Conrad's Last Campaign (8 page)

“Of course, the auxiliaries are pretty well gone. The Christian knights were at the back of the pack and should have done well, but they were on horseback and weighed down with that silly armor they wear. Most didn’t make it, and the rest have decided that God has left you. They and all of their men have decided to take God’s advice and get the hell back to where the loot is easier.

“Most of the ex slaves also have left. When they saw the knights going, they decided that their newly won freedom would be best enjoyed if they were alive.

“It will take days, perhaps weeks, to gather up all of the supplies and get an inventory. Much has been lost, but nothing that cannot eventually be resupplied,” Sir Ivanov finished.

“Then”, I said, “it’s not all bad news. The people who left were undisciplined and mostly unsuitable for the long road ahead. We are left with the professional core of the army and enough supplies to get by until we get resupplied. I am sorry about the men that died, but we do not control the weather. We can only cope with it.”

We stayed just long enough to make certain that the recovery efforts were underway and to move most of the surviving carts to the bridgehead. Of course, there was an additional day for funerals. We are the Christian Army and we care for our dead.

Then we moved out. There wasn’t as much organization as we were used to. I kept my tent up near the bridge and watched the units straggle over. My aid and a few helpers sat at a desk and made a list of personnel as they passed by. The scouts had chosen a pasture about 20 miles past the summit and had marked out a campsite.

The parade went on for about three army hours before the next disaster hit. Several engineers were down under the bridge abutments watching for problems.

In hindsight, we should have been staggering loads over the bridge better, but everyone was wiped out from the flood, and they were just thinking about getting into camp, so they tended to bunch up at the bottleneck.

The bridge was loaded with men, Big People, and a few artillery pieces when one of the engineers blew a horn and came running out from under the bridge. He was waving for the traffic to stop and he seemed very adamant about it. He conferred with his companions and then ran over to me while they ran onto the bridge. Traffic was stopped and the engineers were running by assuring everyone – and making certain that no one was moving.

When the young engineer got over to our table he blurted out, “Knight Bachelor Danuta, sir. That bridge is going down! The rain washed out the foundations from the inside. We’re going to get everyone off, carefully, and the see what we can to do buttress it.”

“How the hell can this happen?” I said. “The damned bridge stood for hundred years and you inspected it before we started.”

He was clearly not in the mood to have a discussion. “You saw the shape that bridge was in. What makes you think the foundations were good? And how the hell do you think we could examine the foundation on the far side before we had a bridge to get to the far side? And what makes you think that the damage would be visible from the outside… Sir.”

I would have busted the little jackass for insubordination, or cut his throat, except that he was right and I was letting my bad mood keep him from attending to the people on the bridge that needed him worse. I waved him off with a surly sneer.

The engineers were carefully moving people off of the bridge, one at a time. Everyone headed toward the closest end, so the ones on the far side had to turn around to make their escape. It was slow work and the bridge was creaking ominously with each movement.

Eventually everyone cleared the bridge and Danuta started to rappel under the foundations. Two of his companions and couple of grunts played out the rope while he dropped down and started to swing under the bridge. It was almost the last thing he ever did. He was, fortunately, on an outward swing when the abutment gave way and the bridge joined all of the spare bridge parts at the bottom of the ravine.

We walked slowly over to the edge. No one said a word as we looked down at the mass of twisted steel far below us. I remember that I was still looking down when I said, “We’re going to need a staff meeting. Call the department heads and barons together.”

The meeting started out as dismal one. I had asked for department heads and barons, but most of them brought an aide or two. We put two tents together and opened up the sides to get enough room for everyone. Since we were a little short on camp chairs, most people ended up sitting on the ground.

Before we started the meeting, each of the commanders had met with one of my aides and the quartermaster, Captain Ivanov, to work on an inventory of people and supplies under his command. I noticed that my staff and the quartermaster had both saved their clipboards.

It was almost two hours before the quartermaster was ready to open the meeting. “Your grace, we have lost much, but the situation is better than I had hoped. We started out with well over sixty thousand men, counting the knights and auxiliaries who attached themselves to this force. Over forty thousand regular Christian Army men, including all of the Wolves, crossed the bridge before it collapsed. None of the auxiliaries or volunteer knights made it. Only the Big People carrying partners or pulling carts got across, but we still have more Big People than soldiers.

“We didn’t do as well with the supplies and equipment. Baron Kowalski sent the artillery through as fast as he could instead of keeping them together, but he still only saved about a hundred pieces. We don’t have an accurate counting of the shells, but we are not flush with ammo.

“In fact, we are now short of everything. We were hauling about thirty thousand carts of supplies, but only about six thousand made it over the bridge, and most of the specialty carts for engineering supplies, medical personal, radio carts and so on were lost. We did get about twenty-five radio carts across.

“Most of the lances got their personal cart through, because they were riding on it, so we have enough tents and sleeping bags to look like an army.

“That means we have about a quarter of our small arms ammo and about a month’s supply of food. If it takes more than a month to get where we’re going, we’ll arrive with empty bellies, and we won’t get home without raiding or hunting. We have enough ammo for a battle or two, as long as they aren’t too long or too bloody.”

I signaled the end of his presentation by rising to speak. “Gentlemen, as bad as this is, it leaves us in good shape to complete our mission. All of the Wolves are with us, and every other man is a mounted cavalryman worth ten of any soldiers that we meet. Those who were left behind will not be missed. We’re leaner, faster, and more deadly then we were yesterday. As for weapons, we may someday be short of bullets, but swords never need to be reloaded.

“As many of you know, this is not a mission to demolish
Mongolia. As much as we would all like to see the last Mongol cease to share our air, this is a raid.

“We know that the Mongols plan to attack our homeland in less than three months. Our mission is to delay or stop that attack by denying the Mongols the means to go to war, and we can still do that.

“We are going to backtrack the path that they use to get to our homelands and destroy any bases or villages that would give them support, and if we run across an invasion army, we’ll bloody it good.

“We will decimate their resources this time, and destroy
Mongolia the next.

“We will proceed to the new encampment. Tomorrow, you will each receive your marching orders.”

We broke camp at the bridgehead and headed inland. Before we left, I called in my radioman. “Prince David said that there was a place where the Big People could ford the river below. Have him show the Big People where it is. Send a message for all Big People, except those who are wounded or carrying wounded, to ford the river and join us at the new camp. They should not bring their riders as the mission that I have in mind will not require riders and we are too short on supplies to feed more men.” I briefly considered having the men rig cargo panniers on the Big People to bring us more supplies but then I realized that we could not afford to either lose Big People on the crossing, or waste the time to collect supplies and load the panniers.

As it was, we wasted two days at the new camp. The first Big People showed up by morning. I gathered the first half gross and told them that their job was to gather six gross of their companions spread out between our latitude and the tree line to the north. They were to space themselves out about a half-mile apart and then sweep to the east. The purpose of the sweep was to kill every horse they could find. At first, there was an unusual quiet. They didn’t move when I finished the orders. Then I noticed that the Big Person nearest me was looking at my bodyguard instead of me.

“What the hell is going on?”

“Lord, they cannot speak to me either. However, I think that they are uncomfortable with your orders. They will do as you command, but they are not natural killers and this much carnage will make them uncomfortable. They will kill to protect humans and they were willing to kill the battle horses going to the Mongol army, but I think that they also know that killing all of the farmer’s horses will cause good people to die. One of the side effects of being able to detect evil is an abhorrence to kill the good people, even indirectly.”

I was pissed. I am not used to defending my orders, particularly to my engineered servants. “Big People. Ladies. These horses are not people, good or evil. They are livestock. Each one you kill will mean one less Mongol can kill the good people you work with. I will, however, make one modification in my orders. If the animal is yoked to a plow or a farmer’s wagon, you can let it live.” The Big Person in front of me nodded and turned to move out. All of the Big People moved with her. They would pass the orders to the other Big People, and I would continue to wonder how they talked among themselves.

The column moved out the next day. We were moving north, into the remnants of the Cuman Khanate. The land was flat, easy traveling, and mostly empty. The Cumans were nomadic warriors and, to my eyes, hard to tell from the Mongols. They had been beaten senseless by Mongols a few years back, and integrated into the Golden Horde. Now the rulers were scattered and large parts of the steppes in the khanate were empty.

We weren’t looking for trouble, but we were moving so fast that they often didn’t have time to get their encampments out of our way. When we ran into them, the advance guard tried to kill their horses and move out without a battle. It didn’t often work out that way. They had become Mongol clones. They were warriors who could move out without baggage and travel fifty miles a day. They went on campaign with nothing but a sheepskin cloak, composite bows, arrows, and a feed sack for their horse, and came back with everything they could carry. Each warrior was required to carry two bows, one long-range and one short-range, and sixty arrows. He typically carried twenty standard arrows, twenty armor-piercing arrows and twenty fire arrows in his quiver.

Composite bows don’t match machine guns for firepower, but they are no joke. We lost a few mounted infantrymen and even some of our Big People were wounded by lucky long-distance bow shots. We also began to pick up a distant following of very angry little men with composite bows. They were a damned annoyance. Our machine guns and field pieces weren’t much good against a single rider on the horizon and I didn’t want to risk casualties and lose time by chasing them around. When they got too close, an infantryman with a scoped rifle would encourage a little distance while I settled for moving forward and setting more guards at night.

We were moving northeast at about a gross miles a day. The Big People could move a lot faster, but we were burdened with our supplies and a small but increasing number of wounded. As we approached the
Volga, we ran into larger settlements and even some small towns. If they didn’t bother us, we left them alone. This was a raid, not a campaign of conquest.

The riverbanks themselves were too populated to travel though as fast as I wanted, so began to run north on a path about ten miles east of the
Volga. One incident almost made me decide to stop for a few days. One afternoon, a trooper rode hard back into the column. He pulled up next to me and held out a rifle. It wasn’t one of ours. “Your grace, You’ll want to look at this. It isn’t one of ours. This thing killed one of our Big People and its friend killed one of our troopers.”

I turned the rifle over in my hands and looked down the barrel. The damned thing was rifled! It was a muzzle loader with a steel barrel and bronze working parts. It even worked with a percussion cap.

There was a clever ram rod attached to the barrel. For centuries, muzzle loaders carried their ram rods in a small tube attached to the barrel. This one had an attached slider that looked like a skinny saxophone slider. The ram rod was actually two rods attached at one end. When you pulled it out, one rod stayed captive in the tube. You then swiveled it around to put the other rod down the barrel. When you were done, the whole thing slid back down and clipped to the side. It probably saved several seconds on each reload because the user didn’t have to fiddle around with getting the ram rod back into its holder. There was even a nice grip where the rods were joined to help you ram better.

I noticed that the trooper had a leather ammunition bag over his shoulder, and that turned out to be even more worrying. The damned thing was filled with ammunition tubes. They were tubes of paper with powder at one end and a ball with wadding at the other. You only needed to bite the end off and ram the whole paper tube and ball into one end of the tube to load up a measured power charge and wadded ball in seconds. In my timeline that wasn’t invented until the 19
th
century.

These people had access to technology far in advance of what should be out here and it was not made in our domains. There were several Chinese symbols stamped on the butt of the gun. I handed it back to the trooper and said, “Find someone in the column that can read these and send him up to me.”

About an hour later, Sir Grzegorz rode up with the rifle in hand. “Sire, you wanted to know what these symbols mean.”

On this expedition, Sir Grzegorz commanded the wolves, the Christian Army’s komand of old-style nobility. As an old style count, he was technically my peer in spite of his lower army rank, so I suppose I should be grateful that Sir Grzegorz and the rest of the Wolves preferred the army style of address. It kept the hierarchy of command clear and remined everyone that I’m the boss, but I still found dealing with him a little uncomfortable.

I sighed, rubbed the back of my neck, and grimaced at the dust and grime it left on my hand.

“I’m a little surprised to see you. I expected one of the guides we picked up.”

“The guides speak a little chink, but they don’t read it. Fortunately, not all nobility spends its days beating serfs and raising turnips. My family has been dealing with traders from the silk road for several generations. I don’t speak the language, but I can recognize some of the common symbols in Chink and Mongol.”

“Can you read these?”

“Most of them, sir. The first four characters say
Great Khan Armory Lanzhou
, so if I’d have to guess, I’d say it’s some kind of trade mark. The last two read something like
Builder of the Universe
. By the way, the
great khan
part is in Mongol, not Chinese.”

This rifle was a load of bad news that just kept coming. This meant that the Mongols had completed their conquest of the Song Dynasty, even after the drubbing we gave them in
Poland. The Mongols had gunpowder grenades and some primitive cannon even before they attacked us, but they shouldn’t have come up with this rifle for about three hundred more years. This thing showed that they had learned at least something from meeting us. Shit, shit, and even more shit.

“Staff meeting, 0500,” I said to no one in particular. One of the nice things about being in charge is when I said something, things just happened.

“Mongol riflemen,” I sighed. This was going to an interesting excursion.

About that time, I decided that we needed a little more privacy. I sent out a squad of fifty mounted Wolves to circle around behind the Cumans who were trailing us. Theoretically, we could have taken their horses and left them stranded on the steppes, but in reality few of them were likely to surrender and this was not a war where we could take prisoners. They were to trap anyone behind us between themselves and the rear guard and eliminate the danger. I gave specific instructions that we needed at least one prisoner who had one of these guns. If they ran into someone carrying a rifle, they were to do their best to capture him and his ammunition.

The staff meeting was not a comfortable one as my big tent, all of our conference furniture, and my cigars were at the bottom of a gorge. I called in the head of our scouts, the quartermaster, Baron Kowalski, Sir Wladyclaw, my adjutant, and our civilian guides. We sat on blankets with cans of cold food in front of us, and wished that the cigars had not been discarded.

The quartermaster started the discussion. “Gentlemen, we have about six weeks of canned food left. We have over a million small arms rounds, and you all know the artillery situation. We have made better inventory while we rode and I can now tell you that we have exactly one hundred and thirty-eight field pieces, and each of them had a hundred rounds stored in the carriage. Unfortunately, most of the shell carts were lost, so that’s about our total supply of shells. I would not suggest a pitched artillery battle.

“Our biggest problem will be with clothing and personal supplies. Each trooper has only the clothes from his personal kit, and cold weather is coming. You may have noticed that it has already gotten cooler than when we started. In a few weeks it will be a lot colder and we are going to be on the steppes, with high winds, no cover, and no coats.”

I said, “A lot of the men brought blankets to augment their sleeping bags. We should encourage them to make ponchos. It’s a Spanish form of coat. You take the blanket, cut a hole in the center just big enough for your head to fit through and then wear it like a cape. A rope around the waist will keep it closed if you’re riding.”

“Sir, we are even short of rope.”

The head of scouts was next. “My lord, we have sent scouts out fifty miles in every direction. Except for some small settlements on the riverbanks, the last hundred miles we covered is empty of people, and it is no different ahead. We run into an occasional Cuman or Mongol yurt surrounded by horses, but this place is almost eerily empty. I have heard that the Mongols killed eighty or ninety percent of the people they conquered in some areas. This must be one of those areas.”

Ahmed, our Arab guide, was anxious to talk. “Your grace, gentlemen, I know that you plan to avoid battle on this raid, but, if you can change your plans a little, I may have a solution for your immediate problems. In the middle of this wilderness, there is one great bazaar.

“We are fifty miles from the
Volga. Two or three hundred miles north of here, the new city of Sarai sits across this very river. It was established about fifteen years ago by Subedi, one of the sons of the great khan, as the administrative center of Golden Hordes and it sits where it does to prosper on trade. Many rich caravans travel from China. They meet boats that travel the river all the way from the Rus’ territories to Constantinople. The merchants there have everything you need. Of course, the administration there, being Mongol, may not welcome your shopping trip but, if the merchants cannot supply coats, dead Mongols will oblige. The rest of the country may be empty, but I hear that there are over two hundred thousand inhabitants in Sarai.”

My mind drifted back to the cold and miserable ride we had that day. The dress of the day had been full armor for several days. Even the average Mongol could hit a man at 350 yards and there are reports that exceptional archers pushed to almost 400 yards; that’s over a quarter of a mile. This place looked rather empty, but no one wanted to give an easy target to any passing Mongol.

It was not a comfortable way to ride. You have your undershirt or long johns, then heavy cotton padding, a vest of lightweight chain mail, and then the armor plates over that. Standard Christian Army armor consisted of a breastplate, backplate, greaves for the legs, and vambraces to protect the upper arms. Cavalry added arm greaves, a thigh plate, and chain mail gloves. By medieval standards, our armor was remarkable. The plate and chain together would stop even an armor-piercing arrow or musket ball, and it took a close up shot to get through anyplace else. Of course, there was always the chance of a lucky shot through the face plate or in a joint. The armories had gotten the weight down to less than forty pounds, and it was stainless. Of course, even the best armor clinks, creaks, and occasionally chafes.

However, the usual problem with armor is that the damned stuff is too hot. Because of the padding, it was sometimes deadly in the tropics. Today was different. I could feel the wind chilling my face and hands. Cold little knives seemed to reach through the cracks and prick my exposed skin, and this was only late fall. Soon, it would be really cold.

I came out of my reverie to see that everyone was waiting for a response from me. “Ahmed, you are right. As far as I can see, we have only one course of action. We are going shopping.

“Gentlemen, any thoughts of how we do our shopping?”

The head of scouts spoke up. “Sir, we should be watching the river. If Ahmed is right, we need to know what’s going in to the city. We don’t want to advertise our presence, but we could dress up as locals, take a few Mongol horses, and camp high on the banks. A couple of days of observation should tell us a lot about the city.”

“That’s a good idea, but it may take you a full day just to get the fleas out of whatever Mongol clothing you liberate. These are the filthiest people in history and we don’t need their parasites or their diseases.”

Baron Kowalski spoke up, “Your grace, I would suggest that we bypass this city.” Seeing my surprised look, he continued, “Sooner or later they are going to know we are out here. However, if we march westward and bypass the city, we may convince them that we are on the way somewhere else and reluctant to attach a fortified city. We camp up river just long enough to lull them a little and then attack from the north.”

“Baron, that’s close enough to the truth to work.” In actual fact, I didn’t relish attacking a fortified city with less than fifty thousand men and a few field pieces.

“Tell the scouts to try to question anyone they find, who doesn’t shoot too fast, about the location of the city. We’ll need to plot a course.”

That night was a cold but one of my guards zippered her sleeping bag to mine to make a double. There are some advantages to having a nubile and mostly naked young lady as your bodyguard. Her slightly higher body temperature was also welcome. As a rule, I considered it immoral to have sex with something that was, technically, non-human, but it had been a long day and I desperately needed relief before I could sleep.

Four days of empty steppes later, I was almost nodding off atop Silver. One great advantage of a Big Person is that you don’t need reigns. A gentle tap of your knees will suffice, or you can just explain where you want to go and nod off. The only thing keeping me alert was that the backplate of my armor was digging into my lower back every time I tried to lean back in the saddle. Good thing, it doesn’t help morale to see the boss asleep at his desk.