Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 69: What Remains

Siban set the felt on the table and stepped back.

Batu picked it up with his left hand and read it through. Three standards at each level, arban through mingan. The language was plain. Each standard named something that could be seen from outside the man being assessed.

Nothing in it required the evaluating commander’s personal read to make it work. The document said what it needed to say.

He set it down and pressed the wolf’s track seal into the wax at the base. The impression came out clean.

"When does Torghul get this," he said.

"Tomorrow morning," Siban said. "I’ll bring it to him before the horse lines open. He’ll want time to read it before the day’s training starts."

Batu set the seal down. Siban gathered the document and left without further exchange. The tent was even more silent with only one man in it.

Batu sat with the lamp and the cold for a moment. He ran the year in his head, looking for the gap. The notice east was done. The Borte-Qol channel had been loaded. The site was confirmed and the prisoner labor was running under Khulgen. The officer standards were sealed and in Siban’s hands. The formation would go into the assessments before spring.

What wasn’t done was larger than what was.

He came to a new problem and stayed with it.

The army going west would eventually reach stone walls. Fortified positions that couldn’t be bought open quickly enough for a cavalry army to sustain its pace.

The steppe answer to fortified positions was to wait them out or absorb the attrition of a long siege, and neither of those worked when the army was moving through someone else’s territory with supply lines that ran further every week.

What worked was siege craft. Engineers who could build approach works, cut off a city’s water, bring down a gate in days rather than months.

Those men existed. He knew exactly where.

In Khurasan. The cities of the southwest, whose craftsmen had been scattered by Genghis’s campaigns a generation back. Men who had survived by making themselves useful to whoever held power, who carried the technical knowledge of Persian siege tradition in their hands and their heads.

Some of them were already working for the main Mongol force in the east. Others had gone south toward the Islamic courts, or west toward the Rus cities, wherever opportunity was.

And in Khitai. The Jin territories, which the eastern Mongol force had finished absorbing this very year. Men who had been building and operating torsion weapons for centuries against the same kinds of walls the western campaign would face.

The Jin collapse had pushed them into the open. The knowledge was sitting in the east right now, waiting to be used.

Neither source was reachable this winter. The logistics weren’t there. More importantly, the authority wasn’t there.

Recruiting specialists into the western campaign on the scale the campaign would require was not something Batu could do without Karakorum’s backing, and Karakorum’s backing would come from the kurultai, which would come in summer, which would authorize the western march.

He filed it where it belonged. After the kurultai, the riders would already be moving east toward Khitai and southwest toward Khurasan with the authority to recruit and the promises that would make skilled men come.

The foundation work was knowing the problem existed and knowing where the answer lived. Both of those were done.

He looked at the lamp.

What could be done this winter was narrowing down to administration. Those had to run whether or not he was watching them closely. Khulgen and Orel between them could carry most of it. That was what building a bureaucracy meant. It functioned when the man who built it turned to look somewhere else.

Torghul came through in the middle of the morning. He wanted to confirm the groupings for the first evaluation round. Which commanders assessed which sections, how the pairing was arranged so that no commander evaluated only his own men. They went through it in twenty minutes and resolved three questions that needed resolving.

When it was done Torghul stood and then stopped before turning for the entrance.

"Jaran," he said. "His year still has to end, but he has questions."

"I know."

"He’s been running with the terrain function since. He asked me where he stands."

Batu looked at him. "He’s here?"

"At the horse lines. I told him I’d pass the question."

"Send him in," Batu said.

Torghul went.

Jaran came through the entrance ten minutes later. The change since the Tergesh submission was in his body, in how he took up space in a room. At twenty-two he had stood in the dust in front of Batu’s horse and said nothing.

He came in now as someone who had commanded forty riders through Berke’s campaign and delivered clean reports from the other side of things that mattered.

He sat without being offered a seat.

Batu looked at him. "Your year is running out."

"Yes."

"You don’t want to go back."

Jaran looked at him directly. "There is work."

"There’s always work," Batu said. "That’s not the question. The question is whether you want to stay or go back to the Tergesh."

Jaran held his gaze for a moment.

"I want to stay," he said. "What I’ve been doing here is something I can only do here. The crossings, the ground reading, running with Kirsa’s men on terrain they know and learning to read terrain they don’t." He paused. "Yesur’s camp is where I came from. This is where the work is."

"Your uncle," Batu said.

"He should hear it from me. He honored every term of the submission. He held the road passage without trouble through the whole southern campaign. He deserves to know his nephew chose to stay. The message should come from me."

"Ride to the Tergesh," Batu said. "Deliver the message yourself."

Jaran nodded.

"Whatever Yesur sends back with you," Batu said, "bring it directly to me."

Jaran stood and left.

Batu looked at the space where he had been. The instincts that had found the gap at twenty-two were still there. Time had pointed them at something larger, and the pointing showed.

The morning was already past its midpoint. He turned back to the supply tallies.

Yesur had been in his fifties at the submission, cautious enough to have held his clan through three changes of regional authority. A man like that would take his own opinion of his nephew’s return. The man who came back, set against the one who left.

His response would tell Batu how the Tergesh tributary arrangement was actually holding. What he sent along with Jaran. What he said when Jaran carried the choice back to him.

Jaran would be out the eastern gate before first light.