The room was cold enough to keep cut meat sound… but the four fires did give warmth to the chamber's painted ivories and golds, and so an impression of comfort.
The odors of much of the audience – sweat, smeared sheep fat, and mare's-milk fartings – made an unpleasant counterpoint.
The audience subject for today – traditionally a Please-and-Thank-You, with wishes that Blue Sky turn trouble away – was not, however, lightning, grazing land, floodwater, or sheep scrapie, the tribesmen's traditional concerns. The subject today was salary… payment… wages.
There had been, over the past few years, more and more interest by the fighting men in money – as opposed to gifts of flocks, horse herds, honors. Razumov had noticed it early, and warned it would increase. "A penalty of civilization, lord, and reward of conquest. The old ways now being seen as 'old ways.'"
Sadly true – and having to be dealt with by such audiences as this, in which little bags of silver coin, minted in Map-Oakland, were handed out to officers whose only interest should be in service to their lord. There was no question how the old Khan, his father, would have dealt with these more and more frequent requests for currency. He would have picked an officer past his prime, and ordered silver spikes driven into his skull, as a lesson on the perils of greed.
It was in the midst of distribution – a rank of rewarded men bowing over their clutched little bags of metal before him, while he smiled and smiled (the watching crowd hissing in approval) – that Toghrul became aware of a disturbance at the doors.
Two men had pushed in past the guards, then immediately had fallen to their hands and knees and begun the long crawl down the center aisle toward his cushioned dais. An excess of debasement, and a very bad sign.
The rank of officers glanced behind them at the crawlers, bowed once more, and got out of the way.
No more hissing approvals. Only silence.
Toghrul waited while the two fools came toward him, baby fashion, crawling more slowly the closer they came. Watching them, copybook Achilles-and-the-Tortoise occurred to him.
He waited, then beckoned them on to finally rest before him, still on hands and knees. They'd come dirty from long riding. He knew one – a minor officer of supply, with Ikbal Crusan's tuman. The other was just a soldier.
"Great, Great Lord – " The officer of supply.
Serious trouble, if it required two 'greats' as introduction. Toghrul sat silent. His father would have approved.
"Map-Fort Stockton… O Khan, live forever." The sweating officer was Kipchak, the steppe still in his face.
Toghrul waited.
"The… the North Map-Mexicans have come up and destroyed it, lord!"
Ah, a fact at last, though likely faulty. Murmurs in the Lily Chamber.
"And with what forces did they accomplish this?"
More groveling. Both men had their faces on the carpet. "It seemed… three or four thousand riders, lord. Heavy and Light. They came from southeast, in the dark before morning."
Listening, a flush – an absolute flush of pleasure, of amusement – rose in Toghrul so he couldn't help smiling, then chuckling at such a surprise, a blow struck as clever as one of his own! An interesting event, and at last an interesting enemy. The joys of complications arising…
"So, I'm to understand that this Captain-General, this Small-Sam Monroe, seeing us striking to the south – west of the border Bend – has taken the opportunity to strike north at us from east of it!"
Silence from the grovelers… well, a little nod from the officer. A nod into the carpet.
"And the place is destroyed?"
"Yes, lord." The Nodder. "Burned and destroyed and all the men killed."
"Only the men?"
"I believe only the men, lord – the seven or eight hundred left behind as guards, herdsmen, and storekeepers." A pause. "I believe the women and children were spared."
"You believe, or you saw?"
"I saw… a little."
"And you – soldier – what did you see?"
But the soldier seemed to have seen nothing, and only burrowed into the carpet, his ass in the air.
"The horses?"
The Nodder murmured, "Gone, lord."
"Almost two thousand – four herds of fine horses gone, taken? Driven away?"
A nod. There were strands of drool on the carpet.
"But you weren't killed… and you were mounted?"
A nod, but a reluctant nod.
"Why then didn't you send… this one… with the report? Why not, yourself, have followed those clever thieves, made certain of their route of retreat? Then you might have become a wind ghost, cut throats in the night to unsettle them, and so secured at least a little of my honor."
"I… lord, I didn't think."
"You didn't? Your head was at fault for not thinking?"
Barely a nod.
"Well then, your head's proved of little use to you. You'll do much better without it." Toghrul lifted his right hand, made a little spilling motion – and four guardsmen, two from each side of the dais, jumped down on the Nodder like swineherds on a shoat, and bound his hands behind him. They lifted him up, and trotted away with him down the chamber's aisle while the officers, chiefs, and important men of audience fell aside as if the pops were carried there in rot and puss and buboes. The Nodder made no sound, going, seemed almost asleep with terror.
The soldier remained silent on the carpet.
"Soldier…" Toghrul waited patiently until a grimy, teary face rose from warp-and-weft. "Soldier, your Khan would never punish a man for obeying his officer's orders, even if the officer has proved a fool and coward. Go then, and report to the commander of the camp for rest, rations, and honorable assignment."
The teary face, astonished, then turned to a lover's, looked up rich with affection and gratitude. There was a subdued murmur of approval at such generous and lordly justice.
The soldier, turning, began to crawl aside, but Toghrul smiled, gestured him up onto his feet, and waved him away into the rest of his life.
There was an odor of urine; the carpet would have to be cleaned. There was no denying blood.
Thought on a throne was well enough; thought in a summer garden well enough. Thought on a cushion couch with a dear wife by one's side, also well enough. – But none the equal, for a Kipchak, of horseback consideration. Consideration, this sunny, clear, and cold afternoon, of the morning's information: the surprising counterstroke from North Map-Mexico. A counterstroke absolutely Monroe's in conception, though Razumov's people – and an after-the-fact pigeon from the Boston creatures in Map-McAllen – suggested the immediate commander was Colonel (now General) Voss, apparently a very competent officer. Banjar player, also, according to Old Peter's farewell report. Monroe, it seemed, had gone to Middle Kingdom.
Toghrul whipped his stallion's withers, lifting Lively to a lope out into Texas prairie endless as an ocean. A frozen ocean now, brown and yellow with frost-burned grass. He rode as if he flew as New Englanders sometimes flew, and smiled again at what Monroe had managed. Very much – oh, very much what he might have done himself. An enemy, a thief, puts his head into a yurt's entrance, intending mischief. What better response, what more humorous response, than to wriggle under the yurt's fabric at the back, circle round, and kick the fellow in the ass?
So, the Captain-General apparently possessed imagination, and certainly a sense of humor. He also now possessed two thousand fine horses, which would remount his cavalry handsomely, and likely help pay the expenses of the expedition.
Well done, and more than worth killing him for. Worth killing Voss and many of his people, too, for laughing, as they must be, at a Khan's discomfiture. But how sad that the only interesting person in the West must be done away with…