Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 77: The Full Tally

Orel was at the administrative station when Batu arrived in the morning. The census records came in on three pieces of felt, Orel’s hand throughout, each entry dated and marked with the wolf’s track seal. He spread them across the table without a word and stepped back.

Batu read the near-camp clans first. The Burjin, the Tergesh, the Ulus, the Sartat, the yellow banner clan, the Yargach, the southern third clan.

All seven ran within a small margin of what they had reported. The third clan’s count was exact, every entry matching the record to the unit. Under Dorbei’s control of the winter grazing, it had nothing to gain from padding its numbers and it knew it.

"The Kipchak," he said.

Orel set the second piece of felt beside the first. Of the six Kipchak clans reached before the ground hardened completely, four came in within range. Two did not.

The first had reported 820 households in the previous season’s registry. The riders counted 1140.

The second had reported 590. The riders counted 810.

Those gaps had been running for years. A headman who reported 820 and held 1140 had looked at the old system and understood that nobody was going to walk through his camp and count the gers. The riders had walked through his camp and counted them.

"Their levy," Batu said. "What figure does it go to."

"The riders’ count. That’s the number the seal covers now." Orel’s voice was precise. "The old registry stops here."

That was the correct answer. Batu had moved past the question before Orel finished.

The Bashkir territory came back thin but clean. Three headmen confirmed, 280 households logged across all three. Small ground, mapped for the first time. The Bashkir line held less than Batu had hoped and more than the old estimates had given.

Then the southern territory. Dorbei’s riders had been carrying submissions north steadily since the campaign closed. Eleven confirmed, roughly 1800 households across them, the count still in progress as his men worked through the outer reaches of Berke’s former sphere.

The southern tally was partial and both men read it as one.

"Is it enough to work from," Batu said.

"The near-camp clans are solid. The Kipchak gaps are in the record and the headmen know it. It will fill in before summer." Orel paused. "The census did what it needed to do."

Batu had been aware of another man at the side table since he walked in. He sat at the far edge of the room, going through the tribute ledgers at a steady pace, his stylus moving across the margin at each page.

Stocky through the middle, the bulk of him resting against the chair the way it had been for hours. Close-trimmed grey beard, the face of a man past sixty, with the presence of decades spent indoors. His hands moved through the pages without hurrying, the fingers of someone whose primary tool had always been a stylus.

He had not looked up.

"’That’s him," Orel said.

Batu walked over. The man looked up and stood, rising with the care of joints that had given up riding long ago, and straightened fully before speaking.

"Mahmud," he said. "From Bukhara." He gave his name and city and nothing beyond them.

Batu sat down across from him. He sat.

His Mongolian was functional, the words accurate, the syllables carrying Persian rhythm underneath. He had learned it through years of use in offices that had passed through several administrations, and it ran without effort now.

"Your background," Batu said.

He answered briefly.

Twelve years managing accounts for the Mongol-appointed governor of the Amu Darya district, the territory along the lower river south of Khwarezm.

Before that, the same work under the last Khwarezm administrator in Bukhara, the man who had run the city’s treasury before the conquest changed who had the post.

He had kept working through the transition because the accounts had to run regardless of whose name was on the seal. He said this as a fact about the work.

Batu looked at him for a moment. Two administrations, neither one chosen.

"What’s wrong with what’s here," Batu said.

Mahmud looked at the open ledger in front of him. He had been working through it for three days and did not need to collect his answer.

"The levy records and the household counts are in separate places. Nobody reads them against each other as a matter of routine. If a clan’s count goes up and the levy doesn’t move with it, that runs for two or three seasons before it becomes visible as a problem."

He looked at Batu.

"Everything here is accurate. The problem is that the accuracy depends on Orel knowing where everything is and what it connects to. When he leaves the room, the cross-check stops running."

"And when the territory grows," Batu said.

"Then it gets slower to catch and more expensive when it surfaces."

Mahmud turned a page.

"A common format applied at the collection point solves it. Every tributary provides the same fields in the same order. Then the household total and the levy figure sit in the same column and the comparison runs on its own. Three weeks to reform what’s here. After that, new entries carry it forward."

"Start this week," Batu said. "Orel handles the tally side. You handle the ledger structure."

Mahmud nodded and made a note.

Batu moved through the rest of what needed to run while he was east.

The tribute rate framework. It had to reach every tributary headman in written form before the column departed, fixed rates and collection schedule, what the arrangement covered and what it didn’t. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Mahmud said two days to draft the structure. He knew the rates. A messenger could carry copies within the week.

The site construction accounts. Labor contracts, materials, correspondence with the craftsmen coming in through the eastern contacts.

He listened and then put his questions in order. How many workers when the ground opened. What the civil account held in silver. Whether the contracts ran in goods or coin.

Batu answered each. Mahmud wrote.

For Dorbei’s reports, as submissions arrived from the outer reaches of the former territory, they came to Mahmud’s desk before the formal ledger. Cross-checked against the rider’s field total.

Any gap above ten percent got flagged before the number moved.

He asked what constituted a field total versus a submission figure. Batu explained the distinction. Mahmud wrote it down.

When the questions were finished, Mahmud looked at the table in front of him.

The three felts from the census. The construction blueprint at the far edge that Khulgen’s deputy had been marking through the winter. The pages and the stack of unfiled reports beside it.

"One man isn’t enough for what you’ve described," he said. A plain assessment of what the scope required.

"The construction program, the tribute framework, the tally records, Dorbei’s reports coming north. That’s many men’s work if the southern counts arrive on schedule. More if they don’t."

Batu considered it. He looked at Mahmud across the table in silence.

After he left, he sat with his thoughts for a moment.

The search had run correctly, which was the right answer to what had been running since winter. That answered one part of a larger problem.

The men who did this work at the scale Batu needed were in the cities the Mongol advance had passed through decades ago, in the administrative offices that had kept running under whoever took the post, where men had spent a generation doing exactly this under three different flags.

Bukhara. Samarkand. The Amu Darya cities.

The route east passed through all of it.

He stood and went to the entrance. The camp ran its spring routines around him, the horse lines and the relay pairs and the last census teams coming in from the distant pasture territories.

The departure sequence was taking form in his head as he walked, the order of what had to close before he left and what could run without him, and the list of what the route east would make possible that the western steppe never had.

He added one item to it and kept moving.