Conrad's Last Campaign (4 page)

It wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre. I didn’t even bother going for my own sword. I knew that I’d never get it out in time.

Beautiful, naked girls are not usually perceived of as a threat to a man, and there is no instinctive reaction to keep them back. My bodyguards took full advantage of this. They got in close, and they killed.

My deadly ladies went for the throat whenever possible, because there was always the chance that their victim was wearing armor beneath his clothes, and armor could ruin a good knife.

Before the first man’s body hit the ground, all seventeen of the others had their throats slashed, with every artery squirting bright red.

None of my bodyguards were injured, but all were splashed with blood.

“As I said, Ahmed, appearances can be deceiving.”

“Indeed, your grace,” he replied quietly as he stared at the still twitching bodies. “Be assured that never will I try to trick you.”

I switched to Polish and said, “Terry, have housekeeping notified about the mess out here. Leave me two guards, but the rest of you should go and wash up. You ladies did a very nice job, incidentally.”

As most of my bloody bodyguards left, I handed Ahmed a bag of coins. Still staring open-mouthed at the dead bodies on the paving stones, it was a minute before he noticed the money, and accepted the bag.

I said, “This is an advance on your salary. This afternoon, make arrangements for whatever horses, clothing, arms, armor, and other property that you may have. Sell them or store them, it is up to you. See that all of your debts are paid before this evening. Take your men to a public bath house tonight. Get your hair cut short, and get shaved. It may be a while before you can get clean again. And in the morning, leave whatever lodgings you are using. Come back here with your men at dawn. Someone will meet you and take you to a place where you and your men will be equipped with the finest clothing, arms and armor that you have ever seen. You, and the six men of your choice, will get golden armor, incidentally, the same as mine. Your Big People will all get new saddles, but not bridles. They don’t need them. Spurs and whips are not permitted. Tomorrow night, we’ll find room for you in the palace.”

“I shall do these things, your grace.”

“Good,” I said. “We need your help, but there is much that you and your men will have to learn quickly. Our Big People cannot speak, but they are very intelligent, and they understand Polish. It is a difficult language to learn, but we have a very simplified version called Pigeon, which will let you communicate with Polish speaking people, and most of my army, as well as with your Big People. It is possible to learn it in a few weeks. Many of our weapons will be new to you. We will do our best to train you in their use while we head north, although in fact, you have not been hired to fight, but rather to guide us. One of my battalions is from Central Africa, and all of them speak Aramaic. You will be assigned to that battalion, and they will assign a man to you and to each of your men, to act as an instructor.”

“This would seem to be a very wise program, your grace.”

“I hope so. Well, I will see you later. For now, we both have much to do.”

I went back to my office to see how things were going. Two blood splattered nude girls walked behind me, and eighteen bodies were lying dead on the ground behind us.

The compound we were assigned was once a military post surrounded by small farms. The brick outer walls enclose an area of about two acres with barracks, offices, stables, repair shops, and warehouses. The stables were cavernous buildings ideal for holding our new mechanisms and the adjoining repair shops were perfect for our craftsmen.

At first, our footsteps echoed in the empty rooms, but they were soon filled with the sounds of workmen and women.

The compound has turned into a virtual city in a very short time. In addition to my original five assistants and two secretaries, we have added metal smiths, blacksmiths, and artists of several types, five more secretaries, an archivist, wood workers, and shop managers. Most brought families as this will be a long project.

Most of the staff live in apartments on the grounds and we now have food stores, clothing stores, two restaurants, a school, and, of course, a tea house because even dedicated scientists need a place for quiet cup of tea or sake away from the eyes and voices of the wives we love so dearly.

I assigned each of my assistants one of the major artifacts and gave him a team of artists and a secretary. For the first week, they just sketched, measured and examined each of the artifacts as much as possible without major disassembly. As they completed their tasks, they were rotated to other artifacts, so that each was examined and documented by at least two teams.

During that first week, I demanded and got visits from warriors who had seen, or claimed to have seen the artifacts in operation. It turned out that we were completely wrong in our assessment of some items and had to start over with them.

The chief of the artillery noyan that had recovered the water mechanism was very uncomfortable at first. The Mongols had few ranks and honorifics. Everyone below the khan and above a common soldier was
chief
, whether you were the commander of a thousand man noyan or a million man army, you were
chief
, until you were khan. Honorifics were not needed for vassal people any more than they were for dogs.
Pig
was a polite way to address a subject person, and he was not certain how to address a vassal people who obviously had such power and favor from the khan.

In spite of his expensive Chinese clothes, Chief Gan was obviously a Mongol. His skin was lighter than Chinese and if his round eyes didn’t give him away, his mild odor would. I broke the ice by bowing, not too deeply, and opening the conversation. “Chief Gan, do you mind if my assistant translates your words as we talk? Several of our people speak only Chinese, but what you have to say is very important to them.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I have been told that you were the one who brought back the biggest and most impressive artifacts to the khan. It must have been a journey such as few men have seen. Please tell us how you did it.”

“It was a great adventure. This stuff was on the damndest boat you can imagine. We took it out with two trebuchet shots, and it was only one that we got much off of because we had to burn most of them stop ’em and the Poles tried to burn any boat they abandoned.

“Near the end of the battle, we saw a boat beached on our side of the river. We dropped the two rocks on it and then charged hard before they could burn it. We lost four hundred men getting across the beach, but once we got on board, it was pretty easy to kill the crew. We knew the khan always rewarded men who brought back new weapons, so we immediately began to salvage what we could.

“We were able to chop most of the works out of the hull and load them onto our artillery wagons. That big thing there lay across three wagons and needed over a dozen horses to pull it. Once we were out of Poland, we had the engineers build some big wagons like our grandparents used to move their yurts, only much bigger, and then it took us over four months to get it home.”

“Your adventure was an epic one and I have personally heard the khan praise your accomplishments. However, we are ignorant scholars please explain to us what made these boats worth the effort. What was so special about the?’”

“For that, you must know something about the battle. I was in charge of over a thousand Chinese engineers and two hundred cavalry. We didn’t have cannon because this was supposed to be a fast raid and there was no time to drag cannon across the steppes. If we had had our cannon, these boats might not have been so dangerous.

“We did, however, bring the metal parts needed to build trebuchets. My men had been cutting logs and loading them onto wagons in the week before the battle, so when we reached the river we were able to assemble several good machines over the period of a few days.

“We reached a wide river, perhaps a
li
across, but before the bridging crews could get anything up, we saw boats approaching, about as big as a standard river cargo boat. It took a little while to realize that they were being moved by that paddle wheel over there. We figured that they had men operating the wheels from inside, like they row Korean battle boats from inside, but they were damned fast and damned big.

“They were also bigger and better armed than the Korean boats. The Korean boats had low metal roofs with blades sticking out the top to keep you from boarding and a fire thrower in the bow. Some had small cannons or crossbow platforms. We killed them pretty easy by just putting a lot of men on top of them and chopping a way in.

“These were a lot different. They were bigger and looked like a floating fort. They had six
bu
high walls covered with metal and battle towers at each corner, and they didn’t use crossbows.

“The first time I saw one from the bank, they opened up with those small cannons you have over there. One shot killed my chief engineer, wounded the assistant standing behind him, and broke a horse’s leg. The damned things shot almost as fast as a bow.

“I got my men off the bank and down behind a hill but then we started hearing strange sounds, something like a clap mixed with a bellows sound. I never heard anything like it before and grenades started dropping on us.

“I thought that they were tossing grenades with small trebuchets, but when I peeked over the top, I saw men dropping grenades into tubes.”

He walked over next to a five foot high tube and rested his hand on the rim. “We kept this one off the boat we captured and there’s another one in one of the wagons. They would light the fuse on a grenade, drop it into the tube here, then stomp their foot and the tube would make that weird sound and toss a grenade the size of your head about ten times as far as a man could, and they could fire as fast as a bow.

“When one for the bridging crews decided to ignore the boats and bridge the river anyway, when we found out that they had fire throwers on the front of the boats. We weren’t able to salvage the one off of our boat, but I see that you have a smaller one sticking out of that war wagon.

“They aren’t much better than our own fire throwers except that they seem to shoot a lot farther and ours were thousands of
li
away.

“About the middle of the second day, we got orders to cross the river. Ogedei must have thought that no matter how good those little cannon were, they had to run out of ammo sometime, and we had armies of auxiliaries that we didn’t want to feed on the way home. In fact the boats were a probably what made him attack. There must have been fifty on this river and any country that can afford to build that many must be very, very wealthy.

“We could easily have turned south and taken Hungary, but Poland was obviously much richer and, as I said, we had a lot of surplus auxiliaries to use up.

“I don’t think it turned out like he planned. Every time we charged over the banks, the boats showed up, and they had another weapon. The men called it the Demon’s Breath. Every boat had a tower at each corner and those towers began slinging metal balls faster than you could count.”

Chief Gan paused to look around the floor. “There. These things are mixed up.” He picked up a large leather bag off the floor. “These are what they fired. They’re metal balls about the size of a china man’s nuts. We dug these out of one of the riverbanks and cleaned ’em up. They came out of that wheel thing on the wagon.”

He dropped the leather bag next to a one
bu
wheel sitting on its side in a wagon. “This thing sat the other way up in a tower. It spun like crazy and threw these balls like a magic sling. They came like hail stones and there was no way past them.

“I think Ogedei just didn’t believe how bad they were. I heard that we lost over three hundred thousand auxiliaries and twenty thousand real troops before we learned how to kill the boats.

“After a couple of days, they started running out of ammo and we learned to kill them with our trebuchets. Mostly we burned them with bags of flaming oil, but this one we killed with two stone balls.

“It was in some kind of trouble and was up against a river bank. We smashed it up and then managed to get on board before they were able to burn it. It was the only unburned one we captured.

“Even then, we didn’t have much time. The Poles always came back to burn captured boats and we couldn’t stand up against a boat with a working flame thrower and Demon’s Breath.

“We had five hundred men with axes alive after we boarded. The engineers pointed out what they wanted, and we chopped it loose with our battle axes as fast as we could. The men were told to chop things out without hurting them, and they did their best. As fast as they chopped things loose, riders roped them and dragged the stuff over the bank, sometimes thirty or forty horses pulled at the same time.

“Sometimes we had to make fast choices. There were four towers where the demons breath was mounted, so we chopped one down and took it with us. There were two identical mechanisms attached to the paddle wheel, one on each side. We could have gotten by with only one, but I didn’t want to damage the paddle wheel by hacking one side off.”

He motioned us to follow him as he walked over to the large machines that were attached to the paddle wheel. “These were all that were attached to the paddles. You should lay them out straight. The paddle wheel was at the back and there was a machine on each side of the boat attached to a crank on the paddle. There wasn’t any place for rowers and we didn’t kill anyone that looked like a rower. These things were also attached to big tea kettles inside the hold.”

“Tea kettles?”

“I don’t know what else to call them. They were big round barrels lying on their sides. There was water running out of them and there was fire under them, so ‘tea kettle’ is the best description I know.

“They were pretty badly smashed by the second rock we threw and too big to get out, so we didn’t bring one back.”

“Were there tubes running to other things on the ship?”

“There were tubes and wires running all over the boat, but we didn’t have time to find out where they went. We were still dragging stuff over the riverbank when another boat showed up and started burning the one we were on.”

Two days later, we started disassembling the little cannons.

Several teams are now dissecting those artifacts which we have in duplicate. Of course, the major interest of the khan is in the small fast firing cannons.

The procedure is a complex one. We have already made external drawings and detailed as much as we can about the internal works. Now two teams are disassembling a cannon and reproducing it the same time.

The artists continue to make accurate drawings of each piece as it removed from the mechanism, then two wood carvers duplicate the part in wood. The wood model is then turned over to metal smiths who cast a duplicate metal part.

Once the part is polished and hardened, we attempt to replace the original part with our reproduction, and usually fail. The tolerances on the weapons parts are very tight. As it is impractical to have more than one craftsman simultaneously, I have had gaslights installed in the workrooms so that two or three shifts of craftsmen can work around the clock.

Even with skilled craftsmen, and sometimes because of them, things go wrong. The glider project was one of the biggest problems in the early part of the investigation. We had been totally unable to get the engine to run. We knew from eye witnesses that the machine attached to the propeller was some sort of engine and we knew from the smell of what we identified as a fuel tank, that it consumed some sort of petroleum project. Our chemists and alchemists tried for weeks without success to produce a fuel and a procedure to get it to function.

I decided to divide the project into two parts. One team could continue to work with the engine and a second team would begin the duplication of the glider itself. If the damned thing could really fly, we might find some other way to power it.

We gave the project to a team of military kit builders. These men claimed to have built man carrying observation kites for the Jin Empire. As I do not remember anyone but the Koreans having fielded such kites, I had my doubts about their veracity, but their skills with lightweight wood and fabric were immediately obvious.

I told them to duplicate the glider exactly and then left them to work, forgetting that they were not scientists. A few weeks later, they sent word that they were ready to show me their new
kite
. It looked about like the Polish kite. It was about the same size and it had the same wires and moveable panels in the same place, but it had a huge bird’s beak on the front, scalloped trailing edges on the wings, a horizontal seat for the pilot to lie in, and the damned thing had skids on the bottom instead of wheels.