EMPIRE REWRITTEN - Book III / Chapter 62: A Khan Who Owes Us.

The guides came down to the camp an hour before light, eight herdsmen from a Shirin clan village up the valley, on small rough horses with bows cased at their knees. Sigerichos had arranged it with them two days before, when they brought sheep down to sell to the camp. The oldest of them talked with him by the horse lines for some time, and Sigerichos told Thomas that there were boar in the oak woods on the far side of the ridge, lying up above a stream, and that the herdsmen would drive them out in their own way.

They rode up through the vineyards in the half dark, Thomas and Izaoul in front with two officers of the legion and twenty men of the tagmata behind them as an escort. Kallistos rode at the back with a boar spear one of the officers had lent him, upright on his stirrup. Below them the cook fires were being lit in the camp, and the flag with the red cross hung over the castle as it had every morning since the Katarina sailed. Thomas had written to Catherine once since then and had found nothing to tell her.

“You could have stayed in your bed, Strategos,” he said over his shoulder.

“I would rather have been on the beach, Prince.” Kallistos moved the spear to his other hand. “I prefer to run in the mornings.”

Thomas laughed. “I tried it for a while too. I never saw much in it.”

Izaoul had been looking back down at the camp. “There is so little to do in that camp that I got up in the dark for a pig,” he said. “I hope we do not have to wait much longer for the khan, so we can be home in the City by the feast of the Apostles. It feels like a year already.”

At the top of the ridge the herdsmen split without a word from anyone, four to each side, and rode out along the slope until they were small against the hill, and then turned down into the trees. Sigerichos explained it as it happened. They would close the wood from both ends and come up the stream together, and whatever was lying in the oaks would be pushed ahead of them to the head of the stream, where the trees gave out onto open grass. Before they split, the oldest herdsman had shown Sigerichos where the spears were to stand, on foot along the edge of the grass a spear’s throw apart. The place in the middle, where the stream came out of the trees, was where the boar would most likely break. One of the officers made to take it, and Thomas insisted on having it himself. He put the two officers on either side of him, with Kallistos and Izaoul on the rise behind them and the escort farther back with the horses.

Outside Constantinople the boar was hunted with hounds and a crowd of beaters on foot, and the noise carried a mile. Here there was nothing for a long time but the birds and a horse blowing on the rise behind them. Then one of the herdsmen called somewhere far down the stream, a short high cry, and another answered him from the other side. After that the calls came closer together, and the birds went up out of the oaks ahead.

The boar came out of the trees at a run, a grey animal with dried mud to its shoulders, and it swung away from the officer on the left and ran across the grass toward Thomas with its head down. He set his feet and took it low in the chest with the spear, and kept his weight on the shaft until it stopped moving.

The herdsmen rode out of the trees one after another and sat their horses round it. The oldest of them got down and looked at the wound and said something to Sigerichos, who told Thomas it was a boar of four or five years. Two of the others tied its legs and lifted it across a packhorse, which shied at the smell and had to be held.

Thomas was wiping the spearhead in the grass when the oldest herdsman said something sharp and pointed north. Six riders were coming down the Solkhat road where it crossed the shoulder of the next hill, riding hard, with the dust hanging behind them. The horses had their heads low, and one of them stumbled on the slope and was pulled up and kicked on. Four of the riders were Tatars. The other two rode high in the saddle with long stirrups, and the sun caught on iron caps.

“From the north, Prince,” Sigerichos said. “From the isthmus road.”

Thomas gave the spear to one of the officers, took his horse from the escort and rode down through the grass to meet them on the road.

The riders pulled up when they saw him coming, and their horses stood in the road with their legs spread and their sides going in and out. The leader was a young Tatar in a quilted coat with a scab across the bridge of his nose and an empty quiver at his hip. Sigerichos spoke with him first and told Thomas that he was the son of Tegene’s brother, one of those who had gone north to Kiev in the winter. The two Lithuanians sat their horses a little apart. The older of them had a fair beard gone dark with the road and a long mail shirt under his coat, and when Izaoul came up and spoke to him in Latin he answered at once.

Thomas asked where the khan was. The young man talked for some time before Sigerichos could put any of it into Greek.

“They crossed the Dnieper at Tavan six days ago, the khan and the bey first with the Shirin, and the Lithuanians were to come after them with the baggage.” He listened for a moment. “In the afternoon a host came down the right bank behind them, and the Lithuanians turned on the bank to hold it while the rest got over. They were cut down there, and in the water. The khan is alive, Prince. He got over with the bey, and he is not hurt.”

Thomas asked whose host it was, and Sigerichos put the question to the young man. “Sayyid’s, Prince. He is khan at Sarai now. He won it in the winter, and the whole Horde answers to him from the Dnieper to the Volga. He has come down for the peninsula, and for the khan.”

Izaoul looked up from the Lithuanian at the name. Thomas asked how many, and the young man answered with his hands as well as his mouth.

“He says twenty thousand, maybe more. The right bank was covered with them for a mile up and down. They were bringing them over when we ran, on rafts, and swimming the horses.” Sigerichos waited while the young man said something else. “Ulugh’s bey is with him. Tegene’s men recognised some of his riders at the river.”

Izaoul had been talking with the Lithuanian all this while, and he turned to Thomas. Radvila had ridden out of Kiev with about three thousand and had fewer than a thousand left. An arrow had gone through the flesh of his arm at the river, and he rode with the khan.

“The khan has six or seven thousand with him,” Sigerichos said. “Tegene’s men and his own, and what is left of the Lithuanians. They come down to Solkhat, two days from now or three. He asks the Prince of the Romans to meet him there.”

Kallistos had come down from the rise while they talked and sat his horse behind Thomas with the boar spear still upright on his stirrup. He asked how far it was from Tavan to the isthmus, and Sigerichos put it to the young man.

“Two days for a host, he says, or perhaps three.”

“Then they are at the isthmus now, or through it,” Kallistos said. “Four or five days before they are at Solkhat, Prince.”

Thomas looked north up the Solkhat road. His brother would be at Thessaloniki by now, or nearly. He told the sergeant of the escort to take the riders down to the camp and feed them, and sent an officer ahead to put the scouts of the horse out on the road.

The war tent, that morning

The flaps of the war tent were tied back for the light, and the legion’s map of the peninsula lay on the table with the Solkhat road drawn in brown ink up from the bay. Tegene’s nephew and the other riders had been given a tent nearby, and they were eating in it. 

Thomas had Kallistos speak first, and the strategos put his slate down on the map. Cembalo and Avlita had walls, and even Calita had its tower, and the fleet could reach all three. Theodoro’s walls could stand a long siege as well. The legion could be split between them and Haci brought inside Avlita’s new wall with what was left of his men, and Sayyid could have the plain for as long as the grass lasted. Twenty thousand men with three horses apiece would eat the grass off that plain in a few weeks and have to go home. He would not fight them on open ground if he could help it. The legion had not come north for a war with the Horde, and what it needed now was time.

“If we sit behind walls, Sayyid takes Solkhat without a fight, and every bey on the peninsula goes over to him,” Thomas said. “Besides, why should we run? We faced Murad’s far larger army on the plain at Edessa. He attacked our line, and we broke him. If we offer Sayyid battle on the plain, he will attack us. Our fire will break them too. They have never seen our way of fighting.”

“They know what our pyrvelos do, Prince. Ulugh’s bey left a hundred and eighty horses under our guns at Avlita, and he rides with Sayyid now.”

“From a fort, at night. He has never ridden at a full legion standing in a line in daylight, and neither has Sayyid.” Thomas put his finger on the map at the open ground north of Solkhat. “We will be the headland, Strategos. The waves break on it, and it stands.”

Kallistos looked up at him, and then back at the map without answering. Outside a sergeant was shouting for the gun teams, and the Tatars had come out of their tent and were watching them across the grass.

Izaoul had been smoothing his gloves on the table. “This may not be our war, Prince,” he said. “Sayyid holds Sarai and everything that answers to Sarai. A khan like that can seal the same terms as Haci Giray, and keep them better. The Emperor sent us here to make a friend at Solkhat. He did not say which one.”

“A khan does not bring that many horse across the steppe to make terms with us,” Kallistos said. “He comes to put his own man at Solkhat and take everything Solkhat had.”

“Then I would rather have a khan at Solkhat who owes us something,” Thomas said. “We gave Tegene our word at Avlita, and again at the rock. We go to Solkhat.”

Nobody spoke for a moment, and then Kallistos picked up his slate. The legion could be on the road by first light, he said. The wagons would not make Solkhat in one day with the guns, so he would leave the heavy stores on the beach under a company and send the horse out ahead of the column all the way.

Thomas gave the rest of the orders himself. One of the four galleys would sail for the City that night with a letter in his own hand. Letters would go to Arethas at Cembalo, to Avlita and to Theodoro, to tell them what was coming and to keep their people inside the walls. The Zoe and the other three galleys would stay in the bay.

He wrote the letter at the end of the table while Izaoul read it over his shoulder, and sealed it with his ring. The galley went out of the bay an hour after dark, and from the door of the tent Thomas watched her lantern until it went behind the castle rock.

The Solkhat road, the next morning

The legion struck its tents in the dark and was on the road by first light, leaving the Zoe and her three galleys in the bay. It passed close to Soldaia, and the Genoese came out along the parapet to watch it go.

In the afternoon of the second day the hills fell away on the left, and the steppe opened to the north under a haze, flat and brown, with nothing on it taller than the grass. An hour short of Solkhat the road ran past a village of the Shirin clan, a camp of felt tents round a few stone houses, and its people were leaving. Women were loading carts with rolled felt, pots and carpets. Boys were driving the sheep up the slope behind the houses toward the woods, with the horses after them. Sigerichos said the people would keep the herds in the hills and the woods until the khan from Sarai had come and gone, as their fathers had done.

From the rise beyond the village Thomas could see Solkhat, a long low town at the foot of the last hills, with a minaret standing up over the roofs. The legion halted on the road below it, and Kallistos rode back along the column to bring the pieces up and close the files.

A little before sunset dust rose on the steppe north of Solkhat, and the khan’s column came in off the plain, past the town and down the road toward them. Tegene rode at the front of the column. His red coat was torn at the shoulder and grey with dust, and there was a cut over his eye that had been stitched. Beside him rode a smaller man of about forty-five with a short grey beard and a plain brown riding coat, on a horse that had been ridden too hard. A rider behind him carried his standard. Farther back the Lithuanians rode together with their long stirrups and their iron caps, and at their head an older man rode with his left arm bound across his chest.

Thomas rode out to meet them with Izaoul and Sigerichos. When they were a few paces apart Tegene put his hand on his chest. The man beside him got down from his horse before Thomas could, and held out his hand to him. Thomas got down and took it.

Haci Giray looked past him at the road, where the first of the pieces was coming up between the files with its team blowing, and said something in Tatar.

Author’s note:

So the khan came down! And Thomas has to make the big call without his brother.

In OTL by the 1440s the Golden Horde was falling apart. Ulugh Muhammad had lost the fight for Sarai and gone north toward Kazan. Küchük Muhammad held Sarai and the Volga, and Sayyid Ahmad, a younger son of Tokhtamysh, held the western steppe toward the Dnieper. In Crimea the clans wanted a khan of their own. Around 1439 their beys asked the Lithuanians for Haci Giray, who gathered an army at Kiev with Radvila Astikas and drove Sayyid’s governor out. Genoese records call him khan in March 1441. Sayyid did not let it go. In 1442 he took Solkhat and Haci fled to the Dnieper, in 1445 he failed at Perekop, and in 1452 Haci caught him crossing the Dnieper and beat him. Sayyid ended his days as a prisoner of the Lithuanians at Kaunas.

In our story the pieces fall differently. Ulugh fails harder and his western clans go over to Sayyid. Sayyid takes Sarai and pushes Küchük down the Volga to Astrakhan. So the Sayyid who comes south in 1441 is master of most of Horde, in name at least, from the Dnieper to the Volga. A rival of the old blood, raised by the clans with Lithuanian silver, is a direct challenge to his title, so he comes in person. This time it is Sayyid who catches Haci at the river, at the Tavan crossing near today’s Kakhovka, the reverse of what really happened in 1452.

And Thomas’s headland is Marcus Aurelius again, Meditations 4.49: be like the headland the waves keep breaking against, which stands firm while the water around it goes quiet.New map of the region drops tomorrow!