Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 51: What Winter Finds

The frost had come in hard overnight. The horse lines were iced at the trough edges and the grass beyond the earthworks stood white and stiff in the early light.

Batu walked the northern face of the fortifications and felt the cold carrying a different quality than it had carried during the crossing, during the battle, during the weeks of raiding. The flat smell of it sat in the air.

The camp was running its morning routine. Penk’s relay pairs were on their routes, their horses’ breath rising white. The outer screen had gone out before the frost lifted.

Since the road engagement, Berke had sent riders north twice, each time a small probing body that reached Kirsa’s outer screen, found it solid, and came back south with nothing.

Each time they returned without contact, the picture Berke held of the camp’s position ran on what his riders had failed to find.

A screen that turned them before they reached anything and a camp they couldn’t see told him the same thing, and the picture was the same either way.

The raiding parties were done. The stores north of the streambed were empty. The animals had been driven back toward camp in groups over the weeks since the battle and were in Jochid hands or were gone to buyers moving east.

The arrangement with Yusuf controlled every trader at the lower river. Each one who came through with cargo moved under the wolf’s track seal, with no counter-document from Berke to cite. The lower river was Jochid ground and every merchant using it operated on that fact.

He was standing at the northern earthwork when Khulgen found him.

"Yusuf is at the outer perimeter," Khulgen said. "He arrived from the river crossing at first light. He’s alone."

Batu looked at the pale grass. The field camp. In frost. Alone.

He turned from the earthwork. "Bring him to the command tent."

Yusuf came in without attendants and sat down. He set his hands on the table and looked at Batu.

"The routes coming in from the Bulgar side have been difficult," he said. "Traders who ran the northern routes are pulling back.

The passes at Bulgar land’s eastern edge are carrying a different kind of traffic. Men moving families. Animals driven west. The kind of movement that precedes something larger."

Batu said nothing.

"I’ve been on these routes long enough to read the difference," Yusuf said. He looked at the table. "What’s coming from the east isn’t commerce."

Batu let him get there.

"The document," Yusuf said. "The guarantee. The seal on it is yours."

"Yes," Batu said.

"When Karakorum forces move through Bulgar land, a campaign force answers to its own commanders.

A merchant carrying this guarantee is carrying a piece of felt that force has no standing reason to honor."

"The wolf’s track belongs to the Jochid line," Batu said. "Karakorum uses its own mark. The arrangement stands on the authority that issued it."

Yusuf looked at the table. "A Karakorum commander in the field won’t stop to check the administrative record."

"The administrators who follow the army will," Batu said. "The agreement is written for the men who come after. That’s who it needs to stand against."

Yusuf was still for a moment. The answer he’d gotten was the only real one available and he had known that before he rode north.

He’d ridden to this camp to hear it said directly.

"My network," he said. "The traders who operate under the arrangement. They’ll need to know the document’s standing when the ground changes."

"Make sure every copy has a clean impression of the seal," Batu said. "The wolf’s track. If a copy is missing it, have it re-stamped before spring."

Yusuf nodded once.

"The crossing," he said. "When it closes for the ice and when it opens again. Does the rate carry through that gap?"

"The rate is fixed," Batu said. "Whatever the crossing does in winter, the rate is the same when it opens."

Yusuf stood.

"I’ve done business all my life without a guarantee in writing," he said.

He left without further exchange.

Batu sat with the conversation after he was gone. Yusuf’s network ran east into the Bulgar approaches and west through the corridor and north along the river routes.

A man who had read the traffic on those passes and ridden to this camp in frost had also confirmed what Batu had already assembled.

The eastern direction was filling. The campaign would come in its own time, under Karakorum’s authority, and move through the Bulgar lands the way a flooding river moves through low ground.

The wolf’s track was the instrument that would survive it. That was what Batu had built it for, back in the command tent when Orel had asked which mark to use and Batu had chosen the one that didn’t depend on Karakorum’s backing to function.

He found Siban at the relay station in the afternoon, going through the morning screen reports.

Siban looked up when Batu stopped in front of him.

"Berke’s men," Batu said.

Siban set the report down. "His commanders haven’t been paid since before the lower river. In his command, that means his men forage on their own or they’re kept together by the promise of what a final engagement produces."

He paused. "He keeps them together regardless. His discipline has run through everything since the river."

"Then he moves," Batu said.

"He moves," Siban said. "Soon. A force kept in the field without pay starts making its own decisions around now. He knows it as well as anyone." He looked at the reports. "He doesn’t have another answer."

Batu left him at the relay station. The frost was coming back in as the light dropped, the grass stiffening again at the track edges.

The cold had a permanence to it now that the earlier cold hadn’t carried.

At the next day, he was at the table working through supply figures when the tent entrance opened before first light. Kirsa’s voice, flat and even.

"My outer pair came in during the second watch," Kirsa said. "A formed body is moving north from the streambed. My rider put it at several thousand."

Batu set the document down.

"It’s moving toward the river," Kirsa said.

Batu stood.