Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 88: Infiltration at the Reeds

The tumen was already dust to the north when Suuqai turned the group east.

Fourteen of them. Seven steppe riders from the Khar Kheshig on the flanks and forward, three norse at the rear, one guide from the Urgench garrison walking his horse at the front beside Suuqai, and two prisoners in the center with their hands bound to their saddle rings.

The prisoners were from the garrison and had been interrogate in the holding pen the night before. They rode without speaking and watched the eastern horizon the way men watched things they had helped create.

The order had come from Batu before the tumen moved. It was brief because it did not need to be long. Two raider groups in the eastern channels. The leaders of those groups alive long enough to understand what had found them, then not alive.

What was left behind would carry the warning further than any rider could.

The delta came up fast. The agricultural ground south of Urgench thinned and the reed beds started at the edge of a field that simply ended, grass giving way to water-dark soil and then the reed wall itself, running north and south along the eastern side as far as Suuqai could see in either direction.

It smelled of standing water and turned earth and something else underneath, an animal denseness that came from enclosed spaces where the water moved slowly and things accumulated.

Suuqai looked at the guide.

The man was in his late thirties, heavily built through the shoulders, with the eyes of someone who had spent years reading conditions that most men didn’t bother to look at.

A delta farmer before the garrison had acquired him, which meant he knew these channels through seasons and floods and the way the reeds parted for movement and closed behind it.

He did not need to be told to go. He had already found the entry point and was watching the water level at the base of the reed wall with his boot, pressing into the mud to feel how firm the footing ran beneath it.

"This one," he said it in a regional dialect that Suuqai’s Mongolian handled well enough.

He pointed south along the wall to where a channel opened in the reed face, narrow, the water running dark between walls of stem. "This goes east for an hour, then splits. We take the right arm."

"The other arm."

"Dead water. It circles back."

Suuqai read his face while he answered. The guide had given the answer before considering what advantage a wrong answer might provide him.

He turned his horse into the channel.

The reeds closed on both sides within the first twenty meters. The channel was wide enough for the horses in single file, no wider.

The stems pressed close enough that a rider’s knee brushed them at the normal seat, and the sound it produced was a constant dry rustle that carried along the water surface in a way Suuqai disliked immediately.

He brought his leg in and the riders behind him did the same without instruction. The steppe riders were watching him at intervals, matching his adjustments as they arrived.

The norse at the rear were not watching him in the same way.

They were watching the eastern face of the reed wall, the direction from which contact would arrive if it was going to arrive, and that was the right formation for them in this terrain even if it was arrived at differently.

The horse under him moved forward at the walk. The mud at the channel’s bottom was soft enough that the hooves went in and pulled free with a sound that carried more than he wanted. He noted that for later.

The light went as the afternoon did. In the open that transition was gradual, the sky losing its color in stages.

In the reeds it arrived differently, the stems cutting the light at their own until the channel floor was already dark while the reed tops still caught something of the evening.

Then the tops went too and the channel was black water and the sound of the horses’ breathing and the guide three lengths ahead with his head slightly turned to the left, watching things Suuqai could not see.

They rode an hour. The channel split and they took the right arm.

The arm was narrower. The horses went more slowly. Suuqai could hear the water current now, a low continuous sound running under the other sounds.

The guide raised his hand and they stopped.

"There," the guide said. He kept his voice low, the sound absorbed by the reed walls around them. "Dry ground. Island. We stop here."

The island was a raised section of the channel floor where sediment had built up and compacted over years. It was not large, thirty paces by twenty, the edges soft but the center firm enough for horses to stand without sinking.

Suuqai dismounted and moved his boots across the surface, reading what it gave back through his feet. The water around it was knee-depth at the nearest edge.

He brought the group onto the island.

He left two of the steppe riders on the island with the prisoners and the horses and moved forward on foot with the remaining five steppe riders and the three Norse and the guide.

The guide read the channel floor before each step, feeling for the firm path through the soft mud with a long reed he carried like a walking staff.

The five steppe riders behind him spread into the channel on either side of the main line in intervals small enough that they could pass hand signals but wide enough that a single burst of arrows would not catch more than one of them.

The norsemen were too large to fit the channel spread pattern. They came in single file behind Suuqai with their blades sheathed and their hands free.

The one whose Mongolian was adequate to basic orders was named Leif. Suuqai had given him three gestures before they left the island. Stop. Down. Forward.

He had demonstrated each once. Leif had repeated them once. That was the limit of what was available. It would have to be enough.

The channel water was cold at the knees where the deeper sections required wading. The reed stems on both sides were close enough that they could be touched from center channel by extending an arm.

Suuqai did not extend his arm. He moved through the center with his eyes forward and his hands at his sides, reading what the guide’s body told him three lengths ahead.

The guide slowed.

Suuqai passed the stop signal back with his left hand without turning. The line went still behind him, the steppe riders passing it back and back until it reached Leif, who received it and held.

The guide turned his head a fraction to the right and then looked at Suuqai.

Through the reed wall on the right, something moved. Not wind. The reeds moved at a specific point in a specific direction and went still again. A man on the far side of the wall, moving parallel to their channel, headed south.

A single figure based on how the reeds moved, not a group. He was gone in a few seconds.

Suuqai held the stop for a count of thirty. Nothing else moved in the wall. He gave the forward signal.

They moved another hundred meters. The guide slowed again, this time to a complete stop, and crouched slowly in the channel until the water was at his chest.

Suuqai crouched with him. The line behind crouched. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

The reeds ahead were thinning. Not because the channel ended but because the channel opened onto a broader piece of water, a lagoon or a wide section of the main channel, and on the far side of that water the reed wall was thinner and through it something was visible that had not been visible for the past two hours.

Firelight.

Low and banked, the specific orange of coals that had been reduced for the night.

The light came through the gaps in the reed stand in horizontal lines, which meant the fire was close to the far bank and there was structure between the fire and the water. Tents or reed-bundle frames, the kind of shelter a permanent delta camp built from its own material.

The sounds that came over the water were the sounds of a camp settling. A cough. The movement of an animal. Something falling and not being picked up.

The guide leaned toward Suuqai’s ear. His voice was lower than breath. "That’s the place."

Suuqai looked at the water between them and the far bank.

Twenty meters across the open section. The fire on the far side. The reed stand thin enough to move through.

He looked at the near bank, tracing the water’s edge, reading where the bottom was firm enough to cross without a sound that carried.

The camp was resting for the night and its leaders were in there.