Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 50: What Betrayal Costs

The supply column came through going south, pack animals moving at load pace, the relay pairs still on the flanks. Every animal carried what it had left camp with.

Batu watched from the road’s edge until the rear guard passed and the open steppe behind it cleared.

The surface of the road still showed the morning’s work. The grass on both sides was pressed flat in the places where riders had gone down, and the earth was churned where the fight had moved and changed direction. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Dust had settled back into all of it. Dozens of men had died on it.

The surviving riders from the two clans were assembled beyond where the fighting had ended, disarmed, sitting their horses in a loose body under Dasang’s men. Their animals were spent, a night’s ride and a morning of hard fighting behind them with no rest between.

The two headmen and their senior riders had been separated from the group and brought forward on foot. They stood between Batu and the formation, not close together, each standing still, looking at what was around him without expression.

He looked at them. A man who arrived at terms after a hard fight carried a different quality than this.

These men had sent riders against a sealed arrangement on the idea that the corridor would give way under force. It had run to its end here, and the full cost of it was standing in front of him.

Batu said nothing. The seal had been placed. They had sent riders against the convoy, and forty-three men were dead because of it.

That was the whole of it.

He killed them and put his blade away.

The horses stood. The assembled riders sat their mounts without sound. The third clan’s riders at the far edge held their positions without being told.

Batu turned to the assembled body. They were watching him without sound, without movement, in the loose shape of a formation that had dissolved when the exchange ended.

"You ride north under his authority." He indicated the remaining headman on the grey horse. "His terms are your terms. His pasture lines run where yours ran. That’s the arrangement."

No one in the assembled body spoke.

He looked at the headman. The man was watching them with a flat, assessing attention. The headman looked at the assembled body for a moment.

His manner said he was already starting.

"The territory moves under your command when the record reaches camp," Batu said. "What you did this morning earns it."

The headman held his gaze for a moment. "Understood." A pause. "The grazing boundary on the eastern edge of their territory. It ran disputed."

"Your boundary now," Batu said. "Handle it."

The headman nodded and turned his horse. His riders organized the surviving body into a column without ceremony. They went without resistance and settled into it.

They moved north at the headman’s pace, and the road cleared.

Batu gave the order to form and rode to the front.

The road ran south toward the river, straight through dry grass, the sky above it pale and even. The steppe was flat on both sides. Behind the formation the road disappeared into the grass behind them.

Ahead, the crossing was the same pale distance it had been since morning. Nothing moved between them and it.

He had what he needed from the morning and held it without elaborating.

The eastern road had been tested by force and produced an answer. Two clans were behind him. The ground was already running under different terms.

The convoy was south with its loads intact. What remained of the two contingents was riding under the man who’d stayed with the arrangement when the others hadn’t.

That account would travel without being sent. Every man who’d been there, every man who’d watched from the edges, and the riders heading back to their camps would carry it, and it would reach every clan on the western steppe within weeks.

A sealed arrangement had been broken. The headmen who broke it were on the ground. The ground was under new terms before the bodies were cold.

The sequence was complete and no part of it would change in the telling, because too many men had been present for each part of it.

What it brought to Berke would be specific. Three clans, all under arrangement. The two that broke were gone, their ground running under the third clan’s mark.

Force sent north against the convoy had produced nothing. The column moving south with its loads intact.

The raiding parties had been working through his reserves north of the streambed since the battle. Whatever remained there wouldn’t stay.

Every merchant moving through the lower river crossing was moving under the Yusuf guarantee, with no written terms on Berke’s side to counter it. The financial pressure that had been building since the lower river fell was still building.

No approach through the river remained.

The winter window was closing. Six to eight weeks from the war council had been the figure, and some of those weeks were gone.

What remained was enough for one more engagement and not much else, and Berke, reading his own position, would know that too.

Whatever engagement settled this had to come across the streambed on open ground, against a force that held the crossing and had worked everything north of it already.

Berke had shown at the lower river what he was. A commander with a shrinking window and one course left moved.

He would come prepared. The recalculation had been running since he stopped at the rear of his withdrawal to read the field before turning south, and a man adding to a recalculation every day was building toward something specific.

Those riders had been on the eastern road when the arc closed. They’d seen the formation, the third clan coming in from the west, the full formation of what two mingans had done against the force Berke had sent.

That picture was moving north now, and a man in that process added everything that reached him to it.

When the engagement came it would come from a man who had read every approach available to him and found one still open.

The river came up ahead of the formation. The eastern crossing was shallow, the near bank firm underfoot.

The column entered the water in groups, the animals stepping through the shallows before the current found them. Cold came off the water. The horses moved through it steadily.

Batu crossed with them. When they came up the south bank and the camp was visible, the low earthworks on the northern face catching the afternoon light, he turned his horse once and looked back at the water.

The formation was still coming through. Behind them the track ran straight into the pale grass and was gone. On both sides of it the steppe was empty and flat, nothing on it in any direction except dry grass and the pale sky above it.

He turned south and kept moving.