The Flying Warlord Page 21

  “It didn’t really happen that way,” he said, staring at a blank wall. “That spear only glanced off my helmet. I saw it coming and I ducked!”

  “It looks like this time you forgot to duck. Tom, why weren’t you better protected than that?”

  “I was! I always am! I wear a bio-engineered fungus coating called a TufSkin.”

  I was familiar with the stuff. I wear it myself, like most people. It’s not only a cheap insurance policy but it makes shaving a breeze.

  The stuff isn’t noticeable, but it has these billions of tiny interlocking plates made of crosslinked tubular graphite, the toughest substance known. If you are hit from the outside, on impact and in microseconds, tiny muscles interlock those plates and give you an armor equivalent to a quarter inch of tool steel. Of course, when it does that, it shears off your hair in the process, but that's a small price to pay!

  Tom was still talking in a dazed sort of way. “The only place it can’t cover is the eyes, but the helmet I was wearing should have sensed that spear coming and slammed shut the eyeslits! Or I could have blinked! I should have been completely safe!”

  “I guess this time there was some sort of mechanical failure.”

  His face was still white as he said, “But there wasn’t one! My God, is the whole universe shredding apart?”

  He hit the START button.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI

  Looking through my telescope, I saw a knight who I think was Count Lambert fall on the field, and another man who I am sure was Count Conrad run out to aid him. Surely there could be no other knight of his size!

  But then I saw that Count Conrad was leading a charge against the Mongols, and doing it without my orders! He had, after all, left me in charge, and one of his first rules of leadership was unity of command! If he wished to take command, that was his prerogative, but he had no right to do so without notifying me!

  And why in the name of all that is holy had he left the carts and gunners behind? It made absolutely no sense! Even if the pikers could encircle the Mongol horsemen, what could they do to harm them? They might skewer the first few ranks, but by that time, the enemy formation would be hundreds of yards thick! And completely unharmed! This was madness!

  But there it was, and there was no way to call those men back now. If I countermanded his order, the results would be pure chaos! Some pikers would be out in the field and some of the carts would have no one but gunners to defend them. There would be gaps in our lines of footmen, and the Mongols could bypass them, cut through those unsupported gunners with ease and escape our trap. Already, I saw two Mongols riding behind our footmen, and a single conventional knight charging at both of them. My people have sometimes been called fools, but no one has ever dared question our courage.

  There was nothing for it but to back my liege lord up, and hope that there was some reason for this insanity. I ordered “All Footmen Charge,” and mounted Betty to follow them out.

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  When I got to the battle lines, I was astounded! We weren’t losing at all! Our lines had been six men deep when we started, but as we closed with the enemy, the circumference naturally got smaller, and since we had started out in a long thin oval, the ends were naturally thicker with men than the sides, which pushed the mass of horsemen inside into something of a circle.

  As I got there, our men were twelve to eighteen ranks deep, and as pressed together as a Macedonian phalanx! I think that if it were not for their clamshell armor, many of our front rank men would have smothered to death. Certainly, most of the horses died that way. They were squeezed so hard together that they could not breathe.

  The enemy horsemen were packed so closely together that they could not get out of the saddle! Their legs were pinned in! Who could have imagined such a thing!

  There were men with halberds and short axes milling around the periphery, wanting to get at the Mongols, but not knowing how.

  Then one man wearing a turban wrapped around his helmet and wielding a short axe screamed and ran right up the backs of the outside row of pikers! He climbed to the top of the men and then actually ran down on the tops of the packed rows of pikes at the enemy! Shouting a war cry that sounded like the howling of a wolf, he leaped to the back of a Mongol horse that was so penned in that it could not move.

  “El Allah il Allah!” he screamed again, in vengeance fifteen years delayed.

  He stretched high as if he was chopping firewood and hacked into the neck of the rider. He swung a second time, though it surely wasn’t necessary, and the Mongol's head flew loose. Then he stepped to the haunch of the next horse and repeated the performance!

  Seeing this told our men what to do! A human wave of axemen ran up on top of the pikers, then across their shoulders and heads to get at the enemy! A lot of pikers might have had bruised backs, but I never heard any complaints. In minutes, ten thousand axemen and swordsmen were running on top of five hundred thousand Mongol horsemen, butchering them without thought of mercy.

  It was over in less than a dozen minutes, and none but the Christian horsemen were left alive. A half-million of the enemy had been killed in this battle and the army’s losses were almost nonexistent, a few broken legs and sprained ankles, plus one case of what looked like a heart attack.

  Then it was over and a strange silence came over the battlefield. The pikers were still pushing forward, since they knew nothing better to do. The axemen on top of the enemy just looked around dumbfounded, seeing nothing else to kill and awestruck at the carnage that they had created. And they all stood there, breathing.

  Then someone started singing one of the army songs, the one that one day would be the Polish national anthem.

  “Poland is not yet dead!”

  “Not while we yet live!”

  Then the song was over and someone started in on “Te Deum.” The men backed off and the Mongol horses slumped to the ground, asphyxiated or exhausted. Most of our warriors went to their knees as well, and gave thanks to God.

  The war was over.

  Hetman Vladimir came by and we discussed the cleanup. Our wounded to go to one place, our dead to another. Some men were detailed to collect booty, others to get supper going.

  “And the Mongols?” he asked.

  “Put their money and jewelry over here, their weapons and anything else valuable over there,” I said, pointing. “Their bodies on that rise for burning, and their heads on that hill. I want a real head count, so stack them neatly.”

  “Yes sir. What about the Mongol wounded?”

  “Once you’ve put all their heads on that hill and their bodies on that rise, you can give medical attention to any that request it.”

  “Right sir, no prisoners. I just wanted to make sure.”

  “Well, what could we do with a Mongol prisoner? They have no secrets to tell us. We can’t keep them, guarding and feeding them forever. If we let them go, they'd have no choice but to rob and murder their way home, so that's out. The horde would never trade Christians for them. They look on one of their men who was taken prisoner. as one who has failed in his duty! They want him killed! Best to just kill them now and be done with it.”

  “Yes, sir. I doubt if there are any of them left alive, anyway.” He started giving efficient orders and I wandered on.

  I saw by his mace that a priest was standing near me and I remembered Count Lambert. At first he was hesitant to go two miles away when there were so many who needed his services right here, but I dismounted and offered him Anna to get him there in a hurry.

  She gave me a “I don’t like this” pose.

  “Look, girl, the war is over and Lambert needs a priest. I’D be okay. I have your white sister over here and she can take care of me as well as you can. But I'm the only one who can speak her language, so I can't lend her out. You understand, don't you?”

  She was still sulking when she rode off with the priest. I mounted the whit
e Big Person and rode about the field. There was a vast silence about all of us, as if a mass were being said and we must not speak. Men were working diligently at the tasks assigned to them, but they spoke only when absolutely necessary, and then in whispers. Something had happened that was vaster than all of us, something great and, somehow, holy.

  The gunners had not participated in the final kill. A gunner stood to his gun no matter what happened. I told them to stand down and report to the field for duty. They passed the word and soon were helping get things in shape.

  Beyond the north line, I came upon our battalion of Night Fighters, with sentries posted but most of them fast asleep in the rain and mud. I looked up Baron Ilya and got him out of his hammock.

  “Ilya, you slept right through the battle.”

  “Our orders was to guard this flank, sir. We done that.”

  “You missed quite a show.”

  “Yes, sir, but so did they, last night. We did our part.”

  “Maybe more than that. But get your men ready to move. I want you to go back to the Mongol camp and see if you can secure it, since you have the only well rested men we’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s an odd horse you're riding.”

  “Odder than you think. I’ve found another Big Person.”

  “There were two of them? Amazing. But for now, sir, I need your permission to strip ammunition out of these abandoned carts if I’m going to see about that camp.”

  “Granted.” God, but I was tired.

  Then I went back to my own cart, set up my old dome tent, and got my first full night’s sleep in a week.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of fresh horse meat, I found that the radios still weren’t working, but I got the battle report. The amount of booty taken was fabulous. Every single man in my army was rich, and there was doubtless far more to be had once we cleaned up the killing grounds on the east bank of the Vistula. Some accounting would be necessary, but I think that the danger of inflation was very real.

  Somehow, I would have to make sure that, while the troops were well rewarded, the economy was not ruined. I did not want to happen to us what happened to Spain after the conquest of the New World. There, so much gold poured in that even the lowliest Spaniard saw no reason to work. Farms and orchards were abandoned because if you were rich, why should you go out and do grunt-labor? But within a few years, they discovered that there was nothing left for their money to buy and that the land had been wasted. Spain never did recover.

  Our losses were surprisingly light. Out of the whole land army, there were only some six hundred dead or missing. Half of the Night-Fighter casualties were still alive in the Mongol camp when Ilya’s battalion returned. Some had retreated in the wrong direction in the dark and some had been knocked unconscious by their own grenades and what not.

  But after the Mongols pulled out in the morning, our stragglers had taken over the Mongol camp themselves! The Mongols had left behind only their most severely wounded and the surviving Polish girls they had captured on the way in. The stories the girls told our men were so brutal that all the Mongol wounded were killed, despite the fact that most of the girls had actually been killed by us, in the course of the fragging. It had never occurred to us that the Mongol officers would have slave girls with them. In our ignorance, we had slaughtered more than three hundred young ladies, our own people.

  But while the army’s losses were small, the traditional forces were another matter. Duke Boleslaw of Mazovia was dead, as was the Duke of Sandomierz. Out of the estimated thirty-one thousand men that followed them, less than four hundred were left alive, and most of those were severely wounded. Virtually every nobleman from the duchies of Mazovia, Little Poland, and Sandomierz was dead!

  A new age was coming to my country, but the flower of the past was gone.

  The next morning, some of my depression had worn off and I was feeling a bit better. I saddled Anna and went to have a look around, with ’ the white Big Person tagging along. That was another problem that would have to be worked out somehow. Anna wouldn't leave me and the new mount had no one that could talk to her but me. Yet it seemed a shame to waste the services of a Big Person.

  Baron Vladimir had ordered Count Lambert’s aircraft sent back to Eagle Nest. When I got there, the last of them was pulling out, strapped to the top of a war cart with the wing dismounted and roped next to the fuselage. The pilots who had flown them were dead, every last foolish one of them.

  The Christian knights were being buried, each in his own grave, with a dog tag on each wooden cross and another on his arms and armor, neatly bundled for return to his family. Someday, we’d send a crew of stonecutters here and have proper tombstones made.

  It was too wet to get a decent fire going, so the Mongol dead were being piled naked in a huge common trench, along with the dead horses. Even the horses had been stripped. Baron Vladimir had apparently felt that a half million horsehides was a prize well worth taking. If he could get them salted down in time, they’d keep the army in boots for many years. I doubt if we had salt enough to do the job, even at Three Walls. Likely, we'd have to send men to the mines and get the mines going besides.

  The heads of the Mongols were stacked separately, as I had ordered. A crew was putting them up on stakes made of old lances, in neat squares a gross heads to the side, for easy counting. Good. I wanted to make sure that no one ever doubted what we had accomplished here. Those heads were a fitting monument to this battle.

  In a day or two, the cleanup would be done, and we could go home. Well, some of us. A contingent would have to be sent to loot and clean up the mess we’d made on the east bank of the Vistula. Likely, Baron Tadaos was starting that already. If only the weather would clear up so we could use the radios again. But the thunder and lightning went on and showed no signs of stopping. It seemed unfitting, somehow. Victories should happen in fine weather.

  Finally, we found Baron Vladimir.

  “Good morning, my lord. The sleep seems to have done you good. You’re looking better. Have you had a medic examine your eye lately?”

  “No, but I suppose I should, at least to change the bandage.”

  “Most of them are down at the field hospital, at our old campsite, my lord.”

  “I’ll go there next. But for now, I want you to set up a meeting for me with the troops, captains and above, for late this afternoon, at six. There are some things I have to tell them.”

  “Done, my lord.”

  “Is anything coming through on the radios, yet?”

  “I’m afraid not, my lord.”

  “Then perhaps you should put a dozen men on Big People and have them spread the word of our victory. Our wives are doubtless worried and Duke Henryk should be informed. Tell the duke that I advise sending at least his foreign troops south to King Bela.”

  “I’ll see to it, my lord.”

  “Good. Then I’ll see you at six, if not before.”

  The medic said that my wound was healing well, and it looked like the eye was uninjured. The only problem was that when he removed the bandage, I couldn’t tell the difference. My right eye was blind.

  Perhaps it’s odd, but somehow it didn't bother me.

  After all the death I had seen and caused, well, maybe losing the eye was some sort of penance.

  The day wound on and it was time for my talk.

  I stepped up on the makeshift podium in front of my captains, komanders, and barons.

  “Brothers!” I said. “I wish that I could address the entire army, and not just the officers, but you all know that it would be impossible. Talking to the almost eight hundred of you is about all my lungs can handle. I am therefore going to ask you captains to each give a similar talk to your men, so I’ll thank you to take notes.”

  Notebooks and real lead pencils dutifully came out.

  “Thank you. First, I want you all to know that riders have been sent to tell your families that you are safe, so they can stop worrying about you.”

&
nbsp; “Next, I want to praise you all for the magnificent victory you have won. For the first time in all of history, the Mongols have been beaten. In the last fifty years, those murdering bastards have defeated over fifty armies, and most of those armies outnumbered the Mongol invaders. But we went at them outnumbered twenty to one, and we killed them to a man!”

  “Over a hundred major cities in China, Asia, and Russia have fallen to their rape, murder, and plunder, but not one major city in Poland has been lost, and all because of you men! The slaughter you worked has saved the lives of millions of your countrymen, and millions of other Christians, besides, for had we lost, the Mongols would not have stopped with Poland. They would have gone on to take Germany, France, and even England, Spain, and Italy. By stopping the Mongols here, you have saved all of Christendom! Your children and grandchildren and their descendants will be singing your praises for a thousand years!”

  “To honor you for this mighty deed, we are changing the name of our organization. No longer will we be simply ’the army.' From this day onward, we will be known as the 'Christian Army,' the defenders of all Christendom!”

  “The Mongol plan was to hit King Beta of Hungary at the same time as they invaded us. We don’t know yet if they planned to take the Hungarians from the east, or from the north through Poland. If the second, you have saved Hungary along with Poland. If the first, if the Mongols actually had enough men to make both invasions at the same time, we have at least saved the many thousands of Christian Knights who are still with my liege lord Duke Henryk at Legnica. I have this day sent a message to my liege urging him to release those fighters to help King- Beta. It may yet be that a victory to the south will happen, and part of the credit for that victory will be due to you.”

  “Then there is the matter of the booty you have earned. You all know that it is fabulous! Though it will be awhile before it can all be properly accounted and a fair distribution made, I think I’m safe in promising every man below the rank of knight at least a thousand pence! The knights will get twice that, and captains eight times that amount! So you are all rich!”