Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 91: What the Maidan Remembers

The report came before the camp’s morning routine had found its rhythm.

Suuqai arrived at the tent entrance while Batu was still working through the day’s supply accounting with Torghul’s deputy. He came alone and waited at the entrance until Batu looked up. The deputy read the exchange and gathered his felts and left without being told.

Suuqai stepped inside.

"It’s done," he said. "Their leader is dead, the mark’s on him. The stores burned through the night and their horses scattered through the reeds."

He paused, to decide whether there was more that needed saying.

"The other raiding groups will know by now."

Batu looked at him. Suuqai’s riding coat still carried the delta smell, standing water and smoke, both faint. The operation had been some days back. He had ridden hard to close the distance.

"How many of ours," Batu said.

"None. In the camp."

The second raider group further south would receive the account from whoever found Faruk’s position at dawn. A dead leader with a mark pressed in blood on his forehead.

A force had moved through it in the night and found no one to stop it, had done so with precision, and had left a name on the way out.

They would know better than attempt to raid Batu’s forces again.

That was an acceptable outcome. The threat from the larger group was gone, and whoever led the southern group would spend the next season deciding whether to test the thing that had come for Faruk or stay out of its reach.

Batu set it aside.

"Stay with the camp today," he said. "I’ll take six."

Suuqai understood the number. He nodded once and went.

The tumen had camped outside Bukhara’s walls for a while by the time Suuqai arrived. The horse lines were organized and the supply stores tallied.

Torghul had arranged the provisioning with the darughachi’s office by them. The stay would be longer than Urgench. There was business in Bukhara, the tumen would wait.

The city appeared ahead of him as he moved toward it.

Rebuilding had started with what was most necessary and worked outward, and the result was a perimeter that varied along its length. Some sections rose to full height and thickness. Others ran lower where the materials and the labor had not yet reached.

One stretch was patched with timber framing. Another showed bare rubble.

The gate itself was intact.

The approach road had been repaved in sections and the stones were different ages and different colors, the old and new set side by side without apology.

The Kalon Minaret rose from inside the city and kept rising past everything around it, the pale stone catching the morning light on its upper half while the base was still in shadow below it.

It had been standing for nearly a hundred years before the conquest arrived.

The campaign that killed the population in numbers too large to account accurately in any single count had passed the minaret and left it there.

The story Batu carried from his previous life said that Genghis had looked up at it while riding through the destruction and ordered it spared. The accounts might have dressed the moment differently than it had happened.

Something had interrupted the massacre, and all that pale stone had come through the siege intact while everything around it had not.

He noted that as information and kept walking.

The six from the Khar Kheshig took their positions as the gate came up.

Four steppe riders forward and to each side. Two norse behind.

One of the norse was Gunnar, riding with the felt pad he had been working on since the reed country now packed inside his coat. The other was Einar, who had been with the formation since the winter selection and had not spoken more than a dozen words in Batu’s presence across all those weeks.

The guards at the entrance recognized what they were looking at and stepped aside without being addressed.

The market district began immediately past it, the way it began in every city of this region.

Spices and dyed cloth and the smell of animals somewhere in the inner lanes. The concentrated smell of what had been returning to itself season by season for fifteen years and had not yet fully arrived.

The entourage came through and the market maintained its business.

The stalls kept running. The transactions continued. The sound of the lanes didn’t stop, and something moved through it the way a current moved through water, visible only in what it displaced.

The women carrying loads found the near side.

The men who had been arguing over a price stopped arguing and stepped apart from each other. Children who had been running through the lanes were lifted or pulled back by hands that did not look down to do it, the parents’ eyes already fixed on the entourage and staying there.

Nobody stepped into the path. Nobody addressed them.

The passage opened ahead and closed behind, and the people at its edges watched from their own spaces with the attention of a population that had spent years building a set of behaviors around exactly this kind of moment.

They were now running those behaviors from muscle memory.

A place unmade and remade under the same authority learned how to behave itself around the people who had that authority.

The occupation had its own kind of precision.

The steppe riders attracted the practiced non-look, the familiar adjustment of men who had been dealing with Mongol cavalry long enough to know their habits.

The norsemen drew something different.

Einar was a full head taller than anyone around him and wider through the chest than two of the vendors standing together, and his face was the face of a man from a cold country far beyond the edge of anything the Silk Road had ever touched.

A textile merchant to Batu’s left stopped moving mid-step and looked at him with wide eyes before pulling his gaze away.

A child at the edge of a stand watched Einar with the uncomplicated attention of a boy who had not yet learned that staring cost something.

A hand found the child’s shoulder.

Batu noted it without it requiring anything from him. His guard produced confusion in the places it entered. That had its own uses.

The streets widened toward the mosque quarter, foot traffic thinning as the approach opened.

They were moving deeper into the older sections, the part that had been rebuilt first, the part that had the structures the administration needed to function.

A Persian official caught them at the junction of two streets, moving at the cautious speed of a man who was afraid of arriving too quickly.

He had a garrison rider beside him and a leather document case under his arm.

He addressed the garrison rider first, as the protocol for approaching a Chinggisid prince without prior arrangement required, and the rider turned to Batu.

"He serves under the darughachi’s office," the rider said. "There’s a dispute."

Batu looked at the official. The man had been patient a long time and was now past patience. That much was in his face.

"I know about it," Batu said. "Find me before the evening meal."

The official looked at the garrison rider, then at Batu, and nodded once.

He had received less than he wanted and more than he had expected, and he stepped back out of the path and held his document case and did not look relieved.

Batu kept moving.

He turned to his nearest steppe rider.

"The engineer from Urgench, Ahmad. He came here three months ago. Find where he is working before midday."

The rider peeled off and went back toward the entrance.

Ahead, the street opened onto the broad space that the center had always organized itself around.

The mosque rose at its far side, restored enough to be functional, its dome catching the full morning light.

Below the dome and before it, the open ground ran flat and wide.

The maidan.

This was where the population of Bukhara had been gathered in 1220 and told what had come for them.

Genghis had stood in this space and spoken through interpreters and the imams had recorded what he said.

The punishment of God.

He had said it while Bukhara burned around them, while thousands of bodies were piled into trenches, while the population standing in this square feared they would be soon executed.

The space was occupied now by market stalls and foot traffic and the ordinary movement of everything going about its morning.

Nothing in it looked like what it had been.

Batu walked toward it.