Batu and Suuqai came off the road from the passes while the tumen was still day behind them, and the Orkhon valley opened ahead in the full morning light with Karakorum inside it.
He had expected something larger. Samarkand's reconstructed walls rose from two centuries of accumulated Islamic civilization, every stone placed and replaced by tradition.
Karakorum was walled and the palace complex sat at its center with the administrative permanence of a place that ran an empire, but the city itself was modest, smaller than Urgench, smaller than Bukhara's rebuilt perimeter, considerably smaller than Samarkand.
Here the power did not match the scale. It never had, anywhere the Mongol line had run. Standing at the valley's edge with the city and its outer formations in view, the difference between what this place looked like and what it controlled was visible.
