Conrad Starguard - Lord Conrad's Lady Part 3

I went to the Inner Gate and shouted to the guards, "East Gate is burning! The army is going to have to pull out of here and go to their aid. I think we've killed most of the Mongols in the city, but you people will have to do the final mop-up yourselves. Do you hear me?"

A gray-bearded man in ancient armor stuck his head out of a small window and looked down at me.

"We hear you, Count Conrad, but you must realize that there are few here save women, children, and the aged. The n.o.ble knights all went off to fight the enemy in the field! Their ladies all just went off somewhere, I think to find a safer place to weather the invasion. Most of the young guildsmen fell defending the outer walls, those that did not leave, months ago to join your army. Many of those that were able to get here after the lower city fell have died defending Wawel Hill. Women have been manning catapults and crossbows, and children have been bringing ammunition to them. We have nothing left to 'mop up' with!"

"You'll just have to do the best you can," I shouted back. "Good-bye and good luck!"

I heard him swearing at me as we left, but what else could I do?

We went through the city, out the Carpenter's Gate, and back to the war carts. Few of the troops had gotten there yet, and most of the cart guards were asleep. They'd decided that one man awake out of six was sufficient, and I really couldn't fault them. A minor attack had been beaten off earlier in the day, but aside from that it had been quiet. I let them sleep, since it would be good to have at least a few men who were well rested.

More of our men were arriving all the time, though most of them were staggering badly in the rain and gloom. Few of them were actually wounded, but running and fighting for two days straight is about all any normal man can take.

I waited in the rain and dark for an entire hour and then decided that we had to go.

"But only half the men have gotten here yet, sir!" Baron Gregor objected. "There's only about two dozen men to a cart, and that many could never pull nonstop to East Gate. They wouldn't have anyone to relieve them. "

"You're right, of course. Well, move the men up to the first carts. Get a full platoon on each cart and have them move out at a quickstep. As more men straggle in, we'll fill more carts and have them catch up with the rest at double time. You'd best stay here and see that the job gets done. "

"Sir, that'll make a mess of the whole command structure! n.o.body will know who's in charge."

"Structure be d.a.m.ned! East Gate is burning! Just make sure that there are six knights and a knight bannerette for each cart, and a captain for every six of them. The field grade officers can sort things out among themselves as we're moving. It's not as though anybody can get lost on a railroad!"

"Yes, sir. What about the wounded?"

"Send the walking wounded back into the city to help out there. Set up a camp for those badly hurt right here."

"Yes, sir," he said, and started shouting orders. The first cart moved out in minutes, with Captain Wladyclaw acting as point man.

Even doing a quickstep was torture for the men, but we pushed on into the night. At around midnight I got word that we now had an even gross of companies in the column, and I hoped that they would be enough to handle whatever was happening at East Gate. By this point each of the men had been able to get a few hours' sleep while riding the carts, and I figured that they could take it. I gave the order to go double time.

I found myself dozing in the saddle, but fortunately a Big Person doesn't need to sleep at all. We pushed on, changing pullers every quarter hour.

I wished that there was some word from Baron Vladimir, but none had come. Had he encountered still more Mongols? Had the courier failed to make it through to him? This business of not knowing what was going on was nerveracking. I'd often heard of the "fog of war," but I never would have believed that it could take so much out of a commander.

If the Mongols had gotten to East Gate, had they gone beyond it? Were the boys at Eagle Nest under attack? The girls at Okoitz? And what about my people, my wife and children at Three Walls? Had all of southern Poland been overrun?

And what of East Gate? Was it still standing? It was our strongest fortification next to the city of Three Walls. It had six towers surrounding the castle, each nine stories tall and made of reinforced concrete, with a dozen swivel guns on top of each one . A low two-story wall connected the towers, and while that wall wasn't tall enough to stop footmen with ladders, no horse could ever get over it. Then six dozen yards inside those defenses was a concrete castle that was as strong as I knew how to make it. The walls were six stories high and protected by six more towers, each eight stories tall. The whole complex bristled with guns and had all sorts of nasty tricks to play on an attacker.

How could such a fort be taken by an enemy with only horses and arrows? How could a completely concrete structure possibly be on fire? To be sure, the fort was manned by women, but they were all properly trained and highly motivated. Much of their ammunition had had to be transferred to the riverboats during the Battle for the Vistula, but a great deal was still left to them. They were up to their armpits in refugees, but the captainette in charge should have been able to handle things. With that strong a fort, all she had to do was close the gates, and then she could laugh at the enemy. The walls were too tall to be scaled and too strong to be battered in.

Well, outside of the walls was the huge Riverboat a.s.sembly Building, and it was made of wood.

A cold feeling went through me. Our casualties during the Battle for the Vistula were much higher than I had expected them to be. The castle had been filled to the rafters with civilian refugees, so I had the loft of the a.s.sembly building converted for use as a hospital. Those wounded men were at the mercy of the enemy, and the Mongols didn't know what mercy was!

We pushed on through the night and into the morning. The men were staggering with fatigue, and I found myself dozing off in the saddle, dreaming strange dreams and suddenly jerking back into reality, unsure of whether I had dreamed or was hallucinating or was actually trying to survive in an alien environment. I saw my pregnant wife, Francine, naked with her feet nailed to a door frame, her belly horribly slashed and her throat cut open by my own sword. I saw my children by Krystyana and Cilicia murdered on the ground, their tiny heads bashed open on the rocks. Eventually the nightmares of my dreams of torture and the nightmare of my tortured reality fused into a living horror that went on and on forever. Yet when I was sure that I could go no farther, when I knew that I must fall off my mount and sleep forever, I looked and saw the troops gasping, running, staggering, splas.h.i.+ng on the muddy boards beside me. If they could go on, then so could 1. 1 drew strength from their dedication and pushed onward.

It was well past noon when we got to East Gate. The Riverboat a.s.sembly Building was gone, reduced to a few blackened stumps sticking up from rain-soaked foundations. The Enterprise was at the docks, next to four hulks burned to the waterline, and the city was guarded by my own troops. A sentry waved us through, but I stopped to talk to him. "What's going on here, warrior?" I asked.

"We got here at dawn by riverboat, sir. Everybody was dead. "

"Dead? How many Mongols were involved? Which way did they go?"

"I don't much know anything else, sir. I've been standing guard ever since we got here, and n.o.body's told me nothing. Maybe you'd best talk to Baron Tadaos. He's back on the boat, I think."

I told the men in my relief column to pull into the railroad yard and rest, and once there most of the men pulling just lay down in the cold spring rain and fell asleep. Those on the carts were already sleeping.

Captain Wladyclaw was near at hand. I told him to get fresh scouts out on Big People and to find out what he could.

Baron Tadaos was in his cabin, debriefing a young corpsman who was crying and shaking in his chair.

The man's clothes were badly burned, his hair was mostly gone, and there were blisters on his hands and face.

"Come in, sir, and sit down. There's some terrible things happened here," Tadaos said.

I sat, grateful to sit on something that wasn't a saddle. "Maybe you'd best tell me the story from the beginning, Baron."

"Yes, sir. I got here yesterday around noon and saw the boat house was burning. I'd put off my company of troops with you almost a week before, so I was down to the boat crew and the signal group under Baron Piotr. Mongols was all over the place, but we docked between two of the other boats that was here. See, half my boats was in port for lack of repairs, fuel, and ammunition. We only had a dozen rounds for each of the guns, but I figured that we'd see what help we could be, anyway."

He was interrupted as an armored boatman came in with a big tray heavily laden with food and drink.

"We found a storeroom in the castle that hadn't been broken into, sir. You haven't eaten since yesterday, and I promised your wives that I'd take care of you, sir. "

He set the tray on the desk and left without another word.

"I can only pray that the girls are still alive somewheres. I guess we all need to eat. Dig in, gentlemen,"

Tadaos said.

"But like I was saying," he said with food in his mouth, "we left three gunners on the bow to do what they could, and the rest us went out with swords and pikes. I was even out of arrows, so I left my bow behind. Never did see it again."

"We joined up with what was left of the boat repairmen, the crews of the other boats, and the medics that was taking care of the wounded in the hospital here. A lot of the walking wounded was with us, too, but we was still way outnumbered. Them Mongols being on horseback didn't help none, neither. We lost us a lot of men, and they pushed us back to the boats."

"Only by then most of the boats was on fire, except for this one on the end, the Enterprise. The engineman on the boat had brains enough to have a head of steam up, and we had no choice but to push off and look for help."

"I didn't feel right doing that, since all five of my wives was in the castle, or so I thought, and it felt like I was murdering them and the kids, too. But it was run for help or die right there for no good reason, so we ran.

"Those d.a.m.n radios of yours haven't worked for a week, but when we got to Cracow, we saw that it was burning, too. That's when I ran into you. Doing what you said, we collected up four companies of troops, all of which I could get aboard, seeing as how they didn't have no war carts, and we ripped down the docks and a dozen sheds nearby to fuel our trip back here. It d.a.m.n nearly wasn't enough. I'd already given the order to start tearing down the boat when the lookout spotted East Gate, and we made it on our head of steam with the boat still intact. Just as well, since this just might be the last boat we got left!"

"The place was empty when we got here first thing in the morning. Empty of living people, anyhow. You could see where there'd been a fight in front of the boat house, and our boys sold their lives pretty d.a.m.n dearly, let me tell you. But there wasn't no fight around the castle. There was just a ma.s.sacre, I think the worst ma.s.sacre the world has ever seen! I just come back from there, and what I saw would make the worst sinner in the Christian world fall down and cry!"

"There must be twenty or thirty thousand people dead in there, sir, and every one of them women or children or a few old gaffers. Ain't a one of them could have done the Mongols a bit of harm, but the filthy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds murdered them all, anyway. s.h.i.+t, sir, I ain't got words bad enough for them . . . them ...

whatevers."

Chapter Seven.

The baron was crying, and I let him have a few moments to get a hold of himself. After a while he continued.

"Sir, I didn't find any of my people, but there was so many dead in there that I knew we'd be weeks sorting them all out. I figured my family was done for, but then some of the troops found this young feller, and what he says is that it wasn't our people who was murdered in there. I mean that they wasn't army families. He says that all them women and kids was the families of n.o.bility from Cracow, Sandomierz, and points in between! But maybe you better hear about it straight from him."

"Maybe I'd better, Tadaos. How about it, son? Are you up to repeating your story for me?"

"Yes, sir. I think so, sir. I was a corpsman working in the hospital that was set up in the loft of the boat house, I mean the Riverboat a.s.sembly Building."

"Relax, son," I said. "You're among friends here. Just tell us the story the way it happened. And tell me, how old are you?" It was maddening to take all this time listening, but unless I knew what had happened, I wouldn't know what to do next.

"Yes, sir. I just turned fifteen. Anyway, I heard my captain telling one of the banners that he had just come back from the fort and that they couldn't give us any help. He said that the women's army contingent there was pulling out with all the commoner refugees in the whole fort. He was pretty mad about it, but he said that there was nothing he could do to change things. He didn't command the stupid c.u.n.t in charge of the fort. Excuse me, sir, but that's what he called her."

"Yes, yes. But why was she abandoning her post?" I said. A captainette was the woman left in charge of an installation when the men went off to war. It was an unusual position in that it was temporary in nature.

For example, Captainette Lubinska, who had been in charge of East Gate, was ordinarily in charge of the accounting section there, and during normal times she had no authority at all outside of accounting. But once the men went off to fight the enemy in the field, she was in absolute charge, subject only to a clearly defined chain of command that ended with me. She even outranked the six baronesses that ordinarily lived at East Gate, for example, and they were expected to obey her orders.

The reason for all this was that men rarely chose their wives for their ability as battle commanders, and it was important to have the most competent woman in charge, no matter who she had married.

But n.o.body except me and Baroness Krystyana could have legally ordered Captainette Lubinska from her post.

"Sir, I was just overhearing somebody else's conversation, and my captain's at that, even though he was pretty loud about it. He said that Count Herman's wife came up with a few dozen bodyguards and a large group of other n.o.blewomen, and the captainette wouldn't let them in. She said that fort was full and that these new refugees would have to continue on down to h.e.l.l, I mean the Warrior's School, thirty miles away, for shelter. But the countess talked the captainette into coming down and talking to her, and then the countess said that the fort wasn't your property, sir, so it wasn't army property. The fort really belonged to Count Lambert, her brother-in-law, and Count Lambert wanted her to take it over and shelter there, since it was the strongest fort in Poland, and everybody knew it."

"That wasn't true," I said. "Count Lambert paid for the fort, but I was to see to the manning of it. He wouldn't have changed that without talking to me about it. I can't believe that he would ever have given anything to the countess. He hated her! Not that we'll ever know for sure. Count Lambert died days ago on the battlefield west of Sandomierz."

"Yes, sir, but she got the captainette to believing her, anyway. They went into the fort. Then an awful lot more n.o.bility kept coming, and the countess turned every commoner out the fort to make room for them.

Some of them went on to h.e.l.l, or the Warrior's School, I mean, and some went up to the hills to take their chances up there."

"And this happened three days ago?" I asked, trying not to vent my anger at the captainette. It was really all my fault for appointing that woman to so important a post in the first place. I'd had a bad feeling about her, but I'd done nothing about replacing her.

"I think four, sir. Then about noon yesterday, I was outside taking a breather, and I saw about a hundred oldstyle knights ride up in chain mail and all. I thought it was kind of funny because they were all riding little horses, but their leader spoke real good Polish to the sentry, and their s.h.i.+elds were all painted with Polish arms. Anyway, the leader said that they had word from Cracow, and I heard the countess yell that they should be admitted. I saw the gates go up and the drawbridge go down, but then my break was over and I had to get back to tending the wounded. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I guess I should have. That must have been how the Mongols tricked their way into the fort."

"Then, about a half hour later, one of our men came up shouting that the place was crawling with Mongols, that they were streaming in on us from the south. We all armed ourselves, but my captain said I was to take care of the wounded, since some of those men were badly hurt. I was the only corpsman left behind. I didn't like it, but orders were orders. I could hear screams from the castle and shouts from the fighting down below. All the wounded who could move had gone down to join the fight, even some guys with only one arm, but there were still more than two dozen of them up there that were helpless."

"A while after that, one of my patients started shouting that the building was on fire, that we all had to get out somehow. From the smoke and the smell, I could see he was right, but there were so many of them and only one of me! I picked up one of the men who was near the stairway and carried him down to the ground floor and outside., but the fighting was so bad out there that he was killed by a Mongol arrow before I got out the door."

"I went back up, and the fire had gotten real bad. Men were crying to me, begging me to not let them die by burning to death. One man, a captain with his legs both messed up, he grabbed me by the arm. 'You know what you've got to do!" he says, and I said that I didn't. He says, 'You can't let all these men die by fire! That's the worst possible way to go. It's so painful that any man doing it would die with a curse on his lips, and then what happens to his soul? You've got that axe, boy. Use it! And use it on me first!'

"Then he starts singing 'Te Deum,' sir, real loud, and the rest of the men starts singing with him, those who were conscious. I'd armed myself when everybody else had, and my axe was sharp and new in its sheath. I'd never used it, not till then, anyway."

"Sir, I chopped that captain straight across the neck, and it took his head almost off. Then I went down the line of wounded men and did the same to almost every one of them. They kept on singing until I was done. Some of those men I killed were already unconscious. Some of the others gritted their teeth as I came up to them, and a few nodded to me that it was okay, what I was doing, but only one of them said I shouldn't do it. He was Robby Prajinski, and I knew him because he was from my own village. He screamed and begged me not to hurt him, so I didn't. I just went to the next man. I guess the fire was real bad, because I couldn't see so good. Maybe it was the smoke, or maybe I was just crying, but I hit every one of those poor men square, sir, even the last one where the floor burned out under us. He was singing until I hit him. I guess that's where I got these burns."

"I lost my axe in the fall, and I could hear Robby screaming somewhere, but I couldn't find him in the fire. I got outside somehow, and all of our men out there were dead. I was thinking I should go back in to try to find Robby, but my clothes outside my armor were burning. It was like the Mongols didn't see me somehow, because I made it into the river, and that put the fire out. I drifted downstream for a while, and I was kind of surprised that I floated in my armor. Maybe it's the goose-down in the gambesons.

Anyway, I crawled out, and I guess I mostly slept until the sentries found me."

I buried my face in my hands, unsure whether I was crying as much as the young corpsman was.

"You did what you had to do, son. Fate put a horrible job in front of you, but you did your duty, and you did it well. May G.o.d bless and forgive you," I said. After a bit I added, "You did fight, son, but maybe you'd better go to confession. There are a number of chaplains around here somewhere. "

"Yes, sir." The boy got up to leave, and Tadaos put some more food in his blistered hands before showing him out.

"Take care of him, won't you," I said to Tadaos.

"Will do, sir. Now, before you leave, do you have any spare ammunition? We'd stripped most of the ammo from the fort for the fight on the river, and it seems like the Mongols burned all the rest of it they could find."

"We can give-you a few dozen cases. You're going to see what you can do about patrolling the river?"

"There's nothing much else I can do, sir. That, and there are still three of my boats unaccounted for, and I mean to find them. Baron Piotr's getting downright antsy about it."

"Piotr still lives, then?"

"Yeah, he was one of the, lucky ones."

"I'm glad. Well, good hunting." I stood to leave.

"You too, sir."

It was now late in the afternoon, and if we left within the hour, well, there were a dozen targets for the Mongols within two dozen miles of here. We'd probably get wherever we were going before dawn. I ordered that all of our Night Fighter companies be re-formed and put in the front of the column, that all of the relatively fresh men who had come in by riverboat be put on the line behind them, and had the two companies in the worst shape left behind to man this installation and start cleaning it up. While I had been talking to Tadaos, eight more companies had come up from Cracow. The city was now secure, even if most of the wooden buildings in the lower city were totally burned down. At least there were no Mongols about, or rather, no live ones.

But there was no word from Baron Vladimir. Two-thirds of our army might as well have vanished from the earth for all I knew.

Baron Gregor just about had things reorganized when Captain Wladyclaw galloped up.

"It's definite," he said. "The entire Mongol force somehow regathered into a single body, and then it went east. There was some fighting at Sir Miesko's manor, but it did not fall to the enemy, or at least it hadn't when one of my scouts saw it through a telescope an hour ago. He said that a bunch of crazy old ladies were up in the towers there with swivel guns and a few gross Mongols were lying dead around them, while the other living enemy troops were keeping at a respectable distance. But he said that the bulk of the Tartars had turned south and are heading for Three Walls, sir."

Three Walls! My wife, my children, and most of my ex-mistresses were at Three Walls. My first impulse was to take my entire force there at a double time, but Baron Gregor talked me out of it. Or rather, he shouted me out of it.

"Sir, these troops are simply not physically capable of running all night long three nights in a row!

n.o.body could possibly do that. Furthermore, at a quick march, where the men can get at least some sleep, our forces can get to Three Walls by dawn. Getting there sooner won't accomplish anything except telling the enemy that he is about to be attacked! It makes sense to send Baron Ilya ahead with his Night Fighters to see what they can accomplish, but the rest of our men are best off being fresh to fight at dawn."

"Three Walls is even stronger than Fast Gate here was, and Baroness Krystyana's in charge there. You know that girl even better than I do, and you know she wouldn't fall for a Mongol ruse the way that silly twit of a countess did here! "

"Yeah, I guess you're right, Gregor." I swung into the saddle.

"And another thing, sir! Every man here has gotten at least some sleep in the last four days except you.

Have you gone crazy? Do you think you can direct a battle with half your brain not working? Do you think we'd trust our lives to someone who was about ready to keel over? Now, you get off that G.o.dd.a.m.n superhorse and stretch out on one of the war carts! Go to sleep! We'll get you to the war on time, never you fear."

"But..."

"But nothing! Shut up and soldier!"

"Yes, sir," I said.