26. The Temple
When Mongols broke camp, the first task was to round up horses.
Mongol horses lived semiwild, in herds that were allowed to roam around the plains until needed. There had been some concern that the time slips might have magicked away many of the herds Genghis Khan’s plans relied on, but riders were sent out into the field to bring them in, and after a day great clouds of horses came thundering across the plain toward the metropolis of yurts. The men closed around the horses brandishing long poles with lassos on the end. As if they knew that a march of thousands of kilometers lay ahead of them, the horses bucked and darted defiantly. But once bound, they allowed themselves to be led away stoically.
Kolya thought it was typical of the Mongols’ whole uncivilized enterprise that even the greatest campaign should have to start with a rodeo.
After the spectacle of the roundup, the preparations for the march were rapid. Most of the yurts were collapsed and loaded onto carts or baggage animals, but some of the larger tents, including those that had made up Genghis’s pavilion, were loaded onto broad-based carts drawn by teams of oxen. Even the Soyuz capsule was to be dragged along. It had been brought here at Genghis’s orders from the village of Scacatai; Kolya understood that a siege engine had been adapted to lift it. Sitting on a heavy-duty cart, strapped on by horsehair ropes, it looked like a metal yurt itself.
For his march on Babylon Kolya estimated that Genghis Khan would be accompanied by around twenty thousand warriors—most of them cavalrymen, and each of these accompanied by at least one attendant, and two or three spare horses. Genghis organized his traveling force into three divisions: armies of the left wing, and of the right, and of the center. The center, commanded by Genghis Khan himself, included the elite imperial guard, including Genghis’s own thousand-strong bodyguard. Sable and Kolya would travel with the center, in the retinue of Yeh-lü.
Some forces were left behind to garrison Mongolia itself, and to continue the task of piecing together what had become of the empire. The garrison would be left under the command of one of Genghis Khan’s sons, Tolui. Genghis Khan was not significantly weakened by leaving Tolui behind. As well as his chancellor Yeh-lü he had with him another son, , and his general Subedei. Considering that was the man who would have succeeded Genghis Khan in the old timeline, and that Subedei was perhaps Genghis’s most able general—the man who would have masterminded the invasion of Europe after Genghis’s death—it was a formidable team indeed.
Kolya witnessed the moment when Genghis Khan took leave of his son. Genghis drew Tolui’s face to his own with his two hands and touched his lips to one of Tolui’s cheeks, inhaling deeply. Sable dismissed it as an “Iron Age air-kiss.” But Kolya was oddly moved.
At last Genghis’s standard was raised, and with a clamor of shouts, trumpets and drums, the force set off, followed by long baggage trains. The three columns, under the command of Genghis, and Sabutai, were to travel independently, perhaps diverging hundreds of kilometers from each other, but they would keep in touch daily, through fast riders, trumpet blasts and smoke signals. Soon the great clouds of kicked-up dust were separating across the plains of Mongolia, and by the second day the forces were out of each other’s sight.
Traveling west from the region of Genghis Khan’s birthplace, they followed a tributary of the Onon river through a country of rich meadows. Kolya rode in a cart with Sable, Basil and other subdued-looking foreign traders, and some of Yeh-lü’s staff. After the first couple of days, they entered a country of gloomy, somewhat sinister forests, broken by boggy valleys that were frequently difficult to ford. The skies remained leaden, and the rain beat down. Kolya felt oppressed in this dismal, gloomy place. He warned Yeh-lü about acid rain, and the administrator passed on orders that the soldiers should ride with their caps on and collars raised on their coats.
Genghis’s troops were no more hygienic than the common Mongols. But they took pride in their appearance. They rode on saddles high at the back and front, with solid stirrups. They wore conical felt caps, lined with fur from fox, wolf or even lynx, and long robe-like coats that opened from top to bottom. The Mongols had worn such garments since time immemorial, but these were a wealthy people now, and some of the officers wore coats embroidered with silk or gold thread, and silken underwear from China. But even Genghis’s generals would wipe their mouths on their sleeves, and their hands on their trousers.
The Mongols’ field craft was slick and practiced—but then it was the product of centuries of tradition. The march was broken each night, and rations distributed: dried milk curd, millet meal, kumis, an alcoholic drink made from fermented milk curd, and cured meat. In the morning a rider would put a bit of dried curd and water into a leather bag, and the shaking as he rode along would soon turn it into a kind of yogurt, consumed with great relish and much belching. Kolya envied the Mongols’ skills: how they made rawhide from cow skin, even how they used a distillate of human urine as a purgative when one man had a fever.
Genghis’s army moved efficiently, and orders and changes of plan were transmitted rapidly and without confusion. The army was rigidly governed by a hierarchy based on rules of ten. That way, the chain of command was simplified, with each officer having no more than ten subordinates. The Mongols empowered their local commanders as much as possible, which enhanced the army’s flexibility and responsiveness. And Genghis made sure that all units of his army, down to the poorest platoon, was made up of a mix of nationalities, clans and tribes. He wanted nobody to have any loyalty, save to the Khan himself. It was, Kolya thought, a remarkably modern way of structuring an army: no wonder these Mongols had overwhelmed the ragbag forces of medieval Europe. But the system relied heavily on efficient and loyal staff. The officer corps was ruthlessly weeded out in training, through such tests as the battue— and, of course, in battle.
After a few days, still deep in the heart of Mongolia, the army crossed a grassy plain toward Karakorum. This city had once been the power center of the Uighurs, and Genghis Khan had established it as his own permanent seat of power. But even from a distance Kolya could see the city’s walls were ruined. Inside the walls a few abandoned temples huddled in one corner, but the rest of the city had been conquered by the eternal grass.
Genghis Khan himself, accompanied by burly guards, stalked with around this place. To Genghis it was only a few years since he had established the city, and now here it was, eroded to rubble. Kolya saw him return to his traveling yurt, his face like thunder, as if he was angry with the very gods who would make such a mockery of his ambitions.
In the days that followed the army passed through the valley of the Orkhon river, an immense walled plain bounded to the east by blue mountains. It was almost like a Martian vallis, Kolya thought idly. The earth here was gray and flaking, the river languid. Sometimes they had to ford tributaries and river channels. At night they camped on islands of bare mud, and made huge aromatic fires of dead willow wood.
They crossed one last river, and the country began to rise. Sable said they were leaving the modern Mongolian province of Arhangay, and crossing the Hangay massif. Behind Kolya, the country folded up into a complex patchwork of forests and valleys, but beyond the massif he could see a more elemental landscape of yellow grassland stretching away.