The fires at the ceremony ground's center had been burning for an hour before the shaman spoke, and in that hour the gathering settled into itself the way a vast body of water settled after all that had been thrown into it had stilled.
The plain was flat in every direction, its extent enormous, dark as when the last trace of summer light had gone entirely from the western horizon and the stars had come fully into their own. From where Batu stood, what he saw felt as mass, as the compressed density of tens of thousands of bodies and animals around a center point, firelight catching in fragments at the nearest faces and dying before it reached the rows behind them.
He stood among the Jochid princes in the position their standing required, those around him close enough that he could hear the way each one breathed. Orda was a step to his left. Siban to his right.
