Of course, I didn’t go straight home. There’s no replacement for eyes on the environment. I visited one of the shops working on the farm wagons, gave personal greetings to some of the troopers, and stopped by to watch the cannon firing at the island forts. Then, I went home to a nice warm bed and a pair of warmer bodyguards.
My first job in the morning was to find our guides. We could hire professional merchant guides easily, and we would get a few, but they were business men who might bolt at the first sign of trouble.
I decided to recruit some of the Chinese troops who might want to go home. As our Chinese-speaking troopers straggled in, they were sent to the barracks to interview Chinese troops who claimed they knew the way and either spoke Polish or seemed smart enough to learn it.
Once a candidate pool was selected, they would be put though the usual procedures. We were short of Big People and I didn’t trust the Chinese in battle anyway, so they would be mounted on Big People who were pulling carts and had no current partners. If selected and passed by a Big Person, they would be uniformed, mounted, given the oath, taught how to care for their partners, and be sent to school.
Until we left, they would spend ten hours a day learning pigeon. A guide isn’t much good unless he can say, “Go past the river,” “Turn Left,” and “Look out for that damned big avalanche!”
Sir Eikmann was as good as his word. Before noon, he had gathered all the wagon repairmen in the parking yard and shown them the conversion he wanted made on the two-wheeled wagons. He specified a heavy iron tire and iron crossbars be added to each wheel. Seen from the side, each wheel ended up looking like a tic-tac-toe pattern inside an iron circle.
Since most of the utility wagons had slat sides instead of boxes, he lined the box with two layers of canvas and made a quick and simple cover to weatherproof it. There was lots of canvas available. The first three hundred conversions would even have iron sleeves in place of wood bearings in the wheels since his staff had found that many sleeve sets in storage.
The first conversions rolled over to the warehouses before the end of the day.
They had to compete for loading space with our regular carts that were already being reloaded.
The city was awakened that morning by Sir Ivanov’s men blasting a hole in the palisade near the docks. When they filled in the moat at that spot, our returning carts were able to enter the city right at the warehouse district, drive straight to the warehouses, load up, make a left turn, and proceed straight out the East Gate to our campgrounds.
I watched the loading for a while until I realized that planning and overseeing the loading was a matter for a hundred officers to manage, and they didn’t need my help.
They also didn’t need me at the merchants meeting where my staff laid out the instructions for cashing our vouchers, and arranged individual meetings to go over inventory lists, and agree on prices. We agreed to some pretty good prices.
It looked as if we actually might make our one week deadline.
I had made my decision about Sarai even before we attacked the city. I had a flyer printed up and on the morning of the seventh day, it was introduced at the merchants meeting.
“Gentlemen, the Christian Army will leave this city during the daylight hours tomorrow. Unfortunately, this city has great political and strategic importance to the Mongols. This is where the Russian princes and all other vassal states come to pay their taxes, do obeisance, and get their patents to rule validated. It is a great symbol of their power.
“It also holds a population of tens of thousands of Mongols, and their subjects, which makes it a dangerous place to have behind us.
“In this situation, the Mongols have consistently followed a simple plan: massacre the population and burn the city to the ground.
“We are not Mongols, so the population will not be slaughtered. However, we cannot allow this city to continue to exist.
“Therefore, today we will distribute the flyers that my aide is passing out to you now. In four languages, it reads:
The Christian Army will leave this city tomorrow and that the city will be burned when we leave.
All citizens are warned to leave as soon as possible. They can take anything with them except muskets and bows and may go anywhere they want, but they must leave.
“We will not torch the foreign compounds, the docks, or your warehouses but neither will we be able to assist with fire fighting, I suggest that you spend the next twenty four-hours preparing fire breaks, filling barrels with water, getting your boats loaded and underway, moving your merchandise out of the city, or doing whatever else you can to prepare for a fire storm.
“On a personal note, I remind you that merchandise can be replaced and wealth is only temporary, but your families are forever. I suggest you look to your families first.”
The meeting immediately split into two halves. Half the men ran for the door to warn their people and the other half jumped up screaming that I couldn’t do it. I left my aide to quiet them down.
Of course I could do it. I didn’t bother to explain that the only reason we weren’t torching their property directly was that King Henryk wouldn’t like all the complaints from European governments. I would just as soon put all the Mongol-trading, treacherous bastards into their warehouses and then burn them down.
There were a few other details to handle. Before we left, I met with Eikmann and Ivanov again.
“Gentlemen, you’ve done an excellent job getting us ready to go. Now before the general panic paralyzes the streets I have one last job for you. I had my aide estimate the fair value of a wagon repair shop on the second day we were here.
“I want your men, Sir Eikmann, to contact all of the shops that helped you and pay them double the value for their businesses in Mongol gold.
“As much as we want to impress upon people that helping or working with Mongols is dangerous, we also need to prove that we stick by our friends.
“Sir Ivanov, please do the same for any local businesses that have volunteered, and I emphasize volunteered, helped, or sold us supplies. You don’t have to do anything with the foreign merchants or businesses because they have been paid well in army scrip, but the Christian Army rewards its friends.”
Of course, part of the reason for my generosity was that we had more damned gold then we could carry. Sarai was where the Russian princes paid their annual tributes and we found several tons of gold in the vaults. Most national treasuries had less gold than we did.
I had already shipped over a ton of gold down the Volga with Sir Willard in the Wanderwind and still had more than I wanted to drag to Mongolia. Normally I would take every ounce with me because it was easier to drag one ounce of gold than the months of food that it could purchase for a warrior, but there weren’t many stores between here and Mongolia.
Meantime, Gorski and Krol were firming up their plans to burn the city. It required a lot of planning. Miss’s O’Leary’s cow got lucky. It’s hard to burn a city. Sarai was about twenty square miles of buildings, walls, and roads, and we weren’t going to be able to burn it all. I needed to burn enough to make certain that no one wanted to rebuilt here and that took planning.
The two barons had divided the town and were planning the routes their troopers would take to fire the place. Sir Ryszard was in charge of warning the population. If he didn’t like killing Mongols, he could take the job of getting them to leave. I know he would fail. No matter how much we warned them, some would refuse to leave out of disbelief, stubbornness, or just plain stupidity. I considered it a practical demonstration of Darwinism that wouldn’t affect my sleep at all.
The day of our departure, I was sitting on Silver’s back in the town square, flanked by Gorski and Krol. The bulk of our forces and all of our wagons were fifty miles away in our new camp on the grasslands.
I leaned down for a torch, lit the two red and gold flares that would signal the fire starters to commence their runs, and then tossed my torch through the open door of the city hall.
As we galloped for the city gates, Sir Krol called out from my left side, “Lord, isn’t this a strange way to burn a city? Don’t we usually just burst in with guns blazing and swords flashing and toss torches as we go?
I yelled back, “Yes, but we don’t usually go shopping first.”
From the Secret Journal of Su Song, Part Three
It has been eight months since we began dissecting the artifacts and the time for our report to the khan has come and gone without a visit from our leader. He has been on his annual campaign against my old masters, the Song Dynasty, south of here. The reports are that the campaign has been a frustrating one.
The Song Empire is an advanced county with a large population. They fight with fire lances and have thousands of well-trained crossbowmen for every battle. After generations of fighting invaders, their cities are well walled and they do not act as foolishly as the Europeans who would leave the safety of their cities to meet my masters’ people out on the open plain. When attacked, they retreat to their fortresses and shower the invaders with gun powder grenades and use trebuchets to lob gunpowder bombs and pots of boiling oil. The larger cities fire scrap metal and rock balls from cannon placed on the walls.
The khan may someday conquer them, but the campaign will take decades rather than months, and I suspect that he will have to wait until the loses in the European campaign are replaced. His people have never been as numerous as his enemies and there were too many deaths to ignore in Poland.
Our progress in his absence has been good on many fronts. I suspect that the most powerful things we have learned are from the war kite and the tracked wagons, but the khan will be most interested in the guns. He is still a warrior at heart and horses, women, dogs, and weapons are his loves.
It has been close. We realized within a few weeks that the Polish guns would be of little use to the mounted Mongol army. The damned things needed an alcohol lamp burning constantly. Even if we made them small enough for horseback, the lamp would be a problem and the ammunition would be prohibitively expensive to make.
The first ten copies we made were useless because they leaked like fish nets. It took our most skilled craftsmen weeks to make each mechanism with enough precision to fire repeatedly. Learning to make the ammunition took several chemists, several expert brass workers, two fireworks technicians, and too much time. Now that we knew how to make them, each bullet still takes much longer to make than even an armor piercing arrow.
I am certain that the Poles have cheaper manufacturing methods that make the guns practical, but for now, they are not good enough to make the khan happy.
I am proud of the fact that we have done as well as we have. Imagine if a Polish craftsman had found one of our bows lost in battle. He would have in his hands the most powerful weapon in the world, but he would also have a problem. He could see that one layer was made of sinew, but he couldn’t know that wild antelope sinew was much stronger than sinew from farm animals, until he spent years experimenting. He would have the same problem with the glue. He could see it was animal glue, but how would he know that only fish based glue would be strong enough for battle use, and if he did, how would he learn to make the glue?
There are at least fifty steps in making one of our bows, and even if you know them, it takes over a year and a half to construct and age a proper bow. It would be years before the Poles could make a decent one.
We had copied their work in less than a year and then found out that it was not good enough for us. We needed to do more than tell the khan that the Polish guns would be limited in their usefulness to him.
We did come up with an answer. The imminent threat of losing face, literally, while it is still attached to your head, is an effective motivation but, even so, it was a close thing and we only firmed up the design weeks before the meeting.
Someone on the staff had the inspiration to turn the simplest weapon on the battlefield into the most effective, using what we had learned from the Polish weapons. The most advanced personal weapons on the battlefield were the Mongol bows, but the most kills were made with crossbows.
The horsemen are the shock troops, but the backbone of an army is the crossbowman. While the bow takes years to master, a crossbowman can be trained in few months, and crossbows are relatively cheap. The problem with the crossbow is that its range is limited to the power one man can pull and it can only fire until the bowman’s arm wears out.
Tan Li, one of our casting experts who worked with cannon, came up with the solution. Before joining us, he had been working on hand cannons. Every army had a few, but they were almost useless. They fired about once a minute and were so inaccurate that you weren’t certain which army you were going to hit.
However, he loved his useless noisemakers and in his mind, he kept overlaying his visions of hand cannon with visions of the Polish guns. First, he realized that if we used something like the Polish bullet, packaged ammunition, it might be fired as fast as a crossbow. If you made it a little smaller and lighter than the Polish gun, it could be fired from the shoulder like a crossbow. You could even use something like the crossbow stock and trigger mechanism.
As for accuracy, we had already learned that the twists in the Polish barrels spun the bullets and made them more accurate.
When he brought the idea to me, I assigned an army of technicians to work with him, night and day. The reality was much more difficult than his vision.
The basic design was sketched up in a day, and redrawn day after day until we had something that looked like it would work. We settled on a barrel that would be about three chi long and which would set on a crossbow frame. We already knew how to make cannon barrels and producing some long skinny ones with spinning grooves was a lot easier than getting a gas tight seal on a complex sliding bolt.
The main problem was ignition. Even the first model loaded easily. The powder and ball were packed in a rice paper tube. When the tube hit the bottom of the barrel, it broke, exposing the gunpowder for lighting.
The first model had a lighting hole in the top. The gunner just struck a match on a rough place on the barrel and touched it to hole to fire the gun. It worked the first time, but there were problems. Matches have been around for a long time, but the reliability has never been good. Worse yet, when they did work, the gunner often ended up with burnt fingers from the flash of the touch hole. The standard match was too short, and if you made it longer, the flex in the wood made it even less reliable.
Our next try used match cord from a cannon. We built up a funnel around the touch hole to guide a hot cotton cord. Instead of clipping the cord onto a stick and guiding it to the touch hole manually, the cord was clipped into the mouth of a small, curved metal dragon. We used a crossbow mechanism to tilt the dragon and lower the cord into the hole.
It worked great, sort of. Unfortunately, the touch hole was on top of the gun, right on the sight line of the gunner, and the flash and the thick smoke blowing out of the touch hole was enough to blind a man. If we rotated the touch hole to the side, we weren’t able to get a smooth action on the dragon head and the cord tended to drop away from the hole.
Our third try was better. We went back to the Polish gun for inspiration. They were using a fuse that they lit with a lamp. Our fireworks expert reproduced a similar fast burning fuse, but made it thicker and much stiffer. It was a little stick about as long as a thumb, skinny on one end and fatter at the end you held. We glued one to each ammunition package.
We then turned the barrel on its side and added a small trough to the bottom side of the funnel to steady a fuse. To fire the gun you ripped the fuse off the paper package, rammed the package into the barrel, and stuck the fuse into the touch hole. Then you shouldered the weapon and fired with the match cord.
It worked well. Using the fuse sticking out of the side, the touch hole could be much smaller than the cord, so we dramatically reduced smoke and flash and got a considerable boost in power. We could get four shots a minute with a little practice and the rifled barrel
was accurate to over two li, three times the range of the standard crossbow.
I actually had hope that we might live past the khan’s visit.
Even when not on campaign, he traveled constantly, moving with the seasons from palace to palace with a large retinue of advisors, guards, and servants. We prepared an opulent audience room well in advance of his visit. As soon as he was seated and the honorifics said we presented him with two brand new Polish-style guns replete with engraved brass plates and decorative gold bands. On one side, the engraved plate showed a hunting scene featuring him on his great horse, and on the other, his traditional nomadic tent surrounded by images of conquered peoples.
As he fondled his new toy, I said “That is a fine weapon, and we can provide them for all of your bodyguards, but, as you know, they are useless on horseback because of the alcohol lamp, which may be why the Poles only used them for defense.
“In six months, we can provide weapons for all of your bodyguards, and if we use every trained steel artisan in your domains, we could produce about five hundred weapons in the next year.”
He looked unhappy enough to make my neck twinge for fear of being detached. Fortunately, if the topic was interesting, he was willing to listen to longer explanations.
“The Polish guns have to be made by creating forged steel blocks and then filing and lapping each block into an intricate, gas-tight part. It’s even harder than producing one of our recurve bows, and, as you know, it takes well over a year to produce each bow. We only have hundreds of thousands of them because we have thousands of craftsmen able to make them.
“However, we have learned enough from Polish guns to craft a new type of gun that we can make in sufficient quantities to be useful on your next campaign.”
I think the phrase new gun cheered him up. He was interested enough to ask, “And what does this new weapon look like?”
Conrad's Last Campaign Page 13
