The Great Board Road Makes the Steppe Run on Schedule

I arrived in Sarai with my cloak already smelling like wet felt and ambition, which is what passes for perfume on the lower Volga when the sky decides to be the color of old pewter. The city looked familiar in the way a face can look familiar when you can’t remember whether you owe it money. Sarai still spreads like a hand dropped open-palmed across the riverbank: tents beside brick, prayer beside profanity, a thousand languages rubbing shoulders and pretending not to notice the rubbing.

In my usual experience, the first thing a traveler notices here is the noise—hooves, shouting, the metal clink of scales and weapons, the eternal arguing that makes a bazaar feel alive. In this world, the first thing you notice is quieter and somehow more shocking: the road is too neat.

Not neat in the way a stone-paved street in some proud Mediterranean city is neat, where the stones have history and the cracks have poetry. This is neat like a clerk’s handwriting. A wide band of fitted timber planks runs straight through the grasslands and into the city, slightly raised and crowned so water slips off, the seams tarred dark and clean. On either side, drainage ditches march along as if dug by a man who believes puddles are a personal failure. Every so often there is a post with a carved mark that tells you how far you’ve come. I stood in front of one and did the strange thing time travelers do: I pretended I had always expected to see it.

A drover beside me, leading three shaggy oxen, saw me staring and snorted. “Boards don’t lie,” he said, like it was a proverb older than the grass.

That is the difference here, and it looks small if you describe it lazily: the Golden Horde standardized plank roads. Not a few, not only in cities, but across the main routes like an empire laying down its own spine. In my home line, the steppe is speed mixed with mud and luck. Here it is speed mixed with rules.

I followed the Great Board Road into Sarai as if it was a river I could walk on. The sound under wheels was a steady thump-thump-thump, which should have been soothing, but instead felt like being chased by a metronome. Wagons moved in something like lanes, and when one tried to drift, a mounted patrolman barked and pointed with his whip as if correcting bad posture. On the shoulder, a man shoveled grit from a sack onto a slick patch with the calm dedication of someone feeding a sacred fire.

My boots were the wrong kind for this surface. On mud, any boot is acceptable if it keeps out the worst of the world. On boards, leather either grips or it doesn’t, and mine didn’t. I slid once, caught myself, and tried to look like it had been deliberate. A boy hauling a bundle of reeds laughed and said, “City feet,” with the pity reserved for people who don’t know which end of a horse bites.

Sarai’s bazaar still hit me like a wall of smells: lamb fat, fish, onions, horse sweat, and the sharp edge of fermented mare’s milk. Persian cloth merchants unfurled colors bright enough to insult the gray sky. Rus’ traders piled furs like small dead storms. A man from somewhere south of the Caspian sold glazed bowls that looked too delicate to survive a single argument. The city was as cosmopolitan as ever, and as unplanned as ever. The difference was that everyone kept glancing toward the road, as if listening for the next heartbeat.

I stopped at a roadside inn—one of the new kind that sits by the road as predictably as beads on a string. The building was not pretty, but it was consistent: timber frame, low walls, wide doors for carts, a platform for loading. A board outside listed rates in neat columns. I had to read it twice, partly because I was wet and tired, and partly because posted prices in this century feel like seeing a dog recite scripture.

Inside, a scribe sat at a table with ink, a seal, and the bored face of someone whose job is to catch people doing what people always do. He was not a grand official—no embroidered coat, no cluster of guards. Just a man with paper and authority, which in most ages is a more dangerous combination than a sword.

A caravan master was arguing with him about a fine. “They only rested a moment,” the caravan master said, gesturing toward his oxen outside. “The beasts needed water.”

The scribe didn’t raise his voice. He tapped a nail-fixed schedule on the wall with his pen. “The main boards are for passage,” he said. “Rest is for the shoulder. The order is posted.”

“Order,” the caravan master repeated, like the word tasted strange.

The scribe’s eyes flicked to me, then away. “Board-blocking,” he said, as if naming a sin.

In my home line, a caravan master would have tried money first, then threats, then appealing to some distant noble’s cousin. Here he tried money too—habits travel well—but the scribe looked more offended by the attempt than tempted. “If you want to give silver,” he said, “give it to the road fund. There is a box.” And there was: a wooden chest with a slit and a painted mark of crossed planks.

I could have laughed. I didn’t, because the room was full of people who treated this like normal life. That is the most unsettling part: not the planks, but the way they have changed what people expect from the world.

A merchant from Novgorod sat near me, chewing dried fish and complaining about a delay. “Two hours,” he said, shaking his head with real anger. “Two hours behind at Ukek. You’d think they were asleep.”

“Two hours,” I repeated, to make sure my ears weren’t inventing things.

He looked at me the way you look at someone who has confessed to not knowing what day it is. “When you’ve promised delivery by the third bell,” he said, “two hours matters.”

Delivery by the third bell. I have crossed centuries where people measure time by hunger and shadow and the mood of the sky. Here, time was being cut into pieces small enough to argue about.

It would be easy to say the road makes them faster. That’s true, but speed is only half the spell. The road makes them predictable, and predictability does something odd to the human brain: it makes people feel entitled. Entitlement is a quiet form of revolution. When you can plan, you can complain when plans fail. When you can complain, you start to believe the world owes you answers.

I learned this the hard way at the gate.

The city’s entrance was not a grand stone arch. It was a cluster of posts, rope, and men with stamps. One man wore a coat with a stitched emblem of planks and a stylized horse. He held out his hand without looking at me. “Pass token,” he said.

I gave him the kind of document that usually works: a piece of paper with official-looking marks, a wax seal I had acquired in another place, and a confidence that borders on fraud. He glanced at it, then frowned.

“Wrong width,” he said.

“For a paper?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

He pointed past me, to a cart being measured with a wooden frame like a tailor measuring a client who might bite. “Axle width,” he said, as if explaining to a child. “All carts on boards must match. If your cart is wrong, you damage planks. If you damage planks, you pay.”

“I don’t have a cart,” I said.

He looked me up and down. “Then don’t walk in the cart lane. There are foot boards.”

There were foot boards. A narrower plank path ran along one side, and I had missed it because my eyes were still busy being offended at the idea of lanes. I moved over and tried to look like I had intended to obey all along. A woman carrying eggs on a tray passed me with the calm balance of someone who has been trained by a world that insists on straight lines.

Inside Sarai, the Great Board Road wasn’t just a route. It was the city’s main sentence, and everyone else was a subordinate clause.

At a wheelwright’s stall I saw stacks of identical spokes and hubs, not the usual mix of custom pieces that only fit one cart in one village. The wheelwright, a thick-armed Rus’ man with a scar on his chin, caught me staring.

“Standard,” he said, tapping a hub. “Same here, same at Ukek, same at Astrakhan.”

“And if someone wants it different?” I asked.

He laughed, a quick bark. “Then they can carry it.”

This kind of standardization does more than make repairs easier. It makes the state hungry. If every cart fits the road, then every cart can be taken. I saw it happen near the tax office: a collector calmly requisitioned three carts from a merchant, handing him receipts stamped with something like a running horse over planks. The merchant didn’t scream. He didn’t beg. He argued about redemption.

“Any station or only Sarai?” he demanded.

“Any station,” the collector said.

“Then write it,” the merchant insisted.

Imagine living in a world where oppression comes with paperwork good enough to critique. It turns rage into a dispute over wording. It makes people participate in their own inconvenience, as long as the inconvenience is properly documented.

The way-stations along the road have become something more than rest stops. In the evening I sat by the inn’s fire and watched the social machinery turn. A Kipchak herdsman traded a leather strap for a small jar of honey from a Bulgar man who claimed his bees were “road-fed,” as if the road itself produced sweetness. A preacher stood near the doorway, waiting until the stew was served and everyone was too comfortable to leave, then began a sermon about how the Eternal Blue Sky favored order and punished waste.

A young couple sat with their families at a table that had been scrubbed so clean it looked ashamed. They were negotiating a marriage. Not quietly, not privately, but in the open, with the innkeeper acting as witness, because the inn was neutral ground and the road guaranteed that relatives could arrive on time.

On time. That phrase kept coming up like a drumbeat.

Even food has changed around the city. In my home line, markets in places like this sell what can survive the journey: grain, salted meat, hardy roots. Here I saw baskets of greens that would wilt if you glared at them too hard. A fishmonger bragged about river fish being “this morning’s catch,” and the customers nodded like this was a reasonable demand instead of a miracle.

A butcher complained to me—complained, as if I was responsible—that buyers now wanted meat “less traveled.” “They say the boards make it easy,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. “Now they get picky.”

Picky customers in the Golden Horde. I wrote that in my head twice, to make sure I didn’t forget it.

The road shapes the army too. I watched a troop column pass outside the market. In other worlds, steppe troops move like water: spread, shifting, hard to count. Here they moved in something like organized lines, keeping to the main boards, their horses’ hooves striking wood in a rhythm that made the column sound like a single creature. The soldiers looked less fierce and more bored, which might be the most dangerous kind of soldier—one who expects the machine to work.

One rider grumbled to his companion that the boards were slick in rain and suggested they spread sand more often. They spoke of traction like men discussing soup.

Later, I tried to walk along the main boards again and got scolded by a patrolman. He wasn’t cruel. He was worse: he was tired. “Foot boards,” he said, pointing, as if I was one more idiot who wanted to be special. I stepped aside, and the wagons continued thumping past, the empire counting itself forward.

In my rented corner of a merchant’s house, the walls are thin enough that I can hear everything: a couple arguing softly in a language I don’t fully recognize, a child coughing, someone laughing at a joke I missed. Outside, the Board Road keeps its steady percussion. The sound is so regular that it’s almost hard to sleep, like trying to rest next to a very patient clock.

I keep thinking about the larger consequences, the ones that won’t show up in any dramatic story. Rebellions become harder when the tax collector arrives exactly when the notice says he will. Raids become less profitable when patrols can move reliably and show up before the raiders are done celebrating. Local princes have fewer excuses when the courier carries a stamped logbook and can point to the time of delivery like a judge.

Even corruption adapts. A man at the inn told me, without shame, what the “road fee” should be if you want your wagon inspected quickly. Not a bribe, he insisted—more like a service charge. The amount was oddly specific, as if agreed upon by a committee. I have seen empires rot from greed; I did not expect to see greed become tidy.

I have my own reasons for tracking these small divergences—reasons that have less to do with romance and more to do with preventing certain futures from becoming too comfortable. Comfort breeds confidence, and confidence breeds plans, and plans are the most dangerous things people make. Still, standing here in Sarai, listening to the steady thump of timber under wheels, I can’t help feeling a grudging respect for anyone who looked at the steppe and decided the answer was carpentry.