Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 83: The Eastern Shore

The Caspian did not look like a lake.

That was the first thing Batu registered when the tumen crested the low ridge that had been blocking the western view and the water appeared. A lake had a far shore. A lake had its horizon at a distance the eye could see as possible.

The Caspian ran west from the shoreline below them and kept running until the sky took it, the water dark gray in the winter light, the surface carrying the long low chop of open water with nothing on the other side to stop it.

The horizon was clean. Whatever was behind it was not visible and would not become visible regardless of how far south the army marched, because the far shore was not to the west.

He had known this about the Caspian from the other life. Maps, campaign histories, the whole geographic archive that had come with the consciousness. Knowing it and standing on a ridge looking at the water were not the same.

He let it run for a moment, the flat breadth of it, and then turned his horse and looked over the column.

Ten thousand men in march order stretched south along the ridge line and down onto the flat ground below it, the tumen moving at the pace a tumen had across open distance when the terrain allowed it.

He had been watching the formation each morning since the departure, taking the same riding position above and to the right of the lead riders and watching what the march produced in it as it moved. Each morning gave him a slightly different picture. He considered the differences.

The screen was running at the correct spacing without direction. The lead pairs were out at the interval the protocol specified, the middle formation behind them at its own interval, the rear observation running the back arc. None of it required Torghul to place a rider every morning with specific instructions.

The screen riders had internalized the protocol through the winter training cycle and carried it now as ordinary function. Before the assessment cycle, the screen had been ad hoc, individual riders sent out at whatever spacing the morning suggested.

The relay ran between the mingans in the same way. Penk’s function had traveled with the column, his riders cycling between the formations at the set intervals, the structure carrying the signals without anyone directing each individual motion.

The jaghun commanders were cycling their ranks on the march without being told. When the ground slowed them, the rear ranks compressed into the center and the tumen absorbed it without bunching.

When it opened up again, the intervals spread back to spacing. That adjustment had required Torghul’s direct intervention on the march north from the narrows. It was now happening on its own.

The new riders were at the tumen’s edges. The recruits and the transferred veterans who had come into the tumen before departure ran the protocols correctly. They had learned them as written criteria, taken the assessment, understood the standard.

The campaign fluency that shared engagements produced was in the core. The edges were sound and hadn’t been tested past that yet.

The tumen had not been tested in combat since it was built from these new standards. When something arrived that the protocols had not anticipated, that would be the question.

He turned his horse south and came back down toward the column’s head.

Torghul found him before he reached it.

He came alongside at the march pace without adjusting his horse’s stride, matching the speed exactly. He had been reading the same things Batu had been reading. His face carried the compression of a man whose thoughts had run ahead of the conversation.

"Horse condition is good," he said. "The early staging points provisioned what Khulgen’s letters promised. No significant sickness in the lines." He kept his eyes on the ground ahead. "The third mingan’s integration is still working out. They know each other well enough for the march."

"How long."

"Depends on what they run into before we reach the passes." Torghul said it plainly. "Road pressure is different from what I’d give them if I could give them anything."

"Urgench," Batu said.

Torghul looked at him.

"We will arrive soon at this pace. The delta approaches start before that." He paused. "The darughachi there has been in the post for four years. Karakorum appointment."

Batu looked south, toward the ground the tumen still had to cover before the terrain changed. The Caspian shore was running flat and salt-crusted to their right, the water visible through the morning in gray-green patches between the low ridges.

"Tell me what you know about Urgench," he said.

Torghul looked at him.

"What you knew before this march," Batu said.

Torghul rode for a moment.

"Large city. Khwarezm Shah’s capital. We took it in the campaign before I was in this command." He paused. "It took a long time. The population fought."

"They fought for months," Batu said. "The city held longer than almost anything the early campaigns encountered in that direction. Subutai and Jebe went around it entirely on the great raid. It was already behind the Mongol lines by then. The siege was running while they were in the Rus territories and beyond."

Torghul received this without comment. He was listening.

"The Khwarezm Shah controlled territory from the Caspian to the edge of India. From the Aral Sea south to the Persian interior. Thirty years before the conquest, that empire didn’t exist. A single military dynasty built it in a generation from a regional governorship."

He kept his voice even. "They broke the Kara-Khitai, absorbed the Ghurids, pushed the Abbasid Caliphate back from their northern border. Then they killed a Mongol trade caravan of four hundred and fifty men and sent back the head of the envoy Genghis sent afterward."

Torghul’s eyes went briefly to Batu’s face. He knew how that move had ended for the Khwarezm Shah.

"The campaign ran for years," Batu said. "Genghis split the army in ways the Shah couldn’t anticipate. The Shah’s strategy was to hold his major cities as fortresses and let each one absorb a siege. He had the resources for it. The fortifications were real. What he didn’t have was a field army that could engage the Mongol force directly, because his military tradition had been absorbing Turkish horse soldiers for two generations and they didn’t hold their ranks the way a steppe force did."

He paused.

"Every city fell. Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Merv. The populations of the ones that resisted were killed or dispersed. The ones that opened their gates early were taxed and administered and told to continue functioning."

Torghul said nothing for a moment. He was placing this against the ground ahead of them.

"Urgench didn’t open its gates," he said.

"Urgench resisted for months. After the walls came down the population fought street by street. When it was over, the population was divided among the Mongol units for killing."

Batu looked west across the water.

"Then they diverted the Amu Darya into the city. Flooded the ruins so the rebuilding couldn’t happen around what was left."

The army kept moving beneath them. The shore ran south. The wind came off the water with the cold mineral smell of it.

"The delta we’re riding into was the agricultural base that fed that city and the surrounding region for centuries before the conquest," Batu said.

"The irrigation network ran back far enough that its origins were lost to record. Maintained and passed down across generations until the conquest stopped the maintenance. When the population was dispersed, the maintenance didn’t run. Some channels silted up. Some were broken."

He paused.

"The land recovers faster than the people do."

Torghul was reading the ground ahead with the attention of a man recalibrating what he expected to see when the terrain changed.

"The darughachi is administering what’s there."

"He’s administering the recovery," Batu said. "Which is different from administering a city. What he holds is a reduced population resettled into a portion of the urban space, a tax structure calibrated to what the agricultural land produces now, and the administrative records that survived because Persian bureaucrats understood that the records were worth protecting regardless of who was reading them."

Torghul looked south.

"What we’re marching into is a ruin."

"We’re marching into what a ruin looks like a decade later," Batu said.

The tumen kept its pace. The Caspian ran gray to the west. Soon, the terrain would change and the delta country would arrive, and the ground they were riding toward had its own account of what the Mongol conquest produced when it ran at full intensity against a civilization that had been accumulating for centuries.

Batu carried that account in a register that had nothing to do with this century. He had read it as history before he had ever stood on the steppe.

Now he was going to read it as ground.

He turned his horse back toward the column’s center.