Conrad Starguard - Flying Warlord Part 17

Grain was arriving daily from the granary, the first batch brought in by a dozen Big People the first 'day.

They'd gone out and taken over the first dozen carts from the slow moving mules, mostly to show Duke Boleslaw that there was nothing to worry about.

Yet for three days there was nothing to do but wait. Patrols were sent out, but they found little. The area was evacuated, since the refugees that had been through a week ago had finally convinced almost every noncombatant to leave.

In hours, we'd set up what amounted to a very large city. Carts were hauled a set distance apart and tarps were zippered over and between them for roofs, just like in a training exercise. Hammocks were slung both under the carts and between them, Cookstoves all had their proper place by the streets, and latrines were dug as per the manual. Oh, everything was covered with freezing mud, but that was only to be expected. After the training we'd put our men through, it was hardly noticed.

Everything was just perfect except for Duke Boleslaw, who couldn't comprehend any sort of tactics except for charging at the enemy and killing them all gloriously.

After days of discussion, persuasion, and pleading I finally had to threaten to cut off his food supply if he didn't let us take part in the fight. Couching it that way, where he was doing a favor for the people who were feeding him, he came around a little.

The plan we came up with, and after vast trouble got our knightly hors.e.m.e.n to agree with, was that they would locate the enemy and entice them into a trap.

They would charge gloriously in, slaughter droves of the enemy and then pretend to run away. They would lead the Tartars into a huge V-shaped formation of war carts, who would open up on the enemy with their guns. After twenty minutes, the hors.e.m.e.n would come back and finish the Mongols off. Thus, Boleslaw's knights would get both first blood and the kill, while we foot soldiers would be content with an a.s.sist. I had to use hunting terms with them because their hunting was organized, even if their warfare wasn't.

One problem with this, as far as the knights were concerned, was that it involved running away from the enemy. I had to convince them that it was a legitimate ruse of war and really a very clever thing for them to do.

I even promised them a beer while we were shooting up Mongols. Actually, I thought that there was a fair chance that they would have to run away, since all reports from the Vistula said that we would be vastly outnumbered, but I couldn't tell them that. I just wanted to make sure that they ran in the right direction.

Another problem was in being able to identify friend from foe. This was difficult enough in a hand-to-hand combat, especially since the riverboats had reported that the Mongols had drawn troops from all of their vast realm, and some dressed not too differently from Polish knights. At a distance, from the perspective of a gunner a half mile away, the problem was serious. Foreseeing this difficulty a year ago, I had caused to be made fifty thousand surcoats, each white with a broad red vertical stripe running up both the front and the back. They were easily identifiable at a great distance, and quite nicely made, since our knights insisted on going into battle looking their best.

The knights all admitted to the advantages of wearing identifiable clothing. The trouble was that they all had their own family devises and colors, and these were a particular point of pride with them. Many had taken vows to never fight without their family colors, and so felt honor-bound to refuse to wear the surcoats I'd given them. Days were spent squabbling over this point, until the duke at last ordered all his men to wear the red-and-white surcoats, over their own surcoats if necessary, but to wear them or leave the battle. At that, a few of our Knights actually went home, but not many.

Then we got word that the Mongols had crossed the Vistula, and two days after that, that they were camped five miles away.

Chapter Twenty-one.

Late in the afternoon on the day before the battle, Duke Boleslaw called together all of his leaders, barons and above. This meant that my army was grossly underrepresented, because a conventional baron often had as few as half a dozen knights whereas mine each commanded a battalion of nine thousand men. But there was nothing I could do about it, so we went.

I'd had a big map made up of the area, and after the duke made a short, boisterous speech, I was surprised that he let me come up and give a presentation outlining the situation. Many of these men were not good with maps, but most of them had been on patrols throughout the area and were able to understand the situation.

I showed them how to get from here to there, where our ambush would be set up, what their "retreat"

route should be. I stressed the importance of a good night's sleep, and a hot meal in the morning. And I repeated my promise of a beer if the ambush worked out well, having s.h.i.+pped in forty thousand gallons of beer for the purpose. These men had been dry for over a week and I think the beer was a serious inducement.

A priest said ma.s.s and we all went to communion. I think every man of mine went into battle in a State of Grace. There are no atheists on the battle lines.

It was dark when Baron Ilya came to me. The weather that had been perfect for the past week, a rare thing at this time of year, was turning bad. Thunder and lightning were cras.h.i.+ng in the distance and it looked likely that we would be fighting tomorrow in a cold spring rain. The lightning had been raising h.e.l.l with the radios since the day before, but fortunately, they had already done their jobs.

I was with the duke and a few of his friends, boys as young as he was, telling them the story of how Count Conrad and I had once chopped up a caravan of Teutonic Knights and rescued a gross of children that otherwise would have been sold into Moslem slavery. The story went over well, since despite the fact that the Teutonic Knights were nominally the va.s.sals of Duke Boleslaw, they had not come to the battle, saying that they had to defend the northern borders, which was bulls.h.i.+t. The duke vowed that if we beat the Mongols, we would fight the Teutonic Order next. I had the boys in high spirits by the time the last Crossman raced over the hills with s.h.i.+t on his breeches. Two against seven, and they were vanquished without putting a mark on us!

"Sir, may I speak to you for a moment?" Baron Ilya said.

"Certainly. Is it something that can be discussed before these fine knights?" These boys were more proud of their knighthood than they were of their higher t.i.tles. Knighthood, after all, had to be earned, while their baronies and all had been inherited.

"I don't see why not, sir, since it's about the invasion. You know that I lead the battalion of Night Fighters. For four years, we have been training and learning to fight at night, in the dark. Well, it's a dark and stormy night out there, and now's the time to put that training to use! Let me take my battalion out there and shake them up a bit! Me and the boys can be back in time to help out with the battle tomorrow, but give us our chance tonight."

I was about to say "Certainly, go see what you can do," but the duke was talking before I could get my mouth open.

"Just what is it that you plan to do, Baron?"

"Well, your grace, we'll probably surround them in the dark, send in creepers to take out their sentries, then roll grenades under their tents and so on. After that, we'll give them a good sh.e.l.ling to cover our men as they come out, and maybe slaughter their horses while we're at it. We'll get some of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and cost them a night's sleep if nothing better."

The young duke was getting progressively more horrified as Ilya spoke, but Ilya wasn't sharp enough to realize it. Or maybe he was just too bull-headed to care.

"What a disgusting thing to even talk about! Do you think for a moment that I would allow such a dishonorable thing to be done under my command? I absolutely forbid this cowardly act you propose, and I tell you that you better see a priest and confess again if you want to be in a State of Grace for tomorrow's battle!"

"A State of Grace! I tell you that I am a Radiant Warrior and personally blessed by G.o.d!" Ilya exploded.

"And cowardly? I want to go alone with only nine thousand men against half a million and you call that cowardly?"

I had to stand up between them to make sure they didn't come to blows. "Ilya, you d.a.m.n fool! Shut up!"

I pushed him toward the door of the tent.

"Forgive him, your grace. He's normally a good man. He's just overwrought. I'll take care of this." I followed Ilya out.

As soon as we were out the door, he said, "Sir--"

"Shut up! Keep your d.a.m.n face closed until we get back to our camp!"

Thunder was cras.h.i.+ng overhead and the rains had started.

Once there, I said, "Don't you have brains enough to not shout at a duke, for G.o.d's sake! And especially a duke who could wreck the whole battle plan if he gets a hair up his a.r.s.e? Didn't your mother teach you anything?"

"I never had a mother. They said the stork brought me."

"I can believe that, judging from your manners! I've worked for almost a week convincing that kid that we're not a bunch of crude peasants and you had to prove otherwise in half a minute!"

"Sorry, sir. What about the raid on the Mongol camp tonight?"

I took a deep breath, letting my anger subside. "Can you do it so that no one from this camp sees you leave and come back?"

"In this weather, sir? Easy! The duke's sentries will never see us."

"Then do it. But don't get caught, or the duke will hang us both!"

"Don't worry, sir. It's just like stealing a pig."

AS TOLD BY BARON ILYA THE BLACKSMITH.

"So like I was saying, we got us permission to make a little night raid, even if it was sort of an underhanded one. I got the boys out of the sack, fed, and called together. We'd been sleeping during the day to stay in shape, and doing night guard duty until we'd done more than our share by the night before.

I'd timed the thing just right."

"The camp was quiet when we left, pulling our small nightfighter carts. See, most of the troops fight out of big, forty-three man platoon carts, but in the dark, there's no way that you can keep track of that many men around you. The most is about six, and you've got to know who your own men are, because everybody else is likely the enemy! So we use a small lance-sized cart, and right then they was unloaded of everything but the gun, ammunition, and grenades that each one carried. We don't use pikes or halberds. In the dark, them weapons ain't worth firewood! But we was pretty good with the knife, the garrote, and the grenade."

"I thought we was clear of the camp when we came on an outlying sentry, and you know it had to be one of Boleslaw's men."

"Hold! Who goes there?"

"Baron Ilya," I says. "Beer run." It was the first thing that came into my head. Never mind that I had nine thousand men coming up behind me.

"Beer? There's two dozen big carts of beer in the camp!"

"Yeah, but that's what our hetman promised you horse jockeys. Now we're going out to get enough for the foot soldiers, too."

"What, all that beer for us alone? Well, carry on then."

"I don't figure that man ever knew he had a creeper right behind him and a garrote over his head. I sure would have hated to do him in, but I did promise Vladimir that n.o.body would see us leave. If he reported that I went on a beer run, well, wouldn't n.o.body take it seriously."

"We had scouts ahead planting markers in the ground, sticks split so the white side showed toward us.

There wasn't no problem finding the Mongol camp. The only surprise was how big that sucker was! It was fully four miles across and they had fires going all around it. No way we could surround this thing the way I told the duke."

"Fire line, two yards apart, a gross yards from the pickets, pa.s.s it on.' I says that would put us a quarter way around the camp, and the carts split off by companies to either side of me, forming wings a mile and a half long. The carts were tipped up on their sides and the guns mounted. They wouldn't be needed for a while, but it's always a good idea to be ready. The signal strings were strung up along both wings, and I waited."

"I got my telescope out and looked over the enemy sentries. Dumbs.h.i.+ts, the lot of them! They was sitting around the fires, staring at the fires and talking. A captain with any brains posts his men so the fires show in the enemy's eyes, not your own. Those men were about to get a very expensive education in night-fighting."

"Plan eight, red and white flares. Pa.s.s the word,' I whispered to both wings and to the sentry behind me who was sorting out the companies."

"It was a while before we got settled into position, but I wasn't worried none. The thunder and rain covered most everything. We was being quiet mostly out of habit. Them sentries weren't looking for trouble, but that wasn't going to help them none. Trouble had just come looking for them!"

"It would have been nice if I could have gone in with most of the other men, but we'd proved time and again that the leader had best stay back and direct things, so that's the way I had to play it. That's one of Count Conrad's big problems. He always has to do everything hisself, and there ain't n.o.body can do everything, not and do it fight."

"I got four tugs on the fight-hand string, saying that the fight wing was ready, and a few minutes later, the left-hand string pulled four times."

"I gave both strings three long, slow pulls and watched as the first-string creepers went out. These were the one best lance from each platoon, and we had a lot of contests to see who that lance was. They figured it was an honor to be the ones that went out ahead of the others and killed the sentries real quiet like."

"I saw the men in front of me in position, but I gave it a few more minutes to make sure that everybody else was ready. Then I lit off a small, red rocket. Count Conrad had made these things as a festival toy, but once I saw one, I knew it was just the thing to signal men in the dark."

"If any of the Mongol sentries saw it, they were looking at the rocket and not the men behind them. Just like a machine, six of my men came up behind six of theirs and slipped garrotes over their heads. The wires were pulled tight and most of them heathens didn't hardly even kick around. Those that did got knifed, but most of them got to die without getting their clothes bloodied. The sentry fires were smothered, usually by piling dead Mongols on them and stuffing the edges with mud and dirt, and it was time for phase two."

"I pulled the signal strings again and five more lances from each platoon went out, leaving only the gunners behind. I put a big white rocket in the launcher to be ready in case of any commotion, but I rested back with my telescope for about an hour and let the men do what they were trained for. They were going through the enemy camp, wreaking any silent mayhem they could do, and that was a lot.

Those boys went out with six garrotes each, and they all complained later that they could have used more."

"There was a lot of knife work, too. You take sleeping troops a tent at a time, cut every throat at the same instant without a sound, then go on to the next tent. The trick is to get men on their stomachs laying all around the tent, ready to go under it. Then one man walks in the front door, calm as he can, and lights a pocket lighter. Before the sleepers know what's happening, they all have an extra mouth and the light goes out. It takes training and practice, but any job worth doing is worth doing right. I could see quick flashes as tents lit up for a moment and then were dark."

"There were enemy troops up and around, but our men was all walking natural and they weren't much noticed. Those Mongols must have had fifty different kinds of people there, and didn't none of them speak the same language. They all figured that if you was in the camp, you must be on their side, so they each had to learn different on their own. It stayed quiet for the longest time."

"One of the rules was that the most important men in the camp usually had the biggest tents, and these were usually in the center of the camp. When there are more than a dozen in a tent, it gets pretty hard to kill them all without somebody on one side or another making a noise, so doctrine was to frag the big tents. Course, the big ones often had sentries of their own, a sure tip-off that you was in officer country, so the sentries had to be taken out first, but we were pretty good at that sort of thing. When a man's upright, a garrote's the thing to use."

"You could always roll a grenade under a tent, but the effect was better if it was up off the ground. The best way was to slit the tent, put in the grenade dangling from a string with a fish hook on the end and with the wick hanging outside, and then light it with your pocket lighter when the signal went up."

"It was still awfully quiet down there and I checked the traveling clock we had with us. Yeah, it had been over an hour, and it was one of Conrad's double-sized hours at that. Some of the boys would be getting real antsy about now, so it was time for the fireworks."

"I lit off the big white rocket flare, which exploded pretty white streamers over the enemy camp so n.o.body could miss it."

"In a few seconds, there were explosions all over the Mongol camp, and most especially in the center of it, I was pleased to note."

"I sat back for another two-twelfths of an hour watching the mayhem through my telescope. The boys were really ripping them up. Each man had had two small four-pound grenades in his pack, as well as a big twelve-pounder, and didn't none of that ordinance get carried back to our firing line."

"As the first of our men got back, puffing and running with the big white crosses they'd opened up on their chests so our gunners would know not to shoot them, I started pulling on the signal strings again.

The gunners generally let loose with a few rifle grenades first, in part to start some additional fires to shoot by, but mostly because they didn't get to shoot them very often, except for dummies, and they're kind of fun.

"A few fires were started near a horse park and that attracted some gunfire until the surviving horses stampeded through the Mongol camp and out of sight."

"More and more of our men were making it back, but the Mongols themselves hadn't acted like we was here yet. One of my worst nightmares had the enemy and our men running out all mixed together, and the gunners having to shoot them all down or be killed themselves. But that didn't happen. The enemy was real slow on the uptake. Me, I figure that was caused by the way we killed most of their officers, but there ain't no way to prove it. Only it figures, you know?"

"We were almost all back, those that were coming back, anyway, before the invaders got together enough to attack us. There was thousands of them on horseback, all yelling and screaming and running into each other, since they had the muzzle flashes coming in at them and that will blind a man or beast in the dark."

"Then we started doing jerk-fire shooting. That's where each gunner fires just after the man to his left does. This lets him aim by the muzzle flashes of the guns that just went off, so the field is almost perfectly lit up. But the men out there that you're shooting at look like they're jumping and jerking around real funny. Conrad explained it to me once, but I never did figure out what he was talking about."

"From out in front of it, when you're being shot at, it's just plain scary. It looks like there's these big bright moving things streaking from your right to your left, and there isn't a horse that will stay around it. Them that wasn't dead took off and their riders went with them."

"After that, they tried charging us on foot, but we shot that one up just as bad or even a little worse.

There was dead bodies as thick as a carpet from their camp to almost our lines. I tell you that a man could have walked on dead Mongols the whole way and never stepped on the ground, they was that thick."

"But we were getting low on ammunition and dawn wasn't that far away. If they knew how few of us there was, they could have walked all over us, and anyhow, I told the hetman that n.o.body would see us coming back. I signaled a pullout."

"Slow burning flares were stuck into the ground in front of our positions, to maybe make them think we was still there. Then we pulled out in the reverse order that we came, and some of the gunners kept on firing right up to the end. We were halfway back, walking in the rain, when I got the butcher's bill. Four hundred fifty-five missing and likely dead, and d.a.m.n few wounded. Well, in that kind of a fight, if you were hurt bad, you just didn't get out. We lost a whole lot less than I thought we would, but even so, odds were that a lot of those men still out there were friends of mine."

"That same sentry was there when we got back near camp. I guess the duke's men weren't much on relieving the night guard."

"You didn't get the beer!" he says.

"Naw, the place was closed."

"d.a.m.n shame. Maybe we'll have some left over for you."

"You'd better." What a dumbs.h.i.+t, I thought.

Chapter Twenty-two.