Chapter 77

When at midmorning the next day they were summoned by Temük Khan's emissary and taken to a great plain stretching two hundred paces from the center of the camp, they were unprepared for the spectacle that unfolded before their eyes.

Located side by side in a perfect line, a hundred Mongol horsemen stood expectantly awaiting orders from their chief, who was sitting with his wife and other members of his family in a kind of box set up on the side of the plain.

Temük Khan and the Begum wore formal clothes that gave an account of their superior status, but had an unquestionable military connotation. The box was covered by a red canopy with multicolored decorations and pieces of cloth with texts written in the Mongolian alphabet with meanings that the visitors did not understand.