The Chagatai rider had committed to going with the throw, and the moment his footing moved to keep pace with his own center the advantage transferred.

Batu felt it through his grip before his eyes had finished reading the move. The resistance disappeared, the pressure in the man’s shoulder going from rigid to soft as he gave up his stance to escape the hip.

The throw had been meant to take him backward and left. The man had stepped into the direction of it to kill the leverage. His feet were ahead of his hips now and his body was leaning forward to compensate.

Batu abandoned the original motion.

He stepped through to the right, past the man’s hip, and pulled the grip forward across his own chest rather than up and over.

The Chagatai rider’s forward lean had nowhere to go. His feet were still catching up with his center.

The pull brought him down across Batu’s planted right leg, and the ground came up to meet the man’s shoulder. The referee’s call cut through the crowd noise in a single flat tone.

"Get up, get up-!"

"Shit, he stopped the counter-"

Someone in the outer ring was clapping with the flat hard sound of happiness of a man who bet on his instinct and was rewarded by it.

Around him were men who had not seen it coming at all, and the difference between those two groups was audible in the way the noise divided.

The Chagatai rider stood. Both men moved through the closing Devekh.

The man’s face had no dissatisfaction. He performed the eagle motion with indifference and walked off the ground without looking back.

Batu’s lungs were working harder than the match had seemed to demand.

The summer air in the Orkhon valley in the middle of the day had a clear sensation, thick with the heat rising off the packed earth and the collective heat of several hundred bodies packed around the wrestling area.

He found water where Suuqai had it ready at the line’s edge and drank briefly, then looked across the ground.

The crowd noise from the far side of the wrestling area was different from anything his match had caused.

It was the boisterous noise of a crowd that, for once, was surprised by a match.

Einar was still in.

He had a man in a front grip, both of them upright, and his opponent was attempting to break the hold through technique. A hip drop, an attempt to establish a lower base and find leverage that way.

Einar’s arms simply did not allow it.

He was not using bökh. He was not doing anything that had a name in the tradition the competition based on.

He was holding a man who could not be released, and then he pushed down, and the man went down with the sudden completeness of someone who had run out of options entirely.

The corner erupted.

"What was that grip?!"

"That’s not any grip I’ve seen, what is that-"

"Is there even a name for that move?"

Someone in the Ogedeid section’s observer cluster, the men Guyuk had placed near the wrestling area’s northern face since the competition opened, called something that Batu didn’t fully catch.

Whatever it was drew a short flat response from the man beside him, and neither of them moved from their position.

They were watching the Khar Kheshig’s norsemen compete in the Mongol world’s most traditional test of a man’s body, and nothing in intelligence they had been gathering before the Jochid tumen arrived had prepared them for what they were looking at.

The next pairing call came before Batu had finished observing the crowd.

He stepped back onto the ground.

The man on the opposite side came from the waiting line with no faction colors anywhere on him. No identifying marks at all.

Batu noticed the absence before he had finished watching his physique, and the physique itself was the second thing.

Wide through the chest, extremely wide, with forearms produced by years of something that had used them heavily, and a base that sat low from the moment the man started walking toward the center.

He moved with patience.

The referee called both names.

The unfactionalized man’s name connected to nothing in Batu’s existing picture of the camp’s composition.

He shrugged and moved past it.

Both men performed the Devekh.

The unfactionalized man moved through the eagle motion with the boredom of someone completing a required task before arriving at the part that interested him.

They came together.

Batu found a grip at the sleeve and the collar and applied pressure, and felt the pressure go nowhere.

The man’s frame took what Batu put into it, and his hips stayed where they were, and his footing stayed where it was.

The grip that should have begun moving his center found nothing to move.

Batu drove into the left side, and the man absorbed it and stood where he had been standing.

His hands were on Batu’s arms but had applied no force yet.

He was waiting.

"He’s not moving him."

"Course he’s not, look at the size."

A voice from somewhere behind Batu’s left shoulder said something in Kipchak that got a laugh from four or five men in its vicinity.

Strong men waited.

A man who had been in enough matches knew he did not need to move first.

He needed to establish his position and let the other man come, because the other man would keep coming until he found the right position.

Finding it meant pushing from different directions, and pushing from different directions meant eventually pushing in the direction the strong man chose to redirect.

The math was simple, and it worked every time unless the other man understood the math too.

Batu stopped pushing.

He stood in the grip and let two full seconds pass with nothing coming from him in any direction.

The crowd did not know what to make of it.

"Why’s he stopped?"

"He’s reading him."

"He’s going to get-"

The man pushed.

He drove forward from his hips with the full mass of his frame behind it, through his forearms and into Batu’s chest and shoulders.

Batu stepped to the side and took everything away.

His left foot planted and his right moved wide, and the push went past him into the air where his chest had been.

The man’s own bulk carried him forward past his own footing, the momentum he had committed to a direction that no longer existed.

Batu found the hip from the side with both hands.

The man’s body was already past his center.

He pulled down and across, sending the man downward, back down.

The ground accepted the man with a flat impact that sent its sound across the full wrestling area.

The referee’s call went up.

Batu moved through the closing Devekh with his breathing working hard and the summer heat pressing down on the packed earth around him.

The crowd shouted in a dozen overlapping voices that had no single source and no single content.

He walked off the ground.