Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 61: What Stands

The physician’s hands were at the shoulder when Khulgen arrived.

The arrow had come out in the field on the march back, the physician having done that work with Batu seated against a horse’s flank on the flat steppe with the light going orange and low.

What remained now was the wound itself, packed with material the physician had soaked in spirits, the muscle damaged deep enough that the man had said the right arm would be restricted for some time.

He was checking his work at the table while Batu held still, the left forearm wrapped from the cut Berke had landed, the document spread out in front of him that Khulgen had just put down.

The camp around them was late afternoon settling into early dark. Cold in a way it had not been at the start of the campaign. Real cold now.

The near-winter had arrived into something harder. The fires were going. The horse lines were full, the animals that had come back from the day’s work standing with their heads down, done.

The wounded were at the healer’s station on the camp’s northern edge. The count there had been running since the first formations came back across the streambed.

Torghul stood on Batu’s left. Dorbei had come in from the camp’s far edge where his force was reorganizing for the assignment. Siban stood to the right.

Khulgen read the streambed figures first.

Across both tumens, Chaidu’s mingan, and Kirsa’s formation, the battle at the streambed had cost nine hundred and fifty dead. Four hundred more could not ride under field conditions.

Six hundred and fifty had wounds they could manage from the saddle.

He set those against the first lower river figures without comment. The comparison made itself.

The enemy count on the streambed field and in the pursuit south ran to approximately eighteen hundred dead. Dorbei’s tumen had pressed the broken center hard and had run it across ground it had no formation to defend.

Eighteen hundred prisoners had been taken when the pursuit caught groups that had separated from the main body and found no other option.

Torghul looked at the prisoners figure.

"We’ll process them in the morning," Batu said.

Khulgen moved to the camp’s western face.

Torghul’s formation had reinforced before the western contingent broke through. The contingent had reached the western face and pushed at it and Torghul’s leading mingans had hit them from the north while the earthworks held from the east.

The cost on the Jochid side had been a hundred and eighty dead, most of them from Torghul’s leading riders who came in fast without full formation.

The western contingent had lost approximately seven hundred dead at the face and on the withdrawal to the ford. Two hundred and fifty more had been taken at the ford when the withdrawal compressed at the crossing and the mingan holding the near bank found them.

The physician pressed something into the wound and Batu held his position. His jaw tightened once and released.

Khulgen laid the full campaign total at the bottom of the arrangement. Both engagements together.

Approximately seventeen hundred and fifty dead across the full arc of the southern campaign.

The camp was still around the table for a moment.

"The liaison rider," Batu said.

Torghul looked up. "He got through. The timing on the signal cost us most of the crossing window. The western contingent had been in the water long enough that we had to commit the drive before they were fully stopped."

He paused. "The doctrine ran. The cost of running it is in those figures."

Batu looked at the total on the table. The doctrine had run its first real engagement and produced the result the plan required and charged the price the crossing under fire had charged.

Both things were true and both were in the accounting.

"Log it," Batu said to Khulgen.

Khulgen noted it.

Batu looked at Dorbei.

Dorbei had been reading the figures throughout. He looked up when Batu’s attention found him. His eyes had the flat settled look of a man with a long winter in front of him.

"Your force stays south," Batu said. "Through winter. The ground from the streambed’s far bank running to whatever boundary Berke’s arrangements reached needs to be Jochid in fact before spring."

"The clans below the streambed had his name on their documents. They get yours." He held the man’s gaze. "Hunt the survivors. Any formed group of his men still operating south of the streambed breaks before the river thaws."

Dorbei took that in without expression. Then he asked the question.

"What does my force have to work with."

Khulgen answered without being directed to.

The raiding parties had stripped the grain stores north of the streambed clean before the battle. Those stores had come north and were in the depot. Dorbei’s force would take half of what was there south across the streambed before the river closed.

The corridor, sealed and running, could carry additional loads down at intervals through winter. It would be slower than summer transit and each party would carry less, but it would run.

Siban spoke then.

"The remaining local clan has winter grazing dependency on the far-bank territory," he said. "Berke managed what they found when they crossed in winter. That management is gone."

He paused. "Dorbei controls what they find now. The clans know it."

Dorbei looked at Siban. Then at Batu.

"Use it," Batu said.

Khulgen had the assignment written before the exchange was finished. He set it in front of Batu. The wolf’s track seal was at his right hand.

The physician moved to the left forearm and began working on the wrap. Batu kept his right hand still on the table edge and brought the left arm up without comment.

The physician unwrapped the cut, assessed it, and began cleaning it.

The feel of the work was specific and present and Batu let it run in the background of his attention while he read Dorbei’s assignment on the felt.

Torghul and the rest returning north with him when the river was still crossable. Dorbei’s authority over ground described by the streambed to the north and by the extent of Berke’s former administrative arrangements below it.

The wolf’s track seal to be honored on all dealings with the third clan and any tributary arrangements Dorbei established in what he had taken.

Batu pressed the seal into the wax at the document’s base.

The mark went into the felt for the first time on ground that had been Berke’s this morning.

Dorbei picked up the document and read it and put it inside his coat.

The others left the table. Torghul to his departure preparation. Dorbei back to the far edge where his men were waiting. Siban to whatever Torghul needed from him before the column formed.

The physician finished with the forearm and wrapped it and said the right arm needed watching on the march north.

Batu nodded once. The physician collected his instruments and went.

Batu stayed at the table.

The camp around him was a formation preparing to split. Torghul’s men sorting equipment on the northern side. Dorbei’s force on the far side, men and horses settling into the arrangement of a formation that knew it was staying when everyone else was going.

The fires burning at both ends. The river somewhere to the north in the dark, still crossable, for a few more days.

The ground was his in ink now as well as in fact. The wolf’s track seal covered it from the lower river crossing to the far bank of the streambed and beyond.

Dorbei’s name was on the arrangement that made it hold through winter.

Berke’s ground had Berke’s structures on it. Clans that had given their arrangements to his name for years. Lines that ran through his knowledge of the land.

Men who had served under him and were now prisoners or scattered or dead. All of it was in what Batu had just sealed.

Taking the ground was the beginning of the work. Making it hold through a winter without the man who had built it, with a force that had never administered a day of it, with clans whose dependency had just rotated from a known name to an unknown one.

The work the spring would judge was how well that rotation held.

He put the physician’s instruction about the wound in the correct part of his attention and stood.

The column north was forming in the morning.