“Where are you from, who are you and what is your business here?” asked one, apparently the captain of the guards.
“That is not for your ears,” replied the boyar sharply, in Mongolian. “Who leads your army?”
“The grandsons of the great Jinghis Khan, Peta-Behadir and Burunda-Behadir.”
“Then go and tell them ‘The river Kalka flows over a muddy bed and empties into the Don.’ We will await your return here by the fire.”
With slavish respect the Mongols backed away from the unknown arrivals who spoke their tongue and in such an authoritative tone, which they were accustomed to hear only from their khans and princes. In a minute the captain of the guards had put another man in his place and leaping upon his horse galloped away to the encampment which was perhaps three-quarters of a mile away from the sentry’s campfire.
Tuhar Wolf and Peace-Renown dismounted from their horses which one of the guards took from them, cleaned, watered and tied in a field of rye sown by peasants on the fertile land. The guests drew closer to the campfire warming their hands grown cold from the chill of the spring evening.
Peace-Renown shivered visibly. The bursting gush of hot blood turning to ice as it rushed, left her face white. She did not raise her eyes to her father’s face. For the first time hearing the Mongolian tongue from her father’s lips and noting with what deference the Mongols obeyed his orders, she began to realize that this was probably not the first time her father had met those dastardly despoilers of her fatherland and to suspect the truth of the gossip she had heard in the court of king Danilo, that Tuhar Wolf, in the battle at Kalka, committed treason by revealing to the Mongols in advance all the secret plans made by the kings for the defense of their country. True, the gossipers had admitted that there was insufficient proof by which to convict him and cause him to be beheaded.
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