Yao Shu remained silent as he was handed the shallow bowl. He sipped, noting the quality of Chin leaf that had been used. It was probably from the khan’s personal supply, brought at immense cost from the tea plantations at Hangzhou. Yao Shu frowned to himself as he put the cup down. In just a few months, Sorhatani had made herself indispensable to the khan. Her energy was extraordinary, but Yao Shu could still be surprised at how deftly she had read the khan’s needs. What was particularly galling was that Yao Shu had respected the orders he had been given. He had accepted Ogedai’s need for privacy and seclusion. The chancellor had done nothing wrong, yet somehow she had bustled into the palace, wielding her sudden authority over servants as if she had been born to it. In less than a day, she had furnished and aired a suite of rooms close by Ogedai’s own. The servants assumed the khan’s approval, and though Yao Shu suspected she had overreached his favor a hundred times over, Sorhatani had dug herself into the palace like a tick burrowing under skin. He watched her closely as she sipped her own tea. Her robe of fine green silk was not lost on him, nor the way her hair was bound in silver and her skin dusted with pale powder, so that she looked almost like porcelain, cool and perfect. The robes and manner of a Chin noblewoman were deliberately assumed, but she returned his gaze with the calm directness of her own people. In itself, her stare was a challenge to him and he struggled not to respond.
“The tea is fresh, Chancellor?” she asked.
He inclined his head. “It is very good, but I must ask—”
“You are comfortable? Shall I have the servants bring a cushion for your back?”
Yao Shu rubbed one of his ears before settling himself again.
“I need no cushions, Sorhatani. What I need is an explanation of the orders that were delivered to my rooms last night.”
“Orders, Chancellor? Surely such things are between you and the khan? It is certainly no business of mine.”
Her eyes were wide and guileless and he covered his irritation by signaling for more of the tea. He sipped the pungent liquid once more before trying again.
“As I’m sure you know, Sorhatani, the khan’s Guards will not let me speak to him.”
It was a humiliating admission and he colored as he spoke, wondering how she had come between Ogedai and the world with such neatness. All the men around the khan had respected his wishes. She had ignored them, treating Ogedai as if he were an invalid or a child. The gossip in the palace was that she doted on him like a mother hen with a chick, but instead of being irritated, Ogedai seemed to find relief in being cosseted. Yao Shu could only hope for his swift recovery, that he might throw the she-wolf out of the palace and rule again in earnest.
“If you wish, Chancellor, I can ask the khan about the orders you say were sent to you. However, he has been unwell in spirit and body. Answers cannot be demanded from him until he is strong again.”
“I am aware of that, Sorhatani,” Yao Shu said. He clenched his teeth for an instant, so that she saw the muscles ripple in his jaw. “Nonetheless, there has been some mistake. I do not think the khan wishes me to leave Karakorum for some pointless tax-gathering tally in the northern Chin towns. I would be away from the city for months.”
“Still, if those are your orders,” she said, shrugging. “We obey, Yao Shu, do we not?”
His suspicions hardened, though he could not see how she could have been the author of the command to send him away. It made him more determined to remain and challenge her control of the khan in his weakened state.
“I will send a colleague. I am needed here, in Karakorum.”
Sorhatani frowned delicately. “You take great risks, Chancellor. In the khan’s state of health, it would not do to anger him with disobedience.”
“I do have other work, such as bringing the khan’s wife back from the summer palace where she has languished these long months.”
It was Sorhatani’s turn to look uncomfortable. “He has not called for Torogene,” she said.
“She is not his servant,” he replied. “She was most interested in your care of her husband. When she heard you were in such close contact, I am told she was keen to return and thank you personally.”
Sorhatani’s eyes were cold as she regarded the chancellor, their mutual loathing barely hidden by the facade of manners and calm.
“You have spoken to her?”
“By letter, of course. I believe she will be arriving in just a few days.” In a moment of inspiration, he embroidered the truth a little for his benefit, playing the game. “She has asked that I be here to receive her, so that she can be told all the latest news of the city. You see now why I cannot go haring off at such a time.”
Sorhatani bowed her head slightly, giving him the point. “You have been … conscientious in your duties, I see,” she said. “There is a great deal to do to welcome back the wife of the khan. I must thank you for letting me know in time.”
A tic had begun high on her forehead, evidence of internal strain. Yao Shu watched it in delight, knowing she felt his gaze on that spot. He chose his moment to add to her discomfort.
“For my own part, I would also have wanted to discuss the permission Ogedai gave for his nephew to travel to Tsubodai.”
“What?” Sorhatani said, shaken from her reverie. “Mongke will not be an observer of the future, Chancellor. He will help to shape it. It is right that my son is present as Tsubodai secures the west. Or should the orlok take all the credit for giving us a safe border?”
“I’m sorry, I did not mean your own son. I meant Baidur, the son of Chagatai. He too is following in Tsubodai’s steps. Oh, I thought you would have heard.”
He tried not to smile as he spoke. For all her connections at the heart of the city, Sorhatani had no access to his network of spies and gossipmongers stretching for thousands of miles in every direction, at least not yet. He watched as she mastered her surprise and her emotions settled. It was impressive control and he had to remind himself that her beauty hid wits sharper than most.
Yao Shu leaned forward so the servants around them could not easily overhear.
“If you are truly one who looks to the future, I am surprised you did not consider Baidur joining the great trek west. His father is next in line to be khan, after all.”
“After Ogedai’s son, Guyuk,” Sorhatani snapped.
Yao Shu nodded. “All being well, of course, but it was not so many years ago that these corridors and rooms were full of armed men contesting just such an event. May it never happen again. The princes are gathering, Sorhatani, with Tsubodai. If you are planning to have your sons reach for the khanate one day, you should be aware of the stakes involved. Guyuk, Batu, and Baidur have as strong a claim as your own, don’t you think?”
She glared at him as if he had raised a hand to her. He smiled and stood, the meeting at an end.
“I will leave you to your tea and fine things, Sorhatani. I have found such luxuries are fleeting, but do enjoy them for the moment.”
As he left her sitting in thought, he promised himself that he would be there to witness the khan’s wife returning to Karakorum. It was one pleasure he would not deny himself after so many months of strain.
The soldiers stood and shivered in the shadow of the huge gate. Like the stockade around them, it was made of ancient black logs, lashed together with ropes that became brittle in the winter cold. There were men in the stockade whose daily task was to walk the outer line, stepping carefully along a tiny walkway. With frozen hands, they checked that each rope was still like iron in the cold. It took them the best part of the day. The stockade was more like a town than a camp, and many thousands were crammed inside.
The yard in front of the gate was a good place to stand, Pavel thought, a safe place. He was there because he had been among the last to come in the night before. Yet the soldiers who stamped and shoved their hands into their armpits for warmth felt its strength looming over them. They tried not to think of the moments to come when the gate would be heaved open by
snorting oxen and they would go out among the wolves.
Pavel stood back from the men close to the gate. He felt his sword nervously, wanting to draw it again and look at it. His grandfather had told him the importance of keeping it sharp. He had not told him what to do if he was given a blade older than he was himself, with more nicks, cuts, and scratches than he could believe. Pavel had seen some of the real soldiers run a whetstone along their swords, but he had not had the courage to ask to borrow one. They did not look like the sort of men who would lend anything to a boy. He had not seen the grand duke yet, though Pavel had craned his neck and stood as tall as he could. That would be something to tell his grandfather when he went home again. His dedushka remembered Krakow and, in his cups, the old man claimed to have seen the king when he was young, though it might have been just a story.
Pavel longed for a glimpse of the freemen adventurers, the Qasaks the duke had bought for the campaign with a river of gold. He tried not to get his hopes up that his father could be among them. Part of him saw the sadness in his grandfather’s eyes whenever he spoke of the brave young man who had gone to join the horsemen. Pavel had seen his mother weep in the house when she thought he couldn’t hear. He suspected his father had simply abandoned them, as so many did when the winters were too hard. He had always been a wanderer. They had left Krakow looking for land of their own to buy, but farmwork had turned out to be one step from starvation and with little more joy. If anything, the Russian farmers were worse off than those they had left behind.
There were always men who traveled to Kiev or Moscow looking for work. They promised they would send money to their families, but few ever did and fewer still came back. Pavel shook his head. He was not a child, hoping for a little truth in all the lies. He had a sword and he would fight for the duke alongside those fierce, coarse riders. He smiled, amused at himself. He would still look for his father’s face among them, tired and lined with hard work, with the hair cropped close to the skull against lice. He hoped he would be able to recognize him after so long. The Qasaks were somewhere outside the stockade, riding their horses in the snow.
The cold was biting as the sun came up, the ground rubbed to slush by men and horses. Pavel wrung his hands together and cursed aloud as he was jostled from behind. He enjoyed cursing. The men around him used terms he had never heard before, and he growled a good blasphemy at his unseen assailant. His irritation faded as he saw it was just a runner boy carrying dough balls stuffed with meat and herbs. Pavel’s hands were quick and he lifted two of the steaming lumps as the boy struggled to get past him. The boy swore at the theft, but Pavel ignored him, cramming one into his mouth before someone noticed and took it away. The taste was glorious and the juices dribbled down his chin and under the mailed jerkin he had been given just that morning. He had felt like a man then, with a man’s weight to carry. He had thought he would be frightened, but there were thousands of soldiers in the stockade and many more Qasaks outside. They did not seem afraid, though many of the faces were stern and quiet. Pavel did not speak to those who wore beards or heavy mustaches. He was still hoping to grow whiskers of his own, but there was nothing there yet. He thought guiltily of his father’s razor in the barn. For a month or so, he’d gone out there every evening to run it up and down his cheeks. The boys in the village said it made the hair grow faster, but there was precious little sign of it on him, at least so far.
Horns sounded somewhere distant and men began shouting orders all around him. There was no time to eat the second dough ball, so Pavel shoved it down his jerkin, feeling the heat spread against his skin. He wished his grandfather could have been there to see him. The old man had been away from home, gathering firewood from miles out so that the easy stocks would still be there as winter tightened its grip. His mother had wept, of course, when Pavel brought the duke’s recruiter to the back door. With the man watching, she hadn’t been able to refuse him, just as he’d planned it. He’d walked tall behind the recruiter and he still remembered the combination of excitement and nervousness in the faces of the others on the road. Some of them were older than Pavel, and one had a beard that reached almost to his chest. He’d been disappointed not to see any of the other village lads there. No doubt they had run from the recruiters. He’d heard of boys hiding in hay barns and even lying down with cattle to avoid the duke’s call. Their fathers were not Qasaks. Pavel hadn’t looked back at the village as he’d left, or only once at least, to see his mother come to the boundary and hold up her hand to him. He hoped his grandfather would be proud when he heard. Pavel wasn’t sure how the old man would react, but at least he’d miss the beating, if that was the result. He grinned at the thought of the old devil standing in the yard with the chickens, with no one to take his strap to.
Something was happening, that much was obvious. Pavel saw his sotski march past, the one officer he knew. The man looked tired and though he didn’t notice Pavel, instinct made him fall in behind. If they were going out, his place was in the hundred, as he’d been told. Pavel didn’t know any of the ones walking with him, but that was where he was meant to be and his sotski at least seemed to be marching with purpose. Together, they crossed the gate and the officer finally saw Pavel standing behind him.
“You are one of mine,” he said, then pointed to a slightly larger group without waiting for an answer.
Pavel and six more walked over, smiling sheepishly at one another. They looked as ungainly as he felt, standing with their swords and iron jerkins that draped almost to their knees, rubbing their frozen hands as they went red and pale blue in the cold. The sotski had gone off to shepherd in a few more of those in his charge.
Pavel jumped as horns sounded again, this time from the walls of the stockade. One of the men with him laughed unpleasantly at his reaction, revealing brown and broken teeth. Pavel’s cheeks burned. He had hoped for the sort of brotherhood his grandfather had described, but he couldn’t see it in the frozen yard, with men pissing in the slush, their thin faces pinched with cold. Snow began falling out of the white sky above, and many of the men cursed it, knowing it would make the day harder in all ways.
Pavel watched as steaming brown oxen were driven past him and roped to the gates. Were they going out already? He could not see the sotski anywhere. The man seemed to have vanished, just when Pavel needed to ask him all sorts of things. He could see daylight through the gates as they groaned inward. Those in the yard were forced back by shouting officers, the crowd swaying in like a drawn breath. Some of the men were facing the widening gap, but a new commotion started somewhere far back and heads turned to see what it was. Pavel could hear voices raised in pain and anger. He craned his neck to look behind him, and the one who had laughed shook his head.
“The whips are out, boy,” he said gruffly. “They’ll send us into battle like animals being driven. It’s the way of the duke’s fine officers.”
Pavel did not like the man who spoke, especially as he seemed to be criticizing the duke himself. He looked away rather than answer, then shuffled forward as those behind began to press into the open yard. The gate yawned wider and the whiteness was almost blinding after so long in its shadow.
The air was painful in his lungs and throat, the cold so intense that Batu could hardly breathe. The mounts of his tuman cantered in together, judging the range to the Russian horsemen. They were already sweating from the maneuvers as the sun came up. All they could do then was keep moving. To stop was to let the sweat freeze and begin to die slowly, unaware of the spreading numbness.
Shortly after first light, Tsubodai had sent his right wing forward, Batu at the head. They did not fear the levies and conscripts the duke had gathered in his great stockades. Those could be torn apart by arrows. The enemy cavalry were the danger and Batu felt pride at being first against them. They had feinted left at dawn, forcing the Russians to bolster their lines there. As the duke pulled men from his other wing, Batu had waited for Tsubodai’s signal, then gone in fast. He could see huge numbers of
horses, and as he rode he saw the lines accelerate toward his tuman, rippling forward as the orders came. The duke had gathered a massive force to defend Kiev, but none of them had expected to fight in winter. It was a killing cold.
Batu tested his bowstring, easing and heaving back on the bow as he rode, feeling the action loosen the great muscles in his shoulders. The arrows were thick in the quivers on their backs, and he could hear the feathers crackle against each other by his ear.
The duke had spotted the threat. Batu could see the man and his pretty flags off to one side. Horns blew his orders, but Tsubodai had sent Mongke in on the left, the two wings drawing ahead of the main force. The orlok held the center with Jebe and Kachiun, his heaviest horsemen armed with lances. Whoever came out of the stockade would be met with a massed black line, ready for them.
Batu nodded to his bannerman and a great streak of orange silk began to swing back and forth, visible all along the line. The creak of thousands of bows bending sounded, a groan that seemed to hum in the air. Four thousand shafts soared as the first ranks released, reaching behind them for another arrow and fitting it at a canter as they had learned to do as children. They lifted themselves slightly off the saddle, letting their knees balance against the lunge of the horse beneath. There was no great need for accuracy at full range. The arrows flew high, then sank into the Qasak horsemen, blurring the air and leaving it clean and dead in their wake.
Horses collapsed among the enemy. Those who had bows responded, but they could not match the range of the Mongol weapons and their shafts fell short. Batu slowed the pace, rather than throw away such an advantage. His signal brought the cantering line down to a trot and then a walk, but the arrows continued to fly out, one every six heartbeats, like hammer blows on an anvil.
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