Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 67: What Officers Earn

The labor had been running for several days and it showed in the ground.

The timber came from the river margin, carried north in loads by men working in pairs, and the track between the river and the staging area was already worn into the frozen earth from the foot traffic. Each log took two men and most of the morning.

The stone came from the shallower sections of the bank where winter had exposed the larger pieces, dragged up on sleds fashioned from spare timber. The noise carried. Wood on frozen ground. The grinding pull of loaded sleds.

Batu stood at the edge of the working area with his right arm in the sling. Condition, pace, distribution of effort across the line. He read it the same way he assessed a position.

Those who had been fed and given a clear task and no other options moved at the right pace.

The guards at the line’s edges were attending to the work, eyes on the labor, which told him the sorting had held. Those under load were the ones who had been put under load. The ones with specific value were elsewhere.

Khulgen was at his left with the small felt pad he carried for field notes.

"The man at the far end of the second line," Khulgen said. "The one handling the stone sled on the left side. He was a depot keeper before Berke’s formation absorbed his clan. He can read and write in the Uighur hand. He’s been logging the staging counts since the second day."

Batu looked at the man. Stocky, middle age. He moved through the line directing the flow of it.

"Who told him to track the counts."

"Nobody," Khulgen said.

Batu said nothing. He kept looking at the line.

"There’s a second one," Khulgen said. "Younger. He’s been directing the timber stacking at the north edge of the staging area. He’s organizing load types. Heavier material on the bottom, lighter on top, the whole stack angled for drainage. He’s worked construction before."

The younger man was moving between the stacks, reading the stack as a structural problem. He said something to the worker beside him, pointing at an angle of the stack, and the worker adjusted without argument.

"Keep both of them off the heavy load rotation," Batu said. "Put them where they’re already working."

Khulgen noted it.

They stood for a moment longer. The line kept moving. Unglamorous, consistent, the sound of work that would only ever be the foundation of something else.

"This runs under you from here," Batu said. "The labor, the groundwork, the staging. When the ground thaws you’ll have what you need at the site."

Khulgen looked at him. "The guards on the labor line. Do they report to me or to the tumen duty rotation."

"To you for this assignment. Military judgment is their own. Everything else comes through you."

Khulgen nodded once. He did not ask what came next for him or how long the assignment would run.

He had been Batu’s logistics and intelligence function from the start. He knew what being handed something meant.

Batu turned and walked back toward the command quarter.

The camp ran its winter rhythm around him. The horse lines. The cook fires going against the cold. The perimeter pairs on their rotation.

He sent a rider for Torghul and a second for Siban before he reached the tent entrance, then went inside and sat.

The lamp was burning low. He did not trim it.

He had been turning the officer problem over for longer than this winter, alongside the campaign’s larger demands. Certain things accumulated in the working layer of his attention until there was space to address them properly.

The narrows had shown him the first edge of it. The timing gap between what the relay cycle carried and what the field actually required. That was partly Penk’s function and Penk had corrected it.

Underneath the relay gap was something Penk’s function did not address and could not address.

At the lower river’s first battle, Chaidu’s riders had taken the worst of the junction casualties when the relay timing gap put its cost there. The system had failed.

The lesson that came out of it was different from the cause.

Even with a clean relay, the jaghun commanders holding that flank needed something the relay could not carry. The capacity to read the larger shape of what was forming around them and act before the signal arrived.

A jaghun commander’s function was his section. See it clearly. Report before acting.

Teachable, testable, and demonstrably absent in those who had survived three engagements without it.

The problem was that survival had become the measure.

It was an understandable measure. A man who had come through the Sarat ridge and the narrows and the two lower river battles had demonstrated something real.

He had held the line when the line needed holding and come home with his men and kept his rank intact.

Holding a line and commanding the next were different demonstrations.

The European campaign was going to run for years on ground he had never walked, through formations he had never met, with supply lines longer than anything he had stretched so far.

The officers in those formations were going to be deciding things he could not supervise and could not correct in time if they decided wrong.

Those filling the jaghun ranks in year three of that march were going to be selected by a process that ran whether he was present or not.

Either that process was built on something real, or it ran on proximity and attrition the same way it always had, and the gaps it produced would show up in engagements where he did not have enough margin to absorb them.

Written standards named what demonstrated competence looked like at each level.

A jaghun commander who had shown he could read a section of the field clearly under pressure and report before he acted, three times, on real ground. That was a man who had earned the next consideration.

A mingan commander who had shown he could hold his formation’s interval and read the junction gap before it opened, without Batu or Torghul pointing at it. That was a man who could be trusted further from the center.

The standards existed independently of who was watching. They ran on the formation.

The relay protocol was the model. Systematic, regardless of the individual.

The friction was already visible before the framework was written. Some officers currently holding rank had earned it the old way. Through survival and proximity and the accumulated trust of those beside them.

Most of them were good enough. Some fell short of what came next and would fail a written evaluation clearly. They would feel that failure as an insult to everything they had come through.

The feeling had its own validity. What they had come through was real. The standard ran on accuracy regardless.

Torghul would carry the implementation. He had to.

He was the one with the respect of the formation and the authority to enforce what the evaluation produced.

He had also earned his own position through exactly the measure Batu was about to formalize, which meant he could not honestly argue against the standard.

It described what he already did.

That would not make the carrying easy.

Some of those who did not pass were commanders Torghul had eaten from the same fire with. Those he had led through the narrows and watched hold their section when the ridge was loud and the arrows were coming from two directions.

He knew them. He was going to have to tell them what they had not yet become.

Siban was a different instrument.

Five years under Torghul’s command, administrative function, no personal history with the Jochid officer corps that predated his submission.

He had read the formation’s records in enough detail to know who was doing what at every level. He could draft the framework honestly, and those whose names appeared in it had no claim on his loyalty that would make him soften the language.

The conclusion was already set.

What Batu needed from Torghul and Siban was the specificity.

The framework had to be written by those who knew the formation from the inside, and the inside of the formation at the officer level was something Batu knew through engagements.

Torghul and Siban lived inside the daily texture of command and administration. That knowledge had to come from them.

He sat with it.

The lamp threw steady light across the empty table.

Outside the camp was audible, the sound of a winter day in the middle of its afternoon hours, the horse lines and the distant noise of the labor and the perimeter pairs on their circuits.

Torghul came through the entrance first.

A moment later, Siban.

Batu looked at them both and said nothing yet.

The problem was here.

He was about to give it to the two men who would carry it.