Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 32: The Terms

The signal took time.

Batu stood at the eastern base and tracked it through the cut by sound.

The rate of release from the heights dropped as the command moved through men who were still in the middle of something and had to read the change and act on it.

Then the ridgeline fire stopped on the eastern face. A breath after that, the western face.

The fighting ran down through the narrows in sections, slower at the western base where Chaidu’s element was still in close contact, faster at the points where the plunging fire had done its work and the mass below it was no longer moving.

A rider came out of the entrance. Unarmed, hands visible, moving at a walk.

Batu walked to meet him at the channel mouth.

"Siban asks for terms," the rider said.

"Siban comes out himself."

The rider returned.

Three minutes passed. Torghul’s depth position was holding the southern flat, the warriors visible in formation across the open ground.

At the western base Chaidu’s riders held their ground, the contracted line still facing the outer edge of the entrance where the external force had been pressing.

Nobody moved toward the passage from either side.

Siban came out on horseback, alone.

He had a cloth binding on his left forearm, wrapped and tied before he rode out.

He stopped six meters from Batu and looked at him with the same flat assessment Batu had seen across a breakfast table months back.

A man reading his position with the same care he’d managed his record, finding now that the record hadn’t been enough.

Batu looked back at him.

"Your force is enclosed. Your arrow supply is gone. The depth position at the south is held."

Siban said nothing.

"Standard tribute terms. The Irtysh detachment resumes its border function under Jochid command authority, no independent operation without written order from this camp.

Your home territory riders are released after weapons collection and tallying."

Batu kept his voice even.

"Penalty levy. Five hundred horses, my selection.

Your senior riders stays in my camp for one season."

"The senior riders," Siban said.

"They go home at the end of the season."

"My men in the channel."

"They come out. The wounded get what my camp can give them. The dead get burial."

Something moved in Siban’s jaw. Brief.

"You take a staff function under Torghul," Batu said. "Five years.

Your pay comes from the Jochid account.

Your detachment stays under the officer I assign it for the same term."

Siban looked at him.

"Davud," Batu said. "The grain merchant from the Kerait post.

He came northeast when the network closed. He’s in your territory."

Siban’s eyes didn’t move.

"He’s delivered to my camp within ten days of your return.

His goods and assets are confiscated on arrival.

Two years in the Jochid supply train after that.

No rank. No independent trading rights when he’s done."

"I don’t know where he is," Siban said.

"Then you find him." Batu held his gaze. "Ten days."

Four seconds.

"It’ll be done," Siban said.

"Torghul handles the weapons collection.

You ride with me until it’s finished."

Siban turned his horse and rode back toward the entrance without another word.

Batu went to find Torghul.

The count took two hours.

Torghul ran the weapons collection at the channel entrance while the ridgeline forces held their positions and Chaidu’s element stayed at the western base until the last of Siban’s external riders had laid their weapons.

Batu moved through the ground with Torghul’s count rider and read the tally as it assembled.

Thirty-five riders from Chaidu’s element were still holding at the western base when the exchange stopped.

Twenty-two dead.

Four more had gone down in the early exchange and been pulled back before the line contracted, too badly wounded to hold their position but alive.

Among them Altai, who had come through the Sarat engagement and rebuilt with the element in the weeks that followed, and Narun and Kesen, both riders who had joined the element after Sarat.

Batu took the remaining names down and kept them.

The mangudai element at the southern point had lost more.

The exchange on open ground south of the narrows had run closer to even, and the count showed it.

Bodai was among the dead. Forty-four in total from that element. Fifty-five wounded.

The ridgeline forces had drawn return fire throughout the full duration of the engagement, archers in the cut shooting upward at men who could drop below the crest between shots but who were themselves targets while drawing.

The skill had been real and the time long enough for it to find results.

Thirty-six dead across both faces. Seventy wounded.

The depth position’s improvised position at the southern flat had been the engagement’s fastest resolution.

The flanking attempt that turned into a frontal press against the full tumen’s main body had broken quickly.

Twenty-eight dead there. Fifty wounded.

The total ran to approximately one hundred and thirty dead.

The wounded count was still assembling as Siban’s riders moved out in organized groups as the tally progressed, but would settle near one hundred and eighty.

The floor of the cut needed no accounting.

More than a thousand dead in the passage alone. The wounded were still being tallied.

Batu held the numbers without reaching past them.

Torghul came to him when the tally was nearly complete.

He had blood on his right sleeve from the depth position’s anchoring and hadn’t addressed it.

Torghul looked at the contracted line. "The western base was two sections short when the flanking attempt came around the south."

"The situation produced the cost," Batu said. "Next time the depth position holds that contingency before the engagement opens."

Torghul held that without arguing with it.

He had the look of a man who’d already run the same numbers and arrived at the same answer.

"The ridgeline fire held longer than the arrow supply should have allowed," he said.

"The supply riders pushed the additional arrows up the slopes the evening before the engagement," Batu said.

"Document it as standard preparation before any ridgeline action.

Penk’s function carries it forward."

Torghul nodded once and went back to the tally.

Batu left the main working ground and walked to a section of the eastern base away from the activity.

The afternoon was past its midpoint.

Siban sat his horse at the entrance and watched without speaking to anyone.

Batu thought about what the engagement produced for Guyuk’s picture.

The Borte-Qol channel would carry it east in whatever form Batu decided it took.

Every node Guyuk had built here was gone.

Chanar, Beke, the Hasal family’s function, the grain chain that had run through Kerait.

What Guyuk held of the western situation was several months out of date on every material point, and it would stay that way for as long as the channel ran clean.

Guyuk’s men would already know the channel had gone dark.

Arslan’s silence was its own signal, and the men around Guyuk were careful.

They would be building a new read from whatever reached them through other routes.

What the narrows had produced would reach them. It would reach them through Berke.

He looked south.

Berke’s territory was well to the south.

The engagement would travel faster than any rider he sent.

Clan riders at the margins, merchants on the circuit roads, the sound of several thousand horses on the northeastern approach and the smoke of fires and the movement of a column going north that had not been seen coming back.

Berke would have a partial account of the outcome before the last of his men had finished clearing the narrows.

Berke had been waiting on one specific thing.

Whether Siban had held, broken, or submitted.

The three outcomes gave him three different situations.

Two of them left him room.

The third changed his position in a way he hadn’t prepared for.

The third one had just finished.

A rider appeared on the steppe south of the tumen’s position, coming up the road from the direction of the lower Ural approach.

Moving fast.

He reached the outer perimeter and was passed through and came toward Torghul’s position at a pace that said the distance behind him had been covered without stopping.

Torghul looked across at Batu.

Batu came over.

The rider was from the Yargach clan.

The headman had sent him north before dawn after seeing a rider on the lower Ural approach road the previous evening.

Moving north. Alone. Fast. No clan markings.

Berke had sent someone north to read the outcome himself.

Batu looked at the channel entrance where Siban still sat his horse, watching the last of his men move through the tally.

By morning, Berke’s rider would reach this ground.

He would find a cleared passage, weapons stacked, Siban’s riders moving under Jochid authority.

He would turn south with that picture.

What Berke built from it, he would build without Siban in it.