“Right, sir. ”
We headed back to the gate through which we had last entered. Captain Wladyclaw came with me, since he was still on Anna and she wasn’t about to leave my side. Had a human acted that way, I would have busted him for insubordination, but with Anna, well, what could I do?
We got to the gate with a platoon of troops we had picked up on the way. Enemy troops were streaming into the portal, and we had to fight our way to it for the last gross yards. We got there to find the bodies of the lance of men I had met on our way in. AH seven of them had died where I had left them. I should have reinforced them at the time. Another sin on my already blackened soul.
The platoon seemed to be holding pretty well, so I went on to the next gate, sending the next platoon I came across back to reinforce the first. This went on for one of our long, double-sized hours before I again met Baron Gregor. I sent him to continue his way around, inspecting and manning the walls while Captain Wladyclaw and I went outside the city to see how things were going there. It was dusk when we got to the dock area to find that one of our riverboats, the RB29 Enterprise, was just pulling in. I saw Baron Tadaos on the bridge.
“Baron Tadaos! What happened to your Muddling Through?” I shouted.
“Burned, sir!” he shouted in the darkening gloom. “Burned along with four-other boats and the whole damned city of East Gate. I came here looking for help!”
Chapter Six
Good god in heaven! A third Mongol army?
“Tadaos! We have a third of the land forces in the city now, You collect up as many troops as you can hold and take them to East Gate. I’ll follow as fast as I can with the rest!” I shouted.
“I’m low on fuel, sir!”
“Then tear down these docks if you have to, and those buildings, too, if you need more wood. But get there!”
“Yes, sir!”
The nearest city gate was the one Captain Wladyclaw and I had left stuffed with Mongol corpses, so we had to race on to the next. Damn! I should have had brains enough to mount a signalman on one of the Big People and keep him with me, but I simply hadn’t thought of it. When the men were concentrated in war carts, there was always a signalman handy in every sixth cart, so there was no point wasting a Big Person on one. Now the situation had changed, and I hadn’t been bright enough to change with it. My stupidity was wasting precious time!
Once in the city, I soon found a bugler and had him sound BREAK OFF FIGHTING, MAN THE WAR CARTS, and EAST GATE IS BURNING. The first two were standard signal tunes that most of the men knew, or at least the officers did, and they could inform the others. The last required the use of a special code that the signalmen had worked out. Our bugles could play only seven notes, but if one played two or three notes in rapid succession, there were enough combinations to cover each letter of the alphabet as well as the numbers and punctuation marks. Messages were spelled out in a sort of code. It took a man with perfect pitch to play and understand the code, and many of the signalmen couldn’t do it. Fortunately, the man I’d found was one who could, and there were enough others like him to get the message passed around.
Soon bugles all over the city were repeating my orders. Men were scurrying to find dropped weapons - many had abandoned their pikes as being unmanageable in the narrow, crooked city streets - and making their way to the Carpenter’s Gate. We raced across town to get to the carts ahead of them, but it occurred to me that I’d better tell the people still on Wawel Hill what was going on.
I went to the Inner Gate and shouted to the guards, “East Gate is burning! The army is going to have to pull out of here and go to their aid. I think we’ve killed most of the Mongols in the city, but you people will have to do the final mop-up yourselves. Do you hear me?”
A gray-bearded man in ancient armor stuck his head out of a small window and looked down at me. “We hear you, Count Conrad, but you must realize that there are few here save women, children, and the aged. The noble knights all went off to fight the enemy in the field! Their ladies all just went off somewhere, I think to find a safer place to weather the invasion. Most of the young guildsmen fell defending the outer walls, those that did not leave, months ago to join your army. Many of those that were able to get here after the lower city fell have died defending Wawel Hill. Women have been manning catapults and crossbows, and children have been bringing ammunition to them. We have nothing left to ‘mop up’ with!”
“You’ll just have to do the best you can,” I shouted back. “Good-bye and good luck!”
I heard him swearing at me as we left, but what else could I do?
We went through the city, out the Carpenter’s Gate, and back to the war carts. Few of the troops had gotten there yet, and most of the cart guards were asleep. They’d decided that one man awake out of six was sufficient, and I really couldn’t fault them. A minor attack had been beaten off earlier in the day, but aside from that it had been quiet. I let them sleep, since it would be good to have at least a few men who were well rested.
More of our men were arriving all the time, though most of them were staggering badly in the rain and gloom. Few of them were actually wounded, but running and fighting for two days straight is about all any normal man can take.
I waited in the rain and dark for an entire hour and then decided that we had to go.
“But only half the men have gotten here yet, sir!” Baron Gregor objected. “There’s only about two dozen men to a cart, and that many could never pull nonstop to East Gate. They wouldn’t have anyone to relieve them. ”
“You’re right, of course. Well, move the men up to the first carts. Get a full platoon on each cart and have them move out at a quickstep. As more men straggle in, we’ll fill more carts and have them catch up with the rest at double time. You’d best stay here and see that the job gets done. ”
“Sir, that’ll make a mess of the whole command structure! Nobody will know who’s in charge.”
“Structure be damned! East Gate is burning! Just make sure that there are six knights and a knight bannerette for each cart, and a captain for every six of them. The field grade officers can sort things out among themselves as we’re moving. It’s not as though anybody can get lost on a railroad!”
“Yes, sir. What about the wounded?”
“Send the walking wounded back into the city to help out there. Set up a camp for those badly hurt right here.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and started shouting orders. The first cart moved out in minutes, with Captain Wladyclaw acting as point man.
Even doing a quickstep was torture for the men, but we pushed on into the night. At around midnight I got word that we now had an even gross of companies in the column, and I hoped that they would be enough to handle whatever was happening at East Gate. By this point each of the men had been able to get a few hours’ sleep while riding the carts, and I figured that they could take it. I gave the order to go double time.
I found myself dozing in the saddle, but fortunately a Big Person doesn’t need to sleep at all. We pushed on, changing pullers every quarter hour.
I wished that there was some word from Baron Vladimir, but none had come. Had he encountered still more Mongols? Had the courier failed to make it through to him? This business of not knowing what was going on was nerveracking. I’d often heard of the “fog of war,” but I never would have believed that it could take so much out of a commander.
If the Mongols had gotten to East Gate, had they gone beyond it? Were the boys at Eagle Nest under attack? The girls at Okoitz? And what about my people, my wife and children at Three Walls? Had all of southern Poland been overrun?
And what of East Gate? Was it still standing? It was our strongest fortification next to the city of Three Walls. It had six towers surrounding the castle, each nine stories tall and made of reinforced concrete, with a dozen swivel guns on top of each one . A low two-story wall connected the towers, and while that wall wasn’t tall enough to stop footmen with ladders, no horse could ever get over it.
Then six dozen yards inside those defenses was a concrete castle that was as strong as I knew how to make it. The walls were six stories high and protected by six more towers, each eight stories tall. The whole complex bristled with guns and had all sorts of nasty tricks to play on an attacker.
How could such a fort be taken by an enemy with only horses and arrows? How could a completely concrete structure possibly be on fire? To be sure, the fort was manned by women, but they were all properly trained and highly motivated. Much of their ammunition had had to be transferred to the riverboats during the Battle for the Vistula, but a great deal was still left to them. They were up to their armpits in refugees, but the captainette in charge should have been able to handle things. With that strong a fort, all she had to do was close the gates, and then she could laugh at the enemy. The walls were too tall to be scaled and too strong to be battered in.
Well, outside of the walls was the huge Riverboat Assembly Building, and it was made of wood.
A cold feeling went through me. Our casualties during the Battle for the Vistula were much higher than I had expected them to be. The castle had been filled to the rafters with civilian refugees, so I had the loft of the assembly building converted for use as a hospital. Those wounded men were at the mercy of the enemy, and the Mongols didn’t know what mercy was!
We pushed on through the night and into the morning. The men were staggering with fatigue, and I found myself dozing off in the saddle, dreaming strange dreams and suddenly jerking back into reality, unsure of whether I had dreamed or was hallucinating or was actually trying to survive in an alien environment. I saw my pregnant wife, Francine, naked with her feet nailed to a door frame, her belly horribly slashed and her throat cut open by my own sword. I saw my children by Krystyana and Cilicia murdered on the ground, their tiny heads bashed open on the rocks. Eventually the nightmares of my dreams of torture and the nightmare of my tortured reality fused into a living horror that went on and on forever. Yet when I was sure that I could go no farther, when I knew that I must fall off my mount and sleep forever, I looked and saw the troops gasping, running, staggering, splashing on the muddy boards beside me. If they could go on, then so could I. I drew strength from their dedication and pushed onward.
It was well past noon when we got to East Gate. The Riverboat Assembly Building was gone, reduced to a few blackened stumps sticking up from rain-soaked foundations. The Enterprise was at the docks, next to four hulks burned to the waterline, and the city was guarded by my own troops. A sentry waved us through, but I stopped to talk to him. “What’s going on here, warrior?” I asked.
“We got here at dawn by riverboat, sir. Everybody was dead. ”
“Dead? How many Mongols were involved? Which way did they go?”
“I don’t much know anything else, sir. I’ve been standing guard ever since we got here, and nobody’s told me nothing. Maybe you’d best talk to Baron Tadaos. He’s back on the boat, I think.”
I told the men in my relief column to pull into the railroad yard and rest, and once there most of the men pulling just lay down in the cold spring rain and fell asleep. Those on the carts were already sleeping.
Captain Wladyclaw was near at hand. I told him to get fresh scouts out on Big People and to find out what he could.
Baron Tadaos was in his cabin, debriefing a young corpsman who was crying and shaking in his chair. The man’s clothes were badly burned, his hair was mostly gone, and there were blisters on his hands and face.
“Come in, sir, and sit down. There’s some terrible things happened here,” Tadaos said.
I sat, grateful to sit on something that wasn’t a saddle. “Maybe you’d best tell me the story from the beginning, Baron.”
“Yes, sir. I got here yesterday around noon and saw the boat house was burning. I’d put off my company of troops with you almost a week before, so I was down to the boat crew and the signal group under Baron Piotr. Mongols was all over the place, but we docked between two of the other boats that was here. See, half my boats was in port for lack of repairs, fuel, and ammunition. We only had a dozen rounds for each of the guns, but I figured that we’d see what help we could be, anyway.”
He was interrupted as an armored boatman came in with a big tray heavily laden with food and drink. “We found a storeroom in the castle that hadn’t been broken into, sir. You haven’t eaten since yesterday, and I promised your wives that I’d take care of you, sir. ”
He set the tray on the desk and left without another word.
“I can only pray that the girls are still alive somewheres. I guess we all need to eat. Dig in, gentlemen,” Tadaos said.
“But like I was saying,” he said with food in his mouth, “we left three gunners on the bow to do what they could, and the rest us went out with swords and pikes. I was even out of arrows, so I left my bow behind. Never did see it again.”
“We joined up with what was left of the boat repairmen, the crews of the other boats, and the medics that was taking care of the wounded in the hospital here. A lot of the walking wounded was with us, too, but we was still way outnumbered. Them Mongols being on horseback didn’t help none, neither. We lost us a lot of men, and they pushed us back to the boats.”
“Only by then most of the boats was on fire, except for this one on the end, the Enterprise. The engineman on the boat had brains enough to have a head of steam up, and we had no choice but to push off and look for help.”
“I didn’t feel right doing that, since all five of my wives was in the castle, or so I thought, and it felt like I was murdering them and the kids, too. But it was run for help or die right there for no good reason, so we ran.
“Those damn radios of yours haven’t worked for a week, but when we got to Cracow, we saw that it was burning, too. That’s when I ran into you. Doing what you said, we collected up four companies of troops, all of which I could get aboard, seeing as how they didn’t have no war carts, and we ripped down the docks and a dozen sheds nearby to fuel our trip back here. It damn nearly wasn’t enough. I’d already given the order to start tearing down the boat when the lookout spotted East Gate, and we made it on our head of steam with the boat still intact. Just as well, since this just might be the last boat we got left!”
“The place was empty when we got here first thing in the morning. Empty of living people, anyhow. You could see where there’d been a fight in front of the boat house, and our boys sold their lives pretty damn dearly, let me tell you. But there wasn’t no fight around the castle. There was just a massacre, I think the worst massacre the world has ever seen! I just come back from there, and what I saw would make the worst sinner in the Christian world fall down and cry!”
“There must be twenty or thirty thousand people dead in there, sir, and every one of them women or children or a few old gaffers. Ain’t a one of them could have done the Mongols a bit of harm, but the filthy bastards murdered them all, anyway. Shit, sir, I ain’t got words bad enough for them… them… whatevers.”
Chapter Seven
The baron was crying, and I let him have a few moments to get a hold of himself. After a while he continued.
“Sir, I didn’t find any of my people, but there was so many dead in there that I knew we’d be weeks sorting them all out. I figured my family was done for, but then some of the troops found this young feller, and what he says is that it wasn’t our people who was murdered in there. I mean that they wasn’t army families. He says that all them women and kids was the families of nobility from Cracow, Sandomierz, and points in between! But maybe you better hear about it straight from him.”
“Maybe I’d better, Tadaos. How about it, son? Are you up to repeating your story for me?”
“Yes, sir. I think so, sir. I was a corpsman working in the hospital that was set up in the loft of the boat house, I mean the Riverboat Assembly Building.”
“Relax, son,” I said. “You’re among friends here. Just tell us the story the way it happened. And tell me, how old are you?” It was m
addening to take all this time listening, but unless I knew what had happened, I wouldn’t know what to do next.
“Yes, sir. I just turned fifteen. Anyway, I heard my captain telling one of the banners that he had just come back from the fort and that they couldn’t give us any help. He said that the women’s army contingent there was pulling out with all the commoner refugees in the whole fort. He was pretty mad about it, but he said that there was nothing he could do to change things. He didn’t command the stupid cunt in charge of the fort. Excuse me, sir, but that’s what he called her.”
“Yes, yes. But why was she abandoning her post?” I said. A captainette was the woman left in charge of an installation when the men went off to war. It was an unusual position in that it was temporary in nature. For example, Captainette Lubinska, who had been in charge of East Gate, was ordinarily in charge of the accounting section there, and during normal times she had no authority at all outside of accounting. But once the men went off to fight the enemy in the field, she was in absolute charge, subject only to a clearly defined chain of command that ended with me. She even outranked the six baronesses that ordinarily lived at East Gate, for example, and they were expected to obey her orders.
The reason for all this was that men rarely chose their wives for their ability as battle commanders, and it was important to have the most competent woman in charge, no matter who she had married.
But nobody except me and Baroness Krystyana could have legally ordered Captainette Lubinska from her post.
“Sir, I was just overhearing somebody else’s conversation, and my captain’s at that, even though he was pretty loud about it. He said that Count Herman’s wife came up with a few dozen bodyguards and a large group of other noblewomen, and the captainette wouldn’t let them in. She said that fort was full and that these new refugees would have to continue on down to Hell, I mean the Warrior’s School, thirty miles away, for shelter. But the countess talked the captainette into coming down and talking to her, and then the countess said that the fort wasn’t your property, sir, so it wasn’t army property. The fort really belonged to Count Lambert, her brother-in-law, and Count Lambert wanted her to take it over and shelter there, since it was the strongest fort in Poland, and everybody knew it.”
Lord Conrad’s Lady Page 5
