Tsubodai looked around at the assembled generals. There was one man he needed to make strong, to separate from the rest, but it was not Batu.

'Guyuk. You will go first. Leave tomorrow with two minghaans. Take tools to cut a path, timber, anything you might need. Make a way through that will be suitable for the heavy carts. Stay in contact with scouts and guide us in.'

The play of authority over Batu had not been wasted on Guyuk. He did not hesitate.

'Your will, orlok,' he said, bowing his head. He was pleased at the responsibility, knowing that the survival of the rest depended on finding a good path. At the same time, it would be grim work and every dead end or false opening would be his to find and mark.

'My scouts say open land lies beyond those mountains,' Tsubodai said. 'They could not see an end to it. We will force the peoples there to meet us in the field. For the khan, we will take their cities, their women and their lands. This is the great raid, the furthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.'

Jebe grunted in pleasure and hefted a skin of airag, throwing it to Tsubodai, who scored his throat with the liquid. The ger stank of wet wool and mutton, a sweet smell that he had known all his life. Guyuk and Baidur exchanged glances at seeing the orlok so animated, so confident. Mongke watched them all, his face unreadable. Pavel ran, as fast as he had ever run in his life. The dim lights of Mongol fires faded on the horizon behind him. He fell more than once and the third time winded him badly enough to make him limp. He had struck his head hard on something in the darkness, but the pain was nothing to what the Mongols would do if they caught him.

He was alone in the night, with neither the sound of pursuing horses, nor any companion. Many of the other men had lost their homes in the years of war. Some of them could barely remember another life, but Pavel had not lost his memory. Somewhere to the north, he hoped his grandfather and mother still tended their little farm. He would be safe once he reached them and he told himself that he would never leave again. As he ran, he imagined the other young men looking on him with envy in their eyes for the things he had seen. The village girls would see him as a hardened soldier, something different from the country boys around them. He would never tell them about the bodies heaped like straw bales, or the hot release as his bladder unclenched in fear. He would not mention those things. His sword was heavy and he knew it slowed him down, but he could not bring himself to throw it away. He would walk into the yard and his mother would surely weep to see him return from the wars. He would make it home. The sword tripped him, and as he stumbled, he let it fall and hesitated before going on. He felt much lighter without it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Batu cursed as he found himself sweating again. He knew that sweat could freeze under clothes in such cold, making a man listless and sleepy until he just lay down and died in the snow. He snorted at the thought, wondering if his constant, simmering anger would help to keep him alive. It was all very well knowing that sweat should be avoided, but there was no help for it when you were manhandling a heavy cart with eight others, heaving and rocking it until the stubborn thing finally shifted another few feet. Ropes stretched from the cart to a group of men pulling like horses; sullen, trudging Russians who never looked back and had to be struck or whipped to break through to them. It was maddening work, needing to be done over and over again as the carts lurched and spilled their contents. The first time Batu had seen one break free and race back to the bottom of the hill, he'd almost laughed. Then he'd seen a man holding his bloody face where a rope had lashed across it and another nursing a broken wrist. Every day brought injuries, and in the cold, even a small wound sapped the strength and made it harder to get up the next morning. They were all stiff and sore, but Tsubodai and his precious generals drove them on, higher into the Carpathian mountains every day.

The sky had come lower and grown blinding white, threatening snow all morning. When it began to fall again, many of the men groaned. The carts were hard enough to manoeuvre on good ground. With fresh slush, the men slipped and fell at every step, gasping for air and knowing that no one was coming to relieve them. Everyone was involved and Batu wondered how they had come to amass such a weight of carts and equipment. He was used to riding out with his tuman and leaving most of it behind. At times, he thought they could have built a city in the wilderness with all the tools and equipment they had with them. Tsubodai had even brought timber into the mountains, a weight of wood that took hundreds of men to move. It meant they had fires at night, when there was nothing else to burn, but the wind sucked away the small heat, or chilled one side of you while the other roasted. Batu seethed at the way he had been treated, more so because Guyuk had not spoken up for him. All he had done was question Tsubodai's absolute authority over them, not refuse an order. He prided himself on that, but he was being punished almost as if he had.

Batu bent his back again to get his shoulder under a beam with the other men, ready to heave the cart over a rut where the wheels had sunk in.

'One, two, three…'

They grunted with effort as he called the rhythm. Tsubodai had not been able to stop his men dismounting to help him with the work. Perhaps at first it was only the loyalty of a warrior to his general, but after days of the back-breaking labour, he thought they felt as disgusted with Tsubodai Bahadur as he was.

'One, two, three…' he growled again.

The cart lifted and thumped down. Batu's feet went out from under him and he grabbed the cart-bed to steady himself. His hands were wrapped in wool and sheepskin, but they stung bitterly, raw as fresh meat. He used spare moments to swing his arms, forcing blood to the tips so he would not lose them to frost. Too many of the men had those white patches on their noses, or on their cheeks. It explained the faded scars on the older men who had been through it all before.

Tsubodai had the right to set him any task, but Batu thought his authority was more fragile than the orlok realised. His right to command came from the khan, but even on the march, not all of their actions were purely military. There would be moments when political decisions had to be made and those were the responsibility of princes, not warriors. With Guyuk's support, the orlok could be overruled, even dismissed, Batu was certain. It would have to be the right moment, when the orlok's authority was not so clear-cut. Batu took hold of the cart again as the cursed thing lurched and almost tipped over. He was willing to wait, but he found his temper growing shorter each day. Tsubodai was not of the blood. The princes would make the future, not some broken-down old general who should have retired to tend his goats long before. Batu used his anger in a surge of strength, so that he felt as if he lifted the cart almost by himself, shoving it onwards and upwards. Ogedai mounted slowly, feeling his hips protest. When had he become so stiff? The muscles in his legs and lower back had grown astonishingly weak. He could make them shudder like a horse shrugging off flies just by raising himself in the stirrups. Sorhatani was deliberately not watching him, he noticed. Instead, she was fussing around her sons. Kublai was checking his pony's belly strap, while Arik-Boke and Hulegu were very quiet in the presence of their khan. Ogedai knew the younger ones only by sight, but Sorhatani had brought Kublai to talk to him in the evenings. She had made it seem a favour to her, but Ogedai had grown to look forward to the conversations. The boy was sharp and he seemed to have an endless interest in the stories of past battles, particularly if Genghis had been part of them. Ogedai had found himself reliving past glories through Kublai's eyes and spent part of each day planning what he would tell the young man that evening.