The wrestling ground was still happening to the east when Batu came through the central section of the games area, and the sound of it went over on the warm afternoon air the same way it had the previous day. The crowd’s periodic noise rose and fell with the matches, the percussion of the competition. He walked past without stopping.

The horse racing corridor was further east, the long cleared approach visible from this distance as a stripe of pressed grass against the valley floor. He looked at it once and kept moving.

That could wait. The archery was today.

The stations were on the southern margin, set out against the farthest edge of the camp’s cleared ground, the range near the Orkhon’s southern bend.

The target stands were at the far end of the range, carrying their sur cylinders at the designated height. Small cylinders of lacquered leather, upright on low wooden stands, spaced in their horizontal line at the standard configuration.

The competition was already running. Men cycled through the shooting line in rotation while judges and scorekeepers stood at positions along the range’s northern end.

Batu took a spot on the outer line and watched the competition.

The crowd here was different from the wrestling crowd. The men around the outer line had the attention of people who knew what they were watching. Riders who had been shooting composite bows since they could sit a horse, who could read a draw’s quality from the shooter’s shoulder before the arrow left the string.

The noise was different too. At the moment of draw the outer line went quiet, the ambient crowd noise dropping to a near-silence. When the result was clear it came back in fragments that lasted only as long as it took the next man to step to the line.

"Inside edge."

"I had him for a miss."

"He’s been five for five."

A cluster of men from the Ogedeid section stood two positions to Batu’s left on the outer line, watching with the organized attention of observers who had been placed there. Guyuk’s men had been maintaining observation posts at each competition since the start. They noticed Batu’s arrival at the outer line the same way they observed everything.

A man at the shooting line took his draw, held it three full seconds, and released at the longer marker rather than the standard one. The arrow’s arc was visible against the pale sky for most of its travel. The impact sound arrived a beat after the crowd’s noise. A clean strike, the cylinder knocked from its stand.

The outer line found its voice.

"That’s the long mark."

"How far out is that?"

"Further than you’ve ever hit anything."

Batu stepped out of the outer line.

The registration was two of the Great Khan’s assembly staff with a felt record. He named himself. The senior of the two wrote it without looking up, and then looked up. He said nothing. He wrote.

"Distance?" Batu said.

"Standard configuration at the far mark, or-"

"Both," Batu said. "Longer distance and the reduced target."

The man looked at him for a moment. He wrote.

The reduced target was a smaller cylinder. Half the diameter of the standard sur, requiring that the arrow’s path be correspondingly more precise. The longer distance added twenty paces to what the standard competition used. Both modifications simultaneously was not a common request.

The judge at the near end of the range received the notation and said something to the scorer that Batu could not hear. Two of the outer line’s men heard it from the other direction, and it went through that section in the way information ran through crowds.

"He asked for the small cylinders."

"At the long mark?"

Batu took the bow from the equipment line and checked the draw before stepping to the line. The composite construction felt familiar. Not his own bow, which was with the Khar Kheshig’s supply load, but close enough in its resistance and spring that the adjustment was minor. He settled his grip.

The line went to its near-silence.

He drew and found the stability point and looked at the first cylinder at the far end of the range. The reduced target at the long mark was small enough that the arc of flight had to be calculated precisely.

Not as a certainty, because no man could calculate an arrow’s flight with complete certainty, but as the narrowest possible margin of error the body and the training and the years of practice could produce.

He released.

The arrow struck the first cylinder and took it from the stand.

The crowd came back. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"First mark."

"That’s the small cylinder, look at the size of that-"

"He hit it."

The second mark. He drew. The silence arrived again like a physical thing, the crowd’s attention compressing around the shooting line. He held the draw for two seconds and released.

The arrow found the second cylinder. The sound of it reached the outer line a beat after the visual.

He ran through the full round without pause between shots. Each draw found its silence, each release found its result.

The fourth shot caught the cylinder on its near edge and sent it spinning rather than clean. Still a hit by the competition’s measure, the judges confirmed it. The fifth and sixth shots were clean.

The seventh, at the far end of the line where the range’s slight crosswind from the river had more time to find the arrow’s arc, required a small compensation in the angle. He made it without analysis, the correction coming through the hands rather than the mind.

The seventh cylinder went down.

The outer line made sound that had a different character from the normal competition noise.

"Seven for seven."

"Who is that?"

"The Jochid."

"On the small cylinders at the long mark?"

"Seven for seven."

Batu stepped back from the shooting line. He handed the bow to the equipment handler and took water from Suuqai, who had it ready at the range’s end. He drank and looked south along the range at the target stands still carrying their reduced-diameter cylinders.

A Chagataid observer section was directly to his right along the outer line. Four men who had been watching since before he stepped to the line.

The man at the front of that group had not been observing from the outside. He had been in the competition himself earlier. Batu had seen him on the shooting line during the first two rounds, shooting at the standard configuration with the proficiency of someone who had done this since before he could ride.

He was in his mid-thirties, built lean through the upper body the way good archers were built, and the Chagataid household colors were on his coat with the placement of a man of some standing in that line.

The crowd had already given him a name by the time he moved out of the observer group.

"That’s Buri."

"Chagatai’s-?"

"Yes."

He stopped two arm-lengths from Batu and looked at the shooting range, and then at Batu with directness.

"Seven for seven is somewhat impressive," Buri said.

"It is," Batu said.

Buri looked east, toward the racing corridor and the open steppe beyond the assembly camp’s cleared edge. A pair of cranes had been moving through the valley’s southern margin since midmorning. The large grey birds were visible as slow shapes against the pale grass when the racing activity on the corridor did not push them east.

One of them was moving along the Orkhon’s near bank now, perhaps two hundred meters out, walking through the shallow edge in the specific unhurried way of wading birds.

Buri looked at it and then back at Batu.

"But if you are really good," he said. "From horseback, at full gallop. That bird."

The outer line heard it.