Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 63: Eighteen Hundred

Batu came through the eastern gate at first light with his right arm in the sling and his breath rising white in the still air. No one with him. He stopped inside the perimeter and read the ground before he moved.

The prisoners were held on the camp’s eastern ground, the area farthest from the horse lines and the supply depot. Eighteen hundred men in the open overnight.

The frost had come down hard again after midnight and the cold had done most of the guarding work. They sat in clusters or stood in groups, the ones who had slept poorly moving to stay warm, the ones who hadn’t given up on sleep yet still wrapped in whatever they had.

The guards were there but the guards were almost ceremonial. Eighteen hundred men with no horses and no weapons in the middle of a formed camp were not going anywhere.

The clustering had happened without direction. Senior riders near the eastern edge, keeping some distance from the others. A habit of rank that survived captivity.

Common riders in the larger mass toward the center. A scattering along the northern face who had separated from both groups and were sitting alone or in pairs.

The loners told him something. Riders who separated from their own kind in a situation like this were either thinking hard about their options or had already decided their options were gone.

He started with the senior riders.

The man who came up to meet him was in his forties, broad through the chest, with the posture of someone who had spent a career giving orders and was not going to stop carrying himself that way because the orders had stopped. He had a cloth binding on his left hand, wrapping two fingers. His face was composed.

"Mingan commander," Batu said.

"Was," he said. His voice was flat. He had thought about how to conduct himself and was within it.

"The raiding," Batu said. "How long before the battle did you know the stores north of the streambed were gone."

The man looked at him. "One week before we moved. Riders came back with nothing to show and a long report of what the parties had taken." He paused. "Berke knew by then that he was fighting for empty ground."

"And he moved anyway."

"The men hadn’t been paid for weeks. With winter of that and they stop being a formation." A pause. "He moved because staying was already finished."

He said it without accusation. He was naming what had happened the way a man names something he has been carrying for a while and no longer needs to protect.

"Your name," Batu said.

"Ochir." He said it without emphasis, placing it on the ground between them.

Batu moved on.

The common riders in the center mass were harder to read because they many and similar. Riders between twenty and forty who had ridden where they were pointed for years without accumulating enough history to leave a mark on their faces.

He stopped near a man sitting alone against a post, not asleep, watching the camp activity with unhurried eyes.

"Where were you in the line," Batu said.

The man looked up. "Third rank. Left side."

"The whole engagement."

"Most of it. My horse went down in the end." He shrugged one shoulder. "Was on foot the rest of it."

Batu looked at him. The man held the look without challenge. He was simply there, answering what was asked.

"What do you want," Batu said.

The man blinked. He sat with it honestly for a moment.

"Somewhere to sleep that isn’t frozen ground," he said. "My horse back, if it’s still alive."

He said it without irony. That was the full extent of his immediate desire. Batu believed him.

He found the man with the hands near the center of the mass, sitting cross-legged with his palms resting on his knees.

The calluses were specific. They ran at the base of the right index finger and along the inside of the thumb, the pressure marks of long work with a stylus. The base of his right thumb showed the depth of it.

He was watching Batu come toward him and he had been watching since Batu cleared the gate.

"Supply records," Batu said.

The man’s expression moved slightly.

"Forward depot at the secondary channel," he said. "A few years."

"What were you tracking."

"Arrow allocation. Fodder by unit. Movement schedules." He paused. "Everything that went south from Berke’s main stores."

"In your head or on felt."

"Felt. All of it." A pause. "I don’t know where any of it is now."

He held the look and said nothing.

It was understood.

One more. He was the youngest face Batu had stopped at. Twenty, perhaps less, with the kind of attention in his eyes that said he had grown up in a tribe that rewarded watching carefully and saying the right thing to the right person at the right time.

He was near the northern edge of the mass, sitting with two others near his age.

"How long under Berke’s command," Batu said.

"Since I was old enough to ride in formation."

"And before that."

"My father’s arban. Same command. He died at the lower river."

He said it plainly. Batu noted it and moved past it.

"What happens next," Batu said.

The young man answered without hesitation.

"Berke regroups in the south. He’s got ground still, and he knows the terrain better than anyone. When spring comes..."

He stopped. He had read Batu’s face, or perhaps he had simply heard his own words.

He looked at the ground. The certainty in his voice was gone.

Batu moved on without filling the silence.

Another man near the eastern edge. He had placed himself at the edge of the senior riders’ cluster. Close enough that their gravity read as his. Far enough that none of them had moved him on.

He was in his thirties, lean, with a rider’s build, and when Batu came to him he said he had been a supply courier on Berke’s eastern route.

He said it smoothly. The kind of smooth that came from having decided on the story before anyone asked.

Batu looked at his hands.

The bow callus on his right index finger was deep and old. The inside of his left forearm had the specific wear pattern of a man who had drawn a heavy composite bow several thousand times over several years, the skin thickened along the edge from the string.

A courier’s hands looked different.

"The eastern route," Batu said.

"Yes."

"Heavy use," Batu said, looking at the forearm.

The man’s eyes moved to his own arm and came back. A fraction of a second. Enough.

"The road is rough," he said.

Batu said nothing. He looked at the man for a moment with the same flat attention he gave everything and moved on.

The lie was useful regardless. Someone who read a situation fast and constructed a response to serve himself was raw material.

He completed his path along the northern face.

The loners here were a different kind from the man who had wanted his horse back. These had separated from both groups by design.

Some of them had the closed faces of those who had decided to give nothing to anyone until they understood what giving cost them. Some had not slept. Their faces showed it.

Two were clearly injured. A man with a wrapped shoulder was managing his breathing carefully. Another sat at an angle that protected his left side.

He marked the injured men and kept moving. The physician would get to them. That was a different accounting.

He came back out through the eastern gate and crossed toward the command quarter.

Khulgen was at the supply depot going through the morning tallies, the felt spread across the outer table and a lamp burning low despite the morning light.

He looked up when Batu approached.

"The records man," Batu said. "Near the center of the mass, sitting cross-legged. A few years running the forward depot at the secondary channel. Arrow allocation and movement schedules on felt." He paused.

"And Ochir. The mingan commander with the bound fingers. And a third. Lean rider near the eastern edge, mid-thirties. He claimed a supply courier’s work but his hands said otherwise."

Khulgen was writing.

"Separate enclosure," Batu said. "Away from the main body. Fed and sheltered."

"When."

"This morning."

Khulgen noted it. He did not ask what the separate enclosure was for.

He finished writing and looked up.

"The rest of the eighteen hundred," he said. "Do you want them sorted before I start moving them?"

"I’ll tell you how to sort them before the end of the day."

Khulgen folded the felt and went to find the guards.

Batu stood at the edge of the depot for a moment.

The camp was running its morning functions around him. The horse lines, the cook fires, the relay riders on their first routes. All of it ordinary.

He had walked through the full count and talked to five prisoners.

The records man knew how to track allocation. Ochir could tell him how Berke’s logistics had failed and why.

The man with the courier’s lie had a talent for reading situations and constructing responses that served him.

All three were raw material for something.

What that something was could wait for Khulgen’s return.

The problem was already taking shape.