The crowd was thickest around the eastern corner of the wrestling area, and the sound coming from that direction told Batu why before he reached it.

Bjorn was in it.

He found a spot in the outer line and watched. Bjorn had a Kipchak rider in a grip at the shoulder and hip, turning into a throw. The Kipchak planted his weight low, and the two of them stalled in the open ground with both men releasing grunts that had nothing to do with speech, the strain of it coming up through their chests in short raw bursts.

"Two horses on the northern one."

"Which one is the northern man."

"The one that looks like he ate the other one."

Bjorn’s throw didn’t complete. The Kipchak rider found a way to break the grip, and the crowd shouted and then focused itself around whatever would happen next.

The two men circled, both breathing hard in the summer heat. Around them, the noise of the larger crowd kept its own rhythms. The wrestling area was only one of four competitions running simultaneously, and the sound from the archery stations to the south and the horse racing corridor to the east kept cutting across the more immediate noise the wrestlers produced.

Batu watched the outer crowd while Bjorn and the Kipchak found their next position. The watching men came from every section of the kurultai camp.

A cluster from the Ogedeid outer camp, three of them together, one pointing at Bjorn and saying something that made the other two turn and look in a way that said the pointing was not admiration. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Men from the minor princes’ sections mixed with servants and grooms and provisioners in the general crowd. A group standing slightly apart with the Chagatai household’s colors on their coats, watching without talking to the men around them.

Einar was on the far side of the ground, waiting for his next pairing. He stood at the margin in the full wrestling costume, bare across the chest, arms at his sides, and the men standing near him were consistently giving him more space than the crowd density required.

"Does he speak anything."

"Not that I’ve heard."

"Ask him how he trained."

"You ask him."

Bjorn’s match finished. The Kipchak rider was put by second throw attempt and went with it instead of against it, redirecting the pressure back, and Bjorn’s right knee went to the ground and the referee’s call went up over the crowd.

Bjorn stood and performed the closing eagle motion, arms out and sweeping forward in the traditional form, and then he was off the ground and the crowd’s noise divided into the part that had bet on the Kipchak and the part that hadn’t.

Batu watched the next pairing come in from the waiting line on the northern edge.

The man who stepped onto the ground from the Chagatai side had already won twice since Batu arrived at the outer line. He was in his thirties, broad through the shoulders but carrying it low, and he moved with the economy of a man who had been doing this long enough to know that the effort was in the technique and not in the demonstration of effort.

His first win had been fast, a grip established and then a hip throw completed before his opponent had finished understanding what was coming.

His second had been slower, more patient, a match that went through three or four exchanges before one man found the window. He had observed each exchange and not committed to anything until the position was right.

Batu knew what he was looking at.

He considered what the next three days required. Guyuk’s faction would have its own men in the competition through the full feast period, visible and performing for the watching princes that Batu needed to be visible to.

The steppe understood capability in its leaders as a matter of assumption. A commander who did not enter the games was a commander that was weak, and the watching princes would supply the reasons from their own imaginations.

He stepped out of the outer line and walked to the competition’s entry point.

The registration was run by two of the Great Khan’s assembly staff, older men with the efficiency of people who had managed events like this at prior kurultais. Batu gave his name and line.

The staff man looked up from his felt record and then back down and wrote it without comment, which was itself a kind of comment.

He stripped down to the wrestling costume in the designated area, with Suuqai and three of the Khar Kheshig steppe riders nearby, taking the outer coat and boots and handing them across.

The summer air found his arms and chest with its texture, warm and dry off the steppe, carrying the collective smell of the feast ground, cook fires and horses and several thousand men in the same area of ground.

He tied the traditional jacket’s chest panel, found his boots’ laces, and stood.

He walked to the waiting line.

The crowd became thicker when they realized who had joined the competition.

The ripple moved through the outer crowd in the way information moved through any dense gathering, person to person, and by the time Batu reached the waiting line he could feel the change in the crowd’s attention without looking at it directly.

"Is that-"

"Yes."

"He’s going to compete himself?"

The pairing call came for the Chagatai rider’s third match before Batu’s first was announced, and he watched from the line.

The Chagatai man stepped onto the ground and performed the Devekh with the ease of someone for whom the eagle motion was as ordinary as walking. Arms spread wide, the forward sweep of them, the lowering, the rising, moving around the ground’s perimeter in the form the tradition required.

His opponent entered from the other side and performed the same motion, and they met in the center.

The match lasted two minutes. Three exchanges, each one probing the other’s base, and then the Chagatai rider found the trip and the throw and his opponent’s hip hit the ground and the referee’s call ended it.

He performed the closing Devekh without breaking pace and walked off the ground.

Batu’s name was called next.

He heard the pairing called by the referee, his own name and the Chagatai rider’s, and he stepped onto the ground.

The Devekh ran its form. He moved through it and felt the crowd’s attention on it in the way he had felt the tailagha’s assembly watching him at the ceremony’s center, except this was not a ceremony and the watching was not reverent.

Every man around the outer line had his own impression of Batu Khan.

He completed the form and came to center.

The Chagatai rider looked at him with the flat professionalism of a man who had just defeated three opponents and had not changed his manner after any of them.

He was watching Batu’s stance and physique the way Batu had been reading his matches, and whatever he found he was already putting into his approach because that was what experienced wrestlers did in the seconds before contact.

They closed.

The first grip was contested, both men reaching for the shoulder and lapel simultaneously, neither one getting the position cleanly. The contact at the sleeve created a moment of mutual assessment before Batu gave his inside grip and took the outside instead.

The Chagatai rider felt the change and adjusted, dropping his hips back, making the center of gravity sit lower than his initial stance.

The crowd found its voice around them.

"Drive him left, his base is weak on the left-"

Someone shouted in Kipchak and was answered in the same language from three different points in the crowd.

"He knows what he’s doing, look at the grip-"

They moved. Batu pushed pressure into the right side and felt the Chagatai rider commit to his resistance there.

In the half-second that the resistance was fully forward, Batu stepped through and loaded his right hip and began the throw.

The Chagatai rider felt it and moved with it, going the way of the momentum to break the leverage, and the throw was in its midpoint with one man committed and neither man on the ground.

The crowd’s noise rose over all of it.