The Flying Warlord Read online

  I wasn’t going to let this happen again, at least not on my lands. The Jews were welcome as individuals, as was anybody else. Well, I wouldn't want an Atheist around, but in fact I never ran into anyone who would admit to being one. But if I let the Jews segregate themselves, they would keep to their own German language and their own customs. They never would become part of us, and racial tensions would inevitably develop. I let them have the use of some of the common rooms for their own religious services and religious instruction. Where the rabbis were sufficiently educated, we hired them into the school system, and the Jews could always wrangle it so they got Saturday off. But separate housing, separate schools, separate laws, and separate dining facilities were out!

  Well, I did have the kitchen staff put up a little sign when something was grossly nonkosher, since many traditional Polish foods were based on blood and others on pork. A Jew would sometimes get violently ill if he found out that he had just eaten kishka. Anyway, you only get a little bowl of blood from a duck, and there is no point in wasting tchanina on somebody who doesn’t appreciate it!

  Now, I know that I was at the very same time keeping the Moslems sworn to me segregated from the rest of the country. But it was not my intent that this should be a permanent situation. One day, we would defeat the Mongols and drive them back to where they came from, at which time I meant to help Zoltan Varanian’s people resettle their original homeland. And if we didn't beat the Mongols, we'd all be dead anyway, so the problem would solve itself.

  Count Lambert’s new castle was completed, and he was vastly proud of it. It really was a functional military defensive structure, with thick masonry walls six stories tall, crenelations, machinations, turret towers, and all the rest. It was completely fireproof, with even the floors being made of masonry, rather than the usual wood. It had room for all of his peasants as well as the four-gross young ladies that worked at his cloth factory. Further, he could play host to half the nobility in the duchy and have beds for everybody.

  And it had glass windows, indoor plumbing, and steam heat. There were even gaslights in the public areas. There was a church, a granary, huge storerooms, a sauna, and an indoor swimming pool. There was even a system of conduits going to every room, so that when we got electric lights and telephones, these things could be easily installed. The kitchens and dining rooms were such that everybody ate there, and private cooking was frowned on.

  I think I was as proud of that building as the count was.

  The fort at East Gate was up as well, and it had gone up much quicker, since at Okoitz I had used vaulted construction throughout, but at East Gate I used prefabricated reinforced concrete for the floors and ceilings. Not as pretty, but it sure was cheaper.

  I was sure that this fort was impregnable. The outer walls were seven stories tall and made of thick, reinforced concrete. It was surrounded by six tall towers, which were really storage silos for hay, grain, and coal but each had a fighting platform on top, and a dunce-cap roof to protect the fighters. These towers were connected to the main fort by underground tunnels. An enemy attacking any point would be in a crossfire from at least two and usually four directions. A two-story wall (that doubled as a long barn for the mules that pulled the railroad carts) surrounded the entire complex, connecting the towers. It wasn’t high enough to stop men with ladders, but it would stop horses and siege equipment.

  The ground plan was a symmetrical hexagon, and what with the six surrounding towers and walls, it resembled a snowflake. We ended up calling the design just that, and I got to toying with the idea of someday building hundreds of them.

  Let the Mongols try and take this one!

  I think that we bragged about it too much, and that this contributed to a major tragedy. But I get ahead of myself.

  Three Walls really had three walls now, and the outer one was of sturdy concrete. There were towers above the surrounding cliffs, and all sorts of dirty tricks were built in as defensive measures.

  And all my other installations at Coaltown, Silver City, and Copper City were similarly fortified. This was necessary because when we men went off to war, we needed someplace safe for the women, children, and old folks. And it was not only our own dependents that we had to protect, but those of everyone else in Silesia and Little Poland. I calculated that by stacking people in like cordwood, we’d have enough room to save them all. And while they might eat a lot of kasha, there would be food enough to feed them all as well.

  Except for adding wall guns, I’d left the castle I'd inherited from Baron Stefan alone, and in fact rarely used it. It was well enough designed as a defensive structure, but the moat made it difficult to add a sewage system. The peasants in the immediate area used the castle for weddings and what not and, come the invasion, would retreat to it for safety, but aside from that, I really didn't see much use for it. Maybe someday I'd fill in the moat and put in a septic system.

  Eagle Nest, on the other hand, got only a single, separate concrete tower, which doubled as a control tower for the airport. If attacked, the boys could go there and be safe enough, since the thing was nine stories tall. There simply weren’t enough people there to defend a wall long enough to surround the entire airport, and there weren't enough peasants nearby to help them. I was sorry to do it, but we had to treat the whole wooden complex as expendable.

  The old cities weren’t in very good shape either. The watts around Cracow were only three stories tall, and a wall that low can be scaled. Wawel Hill was well enough fortified, but the city below it looked likely to fall if it was seriously attacked. But try to get those damn merchants to spend a penny they didn't have to! I offered to sell them guns and to train their people as gunners, all at cost. They bought only a dozen swivel guns for the whole city and considered this to be sufficient!

  Wroclaw was in similar shape, and Legnica! Legnica still had wooden walls!

  We didn’t have room enough inside our fortifications for the farm animals, so doctrine was for the animals to be released to try their luck in the woods. At least the wolves were pretty much eradicated now, what with the Great Hunts and all. A program of branding was underway, so that the animals could be returned to their owners after the invasion.

  We had a similar program going to identify people. My own troops had dog tags, of course, but we enlarged the program to include the conventional knights as well. The service was free, and most of them took us up on it. If they fell in battle, we could at least mark their graves.

  The radios were working, although they weren’t all that dependable. They weighed two-gross pounds each and had a range of only thirty miles and that only in good weather. A lightning storm within fifty miles could drown them out, and they required endless fiddling by the operator. Nonetheless, we'd gone into production, and produced them by the thousands. There was one on every steamboat and one at each depot. Every Pink Dragon Inn had its radio, and there were four at each of our major installations. In addition, one war cart in six had a radio, so each company could keep in touch. Getting enough trained operators was a huge problem, but people were being trained as fast as sets were being built. Most of them were still pretty slow, but we kept them in practice.

  With only nine months to go before the Mongol invasion, Zoltan came to me with a new device. Our swivel guns used brass cartridges. They were breech-loading and clip-fed. But after years of fruitless effort, the alchemists had been unable to come up with a dependable primer to detonate the black powder in the shell. What we were using was a firecracker wick on the back of each shell that was lit by an alcohol burner near the breech. It was a clumsy alternative, but it was the best we could do.

  Zoltan presented me with a new cartridge and a new gun to fire it. Each cartridge had what amounted to a spark plug in the base, and the bolt of the gun contained a piezoelectric crystal to provide the spark.

  This was the same system that we had been using for years on our lighters, and the same system that the boys at Eagle Nest used on their aircraft engines, and th
e same system we used on the spark-gap radios. And for years, it hadn’t occurred to me or anyone else until now to use it to ignite gunpowder!

  In truth, I had to take the blame for this one myself. I had made gunpowder a secret thing, something you weren’t supposed to think about. I had kept Zoltan working on chemical projects and generally away from the Christians working on almost everything else. Secrecy is hell on innovations, and it was 0 my fault.

  To make things worse, there was no time to convert the tens of thousands of swivel guns we had already made. We would have to meet the Mongols with obsolete equipment.

  I designed a simple, single-shot pistol to use the new cartridges, and a few hundred of them were made in time, for use by officers. It had a breaking action like a shotgun, and had the general appearance of an old-style dueling pistol. I also designed a submachine gun along the lines of the Sten gun, but only prototypes were made. There just wasn’t time!

  Then we got word that Kiev had fallen, the walls had been stormed, and the armies slaughtered. The tales we heard from the few survivors were ghastly. They told of old people tortured, young women raped, and children hunted down in the streets for sport.

  No one doubted that we were next on the list.

  FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI

  I was Komander Tadaos now, and making sixty-four pence a day! It makes me wish my father could have lived long enough to see it! I had eighteen boats on the Vistula, and twenty-two on the Odra.

  ’Course, only three of those Odra boats was real fighting boats, two operating above Wroclaw and one below it. The rest were low, skinny things that could make it under the bridges at Wroclaw. There weren't any bridges on the Vistula, nor were there any on any of the tributaries that you could get a fighting boat up, but those Wroclaw bridges was a pain!

  We could build new bridges wide and tall enough. Baron Conrad’s book on them showed just how. But the damn city father (mothers, the lot of them) wouldn't hear of tearing their old ones down.

  I figured that with twelve barrels of gunpowder, we could do in one of the bridges some dark and stormy night and claim it was lightning, an Act of God, but the baron wouldn’t let me do it. He said it would take thirty barrels, easy, and the rubble would likely block the channel. And he said that the duke wouldn't like it, so that ended it.

  But someday, I was going to find a way of getting me them thirty barrels and trying it!

  All the boats was way overmanned, since we had to train crews for the new boats being built. Come spring, I was to have three dozen on the Vistula alone. What’s more, we had a gas generator on all our fighting boats now, and limelights on top of the turrets. These lights had big reflectors that turned with the gun below them, and we could run and fight in the dark, so we needed night crews as well as those for the day.

  We had flamethrowers now, too. These was a big barrel of pitch and wood alcohol in the bow with sort of a fire hose on the end. There was a lighter built in it, and when we put steam pressure to the barrel, we could squirt fire for six dozen yards! ’Course, it only worked for about a minute, but that was a lot.

  We was always doing target practice, mostly with the Halmans and the peashooters, since they didn’t use no gunpowder and was cheap to shoot. The peashooters didn't draw nearly the steam now that they used to, and I was pretty proud of that, since it was my doing. I came up with a valve that shut off the steam, just for an instant, while a new ball was dropping into the chamber. It was a little like the valve the baron designed for the bottom of the Halmans, which let loose a blast of steam when the round hit the bottom, only sort of backward. Anyway, the baron, he was tickled red over it cause now we could fire all four peashooters at once and still power the boat. I got two thousand pence as a bonus and they named that valve after me.

  But like I was saying, there was a target range set up about every two miles on the rivers, and we used them’ These targets was set up by young boys after the baron wrote a magazine article asking them to do it. They was pretty good at coming up with interesting things to shoot at, since they wanted us to do all the shooting we could. See, the ball bearings used by the peashooters and the dummy rounds from the Halmans was all reusable. After we'd go by, the kids would be out there digging them up so they could turn them in for the reward on them. Since we gave them about a quarter of what it would cost to make new ones, everybody came out pretty good.

  Then somebody found out that the Halmans could shoot a potato about as well as a dummy round, and we got to shelling the other steamboats as they went by. The baron told us to stop before somebody got hurt, but everybody on deck was required to wear armor, and no potato ever hurt an armored man. Why, after coming out of a Halman, they was half cooked, anyway. And moving targets was more interesting, so that order sort of got misplaced.

  I was having a row with my wives. They both got pregnant at the same time again, which they’d agreed not to do, and I was finding myself having to do without. Can you believe that? Two wives and still going horny?

  Well, they said it was as much my fault as theirs, it taking two to accomplish anything, but you know how women like to come up with excuses. Then they said that at least this time, they’d both be mine, and I hit the ceiling! I said that the first two was mine, and I'd wallop anybody who said different!

  Then I said that what with my rank and all, I was allowed a wife and four servants, and I was going to Okoitz to find me another one. They said that it took their permission, too, and they had to pass on any girl I picked. So we left two of the kids with a family at East Gate and we took one of the passenger carts to Okoitz the next time we had a few days off.

  Well, you know I found me a pretty and willing girl in just no time at all, and so did they. The trouble was that they wasn’t the same girl, and we had us another row about it. Finally we compromised and I took the both of the new girls on. But that's going to be the end of it, unless all four of them get pregnant simultaneous. If they do that on me, well, I'm still allowed one more, and after that I'll just have to get me some more rank.

  Chapter Eleven

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  There were Mongols in Cracow, but they weren’t invading just yet. This was a diplomatic party, and the duke wanted me and some of my people there to advise him.

  We’d had plenty of warning about their coming, since they were spotted at one of our depots on the River Bug. The operator there got out a radio message fast, and she was bright enough to warn away the steamboats in the area. I don't think they saw any of the planes, either.

  I knew that it was important to make as brave a show as possible, but at the same time I didn’t want them to see everything we had. Word went out on the radio that the steamboats and airplanes were to avoid the Mongols, the guns were to be taken down and hidden, and that the radios themselves were not to be talked about.

  I’d never publicized the radios, but I knew that scattered around as they had to be, there was no way of keeping their existence a secret. Operating principles were something else, but since few people knew them anyway, I wasn't worried.

  In fact, I needn’t have worried at all, since people who did hear about them didn't believe it. They'd believe in a steamboat because they saw it, and the same was true with the airplanes, which still had people running outdoors and pointing upward whenever one went over, but a machine that made sparks and talked to people miles away?… Nawww…

  I wanted the Mongols to be afraid of us, but for the wrong reasons. There wouldn’t be enough of Anna's mature children to make a difference in the invasion. Oh, they'd stand night guard duty and run messages, but there would only be thirty-three adult Big People by the time of the battle, and that wasn't enough to tip the scales.

  Still, if I could make the Mongols worry about fighting a highly mobile cavalry force, they might conduct their strategy accordingly, and that couldn’t do us any harm. Mobility was where we were weakest.

  I collected all the Big People I could, twenty of them co
unting Anna, along with some of my main people, and rode to Cracow. I brought Sir Vladimir, Sir Piotr, and the Banki brothers, among others.

  I brought Cilicia along, and I had the others bring their wives. We came in civilian clothes and without armor, my idea being to lend the occasion as little dignity as possible.

  We arrived in the early morning, just hours ahead of the Mongol delegation. Duke Henryk met with me and asked me to do the bulk of the talking at the preliminary meeting, since I apparently knew more about the Mongols than anybody else.

  “Just stand on the dais by my left hand, Baron Conrad. Should I want to talk to them directly, I shall signal you. But talk as you see fit.”

  A number of counts were up there as well, sort of an honor guard. The throne room was filled with gawkers, but all of my own people were there as well. This was supposed to be just a formal meeting, with further negotiations to be held in private. At least that was what the duke thought. I had somewhat different ideas, and the Mongols were way out in left field!

  The Mongol ambassador entered with twenty warriors at his back. Surprisingly, he spoke very good Polish.

  “I have come-”

  “A moment,” Duke Henryk said. “First off, who are you? Are you a Mongol?”

  “No. I am a Tartar.”

  The duke gave me a smug look, but the ambassador continued.

  “I am a Tartar but the great Ogotai Kakhan is a Mongol. They are slightly different tribes, like your Silesians and Mazovians.”

  “Thank you for clearing that up. Now, you were saying?”

  “I have come to accept your submission to my lord, Batu Khan, and to the great Ogotai Kakhan, Lord of All the World!” He was bowlegged and he stank, but you couldn’t accuse him of not coming to the point. His head was shaved, leaving ridiculous tufts of hair on his forehead and behind his ears, but then military organizations generally adopt funny haircuts. He wore gaudy silk brocades that might once have been attractive, but now were grease-stained and filthy.