Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 92: The Punishment of God

The maidan was packed earth and worn stone, perhaps two hundred meters across at its widest, bounded on the north by the mosque’s restored facade and on the other sides by market buildings rebuilt at varying heights and in varying materials over fifteen years of recovery.

The morning’s traffic moved across it, grain merchants with loaded carts, a group of students walking fast toward the entrance, a water seller calling his price, two men arguing over a bale of cloth at the eastern end. The sounds of an ordinary morning in a city.

Batu stood at the south edge and watched it.

He knew this ground from the other life.

What happened in this space in was recorded by men whose entire surviving tradition was built on careful documentation, which meant it was accurate in its outlines and precise in its particulars and the particulars were worse than the outlines suggested.

The garrison had been killed first. That was standard. Most of those men had understood it as the inevitable consequence of their decision to fight, which meant they had made their peace with it somewhere during the siege’s final hours.

The ones who ran were caught in the fields outside the walls. A handful cleared the fields and reached what remained of the Khwarazm Shah’s dissolved army. That was the full extent of what their resistance had produced.

Then the population was brought here.

The sorting ran the way it had been refined across a decade of conquest before Bukhara.

Young men of military age to the front. They would march before the next army’s advance in sufficient numbers to absorb the first arrow volleys and make the defenders of the next target hesitate before releasing them. There was no honor in a meat shield. Batu didn’t have the figure for how many. Nobody had kept it.

Craftsmen were pulled next. Metalworkers, masons, carpenters, men who could build siege equipment or cast bronze or fire kilns.

Organized under guard and moved east toward the production centers that ran in support of the main Mongol effort. Some of those men were still alive in those workshops. Some of their sons had been born in those same places and would die there and had never seen Bukhara.

The scholars and administrators who stepped forward and identified themselves, accountants and men who could read and do the sums that taxation required, men who understood irrigation maintenance cycles, were sorted into a third category.

Those men lived if they were convincing about their utility and died if they weren’t convincing enough, or if the officer handling it had run out of patience before he reached them in the line. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Bukhara’s general population made the largest group.

The killing ran across days, organized into work parties the way any large logistical task was organized, because the bodies had to go somewhere and Bukhara’s capacity to absorb them was limited.

The estimates ranged from thirty thousand to a hundred thousand depending on the account, which meant the actual figure sat somewhere inside a range too wide to be precise and too large to be abstract. The people who had lived here had been reduced to a fraction of what they were.

Fifteen years later, the grain merchants and the water seller and the two men arguing over cloth moved across the same ground.

Batu watched a boy run between two stalls and disappear into a side street. He crossed toward the building.

The entrance was open and the students coming out adjusted around the Khar Kheshig riders with the trained reflex of a population that had long since learned to navigate around armed men.

Inside, the air was cooler and carried lamp oil and stone dust and the smell of old manuscripts stored somewhere nearby.

The restoration had kept the main prayer hall functional. The side rooms were in use, stacked manuscript cases against the near wall, a young man copying at a low table with his back to the entrance, his head down and his pen moving steadily, with hours of this work still ahead of him.

At the far end of the prayer hall, an old man sat against the wall with an open text across his knees.

He looked up when Batu entered and did not look away. Every other person in the space that morning had looked and glanced off.

This man looked and stayed looking with the attention of someone who had made a habit of seeing things plainly regardless of what looking cost.

He was well past seventy by the look of him. The skin at his temples and throat had the thinness of age. He wore the dress of a scholar-administrator, clean and maintained.

The garrison rider who had been serving as interpreter since the gate stepped forward and made the necessary introduction in Persian.

The old man listened and then spoke, still looking at Batu rather than the rider.

"He says he was in this building when the army arrived in 1220," the rider said. "He says he wants you to know that before anything else."

Batu looked at him. "What’s his name."

The translation came back. "Dawud ibn Yusuf. Assistant administrator for the eastern granary quarter under the Khwarazmshah. He’s had the same function under three successive Mongol-appointed governors."

Batu sat down across from him. The Khar Kheshig riders took their positions along the walls. The young man copying at the table had stopped copying.

The exchange moved through the interpreter.

Dawud told him what Bukhara had lost without being asked for it.

The population figure was too large for a personal account. He named twelve scholars he had known personally, giving each man’s field and the specific texts they had produced that no longer existed because the texts had gone with the men or burned in the rooms where they were stored.

He named the head of the irrigation administration, a man called Rashid, who had been killed on the second day of what followed because he had hesitated too long when asked to demonstrate his usefulness and the officer questioning him had run out of patience before Rashid found the right words.

He described the senior imam who had gone to the gate to negotiate with the first Mongol officers and had gone down there for the presumption, before the army ever reached the maidan.

He had lived with these names for fifteen years and he carried each one specifically, attached to the day when it last existed.

"How did you survive," Batu said.

Dawud received the question through the rider and answered it without pause.

"I spoke first," the rider translated. "When the officer reached me in the line, I spoke before he could ask me anything. I told him what I administered, what I could administer, and what I was worth. I kept my hands visible and I spoke clearly and I didn’t cry."

A pause while the old man continued.

"The man standing next to me was a poet. A good one. He waited to be asked what he was and he wasn’t asked. There was no use for poets."

Batu said nothing.

"I’ve thought about that man many times," the rider translated.

"He was two steps to my right. If I had been standing where he stood and he had been standing where I stood, I’d be dead and he’d be sitting here."

The lamp oil burned at the far end of the prayer hall.

Outside, through the open entrance, the maidan’s ordinary noise came through in fragments, the water seller’s call, the roll of a cart wheel across stone.

Batu looked at Dawud and Dawud looked back.

Underneath what he was delivering, something else had been running since Batu sat down.

He was watching how Batu received each name, each specific detail of how the sorting had worked, each death that came from a hesitation or a category without space for it. He was watching whether anything landed on Batu’s face.

"You want to know something about me," Batu said.

The translation came back. Then Dawud’s answer.

"I want to know how would you act," the rider said.

"Some commanders prefer that cities burn. It makes the next target afraid, and afraid defenders sometimes open their gates before the army arrives."

A pause.

"Other commanders want what they take to last. The siege costs more when the defenders resist because they know surrender means death, but what you administer afterward is worth administering."

The rider listened as Dawud finished.

"I’ve served under both kinds for fifteen years. I’d like to know which kind I’m looking at now, while I’m still alive to find the answer interesting."

The mosque was still around them. The young man at the copying table had his pen down and his hands flat on the manuscript and was not looking up.

He had made his decision a long time ago.

It was clear and practical and it had nothing to do with mercy.

Ruins couldn’t pay tribute. Dead scholars couldn’t administer. Burned irrigation networks took generations to rebuild and the agricultural production in the interim fed nobody.

Destruction beyond what the objective required was waste, and waste was a failure of planning, and failures of planning compounded.

Intentions and outcomes were different things.

An intention was what a commander carried into a campaign. An outcome was what the campaign produced, and the difference between the two was where armies lost their discipline and campaigns ran past their use and the men carrying out the work stopped distinguishing between the reasons they’d been given.

He had watched it in his previous life.

He had watched it in this one.

The difference between what Genghis intended and what his armies produced at any point could belong to a tumen commander on the ground, or to a single man with a bad morning behind him, or simply to the momentum of a large force that had been in a siege for two months and had lost men to disease and arrows and had been waiting a long time for the walls to come down.

Batu looked at Dawud ibn Yusuf.

"What I’d choose and what I’ll do aren’t the same question," he said. "What I’ll do depends on the resistance."

The translation ran.

The old man was silent for a moment.

Then he nodded once, the small careful nod of a man who has received an honest answer to a question he already knew the true of, given what fifteen years of surviving had taught him about conquerors and what they said when they were being direct.

An answer was what he had given, and answers was the only currency available to a man in Dawud’s position. Dawud had recognized it immediately.

They sat a few minutes more.

Then Batu stood.

Gunnar and Einar fell in behind him as he walked back toward the entrance, the four steppe riders coming off the walls.

Outside, the maidan spread in the morning light with its ordinary work running across the ground where the bodies had gone into the river and the fields and the street.

The stone was the same stone. The earth was the same earth. Time had come and gone across them both and left them where they were.

West of here, the kingdoms he was moving toward were still waiting to see it.

The variable between Bukhara ending as it had ended and Merv ending as it had, a reduced remnant against a ruin with weeds through it, was the clarity of the man giving the orders, and how much of that clarity survived contact with the army executing them.

He was going to be the man giving the orders.