The outer line understood before Batu had moved. The challenge had been public enough that every man within thirty paces had heard it, and the men within thirty paces of the archery ground were those who understood what mounted archery at full gallop against a bird at two hundred meters meant. The noise around the line changed before Batu’s feet changed direction.

He looked at Suuqai.

"Horse."

Suuqai was already moving. He crossed to the nearest Khar Kheshig steppe rider and took the animal’s lead from him and brought it to Batu’s position in the time it took Batu to hand the competition bow back to the equipment line and take his own from the rider who had it.

His own bow. The one from the Jochid camp’s string, that had come through the mountain passes and the plateau and the whole eastern march in its case. He checked the string with two fingers at the center and found it in order.

He mounted.

The crowd around the archery ground had reorganized itself. Men who had been facing the range turned to face the river. Men from the outer line moved to positions that would give them sight lines to the near bank.

The noise changed volume, lower and faster, the frequency of several hundred men in the middle of a collective realization.

"He’s going to do it."

"The bird’s still there."

"He can’t be going to-"

"He’s going."

Batu watched the crane from horseback. It was still on the near bank, going through the shallows at the pace wading birds kept, unhurried, moving along the river in a direction that would take it further east if he didn’t move now.

Two hundred meters to the near bank from the archery ground’s southern margin. The angle required that he come at the shot from the west, using the approach along the camp’s outer edge, to have the bird in the forward arc when the moment arrived.

He put the horse into motion.

The animal responded the way it should. No delay between the signal and the stride, the years of campaign and open ground training finding their expression in the first contact of the horse’s chest with the summer air.

The camp’s outer margin opened ahead, the Orkhon visible at its far in the midday light.

The gallop built quickly on the firm valley floor.

At full stride, the horse’s motion worked up through his seat and into his core, the rhythm specific to this animal, slightly longer in the off-stride than in the near, a thing he had felt in the first hundred meters and had already accounted for by the time the river appeared as a pale line to a visible bank with the crane still in it.

His bow arm came up. The string found the place at his jaw.

The lead was the problem that couldn’t be solved by thought. The crane was going east at its own unhurried pace and the arrow would take its own unhurried time crossing the distance and the two trajectories had to intersect at the same point at the same moment without any of this being made in the conscious way.

The body knew or it didn’t know. Years of practice or none.

He aimed at where the bird was going to be.

The river wind hit the right side of his face at the moment his fingers released. He had already adjusted for it before the release, the adjustment arriving through his hands the same way the lead arrived.

The arrow crossed two hundred meters of Orkhon valley air in the summer morning.

The crane went down at the water’s edge in the way of large birds going down. A folding rather than a fall, the long neck dropping first, the whole of the animal collapsing without a second motion.

The outer line erupted.

"He hit it."

"From full gallop-"

Someone was shouting in Kipchak from the far end of the line and being answered in the same language from two different positions.

"That’s two hundred meters."

"I’ve never seen that distance-"

Batu turned his horse back toward the archery ground at a canter and came off the animal at the line’s edge and handed the reins back to the rider he had taken it from.

The bow went back to his own hand.

The crowd around him had the noise of men who had been watching archery competitions for years and had just seen something that they were going to describe for the rest of their lives.

Buri had not left.

He was standing at the Chagataid observer section and his face warped into an ugly expression.

"The bird walked into the shot," Buri said. "It was moving toward you."

The outer line heard it.

"The wind carried it," Buri continued. "At that distance, with the river wind from the south-"

"The wind was against him," someone said from the outer line.

The crowd had shifted toward the speaker and away from Buri before Buri had finished his next sentence.

Batu had not looked at Buri. He was looking at Suuqai.

"Show them," Batu said. "The seven cylinders at the long mark."

Suuqai looked at him.

"Hit them blindfolded," Batu said.

Suuqai locked his gaze for a moment. Then he looked at the archery range. One full sweep of the target stands at the far end, the seven small cylinders on their stands at the long mark, the position of each one in the horizontal line.

He looked for the duration of a man making a map of something he intended to find again in the dark. Then he looked away from it.

Batu signaled to the nearest equipment handler on the range’s northern end. The man came forward and Batu told him what he needed. The handler produced a length of cloth from the materials kept at the line for equipment repairs and handed it across.

Suuqai took the competition bow from the equipment line, checked the draw with two fingers the same way Batu had, and stepped to the shooting position.

He did not look at the targets again.

He looked straight ahead while the cloth was tied over his eyes by the equipment handler.

Then he stood at the line with the bow in his hand and the blindfold over his face and the seven cylinders at two hundred-pace distance at the far end of the range in front of him.

Only one of those two parties could still see anything.

The outer line went entirely still.

The silence of several hundred men who were watching something they had no way to describe for and were not yet certain was real.

Suuqai drew.

The draw was the same arc as every draw he had made since Batu had seen him work. Steady, precise, the string reaching full tension without the force of it showing anywhere in his frame.

He held. He released.

The first cylinder came off its stand.

A breath passed where the outer line was without breath.

Then it came back in a way Batu had not heard from this crowd before. An involuntary response in it, the way one subconsciously shout when they see something that made no sense.

"He’s blindfolded."

"I can see the cloth from here."

"He hit it."

Suuqai took the same position.

Drew. Released.

The second cylinder went down.

"He can’t be doing this."

"He is doing it."

A man from the far end of the line said something in Persian that the man beside him translated immediately for the man beside him, and the translation went into the crowd’s ambient noise and was absorbed by it.

Five more shots.

Suuqai moved through them with patience.

The third cylinder. The fourth.

The crowd’s noise peaked between each shot in a continuous undercurrent rather than resetting each time. The individual reactions losing their distinctness, merging into the collective sound of men watching each cylinder fall and understanding what kind of thing was happening in front of them.

The fifth went down. The sixth.

The seventh shot’s release came from the same position as the first and the arrow found the last cylinder with the sound that all seven had made. The flat crack of impact, the cylinder off the stand, the result clear to everyone within sight of the range.

Suuqai lowered the bow.

He removed the blindfold himself, a single pull of the knot the handler had made.

He handed the cloth back to the handler and the bow back to the equipment line and stood where he stood.

He did not look at the results. He already knew what they were.

Batu walked west through the outer line.

Suuqai fell in at his position. The two Khar Kheshig steppe riders joined the movement without instruction.

The crowd around them opened and closed and the noise they left behind them had no single voice in it anymore. It was the full undifferentiated sound of the archery ground trying to process what it had just held.

Batu walked off the ground.