Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 75: The Pieces on the Table

The tent had the lamp and the summons and nothing else.

Batu pulled the map board from beneath the table’s edge and set it in the center. Carved wood, the terrain marked in low relief, the plains and river lines and general distances between the western steppe and Karakorum indicated in shallow cuts.

He had used it since before the southern march. The pieces came from a leather pouch beside it, carved in the same functional way, each one distinguished by a notch or a mark, functional and plain. He emptied the pouch and left the figures in a loose pile at the board’s edge.

He picked up the largest and set it in the west.

That was the Jochid position. Three tumens with campaign experience, an administrative apparatus under the wolf’s track seal, census riders in the field, and a capital site marked in the frozen ground east of the camp that would break ground in spring.

A man arriving at the kurultai as the command already in place asked for ratification, for the decision to be acknowledged as already made. The distinction was everything. He considered it for a moment and then left it where it was.

Orda’s figure went to the right of it. A smaller carving, set close.

He thought about what Siban had said. Orda reads power.

He had made his standing before any of this began and he had not moved from it. The argument to him was simple, the Jochid line’s coherence against the alternative, which was absorption.

That argument had to arrive in Orda’s hands in writing before he reached Karakorum, long before the council table formed around him and the pressure of the room began to affect his reading. The administrative record, the wolf’s track documents, the tribute tallies.

The evidence of what the western territories looked like from the inside. Orda walked into the kurultai knowing what he was standing behind, and he stood.

Riders went east this week. Before the ground thawed.

He picked up a figure for Siban and placed it near his own.

Siban had committed an hour ago. The Irtysh assessment had been delivered to Torghul. Davud was in camp.

The eastern merchant contacts had been transferred to Orel’s function. The bulk of the work was done.

A man who had completed his primary obligations and who carried the specific standing of a Jochid prince who had fought against Batu at the narrows and now stood beside him, that man arriving in Karakorum ahead of the kurultai carried its own argument without saying a word.

Batu added a figure for Berke at the board’s far edge. Neither on the table nor off it.

He did not move it.

Then he placed the figures for the minor princes, scattered around the board’s perimeter in the loose arrangement that reflected their actual situation. Each one ran his own schemes against the two poles that were forming.

Guyuk had been working these men through the provincial network for some time. Some of them were already counted.

Others were watching to see which reading of the situation turned out to be accurate, which was its own kind of answer, and they would move toward the reading that looked strongest when the room assembled.

What the room saw when Siban arrived and the western record was laid on the council table would be different from what Guyuk had told them to expect.

The deception operation had given Guyuk a weakened Batu struggling through winter.

The gap between that picture and the visible reality was what he intended to use.

He set a figure for Guyuk at the board’s eastern end and left a space between it and the Jochid position.

Then he held a piece for the old general and looked at it for a moment before setting it in the space between the two poles, apart from both.

Subutai. The old general had spent his career in the service of the empire’s strategic function, and the empire’s strategic function was conquest.

The western campaign was the only conquest that remained at scale.

A man who had designed more campaigns than any other commander alive and who was still alive did not arrive at a kurultai as a political actor. He arrived as the answer to the question of how the next war got won.

Engaging him with specifics before the kurultai was a professional act, and the right one.

A brief letter to his staff, an introduction and an invitation to meet during the kurultai to discuss the western campaign routes. An opening of a professional conversation, nothing more, between a field commander who had fought the western ground and a field commander who had studied it.

The old general would read the question as the question it was.

Batu set the figure between the blocs and moved to the one he had been holding back.

He picked up the Toluid figure and held it for a long time.

The Jochi question ran under everything he was building.

He had read it in the body’s memory from the first night, whose legitimacy half the empire still whispered about behind cupped hands, and it had not changed.

The wolf’s track seal and the census riders and the three tumens answered a different question. They documented what existed.

The legitimacy question, the murmur about Jochi’s origins, ran in a register those documents could not reach.

The steppe prospect sat unformalized.

The arrangement proposed through the camp’s senior men before his consciousness arrived, a well-positioned western noblewoman, the kind of match that produced clan alliance and no controversy.

He had given no answer because any answer was premature.

At the kurultai he would indicate the western situation had required postponement and that he intended to formalize it after the campaign opened. That expectation remained alive in the political air.

It kept certain men from asking the next question.

The next question was answered differently.

A daughter of Tolui’s house.

Genghis’s youngest and favored son, the line whose blood was unquestioned by anyone in the empire.

Joined to the Jochid line through Batu. His children would carry both.

The murmur about Jochi’s origins was irrelevant once the blood in the next generation was unambiguous.

A Toluid marriage alliance was the only answer that sealed the legitimacy question permanently, sealing it in the generation that would actually need it, the generation that would govern the western territories when the western campaign was done.

He set the Toluid figure near the kurultai position and looked at the board.

The marriage was part of the exchange.

The other part was what the Toluid line received from it.

He had been looking past this piece for a long time.

Now he looked at it directly.

Ogedei habits made his death a constant possibility.

The question of who followed him had been the subtext of every political move in the empire for some time.

Guyuk’s bloc, the provincial lobbying, the assassination contract that had sent three men into his camp. All of it was preparation for the succession question.

The kurultai called for campaign planning was also and primarily a kurultai about who was next.

Guyuk succeeding was the problem Batu had been designing against from the beginning.

A Guyuk succession meant centralization, meant recall, meant a Great Khan who had already reached into the western steppe to kill Batu and would reach again from a position of formal authority.

There was no western separation in that world that did not become a war.

The Toluid line had every reason to resist that outcome.

Mongke, Tolui’s eldest, capable and cold, could not stop it without someone who had enough influence to move the Mongolian factions.

The Jochid princes at the kurultai held a plurality, a specific leverage.

The western campaign could not be authorized without them, and the man who controlled the western campaign question controlled the kurultai’s central business.

Withholding that authorization was the act that mattered.

Delivering it to the Toluid bloc, and through it making Mongke the most likely successor, was the kingmaker play.

Mongke became Great Khan of the East.

Mongke owed Batu the throne.

The western separation became an arrangement between two great khans who had reached a settlement before the campaign began.

A formal division of what the empire was too large to govern from a single center.

The east framed as the sacred ancestral homeland. The west as the imperial frontier requiring its own permanent authority.

Each line governing its half by right of competence and by the blood of the Eternal Blue Sky.

The schism was the outcome.

Mongke was the instrument that made it survivable.

Batu set his own figure beside the Toluid marker.

He did not merge them.

The alliance took form at the kurultai.

Winter was for the approach.

What could be done now was the approach.

The approach needed a contact into the Toluid inner circle that moved without touching any structure inside this camp.

Siban knew the eastern court, but Siban had committed to the Jochid cause as he understood it, unified and strong, a bloc at the council table.

The version he had committed to was accurate as far as it went.

If he knew the kingmaker play existed, he would read it correctly as a far greater risk than anything he had assessed so far.

He was going east as a representative.

The full design stayed here.

The eastern court circles held that person somewhere, someone whose movement between factions had gone unremarked across multiple succession crises.

He was in Karakorum, and Siban would carry nothing about this in the letters he brought.

Batu looked at the board.

The pieces sat in their positions.

The Jochid bloc in the west, the minor princes scattered, Guyuk at the eastern end, the old general between the blocs, the Toluid figure near the council position, his own figure beside it.

The Orda marker close and committed. Siban’s marker near his own.

He swept the pieces to the edge without putting them away.

The map underneath showed the western territories in carved relief. He had been looking at this board since before the Tergesh campaign.

The ground it showed was the same ground it had always shown.

More of it was his now.

He reached for felt and a stylus and began to write. Three documents.

The first for Orda, administrative record, tribute tallies, the wolf’s track seal documents, Siban carrying it east this week.

The second for the old general’s staff, an introduction and an invitation to meet during the kurultai to discuss the western campaign routes. A professional question from one field commander to another.

The third was a working list, the things Siban would carry east and the things that required a different hand entirely.

The list was short.

The implications ran deep.

Outside, the camp ran its evening cycle.

The horse lines, the cook fires, the sound of several thousand men moving through the end of a day.

The lamp on the table burned low.

He set the stylus down and looked at what he had written and then looked at the board with its pieces at the edge and the map beneath them.

The kurultai was in summer.

It was winter now.

There was time, and there was the specific kind of time that could not be recovered once it passed, and he had learned since the first night in this body to know the difference between them.

He picked up the stylus again.