The ger was cold by the time the competition closed and Batu returned to it. He sat and let thought over the competition. Five wins, one loss, the last match taken from him by a man from the Borjigin outer camps who had watched all five prior matches before entering and had known exactly how to fight him.

The loss had arrived at the end of the afternoon when his body had already given most of what it had. It was predictable. The decision to compete past the fifth match had been a move with a known cost attached to it, and the cost had arrived on schedule.

He looked back at it for what it was and moved on.

Einar had won ten consecutive matches. The information sat in the head of every prince who had been at the wrestling ground, and they were all about to sit down to eat together.

Suuqai was at the entrance when Batu stood.

They walked to the feast ground as the last of the afternoon light was going horizontal across the valley, the Orkhon catching it in flat gold sections to the east.

The cook fire smell reached them long before the feast ground was visible, mutton and horse fat and the density of fuel burned in large quantity, a smell that had no equivalent in any enclosed space, only in open air with tens of thousands of people sharing it simultaneously.

The feast was already in full voice when they came through the outer approach.

The Great Khan sat at the head with a cup already present, and the cup had been refilled before Batu had taken three steps into the ground’s perimeter. Ogedei drank the way he did everything at occasions like this, without any urgency and with no apparent ceiling.

The Empresses were at their designated positions to his right, the senior household in the order the tradition required. The princes occupied their section by line and seniority, and the men who had spent their careers understanding what table placement communicated were watching it continuously.

The assembly staff had a man standing at the near side with a felt record of the day’s awards. He found the first name on his list and called it across the feast ground in a carrying voice.

"Champion of the first day’s wrestling competition. Ten victories. The representative of the Jochid western ulus. Einar."

The name sat in the feast ground for a moment awkwardly, a Scandinavian syllable heard aloud by ten thousand people who had no prior context for it.

Then the shouting came up from the Jochid section’s with enough force to establish the fact of the thing, and from various points across the ground men who had been at the wrestling area added to it.

The morin khuur player at the feast’s eastern part kept his rhythm without adjustment because he was a professional and had heard stranger things called out at these gatherings.

Batu moved into the feast.

Orda had found a position adjacent to the table section where Arghun’s riders had been placed. He was not speaking to Arghun directly. He was simply present, at close range.

Arghun was watching him from the corner of his awareness with cautious attention. He understood he was being shown something and was deciding what to do about it.

Tangqut was three tables further along with a cup in his hand and the look of a man who had received a real command and knew it. He was talking to a rider from one of the minor Kipchak contingents with the easy sociability that the feast made appropriate.

Toqa-Timur had found the table cluster where the princes with eastern steppe interests sat, men whose futures touched the Crimean routes and the Caucasus. He was doing there what a man with a formal written promise about those territories would naturally do among men who didn’t have one yet.

Siban sat at the brothers’ main table with his cup held loosely and his eyes moving across the ground at intervals without anything performing in them.

He was the brother who had come back in from the outside, the same as Berke, but from a different kind of outside, and his presence at the table felt right to who understood it. He said something to the rider beside him that Batu couldn’t hear across the distance, and the rider laughed.

Berke was at the table’s far end. He was eating. That was all. His being there was the important part, and he understood that, and he did nothing to expand it.

"He’s still being watched," Suuqai said, at the level of a voice meant for one set of ears.

"Who’s with him?"

"Daichi has it covered from the east. He won’t be able to move without being known."

Batu looked at the mutton on the plate someone had placed in front of him without his noticing.

The precaution had been his order. A man newly accepted into the faction, whatever the circumstances, was a man whose outside connections were not fully mapped.

Watching Berke through the feast period through Khar Kheshig riders was not suspicion of a specific thing. It was the same logic as the three-layer screen, you knew what was there before it became information you needed to have had earlier.

"Keep it running," Batu said. "All three days."

Across the feast ground, at a table position near the Great Khan’s establishment that was itself to show about the regard in which the court held him, Mongke was visible.

Batu considered an approach and dismissed it at the same breath.

Every pair of eyes at this gathering tracked movement through the feast ground’s senior sections, and a conversation between the Jochid senior prince and the Toluid faction’s leader at the first feast of the kurultai would be watched by all of them before either man had finished sitting down.

The private meeting required a different time and a different approach. He noted the position and kept moving.

Subutai was three tables to Mongke’s left.

He was compact through the chest and wide through the shoulders, the physique built by decades of the demands a campaign commander placed on a body.

He was past sixty and it showed in his face, the lines cut deep and the skin carrying the texture of ten thousand mornings in cold air. His eyes were watching the feast ground in the manner of someone who could not stop reading terrain regardless of what kind of terrain was in front of him.

He looked at Batu coming toward him before Batu had closed half the distance.

Batu sat down across from him.

Neither man performed anything about the fact that every faction observer at the gathering was now tracking this table.

"The western campaign," Subutai said. He said it the way he would have said it to one of his own staff officers, directly. "The terrain past the Carpathian passes. What’s your thoughts on the supply requirement?"

"Twelve months minimum from the Volga to the deepest point the campaign reaches," Batu said. "The vanguard can’t live off the land beyond a certain depth. The population density drops and what’s there has already been taken by the time the rear force arrives."

Subutai’s eyes stayed on him. "I’ve the same opinion. The difference between this campaign and the Rus operation is the distance from a loyal base."

"And the walls."

"And the walls," Subutai said.

He drank from his cup and set it down.

"The Rus cities, timber behind earthwork, gates designed for the steppe approach’s limitations. I have doctrine for those."

He looked at the cup. "Everything I’ve read on the western fortifications says they’re built from a different assumption. With stone from the base up, designs that account for siege from people who have been doing it longer than we have."

"The accounts are accurate," Batu said. "The walls at the deepest point of the campaign will be a categorically different problem from Kozelsk or Vladimir. The siege doctrine that reduced those cities in weeks will stall in front of them."

Subutai was quiet for a moment.

"Then we need something that addresses stone specifically," he said. "Which means equipment and the men who know how to use it, and those men aren’t on the steppe."

"No," Batu said. "They’re in Kashgar and in the cities east of there and in the Khorasan settlements. I’ve made deals for some of them."

Subutai looked at him with the attention of a man reassessing a picture he had already completed.

He looked past Batu briefly at the Khar Kheshig riders posted nearby. Suuqai visible nearby, two steppe riders beyond him, and further out the unmistakable profile of Einar standing at the margin of the feast ground.

"Your guard," Subutai said. "The foreign part. I’ve been looking at it since your tumen arrived." He set his hands flat on the table.

"Why no clan ties anywhere in the formation? The steppe riders I can understand for, but why bring northern men into a guard unit rather than have them separately as a specialist force?"