Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 35: Before the Sky

The fire had been burning on the eastern edge since before the watch changed.

Batu came to it in the dark before the men assembled, taking his position at the point the shaman indicated with a brief gesture.

He had stood at this mark before the Tergesh campaign, and before Sarat, and before the march north to the narrows. The mark was the same. It was larger this time, built for a larger departure.

The old man, Buqa, did not acknowledge his arrival. He had been the camp’s shaman since before Batu arrived and his authority in this space ran without requiring confirmation from anyone.

He moved through the preparations at an unhurried pace that had nothing to do with the camp’s daily accounting. His attendant worked the coals with a long-handled implement.

The sky was still dark at its northern edge. Cold came off the ground in the way it did in the hours before dawn, pressing up through the soles of the boots.

The riders arrived in the gray. They came without formation. A campaign departure brought men to this space differently than a column order.

The senior riders found their positions around the fire’s perimeter by long habit. Section commanders settled in behind them.

Torghul arrived and took his position to Batu’s left without speaking. He was the only man in the assembly whose eyes moved to Batu before they moved to the fire. They held a moment and then settled forward.

Buqa opened without announcement.

Eternal Blue Sky, you are above us.The earth that holds our dead holds them in your sight.The ancestors who rode before us watch from where they are.We stand before you at the opening of a march.The column goes south.Hold what we do there in your sight.

The words had a cadence Batu had absorbed through the prior ceremonies without having memorized them.

The men around the fire were still in a specific way. A campaign brought its own kind of attention to a rite that might otherwise be observed by rote.

The column was going south. Every man in the assembly knew the direction and knew who held the ground there. The old words carried that and the stillness in the assembly had it in it.

Batu stood at the edge and watched the ritual do what it was built to do.

He had no problem with any of it. He never had.

The ceremony was moving the men around this fire from the camp’s ordinary function into the specific committed attention a column required. The old man was performing for the men, and they were receiving it, and it was working in the way it worked every time. Completely.

He understood this. He had used ceremony throughout his time in this camp. The wolf’s track seal. The formal register of terms. The specific structure of a written arrangement.

He knew what ceremony did to men and valued it for what it was.

He could see the space the ritual was opening in them. He could see it in their stillness, in the particular cast of their attention, in the way their bodies had settled into positions they had occupied since childhood.

The invocation was asking them to open toward something and they were opening. The words were old. Whatever was asked of the men standing there, they gave it.

Batu’s position at the fire was correct in every visible way. He stood where he was supposed to stand, held what he was supposed to hold.

The interior the ritual required of him was not available.

He had been standing under this sky since the first night, when the bodies were still on the floor of his tent. At Sarat, at the narrows, at every watch between.

Its size was not a question he carried. It had never spoken to him. He had never expected it to.

When Buqa poured the airag into the fire, the flame caught it, briefly higher, the smoke thickening before it returned to its flat eastward run. Batu watched as a man was supposed to watch.

Then Buqa turned to him.

The affirmation was the commander’s part. The purpose of the march named before the heavens, the request made by the man who had ordered the column south.

His attendant brought the vessel. Batu took it with the correct hand, held it at the correct angle, and spoke.

Eternal Blue Sky.The column rides south under your sight.What is ours, we go to confirm it holds.Hold this march.

The words went out into the cold air where the assembled riders received them.

The old man closed it. The final invocation. The last motion over the coals. The cadence that indicated the rite’s end.

The assembly released without announcement. They returned to the preparation ground more composed than they had arrived, carrying the particular attention it had built in them.

Torghul went without speaking, moving toward the command quarter with a full list in front of him before the gates opened. His section commanders followed.

Batu stayed.

The coals burned low. His attendant moved to bank them. The old man completed the closing preparations beside the embers, each step given the same unhurried care he had brought to every part of it.

When he was done he turned and looked at Batu across the dying embers.

The old man had a look that Batu had seen in experienced men reading an unfamiliar situation. Whatever he found in the space between them, he kept it.

He crossed the space between them and stopped two paces out.

"How long have you been away from it," Buqa said.

The question was a practical assessment. An identification, nothing more.

He was asking from the outside of something, identifying the change without needing to name the cause.

Batu looked at him. The true answer was not possible. The honest answer had no form that fit the question.

Some answers had the right shape. An operation gone wrong, a loss that had pulled a man back from its reach, the ordinary distances that opened between a man and his faith across hard seasons. They were the right shape for a different man’s answer.

"A long time," Batu said.

Buqa looked at him for a moment. Then he inclined his head once and walked back toward the attendant and the banked coals.

Batu stood at the eastern edge alone.

The sky was lightening. The dark going gray, the gray taking on the flat pale color of a cold morning.

Behind him the camp was audible. The horse lines, the supply stacks, the sound of a force settling into its departure.

The coals had dropped to nothing visible. The smoke was gone.

The column would leave the eastern gate in less than an hour. It would move south on a timeline Berke had not prepared for.

The preparation was real and the force was real and the direction was correct.

He was also carrying a question that had no available answer. It would ride south with the column. That was the only place it was going. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

He turned and walked back through the camp. The eastern gate was already open.