Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 82: Tailagha

The garrison was already assembled when Batu came through the camp fence onto the eastern ground.

The arc ran from both sides of the fire outward to where the firelight gave out and continued beyond it in silhouette and mass, the garrison filling the space in the pre-dawn cold between the ceremony’s center and the open steppe behind them.

The pressure of that many men holding a single point of focus had presence to it, a thing the cold carried and the dark gave definition to.

At the arc’s near edge the Khar Kheshig stood in position, the two halves of them standing without gap between them. Suuqai was at their center. Further east, on the open flat beyond the assembly’s outer edge, Torghul’s tumen stood in march order. The column was waiting for what came after.

The white horse was at the ground’s center with the fire behind it.

The fire had been building since well before Batu arrived. Buqa’s attendant had fed it through the hours before the watch changed, and it had reached the level that a long sustained feed found and held, throwing light across the ground’s full width, pushing the pre-dawn dark back past the fence line into the open steppe beyond.

The fire’s light on the white horse turned its near flank the color of old gold and left its far side in deep shadow, so that the animal stood precisely at the boundary between what the fire reached and what it didn’t, one half of it in each.

It breathed and the cloud of its breath rose into the firelight and caught there briefly before the cold air dispersed it.

Buqa stood at the fire’s near side, his back to the assembled garrison. He was arranging what the ritual required on the low stand his attendant had built from split timber. The copper vessel. The ceremonial blade, handle wrapped in white cord. A strip of clean felt placed alongside them.

He worked through the sequence without hurrying, each object taken to its position in the order the sequence required, because in this space nothing was preliminary. He did not look up when Batu arrived.

Batu walked to his position at the ceremony’s center, facing east.

The attendant came from the south with the ceramic flask and moved to the eastern point first and tipped it, letting a thread of airag fall to the frozen earth.

The smell of it came sharp and sour on the morning air, the season’s concentration in it. The attendant moved to the south point, then west, then north, completing the service before returning to his station at the fire’s edge.

Buqa turned from the preparation stand.

He looked past the fire toward the eastern horizon, where the dark still was without change toward gray.

Eternal Blue Sky. You see what is done here.

His voice washed over the assembly, the mass of men taking the words and moving them back through the arc.

The earth has what it has taken and they watch from where they are. The ancestors of this blood watch from there.

Genghis Khan.

The name went out into the pre-dawn air with the directness of something being addressed, a man whose bones lay in the sacred ground to the east being informed of what his line was doing on its western frontier. Jochi, his son. Batu, his grandson. That name had carried its freight across this ground since before many of the assembly were born.

His blood goes east. Back toward where what was made was made. The line returns to the heartland. The kurultai receives it. Stand clear of the road it takes.

He turned and nodded once and the two men holding the white horse on its short lead brought it forward.

The animal came in, step by step, each stride echoing in the men’s hearts. Its coat moved through cream and orange and gold as the fire’s light worked across it, the colors turning with each stride so that the animal seemed to change what it was as it moved.

It came to the assembly’s center and the assembly’s focus pulled tighter without moving. When its center arrived, the ceremony changed.

Buqa’s two men brought it to its knees.

It braced and spread its front legs. Then it accepted the pressure when both men did not release, and it rested onto the frozen earth beneath them. It breathed, steady, and the cloud of its breath rose into the firelight above it and dispersed into the cold air.

Batu crossed to the preparation stand.

The ceremonial blade was there with its white-cord handle, and he picked it up and walked to the horse and took the mane with his left hand. The location of the cut was simple. The exact point on the neck, the angle the blade needed, the pressure required to make it clean and complete. He drew on it directly, without ceremony of his own.

He made the cut.

The blood came fast and dark in the firelight, and the attendant was there with the copper vessel to receive it. The horse released its tension from the head back, the breath stopping, the legs going flat into the frozen earth beneath them, the large body settling into stillness.

The attendant placed fat portions from the prepared carcass into the flames and they rose briefly, the smoke thickening and going dark before the air drew it east past the fence line and into the open beyond.

The two men worked the hide while the fire ran through the offering. When the poles were ready they drove them into the earth and stretched the skin between them, legs and head still attached, the full shape of the horse present in what remained of it, facing east.

The horse’s spirit was going ahead of the riders. That was what it meant, and every man in the assembly understood it as such, and the understanding had been moving through them since the fire was built and the horse was led out in the dark before light came.

Batu could read it in how the garrison adjusted itself, in the attention directed at the fire and the stretched hide and the eastern horizon.

The ritual was making these men into men who had done something on behalf of the one going east, and that making was real in them and would hold in them when the garrison was past sight range and the ground behind them was empty.

He stood at the center of it. The faith the ritual required of him was where it had always been.

He had stopped pondering over that belief some time ago. What he could do was stand correctly, and he stood correctly. What he could understand was what was happening in the men around him, and he understood it with precision.

The ritual asked presence and the visible demonstration of what the gathering was producing. That he could give exactly.

Buqa came across the ground with the copper vessel.

He stopped in front of Batu at the distance the act required and looked at him. He at the surface and what sat behind the surface, filing both without requiring that the two align. He had been making this read for long enough that the process took him almost no time.

He dipped his thumb.

The stroke went across Batu’s forehead from left to right. The blood was still warm against the morning air, and he felt the warmth of it as a narrow specific band above his eyes, the skin there reporting something placed where nothing was usually placed, the nerve endings at the surface doing their work without interpretation. The cold was settling the mark into his skin as it dried.

Buqa looked at what he had placed there, and then at what was behind it.

"The blood is what it is," he said it plainly, as something confirmed through direct observation, nothing dressed around it. "Tengri sees the lineage in it."

Batu steadied his gaze.

Buqa stepped back. He returned the vessel to the attendant and turned east. His voice ran the closing passage through the garrison.

Through the cities of the river delta.

Through the cities where the old knowledge did not leave when the armies came.

Over the passes where the mountains sustain the sky on both sides.

The heartland is at the road’s far end.

Keep the sky clear for the full length of it. From this ground to there, keep it clear.

Then Buqa looked at Batu. The position that meant it was time.

Batu looked past the fire and past the stretched hide toward the eastern horizon. The dark there had moved one step back from its deepest, the faintest gray beginning at the furthest edge where the sky met the steppe.

Eternal Blue Sky. The road goes east. I ride it under your sight.

The silence after he stopped was the moment before the assembly answered.

Then it came.

Hurree!

The first went out across the full arc and crossed the fence line and the open land received it without returning anything, the sound having traveled where it was meant to travel.

Hurree!!!

The second gathered the assembly’s mass more fully, the full assembly arriving at the same note at the same moment, and the morning air took it further than the first had gone, out past the fire’s light, past the fence, into the open beyond where nothing was there to stop it.

Hurreeeee!!!

The third was different in kind from both. It went out and kept going, running across the flat ground into the distance, and the men who had produced it stood and listened to it go. The going was the point. The third always went further than hearing range before it peaked, out to where the steppe gave way to distance itself.

The fire burned. Buqa’s attendant began banking it.

Batu turned.

The Khar Kheshig formed around him without instruction. He mounted from the left, the right shoulder firm through the motion. The mark had set against his skin in the morning cold and it would stay there through the long road south and east, through the cities the route crossed, through the mountain approaches, and into Karakorum.

The men along that road who saw it would understand it for what it was.

Torghul was at the head of the tumen on the eastern flat. He looked at Batu once and turned his horse toward the road.

The army began to move.