Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 78: Khar Kheshig

The hundred were assembled on the open ground east of the camp fence, separated into two groups without instruction.

The steppe riders had gathered on the near side. The foreign men stood further out, twenty feet of open ground between them, and neither half had moved to close it.

Batu observed it in silence.

The steppe riders looked like the rest of his tumens. Lean through the body, composite bows racked across their backs, the watchful figure of men who had grown up on horseback.

Nothing on them carried tumen markings or clan colors. Suuqai’s work. Fifty men from across three tumens, no more than two from any single mingan, each one stripped of the affiliations they had walked in with.

The foreign men were built differently. They stood lower through the body, wider through the chest, several carrying full beards no rider in the steppe tumens wore.

Their weapons were longer than the sabers across the gap, and several of them carried short axes at the hip as a second. The build of men whose years of training had been spent on foot.

One of them stood at the near edge of his group. Lean through the face, younger than most of the men beside him, a pale scar along the line of his jaw.

When Suuqai spoke low to Batu’s left, this man’s eyes tracked the sound without turning his head.

He followed enough to understand the language.

Batu gestured once and Suuqai spoke briefly to the steppe riders. They spread to the line of felt-wrapped posts along the far fence, placed that morning.

Twenty of them, ranging from fifty meters to the far posts.

The first drew at fifty meters.

The release came fast and clean, five shafts in the time it took a breath. All five found the post.

The sound of them arriving carried back as a single compressed note, each impact so close behind the others they collapsed into one.

The second moved to seventy meters. He calmed his horse with one hand on its neck.

His grouping was tight enough that the third shaft struck the second and drove it sideways.

The third walked his horse to the far line. A hundred and forty meters, the steppe wind coming at a low angle from the east.

He put two shafts into the target before the horse had finished its last step.

Batu watched where the second shaft entered and what the entry point said about how the first had landed.

The man had adjusted for the wind between releases. He had time for that only because the first had been correct.

Batu stood with it for a moment.

These fifty would stand between him and whatever came through a door or out of a crowd or arrived on horseback at the wrong hour.

In Karakorum the attempt would come again, constructed from the lessons of the first, by what the failure had taught. A tumen couldn’t reach into the kind of space where the next attempt would arrive. They existed for that.

He moved to the rack and took a bow.

The draw came up cleanly through the first half. At full extension the load found the right shoulder and the muscle locked briefly before releasing, the same brief seize that had run since the campaign.

He pulled from the pain that cost less, compensated for the reduced draw weight, and loosed.

The arrow went into the center of the seventy-meter post. Accurate enough.

He loosed twice more. The constraint held the same on both.

He set the bow back.

They had watched without expression. They had read the draw exactly as it was.

They were better at this than he was, and might remain so for some time.

A guard’s purpose was the man at its center. He was what the formation was built around, and those surrounding him needed to be more capable at the key functions than he was.

He walked to the foreign group.

The lean man at the near edge had been watching him since he picked up the bow.

When Batu reached him and stopped, the man met his eyes directly.

"Your name," Batu said.

The man gave a word in the northern tongue first, then a version that Mongolian could hold.

"Gunnar."

"How long on the steppe."

"Three years. River routes, then the eastern approaches."

His Mongolian had an accent, formed by years of commerce at crossing points. The camps had come later.

Each word placed correctly, the language gone past where most merchants stopped.

"I understand enough."

"More than enough," Batu said. "Or you wouldn’t know to say it that way."

"Tell them we’re going to work," Batu continued. "Hand weapons. Ask who among them has spent the most time in close fighting."

Gunnar turned and spoke to the group in the northern tongue.

One of them came forward without discussion.

He was among the tallest of them, with heavy forearms and the easy movement of a veteran warrior.

He held a training blade two-handed, angled out from his right hip, point forward, using the length to set his preferred distance before anything began.

Batu took one from the rack.

The man came in at his blade’s range, keeping Batu from closing.

His grip was practiced and his transitions between pressure and release were smooth.

He was strong with the specific kind that came from years of work in narrow situations, where a small advantage applied correctly undid a larger opponent.

Batu pressed toward the inside of the two-handed grip where the hold gave slightly, then pulled back when the response gathered.

The man firmed through it and adjusted.

He was building a read of the exchange from its accumulated pattern.

At the minute mark, the man probed twice toward Batu’s right side.

Clean and unhurried, looking for the injury the bow draw had shown.

Batu stepped off the line both times.

The man moved off it. He took a slow arc at working distance.

The exchange settled into a period where neither pressed for a conclusion, both working from what the first minute had built, waiting for the other to offer something from it.

He pushed from the left.

The man covered it, and the covering cost him the position he had been building for thirty seconds.

Batu drove into the gap that came open, far enough to read it, then pulled back.

The man stepped back and reset.

From his reset position he looked at Batu with attention and nothing further.

The exchange concluded without a final answer.

When Batu raised his open hand, the man dropped his blade point immediately, his breathing controlled.

"Your name," Batu said.

The man gave it in the northern tongue.

Gunnar repeated, "Bjorn."

Batu handed the weapon to Suuqai’s man at the rack.

"Their background," he said to Suuqai. "You’re certain."

"The routes, the contacts, the sponsors," Suuqai said. "Everything runs back to what they claimed. Every one triple-checked."

"Gunnar."

"Clean. Cleaner than most."

"He serves as your interpreter for the first season," Batu said. "Until they can work without him."

Suuqai noted it.

The twenty feet of open ground between the two halves of the assembled hundred was still there.

It would close through work and shared function and the specific pressure of those depending on one another inside the same formation, or it would stay and become a fault line when real pressure arrived.

Batu crossed to the center of the assembled hundred.

A few of them were watching him.

Gunnar had spoken something brief to the foreign men while Batu crossed the ground, and they had formed into the same position as the steppe riders.

"The Khar Kheshig," Batu said. His voice carried without being raised. "The Black Guard. You answer to the man who gives you this post. Every prior claim on you ends here."

He kept the pause while Gunnar relayed it.

A few of them looked at each other. Then they looked back at Batu.

He looked at Suuqai.

"You command it."

Suuqai turned and faced the hundred.

There were still problems.

That would be Suuqai’s to deal with.

Every obligation they carried ended at this post, and in Karakorum that fact would matter more than any of them yet understood.