The Flying Warlord Read online

  The RB7 Invincible was coming downstream at us, followed closely by the RB12 Insufferable, so we had to stay a little farther out in the channel and try not to shoot holes in them.

  The sun was well up now, and shining in our eyes, but we didn’t need accurate shooting at this point, we just needed shooting! Even at a gross yards, we could hardly miss that mass of enemy troops.

  I went to the starboard side and looked over. Since it was only sheet metal over wood, there were thousands of arrows stuck in the ship’s armor. But I guess we had judged the metal gauge right, since none of them penetrated all the way.

  On the opposite shore, people on the walls of Sandomierz were waving at us, cheering us on. But sightseeing, I wasn’t doing my job. I turned to go back down to the control room when a plane flew over. One of the oversized message arrows thunked into the deck. I picked it up myself and waved at the pilot. He wagged his wings and flew off.

  Downstairs, I read the message.

  “Praty gud!” it read. “Bot they mak a bridge 7 mil downstream of U. Lambert.” So Count Lambert was finally learning how to read and write! A pity about his spelling, though.

  I checked the situation board and found that we had no boats between Sieciechow and Sandomierz. There should have been, but nobody nearby wanted to miss out on the action here. I sent a message to Tadaos to turn downstream again and radioed RB17 The Ghost of St. Joseph to follow us.

  The RB21 Calypso reported that another concentration of Mongols west of Brzesko had been spotted by a plane, and wanted to turn back and investigate. With the planes flying, we really didn’t have to keep up a steady watch for breakthroughs from the boats. Permission granted.

  As we proceeded downriver, it was soon obvious what Lambert had seen. Along the shore, a long line of small boats was being lashed together, gunwale to gunwale, and ropes and logs were being fastened on top of them to form a roadway. All the boats on the west bank were supposed to have been destroyed, but I guess that hadn’t happened. Once completed, they would swing that pontoon bridge into the current and fasten it to the opposite shore. At least that looked to be their plan.

  I called for Captain Targ, who commanded the company of troops we had on board.

  “I need three platoons with axes,” I said.

  “Good, sir. The boys down below have been looking for something to do. It’s no fun for them, sitting there while everybody else gets to play,” he said, grinning.

  “Such a rough life. Bow landing, you know the drill. And move some of your gunners up to the bow.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Piotr sent a message to RB17 The Ghost of St. Joseph to get their troops ready to take out the downstream half of the bridge. I went to Tadaos, who was pulling Mongol arrows from his deck and saving them.

  “Most of these are long enough for me to shoot,” he said. “I suppose you’ll be wanting the flamethrower warmed up.”

  “No, we do this one with axes,” I said. “We’ll give it one pass to soften them up, then we put some troops ashore at the middle and cover them as we go upstream. The Ghost will take the first half of it.”

  “You sure about that, sir? I think now’s the time for the flamethrowers.”

  “It’s a little late to change things. I've already given orders to the Ghost.”

  “As you will, sir.”

  We’d drilled this maneuver last summer, but most of the men were new. The knights had been through it, though, and that should be enough.

  We went into them with our escort right on our tail. This bunch of Mongols hadn’t been fired on before, I think, because they didn't seem to take us very seriously until we opened fire. Then it was a little late for them.

  The river embankment was twenty yards from the shore and pretty high just here, higher than the boat, actually, and not too many of the Mongols made it over the top. A few tried to outrun us, and we were going pretty slow, but not quite that slow. There wasn’t much for the Ghost to clean up.

  We made a U-turn and headed back to the middle. Of course, playing administrator was about as frustrating as sitting below, waiting for something to happen. As we approached our touchdown point, I decided what the hell! and ran down to join the landing party. It had been years since I had swung a sword in earnest, and rank hath its privileges.

  I slipped the lanyard of my sword over my wrist as I approached Captain Targ.

  “Do you have room for an extra man? ” I said.

  “Always room for one more! Or eighty more, for that matter.”

  “I see. All six platoons, huh?”

  “I left the gunners up top, but we’re so low on ammunition that they don't need loaders or spotters. They can take their time because they don't have enough bullets to shoot fast anyway.”

  “But surely you had the standard thirty-six thousand rounds in your carts,” I said.

  “Maybe a mite more than that, sir, but we just did one hell of a lot of shooting. We’re down to a gross rounds per gun right now, and that's counting the boat's stores besides our own.”

  “I didn’t realize consumption was that high. We should have conserved ammunition.”

  “What for, sir? We couldn’t have used it better than we did! When every round kills an enemy or three, they're doing what they were made for!”

  Before I could reply, the boat touched the shore and the front drawbridge dropped. We all rushed out and through the knee-deep freezing mud. What with my goose-down padding and all the excitement, I’d forgotten how cold it was. We started chopping up boats, lashings and any Mongols that showed signs of wanting to be alive.

  The guns above were ready to give us covering fire, but it wasn’t needed. Those few of the enemy who had gone over the hill were still going.

  The captain and I were at the end of the line going out, and there wasn’t much for us to do as we walked slowly along the riverbank, keeping even with the paddle wheel of the boat. The two hundred men in front of us were chopping everything up into tooth picks and hamburger. One of the troops ahead of us stopped to cut the purse off one of the Mongol dead, and this annoyed Captain Targ.

  “Hey, you asshole! You know the doctrine’ We don't pick up loot until the battle's over!”

  As a general thing, he was right, of course. Countless medieval battles had been lost because the troops had stopped to loot instead of staying in formation. Our rules were that we didn’t loot until afterward, and then all loot was divided up evenly, no matter who did the looting. But first you had to win, dammit!

  But just now, there wasn’t any enemy opposition and we really didn't have enough to do.

  “Captain, maybe he’s right. Detail a platoon to take the Mongol purses. Tell them not to bother with weapons and jewelry, but let's see what we get,” I said.

  “Done, sir. Blue platoon only! Start looting! Purses only! Pass the word!”

  While he was giving orders, I picked up one of the purses myself. It was full of silver and gold, almost half and half, and must have weighed four pounds! I was holding everything this bastard had been able to steal in three years of looting Russia! Yet in a way, it made sense. While he was pillaging, he had to carry everything he gained with him. It wasn’t as though there was a bank he could have deposited it in.

  Doing some crude mental calculations, we must have killed a half-million Mongols this morning! If every one of them had two pounds of gold on him, that was… well, given a fifty-to-one exchange rate, silver to gold, and a six-to-one rate, zinc to silver, that was… more than I could work out in my head. But maybe I shouldn’t have worried so much about the deflated currency. If something wasn't done, we were about to see one bodacious inflation!

  I picked up eight more purses and was musing on this when all hell shut down for payday.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I saw my error as soon as it happened. The riverbank being taller than the boat, our gunners couldn’t see over it. They didn't see the horde that was coming until it was on top of us. I should have put observers
up there. To add to our problems, while our helmets offered excellent protection, you couldn't tilt your head back in them. The helmet and beaver clamped into a ring around the collar of the breast and back plates. The helmet could turn sideways, but not up and down. The only way to look up was to tilt your whole body. Most people rarely look up in any event.

  I think the reason that we weren’t all killed was that the Mongols stopped at the top of the embankment to let off a flight of arrows. This got our attention.

  It also got me an arrow in the eye.

  I staggered back, scattering the gold and silver I’d picked up, tripping over the wreckage of the pontoon bridge and falling into the freezing mud. For a moment, I couldn't figure out what happened, except that I couldn't see out of my right eye, and my left was blurry. The pain came a bit later.

  I struggled to get up, but kept falling back into the slippery wreckage. I could hear the shouting and fighting around me, the peashooters and the swivel guns firing, but I couldn’t seem to get untangled. I broke off the damn arrow and could see with my left eye, I guess it was only that the shaft was in the way.

  I was on my left side, and suddenly I was surrounded by legs and boots. But those weren’t army uniforms! I tried again to get up and something unseen bashed into me, knocking me down again into deeper water and mud. I fumbled for my pistol, brought it up and aimed at a huge gold belt buckle a yard away. The gun fired, but what with the slippery mud and all, it flew from my hand. There wasn't time to reload it anyway.

  Someone slammed into my side and we went down in a heap. I managed to get hold of my sword, which was still tied to my wrist, rolled over onto my knees and jabbed someone with red pants in the groin. He went down, but I got another bash on the back of the head from somewhere. But while that helmet restricted visibility, it sure protected you! I don’t know how many times that ring around my collar saved my life.

  Then I heard an army rallying cry! I saw three pairs of red pants go down as a group and then suddenly I was being lifted up into the air by strong arms under each of my armpits.

  “Can you walk, sir?” It was Captain Targ.

  “I think so. How goes the battle?”

  “Time for a strategic withdrawal, sir. Or in nonmilitary parlance, let’s run away!”

  “Okay. But don’t leave any of our men behind! Not even if you know they're dead!”

  “Right sir. Standard doctrine. Fall back to the boat! Don’t leave our own men! Pick up our dead! Pass the word!”

  The gunners above us were keeping most of the enemy from getting to us, but there wasn’t anything they could do about those already on top of us. We were hard-pressed to keep up any sort of line, and in that damned mud, a saber had the advantage over a rapier. You couldn't get enough traction to lunge!

  Fortunately, most of our men had axes and I had my sword. It was only the captain and his knights who had serious problems.

  With only one eye, I still did my share. I think I must have killed a half dozen of the bastards, taking a dozen hits that would have killed me had I been wearing lesser armor. The stuff got in the way, but it was worth it.

  In minutes, we weren’t fighting in the mud anymore. We were fighting on top of the enemy dead, and that's treacherous footing. The Mongol sabers bounced off our armor, but many of them were armed with a spear that had a long, thin, triangular point, and that thing was a killer! Carried by a man on the run, or thrown at short range, they could punch right through our armor, and most of our serious casualties were caused by them.

  Yet discipline and training held true for us. Our lines tightened up, our dead and wounded were put aboard and soon we were safe. I was next to the last man off the shore, and I would have been the last, except for the captain.

  “My honors, sir. This is my company, and I’ll be the last man off!”

  He’d earned it, so I clambered aboard and let him follow me.

  As Tadaos pulled the boat away from the shore, a medic took me inside and I was the last man to be hustled up to sick bay, even though I wanted to see what was going on topside. Medics have no respect for the wishes of a wounded man. They’re all mother hens who are convinced that they know best.

  He got my helmet off and tsk-tsked at my right eye.

  “Have I lost it?” I said.

  “No, sir, it missed the eyeball. But it stuck in the bone just to the right of it. You’re going to have a scar, I'm afraid, but you'll see again. You were lucky.”

  “I would have been a damn sight luckier if the arrow had missed!”

  “There is that, sir.”

  “Well, open that surgeon’s kit' Get the arrowhead out, clean the wound, and sew it up! Didn't they teach you anything in medic's school?”

  “I never sewed up an eye before, sir. In fact, I’ve never sewn up anything but dead animals in training.”

  “Well, boy, now’s your chance to learn! First, wash your hands in white lightning, and then wash around the wound as best you can.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a bit, I said, “You got that done? Then get the pliers out of your kit and pull the arrowhead out. Better get somebody to hold my head still. It’ll hurt, and I might flinch.”

  “You, sir? Never!”

  “I said get somebody to hold my head and stop acting like I’m God! That's an order!”

  “Yes, sir, You’re not God. Hey, Lezek! Give me a hand! Hold his head!”

  “Now the pliers,” I said.

  I don’t know if I yelled or not, but I saw the most incredible visual display and I think I might have blacked out for a few moments.

  “It’s out, sir,” he said, holding the bloody thing so I could see it with my good eye. The right one still wasn't working, somehow.

  “Good. Throw it away. That kind of souvenir I don’t need. Now get a pair of tweezers and feel around in the wound for any bits of broken bone or any foreign matter.”

  This time, I know I screamed. Having somebody feeling around inside of your head without anesthetics is no fun at all!

  But he took his time at it and seemed to take out a few chunks of something. I wanted to tell him to leave some of the skull behind, but I thought better of it. I couldn’t see what was happening and so I had to trust to the kid's judgment.

  “I think that’s all of it, sir.”

  “Thank God! Now, clean it all out again with white lightning. Pour it right in.”

  By now, the area was getting numb, and I didn’t scream. I wanted to, you understand, but I could- hold it in.

  “Okay. Now get out your sterile needle and thread and sew it up. Use nice neat little stitches, because if my wife doesn’t like the job you did, she will make your life not worth living. Believe me. I know the woman.”

  “Yes, sir. Try not to wince so much. It makes it hard to line the edges up.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He put nine stitches in there. I counted,

  “That’s it, sir.”

  “Well, bandage it up then, with some peat-bog moss next to the wound!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Without adhesive tape, the thing had to be held on by wrapping gauze around my head and under my chin.

  When he was done, I sat up.

  “Well. Good job, I hope. Thank you, but now you better get around to the other men who were wounded.”

  He looked around the room. “No sir, I think the surgeons have taken care of everybody.”

  “The surgeons!” I yelled. “Then what the hell are you?”

  “Me, sir? I’m an assistant corpsman.”

  “Then what the hell were you doing operating on my head?”

  “But, you ordered me to, sir! It was a direct order from my commanding officer! What was I supposed to do? Disobey you?”

  “Then what were you doing with a surgeon’s kit?”

  “Oh, they had extra of those at the warehouse, sir, so they handed them out to some of the corpsmen, just in case.”

  “They just handed it to you?”

>   “Yes, sir. It’s nice to know what some of these things are for.”

  I found I couldn’t wear my arming hat over the bandage, but I could get the helmet on.

  Before I could leave the sick bay, the chief surgeon came up to me, his armor hacked in a dozen places. I could see by the insignia and the fact that he carried a mace rather than a sword that the equally battered man standing next to the chief surgeon was the company chaplain. In any modem army, both of these positions would have been given noncombatant status, but in ours, every man was a warrior. This Sir Majinski was banner of the orange platoon, besides his medical duties.

  “The butcher’s bill, sir,” he said.

  I looked at it. Eleven dead. Twenty-ten seriously wounded, and I wasn’t on that list. Fifty-one with minor wounds. Had I done it Tadaos's way, with flamethrowers, these men would all be alive and sound.

  “Sorry about the incident with the corpsman, sir. I kept an eye on him while he was working on you, but I had a man with a sucking chest wound on my table, and I thought I might be able to save him. But the corpsman meant well, and he did a fair job.”

  “Well, give the corpsman my apologies. The man with the chest wound, could you save him?”

  “No.”

  I checked in with Tartar Control. The battle near Brzesko was up to three boats now, and the battle across from Sandomierz was still raging, with a dozen boats still butchering Mongols. But it wasn’t the same dozen. That group, out of ammunition, was heading back upstream to East Gate to rearm. I knew the supplies we had there and it wasn't going to be enough.

  In the history books I read when I was a boy, some said that the Mongols had invaded with a million men. Others said that this was impossible, that the logistics of the time couldn’t have supported more than fifty thousand. But if the estimates that I'd made and those I was getting from the other boats were anything like correct, we had killed more than a half a million Mongols in the first morning of the attack! Furthermore, they showed no signs of thinning out! In any event, the numbers involved were so much higher than I had expected that I had vastly underestimated the ammunition requirements.