The fires at the ceremony ground’s center had been burning for an hour before the shaman spoke, and in that hour the gathering settled into itself the way a vast body of water settled after all that had been thrown into it had stilled.

The plain was flat in every direction, its extent enormous, dark as when the last trace of summer light had gone entirely from the western horizon and the stars had come fully into their own. From where Batu stood, what he saw felt as mass, as the compressed density of tens of thousands of bodies and animals around a center point, firelight catching in fragments at the nearest faces and dying before it reached the rows behind them. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

He stood among the Jochid princes in the position their standing required, those around him close enough that he could hear the way each one breathed. Orda was a step to his left. Siban to his right.

The ground under his boots was summer steppe grass, the blades dry and pressed flat by the footfall of all that had moved across this plain since dawn. Wood smoke rose from above and carried with it the sweetness of dried dung fuel burning slow and low, and underneath that the animal heat of horses standing at its outer margin by the tens of thousands, their breath rising in pale columns in the cooler air that came off the steppe after full dark.

The airag had been set out in vessels at the four approach points, and the scent of it reached him from the south-facing vessel closest to the Jochid position, sour and alive, the steppe’s own ferment in large quantity.

He had been to gatherings like this before. In this body, he had stood at the center of two of them and understood with precision what each one did to those around him.

This was the first time he stood inside as one between many.

The shaman began.

He was the Great Khan’s chief shaman, a different order of figure from any camp shaman, and the first word of the invocation came across the open air with the a roughness of a voice long projected into open space in total dark.

The word arrived to Batu a half-beat after it left the shaman’s mouth. The distance between that fire and where the Jochid princes stood was wide enough that the sound traveled across it in a perceptible span, the open air adding a fraction of time between the speaking and the receiving.

Möngke Tengri. Eternal Blue Sky.

The words went out in the Mongolian ceremonial dialect, older in its form than the spoken tongue of the camp. They reached the full circumference of what stood there at different moments, each section receiving them in the sequence the distance required, the invocation moving outward until the dark took them.

You are above us. You were above those who came before us. You are witness to what is gathered here.

The shaman’s attendants went to the vessels. The libation for the south went first, the airag poured out onto the ground in a long slow motion, and it sharpened in the warm air and mixed with the fire smoke.

Then west. Then north. Then east, the final direction completing the rite, the sky above each quarter of the plain named and acknowledged in turn.

The mass lived through it.

That hush arrived with the ceremony, the same way it had always done it in the camps Batu had watched since he had been in this body, but on the scale of the full kurultai it had its own kind of pressure, tens of thousands present and the animals with them all arriving at the same cessation simultaneously.

Above, the crackling went across all of it with a clarity that would not have been possible inside a normal camp’s noise.

He stood and let it run over him.

The shaman’s invocation rose toward its close. The ancestral names came in their order.

Genghis Khan, whose bones rested in the earth to the east, named as the heritage source and its witness from wherever the earth has him.

The princes were named in their line, each addressed in their collective role, the body gathered there consecrated for the work ahead.

The western campaign was the Great Khan’s to name. The shaman’s part was to open the witness, to call the sky into its attending role and establish that what was done in this space was done under it and would be watched by it.

Then the shaman held his arms at his sides and waited.

What came up from the plain was a sound from every direction at once.

Tens of thousands of voices in the same instant, the collective acknowledgment of a full kurultai rising from its full circumference simultaneously, arriving from all sides at the same moment, the sound doubling back on itself from all points. Standing inside it, what reached Batu surrounded him from all directions, sourceless, the medium itself changed by what was moving through it.

Batu stood inside it.

The faith it required of him remained where it had always been, unreachable as it had always been. That had been the case since the first night in this body and had stayed the case.

He stood part of the rite, as he always had, his arms at his sides, his face toward the light he could see above the heads of those between him and the fires.

What he could watch was what the invocation did in those around him.

Orda stood with the same posture he brought to everything, nothing performed in it, simply present. Behind them the brothers had each gone to their own self, drawn inward by what was running over all of them.

The scale pressed through the air around him and the earth under his feet, the vibration of tens of thousands of voices moving through the steppe grass and upward.

It went over all of them equally. He was one point in that field, receiving what it gave, standing where he stood under the same sky as the rest.

Ogedei came forward from the Great Khan’s position when the acknowledgment had flew out across the steppe and the night had received it.

Ogedei’s voice had the authority of an Emperor that did not require volume.

Eternal Blue Sky has witnessed this gathering. The empire of the Great Mongol people is here. The ancestral mandate is ours. The western territories await what this assembly will send against them.

The princes of each line will take their places in the session that opens at the rising of tomorrow’s sun. What is decided in that assembly, the Sky witnesses alongside us.

He stopped there. The proclamation was complete.

The opening session was named for the morning.

The fires burned at the ceremony ground’s center, the smoke rising straight in the still summer air toward the stars above the Orkhon plain, and the empire stood around them without moving, the night settling across the breadth of it.

The morning was coming.