The Flying Warlord Read online

  And we came up with a plan to do something about it. The friar had a painting kit with some gold leaf in it. He was going to cover some of my arrows with gold, and the blacksmith, he had some steel arrowheads that could cut any armor. I was going to be up on top of the windmill, and if Sir Conrad got into trouble, I planned to shoot me the Crossman champion. Once I did that, and golden arrows came down out of the sky to punish the evildoers, the others would be in the crowd shouting “An Act of God!”, “A miracle!”, and such like nonsense, since who’d took for the perpetrator of a miracle? How could they punish me or Sir Conrad for an Act of God?

  When the time came, we was all ready. Sir Conrad got hisself bashed out of the saddle on the first pass, and the Crossman, he came around to finish him off. I let fly and then hid myself, but somehow I must have missed him clean because when I looked up, him and Sir Conrad was locked in a close fight. Since I missed once, I was afraid that the weight of the gold leaf was throwing off my aim, and I didn’t shoot for fear of hitting Sir Conrad. Just as well, because Sir Conrad kicked the Crossman's smelly arse! He played with the bastard, first throwing away his shield and then killing him with his bare hands!

  Then when the fight was over and I was getting ready to climb down, four more Crossmen charged onto the tourney field at Sir Conrad. I had my bow bent real quick and let four arrows fly as fast as you can blink! This time, I watched them fly through the low clouds and come out again to hit every one of them Crossmen square in the heart! I tell you I got four out of four, and every one of them straight in at three hundred yards! I killed every one of them fouling bastards and their empty horses ran past Sir Conrad on either side.

  Then, right according to plan, everybody was shouting “A miracle!” and “An Act of God!” The blacksmith ran out on the field, to be the first one there to recover my arrows, since we figured that nobody would believe God using gold-covered arrows. God would use real solid gold if He used anything. It was best to get rid of the evidence.

  But when Ilya tried to pull out the first arrow, it bent in his hand! It really was real solid pure gold!

  I got religion about then, saying my prayers every night like the priest taught me and going to mass every morning. I did that for about a month and then was my old self again, or pretty near. Only I don’t make jokes about the stupid priests anymore and I try to watch my language, except when the shitheads push me too hard.

  So Sir Conrad lived and them kids all grew up proper at Three Walls instead of being slaves to the Mussulmen. And nobody thought to catch me for killing them Crossmen, if it was me that shot them and not God. It was some damn fine shooting, Whoever did it.

  So we all went back to Three Walls, right after Sir Vladimir married Annastashia. I went back to the Widow Bromski and spent most of the next four or five years hunting and standing guard, except for a few side trips with Sir Conrad. Well, besides that I got me a fine education at the school Sir Conrad set up, but I guess that shows up in my writing.

  They was always building something new at Three Walls, and some of it was pretty exciting, especially the steam engines. In my off-hours I got to looking at them and talking to anybody what knew much about it. I tried to get Sir Conrad to transfer me to one of the machining sections, but he wouldn’t do it. He said he had plenty of good men who could run a lathe, but only one man who could shoot like me.

  After that, about the only thing that happened that was worth talking about was once when we was all going to a new site that Sir Conrad got from Duke Henryk to open up a copper mine. We got word that there was a bunch of foreigners in Toszek, just a mile up the road, that was murdering people and burning women at the stake! Naturally, we went right there, and Sir Conrad and another knight went in to arrest the bastards-there must have been five dozen of them-while I got up on a shed to back them up with my longbow.

  Well, these foreigners, some kind of Spaniards they was, they didn’t want to be arrested so naturally a fight got started. All our workers got into it and I let fly with all the arrows I had, a dozen and a half of them. I only missed but once, when the fletching let loose on an old arrow, but that one time was when a soldier was coming at Sir Conrad and all I shot was some priest standing behind him. Sir Conrad's horse killed the bastard, kicked him square in the face and killed him dead, but like I said, that's a spooky horse!

  I felt bad about missing, since Sir Conrad had saved my life three times, and up till then I’d only saved his once, but he wasn't mad about it. Like I said, he was a fine man.

  We took prisoner such of them as we didn’t kill and we divvied up the booty and I got three months pay out of it, besides a fine sword and a knife. Ask me and I'll show them to you sometimes.

  Then they had a trial where everybody could speak their piece, and the foreigners, they said that they was only killing witches, and after that we hung the bastards. I never heard of nobody hunting witches from that time on.

  So it wasn’t so bad, working for Sir Conrad, but I got to yearning for the river. Being a boatman gets into your liver after a while, and when you been doing it for four or six generations, it sticks heavy in your blood. When I was close to working off my debt, I went to Sir Conrad to talk about it, or rather I made an appointment to see him with Natalia, his secretary. He was a busy man. And he wasn't “Sir” Conrad any more. Count Lambert had bumped him up to “Baron” now.

  I was hoping that he’d stake me to a boat and cargo, or maybe let me work a few more years at the same rate so I could buy my own, but he had other ideas.

  He said that he was going to build a fleet of the finest riverboats ever seen, and every one of them powered by one of his steam engines. They’d each carry a dozen times the cargo of any boat now on the rivers, and they'd go six times faster, upstream or down!

  I asked what would happen to the other boatmen on the river and he said that we’d have to hire them, but he needed a good man to be boss, a man he trusted and a man who could speak the language of the other boatmen. Then he asked me if I was interested in the job.

  I near fell off my chair! Hell yes, I was interested! Me running all the boats on the Vistula! Damn right I was interested!

  He said good, he wanted me. And it wasn’t only the Vistula. There was more cargo to be hauled on the Odra than on the Vistula, what with his installations at Copper City near Legnica and Coaltown north of Kolzie. On top of that, these boats wouldn't only be just for cargo. They'd be armored to stop any arrow and armed with weapons he didn't want to talk about just yet. He said the Mongols were coming in a few years and they would try to kill everybody, but we would stop them, and we would do it with the riverboats if that was possible. If that failed, he had an army building at the Warrior's School, and that would be the second line of defense. But the men on the boats would have to be warriors too, so I would be in the first class through, now that they was almost finished training the instructors.

  Now that took me back a peg or five. I’d heard a lot of stories about that school and wasn't none of them good. It was supposed to be a secret, but everybody knew that three-quarters of the men who started didn't live through it and I told Baron Conrad so.

  He said that I’d been listening to a lot of old wives' tales. That while only a quarter of the first class graduated, only one in six had actually died. Most of the rest had been washed out for injuries, or physical or mental problems, and anyway the next class would not have it so hard. They were projecting a fifty percent graduation rate. On top of that, everybody who worked for Baron Conrad would soon have to go through the school, so I might as well get it over with, before I got any older. Younger men had a better survival rate.

  I said I didn’t like them words “survival rate,” but Baron Conrad said he only meant the ratio of men graduating, and nobody wants to live forever, anyhow.

  I said it was my Christian duty to try, but Baron Conrad, he told me that it was still a secret, but that all of that first class was going to be knighted, and the next one was, too. He told me to thi
nk about all them pretty young girls I saw in the shower room every day and to think about the old widow I was living with. Yeah, I guess he knew about it.

  So I thought about them eager young smiles and the Widow Bromski’s scowling face, and about them bouncing young tits and her sagging dugs and that's what done me in.

  Chapter Two

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  The weather was so beautiful that Krystyana and Sir Piotr had elected to have their wedding ceremony, complete with church service and reception, held outside. Since Sir Piotr was the local boy who had made good, the priest and everyone else went along with it.

  And of course, since everything had to be done as ceremoniously as possible, the mass went on for over an hour and I had some time to get some thinking done. I was working on my next four-year plan.

  Yes, I know that socialists are supposed to write five year plans, but in less than four years the Mongols were going to invade, and there didn’t seem to be any sane reason to plan much beyond that. If we could lick the Mongols, we'd have a whole lifetime to plan things. If not, well what was the point? We'd all be dead.

  For the last five years, I had been working mostly at getting our industrial base going. We now had a productive cloth factory and a sugar refinery here at Okoitz, and a coppermining, smelting, and machining installation at Copper City, that Duke Henryk owned. More than a dozen of Count Lambert’s other barons and knights had various light industries going at their manors, mostly to keep their peasants busy during the winters. Some of them were my vendors, making boots and uniforms for my future army.

  At the Franciscan monastery in Cracow, we had a papermaking plant, a printshop, and a book bindery. And besides books, they were also producing a monthly magazine.

  I had three new towns of my own running. There was Three Walls , where we were making iron, steel, coke, cement, bricks, and other ceramics, and machinery, plus several hundred different consumer products. It also had a major carpentry shop, set up for mass production, and valley filled with Moslem refugees that functioned as an R&D center and a gunpowder works. There was Coaltown, where we were making coke, bricks, glass, and chemicals. And there was Silver City, in the Malapolska Hills, where we mined and refined lead and zinc.

  Silver City got its name when my sales manager, Boris Novacek, refused to let me call zinc by its rightful name. He said that a zinc was a musical instrument, and that it was stupid to use the same word on a metal. He wanted to call it “silver” and pass it off as the real thing, but I wouldn’t let him do it. We compromised on “Polish Silver,” and the name stuck.

  In addition to the factories and mines, a major agricultural revolution was taking place, mostly because of the seeds I’d brought back with me, but also because of the farm machinery I'd introduced.

  Understand that none of these installations was really up to twentieth-century standards. At best, some of it was up to nineteenth-century standards. Everything was primitive and on a small scale. Most of the work was still being done by hand, and the most useful and cost effective piece of farm machinery I’d introduced was the wheelbarrow. Well, the new steel plows worked well, and the McCormick-style reapers sold well even if they were too expensive. A whole village had to club up to buy one.

  Nonetheless, worker productivity was four times what it had been when I’d arrived, and things were constantly getting better. The infant mortality rate was way down, too, because of the sanitation measures I'd introduced. Of course, the birth rate hadn't changed to any noticeable degree, so the place was crawling with rug rats, but what the heck. There was plenty of room for them. There was an underpopulated world out there.

  Eagle Nest was nominally an aircraft development center, but I completely doubted if a bunch of twelve-year-old boys could really develop practical aviation. I’d helped build it to keep my liege lord happy and because in the long run, it was actually an engineering school, which we needed.

  Lastly, I had the new Warrior’s School ready to go, and my corps of instructors trained. My army was to have three branches.

  The first branch would be made up of my existing factory workers. They would all have to go through an abbreviated basic-training period of six months and then train one day a week after that. The problem was that I would have to send the managers through first, since we couldn’t have a situation where the subordinates were knighted and the managers were commoners. Discipline would vanish! There wasn't time to send the managers out in small bunches, so there was nothing for it but to send them all at once, which involved running the factories with untrained, temporary managers. It was scary, but I didn't see any way around it. Everybody in the top two layers was told to pick a man from below and teach him how to do his job in ten weeks. Only thirty-five men were leaving, but they were my best thirty-five men.

  There were screams and moans from all quarters, but I got my way.

  Furthermore, all new hires, women as well as men, had to go through the six-month training period before they could start work. I required the women to be trained because when we went off to war, I planned to take every able-bodied man with me. The women would have to “man” the wall guns and other defenses without us. And this meant setting up a training program for the wives of my managers as well.

  Then there were the river defenses. If the weather was right, and the rivers weren’t frozen, we just might be able to stop the Mongols at the Vistula, or even at the Bug. We already had good steam engines and a carpentry shop set up for mass production. Steamboats should be a fairly straightforward proposition. The troops manning them would be hired from among existing riverboat men and then put through the full-year basic-training program. Then, after that, they'd have to learn about fighting from a steamboat on the job.

  The regular army would be a full-time group based on the training instructors I already had. Besides training everybody else, they had to multiply their own numbers by at least six each year for the next three years, and then twice more in the last year to get us an army big enough to do the job. And those were absolute minimums. Anything less than fifty thousand men would just get us all killed. The production quotas for the factories were set up for a hundred fifty thousand.

  From an economic standpoint, land transport was even more important than river transport. All of the roads were so bad that it was almost impossible to get a cart over them. Almost all goods were transported by caravan mule, and the best of them could only carry a quarter ton. They could only do thirty miles a day and had to be loaded and unloaded twice a day at that. But on level ground, on a steel track and steel wheels with good bearings, a mule should be able to tow two dozen times what it could carry on its back.

  But more important than economics was the fact that my army was being trained to fight with war carts. Swivel guns mounted in big carts would fire over the heads of the pikemen towing the cart. I had to get the troops to the battlefields quickly and in reasonably good shape. It was time to build railroads.

  And if I was going to build a transport system, I was going to build it right from the beginning. All the railroad tracks would be wide gauge and that gauge would be absolutely standardized. And we would containerize right from the start. Our war carts were six yards long, two yards wide and a yard and a half high. That would be our standard container size. All chests and barrels would be sized to fit neatly within the container, and anything nonstandard would get charged double rates, at least. The four wheels on a war cart were two yards high and mounted on casters, and each could be locked either fore and aft or to the side. Fore and aft, the center of the wheels were two yards apart, so that was the standard track gauge, and future carts would have flanged wheels to keep them on the track. If they tore up the ground when going cross country, tough.

  Then we needed maps, and there weren’t any. How a medieval general ever commanded troops without adequate maps was beyond me, and I didn't intend to learn. I'd had the machine shop make up some crude but usable theodolites (they didn't have a t
elescope on them, just iron sights like on a gun) and I had a good mathematician, Sir Piotr, to put in charge of the project. He could train others.

  And we needed radios. Integrated circuits, transistors, and even tubes were well beyond us, and would be for years. I’d been able to muddle my way through a lot of things because I was too ignorant to know what I was getting into. With electronics, I knew what the problems would be, and they frightened me! Where would I get the rare-earth oxides needed to make a decent cathode? How would I develop alloys with the same temperature coefficients as our glass to take wires into the tube without shattering it? How could I possibly get a good enough vacuum?

  But working radios were invented long before there were tubes. They used spark-gap transmitters and coherers to pick up the signals, and with enough work, I thought I could get one going. With radios, I could effectively double our speed, since I wouldn’t have to send a runner to convey every order. Speed was the one area where the Mongols would be our undoubted superiors. Those shaggy ponies could move!

  Radios were an absolute first priority.

  The mass ended and we all walked over to the reception area. I stood in line to kiss the bride, even though I had done it all-too-many times before. Cilicia kissed the groom full on the mouth and warmly, probably because she too was glad to see Krystyana married off. As we went to the sideboard to get a couple of glasses of mead, my liege lord came up.

  “Ah, Baron Conrad! You seem to be enjoying yourself!” Count Lambert said. Cilicia remained silent around my lord. They didn’t get along.

  “I might as well, my lord, seeing as how I’m footing the bill for the wedding feast,” I said.

  “And the dowry as well, I suppose?”

  “Of course, my lord. After all, I’ve had three children by Krystyana and it seems the least I could do. I'm just glad that the kids will have a proper father.”