The first clan camp came into view in the early afternoon. Low gers against the flat terrain, horse lines running along its eastern side, a larger structure at the center.

A modest camp that had been reading the column’s approach for a long time across open ground.

The Ulus riders were at the camp’s northern edge when Batu arrived. They stood beside their horses and watched.

They had done what Aidu sent them to do and were waiting to see what came after.

The camp had arranged itself in the way small camps arranged themselves when a large force arrived.

Every visible activity was calm and ordinary. Men attending to horses, a cook fire running at the edge of the main cluster.

The studied normalcy of a camp that had composed itself to be read clearly from a distance.

The headman came out before Batu reached the central ger.

A man in his fifties, lean, his face marked by years on open steppe.

Coming to the midpoint between the outer edge and the central structure, he stopped and held his ground.

He did not look at the column behind Batu. He looked at Batu, and his look carried the steadiness of a man whose answer was already settled.

Batu dismounted and stopped in front of him.

"You received the Ulus riders," Batu said.

"Yesterday morning." The headman’s voice was flat and functional. "Berke’s men came the day before. I received them first."

"What were they offering."

A pause. The answer was in it already. The only question was how plainly to deliver it.

"My herds go south every winter," the headman said.

"My father’s herds went south. His father’s before that. When the cold months come, we cross the lower river and graze the southern pasture until the ground up here is usable again. That’s how this camp survives winter."

He looked at Batu. "Berke’s men offered a formal arrangement for that movement. Terms for crossing when we need to cross and coming back when the grass returns."

He was placing a fact in front of Batu. The condition of the ground. Nothing more.

"Tribute under the wolf’s track seal," Batu said. "Written today, sealed today, standard levy."

He held the headman’s gaze. "Your riders carry nothing east from Berke’s territory. Any arrangement you make for the winter movement goes into Jochid record."

The headman looked at him. Past Batu’s shoulder, fifteen thousand horses and riders spread across the flat ground in both directions, the horizon line broken by the mass of the column and nothing else.

There was no elevated position between this camp and that force, no approach that would give his riders time or cover.

"It’ll be done," he said.

Batu told the document rider to write and seal it. The headman received the felt, looked at the wolf’s track seal for a moment, and held it.

Batu walked to the camp’s northern edge and stood looking south.

The river was a line at the horizon, the same line it had been from the column’s march.

Everything between this camp and that line was flat and open. Everything south of it belonged to Berke.

His territory began at that crossing and ran into the richest grazing land on the western steppe, winter pasture that stayed workable through the cold months, the kind of ground that made a clan’s animals fat and kept them alive while the northern steppe froze.

The corridor clans had been crossing that river with their herds every year since before Batu arrived in this body.

Berke had not created that movement. He had made an offer that sat on top of it, and the offer’s value was exactly as large as the dependency beneath it.

The written terms on the felt the headman was holding said nothing about what happened every winter when his animals needed to cross south and Berke was the one who controlled what they found on the other side.

Torghul came up beside him.

"The other two clans," he said.

"The same situation," Batu said.

Torghul was still for a moment. "If his grazing offer holds season after season, the seal on the felt means less each time."

"Yes."

The column would reach the second clan before long. The arrangement there would be the same as here. Written and sealed, and resting on the same incomplete foundation.

Batu had marched fifteen thousand men south to establish Jochid presence in the corridor before Berke finished his layer.

The presence was established. The layer was real. The terms existed on paper across three clans that would accept them and mean them and then lead their herds south each year across a river that Berke controlled.

The wolf’s track seal held the corridor on paper.

The corridor needed the southern pasture to hold in practice. That pasture was on Berke’s side of the river, and it had been there long before any seal existed to say otherwise.