The Flying Warlord
Book 4 of the Adventures of Conrad Starguard
By Leo Frankowski
ISBN: 0-345-32765-9


Prologue
"Whoopee shit!... It's finally happening," she said. "A hundred years of 
tracking protohuman migration patterns on the African plain and it's finally 
over! It feels so good that I almost don't hate your guts anymore!"
"Well, don't get too carried away. You deserved every minute of it for dumping 
the owner's cousin into the thirteenth century when the guy didn't even know 
that time travel existed. And you deserve twice that for getting me messed up in 
it. Now get your scrawny body in the box. Time's running short!"
"Eat your heart out! I'll have my old sexy body back, and I'll take bubble baths 
and while you're eating carrion, I'll gorge for weeks on lobster thermidor and 
New York cheesecake and--"
He sealed her into the stasis chamber, then watched the readout over the 
temporal transport canister count down to zero.
The tone sounded and he opened the canister, pulled out his new subordinate 
without glancing at him, and started to slide his previous superior in. It was 
expensive to hold the canister in 2,548,850 BC, so doctrine was to make the 
transfer as quickly as possible.
She was almost in when something struck him as being very, very wrong. He took a 
closer look at the body he had just extracted. He gagged, retched, and vomited 
on the floor. Then he switched off his boss's stasis field.
"--Cherries Jubilee! Hey! What the hell is this? What am I still doing here? 
You're holding up the canister, you ass! Do you realize what that costs?"
"So the owner has lots of money but you only have the one life. I figured I 
didn't hate you that goddamn much."
"You're not making any sense; get me out of this time period! I've waited long 
enough!"
"Anything you say, lady, but take a look at what just came out of the canister 
and then ask yourself if you really want to get into it."
She stared at him and then at the other stasis chamber.
The body within was shriveled and dried. It was laying on its side, a look of 
horror on its face. Its fingernails were all ripped off as if the man had tried 
to claw his way out before his air was exhausted.
"His stasis field must have failed," he said.
"But that's impossible! You know that's impossible! The circuitry for the stasis 
field is always built inside the field itself Time doesn't exist inside the 
field, so how could the circuitry possibly have had time to fail?"
"Yeah, I know. But I still say that something is screwed up somewhere. The trip 
here takes six years subjective, and he had maybe two hours of air in the can. 
But that's not the big question. The biggie is whether or not you want to take 
the trip back. Me, I wouldn't risk it. "
"Well, this chamber that I'm in hasn't failed. Why should it fail just because 
the other one did?"
"You know better than that, bitch. You're in the same damn chamber he's in. 
Right after sending you back, I got to send the empty chamber back to yesterday. 
It makes for a quicker turnaround that way. But I ran a self-check on it last 
night and it checked out perfect. So make up your mind. You're costing the owner 
a million bucks a second."
"Screw the owner," she said, squirming out of the chamber. "I'm not going 
anywhere till I see a live body crawl out of this thing!"
"Then help me get this dead one into your chamber. We gotta let the people 
uptime know what the problem is and we don't have much time to do it. Getting 
the body should be explanation enough!"
"Why not just ship him in the one he came in?"
He got the surprisingly light corpse into the other canister. "Lady, your big 
problem is that you're dumb."
He sent the canister back uptime and waited for a reply.
He waited for a long, long time.


Chapter One
FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI
My people was always boatmen on the Vistula. My father was a boatman and his 
father before him, and my great-grandfather was one, too. I still would be, 
except I lost my boat a few years back. I would have lost my life with it, if it 
hadn't been for Baron Conrad Stargard.
I was maybe the first man to meet him in Poland, next to the priest, Abbot 
Ignacy at the Franciscan Monastery in Cracow. I was stuck on the rocks on the 
upper Dunajec with no one but a worthless little Goliard poet to help get me 
off. It was the poet's fault that we were hung up in the first place, since the 
twit rowed to port when I yelled starboard, but that's all water down the river. 
It was late in the season, and the weather was cold. Another day, and the river 
would be froze over and I'd lose my boat and cargo, all I owned, and maybe my 
life, too.
Then along comes this priest and with him was Sir Conrad. He was a giant of a 
man, a head and a half taller than I am, and I'm no shorty. He was pretty smart, 
and after I'd hired them two, we got the boat free in jig time with a line bent 
around a rock upriver, following Sir Conrad's directions. Never saw the like of 
it.
He told me he was an Englishman, but I never believed it. He didn't talk like no 
Englishman and he'd never seen an English longbow!
Now me, I'm a master of the English longbow. There's no one no where who can 
shoot farther or straighter or better than me, and that's no drunkard's boast. 
It's a gift, I tell you, and many's the time I've hit a buck square in the head 
at two hundred yards from a moving boat. I did it in front of Sir Conrad, and he 
helped me eat the venison.
And if you don't believe me, you meet me down at the practice butts some time, 
and I'll show you what shooting is all about. Only you better be ready to bet 
money.
We got that load to Cracow and I paid off my crew, me spending the night aboard 
to ward off thieves. Good thing, too, because three of them tried to rob me that 
night and kill me, besides. I was asleep, but at just the right time Sir Conrad 
shouts me awake, while he was holding a candle to me.
I tell you there was three of the bastards on my boat, coming at me with their 
knives drawn! I killed the first one with a steering oar, broke it clean over 
his head and his head broke with it. I threw the broken end at the second one 
and when he raised his arms to ward the blow, I caught him in the gut with my 
own knife, just as slick as you please.
The third one, he tried to get away, but in that kind of business, where you're 
a stranger in town, you best not leave no witnesses! Any thief would have a 
dozen friends swear that he was an honest man and I was the murderer.
So I bent my longbow and caught the bastard in the throat as he ran along the 
shore. Nailed him square to a tree, I did, and he stuck there, wiggling some.
Sir Conrad, he had his own funny knife out, that one that bends in the middle, 
but I wouldn't let him finish the thief. After all, it was me they was trying to 
rob and kill, so the honors was mine. Anyway, that was a good arrow, and I 
didn't want the fletching messed up. I cut the thief's throat and saved my 
arrow, and I guess Sir Conrad, he was a little mad because he wouldn't help me 
slide the three bodies into the river current to get rid of them. He even 
threatened to call out the guard!
But I got him calmed down just fine and he went back to the inn where he was 
staying at. That was the second time he saved me, because if them thieves had of 
caught me asleep, I'd be a dead man, and my cargo gone besides.
Well, I got me a good price for my cargo of grain and spent the winter in Cracow 
with a widow of my acquaintance.
The next summer a friar brought me this letter. He was the same kid what used to 
be a Goliard poet and worked for me the last fall. He read it to me, and it was 
from Sir Conrad and it had Count Lambert's seal on it. They wanted me to come to 
Okoitz and teach the peasants there how to shoot the longbow. I was sort of 
tempted because I'd heard of beautiful things about Okoitz. They said that Count 
Lambert had all the peasant girls trained to jump into the bed of any knight 
that wanted them, and if Sir Conrad could qualify for them privileges, then why 
not me as well? At least I could dicker for it, if they really wanted me that 
bad, and they must have, since they wrote that letter on real calfskin vellum. 
Not that I was about to give up my boat and the Vistula, you know, but it might 
make a fine way to spend a winter.
But just then I had a contract to deliver a load of iron bars to Turon, and two 
other ones to buy grain on the upper Dunajec and sell it in Cracow. I didn't 
have the time to find someone who could write me a letter to Sir Conrad, so I 
told the friar, him what brought me the letter, that I'd reply to Sir Conrad 
when I got back, in a few weeks, like.
That trip went just fine until I was heading down the Dunajec again. The water 
was high, so I was working the boat alone, and I saw a buck at the water's edge 
in the same place where I'd bagged two other ones before, where a game trail 
comes down to the water. I was out of meat, so I shot that buck square in the 
head and pulled for shore to get it aboard before I got caught poaching.
Only it wasn't a buck I shot! It was a stuffed dummy with a deer skin on it, and 
the baron's men, they had me surrounded before I knew what was happening. They 
stole my boat and cargo, "confiscated" it, they called it, and I never did see 
it again. They would have hung me except I had that letter, written on good 
calfskin vellum it was, with Count Lambert's seal on it.
The baron said he wasn't about to offend a lord as high as Count Lambert, not 
without finding out what that man would pay for my life. They was all eating and 
drinking while I was tied up in front of them, and every round of wine they 
drank, they'd decide on a higher price for my ransom. By the time they was near 
dead drunk, they had this priest write up a letter to Count Lambert saying that 
if he didn't come up with four thou sand pence in six weeks, they'd hang me for 
poaching, and I knew I was a dead man. I'd never seen that much money in one 
spot in my whole life, and the count didn't even know me. Who'd spend a fortune 
to save a man they'd never even met?
So they chained me with shackles riveted around my wrists and ankles and threw 
me into this tiny cell in the basement, with barely room to lay down. The only 
food I got was some table scraps every third day or so and they was stingy with 
the water. They wouldn't even give me a pot to piss in, and I had to piss and 
shit on the floor of my cell. But that whole castle stank so bad that they 
didn't even notice the stench I added. In a month's time, I was covered with my 
own shit, and being hung didn't seem like such a bad thing after all. At least 
then I could stop smelling myself!
Then along comes Sir Conrad, all decked out in red velvet and gold trim, with 
good armor under it. There was another knight with him, Sir Vladimir, and two of 
the prettiest girls you've ever seen, Annastashia and Krystyana. He paid out 
four thousand pence in silver coin and got my bow and arrows back, too, but I 
had no such luck with my boat and cargo.
A blacksmith knocked the shackles off me and it was strange to stand there in 
the bright sun with clean air to breathe, trying to make myself understand that 
I was going to get to live again.
Sir Conrad said I owed him four thousand pence, and I'd pay it off by working 
for him at three pence a day, the same pay that I'd given him the last fall. 
That was five ' years pay, even if I saved every penny of it, and many's the 
time I wished I'd paid him the six pence a day he'd asked for in the first 
place, instead of dickering him and the priest down to something reasonable.
They all stayed upwind of me until we got to an inn, and the innkeeper wouldn't 
let me inside until they'd given me a bath in the courtyard. They burned my 
clothes and I had to make do with a set of Sir Conrad's with the cuffs rolled 
up.
So we headed north and west, and when we got to Cracow, the ferryboat there had 
been changed at Sir Conrad's suggestion. It had a long rope running upstream to 
a big tree on the bank, and by adjusting that rope, the ferry master could take 
the ferry back and forth without needing any oarsmen!
I'd known Sir Conrad was smart, but this amazed me. I was still staring at it 
when we was attacked by a band of unemployed oarsmen. They blamed Sir Conrad for 
robbing their jobs, and maybe they was fight. Sir Conrad, he got knocked off his 
horse by a rock that hit him square in the head, but Sir Vladimir, he went out 
and started smashing them oarsmen, and darned if Sir Conrad's mare didn't go out 
there and help him with the job. That horse is spooky, smarter than a lot of men 
I've hired. Sir Conrad says she's people, and he even pays her a wage for her 
work, swearing her in just like she was a vassal, but she scares me sometimes. 
It just ain't natural.
I got my bow bent, but I noticed that Sir Vladimir was using the flat of his 
sword on the oarsmen, so I didn't kill nobody either. I just nailed a few of 
their arms to some trees and buildings, me being that good a shot.
Once Sir Conrad got his wits back, he talked to the oarsmen and said that if any 
of them couldn't find work in Cracow, well, they could come to his lands at 
Three Walls and get work there. Most of them took him up on it, too. So did a 
lot of others that never was oarsmen, but it wasn't my place to say nothing. Why 
should I cost a man his job?
Sir Vladimir. he led the party right up to Wawel Castle, and all the pages and 
grooms scurried around like our party was real important. I got put up in the 
servants' quarters, of course, not being quality folk, but it wasn't bad. Them 
castle servants eat good, and I was still a month behind on my eating.
Besides filling me up on food, them servants filled me in on what was happening. 
They said that Sir Conrad got on the right side of Count Lambert by building all 
sorts of machines for him, and the count gave Sir Conrad a huge tract of land in 
the mountains near Cieszyn. Sir Conrad was building a city there when he heard I 
was in trouble and he got into a cesspool of trouble hisself on the way to get 
me.
They said he met a band of Teutonic Knights what were taking a gross of young 
heathen slaves to the markets in Constantinople, and Sir Conrad wouldn't allow 
them to do it. He said they was molesting children, so him and Sir Vladimir 
chopped up them seven guards and took the children back to Three Walls.
The trouble was that them Teutonic Knights, or Crossmen they're called, are the 
biggest and orneriest band of fighting men within a thousand miles, and they 
wasn't about to let Sir Conrad get away with robbing them. There was going to be 
a trial by combat, and Sir Conrad was going to get hisself killed, sure as sin. 
No body beats a Crossman champion in a fair fight, and mostly they don't fight 
fair.
I tell you that if you ever want to know something, you just ask a palace 
servant. They know everything that's happening, which is probably the reason 
that Sir Conrad won't have any. Lots of people works for him, you understand, 
but he gets up and gets his own meals just like everybody else.
We went to Okoitz, and I could see why Count Lambert was so impressed with Sir 
Conrad. There was a huge windmill, taller than a church steeple, and it sawed 
wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of things, and there was this big cloth 
factory chock-filled with the damndest machines you ever saw, making cloth by 
the mile.
It was also filled with the finest collection of pretty girls in the world, and 
didn't none of them wear much. They was all crowding around Count Lambert and 
Sir Conrad, hoping to get their butts patted or their tits pinched. Not that any 
of them would pay any attention to the likes of me. I wasn't a knight and they 
didn't have time for us common trash.
Then, like there wasn't a gross of pretty girls after his body, and the Crossmen 
wasn't going to kill him, Sir Conrad invents a flying toy called a kite, and 
spends a week building them. He's a very strange man, that one.
Then we went to Three Walls and I got put to work, mostly doing guard duty at 
night. It wasn't so bad, since Sir Conrad let me hunt all I wanted, just so that 
everything I shot went into the pot, which was fine by me. I ate my share of it, 
and so did Sir Conrad. One of his rules was everybody ate the same, and there 
was always plenty of it. I respected him for that, even though a lot of the 
others just thought he was crazy.
At first, there wasn't much at Three Walls but a big sawmill and some temporary 
shacks, but they got some fine buildings up real quick before the snow flew, and 
since Sir Conrad planned it all, you just know they was full of odd things The 
strangest were the bathrooms, where they had flush toilets and hot showers and 
more copper pipes than you ever seen in your life. And some damn fine scenery, 
since the girls used the same showers we did. Not that any of the young ones 
would have much to do with me, no, they was all wanting a real knight and maybe 
even Sir Conrad.
But I found me another sensible widow and just sort of moved in with her. Nobody 
said anything about it and in a few weeks somebody else was using my bunk in the 
bachelors' quarters, and that was fine, too.
Come time for Sir Conrad's trial by combat, everybody in Three Walls went to 
Okoitz to watch it. I got to talking with Sir Vladimir and Friar Roman-him what 
used to be the Goliard poet-along with Ilya, the blacksmith. We all allowed as 
how it was a rotten shame that a fine man like Sir Conrad was going to get 
hisself killed, and especially by them filthy German Crossmen.
And we came up with a plan to do something about it. The friar had a painting 
kit with some gold leaf in it. He was going to cover some of my arrows with 
gold, and the blacksmith, he had some steel arrowheads that could cut any armor. 
I was going to be up on top of the windmill, and if Sir Conrad got into trouble, 
I planned to shoot me the Crossman champion. Once I did that, and golden arrows 
came down out of the sky to punish the evildoers, the others would be in the 
crowd shouting "An Act of God!", "A miracle!", and such like nonsense, since 
who'd took for the perpetrator of a miracle? How could they punish me or Sir 
Conrad for an Act of God?
When the time came, we was all ready. Sir Conrad got hisself bashed out of the 
saddle on the first pass, and the Crossman, he came around to finish him off. I 
let fly and then hid myself, but somehow I must have missed him clean because 
when I looked up, him and Sir Conrad was locked in a close fight. Since I missed 
once, I was afraid that the weight of the gold leaf was throwing off my aim, and 
I didn't shoot for fear of hitting Sir Conrad. Just as well, because Sir Conrad 
kicked the Crossman's smelly arse! He played with the bastard, first throwing 
away his shield and then killing him with his bare hands!
Then when the fight was over and I was getting ready to climb down, four more 
Crossmen charged onto the tourney field at Sir Conrad. I had my bow bent real 
quick and let four arrows fly as fast as you can blink! This time, I watched 
them fly through the low clouds and come out again to hit every one of them 
Crossmen square in the heart! I tell you I got four out of four, and every one 
of them straight in at three hundred yards! I killed every one of them fouling 
bastards and their empty horses ran past Sir Conrad on either side.
Then, right according to plan, everybody was shouting "A miracle!" and "An Act 
of God!" The blacksmith ran out on the field, to be the first one there to 
recover my arrows, since we figured that nobody would believe God using 
gold-covered arrows. God would use real solid gold if He used anything. It was 
best to get rid of the evidence.
But when Ilya tried to pull out the first arrow, it bent in his hand! It really 
was real solid pure gold!
I got religion about then, saying my prayers every night like the priest taught 
me and going to mass every morning. I did that for about a month and then was my 
old self again, or pretty near. Only I don't make jokes about the stupid priests 
anymore and I try to watch my language, except when the shitheads push me too 
hard.
So Sir Conrad lived and them kids all grew up proper at Three Walls instead of 
being slaves to the Mussulmen. And nobody thought to catch me for killing them 
Crossmen, if it was me that shot them and not God. It was some damn fine 
shooting, Whoever did it.
So we all went back to Three Walls, right after Sir Vladimir married 
Annastashia. I went back to the Widow Bromski and spent most of the next four or 
five years hunting and standing guard, except for a few side trips with Sir 
Conrad. Well, besides that I got me a fine education at the school Sir Conrad 
set up, but I guess that shows up in my writing.
They was always building something new at Three Walls, and some of it was pretty 
exciting, especially the steam engines. In my off-hours I got to looking at them 
and talking to anybody what knew much about it. I tried to get Sir Conrad to 
transfer me to one of the machining sections, but he wouldn't do it. He said he 
had plenty of good men who could run a lathe, but only one man who could shoot 
like me.
After that, about the only thing that happened that was worth talking about was 
once when we was all going to a new site that Sir Conrad got from Duke Henryk to 
open up a copper mine. We got word that there was a bunch of foreigners in 
Toszek, just a mile up the road, that was murdering people and burning women at 
the stake! Naturally, we went right there, and Sir Conrad and another knight 
went in to arrest the bastards-there must have been five dozen of them-while I 
got up on a shed to back them up with my longbow.
Well, these foreigners, some kind of Spaniards they was, they didn't want to be 
arrested so naturally a fight got started. All our workers got into it and I let 
fly with all the arrows I had, a dozen and a half of them. I only missed but 
once, when the fletching let loose on an old arrow, but that one time was when a 
soldier was coming at Sir Conrad and all I shot was some priest standing behind 
him. Sir Conrad's horse killed the bastard, kicked him square in the face and 
killed him dead, but like I said, that's a spooky horse!
I felt bad about missing, since Sir Conrad had saved my life three times, and up 
till then I'd only saved his once, but he wasn't mad about it. Like I said, he 
was a fine man.
We took prisoner such of them as we didn't kill and we divvied up the booty and 
I got three months pay out of it, besides a fine sword and a knife. Ask me and 
I'll show them to you sometimes.
Then they had a trial where everybody could speak their piece, and the 
foreigners, they said that they was only killing witches, and after that we hung 
the bastards. I never heard of nobody hunting witches from that time on.
So it wasn't so bad, working for Sir Conrad, but I got to yearning for the 
river. Being a boatman gets into your liver after a while, and when you been 
doing it for four or six generations, it sticks heavy in your blood. When I was 
close to working off my debt, I went to Sir Conrad to talk about it, or rather I 
made an appointment to see him with Natalia, his secretary. He was a busy man. 
And he wasn't "Sir" Conrad any more. Count Lambert had bumped him up to "Baron" 
now.
I was hoping that he'd stake me to a boat and cargo, or maybe let me work a few 
more years at the same rate so I could buy my own, but he had other ideas.
He said that he was going to build a fleet of the finest riverboats ever seen, 
and every one of them powered by one of his steam engines. They'd each carry a 
dozen times the cargo of any boat now on the rivers, and they'd go six times 
faster, upstream or down!
I asked what would happen to the other boatmen on the river and he said that 
we'd have to hire them, but he needed a good man to be boss, a man he trusted 
and a man who could speak the language of the other boatmen. Then he asked me if 
I was interested in the job.
I near fell off my chair! Hell yes, I was interested! Me running all the boats 
on the Vistula! Damn right I was interested!
He said good, he wanted me. And it wasn't only the Vistula. There was more cargo 
to be hauled on the Odra than on the Vistula, what with his installations at 
Copper City near Legnica and Coaltown north of Kolzie. On top of that, these 
boats wouldn't only be just for cargo. They'd be armored to stop any arrow and 
armed with weapons he didn't want to talk about just yet. He said the Mongols 
were coming in a few years and they would try to kill everybody, but we would 
stop them, and we would do it with the riverboats if that was possible. If that 
failed, he had an army building at the Warrior's School, and that would be the 
second line of defense. But the men on the boats would have to be warriors too, 
so I would be in the first class through, now that they was almost finished 
training the instructors.
Now that took me back a peg or five. I'd heard a lot of stories about that 
school and wasn't none of them good. It was supposed to be a secret, but 
everybody knew that three-quarters of the men who started didn't live through it 
and I told Baron Conrad so.
He said that I'd been listening to a lot of old wives' tales. That while only a 
quarter of the first class graduated, only one in six had actually died. Most of 
the rest had been washed out for injuries, or physical or mental problems, and 
anyway the next class would not have it so hard. They were projecting a fifty 
percent graduation rate. On top of that, everybody who worked for Baron Conrad 
would soon have to go through the school, so I might as well get it over with, 
before I got any older. Younger men had a better survival rate.
I said I didn't like them words "survival rate," but Baron Conrad said he only 
meant the ratio of men graduating, and nobody wants to live forever, anyhow.
I said it was my Christian duty to try, but Baron Conrad, he told me that it was 
still a secret, but that all of that first class was going to be knighted, and 
the next one was, too. He told me to think about all them pretty young girls I 
saw in the shower room every day and to think about the old widow I was living 
with. Yeah, I guess he knew about it.
So I thought about them eager young smiles and the Widow Bromski's scowling 
face, and about them bouncing young tits and her sagging dugs and that's what 
done me in.


Chapter Two
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
The weather was so beautiful that Krystyana and Sir Piotr had elected to have 
their wedding ceremony, complete with church service and reception, held 
outside. Since Sir Piotr was the local boy who had made good, the priest and 
everyone else went along with it.
And of course, since everything had to be done as ceremoniously as possible, the 
mass went on for over an hour and I had some time to get some thinking done. I 
was working on my next four-year plan.
Yes, I know that socialists are supposed to write five year plans, but in less 
than four years the Mongols were going to invade, and there didn't seem to be 
any sane reason to plan much beyond that. If we could lick the Mongols, we'd 
have a whole lifetime to plan things. If not, well what was the point? We'd all 
be dead.
For the last five years, I had been working mostly at getting our industrial 
base going. We now had a productive cloth factory and a sugar refinery here at 
Okoitz, and a coppermining, smelting, and machining installation at Copper City, 
that Duke Henryk owned. More than a dozen of Count Lambert's other barons and 
knights had various light industries going at their manors, mostly to keep their 
peasants busy during the winters. Some of them were my vendors, making boots and 
uniforms for my future army.
At the Franciscan monastery in Cracow, we had a papermaking plant, a printshop, 
and a book bindery. And besides books, they were also producing a monthly 
magazine.
I had three new towns of my own running. There was Three Walls , where we were 
making iron, steel, coke, cement, bricks, and other ceramics, and machinery, 
plus several hundred different consumer products. It also had a major carpentry 
shop, set up for mass production, and valley filled with Moslem refugees that 
functioned as an R&D center and a gunpowder works. There was Coaltown, where we 
were making coke, bricks, glass, and chemicals. And there was Silver City, in 
the Malapolska Hills, where we mined and refined lead and zinc.
Silver City got its name when my sales manager, Boris Novacek, refused to let me 
call zinc by its rightful name. He said that a zinc was a musical instrument, 
and that it was stupid to use the same word on a metal. He wanted to call it 
"silver" and pass it off as the real thing, but I wouldn't let him do it. We 
compromised on "Polish Silver," and the name stuck.
In addition to the factories and mines, a major agricultural revolution was 
taking place, mostly because of the seeds I'd brought back with me, but also 
because of the farm machinery I'd introduced.
Understand that none of these installations was really up to twentieth-century 
standards. At best, some of it was up to nineteenth-century standards. 
Everything was primitive and on a small scale. Most of the work was still being 
done by hand, and the most useful and cost effective piece of farm machinery I'd 
introduced was the wheelbarrow. Well, the new steel plows worked well, and the 
McCormick-style reapers sold well even if they were too expensive. A whole 
village had to club up to buy one.
Nonetheless, worker productivity was four times what it had been when I'd 
arrived, and things were constantly getting better. The infant mortality rate 
was way down, too, because of the sanitation measures I'd introduced. Of course, 
the birth rate hadn't changed to any noticeable degree, so the place was 
crawling with rug rats, but what the heck. There was plenty of room for them. 
There was an underpopulated world out there.
Eagle Nest was nominally an aircraft development center, but I completely 
doubted if a bunch of twelve-year-old boys could really develop practical 
aviation. I'd helped build it to keep my liege lord happy and because in the 
long run, it was actually an engineering school, which we needed.
Lastly, I had the new Warrior's School ready to go, and my corps of instructors 
trained. My army was to have three branches.
The first branch would be made up of my existing factory workers. They would all 
have to go through an abbreviated basic-training period of six months and then 
train one day a week after that. The problem was that I would have to send the 
managers through first, since we couldn't have a situation where the 
subordinates were knighted and the managers were commoners. Discipline would 
vanish! There wasn't time to send the managers out in small bunches, so there 
was nothing for it but to send them all at once, which involved running the 
factories with untrained, temporary managers. It was scary, but I didn't see any 
way around it. Everybody in the top two layers was told to pick a man from below 
and teach him how to do his job in ten weeks. Only thirty-five men were leaving, 
but they were my best thirty-five men.
There were screams and moans from all quarters, but I got my way.
Furthermore, all new hires, women as well as men, had to go through the 
six-month training period before they could start work. I required the women to 
be trained because when we went off to war, I planned to take every able-bodied 
man with me. The women would have to "man" the wall guns and other defenses 
without us. And this meant setting up a training program for the wives of my 
managers as well.
Then there were the river defenses. If the weather was right, and the rivers 
weren't frozen, we just might be able to stop the Mongols at the Vistula, or 
even at the Bug. We already had good steam engines and a carpentry shop set up 
for mass production. Steamboats should be a fairly straightforward proposition. 
The troops manning them would be hired from among existing riverboat men and 
then put through the full-year basic-training program. Then, after that, they'd 
have to learn about fighting from a steamboat on the job.
The regular army would be a full-time group based on the training instructors I 
already had. Besides training everybody else, they had to multiply their own 
numbers by at least six each year for the next three years, and then twice more 
in the last year to get us an army big enough to do the job. And those were 
absolute minimums. Anything less than fifty thousand men would just get us all 
killed. The production quotas for the factories were set up for a hundred fifty 
thousand.
From an economic standpoint, land transport was even more important than river 
transport. All of the roads were so bad that it was almost impossible to get a 
cart over them. Almost all goods were transported by caravan mule, and the best 
of them could only carry a quarter ton. They could only do thirty miles a day 
and had to be loaded and unloaded twice a day at that. But on level ground, on a 
steel track and steel wheels with good bearings, a mule should be able to tow 
two dozen times what it could carry on its back.
But more important than economics was the fact that my army was being trained to 
fight with war carts. Swivel guns mounted in big carts would fire over the heads 
of the pikemen towing the cart. I had to get the troops to the battlefields 
quickly and in reasonably good shape. It was time to build railroads.
And if I was going to build a transport system, I was going to build it right 
from the beginning. All the railroad tracks would be wide gauge and that gauge 
would be absolutely standardized. And we would containerize right from the 
start. Our war carts were six yards long, two yards wide and a yard and a half 
high. That would be our standard container size. All chests and barrels would be 
sized to fit neatly within the container, and anything nonstandard would get 
charged double rates, at least. The four wheels on a war cart were two yards 
high and mounted on casters, and each could be locked either fore and aft or to 
the side. Fore and aft, the center of the wheels were two yards apart, so that 
was the standard track gauge, and future carts would have flanged wheels to keep 
them on the track. If they tore up the ground when going cross country, tough.
Then we needed maps, and there weren't any. How a medieval general ever 
commanded troops without adequate maps was beyond me, and I didn't intend to 
learn. I'd had the machine shop make up some crude but usable theodolites (they 
didn't have a telescope on them, just iron sights like on a gun) and I had a 
good mathematician, Sir Piotr, to put in charge of the project. He could train 
others.
And we needed radios. Integrated circuits, transistors, and even tubes were well 
beyond us, and would be for years. I'd been able to muddle my way through a lot 
of things because I was too ignorant to know what I was getting into. With 
electronics, I knew what the problems would be, and they frightened me! Where 
would I get the rare-earth oxides needed to make a decent cathode? How would I 
develop alloys with the same temperature coefficients as our glass to take wires 
into the tube without shattering it? How could I possibly get a good enough 
vacuum?
But working radios were invented long before there were tubes. They used 
spark-gap transmitters and coherers to pick up the signals, and with enough 
work, I thought I could get one going. With radios, I could effectively double 
our speed, since I wouldn't have to send a runner to convey every order. Speed 
was the one area where the Mongols would be our undoubted superiors. Those 
shaggy ponies could move!
Radios were an absolute first priority.
The mass ended and we all walked over to the reception area. I stood in line to 
kiss the bride, even though I had done it all-too-many times before. Cilicia 
kissed the groom full on the mouth and warmly, probably because she too was glad 
to see Krystyana married off. As we went to the sideboard to get a couple of 
glasses of mead, my liege lord came up.
"Ah, Baron Conrad! You seem to be enjoying yourself!" Count Lambert said. 
Cilicia remained silent around my lord. They didn't get along.
"I might as well, my lord, seeing as how I'm footing the bill for the wedding 
feast," I said.
"And the dowry as well, I suppose?"
"Of course, my lord. After all, I've had three children by Krystyana and it 
seems the least I could do. I'm just glad that the kids will have a proper 
father."
"Indeed. I'm surprised that the Church hasn't come down on you for it."
"I'm sure that they are keeping careful notes, my lord. The inquisition 
concerning me is still up in the air."
"That's not all that's up there! I trust you've looked up sometime in the last 
hour?"
I hadn't, but I did so now. There was this thirteenth century sailplane circling 
overhead.
"I guess I must have been thinking about something else, my lord. There must be 
quite a thermal above the town."
"Quite. It's doubtless helped by the way every fire in the town is burning 
bright on a warm, calm day. You don't think that's cheating, do you?"
"I guess not, my lord. We never qualified what it had to do to stay up, only 
that it had to fly for two hours. It looks like it's climbing. The wager is 
yours."
"Good! Then where is my aircraft engine?"
"Still in my head, my lord, but I'll get working on it as soon as I get back to 
Three Walls. Perhaps I can deliver something to you in a few months."
"It will take that long? The boys were hoping to get started immediately!"
"It will take at least that long, my lord. Do you realize what you're asking? 
It's not just designing and building the mechanical parts, though that's going 
to be hard enough! I have no idea how we'll go about machining a crankshaft on 
one of our lathes! There's a lubrication system to worry about and a carburetion 
system. And how am I to make a spark coil with nothing but beeswax and paper for 
insulators? And spark plugs! Thermal expansion problems alone could kill us 
right there! And-"
"You will solve it, Baron Conrad. You always have before. Shall we say by the 
Harvest Festival, then?"
"My lord, I will work on it diligently, but I cannot promise results by any 
fixed date. There's the problem with fuel. I think we can use wood alcohol, 
but--"
"We'll discuss it again on the Feast of Our Lady of the Harvest. Oh, yes. There 
was another thing I wanted to talk over with you. When first you came here, you 
showed us the zipper things that fastened your clothes and equipage together. 
You distinctly said that you could show my workmen the way of making them. Well, 
almost six years have gone by and you still haven't done it. I want you to start 
on that as well."
"My lord, don't we have more important things to worry about than zippers? In 
less than four years, the Mongols will be arriving. There are all sorts of 
things that need doing if we are to survive that."
"Indeed? Like what? You are training some very good infantry, and you should 
have plenty of them in time. As to the cavalry, well, our Polish knights are 
always ready. All the more so once you have them in plate armor. But I've seen 
your stamping presses work, and they'll have no difficulty getting the job done. 
As to the air force, if you can build the engines you promised, the boys and I 
can do the rest. What more remains to be done?"
"Plenty, my lord. Remember the binoculars I gave you on the first day we met?"
"Of course! Marvelous things! I keep them in my chambers."
"Well, I think we may be able to produce something similar called a telescope. 
It will be bulkier and will be used over only one eye, but it should do the job. 
What if I could have enough of them made so that you could give one to every 
Polish baron, count, and duke before the battle? What would that do for your 
fame?"
"I like it, Baron Conrad, and I would even pay the cost of it all, in cloth of 
course."
"Then I'll put a team to working at it, my lord. It would help if I could borrow 
those binoculars back for a week or two."
"Take them for as long as you need them. But what does that have to do with 
zippers and Mongols?"
"I'm just trying to say that we have a lot more to do. Now let me tell you about 
railroads ......"
The conversation went on for hours while the party went on around us. The upshot 
of it was that Lambert would provide the land to run a line from Coaltown to the 
Vistula, and from Three Walls north to the., line, along with two square miles 
of land along the Vistula where I would build a fort and a riverboat assembly 
factory. The fort would be at Count Lambert's expense, in cloth, and he would be 
in nominal command, but I would see to the manning of it, since the people there 
would be working at the riverboat factory and the railyard. I would build the 
track at my expense, and all my goods, and the duke's, would travel on the line 
free. Others could use it by paying a toll to Lambert, but they'd have to rent 
railroad cars from me. After that, we'd run a line from the east end of the line 
to Silver City, and that part of it on Count Lambert's land would be managed on 
the same basis as the rest.
Medieval business deals were always complicated, especially when Count Lambert 
was in something like his current mood. Actually, I didn't care who owned what, 
so long as the job got done. As to the division of the profits, well, I'd have 
to keep my liege lord happy in any event. After that, the accountants all worked 
for me so he would be rewarded as I saw fit!
"Done, Baron Conrad! This has been a good day's work! I feel right about it. But 
I still think that when the Mongols arrive, we should be dressed in our best, so 
do get to work on that zipper machine, won't you? At your own expense, of 
course."
With that, he got up and walked away and I started thinking about how one would 
go about building a zipper-making machine.


Interlude One
I hit the STOP button.
"Tom, something's been bothering me since you mentioned it a few days ago."
"And what is troubling you, my son?"
"Well, you said that you found out about Conrad's trip to the Middle Ages when 
you went to the Battle of Chmielnick during the Mongol invasion. You said that 
the battle you saw had a different outcome than what's written up in the history 
books. And you said that the investigation teams you sent out came back 
duplicated. Why weren't you duplicated as well?"
"Well, I was! It was strange, meeting myself. Not because running into yourself 
is all that odd. With time travel, we do that all the time. But protocol is that 
the senior self always talks first, and the two of us just stood there, each 
waiting for the other to speak first, since neither of us remembered being there 
before. It was quite a while before I asked him why he didn't say something. 
Eventually, we figured out what happened. Being a sensible person, both of me, I 
decided to timeshare the management of the place with my other half. We flipped 
a coin and I got it for this century and he gets it for the next."
"Good Lord!"
"Well, what else could I do? Fight myself? I suppose it would have been more 
complicated had I been married, but after a bit of youthful insanity, like 
Conrad, I'm not the marrying kind."
He hit the START button.


Chapter Three
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
Part of my deal with Count Lambert was that I would spend two days a month 
looking over the projects we had going at Okoitz, so I couldn't go back to Three 
Walls immediately. I checked the windmills and went down the coal mine. I looked 
over the progress made on Count Lambert's new castle, which was now more than 
half built, and spent more time than was necessary in the cloth factory, mostly 
because all the girls working there wanted to talk to me about something or 
another. Mostly, they were just trying to get me interested in themselves, and 
since I was still pretty seriously involved with Cilicia, they were out of luck. 
None the less, it's fun being pursued by scantily clad young ladies, even when 
you don't intend being caught, so I ended up spending half of both days there. 
Cilicia spent her time teaching dancing to the ladies of the town, charging all 
the traffic could bear.
Then it was back to Three Walls, where I got a half dozen research teams going 
on the new projects. My usual approach to research was to set up a team of two 
young men, apprentices, generally, along with one older craftsman. The rule was 
that they had to try out everybody's ideas, and the older man was not allowed to 
squelch the dumb ideas that the kids came up with. I reviewed the progress with 
each team every week or two and threw in my own thoughts, and usually something 
workable resulted. On really important things, I'd set up two competing teams 
and let them work independently. The reward for all this, besides their pay, was 
in the form of cash bonuses if they were successful and the fact that if the new 
product went into production, the men on the research team were the obvious 
people to manage the new factory, so promotions were in order.
The railroads and the steamboats were just a matter of design and build, with 
little real research required at first. Sir Piotr's first survey job was for the 
railroad track.
Yashoo was sent with a crew to the new lands, which we called East Gate, to 
build a boat-assembly building and the foundry got busy making cast-iron 
railroad track. The construction crews were scheduled to go through the 
Warrior's school in the winter, when there wasn't much else for them to do 
anyhow.
We didn't have the machinery necessary to roll steel track, and with the 
comparatively light loads that our track would be handling, malleable cast iron 
was good enough. Cast iron also had the advantage of being not worth stealing. A 
blacksmith couldn't make anything out of it. If he tried heating it and beating 
on it with a hammer, it just crumbled. This fact, coupled with Anna's 
outstanding ability to sniff out thieves, reduced our theft problem to almost 
zero.
I was almost tempted to try to build a telegraph again, but not quite. There was 
no way that I could make copper not worth stealing, and the Mongols would 
probably be smart enough to cut our lines once the invasion started, so its 
military advantage would be nil.
Our roiling stock consisted of small flatcars big enough to carry a single 
container, with a load limit of ten tons. A tenth the size of modem cars, they 
were huge by the standards of the thirteenth century. They would all be horse or 
mule drawn, since our line would be only thirty miles long. There wasn't any 
need for greater speed and the mules already existed. Locomotives were for the 
future.
Sketching up the boats and the railroad took less than a week, since I had a 
staff of draftsmen (and draftswomen) now. The aircraft engine was something 
else.
My first thought had been to make an air-cooled single cylinder two-cycle 
engine, the sort that is used on lawnmowers, but I got to worrying about 
balancing it. Static balancing would be no great problem, but dynamic balancing 
without any sort of test equipment seemed impossible. The thought of vibrations 
tearing one of our frail wood-and-canvas planes to shreds in midair bothered me.
I went to a two-opposed cylinder design, where both pistons went out at the same 
time. If every part was identical to its opposite part, it all should balance 
perfectly. I hoped.
Lubrication? All we had was various animal fats and imported olive oil. I 
designed a pressurized lube system, knowing that it would be contaminated with 
the wood alcohol I hoped to use. After that, we would just have to try different 
mixtures and bum out engines until we found something that worked reasonably 
well.
Carburetion? All I could do was to sketch up what I think I saw in a textbook 
fifteen years ago and hope.
Ignition? I put one research team to work on a magneto system and another on the 
battery-and-coil type and again I hoped.
Then there were the mechanical parts. The engine had to be as light as possible, 
which meant that I needed the best possible strength-to-weight ratio. Sad to 
say, our best cast steel was weaker than ordinary cast bronze. Bronze was 
expensive, since it was made, in part, of tin that had to be imported from 
England, but hang the expense. I'd get it out of Count Lambert somehow. 
Everything on that engine was bronze except for the bearings (another research 
group), the cylinder liners, and the piston rings. These last two were cast 
iron, just like on many modem engines.
As more and more problems were encountered, more research teams were set up. Did 
we have a ceramic that had a coefficient of expansion similar to some metal we 
already had, so we could make a spark plug that didn't shatter when the engine 
heated up? Get the machinists to make spark plug jackets out of as many metals 
as they had , and for each type, have the potters mold in all their different 
types of clays and try to fire them. Could we insulate wires with some sort of 
varnish? Put a team of alchemists on it!
But many of the problems had to be solved sequentially, rather than in parallel. 
We couldn't test bearing materials without a working engine, nor could we work 
on lubricants or carburetion or propellers. The first big snag was ignition, and 
the problem there was the lack of a decent electrical insulator for the spark 
coil. The damn things kept shorting out.
While this was going on, there were innumerable problems with the factories, 
since the entire upper management, everybody above the foreman level, was out 
playing soldier. And besides Three Walls, I still had to keep tabs on all the 
other installations, which were also running without their best men and women.
Then there was the problem of the barony that I had just been given. It was 
previously owned by my enemies, the Jaraslavs. These men had hated everything 
about me and as a result, they had refused to allow any of my innovations on 
their lands. Because of this, the barony was the most backward in the duchy. The 
spring crops were already planted when I got the place, so not much could be 
done in that direction until next year, but there were a lot of other things 
that needed doing.
The school system had to be extended into it. That meant more work for Father 
Thomas, who ran the schools, but not much for me. Along with the schools went 
our distribution system and the mails. Boris's job. Teaching the farmers about 
the new crops and machines? I managed to "borrow" two dozen of Count Lambert's 
more mature peasants, men with grown sons who would just as soon take over the 
family farm. I made these men my bailiffs and assigned farmland to them 
scattered over the barony, along with a complete set of the newest farm 
equipment, with the understanding that they had to teach their new neighbors 
about the new stuff.
Understand that none of these were trivial jobs. That barony was big! There were 
four thousand three hundred peasant families living on it. No wonder Baron 
Stefan had been able to ride around with solid gold trim on his armor!
As to the fifty-odd knights and their squires that were sworn to Baron Stefan, I 
pointed out to them that their previous liege lord had been killed in a fair 
fight when he was fully armed and on horseback. And that this deed had been done 
by scrawny and naked little Piotr, one of my students at the Warrior's school. 
If they wanted to swear to me, they had to go to the school, too. And there I 
was a school for their wives as well. 
Those who had manors still kept them, but it was many years before they could do 
more than occasionally visit. They were in the army now!
All told, it was a rough summer and fall.
In the middle of this, my alchemist, a heretical Moslem named Zoltan Varanian, 
came to me with a vast grin on his face. He wanted to show me something in the 
valley I had set aside for the use of his people. He took me to a cave in the 
hills, which had centuries of bat droppings on the floor.
"You see?" he said. "We will no longer have to haul shit up here to make into 
your gunpowder, my lord! On this very floor is sufficient to make nine hundred 
tons of gunpowder! I have calculated it!"
This was extremely good news. Getting enough manure to meet the gunpowder quotas 
was a problem, and the peasants complained that we were taking the only thing 
they had to fertilize their fields. Furthermore, the manufacturing process for 
gunpowder was one of our major secrets, as were the ingredients that went into 
it. Having an internal supply of saltpeter eliminated one possible security 
leak. On top of that, why couldn't bat droppings be used as fertilizer? There 
were a lot of bat caves around.
We still had a problem with the sulfur needed, and were importing it from 
Hungary in the form of cinnabar, mercuric sulfide. We were just storing the 
mercury, except for a little that was used in thermometers, but it would find a 
use someday.
The annoying thing was that Poland has vast deposits of sulfur, but they are so 
far down that we couldn't get to them without some sophisticated drilling 
equipment that we hadn't had time to develop. Many of the ores we were mining 
were sulfides, and in roasting them, we were able to recover the sulfur dioxide 
and convert it to usable sulfuric acid. But taking sulfuric acid back to sulfur 
is harder than getting toothpaste back into the tube! As Zoltan put it, "Can the 
child be put back into the mother?" For the foreseeable future, we were stuck 
with imported sulfur.
I gave Zoltan my hearty congratulations, and two dozen huge bolts of Count 
Lambert's cloth as a bonus.
By fall, the team working on the zipper was successful, since all they had to do 
was duplicate the zipper on my sleeping bag, and this mollified Count Lambert 
somewhat, but the boys at Eagle Nest were disappointed with me. They had done 
their part and I had failed to do mine. I finally invited the entire senior 
class to Three Walls so that they could see the problems we were having with the 
aircraft engine and try their hands at solving some of them.
And the little bastards did!
A fourteen-year-old kid came up with an incredibly simple and efficient ignition 
system. Our cigarette lighters made a spark, didn't they? They worked on the 
principle of hitting a quartz crystal, didn't they?
So he made a spark plug with a hefty quartz crystal inside of it, which was 
struck by a little hammer connected by a linkage to the crankshaft. It didn't 
need insulation for the wires because there weren't any wires!
So we named the system after him, calling it the Skrzynecki ignition, and threw 
a party in his honor. What troubled me about it was the fact that I should have 
thought of that one myself. After all, I was the one who had designed our 
lighters in the first place. I just had to put it down to a mental blind spot.
It took a few months to beat down the other problems, but by Christmas we had an 
engine that could run for six hours without an overhaul and that was good enough 
for starters.
By spring they had six powered aircraft flying. It is astounding what a bunch of 
motivated kids can come up with!
Of course, the same electrical problems that plagued the engine also troubled 
the radio. To make a spark-gap transmitter, you have to have a spark. So I used 
a variation on the Skrzynecki ignition to power the transmitter. To transmit, 
somebody had to turn the crank so that a dozen little wooden hammers beat on a 
big quartz crystal, but that was no big problem.
Waxed paper and gold foil (the only really thin metal available) made a usable 
capacitor, a large, carefully made air core coil of bare wire served for a 
choke, and a long bare copper wire served as an antenna.
The receiver had a similar antenna connected with an identical coil and 
capacitor. This in turn went to a coherer, which was little more than a glass 
tube with iron filings in it. If a signal was picked up, the iron filings 
slightly welded themselves together and the resistance through them went way 
down. This let a low voltage current go through a relay which went "click" and 
tapped the coherer, shaking loose the iron filings to wait for another signal. 
It was a year and a half getting a pair of transceivers working that could send 
and receive over two dozen miles, and they weren't very dependable, requiring 
constant fiddling on the part of the operators, but they were good enough. We 
went into production with them.
About then, I somehow found time to polish up the books I had been writing. Over 
the years, I had tried to write down everything I could remember about science 
and modem technology, and over time these scattered notes had turned themselves 
into about two dozen books. Or perhaps I should say pamphlets, since none of 
them was more than three dozen pages long, and in fact the longest of them was 
the poetry I had remembered.
One was called Concerning Optics. Everything I knew in twenty-nine pages. 
Another was Power Transmission, eighteen pages. It was frustrating! Here was 
everything I remembered from seventeen years of formal education, and a lot of 
reading besides, all in one short stack of papers! Even then, some of them 
wouldn't be useful here for many years, and books like Computer Design, 
Programming and Semiconductors were filed for future publication. But Bridges, 
and Canals, Locks, and Dams could aid contemporary builders, and there was no 
reason to withhold the information. I got the stack over to Father Ignacy and 
ordered six thousand copies of each, with woodcut illustrations. He was 
awestruck, but said he'd start having it done.
Around Christmas, Sir Piotr brought me copies of his first maps, the first 
accurate maps ever done of my own lands. He was an amazingly good mathematician, 
and after some years of tutoring on my part, he was starting to pull ahead of 
me. Certainly, his books on arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry were better 
than mine, and we published his instead of what I'd done. He himself, with the 
help of the accountants that used to work with him, had written a book of trig 
tables, and had worked out the techniques necessary for accurate mapmaking. 
Those got into print as well, and we paid decent royalties.
There was a compass rose on the map, so naturally I turned it so that the arrow 
pointed up and I could read the words. I stared at the representation of the 
land that I had been riding over for years and I couldn't make heads or tails of 
it.
"Sir Piotr,- there's something very wrong here. This isn't my land."
"But of course it is, my lord. I could hardly make a mistake like surveying the 
wrong property."
"But ... you've got Sir Miesko's manor south of Three Walls. It's north of us!"
"Right, my lord. It's north of us."
"Then why do you have it at the bottom of the map?"
"Because I put south at the top of the map, my lord."
"You put south at the top of a map?"
"Yes, my lord. I worried a bit about that, since of course it's traditional to 
put east at the top--"
"East, for God's sake?"
"Of course, my lord. But I knew you'd want things done in a sensible and 
rational manner, so naturally south goes at the top."
"Naturally. Would you please go over your reasons for that conclusion?" I'm not 
sure whether it was caused by graduating from the Warrior's-School, being 
knighted, or marrying Krystyana, but Piotr just didn't get intimidated anymore.
"Happy to, my lord. Your prime referent has always been your clock. All of our 
angles are measured as though they were the time of day it is when the fat hand 
is at that angle. At least that was the system you taught me. The fat hand 
corresponds to the position of the sun when the clock is south of the viewer, 
and all of your clocks are always mounted on a south wall for that reason. 
Therefore, all of the angles shown on the map correspond to the normal clock if 
the map is placed up next to the clock. Since the map corresponds to the land, 
and the land, looking south, has the more southerly portions appearing to be 
higher, this just naturally puts south at the top of the map. In addition, 
everybody knows that the mountains are to the south of us, and the plains and 
the sea are to the north. The mountains are higher, so naturally they go at the 
top."
I had to stare at it for a while and think about it, but in the end I had to 
admit that his way was more consistent.
It was more consistent to read our angles clockwise rather than 
counterclockwise, as it is done in the modern world, so we did it that way.
In the modern world, electricity flows from negative to positive. It happened 
that way because Ben Franklin knew that something was flowing, but he guessed 
wrong about the direction. Since I was starting out fresh, I corrected Ben's 
error. Our electrons were positive.
The controls on the aircraft worked the opposite of those on twentieth-century 
planes, because the boys started out flying hang gliders. With the usual control 
stick, if you want to go down, you push the lever away from you, but on a hang 
glider, which steers by the shift in body weight, to go down you must pull on 
the stick to pull your body forward. So when they started making gliders with 
control surfaces, it was natural for them to make it so that you pulled the 
stick to go down. Exactly the same thing happened with turning left and right. 
Sensible, but the opposite of what I was used to.
And on the riverboats, the same damn thing happened. I'd installed a 
conventional ship's wheel, but Tadaos had insisted on reworking the steering 
apparatus so it would be more "natural" for him. He was used to steering with a 
tiller bar, where to go to the fight, you push the bar to the left. "Natural" 
for him was to move the top of the wheel to the left to make the boat go to the 
right. I had to do it his way or fire him, and just then I didn't have a 
replacement.
Yes, I know we were all Polish, but is that any reason why everything has to 
come out backward?


Chapter Four
FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI
Well, they dang nearly killed me, but they didn't.
They shaved me naked and yelled and screamed and ran me up and down mountains 
and cliffs, and ropes, and all the while singing damn fool songs and blowing on 
horns and beating stupid drums. They got me up every day before dawn to swear 
the same dang; oath, like I didn't remember it from the last two hundred 
mornings we'd said it, and then came at me with pikes and swords and axes, and 
they made me do the same to the others. They made me walk funny and talk funny 
and smile when they was shouting at me.
You see, one of the twelve things we was always to be was cheerful, and I think 
that was the hardest of the bunch. I finally figured out that if I squinted my 
eyes and gritted my teeth at them, I could usually make them think I was 
smiling.
Worst yet, they made me go the first six months of it without getting drunk or 
laid.
Sometimes, I think it was that last that kept me going, knowing that once I got 
out of this hell, a those pretty little girls would be waiting for Sir Tadaos to 
service them. I lived for that, and like I said, I nearly died for it.
A lot of men did die in that training, but not in my platoon. I guess I was 
lucky in that I was put in with the baron's managers for the first six months, 
and not many of them men washed out. I mean that they could all read and write 
already, and they was mostly pretty sensible. A few got hurt pretty bad on the 
cliffs, but even they graduated. I thought that I was going to graduate with 
them, but no, the day before the rest went through the firewalking ordeal and 
the vigil, they told me that I was scheduled for the whole year-long program. I 
went and talked to Sir Vladimir about that, since he ran the school and I knew 
him pretty well. Hell, once he let me use him for target practice, but that's 
another story.
Anyhow, he said that there was nothing he could do about it since the baron, he 
had put it in writing and that was that. But he did give me a pass to go to 
Three Walls for three days, so I could get proper drunk and visit the Widow 
Bromski. Seeing her again after spending six months dreaming about those sweet 
young things, well, it helped to get drunk first. I'd worn my armor coming in, 
but I guess I didn't fool anybody. Certainly not any of the girls. They must 
have some kind of secret code about that sort of thing. But at least I got good 
and blasted with the girls at the Pink Dragon Inn. Course, that's a 
look-but-don't touch sort of place, but I tell you it's well worth the looking.
So I went back to Hell, and this time they put me in with the baron's new 
knights, them what he got after little Piotr killed Baron Stefan and Conrad 
stepped into the old baron's shoes. They was pretty standoffish at first, but 
then one day Sir Vladimir called me "Squire Tadaos" in public, and those knights 
and squires loosened up some.
I guess I did learn something there. I got to be real good with a sword, one of 
those long skinny ones you wear over your left shoulder. I could hold my own 
with an axe or a pike, though I don't much like a pike, and I found out I was 
near as good a shot with one of them swivel guns as I was with my bow. I could 
outshoot anybody, the instructors included.
So at last came the day when we was to graduate. They made a big to-do about it, 
but me, I was just glad it was over. The others was worried about walking on 
fire, but not me. If Piotr and all them managers could do it, I knew I wouldn't 
have no trouble, and I didn't.
Look here. Every man in the world has snuffed a candle with his fingers without 
burning hisself, and walking on coals is just the same thing in a bigger way. 
Anyhow, I did bum myself a little, though I didn't feel nothing at the time.
Naturally, I had brains enough to go through it all with a straight face, not 
wanting to be dropped this late in the thing. I know when to keep my mouth shut.
After that, there was some hocus-pocus about sitting up all night and seeing if 
we had halos in the morning. I guess I never been much of a religious man, 
except once there, and that didn't last long. But I learned long ago that if you 
play the game and look nice, there's a whole lot less trouble. So we waited up 
all night and the sun come up and didn't none of us have a halo showing on the 
fog. There wasn't even no fog!
So this priest, he says that one of us must not be in a state of grace, and that 
we'd have to pray all day and try it again tomorrow. We was all pretty 
disappointed.
Them knights, they all took it real serious and did some real soulsearching, so 
naturally I had to look like I was doing the same. But any man with half the 
brains of a cow should be able to figure out that you can't see your shadow on 
the fog, halo or no halo, when there wasn't no fog in the first place!
So we stayed up the whole day in prayer, and the next night in vigil and again 
there wasn't no fog. I thought some of them knights was going to die right there 
from the humiliation of it. They figured God was rejecting them for their sins, 
and of course, I couldn't tell them no different.
So a third day and night went by without no sleep and in the middle of the 
night, Baron Conrad came by. He hadn't been there the other two nights, and I 
figured he knew when it'd be foggy. I always knew that man was smart.
So we finally got fog and saw our shadows in it. What they got so excited about 
was something I'd seen a hundred times before, only looking into green water 
instead of fog. Sort of these rays of light seem to come out of the head of your 
shadow. Every man on the river has seen it, them with brains enough to look 
down, and fog is just another kind of water, isn't it?
But it wasn't my place to say nothing, so I got in line with the others and was 
knighted and sworn in and became Sir Tadaos Kolpinski.
We slept in that day and threw a party that night with the help of some 
beautiful young girls from the cloth factory at Okoitz. The next day, they gave 
me a full purse of silver and lent me a horse, so I gave one of them girls a 
lift back, because Okoitz was the place I intended to spend my month's leave.
I had a month off, and after the first day, I just sent the horse back to the 
baron, cause I wasn't going nowheres else. That place is even better than the 
stories they tell about it! They not only had the prettiest and the eagerest 
girls in the world, they had two shifts of them! You could stand there smiling 
in your red-and-white dress uniform, with all your brass and boots polished, 
watching them as they paraded out after the end of their work day, and none of 
them wearing much of anything. Then when you saw one that suited you, you just 
smiled and asked her if she wanted to have a beer with you, and never one of 
them turned me down.
Then in the morning, when you'd eaten and drunk and fornicated all night, you 
walked her back to the factory and there'd be the night shift coming off work, 
rubbing the limelights out of their pretty eyes and wondering what they'd do 
with themselves all the lonely day.
I'd just spent a year in Hell, but now I was in Heaven!
This went on for three weeks, when one night I was sitting in the inn with two 
of the prettiest girls in Okoitz. Good friends and roommates they was, and I'd 
had the both of them before, one at a time, and that night I couldn't decide 
between them so I took them both, and they said that sounded like fun.
They was both wearing about what the waitresses at the inn wear and, that's to 
say, nearly nothing. They said it was the new style at Wroclaw, and I sure 
didn't make no argument about their tits hanging out. Not that theirs really 
hung, you understand, being of the young, conical variety.
We was all laughing and talking when Baron Conrad comes up. I asked him if I 
could buy him a beer, or maybe a mead would be more fitting for one of his 
exalted rank. He said it had been a hot day, and if I was buying beer, he was 
drinking it. Course, he never had to pay for his drinks anyway, seeing as how he 
owned this Pink Dragon Inn and fifty others besides, but it felt good playing 
host to my liege lord. He downed it quick and bought the next round for the 
table, just like he was a normal man and all.
Then he got down to business. He said that I was going to have to cut my leave 
short. It seems that the first steamboat was all built ahead of schedule, and if 
I figured to be its captain, I'd better be in East Gate tomorrow by noon.
Course, I wouldn't of missed that boat for all the girls in Okoitz, now that I'd 
had three weeks of them. But I figured that it was worthwhile complaining about 
it, since the baron might sweeten the pot a bit to get me there. It's the 
squeaky oarlock that gets the oil.
So I said that it would be hard, tearing myself away from these poor girls, 
leaving them to God knew what sad fate.
So the baron, he says that if I was worried about their futures, why, I could 
marry them if I wanted to.
I said I couldn't marry them both and he said I could if I was of a mind to. 
Hadn't I read the manual and rules of the Radiant Warriors?
Well, they'd given me this little printed book just as I left, but I hadn't read 
nothing and I had to admit it. So the baron says that any knight in our order 
had the right to have a servant, with his wife's permission. And a servant of 
ours had all the rights of a wife, so it was the same thing, except for the 
church ceremony, of course.
Well, that sort of flabbergasted me, and I said I didn't know which one I should 
marry. I don't rightly know if he was serious or not, but he says that if I 
couldn't decide, I should let the girls do it. Let them flip a coin, he says.
Before I can blink twice, the girls are grinning and nodding at each other. One 
of them digs a silver penny out of my purse and flips it in the air. The other 
calls "crowns," and that was the way that I proposed to Alona. I never had a 
word to say about it.
Course, the girls were both jabbering now, working oat the details. If I had to 
go to East Gate tomorrow, why, Alona's village was only a half mile off the new 
railroad. She could come with me and I could speak to her father and post banns 
at the village church, because that's where she wanted to be married. Then 
Petrushka would be her bridesmaid and right after the ceremony, she'd become the 
servant.
All this was fine by Petrushka, so the girls had it all settled while me and 
Baron Conrad never said a word.
Then the girls left in a hurry to tell all their friends and I was left staring 
at the baron. I think that if I hadn't been drinking and fornicating for three 
weeks, I might have had enough sense to shout "NO!", but I had been and I 
didn't. The baron, he just seemed amused and said that under the circumstances I 
didn't have to get to East Gate until tomorrow night.
But looking back on it all, I tell you that if I had been sensible that night, I 
would have made the biggest mistake of my life. Them girls was everything a 
reasonable man could want, and we've been mostly happy together.
So the next morning, I rented us two horses, one with a sidesaddle since Alona 
didn't figure it was smart wearing the Wroclaw styles home, but had on a nice 
wool dress she'd made. We got there before noon and I talked to her old man and 
the priest and we settled everything real quick, since I didn't much care about 
the dowry and all, what with me making eight pennies a day now. Then I left her 
with her folks to visit for a day or two and got to East Gate before dark.
They had limelights up around the dock area, so I went out to look at my new 
boat right after supper, and she was a beauty! She was painted red and white, 
with gold and black trim, and a big white Piast eagle was painted on her side, 
just like the one on the back of the dress uniform. She looked more like a 
castle than a boat, what with her tall, flat armored sides, and there was 
crenelations all around the top and turrets at all four comers.
I swear I loved that boat more than the girls I was going to marry.
She was huge, fully three dozen yards long and ten wide. She was two and a half 
stories tall and armored with steel thick enough to stop any arrow but one of 
mine! She could carry sixty tons of cargo in six containers, and had fourteen 
cabins for passengers as well, plus five more for the crew. Yet the night guard 
told me that she only drew a half a yard of water with a full load!
I went down to the engine room and who do I find there but Baron Conrad hisself. 
I told him this boat of his was the finest looking thing I'd ever seen, both my 
girls included, and he said he was glad I thought so, but I better not let them 
hear that. Then he showed me all over that engine. It had a tubular boiler that 
ran at two dozen atmospheres, and a sealed condenser below the waterline so we 
got full power from it. It had a separate distillery run off waste heat, with 
its own condenser to make distilled water for the main boiler, so he didn't 
figure we'd ever have a fouling problem. It had two big double expansion 
cylinders that turned a paddle wheel that was two stories tall. There was a 
kitchen that could feed a whole company of men. There was even a bathroom with 
hot showers!
Then he got into the armament. We carried twelve swivel guns aboard, plus four 
steam-powered guns in the comer turrets he called peashooters. These fired ban 
bearings at the rate of three gross rounds a minute, one after another. And 
there was two steam projectors, Halmans, he called them, that could throw three 
pounds of death at the enemy. And during wartime, the boat was set up to carry a 
full company of men with all their equipment, including their war carts!
Then he told me I better get some sleep, because we was going to take her out in 
the morning.


Chapter Five
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
We took the steamboat out with a skeleton crew: an engine operator, a fireman, 
Tadaos and myself, plus a dozen of the carpenters and machinists who had helped 
build her. And of course I brought Anna along, since she didn't like being far 
from me, and her senses were better than a human's. There was always the chance 
that she would spot something wrong before the rest of us did.
One of the watertight compartments below deck leaked a bit, but that was not 
serious. There were two dozen of them, and it could have been holed without 
endangering the boat. There were no other hitches, except for Tadaos' problems 
with the steering wheel. Once, when he wasn't sure if the water ahead was deep 
enough, we sent a man out ahead of the boat, walking. As long as the water 
stayed above the guy's knees, we were safe!
I'd planned to just take her a few miles downriver and return, but with things 
going so well, we went all the way to Cracow. We took up half the dock and drew 
quite a crowd, so I told Tadaos to speak with the riverboat men and try to talk 
them into joining the army. We were advertising in the magazine, but most of 
these men couldn't read.
I rode Anna up to Wawel Castle to pay my respects to the duke and see if he 
wanted a ride. Duke Henryk the Bearded was even more important to me than Count 
Lambert, and without the duke's support, I couldn't have accomplished a tenth of 
what I had. On the way there, Anna gestured that something was wrong, but she 
didn't know what it was.
The guard at the castle gate looked glum, but he recognized us and let us in. I 
didn't find out what was the trouble until I asked the marshal, the man in 
charge of the stables, where I could find the duke.
"Young Duke Henryk is in his chambers, my lord, but I wouldn't bother him just 
now."
"Young Duke Henryk? What are you talking about? The duke is over seventy!" I 
said.
"You hadn't heard, my lord? Duke Henryk the Bearded was killed last night. Duke 
Henryk the Pious now rules."
"Good God in Heaven! How did it happen?"
"It was one of his own guards that killed him, my lord, a Sir Frederick. Shot 
him with a filthy crossbow while he was asleep. The other guards chopped up Sir 
Frederick, killed him on the spot, so I don't guess we'll ever find out why he 
did it."
I left Anna with the marshal and went to young Henryk's chambers. Actually, he 
was ten years older than I was, but he still might want someone to talk to, and 
I knew the man fairly well. In any event, I could hardly leave the castle at a 
time like this without his permission. There was a crowd around his closed door, 
but just as I got there, the door opened and the new duke came out. He was 
wearing an army uniform.
"Ah, Baron Conrad. You got here quickly."
"In truth, your grace, I didn't hear the news until I arrived."
"Your grace?" he mused. "Yes, I guess I am that now. I've been going over my 
late father's private papers. I want to talk to you alone. The rest of you, 
please tell everyone that I will want to see every noble in the throne room in 
two hours, but for now, disperse. Come in, Baron Conrad."
"Thank you, your grace. May I say how sorry I am about your father's death?"
"No sorrier than I am, I assure you. But things must go on if I am not to waste 
the work he spent his life on."
"Have you any idea why Sir Frederick would do such a thing, your grace?"
He thought a moment. "My father was often rude to the man, but there must have 
been more to it than that. My father made many enemies. He had to knock a lot of 
heads together to get the lords of both Little and Great Poland to swear 
allegiance to him. There are a lot of young hotheads out there who thought that 
they would inherit petty dukedoms and who now find themselves only becoming 
counts or even barons. Doubtless one of them got to Sir Frederick somehow. But 
which one? I doubt that we'll ever know. But I tell you this--every noble on my 
lands is going to swear allegiance to me, and those who don't are going to wish 
they had!"
"Whoever did it might come after you next, your grace. Perhaps you could use a 
special sort of bodyguard. I'm sure you've heard many stories about my horse, 
Anna. The truth is that she's not really a horse. She's almost as intelligent as 
a man. She's absolutely loyal and she's saved my life many times. The first of 
her children are of age now, and I'd like you to have one of them, sort of a 
permanent loan. The young ones are identical to their mother, and might save 
your life."
"Can they run like she does?"
"Yes, your grace."
"Then I'll take one. But that's not what I wanted to talk to you about. My 
father's secret letters to me say some astounding things about you. Are you 
really from the future?"
"Yes, your grace. I was born in the twentieth century."
"And you don't know how you got here?"
"Not really, your grace. I think it had something to do with an inn I slept in, 
but that inn is gone now. Certainly my own people never had a time machine."
"But you were Polish, and a sworn officer in the military."
"I am Polish, your grace, and once an officer, always an officer."
"Yes, yes. Then your knowledge of the Tartar invasion is one of simple 
historical fact?"
"Yes, your grace. But in truth, I am no longer sure just what a historical fact 
is. In my history, at this time there was nothing like the factories or 
railroads or aircraft or steamboats that I have built here. My being here has 
changed things, and I have no idea whether or how these changes will affect 
other things. In my time, the Mongols invaded Poland in late February and early 
March of 1241. Two major battles were fought, one at Chmielnick on March 
seventh, and another at Legnica two weeks later. We lost both battles."
"But you don't know if these things are fixed by fate?"
"No, your grace, I don't. I'm praying that they are not. It is my intent to 
defeat the Mongols and kill them an."
"I see. Well, you may rest assured that the 'Mongols,' as you persist in calling 
them, are indeed coming. They are already invading southeastern Russia. We just 
got word that the city of Vladimir has fallen. They said it had been larger than 
Cracow. But it's gone now, with almost every man, woman, and child slaughtered, 
The Mongols even killed every animal-why, I do not know."
"Perhaps they simply enjoy killing, your grace."
"I see. You were definitely not sent here by anyone?"
"Not to my knowledge, your grace, but I got here somehow. Someone must have done 
it."
"Well. I'll expect you and any of your knights that you have with you to swear 
fealty to me this afternoon. Tell me, if you hadn't heard of my father's death, 
why did you come here today?"
"It seems trivial now, your grace, but we just got the first riverboat working. 
It's tied up at the docks here in Cracow. I came to see if your father wanted to 
ride it."
"Perhaps tomorrow I might have time to inspect it. For now, good day, Baron 
Conrad."
I scrounged up some writing materials, wrote some quick letters, and then went 
down to see Anna.
I met Lady Francine in the courtyard. She had been the old duke's companion 
(Paramour? Assistant? Toy?) for some years, and we had been friends for even 
longer. Perhaps next to Cilicia, she was the most beautiful woman in Poland. I 
gave her my condolences and invited her to join me on my errand.
"I would love to, Baron Conrad. But do not be so downhearted," she said with her 
thick French accent as we walked to the stables. "The old duke had a long full 
life, and he died without pain, yes? How many others have done the same?" She 
was wearing a most modest dress that covered her from wrists to chin to ankles, 
a far cry from the miniskirt and topless styles the old duke preferred.
"I suppose you're right. That's a most attractive dress, my lady."
"It is the style that will be worn at court from now on, I am afraid. Everyone 
knows the young duke's displeasure with the styles preferred by his father."
"Perhaps it's just as well, my lady. The bare-breasted style was lovely on you 
and on a few other young women, but on the battle-scarred spinsters who were 
wearing them, well, perhaps it's all for the best."
"My only regret is that the bare styles had to arrive in the wintertime, and 
these cover-it-all things must needs be worn now that summer is finally here. If 
only the old duke could have lived five months longer!" She smiled at her own 
audacity.
"Still, he'll be missed."
"All too true."
"But what about you, my lady. What is to happen to you?"
"Indeed, I do not know. I am not in want. Much to the contrary, for I had little 
chance to spend my excellent income. Also, the duke saw fit to elevate me to the 
peerage. I am a countess now, with a large estate near Wroclaw. But as to what I 
will do, I do not know."
"Don't worry, my lady. The most beautiful woman in Poland will not be left alone 
for long."
"Oh, the boys are already flocking around, but only boys. Not men like you."
I was saved by our arrival at Anna's stall.
"Anna, I have some errands for you to run." I threw on her saddle and cinched it 
down. "This letter is for Tadaos down at the boat. He is to come here right 
away, so give him a lift up here, drop him off at the gate, and then be on your 
way. This one is for the people at East Gate, since they have to be worrying 
about us. And this one is for your servant, Kotcha. If you haven't heard yet, 
the old duke was killed. I think that the young duke would be a lot safer if one 
of your daughters was with him. Do you think one of them would like that?"
Anna nodded YES.
I put the letters under her saddle where she could get at each of them 
individually. "Oh, yes. This last letter is for anyone silly enough to try to 
stop you. On your way, girl. "
Anna sped out of the stables and past a startled guard. I waved to the man so he 
would know that nothing was wrong.
"Such an amazing beast!" Lady Francine said.
"Not a beast at all, my lady. Anna's people."
"Still, would that I had such a mount."
"Well, Anna's not exactly for sale."
"But you said that she had children."
"She does. But I also said she was people and you didn't believe me. One doesn't 
sell children. my lady."
"Well, I never offered any money, my lord."
"Sorry. It's just that I feel protective toward her. Everybody tries to treat 
her like a dumb animal and I don't like to see her feelings hurt."
"You always take so much upon yourself, Conrad. You cannot change the whole 
world."
"It's strange, my lady, but you know?-I really think I can. But while I can't 
give you Anna, I can give you a lift. After the funeral, if you want 
transportation back to your estate, I can provide a steamboat to East Gate and a 
railroad to Coaltown. Or you could stay a while at Three Walls if you like."
"Much of my last stay there was enjoyable, my lord. Perhaps I shall get a job 
again as a waitress at your inn, yes? I still qualify."
That was her way of telling me that she was still a virgin. Well, the duke was a 
very old man. But while I enjoyed the tentative way she was offering herself to 
me, I had the feeling that she wanted much more than a casual affair. And the 
whole idea of marriage scares me shitless!
I was saved again when a page called us to the throne room. We got there just as 
Sir Tadaos came puffing in.
"Your uniform's a mess, Sir Tadaos. It's filthy! Don't you know that you are 
about to swear fealty to the new duke?"
"It's not like I had a spare to change into, my lord. I didn't even know we was 
coming to Cracow! And I was fixing the cabling on the steering wheel, and-"
"Well, there's nothing for it now. We'll have to bluff it through. Come and sit 
by me and do what I do. My lady?" I said, offering Lady Francine my arm.
And thus it was that I swore fealty to Duke Henryk the Pious of Silesia, Little 
and Great Poland, and my future king if I had anything to say about it, standing 
between a filthy subordinate and a woman I was afraid Of.


Chapter Six
Anna came back as soon as the city gates were opened the next morning, and with 
her were all four of her oldest daughters. They said that they all wanted to 
work for the duke, and figured that he should make the decision between them. Of 
course they said this in a combination of the sign language we'd worked out and 
by my playing a game of twenty questions with them.
The funeral was held the next day. Embalming techniques were unknown, and in the 
summertime, well, these things couldn't be delayed. The old duke was placed in 
the crypt below Wawel Cathedral.
The morning after, I was trying to talk the kitchen help into scrambling me up 
some eggs, since nobody else in this century ever ate before late morning and I 
was partial to a decent breakfast. But word came that the duke would speak to 
me, so I missed another breakfast.
When I arrived before him, the duke looked up from a stack of parchment. We were 
producing some decent paper now, but everything official was still being 
handwritten on real sheepskin parchment, when it wasn't on the even more 
expensive calfskin vellum.
"Ah, Baron Conrad. Riders have been sent out to every noble in Little Poland, 
telling of my father's death and my requirement that they all swear allegiance 
to me. It will be a few days before they start getting here, so I have time to 
inspect that boat of yours. Also, the marshal tells me that there are now five 
'Annas' in the stables, but I suppose you know about that."
"I do, your grace. The children felt that you should choose among them."
"Then let's do it."
At the stables, the duke said, "By God, they are identical. How do you tell them 
apart?"
"I have to ask them who is who, your grace. Anna, ,.Please come here by me, and 
the rest of you get into alphabetical order, so I can introduce you properly."
There was always a crowd around the duke, but this drew a bigger crowd than 
usual . I noticed Count Lambert's sister-in-law, who was trying to flirt with me 
as always. Both she and her husband, Count Herman, were of the opinion that 
people should be respected on the basis of their rank, and only on that basis. 
To her mind, this made her infinitely desirable, despite the fact that she was 
ignorant, supercilious, intolerant, married, and shaped like a pear. I ignored 
her, as was my custom.
I introduced Anna's children, and each bowed properly to Henryk. Everyone was 
familiar enough with Anna not to be too astounded.
"They're all perfect, and I don't see how one could possibly choose between 
them. I'd be forced to choose a horse by its saddle. But they're not really 
horses, are they?"
"No, your grace."
"Well, we must call them something. You keep calling them 'people,' but they're 
not really like ordinary people either, are they? What say we call them 'Big 
People'?"
"Well girls, what do you say?"
They all nodded YES, that was fine by them.
"We all seem to think it an excellent term, your grace."
"It's all settled, then. Well, Big People, am I correct in assuming that you all 
would like to serve me?"
The four sisters nodded YES.
"I see, and I thank you. Baron Conrad, you have offered me the loan of one of 
these lovely ladies. But what if I was attacked on the road by a superior force? 
I might then have to run for it, wouldn't I? But I would hate to run if I had to 
leave my wife or sons behind. In fact, I likely wouldn't do it. Could I prevail 
upon you? I know you have others like these growing up. Could I have all four?"
"You are a hard man to refuse, your grace. Of course. Since the Big People are 
willing, you may have the loan of all four."
"And that's another point. Why do you keep saying 'loan'? Many would simply make 
it a gift."
"Three reasons, your grace. One is the fact that they really are people, which 
you are already forgetting. I can't give them away because I don't own them. 
They are sworn to me and I pay them a regular salary, so I can loan out their 
services. The second is that I want to keep very careful control over who has 
them. I don't want them abused, and I wouldn't want an enemy to have them. The 
third is that I want all their fillies returned to me, again so that I can take 
proper care of them, and keep control over who has them."
"You seem adamant on these points, Baron Conrad."
"I am, your grace. Surely you can see my reasoning."
"I suppose I can. Perhaps I was being greedy. But what if there were enough for 
all my retainers? For all my knights! Such an army would be unbeatable!"
"Perhaps in time that will be possible, your grace. They reproduce rapidly. 
Indeed, all five that you see here are expecting, and each will have four 
fillies. In twenty or thirty years, they could outnumber people, if they wanted 
to. I assure you, we'll discuss such a mounted force when the time comes. For 
now, I suggest that we go for a ride. You notice that none of them has a bridle. 
They don't need them. Also, I'd thank you if you took off your spurs."
"What? Oh, yes. I'd forgotten that."
Two of his knights bent down to remove the duke's spurs, and I noticed Lady 
Francine join the crowd.
"Baron Conrad, may I join your group?" she asked.
"I'm sorry, my lady, but I believe the duke already has his party chosen."
"But there would be room for me if you put that thing behind your saddle on 
Anna."
"That thing" was the sidesaddle I'd had made to fit behind a regular saddle so a 
passenger, Cilicia for the last few years, could sit comfortably. It was sort of 
a pillion with a foot rest. Kotcha had given each of Anna's children one of my 
saddles, every single spare one that I kept for my own personal use, and I had 
the feeling that it would be awkward getting them back. This way, I could at 
least save the sidesaddle. I gestured to a groom to switch the thing.
"Then I would be delighted to have you riding apillion, my lady."
The duke mounted up along with three of his armed guards. They each carried an 
oversized shield and they'd had brains enough to remove their spurs.
"We'll go out by way of the Carpenter's Gate, then take the outer road to the 
docks," the duke announced. "That should let us give the Big People a good run."
I gave Lady Francine a lift into the rear saddle. She was a lot fleshier than 
Cilicia, but in fact she was lighter, not having the dense, muscular dancer's 
body that Cilicia has.
Once we were out of the city, I told Anna to go at her best speed, to show the 
duke what running was. We were soon going at a solid run, doing about the speed 
that a modern thoroughbred can run, but where an ordinary horse might match our 
speed with a tiny jockey aboard and for a mile, Anna and her kin could do it 
with two full-sized people on their backs, and keep it up all day!
Nonetheless, Anna was carrying double and her daughters pulled ahead of her. 
They were two-gross yards ahead of us when the attack occurred.
Suddenly, an armored man stood up in the bushes a gross yards from the road. He 
leveled a crossbow at the duke and let fly. The guard to the duke's right, a 
left-hander who carried his shield on his right arm, had remarkably good 
reflexes. He raised his shield in time to deflect the bolt high into the air.
But at the same time, two other crossbowmen were raising on the left, hoping to 
catch the duke's party off guard. They didn't. Those guards were on the ball, 
and Anna's daughters weren't being slouches, either. They had the duke 
surrounded, and the guards were holding their shields, not to cover themselves, 
but to cover the duke! It was as though they considered their own bodies as 
extensions of their shields. The next two bolts were stopped, one by a shield 
and one by a guard's arm.
The duke's party continued down the road, not knowing how many assassins they 
faced. But from my vantage point, I was sure that there were only the three of 
them. Sad experience had taught me that speed was more important than planning. 
When in doubt, charge straight in! I signaled Anna to attack the two on the 
left.
They were franticly trying to rewind their crossbows, hoping to get off a second 
shot. I don't think they saw us coming. Anna can run very quietly when she wants 
to, although she says that it's a lot more work. We were only a few dozen yards 
away when they noticed us. I had my sword out, but I wasn't wearing armor or 
carrying a shield. Heck, I'd started out dressed for a boatride. A knight is 
always supposed to be ready for emergencies, but that's often hard to do!
Anna passed to the left of the first man, and I found that he had stuck his 
sword in the dirt so as to have it near if he needed it in a hurry. He dropped 
his crossbow and swung his sword at me. I wanted to take prisoners, since these 
men probably had something to do with the old duke's assassination, but all I 
could do under the circumstances was to chop down at his sword as hard as I 
could. My sword went right through the crossbowman's blade, and through his 
helmet and head as well.
Before I could recover from the blow, Anna was already onto the second man. She 
just went right over him, trampling him flat. She turned and I saw that there 
were four hoofprints in the assassin's chest. He had squirted out of his armor 
like toothpaste from a tube hit by a sledgehammer.
We turned to see the last assassin mounting his horse and leaving.
"Catch him, Anna!" I shouted, but she was already on the way.
"This is so exciting!" Lady Francine shouted.
This shocked me. Would you believe that I had actually forgotten that I had a 
beautiful woman riding at my back? Worse yet, that I had gone into combat 
without even considering that I was risking her life!
"My lady!" I yelled, and Anna picked up from my body language that I wanted to 
stop.
"NO, NO!" Lady Francine shouted. "We must catch him! He must know who had the 
duke murdered!"
She was right, of course. Her safety and mine were unimportant compared to 
insuring the young duke's safety. The mystery had to be solved.
Anna picked up speed as she felt my new resolve. The assassin had quite a lead 
on us, but we caught up with him within half a mile. He ducked into a woods, 
trying to shake us, but it did him no good.
"We need a prisoner, Anna!" I shouted, as we approached him from the rear. She 
nodded okay. My thought was to hack off one of the horse's hind legs and then 
deal with the rider at our leisure. I never had a chance to, since Anna had 
similar ideas. She broke both of that animal's rear legs with her forehoofs. The 
horse went down in a heap. The rider flew over its head and stopped abruptly 
against a big tree trunk.
We dismounted in a hurry. The horse was still alive but the rider was not. He 
had both a caved-in forehead and a broken neck. One hundred percent overkill.
"Damn! Not a single prisoner."
"Your sword, Conrad! It went right through that knight's sword, and his helm and 
head as well!"
"Yes, it's quite a blade. I wish I knew how it was made." I bent to search the 
dead knight, hoping to find some clue to who he was.


Interlude Two
I hit the STOP button.
"Hey, Tom, how was that sword made?"
"It happens that I am well informed on that subject, seeing as how I invented 
the process and made that particular sword myself," he said smugly. "First you 
get a good quality Damascus steel blade, which, by the way, were mostly made in 
India. Damascus was nothing more than a distribution point. You split the blade 
in half the hard way, right down the middle, through the edge."
"How do you do that?"
"Simple. You line up a nonlinear temporal field just right, then send one half 
of the blade a few minutes farther forward in time than the other. This gives 
you perfectly smooth surfaces, and since you're working in a vacuum, those 
surfaces are pretty reactive, chemically. Then you put a thin slice of diamond 
between them, about a hundred angstroms thick. You get that by slicing it off a 
larger block, using the same temporal cutting technique as you used on the 
blade. Then you clamp this sandwich together at four thousand PSI for two 
hundred years in a hard vacuum at room temperature. This welds the pieces 
together without harming the crystalline structure of the steel. You end up with 
as perfect a sword as is possible, with a pure diamond edge."
"Uh-huh. Where did you get a block of diamond that big?"
"Simple. You just put a block of graphite somewhere at thirty million PSI and 
two thousand degrees for twenty thousand years. It's not as though you need a 
flawless, single crystal."
"Oh. Is that all. I should have known." I hit the START button.


Chapter Seven
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
Lady Francine was flushed. "That was very ... exciting, my lord."
"The first time you've seen combat? Well, try not to let it upset you." I was 
checking the dead man's pouch. Of course, nobody carried any ID in this age, but 
there might be something identifiable.
"I am not upset, I am ... excited. Take me, my lord. Please. "
"What? My lady, you don't know what you're saying. Look. Violence excites a lot 
of people sexually. It doesn't get me that way, but it's not uncommon. It's 
nothing to be ashamed of, but don't lose your head." I went over to dispatch the 
wounded horse, not looking at her.
"I know exactly what I am saying. Take me. Now."
"Here? Lady, besides the violence, you were just bouncing your butt on Anna's 
hindquarters * That can get you horny, too, but for physical rather than 
psychological reasons. Anyway, you're a virgin and--" I was still avoiding 
looking at her. I took out the wounded horse by cutting its head off. Then I 
checked its saddlebags. Nothing.
"I am a twenty-six-year old virgin and I know exactly what I am doing. Look at 
me. Please?"
I looked at her. She had stripped down to her slip, and was naked to the waist. 
Lord, what a magnificent body. I went over to her.
"You know I'm not the marrying kind. I can't promise-"
She put her arms around me. "Do not promise any thing, do not say anything, just 
take me. Do it now."
Well, the woods were fairly secluded and there is a limit as to how many times a 
normal man can say "no" to a beautiful woman. And if the violence and bouncing 
had turned her on, well, I have my hot buttons, too. One of my major ones 
involves holding a beautiful, passionate and nearly naked woman in my arms.
If she wasn't totally rational, well, neither was I. I pushed my own future 
regrets aside and took her, with a dead horse on one side of us and a dead man 
on the other. But the taking of a virgin is a time-consuming affair, if one is 
not to be a total klutz about it, and it was over an hour before we sat up on 
the woodland moss.
I noticed a knight in the duke's colors sitting a hundred yards from us with his 
back turned.
Embarrassing as hell. Once we were dressed, I shouted, "Okay! You can turn 
around now! What are you doing here?"
"My lord, I was sent with others by the duke to see to your safety and come to 
your aid, though when we found you we thought our assistance might not be 
welcome. We have reported your safety to the duke, and have your other rewards 
of combat, that is to say, your booty, packed and ready for transport." His left 
arm was bandaged, but it didn't seem to bother him.
"Thank you, I suppose. Did you report what we were doing to the duke?"
"It was needful, my lord, since he asked about the delay."
Great. The rumormongers would be going for months over this one. Yet Lady 
Francine didn't look the least bit embarrassed. She looked as if there were 
canary feathers on her mouth.
"I take it that the duke is at my boat?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Then we'll be going there now. Clean up the rest of this mess," I said, 
gesturing to the dead knight and horse. "And then bring it all to the boat. The 
duke will want to examine it."
"And after that, my lord?"
"After that, you can keep it. Divide the booty up among your fellow guards."
"Thank you, my lord, you are most generous! But then, you have taken a far 
greater reward for yourself."
"Shut your damn mouth!"
At the boat, the duke was smiling. "Well, Baron Conrad, they tell me that you 
killed all three would-be assassins, and with a lovely lady at your back, 
besides I"
"I killed one, your grace. Anna got two, and one of those was an accident. We 
were trying for a prisoner, but he was killed when his horse went down."
"A prisoner? But who would ransom an assassin? To do so would be to admit one's 
guilt!"
"I wasn't worried about a ransom, your grace. But the men who were trying to 
kill you were probably connected to whoever was behind the death of your father. 
"
"Yes. of course. Stupid of me. I think my father's death must have affected me 
more than I had thought. Well, I shall instruct my guards to try to capture 
assassins in the future, and if we can't identify the men you killed, I'll have 
their heads set on poles in the marketplace, across from St. Mary's Church, with 
a reward posted for any information about them. For now, your excellent Sir 
Tadaos has shown me around the boat during your absence, and I suggest that we 
take it out for a ride."
They had the booty on board before Tadaos could get a head of steam up. We went 
downstream to the limits of the duke's lands, halfway to Sandomierz, and then 
back past Cracow to East Gate. Lady Francine stayed close to me the whole while, 
but I stayed close to the duke, so she couldn't speak what was on her mind.
The duke tested all our weaponry himself, and was both impressed and troubled by 
it. He'd seen the swivel guns before, though this was the first time he'd fired 
one. The Halman Projectors were essentially steam-powered mortars, of a type 
that was used on merchant ships during WWII. We fired off a number of dummy 
rounds and one grenade. The peashooters were turret-mounted steam-powered 
machine guns. They worked as well on the boat as they had in the shop, with one 
problem. They drew so much steam that firing a single one of them noticeably 
slowed the boat. Something would have to be done, but I wasn't sure what.
What troubled the duke was that these weapons could rip up any group of mounted 
knights, and there wasn't much that conventional forces could do about it. And 
the duke's power was ultimately based on his knights.
"Good, Baron Conrad. We will need dozens, many dozens of these boats. With them, 
if the rivers be free of ice, you might stop the Tartars from killing my people. 
But in so saying, I am chanting the doom of my own kind."
"Not so, your grace. Poland will always need leaders and the land must have a 
king."
He looked at me strangely. "Yes. But who?"
I got off at East Gate and offered to have Tadaos run the duke back to Cracow. 
He said he preferred to ride back on his new mounts, and left. One of the guards 
made quick arrangements with Tadaos with regards to the bodies and booty, and 
Francine sent a note back with the guard concerning her servants and luggage.
Lady Francine stayed with me and seemed to take it for granted that she would 
continue to do so.
As soon as we were alone, I said, "I once asked you if you wanted to join my 
household. You know that offer still stands."
"To join your household? To be one among many?" 
"Not so many. Actually, you'd be one among two."
"Two. Do you mean that foreign woman?"
"Cilicia, yes. And you yourself are something of a foreigner here, my lady."
"I had hoped for something better."
"It's all that I have to offer, my lady. I couldn't dump Cilicia. She's heavy 
with my child. And I've told you that I'm not the marrying kind."
"I must think on it."
Well, she didn't seem to think much, but continued acting as if she owned me. We 
got back to Three Walls the next day and I introduced her around.
She'd met Cilicia a few dozen times when she was with the old duke, and always 
they had been cordial, even friendly with each other. Now all that was changed. 
You could see little lightning bolts flash between the two women, with plenty of 
fireworks and the occasional atomic blast!
It was an awkward, unpleasant situation, and I did my best to ignore it. I found 
myself working late in the shops and hoping that the ladies would come to some 
sort of an accommodation. I tried to be fair, and took them to bed on alternate 
nights, but their concept of fairness was different from mine. At last, I tried 
to sit them down together and get them to talk it out, but they both just sat 
there radiating hate.
After a month, Lady Francine rather stiffly thanked me for a pleasant visit and 
said that she was leaving for her estate. She stressed that I would always be 
welcome there, but that she would not be returning to Three Walls.
We gave her a nice sendoff, and I breathed a vast sigh of relief. Having the two 
most beautiful women in the country was nice, but it was not worth the total 
absence of domestic tranquility.
I think I must be growing old.
Yet ever after, I could not help but visit the countess at her manor, once or 
twice a month. And always I stayed the night.

FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI
In the summer of 1238, 1 married Alona and took Petrushka on as a "servant" as 
we'd agreed, and we was as happy as three people could be. The captain's cabin 
on my boat was bigger than a lot of the houses we'd all lived in, so that was no 
problem, and the girls just naturally took over the kitchens and all, just like 
the boat was a house.
I even got them both on the payroll, at two pence a day, each.
Most of that summer, while the people at East Gate was building a dozen new 
boats, we went up and down the Vistula and its tributaries, setting up small 
depots with the help of Boris Novacek, him with no hands, and his wife, Natasha.
The idea was to have a depot every twelve miles or so along all the rivers, 
where they'd buy and sell goods, or contract goods for shipment. Every one of 
these was to have a radio, once we got them, so we'd know when to stop, but for 
now they just ran up a flag.
'Course, once it started working, every boatman on the river started howling 
about how we was ruining them, since we was charging half what was usual. I kept 
telling people that if they could get through the Warrior's School, they could 
work on the steamboats, and maybe get one for their own. Well, a lot of them 
went to that school, and more than half of them got through it alive ' but we 
was always pressed for enough good boatmasters.
Yet I don't think we put anybody out of business. We collared the long-run 
trade, sure, but once we got going, there was just a whole lot more trade going 
on! The short-run stuff and running up small rivers kept all the boatmen busy 
enough.
But for me, the best part was the baron's strict orders that we wasn't to pay no 
tolls! He said that despite the fact that we was engaging in trade, this was a 
military craft engaged in defending the country. It was owned by a baron and 
commanded by a knight, and if anybody didn't like it, they could challenge me if 
they wanted to. Their boat against mine! Didn't nobody take me up on it, though, 
except maybe once.
There'd be their toll boat, out there and I'd come steaming past them just as 
smooth as you please, and I'd wave at them bastards as I went by.
Even that jackass Baron Przemysl had a toll boat out when we went up the 
Dunajec. Just like I was ordered, I explained why we wasn't to pay no tolls. 
'Course, I had to explain to them that I was the man they jailed for poaching 
some years back, and suggest to them what I felt about their morals and 
standards of cleanliness. They got abusive in return, and I decided that this 
was a sufficient affront to my knightly honor as to constitute a challenge. 
Anyhow, they wouldn't get out of my way, so I just ran the buggers down and 
dunked them. 'Course, they was wearing chain mail, and they didn't come back up 
again, but that was their problem and not mine.
I tell you that it was worth more to do that than all the money I got paid for 
doing it. No man ever said wrong about Baron Conrad when I was around, or at 
least not twice!
But there was a lot of petty nobles that wouldn't let us set up depots because 
of the way we didn't pay no tolls. They didn't bother Boris none. He just spread 
the word that we was paying to set up our depots this year, but next year we 
wouldn't. And the year after that, if anybody wanted a depot, they'd have to pay 
us.
And you know, some of them that wouldn't have us at first later on paid us to 
come. There was profit in having a depot on your land, and in time, a lot of 
them depots got a Pink Dragon Inn by them, and there was profit in that, too.
Well, come fall, both of my ladies was bulging, and they both had their kids 
within a week of Christmas. Now, I knew that that was only seven months from the 
time I met them, but the saying is that a kid takes nine months, except for the 
first one, which can take any time it wants to. I never said a thing about it to 
them, since a grown man knows when to keep his mouth shut. I knew when I had a 
good thing going, and I wasn't going to let a few little months upset it.
But after that, we tried to work it so only one of them got pregnant at a time.


Chapter Eight
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
By the fall of 1239, all the people who worked for me at any level above the 
bottom had gone through the Warrior's School, with the exception of a few like 
Boris Novacek, who had no hands. There was even a four-month winter school for 
the peasants on my new barony. Three years of it and they could be knighted. But 
a lot of men didn't make it through, and I had to be fairly brutal about weeding 
them out. Since they were sworn to me, I couldn't fire them for not passing, but 
I wouldn't let them stay on in any kind of a managerial capacity, either. 
Mostly, I just demoted them down to apprentice, no matter what their skill 
level, and I gave some of them plots of land and let them be peasants. Many took 
this pretty hard. Some people quit and there were even a few suicides, but I was 
adamant.
To keep in practice, everybody spent one day a week in military training. Not 
the same day, of course, since the factories had to keep running full blast if 
we were going to meet our production quotas.
I would have preferred a system where the men who worked together fought 
together, but there was just no way we could do that. In the factories, each 
section had people with specialized skills. If they were A off and in training 
on the same day, their machines would be idle.
As it was, most work teams had seven men, counting the leader, who was always 
knighted. The bottom rank was made up mostly of pages and squires. On any one 
day, five of them would be working, one would be at military exercises and one 
would be enjoying his day off.
This meant working Sundays, and I got a lot of flak about it, both from the men 
and from the Church. I tried to prove to them that what God meant was that they 
should spend one day a week in prayer and rest, and the original Sabbath was on 
Saturday, anyhow, but they were still mad at me. We tried juggling schedules, 
hoping to keep everybody happy, but that didn't work either.
On top of this, virtually every industrial job was worked in two shifts, one 
days and one nights, and that was another set of headaches.
Finally, I just threw a temper tantrum and said they could do it my way or they 
could leave. Very few quit.
We tried to keep the training as amusing as possible, with contests, races, and 
that sort of thing. To a certain extent, we were successful and military sports 
became the big game on campus. At Three Walls, these drills and games were 
generally held on the "killing ground" in front of the walls. This was where we 
held our portion of the yearly Great Hunt, the harvesting of the wild animals on 
our lands. It was a great alluvial, fan shaped area, almost a mile to the side, 
and was surrounded by a vast tangle of Japanese roses, fully five yards high and 
twice that thick. Barbed wire would have been inferior as a military defense!
It wasn't only the men who did military training. The women had their duties as 
well, concentrating on defending the walls. They got proficient with the swivel 
guns on the outer wall, as well as with grenades. They didn't work out with the 
pike or halberd, the usual woman's arms being a little weak to handle these big 
weapons, but most of them were decent with a rapier.
Lady Krystyana became a master swordswoman, always winning the women's 
championship and outfencing me most of the time. She seemed to get a special 
thrill out of scoring on me, I suppose in revenge for all the years I'd spent 
sticking it to her.
But these exercises were a problem for the night shift, since despite fudging 
things by an hour or two, most of their training day happened in the dark.
Sir Ilya was my night shift manager at Three Walls. He had wanted this job 
because his wife was incapable of sleeping in the day, and the arrangement 
suited him. He just got a bunk in night shift bachelors' quarters and mostly 
ignored her, despite my orders to the contrary. After a year of being ignored, 
she ran away with Count Lambert's blacksmith to places unknown. It was two weeks 
before Ilya noticed it, and then only when he checked his account at the bank. 
Not that he tried to find her, or replace her, or even take on a "servant." A 
bachelor's life suited him.
But despite his marital problems, Ilya took his work seriously, and if military 
duties were part of his job, he did it. But he did it in his own way.
He figured that what we needed was a special group of men trained to fight at 
night. He even named them "The Night Fighters." As a group, they worked out the 
techniques for silent fighting in the dark. I helped them where I could, mostly 
telling them about commando stuff I'd seen in the movies, but they got good at 
it. They learned to walk quietly in total darkness, the leader signaling the men 
behind him with a string they all held in their left hands. They practiced with 
the knife and with the garrote, their version of which was a steel wire with a 
couple of wooden spools and a strange, one way slipknot. I think it might have 
been the world's first disposable weapons system. It only worked once. But since 
you weren't likely to miss with one, once was enough.
And they played games, just like the day shift, only different. One of their's 
was "steal the pig." This was played with a live pig, one scheduled for 
tomorrow's supper, since the pig often did not survive the game. It was played 
in pitch darkness, and if there was a moon out, they'd play it in a basement. 
The pig wore a harness around its body which was tied to a pole with a three 
yard rope. A lance of seven men was assigned to guard it and another lance was 
given the task of stealing it. It was played in full armor, and no weapons were 
allowed except on the pig. After that, anything went! Real class was to steal 
the pig without the guards knowing it was gone, but decking them all out cold 
was fair.
Games of this type put a premium on quiet motion, which wasn't easy in 
regulation plate armor. They naturally got to working on the armor. I told them 
that we could not possibly make new stamping dies, not this late in the game, so 
they worked within those limitations. What they came up with was a set of 
armored coveralls. It used the same pieces as our standard armor, but each piece 
fit into a sort of pocket sewn in the garment. Baggy when you first put them on, 
they had zippers up the sides and on all four limbs which snugged them up 
properly. Where the plate armor couldn't cover, as on the armpits and on the 
inside of the knees and elbows, pieces of chain mail were sewn in.
One of the beauties of this design was that you could get into it in a hurry. It 
took a quarter-hour for a man to arm himself with our standard armor. With 
Night-Fighter armor, it was a matter of a minute.
Another problem with any plate armor was that it didn't breath. Steel is 
impervious to air. This was no problem in the winter, when we normally wore 
quilted goose-down long underwear, but in the summer, you could suffocate in 
there, and cases of heat exhaustion and even heatstroke were all too common.
They worked out a system of forced ventilation. In the summer, you wore a set of 
thin linen long johns that had zippers all over the place. These zippers matched 
up with zippers on the inside of the armored coveralls. Since the armor was 
about a finger's width bigger than you were, all around, the result was a number 
of separate compartments all over you. The front of your shin was one 
compartment and the back of it was another. There were valves, simple flaps 
covering holes, at the knees and ankles, such that cool air could come in at the 
ankles and go out at the knees. As you walked, you naturally moved around inside 
this oversized armor, and this motion pumped cool air in the bottom and hot air 
out the top. Since there were eighteen of these compartments around your body, 
you stayed reasonably cool. Not like you'd be in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, 
but cases of heat exhaustion became rare.
They did talk me into a summer helmet, which resembled a Chinese coolie hat, and 
we tooled up for that.
Their system was so superior to what we had that I made it the army standard, 
for the men anyway.
There wasn't much to setting up for the new armor. A number of conventional 
knights were looking for something for their peasants to do as a winter 
money-maker, so we set them up sewing armor coveralls.
I'd originally issued the same armor to the women that I had to the men, but the 
girls didn't like it. It had to be of the same thickness as the men's or it 
wouldn't be able to stop an arrow, and they said it was too heavy.
Since they would be fighting only from the walls, where the parapet protected 
them from the waist down, they soon discarded the leg armor. They said that the 
gauntlets made it hard to operate a gun, so they got rid of them, too. But the 
man's sword had only a small hand guard, about what you'd find on a Japanese 
sword, since the men wore steel gloves. Without authorization, the girls got the 
shop to tool up a special big hand guard, like they put on a modem epee.
And the standard breastplates. No style at all! Completely without my 
permission, special tooling was made, thirty-two expensive dies in all, just to 
satisfy them.
Now their breastplates had breasts on them.
And having done that, they thought that it was prettier polished and shiny, so 
they didn't go the practical coverall route. They'd even come up with a 
zowie-looking helmet with a Greek-style crest on it when I put my foot down. 
There was no face guard, and it didn't protect the neck at all, since the girls 
wanted their hair to show! I ranted and swore that this was a stupid design and 
a stupider waste of resources. They said. yes, sir. You're right, sir. We'll do 
it your way, sir.
Then two months later they were all wearing these new helmets!
I never could find out who made the dies, since they knew I would have fired the 
bastard, and the production schedules on the stamping presses showed no time 
allotted to the silly things. How they got them made, I don't know, but soon the 
ladies at all the other installations were in the new outfits, too.
But you try holding back a bunch of women when they get a bright idea.
Then to top it all off, the duke saw the ladies' helmets and thought that, 
gold-plated, they'd be just the thing for a ceremonial guard! I managed to talk 
him out of it. They wouldn't have fit a man, anyway, a female's head being much 
smaller than a male's. Darned if I was going to let any more draw dies be made.
Strange to say, despite its obvious advantages, the new coverall armor didn't 
catch on with the conventional knights.
Of course, during all this time, we'd been selling plate armor at decent prices 
to anyone who wanted to buy from us. Well, we wouldn't have sold to a Mongol, 
but none of them applied. But after three years of selling polished plate armor, 
it was all the rage among the hawking and hunting set. While our troops were 
discovering camouflage paint, they wanted to shine. There was nothing we could 
do about it, so we let them have their own way.
Another thing the Night Fighters did was with the swivel guns. They put a big 
pie plate of a flash suppressor at the muzzle of the gun. This did two things 
for them. For one thing, it stopped the muzzle flash from blinding the gunner at 
night. For another, it reflected all of the light forward, and they worked out a 
system where each gunner fired just after the man to his left. This let him aim 
by the flash of light caused by the last gun going off. From a distance, it 
looked like a string of chase lights on a theater marquis, but they got 
reasonably accurate with the system. Flash suppressors soon became standard for 
all our swivel guns.
Innovation was the name of the game at Eagle Nest, where a sturdy band of very 
young men were busily conquering the skies. Actually, they were getting too 
innovative, and I had to work at converting their efforts from research to 
production.
They had started out with motorless sailplanes, and their aircraft showed that 
heritage. The wings were long and thin, the bodies long and sleek. They were all 
highwinged, since I'd always been aiming at observation craft, and even with 
motors, they still had to be catapult launched.
This catapult was built on top of an ancient, manmade hill about six dozen yards 
high, probably some sort of prehistoric defensive structure. The hill was 
conical, with a flat spot on top about two dozen yards across. We built a low, 
circular concrete wall, and the catapult rode on this wall, so as to point into 
the wind. The catapult itself was a wooden ramp, six dozen yards long and 
angling upward at a half-hour angle. A rope ran from the back of the catapult to 
a pulley at the front, then back halfway to the center where it went over 
another pulley and then was attached to a massive concrete weight that was hung 
over a well we'd dug in the hill.
To launch, a plane was hauled up the hill and loaded onto the catapult. Then 
four dozen boys walked up to the front of the catapult, grabbed the rope, and 
hauled it back to the plane. With practice, they got so they could launch a 
dozen planes an hour this way.
But instead of building a few dozen planes of the best design we had and "fine 
tuning" them, they wanted to continue designing whole new ones. Part of the 
problem was that I'd once mentioned that a canard-type plane, with the propeller 
in back and the elevator forward of the wing was more efficient than the 
conventional design, but that these planes were too difficult for us to design 
and fly. The boys took that as a challenge, and Count Lambert was on their side. 
It took me three temper tantrums, and them four deadly wrecks, before they went 
into production on a standard, conventional aircraft.
Even with that, crack-ups were so frequent that they rarely had three planes 
ready to fly at any one time, and the price they willingly paid in lives still 
gives me nightmares.


Chapter Nine
About this time, we began to notice that there wasn't enough money to go around. 
I don't mean that we were spending more than we made. Far to the contrary! Our 
products were being sold all over Europe, and the local currency had become a 
hodgepodge of pennies, deniers, pfennigs, and what have you, minted in dozens of 
different places. In theory, all these coins were of the same value, but in 
fact, their weight and silver content varied all over the map.
But despite this influx of foreign coins, there still wasn't enough to go 
around. I was converting Poland from a barter economy to a money economy. 
Peasants who had rarely needed or even seen money in their lives suddenly found 
that they wanted money to buy the things we sold, and that they could get money 
by selling their crops, now that the railroads and steamboats were operating and 
they could get those crops to market. The lack of silver coin was causing a 
serious deflation, and the prices of things were dropping precipitously.
I, of course, had all kinds of money, and at first I tried to counteract the 
deflation by raising the pay scales of the people who worked for me. I kept the 
bottom rate the same, a penny a day, since we always had a waiting list to get 
in, even with the military-training requirement. But after that, pay doubled 
with each promotion. There were three grades of non-managerial workers, 
warriors, pages, and squires, earning one, two, and four pence respectively, and 
from then on, well, a man could get rich working for me.
But it didn't help the deflation a bit. Most of the extra pay was spent in my 
stores and my inns, or left in my bank. Very little of it got out to the general 
public.
Then I tried buying things I didn't really need, mostly land. I started buying 
up land along the rivers because I had some vague ideas of one day building a 
series of forts along them. But not that much land was for sale, and buying land 
was not as easy as it would be in the twentieth century. There were all sorts of 
encumbrances involved, oaths of fealty, requirements of military service, the 
rights of the peasants living there, strange taxes, and what not. I managed to 
get out of most of these-but not peasants' rights-with one-time cash payments, 
yet it did not cure the major problem that I was trying to solve. When I bought 
land from some nobleman, he usually spent the money to buy the things that my 
factories were making! He wanted arms and armor, glass windows, and indoor 
plumbing. The money came right back to me and the deflation continued!
Furthermore, I couldn't resist making the land I'd bought productive and 
profitable.
Surely, this was a problem that no capitalist ever had to cope with!
Charity work was another matter. With the assistance of Abbot Ignacy and his 
monks, I worked hard at helping the poor. We set up soup kitchens in the major 
cities and a large leper colony on an isolated estate that I'd bought. But the 
engineer in me hates waste, and the waste of human potential is the worst sort.
Many of the poor were that way simply because they could not find honest work, 
so I gave it to them. I set up non-army construction groups to build railroads 
and bridges. They were supervised by army personnel, of course, since there 
weren't many trained, technically competent people outside it. We were running 
tracks as fast as the blast furnaces could cast them, and most of our lines were 
double-tracked, so we didn't have to worry much about scheduling. With a 
single-tracked line, you have to make sure that a train isn't coming north 
before you take yours south. Double tracks can be treated just like a highway.
Some of the poor were children, orphans. We set up an adoption service, and many 
of these kids were adopted by army families. Some of the poor were old or 
feeble. In the cities we set up factories that turned out knitted goods, much of 
which were bought by the army. We always needed socks and underwear.
Undoubtedly, all of this did a great deal of good for the people. I think it 
made me something of a people's hero. At least they insisted on cheering 
whenever I was around, though in fact I would have preferred some peace and 
quiet. And what do you do when children and old women insist on kissing your 
boot, for God's sake! It was embarrassing. I got to giving a standard speech, 
thanking them, but saying that I didn't like people yelling at me, and if they 
wanted to do anything for me, they could pray in church for my soul, which 
needed it. It didn't help much. Most people would rather yell than pray.
Yet the prices kept on dropping and my coffers stayed full. Even feeding the 
indigent, we had to buy from the farmers, and the farmers made enough money to 
buy our plumbing supplies and glass windows. Raising my prices didn't help 
either. They just bought less, but spent the same amount of money, so I put 
prices back where they had been.
I In the middle of this charity work, Abbot Ignacy became His Excellency Ignacy, 
Bishop of Cracow, and he stepped lightly from the regular clergy to the secular 
branch of the Church. How much I had to do with this promotion, I don't know.
Despite his elevation, Bishop Ignacy remained my confessor, and I made a point 
of seeing him at least once a month. He had traded in his humble monk's robe for 
the glorious raiment of his new office, but he wore his embroidered silks and 
velvets with the casualness with which he had treated his old brown smock when 
we had camped along the river, so many years ago. His new office, in his palace 
near Wawel Cathedral, was as ornate as a church altar, with brightly painted 
carved wood encrusting the walls and ceiling, but he had moved one of our 
standard wooden desks into it, the sort that our cabinet shop turned out by the 
gross.
"Ah, Conrad! Have you come to confess again? Have I told you how much I like 
these desks you've designed? What with all the drawers, I can keep everything at 
hand. I've recommended them to all my priests."
"Uh, yes, no, and thank you, your excellency." I made a mental note to have a 
special desk made that would match his office, rather than looking like a 
computer in a church.
"Oh, 'Father' is sufficient when we are alone, Conrad. Did I tell you that there 
is word on the inquisition the Church is conducting in your regard?"
Ever since arriving in this century, an inquisition had been hanging over my 
head. The Church was trying to decide if I was an instrument of God, perhaps to 
be canonized, or an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. I 
couldn't help being a little anxious about it.
"What has happened, Father?"
"Well, you recall that when first you came to this century, I wrote up all the 
particulars quite diligently and presented them to my abbot. He, in turn, 
quickly annotated my report and within the month sent it to this very office. 
The bishop of that time felt that the matter would best go through the regular 
branch of the Church, rather than the secular, so he sent it back to my abbot 
with that recommendation. My abbot then sent it to the home monastery as soon as 
someone could be found who was going in that direction, and the speed and 
diligence of all concerned was such that the home monastery in Italy was able to 
reply back to us within the year."
"Yes, Father, but--"
"But the home monastery was sure that this was a matter for the secular branch, 
so my abbot sent the report, with notations, back to the Bishop of Cracow. But 
by this time, you had established yourself in Silesia, which of course is in the 
Diocese of Wroclaw. The Bishop of Cracow therefore sent the report to the Bishop 
of Wroclaw, who forwarded it to the Archbishop at Gniezno. From there, it was 
sent to Rome, with further notations. Rome then replied with a request that the 
Abbot of the Franciscan monastery here confirm the report. By this time, 
however, I was that very personage, and having all the facts at my fingertips, 
as it were, I was quickly able to comply, and provided an update on all your 
doings."
How could I forget that? After three years, all that had happened was that 
Father Ignacy had written a letter to himself, and then he had replied to it!
"Yes, Father, but-"
"Now, since all this had transpired within a few years, you can see that the 
matter was being pushed forward as quickly as possible. But then several years 
went by in which I heard nothing, so I took it on myself to write a letter of 
inquiry to Rome. As it turned out, my reply to the report had somehow gone 
astray somewhere between Gniezno and Rome, no one has any idea what happened to 
it, and the merchant who carried it was never seen again. Fortunately, the 
Archbishop of Gniezno had caused to be made a true copy of the entire annotated 
report for his files. A copy of this was made and again it was sent to Rome. 
Rome's reply returned through proper channels only a week ago, and it orders 
that a full inquiry be made by the Bishop of Cracow, who at this time again 
happens to be me. Of course, I complied immediately, and a full report is again 
on the way to Rome, through channels, of course."
So Father Ignacy had for a second time answered his own report! And nothing of 
significance had transpired in seven years! It made me want to scream and pull 
out my hair! But, with work, I kept my cool.
"So Rome still doesn't know much about me, Father?"
"How can you say that, Conrad? They've seen my reports, haven't they? They also 
subscribe to the magazine you started and get a copy of it every month! People 
are learning Polish just to be able to read it! Your books and plumbing supplies 
are all the rage in Rome, and everyone there has one of your lighters! Of course 
they know about you!"
I sighed. After Confession, I mentioned that I was going over to the monastery 
to talk to the artist, Friar Roman.
"Then I've saved you a trip, Conrad. I brought Roman over with me, I think 
mostly to keep an eye on him. He had been using the wealth he gained from 
designing church windows to hire young ladies as models, and was posing them 
most immodestly!"
"In most cultures, your excellency, that would be considered an artist's 
prerogative."
"Not in my church, it isn't! What did you want to see him about?"
"Lithography. It's another printing process, well suited to art work. We have 
accurate maps of much of Poland now, and I need many copies made of each. I have 
a new machine almost ready at Three Walls, and I want to teach him how to use 
it, since it takes an artist:"
"Three Walls would be just fine, Conrad. Take him for as long as you need him. 
But you keep that boy away from Okoitz! If it was in my diocese, there'd be some 
changes made there, I assure you!"
"Yes, Father."
Friar Roman was delighted to get out from under Bishop Ignacy's thumb, and 
caught the next boat to Three Walls.
The deflation was still troubling me, and I finally realized that to inflate the 
economy back to its previous levels, I was going to have to add new money to the 
system. With the duke's permission, I started making my own coins, with his 
likeness on one side and a Polish eagle on the other. For some years, we had 
been refining zinc and calling it "Polish Silver." No one had paid much mind, 
but the fact was that we were the only people in the world that had this 
technology. I made it a secret technology.
The only problem was that to use zinc for coinage, I had to drastically raise 
its price. I could sneak it into the brass, since very few people realized that 
brass was an alloy of copper and zinc. They acted like it was a separate metal. 
But the price of pure zinc items had to go up and the price of galvanized iron 
skyrocketed to the point that sales went way down.
I wrote a series of articles for our magazine, explaining the cause of the 
deflation and what I intended to do about it. My alchemist, Zoltan Varanian, 
made an analysis of the silver content of each of the six dozen supposedly 
identical coins that were in circulation, and I published it. The silver content 
of those coins varied from forty percent down to as little as three percent!
The result was economic chaos for a half year. But at the same time, I came out 
with a series of zinc coins in various denominations. I rated zinc at one-sixth 
the value of pure silver, but the whole concept for different denominations was 
new, and it took some people a while to get used to it. But in our money system, 
with a few large coins you could buy a horse, and with the smallest, a kid could 
buy a piece of candy, something that was not possible before.
In one of my magazine articles, I made a serious oath that the content and 
weight of my coins would be absolutely constant, that we would trade any worn 
(but not clipped!) coin for a new one, and that we would trade our coins for 
standard silver coins on demand. "Polish Silver" caught on.
Then we started buying everything in sight! We bought land, we bought furs, we 
bought amber. We bought land in the Bledowska Desert, built huge granaries 
there, and set up a constant pricing system for purchases and sales, buying 
grain by the hundreds of tons! We even bought silver and gold. But mostly we 
bought land. In a few years, we owned most of the land within five miles of the 
Vistula, the Odra, and many of their tributaries. Once we had the time, I was 
going to ring Poland with a line of concrete forts!
But all this land aggravated some of my other problems. Besides being the owner, 
I had to be the police force and the judge as well. The police force wasn't a 
big problem, since I had set one up years ago. Whenever one of my bailiffs had a 
problem he couldn't handle, he called in a detective. And now that these men 
were partnered with Anna's progeny, their arrest rate was near perfect. The Big 
People could smell out a thief or a murderer every time.
Most of the other Big People were working carrying the mails, and the speed of 
mail transport was doubled. After the first few months, we started using them 
without riders, and except for some astounded travelers, there wasn't a hitch.
But what I needed now was some judges and lawyers, and the man I knew who was 
most knowledgeable of the law was Sir Miesko. He had been my next door neighbor 
for years. Well, his manor was six miles away from mine, but that's the way 
these things went. He was my assistant Master of the Hunt, and in fact ran the 
thing on all the duke's lands. He got all the furs taken each fall, and this had 
made him rich. He had once been my biggest vendor. providing food for Three 
Walls, but now was one of my best customers. He'd built a truly fine castle 
using my building supplies, and many of the features of my own defensive works, 
like the combination granary and watchtower, were invented by him.
He'd been a legal clerk, the closest local equivalent to a lawyer, before he was 
knighted for valor, so I asked him to head up my legal department.
"I'd like to, Baron Conrad, but I just can't. The Great Hunt takes up a lot of 
my time, and running my manor takes up more. You know that all of my boys have 
joined your army instead of helping me out around here, and, well, I'm just not 
as young as I used to be."
"Damn. I can see your point, though. Okay, if not you, then who? Do you know a 
truly honest man who knows the law?" I said.
"That's a hard one, Baron. Somehow, the more a man knows about the law, the less 
he seems inclined to obey it! But yes, one man comes to mind. He's only a few 
years younger than I am, but he doesn't have my responsibilities. We worked 
together in my youth, and we've kept in touch. Adam Pulaski, he's your man."
So I got in touch with this Pulaski. I set him up with three younger men, one to 
act as prosecutor, one to be defender, and one to be court recorder. I sent them 
out to take over my case load. I had to approve all their actions, of course, 
and any capital offenses had to be taken to my liege lord, Count Lambert, but 
they were the start of the army court system.
Before the Mongol invasion, prices were back up to Where they had been before I 
had arrived. After that, we just watched the prices of a dozen common 
commodities, and if the average price got too low, we brought it back up by 
making more coins and buying things we didn't need.


Chapter Ten
By the spring of 1240, 1 knew we'd be ready. The Warrior's School was completed, 
even though everybody was calling it "Hell" now. The main building was a mile 
square and six stories tall, surrounding a collection of mess halls, parade 
grounds, churches, huge warehouses filled to the rafters with military goods, an 
induction center, and even a synagogue.
I was surprised to find how many Jews I had working for me. The Jews were a new 
element in thirteenth-century Poland, most of them coming in with the Germans in 
their peaceful "invasion." There were no racial tensions at the time, mostly 
because the Christians were rarely aware of the Jews. In fact, most people 
didn't even know of their existence as a separate religious group, lumping them 
in with other foreigners.
But most work crews were eager to get them when they could. Jews were perfectly 
willing to work on Sunday, providing they could get Saturday off, or Friday 
night in the case of night-shift workers. The vast majority of my people were 
Catholics, and the more Jews in your crew, the better your chances were of 
getting Sunday off.
A delegation of rabbis had once come to me, asking if they could set up a ghetto 
at Three Walls, the way they were being set up in the increasingly 
German-dominated cities. I wouldn't do it.
I would like to make it clear that these ghettos were not slums where the 
unfortunate were stuffed to get them out of the way. The ghetto was a portion of 
the city where Jewish Law, rather than Christian Law, was practiced. In the 
ghetto, the Jews had their own council, their own schools, their own courts, and 
what amounted to their own police force. Furthermore, there were special courts 
to handle problems between Jews and Catholics, and an attempt was made to keep 
these fair. The ghetto was a privilege that the Jews sought and paid cash for.
In the world I grew up in, and I am becoming convinced that it was a different 
world than that which I am now living in, the Jews came to Poland at about the 
same time, and settled in the cities.
There is a natural animosity between city dwellers and rural people. Before the 
days- of movies and television, they lived in such totally different 
environments that neither comprehended the lifestyle of the other.
Yet each needed the products of the other. The cities needed food and the 
countrymen needed the manufactured goods of the cities. They traded, but each 
soon felt that the other was out to cheat him, and so retaliation seemed the 
sensible thing to do. Once this started to happen, the myth had become truth, a 
self-fulfilling prophecy.
When this difference in lifestyles was added to differences in language, 
differences in customs, and differences in religion, these animosities naturally 
were accentuated. There were even differences in political allegiances, for many 
cities within the political boundaries of Poland became members of the Hanseatic 
League, and no longer swore allegiance to the Polish Crown.
And in Silesia, the countrymen were Polish, the nobles were sworn to the German 
Holy Roman Empire and mostly spoke German, and the cities were allied with the 
Nordic Hans! And part of each city was yet another separate political entity, 
the Jewish ghetto! A crazy system, yet it survived for centuries!
The truth is that the Jews in Poland maintained their separate culture for seven 
hundred years! They did not learn Polish, the language of the people around 
them, but continued speaking German, although in time their language drifted so 
far from standard German as to become a separate dialect, Yiddish.
The Jews called the people surrounding them goyim, cattle, and were sure that 
these farmers were out to poison them. And indeed, there were unscrupulous 
farmers who tried to make a quick profit. Not many, but some. The Jews 
overreacted with a ridiculously strict adherence to the biblical dietary codes, 
having a religious leader inspect all food eaten, and cheated a dumb farmer 
whenever possible.
In the early thirteenth-century Poland, Jewish dietary rules were not nearly as 
evolved as they became later.
The countrymen became convinced that the Jews stole Christian babies for 
sacrifice at their religious services. This was of course not true, but a few 
Jews did engage in kidnapping Christians and selling them as slaves to the 
Moslems, a thing that Christians generally could not do since the Moslems 
usually refused to trade with Christians.
Without a basis of mutual understanding, the actions of a few criminals became 
"what everybody knows."
Having said all this, I must point out that Poland was the best place in Europe 
for a Jew to be, at least up until World War Two. Everywhere else, it was worse. 
The Jews were thrown out of England, France, Spain, and many other countries. 
All their property was confiscated, and many of their people were killed. This 
never happened in Poland, at least not until Poland itself was conquered by 
foreign powers. There has always been an official policy of toleration, no 
matter what most people actually felt.
Separate peoples, hating each other and misunderstanding each other, they lived 
together because they needed each other.
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 
the 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 counting 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.
Yet he wasn't at all what I had expected. He didn't look like a Mongol! He did 
not have slanty, black eyes * They were green and Caucasoid. His skin, under the 
dirt, looked to be white, rather than yellow, and his hair was not black. It was 
red! And none of his men were "Mongoloid" either.
I Rather than answer the man, the duke glanced at me, so I said, "That's quite a 
statement. Why should we want to do such a thing?"
"Why? You will do it because you want to live!"
"We've been doing a pretty good job of living without the khan. Why should we' 
want that to change?" He wasn't using any honorifics on me, so I didn't see why 
I should use them on him.
"You talk like a fool or a crazy man! All men must submit to the kakhan!"
"I'm a crazy man? I hope you realize that your last few statements sound like 
those of a rampant megalomaniac. But I repeat my question. Why should we want to 
do something as silly as bowing down to your kaka?"
"That's kakhan, you fool, and you will submit or our swords will take all your 
heads!" He drew his sword for emphasis. Apparently, he felt that I wasn't 
playing my role properly.
"Oh. With swords like that? May I see it?" He handed it to me. It was good 
Damascus steel, better than what most of the conventional knights carried. But I 
couldn't let him get one up on us.
"A pretty handle," I said. "Where did you steal it?"
"I won that blade at the Battle of Samarkand, when the fools there refused 
submission ' "
"Well, that's a bit far to go. Mine only has an iron hilt. May I test them?"
"Destroy your blade if you want!"
I drew my own sword. Setting the tip of his blade to the marble floor, I shaved 
a thin wire of steel off the edge of his sword.
"The edge is soft," I said, throwing the wire to him. Then I put my blade tip to 
the floor, edge up, and swung at it with his. His blade was cut in two. "The 
shank was weak. Next time, don't steal a sword because of its flashy mountings." 
I tossed the pieces back to him:
The emissary was livid. This was not going as planned. "It is not weapons that 
win, it is the men behind the weapons!"
"You know, I've been saying that for years. That's why I know that we have 
nothing to fear from you people."
"The kakhan has the finest army in the world!"
"He has a bunch of undisciplined goat herders, suitable only for murdering 
helpless women and children. True warriors need not fear them."
"Undisciplined? You lie! Choose three of my men."
"If you wish. That one, that one, and that one." I'd picked the three most 
gaudily dressed of his entourage, and I think I picked right. I must have 
singled out someone pretty important, since a trickle of sweat went down the 
ambassador's cheek. I could see him weighing the loss of face against the loss 
of someone special. Face lost out.
"The first man you picked is Subotai Bahadur. He, like me, is sworn to report to 
Batu Khan. You must pick another. "
"As you like. How about that pretty little guy on the end?" I later found out 
that this man was the ambassador's son, but the father didn't bat an eye.
He spoke briefly to the three men in what must have been Mongolian. Then he 
said, "I have just ordered these men to cut their own throats, as a 
demonstration of their loyalty and obedience to the kakhan!"
And those three men did it! One after another, they stepped forward, said some 
sort of prayer, drew their belt knives, and cut their own throats! There were 
gasps of horror and disbelief from the audience. I glanced at the duke and he 
looked a little pale.
If word of this got around, Polish morale would suffer. I couldn't let them 
outdo us, but I wasn't going to see if any of my men felt suicidal! So I laughed 
at him.
"Well, don't feel too bad about it," I said. "We have crazy people in this 
country, too. Of course, we try not to show them off in public when company is 
calling, but I suppose that customs differ. How about that one? Would he cut his 
throat, too?"
"Any true Mongol would obey orders!"
"Then let's see it!"
And damned if he didn't order it and the poor bastard ended up bleeding on the 
floor along with the others.
"And how about that one?" I said.
"What are you trying to do?" screamed the ambassador.
"Well, I figured that if we could get every Mongol to cut his fool throat, we 
wouldn't have to fight a war next spring." The room exploded in laughter.
"Were I not forbidden by my lord Batu to fight, I would kill you here and now!"
"It wouldn't be much of a fight, especially since you don't have a sword 
anymore. Why, any of our women could beat any of your fools with a sword. Even 
little Krystyana over there could take on any one of you, and she's had six 
children."
"Could 1, my lord? Could I really fight him?" Krystyana said as she eagerly 
stepped out from the crowd. She was in court dress and so of course was unarmed, 
but she had borrowed her husband's sword with such vigor that Sir Piotr had a 
thin trickle of blood running down from his left ear.
"Well, I was just talking, Lady Krystyana. This is a diplomatic meeting, and not 
the place for a fight."
"Ah! You make a foolish boast and then you try to wiggle out of it! I say that 
you must back up your boast!"
"I suppose, if you insist. Sir Piotr, what do you say about this? She's your 
wife, after all."
"My lord, when she's in this mood, I've found it's best to let her have her own 
way."
"Very well then, pick your best swordsman," I said to the ambassador.
"Let the lady choose her own executioner," he said with a greasy smile.
"I want that one," Krystyana said. "He's wearing the most gold, and I get it 
when I win, don't I?"
"To the victor goes the spoils, my lady," I said.
"Good! Of course, I can't fight in this silly outfit!" She said, as she stripped 
her clothes off. The Mongols were all wearing armor and she was proposing to 
fight naked!
At this time, Poland didn't have a nudity taboo, so a naked lady wasn't all that 
unheard of, but the duke had let it be known that he wanted a complete coverup 
in his own court, and thus far, no one had ever dared defy him. I glanced at the 
duke again, but he just looked up at the coffered ceiling.
The Mongol acted as if he was just going to walk up and murder her. Krystyana 
parried his blow easily and gave him a horizontal cut on the forehead.
This startled the man, and he started hacking in earnest. It got him nowhere. He 
might have been good at saber fighting on horseback, but his footwork was almost 
nonexistent. The parries used on horseback are different from those used on 
foot, and are slower, since on a horse you have the animal's neck between your 
legs and it gets in the way.
But mostly, he'd never seen a rapier before, whereas Krystyana had often fought 
rapier against saber. She'd beaten me that way quite a few times.
So she played with him. She added a vertical cut to the one horizontal one on 
his forehead, making a perfect Christian cross. Then she put a cross on each 
cheek, and during all this had not taken a cut herself.
She was making the Mongol look like a buffoon, which was wonderful. She was 
savvy enough to realize that we had to take people's minds off the dead bodies 
on the floor.
The crowd was going wild, and the ambassador was turning livid purple.
"She's making a Christian out of him!" Piotr yelled.
"Does that count as a Baptism?" somebody shouted.
"No! That's Extreme Unction!" another wit called back.
"Krystyana, didn't your mother tell you not to play with your food?" yelled 
someone else.
She was working at cutting the Mongol's armor off when I said, "I think you've 
made your point, Lady Krystyana. Kill him and be done with it."
"Yes, my lord. On the count of four! One! ... Two' ... Three! . . . "
And she skewered him, straight through the heart, on the count of four. Then she 
bowed to the duke and to the crowd, picked up her clothes, and retired. The 
applause rocked the castle!
I turned to the ambassador. "With regards to your request for submission, the 
answer is no."
"And who are you, to say this thing? What is your name and station?"
"I am Baron Conrad Stargard."
"What! I have been talking to a mere baron?"
"Surely you didn't expect our duke to dirty his lips by talking to such as you? 
I'm the lowest ranking man up here!"
The Mongols turned and left, leaving their dead on the floor.
The duke stood and motioned for me to follow. Once we were alone in his privy 
chamber, he turned and glared at me.
"Damn you, Conrad! I asked you to conduct a preliminary interview, not to set 
policy for me!"
"Yes, your grace. I guess I sort of got carried away."
"You 'sort of got carried away'? Were my father still on the throne, you would 
be carried away in a coffin!"
"Yes, your grace."
"Yes, your grace!' Is that all you can say?"
"Well, your grace, what other outcome could there have been? Surely you never 
considered submitting to them! You know what has happened to every other people 
that has done that. They make insatiable demands, require hostages, and ruinous 
tribute! Poland under the Mongols would be a living hell until they killed us 
all! Then it would be a dead one!"
"I know, I know. But there was no need to make them mad! You've told me that 
their plan is to simultaneously attack both Poland and Hungary. After what 
you've done, they just might come at us alone with all their forces! King Bela 
can put two knights in the field for every one that Poland can, and I include 
Sandomierz, Mazovia, and the Teutonic Knights as being with us!"
"Then maybe I've done some good, your grace. If I've made them mad enough, 
they'll go straight back to Batu Khan without talking to the other Polish 
powers. There was always the chance that they could have split us up, or talked 
some of the others into being neutral."
"That would never have happened, Baron. We may not be united, but we Poles would 
always stand together against a foreign aggressor."
"I hope you're right, your grace. But the Crossmen aren't Poles, they're Germans 
who have no great love for us. The Duke of Mazovia is a fourteen-year-old boy! 
Who can tell about a child?"
"Perhaps the Teutonic Knights are a cipher, but if the Duke of Mazovia's youth 
causes problems, they will be in the Other direction, entirely. He might rashly 
charge into certain slaughter, but he won't prove a coward."
"Yes, your grace."
"As to the Mongols, well, we'll talk to them again tomorrow."
At this point, a page knocked, entered and announced that the Mongol party had 
left Wawel Hill.
"Damn!" the duke said. "Baron Conrad, go after them and see what you can do 
about extending the negotiations."
"Yes, your grace," I said, fully intending to do just the opposite.
I had had my people dress, not in armor or even dress uniforms, but in civilian 
court garb, and our embroidered velvets shone in all the colors of the rainbow 
and then some. Some of the colors that Piotr wore had to be unique!
Since we were all riding Big People, we caught up with the Mongols within the 
hour.
"Hello, ambassador. You left without your honor guard!" I said.
"More of your insolence, Baron Conrad? You call this bunch of fops an honor 
guard? Why, none of you are in armor and half of you are women!"
"What's more, they're our better half Why should we need armor in our own 
country? None of our people would harm us and these woods were cleansed of 
wolves years ago. Haven't you ever been in a civilized country before?"
"I've seen silly fools before, riding sleek horses."
"Speaking of which, can those little ponies of yours run? What say we race, say 
from here to the River Bug."
His men had four spare mounts each and he could see that we didn't have any. He 
said, "Are you suggesting a wager, Baron?"
"Why not? Shall we say a bag of gold to the winner?"
He insisted on seeing my gold, but we made the bet. We soon left them in our 
dust. When we were about six miles ahead of them, we stopped by a brook and 
broke out a picnic supper. We were well into it before the Mongols caught up 
with us, their horses lathered with sweat.
"Care to join us, ambassador?" Krystyana shouted and waved. "There are plenty of 
leftovers!"
"A Mongol eats in the saddle!" The ambassador was not amused. They rode on.
We passed them again a while later, and I slowed down to chat. "I notice that 
you have changed horses already. Surely those little things can't be tired yet!"
"Changing horses is the custom of my people," he said stiffly.
"As you like," I said, "but it's obvious that this is not a fair contest. We'll 
try to make it more even."
With that, Anna and I went to the front of his column, circled ahead of it, ran 
back to the end, then back to the front again, literally running circles around 
them. The others in my party joined in the fun, laughing and shouting while the 
Mongols galloped stoically forward.
Toward dusk, we again left them behind, and when they caught up with us, we had 
a big campfire going, and Cilicia was dancing for us around it. Piotr and two of 
the Bankis were playing recorders and the rest of us were keeping time by 
beating on saddles and swords. A glass bottle of wine was being passed around. I 
was stretched out with my back to a tree.
Cilicia timed it such that they got a good eyeful of her magnificent nude body, 
then ended the dance by failing naked into my arms.
"Again you work to humiliate me," the ambassador said. "What manner of devil's 
spawn are you riding?"
"These? Why, they're just ordinary Christian horses. In fact, these are all just 
mares. We keep the stallions for battle, when you really need something big and 
fast. Haven't you seen good horses before?" I asked.
"We have fought Christians before. All the Russias do homage to us! But they did 
not have such animals as these!"
"Oh. Well, those were Orthodox Christians. We're Catholics. There's a 
difference."
"Your false gods have nothing to do with your horses!"
"Don't tell them that! They might get mad. They're all very religious," I said.
"Bah! They might be fast, but they would never last through a campaign. Sleek 
horses like those must eat grain! They'd starve if they had to travel across the 
steppes!"
"Well, we have a lot of grain for them to eat, but in fact they prefer fresh 
grass when they can get it. And in a pinch, they can eat darned nearly anything. 
Anna! Come here, girl!"
The ambassador looked astounded as Anna came up.
"Anna, this man doesn't think that you can get along without grain. Would you 
please eat that tree for him?"
Anna looked at the pine tree I'd pointed to, winced, and made an expression of a 
bad taste in her mouth. Then she looked wistfully at a young apple tree near by.
"Oh, okay. Eat the apple tree instead."
Before the dumbfounded Mongols, Anna and a few of her daughters ate that tree 
right down to the ground, biting off chunks of wood and chewing them up.
"Well," I said, "this has been a pleasant diversion, but we didn't bring our 
camping gear with us. There's an inn a dozen or so miles up the road, right on 
the River Bug. We'll wait for you there and collect on the bet."
"Mongols prefer to sleep under the stars!"
"Suit yourselves. You're welcome to the fire, but be sure to put it out when you 
leave. Forest fires, you know."
The Big People came when we called them. We saddled up while Cilicia put her 
clothes back on and galloped off into the pitch-dark night. Big People have the 
most amazing eyesight. They really can see in the dark.
It was another of my Pink Dragon Inns, one I hadn't visited before. The 
innkeeper promised to wake me when the Mongols arrived, but they never came. 
Later the next day we got word that they crossed over into Russia a few miles 
upstream.
"They cheated on their bet!" Sir Vladimir said.
"Don't worry," Sir Piotr said. "We'll collect in the spring."


Chapter Twelve
All the factories were idle and no one manned the machines. The mines were no 
longer functioning and the furnaces were cold. The farms no longer had farmers 
and the countryside looked abandoned.
Right on schedule. The winter of the war was coming and almost every able-bodied 
young man in southern Poland was training for combat. Our propaganda, appeals, 
and sometimes outright orders had borne fruit, and from all the lands controlled 
by the duke came a hundred thirty thousand new men to Hell. In a few weeks, a 
square mile of nearly empty buildings became the most populous city in Europe. 
Every skilled man I had was needed to train the new troops, and if we lacked 
some piece of military equipment, we would just have to do without it. There was 
no time to build more.
Squires and pages found themselves knighted and training their own lances of six 
men each. Knights were now knight banners and even captains, and above that we 
were hard-pressed to keep the command situation from becoming chaos.
Hell itself was chaotic, or at least it must have seemed so to the new men that 
arrived. There were big signs everywhere, but half of the new people couldn't 
read, and there was no time to teach them. We even got to painting some men's 
barracks number on their sleeve so that they could compare it with the numbers 
over the doors to find their bunks.
But somehow, arms and armor were issued and fitted, men were fed, and training 
went ahead full blast. There was very little skull work in the training schedule 
now; the men were not taught to read and write, and there was little mention 
made of strategy and tactics. We already had all the leaders that we were going 
to get, and we had only four months to train the men who would do most of the 
actual fighting.
It was drill and drill and drill, with pike and axe and gun. Even the sword was 
de-emphasized, since it takes years to make a swordsman. The new troops were 
issued axes as a secondary weapon. Most of these farmboys already knew how to 
use an axe.
And amid all this work, doing something that none of us had ever done before, 
dealing with six times as many people as we had ever handled before, trying to 
keep track of millions of details without the aid of a computer or even a decent 
bureaucracy, my liege lord, Count Lambert came visiting.
"Baron Conrad, there is a very serious matter that I wish to speak to you 
about."
"Yes, my lord?" Shit. A brand new steamboat had just sunk the first time it slid 
down the ways, six tons of battle-axes had been found to be improperly 
heat-treated, and we seemed to be out of size-five shin guards. What did he 
want?
"Can we speak privately?"
"Of course, my lord." I led the way back to my private office, leaving Piotr to 
track down the fifty-five cases of missing maps.
"It's my daughter, Baron Conrad. She's come to Poland, and I'm worried about 
her."
"Your daughter, my lord? I'd forgotten that you had one. Well, except for the 
children that you've gotten off your peasant girls-but I gather you aren't 
talking about one of them."
"No, no, of course not. I mean my real daughter, the child of my deceased wife."
"I'm sorry, my lord, but I hadn't even heard that your wife had died."
"I suppose that we can allow for the fact that you've been inordinately busy 
lately, and of course you never met the woman. She lived with her relatives in 
Hungary for her last eleven years, and of course our daughter was with her. But 
now that she is dead, my child has returned to me."
This sudden outbreak of parental love surprised me. I'd never known the count to 
get sentimental about anything before, and his habits with the girls at Okoitz 
were such that he must have fathered hundreds of children. Oh, he always made 
sure that the girl was married off properly, and with a decent dowry, but his 
interest always stopped at that point. Why bring the problem to me?
"I suppose that will make for some changes in your household, my lord, but I can 
assure you that children add a lot to a home. She'll doubtless be a great 
comfort to you as you grow older." Just smooth it all over with honeyed oatmeal, 
I thought. Sometimes that works.
"Well, there is that, but don't you see? She's not exactly a child anymore. 
She's a young woman! She's fourteen years old and it's my duty to find her a 
proper husband."
"That's certainly fine, Christian thinking, my lord, but why discuss it with an 
old, confirmed bachelor like me? Better you should go talk to all of your female 
relatives and have them be on the lookout for a suitable young man."
"You know that most of those old bitches don't like me, Conrad, and anyway, I 
know the man I'd want for my heir."
That was the first time in nine years that he had called me just "Conrad." I was 
beginning to get a very bad feeling about this conversation.
"What's this talk about an heir, my lord? You're barely over forty and you come 
from a long-lived family. Why, you'll probably live longer than your uncle the 
old duke did!"
"Lately, I have had a premonition of death. I feel it strongly, and I am 
worried." He shook his head.
"We're all concerned about the invasion, my lord. Any of us could fall in 
battle, but a knight doesn't worry about that sort of thing, does he? Anyway, if 
you've come for my advice about your daughter, it's to let the girl pick her own 
future husband. She'll be a lot happier that way, and it will vastly increase 
your domestic tranquility."
"But I didn't come for your advice, Conrad. I came for your consent!"
"My consent, my lord?"
"To marriage, of course!"
"To marriage!" I stood. For the first time in twenty years, my voice broke and 
it came out like a squeak.
"Of course! What do you think I'm talking about? I want you to be my son-in-law! 
I want you to marry my only child and be my heir."
"But, but I'm just not the marrying kind! The whole institution frightens me! 
No, no, my lord. I would never make a decent son-in-law! You'd learn to hate me. 
So would she!"
"Nonsense, my boy. Why, you and I have gotten along for years with never a cross 
word. All the women around seem to love you. Why should my daughter be any 
different?"
"What's this 'my boy' business? I'm only two years younger than you! I'm an old 
man! You shouldn't saddle your daughter with an old man! She'll end up being a 
young widow, and you know all the trouble they get into!"
"Again, nonsense! You're as healthy a man as I've ever met, and any woman with 
any brains about her prefers a mature man to a young stripling."
"They didn't when I was a stripling!"
"Well, that simply proves your prowess! None of your ladies are complaining, are 
they?"
"It's not a matter of my ladies, my lord. For years now, I've been satisfied 
with just one, Cilicia. She's heavy with our second child now. I couldn't 
possibly leave her."
"Well, you wouldn't have to leave her, just sort of get her out of the way for a 
while. Anyway, I know full well that you haven't been absolutely faithful to 
her. You manage to get to Countess Francine's, manor at least once a month."
"She's an old friend."
"And a close one, no doubt. But that's all one to me. Just keep up appearances, 
and you'll hear no complaints from your father-in-law."
"My lord, I've never even met your daughter."
"So? She's a normal, healthy girl. She has all the standard features. What more 
can be said? And she'll learn Polish soon enough, so that's no problem."
"She doesn't even speak Polish! Well, I don't speak any Hungarian! What do we 
do? Invite an interpreter to bed with us?"
"Mind your manners, Conrad. This is my own flesh and blood we're talking about."
"There are hundreds of girls that are your own flesh and blood! And all the rest 
of them can at least speak the language! Why don't you make me marry one of 
them?"
"Conrad! Control yourself! If this goes on, you shall anger me."
"See what a lousy son-in-law I'd make? We had an excellent relationship until it 
was torn asunder by the mere mention of marriage! Find another man, my lord. I 
don't want to get married!"
"That's your final word, then?"
"Yes, my lord, it is."
"Well then. It has certainly been a pleasure having you for a vassal, and the 
experience has been vastly profitable. Tell me, where were you planning to go 
next?"
"My lord, what are you talking about? You can't fire me like a bricklayer who's 
finished his job! We made an oath together, and that oath gives you no right to 
force me into marriage."
"True. We made an oath. Do you remember it? It was Christmas time, almost nine 
years ago. True, I don't have the fight to force marriage on you, but you made 
one strange addition to the standard oath, which at the time I thought 
inconsequential, but now it comes into the fore. You swore fealty to me for only 
nine years! Those nine years will be up in three weeks, at which time our 
agreement is off! So I wish you well. Be sure and fill your saddlebags before 
you leave. Take a few carts of gold with you if you wish. But I am not minded to 
renew my oath with one who would so crassly insult my own daughter as to refuse 
her hand in marriage."
I was dumbstruck. I had put that in my oath! At the time, I wasn't sure whether 
I could get technology going in this century or not, and if I couldn't I wanted 
to have the right to be somewhere else than in the middle of a Mongol massacre, 
where one more dead body wouldn't have done Poland much good. I had left myself 
a coward's way out and now I was paying for it!
"But-but the army, the boats, the aircraft! I'm needed here now more than ever! 
You can't do this! Not to me nor to Poland."
"Wrong, Baron. Or at least 'baron' for the next three weeks. I can do it and I 
intend to do it. Sir Vladimir can handle the army properly, I'm sure, and Sir 
Tadaos can do what's right with the steamboats. And the aircraft? Well, I'm 
already in charge there!"
"Well, I won't stand for it! I'll go talk to the duke about this!"
"Feel free, but I've already discussed the matter with him. You know that he has 
long been displeased with you concerning the way that you have consistently 
lived in sin since coming here. He thinks that you should get married and that 
my daughter would be an excellent match. He has already given his blessings on 
the union!"
"But my lifestyle is a good deal more moral than yours!"
"True, at least by any sensible standard. But I am a mere backwoods count, 
whereas you have made yourself into a hero. Heroes have to live upright lives! 
After all, the youth of Poland looks to you for guidance! Myself, I think where 
you went wrong was all the charity work. You should have left those wretches 
alone,"
"But this is filthy, rotten blackmail!"
"Yes, it is, isn't it. Shall we say the day after Christmas for the wedding? The 
Bishop of Wroclaw has already given dispensation for the posting of the banns."
"Damn you, Lambert! God damn you straight to hell and the devil!"
I stormed out of my office, pushing aside a startled secretary who was standing 
in the doorway. I went down to the stables, threw a saddle on Anna and charged 
back to Three Walls. I told the stable girl, Kotcha, to put Anna's best saddle 
and barding on her and went up to my room.
I put on my best armor, not my efficient Night-Fighter suit, but the fancy, 
engraved, gold-plated stuff they'd given me for Christmas a few years back. I 
threw my wolfskin cloak over my shoulders and went down to the strong room. I 
came back up with my saddlebags filled with gold. To hell with the silver, the 
gold would do. It was all that I could carry, anyhow.
Then I headed down the trail, or railroad track now, and at the first 
intersection I headed not east, toward the Mongols, but west, toward France! I'd 
heard a lot of nice things about France. Maybe I could even learn the language.
Nine years in a country that punishes a man for helping the poor! Well, to hell 
with them! To hell with them all.
We rode like thunder for hours and Anna never let up. She didn't know where we 
were going or why, but I wanted to go and that was enough for her. The one good 
friend I had.
Darkness was closing in as we rode by the trail to Countess Francine's manor. 
Well, it was a bit cold for camping out, and I hadn't brought my old camping 
gear along, anyway. Maybe Francine would like a lift back to France.
She was a countess while I was only a baron, despite the fact that her county 
was much smaller than my barony. She only had six knights subordinate to her, 
yet she was my superior in status. Because of this, she absolutely refused to 
use my title or her own when we were together, and got unhappy when I used them 
myself. I think she thought I really gave a damn about that sort of thing.
Her watchman must have called her, because the drawbridge was lowering as we 
approached, and she stood just behind it, waiting.
"You come gaily clad, my friend!" she said as she warmly embraced my cold armor.
"It seemed like a good idea, if I was going to France."
"France! But you must come inside and tell me ail about it!"
A marshal came up to take care of Anna, but I slung the heavy saddlebags over my 
own shoulder. I just wasn't very trusting anymore.
At supper, Francine got the whole story out of me.
"So you charged away like a hero in a fireside tale, without even a change of 
underwear." She giggled. "Oh, you poor little dumpling."
"Well, I don't think it's the least bit funny."
"Of course it is not, darling. It is horrible. You have been rudely treated by a 
man that you have done everything for. You have a perfect right to be angry, but 
if Lambert has made himself your enemy, then you must fight him! You have done 
great things here and you must not let them be stolen from you!"
"The truth is that I really don't give a damn anymore."
"You have just worked too hard for too long and have treated it all too 
seriously," she said.
"Call it a long vacation, then. Say, fifty years or so. France still seems like 
a great idea. Would you like me to give you a lift there?"
"To ride with my knight and hero back to my homeland? Oh, Conrad, what a 
romantic thought! But France is not Poland and if you did not marry me, people 
would call me a strumpet! Would you let them do that to your poor damsel?"
"And so I would have to do the very thing I was running away from. You're pretty 
good at popping balloons."
"And someday you must tell me what a balloon is, but not right now. Think! If 
you do not care about your wealth or position, what of the people who are 
depending on you? What of the noble Sir Vladimir? What of earnest little Sir 
Piotr? And Lady Krystyana. I know you loved her once. Has that love turned to 
such hate that you would abandon her to the Tartars?"
"No. I guess not."
"Then you must stay in Poland and find a way to resolve your problem with 
Lambert. We must plan our strategy! We must confound your liege lord and defeat 
him!"
"Well, I can hardly go out and fight the man."
"Of course not. You have a hundred fifty thousand fighting men and he does not 
have a hundred fifty, yes? How could there be a fight? You could massacre him if 
you wished, but that would be immoral. No. You must use a woman's arts of 
persuasion and intrigue, and I am the woman to help you with this. First, you 
must realize that you have many friends in the very highest places. The Bishop 
of Cracow is your friend and confessor, yes? And the duke himself is a member of 
your order of Radiant Warriors. And you have me. I spent many years by the side 
of the old duke. I know where all the bodies were buried and was privy to all of 
the old duke's secrets. "
"All? You mean..."
"Yes, all. Even about you. An old man will always tell everything to an adoring 
young woman."
"Then ... tell me what you know about me."
She glanced around to see that the servants were out of the room, then said 
quietly, "I know that you have come to us from the far future in some way that 
even you do not understand. Is that enough?"
"It's way too much. You shouldn't have been told."
"But I was. Don't worry, darling, your secret is safe with me. I swear that you 
are the only person I have ever told it to, and ever will."
"And it doesn't bother you?"
"It is passing strange, but I love you still."
"Well. You mentioned strategy. What do you think we should do?" I asked.
"First we must speak to the duke. We must do this right away, before Count 
Lambert has a chance to see him again. We must find out where he stands on your 
marriage to Jadwiga, and-"
"Who?"
"Jadwiga. Oh, you dumpling! You do not even know the name of the girl they are 
trying to marry you to?"
"The count never mentioned it."
"Well, now you know. Knowing the young duke as I do, it is quite possible that 
he really does want you to get married. He is such a prude about some things! 
Has he ever mentioned it to you?"
"I'm afraid so. Quite a number of times, as a matter of fact. "
"Then you just might have to get married."
"What!"
"Hush, dear. It is not the end of the world. You have been living with Cilicia 
for many years now, yes? Nothing need change if you were married to her. It 
could be done quietly, a few minutes with a priest. Is that so bad?"
"I can't marry Cilicia. We couldn't have a Christian wedding because she refuses 
to become a Christian! Believe me, I've been trying to convert her since we 
first met. And even if I was willing to become her brand of Moslem, which I'm 
not, her father has some sort of complicated theological reason why I couldn't 
join their church, or whatever they call it. The whole thing is simply 
impossible!"
"Then marry me. You have been coming here every few weeks for years. That would 
satisfy me, if I could get no better. Nothing need change, darling."
"But..."
"Then think on it. Come love, we must be up before gray dawn to ride to Cracow 
and see the duke. Let us go to bed."
Even after a vigorous bout of lovemaking, I had a hard time getting to sleep 
that night. Francine was asleep with her head on my arm, her back to my stomach, 
spoon fashion. I was careful not to wake her, but I needed a good think.
Okay, I told myself. You've got this phobia. Nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of 
people have phobias.
You've got to stay in Poland and fight this invasion. That's a given. A lot of 
good people are counting on you, You can't let them down. You've made promises 
and you have to live with them.
Is that what really scares you about marriage? The fact that it's a lifetime 
promise, without any way out if you were wrong? But you've made so many other 
promises, and you can't get out of them, either. You didn't go into a cold funk 
when you swore to Lambert, did you' Oh, you let yourself have a coward's way 
out, but that's one of the things you're regretting now, isn't it?
But if you're going to stay, you've somehow got to placate Lambert and the duke. 
Lambert isn't going to let up, you know. Once he gets an idea into his head, 
he's like a bulldog clamped down on a bull's snout. As long as there is any 
chance that you will marry his daughter, he'll be in there conniving a way to 
force you to do it.
And the duke. He wants everybody to live a fine, conventional and Christian 
life, just like in all the stories the priests like to tell. He would have had 
Lambert back with his wife years ago if she hadn't been out of the country and 
the duke's jurisdiction, that's sure. If you were married, you'd have the duke 
solidly on your side against Lambert. What's more, once you were married, 
Lambert would give up on his plans for you and his daughter. He's a bulldog, but 
he's not stupid.
So getting married is the rational thing to do at this point. It solves all the 
conflicting problems of duty, morality, your boss, and your boss's boss.
So why aren't you rational about it? Because you're scared shitless, that's why! 
All this business you keep telling yourself and everybody else about rationality 
and the scientific method is just a hypocritical ball of lies!
Underneath, you're just a wad of primeval fears, a caveman huddled around his 
campfire, afraid of the dark, a whining neurotic desperately in need of 
professional help!
Well, maybe not that last, but you sure need help. Look, would it really be so 
bad? This woman in your arms, is she so bad? She's beautiful. She's easily the 
best looking Christian you've seen since you got here. She's mature, well 
educated, and damned intelligent. What's more, she wants to marry you, and you 
damn well know you'll never get a better offer. You're almost living with her 
now. Is she really asking so much? One little church ceremony? It could be over 
in minutes, in some obscure little village church.
Five minutes. It could be over in five minutes. You're man enough to stand up to 
that, aren't you? It would solve your problems with both Lambert and the duke, 
and would make a very nice lady very happy. Like she said, it would make no 
difference in your lifestyle. Nothing need change at all. You could do that, 
couldn't you?
Yeah, I thought, I suppose I could. But just a little ceremony.
Francine snuggled even closer in my arms.
In her sleep, she murmured, "I am so glad that it Is settled." Then she was 
quiet once more.
I don't like it when things like that happen.
In the morning we both sort of half awoke and calmly, warmly I was inside of her 
again.
"Francine, do you really want to marry me?"
"Of course, darling, with all my heart!"
"Then let's do it."
This brought on a smile and a squeal and a hug and a kiss that quite literally 
took my breath away, followed, naturally, by far more enthusiastic lovemaking.
Later, she said. "You really want this? I have not done anything unfair to get 
you?"
"Yes, I want you, and your magnificent body is a most unfair enticement."
"Good. I did not want you to think you were forced. But if you are going ahead 
freely, there is something that I must tell you."
"What?"
"That you are going to be a papa again, and this time. I am going to be the 
mama!"
I should be getting used to this sort of thing, but I'm not.


Interlude Three
Tom HIT the STOP button.
"What the hell goes on here!" he shouted.
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"I'll show you!" He pushed the intercom button. "I want the asshole who edited 
this tape front and center, here and now!"
A man dressed in a conservative brown T-shirt and shorts stepped in immediately. 
Another advantage of time travel is that you always have time to get to meetings 
promptly.
"Sir?" the man said.
"Just what are you trying to pull?"
"Sir? What are you talking about?"
"This tape! It has Conrad getting ready to marry Lady Francine! When I viewed it 
last week, she talked him into marrying Lambert's daughter. If this is some kind 
of joke, mister, I don't like your sense of humor!"
"But sir! I edited that tape, and he didn't do either one of those things! He 
went on toward France until an emissary of the duke caught up with him in Worms 
and talked him into returning to Poland!"
"What?" Tom thought a minute. "If this is a joke, the prankster will spend the 
next century doing anthropological work on Eskimos! But fight now, I want you to 
get your staff together and find out who the joker is. I want to see how this 
version comes out, but I'll see you and your people in two hours. Now get out!"
The man bolted out the door.
"Tom, I don't think he fudged it," I said. "I mean, he would have to have found 
actors who were exact doubles for Francine and Conrad. He would have to build 
perfect sets and backgrounds. It's not the sort of thing that would be done as a 
joke!"
"I know. But the alternative is frightening. It means that we are seeing a 
temporal split right here. Two temporal splits!"
"But how could something that happened in the thirteenth century effect us? 
We're seventy thousand years in their past!"
"I don't know, but it scares the shit out of me!"
He hit the START button.


Chapter Thirteen
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
Anna carried us both through the day, and that night in Cracow, the duke granted 
us an immediate private audience.
"Baron Conrad. I'm glad you're here. I was about to send men out in search of 
you. But the matter which we must discuss, well, are you sure that you want the 
Countess Francine present?"
"Quite sure, your Grace."
"Very well, then. What is this business between you and Count Lambert's 
daughter? Dalliance with peasant girls and heathens is bad enough. Trifling with 
the peerage is something else!"
"Your Grace, I have never met the count's daughter! I have never seen her, let 
alone touched her. I had forgotten that she even existed until Count Lambert 
told me yesterday that she is in Poland!"
"Then what's this business of his insisting that you marry her?"
"I don't know, your Grace. I was shocked by his demands. He said that you had 
approved the marriage."
"Well, he asked me if I would approve such a marriage, and of course I said I 
would do so. You know that I would be delighted to see you married. This 
business of your cohabiting with an infidel Moslem is shameful, and your 
fornications with my ward are even worse!"
"Your ward?"
"Countess Francine here, of course! She's not married and she has no family in 
the country, so she must have a guardian, and who else but a duke could be 
guardian to a countess? Use your head, man. It's complicated by the fact that 
she was my father's friend and is quite capable of taking care of herself, but 
nonetheless I am personally responsible for her before God, and you have been 
bedding her!"
"That is the other matter that I would like to discuss with you, your Grace. The 
Countess Francine and I would like to be married."
For the first time, the duke relaxed and smiled. "And is this your wish as well, 
Countess?"
"With all my heart, your Grace."
"Then with all mine, you have my approval. But back to the matter at hand. My 
impression was that you, Conrad, had been the instigator of the marriage 
proceedings between yourself and Jadwiga. I mean, that's the usual thing! If two 
people wish to get married, they talk to the girl's father, and if there is a 
major inheritance involved, the father talks to his liege. I thought that in 
approving Lambert's request, I was granting your wishes!"
"I swear I knew nothing of it, your Grace."
"Well. For now, I'll take your word for it, but if you're lying to me, I'll see 
you hung! All I know of this is that your secretary, Lady Natalia, came to me 
this morning and reported your conversation with Count Lambert verbatim. She 
even had it in writing, though I could scarcely believe it! Does she always do 
things like this?"
He tossed a sheaf of papers at me. I quickly scanned it.
"She has a remarkable memory, your Grace. The door was open and I guess we were 
pretty loud. But this is what was said, word for word."
"She also told me that you had taken all your ready gold and had headed west 
without explaining to anyone. She was deathly worried about you."
"I'm sorry I upset her, your Grace. I was pretty upset myself."
"As I suppose I would have been in your position. This business of only swearing 
for nine years. I suppose that's true?"
"Yes, your Grace. At the time, I didn't know how long I would want to stay."
"I see. But later, when you were enlarged to a barony, you must have sworn again 
to Lambert. Was there any time limit made in that oath?"
"No, your Grace."
"Then the second oath supercedes the first. Count Lambert had no right to 
threaten you with escheating your lands. Also, if you are to marry Countess 
Francine, you must be enlarged to her county. That is to say, you must swear 
fealty to me as my count, though you will also remain Count Lambert's baron. You 
will be his subordinate, yet his equal in status. As to Lambert, you will have 
no further problems with him, I assure you. He and I will have a serious talk! 
For the rest, see a priest, or perhaps the Bishop of Cracow, since he's a friend 
of yours, and post proper banns. Your oath of fealty can be taken at the 
wedding."
"Yes, your Grace, although we had thought that just a simple ceremony-"
"What! My ward being married in a back chapel like an eloping peasant? I 
wouldn't hear of it! You shall be married in Wawel Cathedral before all the 
nobility of the land and I shall give the bride away! Now be off with you both 
and, uh, separate bedrooms until the wedding, right?"
The next morning, Bishop Ignacy was as pleased about the wedding as the duke, 
and the date was set for three days after Twelfth Night. Francine stayed on in 
Cracow to help with the arrangements, but I still had a war to get ready for.
Word of my engagement had gotten to Hell before me, and I had to put up with a 
lot of stupid cheering, but I soon got things back to business.
"The steamboat that sank has been brought back up," Natalia reported. "And the 
boatyard says they'll have it fixed in a month. Sir Ilya has taken over the 
problem of those axeheads. He says that he was tempering axeheads over wood 
fires nine years ago and he can still do it. They found three containers of 
size-five shin guards labeled size one, so that's all right, and one of the 
cooks from mess hall eleventeen brought over the fifty-five cases of maps and 
wanted to know how he was supposed to cook them so that even a grunt could eat 
it. They got delivered to him in the same container as the seven cases of 
applesauce he'd ordered."
"So problems are being solved," I said.
"Yes sir. But there are eighty thousand rounds of swivel gun ammunition that 
were cast oversize and won't fit in the chambers. Coherers-is that how you 
pronounce it?-coherers for the radios have been breaking faster than expected 
and we're almost out of spares, and six thousand sets of goose-down underwear 
were found to be stuffed with chicken feathers. They say they're too scratchy to 
wear."
"So things are back to normal," I said. "And Natalia--thank you. Thank you for 
everything."
That night I went back to Three Walls. Cilicia had already left, gone back to 
her father in the valley I had given his people. Well, all right, I'd miss her, 
but she had to do what she had to do. She'd taken our boy with her and that was 
not all right. He was my son and by God he'd be raised a Christian, and that 
went double for the one in the cooker.
But then I cooled down and decided that this was not the time to push it. Maybe 
Cilicia would come back. Maybe we'd all be killed in the invasion. And maybe the 
horse would sing.
Later. We'd see about it later.
For now, there were mass maneuvers with the war carts.
I think I was dreading my wedding more than the Mongol invasion. It was not a 
pleasant Christmas, in part because of my worries, but mostly because we really 
didn't celebrate it. We held a High Mass in the morning and served a better than 
average dinner, then spent the afternoon in training. There were complaints from 
all quarters, but we couldn't waste the time. Furthermore, the men couldn't have 
their families with them, and I would rather have them mad than maudlin.
My wedding preparations went on without me. Countess Francine wrote me 
constantly and visited me twice at Hell to keep me updated, although she 
insisted on sleeping alone. These wedding customs are ridiculous! With both 
Cilicia and Francine unavailable, sexual frustration was added to all my other 
problems. After a week, Natalia got together with Krystyana, who had taken over 
food preparation at Hell. They started sending me young peasant girls on the 
theory that I shouldn't go to waste. Bless them.
Despite the war preparations, the duke was planning to make my wedding the major 
social event of the year! Every count and baron under the duke was expected to 
attend, and the dukes of Sandomierz and Mazovia were coming along with their 
peerages. This when we should have been sharpening our swords!
But there was nothing I could do about it.
Years ago, I had mentioned cutting gemstones to my Moslem jeweler, and now he 
gave me a faceted stone that I think was diamond. It wasn't as sparkling as a 
modem gem, but maybe that was because the jeweler didn't have all the angles 
exactly right. At least it cut glass. I had it set in a gold ring and Countess 
Francine was pleased with it, but nobody had ever heard of an engagement ring 
before. It started a new fad.
The day approached and I left for Cracow with my best three-dozen men and their 
ladies. We got there to find out that the heralds had taken over the seating 
arrangements in the cathedral and there was room for only barons and better. My 
own party wouldn't be able to attend!
I went to the duke with the problem and he swore me in as count a day early. 
Then I swore in my whole party as barons! I even swore in Novacek, who had never 
been knighted! Damn all heralds, anyway.
Word was that this was to be a military wedding, and all were to be dressed in 
their best armor. Well, I had my gold stuff and my best man, Baron Vladimir, had 
managed to scrounge up a similar set, as it turned out, from Count Lambert. But 
most of my people had only NightFighter armor, efficient but not decorative. 
They did what they could, bleaching it white and adding bright red baldrics. 
They certainly stood out among the polished plate.
For me, well, it was like I had agreed to have my leg amputated with an axe, and 
then the doctors decided to do it with a grinding wheel instead.
Somehow, I survived the ceremony.
"Why is it that men smile at a wedding and women cry?"
Afterward, there was a reception that filled most of the rooms in Wawel Castle. 
I was trying to be agreeable to a crowd of people that I hardly knew when Count 
Lambert came up.
"May I offer you my congratulations, Count Conrad, as well as my apologies? I 
realize now how crass and crude I was to handle that matter in the way I did. 
Can you forgive me?"
"Of course, my lord. At least I think I still address you that way. There is 
nothing to forgive. We were both overwrought and the less said now the better."
"I quite agree. And as to your form of address, my friend, well, you can call me 
anything you like but a coward. I think that equals speech would be most 
appropriate, don't you think so, Conrad?"
"That sounds good to me, Lambert." I smiled, though I knew our relationship 
would never again be the same.
Finally, things settled down enough so that Francine and I could sneak off and 
enjoy our first night together in a month and a half.
Early the next morning, Duke Henryk called the visiting dukes and all counts 
present to a council of war, and I finally saw why attendance at this event had 
been mandatory. The wedding had been a cover for the council.
Besides the Polish nobility, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order was there 
with a dozen of his masters. There was bad blood between the Crossmen and me, so 
they had not attended the wedding. There was also a representative from the 
Knights Hospitalers, as well as nobles from both King Louis IX of France and 
Emperor Frederic II of Germany. Duke Henryk had been doing his homework.
After an opening prayer, Duke Henryk introduced the envoy from the King of 
France. Speaking through an interpreter, this marquis pledged the support of 
France to our cause, and said that already, three thousand lances of French 
knights were coming to our aid, a total of about nine thousand men, a third of 
them nobles, a third squires, and a third crossbow men.
The emperor's envoy made a similar statement, promising half again as many men 
as the French, as well as supplies for the French forces as they crossed the 
Holy Roman Empire.
You could see the mood of the room lightening. The Polish knights wouldn't have 
to fight alone! We had powerful friends coming to our aid!
Duke Henryk spoke of strong contingents of Spanish, English, and Italian knights 
coming to Poland as well. He had been in communication with King Bela of Hungary 
and Tzar Ivan Asen 11 of the Bulgarian Empire. Since these two empires were 
threatened with invasion at the same time as Poland, he could not in good con 
science ask them for aid. But they had agreed that should any of the three 
powers defeat the Mongols in its own country, that power would then go to the 
aid of the others.
With emperors and kings accounted for, the Knights Hospitalers stood and 
promised six hundred knights to our aid, which was almost all that they had.
The Teutonic Knights promised only five hundred, saying that their men were on 
the frontiers as well, and they could not leave those borders undefended. All 
present knew that was bullshit. The Crossmen had over three thousand men and the 
Pruthenians against whom 2500 were supposed to be guarding were no serious 
danger. At worst, they might do a little cattle-raiding and, what with all the 
animals running free, they could take their pick without hurting anybody. I got 
madder when I found out that to get even this little help out of the Crossmen, 
the duke had had to promise to rescind his father's ban on their order in 
Silesia. I'd nearly gotten killed getting them thrown out! There was nothing I 
could do about it now, but someday I was going to get those bastards.
Duke Boleslaw V of Mazovia stood and pledged every man he had, about sixteen 
thousand of them. In the history books, he's called "the chaste" or "the 
bashful," depending on whether the particular historian liked him or not. The 
nickname had to do with his love life, not his fighting. At fifteen, he looked 
to be a hellraiser.
The Duke of Sandomierz followed suit, pledging twelve thousand men. Knighthood 
was not really well established in Sandomierz and Mazovia. The men fought in 
family groups rather than in feudal levies, and the concept of nobility was 
somewhat different. Not that it mattered much right now.
Duke Henryk announced that from Silesia, Great and Little Poland, he would lead 
twenty-nine thousand men into battle, over half of whom were knighted, and that 
he did not include in this total the infantry that I was training.
I was the only mere count who spoke at that council. I said that they all knew 
about the arms and armor that my men had made. Indeed, most of those present 
were wearing our products. They knew about the steamboats, but were surprised to 
learn that there would be three dozen of them on the Vistula alone. The aircraft 
were well known, and I spoke a bit on the advantages of aerial reconnaissance, 
until the duke motioned for me to hurry it up.
Then I announced the radios and told what they could do. I don't think anybody 
believed me! They'd all heard tales about my Warrior's School, but when I said 
that we would march out with a hundred fifty thousand fighting men, there were 
looks of stupid disbelief and a few people laughed. They simply didn't think in 
terms that large.
I was red-faced when I stepped down.
Nonetheless, there was a feeling of buoyancy and confidence in the room. We had 
the men, we had the power, we had allies coming in from all of Christendom!
Then Duke Henryk announced his battle plan and things started to fall apart. He 
said that all the foreign contingents, most of which were already on the way, 
would be gathering at Legnica, and that the rest of us should meet them there. 
We could then have a single, strong, unified army with which to advance eastward 
toward the Mongols.
The knights of Little Poland, Sandomierz, and Mazovia were not the least bit 
pleased by this plan! It meant that they would have to march hundreds of miles 
west, wait for the foreigners to arrive, and then march back again! And while 
this was going on, their own lands would be completely at the mercy of the 
Mongol invaders with no one to defend them!
Young Duke Boleslaw was the first on his feet, shouting. "Henryk, do you expect 
me to abandon my own duchy, my own people, to go off to your estates to defend 
your lands? Because if you do, you're crazy! My lands, and those of Sandomierz 
and Little Poland are in front of yours! The Tartars must go through us before 
they can touch your precious lands! It is you who should come and support us!"
Duke Henryk was on his feet. "We will come in your support! But don't you see 
that we must come together? If every man stands and defends his own manor, the 
Tartars will chew us up one by one in little bites! If we join together in a 
single army, we will be invincible! The choice of Legnica as a rallying point is 
the result of simple geography. It is the center point of all the knights who 
will be fighting on our side, the center of gravity, as Count Conrad would call 
it. Yes, it is on my lands, but it has to be on somebody's lands! Further, 
arrangements have already been made to feed and house the vast number of 
fighting men who will be gathering. Can any of you provide such a thing? Can 
Sandomierz or Plock feed so many men?"
"Merchants will come," Duke Boleslaw said. "They always do! I say that I will 
defend eastern Poland with my life! I will not run back for three hundred miles 
while my people are murdered! I will defend, and if you and your foreigners can 
come up in time to help me, I will be forever grateful to you. But if you are 
late, may God have mercy on you, because no one else will!" 
And with that bit of bombast, the kid stomped out of the room, followed by all 
the men of Mazovia. After a few awkward moments, the Duke of Sandomierz stood 
and followed him, and in a few minutes, the hall was half empty. Even those men 
from Little Poland, men from the Cracow area who were personally sworn to Duke 
Henryk, had left. To them, the decision to be made was between abandoning their 
lands and peoples, or abandoning their oath to their duke. And they had made it. 
Even many still in the room seemed uncertain.
"Well," the duke said. "It seems that we must fight without them. But at least 
you men are with me, and Count Conrad's men outnumber by far all those that have 
left."
I had to stand. "Your grace, don't you see that I can't bring all my men to 
Legnica, either? I have a major force in my boats on the Vistula. I cannot bring 
those boats overland to the Odra. They must be used in eastern Poland or not be 
used at all! The aircraft will be far more useful than you now realize, but we 
only have one airport! That airport is near Okoitz, which is east of Legnica, 
and if it is overrun, the planes are useless! My infantry needs the railroads to 
travel quickly. We have built extensive tracks along the Vistula and through the 
Malapolska Hills, the area that we will need to defend first. If we can win 
there, western Poland is safe. But the railroad net is thin in western Poland 
and nonexistent in many areas. We haven't had time to expand it yet. My men can 
not effectively fight in western Poland!"
"So. You, too, Conrad?"
"Your grace, I am not abandoning you, but don't you realize what the radios and 
the rails mean? It is not necessary for all of us to be in the same spot for us 
to be together! With good communications, we can work in concert even though we 
are hundreds of miles apart."
"Count Conrad, I don't understand what you're saying. But what I do know is that 
every man true to me will join me at Legnica before the first of March!"
With that he got up and left, and the council of war was never called again. 
Instead of one Polish Army, there were now three of them. Those in the east 
under Duke Boleslaw, those in the west under Duke Henryk, and those men sworn to 
me. We were in pieces before the Mongols had even arrived.


Chapter Fourteen
There wasn't much time for marital bliss. Not with the war just weeks away. 
Francine moved into Hell with me, but that was only temporary. The. place for 
her when it started was Three Walls, only she didn't see it that way. She had 
visions of herself being a female power behind the throne.
We were arguing about that one night in bed. "Look, love. Three Walls is my 
home. It's where I normally live and work. It's also my biggest installation, 
and my best defended. On top of all that, it's the one farthest back. Before the 
Mongols dare attack it, they must first destroy East Gate. Then they must take 
out Sir Miesko's formidable manor, as well as Hell, or they have an enemy at 
their rear. They'd even be well advised to destroy Okoitz before they tried to 
take Three Walls. It's a matter of simple geography."
"Geography, yes. But not politics. It would be best if I were in Cracow. There I 
can do you some good."
"I don't need you to do me any good. I need you to be alive. You will have a 
much better chance of staying that way at Three Walls."
"You have no feeling for the politics of the situation."
"I don't give a damn about the politics of the situation! The city walls at 
Cracow are made of old crumbly bricks. They are only three stories high, and 
they are defended by only two dozen guns. Do you know what came into the office 
today? An order from the city fathers of Cracow for two thousand swivel guns, to 
be shipped immediately! They should have placed that order two years ago! Then 
it could have been filled! Now, I could fill it only by stripping the guns from 
the walls of other cities, and I won't do it!"
"You see? If you had understood the politics there, you could have sold them 
those guns at the time, yes?"
"It's not that I wanted to sell them the guns! I've never made a penny selling 
arms and armor! It's just that the city is weak and the people there don't have 
much chance if they're attacked. You are going to Three Walls. I am your husband 
and you will obey me in this!"
"What happened to letting each other live our own lives?"
"I'm still for it! But you have to be alive before you can live! Now shut up and 
go to sleep. I have other things to worry about."
"What other things, my darling?"
"Treason, for one. There is no way that I can obey the duke and retreat to 
Legnica. That move would destroy the usefulness of everything that I've done 
here. I must disobey him."
"So. This must be?"
"Absolutely. There is no way around it. I wish I could obey him, and after the 
war I hope he still wants me for a vassal, but his battle plan is Just Plain 
Awful."
"Then perhaps I should be going to Legnica, yes?"
"No! You are not going anywhere but Three Walls. And 1, well, I'm going to 
Okoitz in the morning."
"And why do you go to Lambert, whom you do not like anymore?"
"I go there to add conspiracy to my treason, and compound it with sowing 
disaffection among the duke's loyal men. If I'm going to send out the riverboats 
to hold the Vistula, and maybe even the Bug, I'm going to need the aircraft to 
help patrol the area and watch for the enemy. Lambert is in solid control of the 
boys at Eagle Nest, so I have to talk him into joining me."
"And you say that you do not care for politics."
"I don't. And I'm sure not looking forward to tomorrow's meeting."
At Okoitz, Lambert was effusive.
"Ah, my dear Conrad! It's so good to see you again! I trust you've come for your 
usual monthly visit. I want you to look over our defenses here one more time. 
Those old women you sent to teach my girls how to defend the place seem to know 
what they're about, but defense is really a man's business, what?"
"I'd be happy to go over the defenses, my lord, but there's another matter to be 
discussed."
"Now, what's this 'my lord' nonsense? I thought we agreed to treat each other as 
equals, as brothers, even!"
"Sorry, Lambert. Just habit, I suppose."
"Good! Now, what was this other matter?"
"Treason."
"Dog's blood! Whose?"
"Mine. Maybe yours as well."
"What the devil are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the duke's battle plan. You were at the council of war. You 
saw what happened, and you heard what I had to say. It still goes. If I follow 
the duke's plan, everything I've done here is wasted. Poland will fall and most 
of us, the duke included, will likely be killed. I'm going to have to disobey 
him."
"I see. But you've always had an obligation to a Higher Power."
"What do you mean?" I said.
"Prester John, of course! I figured out who sent you here long ago. The greatest 
Christian king of all, Prester John."
Good lord! Lambert told me about this fantasy of his nine years ago, but he 
hadn't mentioned it since, so I'd hoped he'd forgotten about it. Yet my oath to 
Father Ignacy still stood, and I couldn't tell him the truth of the matter.
"You are silent," Lambert continued. "Well, I understand your problem and your 
oath of silence. But to answer your implied question, I'd say that your duty to 
your king takes precedence over your later oath to the duke, so you are safe on 
moral grounds. As to the practical considerations, well, if your strategy is 
fight and the duke's is wrong, then you will be a hero and there won't be much 
he can do to you. If the duke's strategy is right and yours is wrong, then you 
are likely to die on the battlefield, and again there won't be anything he can 
do to you. Offhand, I'd say that your treason is a safe one."
As safe as a tomb, I thought.
"Thank you. but I didn't come here for your moral support. I came here for your 
physical support. My boats are going to need your aircraft to show them where 
the enemy is concentrating. Can I count on your help here, though it be treason 
on your part?"
"You can count on my help and that of the boys from Eagle Nest. We'll be up 
there, you may be sure! But how would that be treason to the duke? My oath to 
him requires that I send him so many knights in the time of his need. I shall do 
so, and then some, for I now have more men than my oath requires, despite the 
loss of those knights that once served Baron Jaraslav and now serve you. In 
truth, since you are arming all of my knights and squires and my barons, and I 
need only provide training and a horse, in the last six years we have been able 
to more than double the number of knights that serve me. I was wise to accept 
your offer, you see."
"And while my oath does not require it, I have told him that we shall be 
watching the enemy from above, and reporting their movements to him, and this, 
too, I shall do. If we also tell your boats what we tell the duke, how is that 
treason? It's just the sensible thing to do. We're all fighting the same enemy, 
after all!"
"You have relieved my mind, Lambert."
"If you say so. Myself, I can't imagine how you thought I could have done 
otherwise! Now then, shall we see to my defenses? And afterward, you shall have 
supper here with me and my daughter, and you shall see what you missed out on!"

FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINKSI
In the last week of February, the ice on the Vistula was breaking up some, but 
it wasn't gone. Like usual, it'd drift downstream and jam up at some turn, then 
more ice would pile on top, then that night, sure as Hell for a Heathen, it 
would turn cold again and the whole damn thing would freeze solid.
I had three boats on the river and we was loaded with bombs, something new we 
wasn't sure would work. They was big iron barrels filled with gunpowder and 
weighted so's they'd just barely sink. There was a slow fuse in a bottle in one 
side, and the idea was when you came to a jam, you lit one, screwed down the 
cap, and got it over the side before it blew up in your face. It was supposed to 
drift with the current under the jam while you was paddling backward under full 
steam.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it drifted too far or not far enough. Once it 
blew and took the whole damn boat with it.
At least I think that was what happened. Nobody from The Pride of Bytom lived to 
tell about it. We just heard the blast around the bend, and when my own Muddling 
Through got there, well, there wasn't much left. Every barrel in her must have 
blown with the first one.
But we was pushing the ice downriver, and not that much was coming from upstream 
behind us. Once we got past Cracow, I ordered the other boats out, so's we could 
at least patrol what was clear. They went down their ways without a hitch and 
each loaded up with six war carts and a full company of warriors.
We continued north with the Hotspur, blowing ice and sometimes getting a shot at 
a Mongol patrol, until we got to the River Bug. It was froze solid and there was 
nothing we could do about it. We was out of bombs then, and there wasn't no way 
we could work upstream, anyhow. I'd hoped to save maybe three dozen of them 
bombs for another project I had in mind, but there was no way to do it, what 
with the loss of The Pride of Bytom and all. We couldn't get up the Dunajec 
either, so all of Poland west of the Vistula was left open to the enemy.
But we did what we could, damn it! What else can a man do?
The other boats was running into bigger patrols and we turned back to pick up 
our troops at East Gate. It took a while. Doctrine was to give refugees a lift 
across the river when we weren't actually in a fight, and we had to stop and 
ferry God knows how many thousands of people across.
The planes was up and flying whenever the weather was decent, and they'd tell us 
about refugees and Mongol patrols. They had these big arrows with a long red 
ribbon on them that they'd drop right on your deck. They'd stick tight in the 
wood and it was amazing they never killed nobody. But there'd be a message in 
the arrowhead that wasn't hardly ever wrong. Them flyboys was okay.
In two places we found river ferries that we put into service and to hell with 
their owners. They was both of the long rope kind that Count Conrad invented 
years ago. In both places I put two of my men ashore to work them, since a 
civilian couldn't be trusted not to run. Not one of those four men lived. They 
stuck to their jobs till they was all killed. Let me tell you their names. They 
were Ivan Torunski and his brother Wladyclaw, and John Sobinski and Vlad 
Tchernic. Good men, every one of them.
That was all we could do for them refugees, though. Lift them across and give 
them a map showing where they was and where the safe forts was. Maybe some of 
them made it alive.
We'd been telling people for years that noncombatants should evacuate by the 
first of February, handed out leaflets and wrote magazine articles, but the 
fools wouldn't move until they was burned out and half of them was dead. But you 
can't let a kid die just 'cause his folks are dumb!
Then half the idiots would want to ferry their cow across, too, when there 
wasn't hardly room for the people! But doctrine was to leave the animals for the 
Mongols to eat, cause if they couldn't get animals, them bastards would eat 
humans!
Our own people was out of there long before that. The inns and depots was long 
closed down except for the radios. The baron had called for volunteers to man 
the forward radios so we would know where the enemy was. Almost all of those 
people, half of them women, stayed at their posts. Sometimes there was some last 
words, sometimes not. Usually we found out that a site had been taken when the 
radio went off the air.
When we got to East Gate, Count Conrad was waiting for us.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
On the last day of February, we seemed to be ready. We had to be, for we were 
moving out at dawn. The new troops hadn't been given the graduation ceremony 
that all the other classes had gotten. There was simply no way that we could 
have scheduled that many men to do the hillside vigil. The halo effect didn't 
happen that often in the wintertime, and anyway, these men weren't being 
knighted. With only four months of training, and all of it physical training, 
they just weren't ready for it.
But every one of them was armored and armed, and they knew how to use those 
arms. Their equipment had been inspected hundreds of times, as had the contents 
of their war carts. They had spares, bedding, food for a month, and a ton of 
ammunition in each cart.
That afternoon, people were running to me with scores of last minute problems, 
things that should have been done earlier, or things that should have been done 
without my knowledge. I think that everyone else's nerves were about as shot as 
mine, and they all wanted stroking. Well, I wanted it too, and I wasn't getting 
it either. I was growling at people.
At this point I got a surprise visit by two priests. They spoke Italian and 
Latin. I spoke Polish and Modem English. I don't even understand how they got in 
to see me, but I had them sit in the outer office and had a runner find Father 
Thomas Aquinas. Maybe he could figure out what they wanted.
Fifteen trivial problems later I was getting ready to start chewing holes in my 
desk. At this point Father Thomas came in.
"It's the Inquisition," he said. "Was there an inquisition being held concerning 
you')"
Good God in Heaven! Nine and a half years had gone by since the thing had 
started, and they had to pick today of all days to show up.
"Yes," I said, "but it concerns something that happened long ago. Ask them what 
I can do for them."
They talked a while in hesitant Latin, their arms stiffly at their sides. Then 
they seemed to discover that they all spoke Italian and the conversation speeded 
up considerably, and their arms started waving. They brought out a thick sheaf 
of parchment, but wouldn't let Father Thomas see it. They handed it to me. I 
looked it over. It was all in Latin.
"They want you to read this and say if it is the truth," the Father said.
"Tell them that I'm sorry, but I don't speak Latin. I don't read it or write it, 
either."
They looked sheepishly at each other as Father Thomas translated what I had 
said. There was more conversation, and I finally got the idea that they weren't 
allowed to tell Father Thomas what the case was about. They couldn't tell it to 
the interpreter and they couldn't speak my language. And it hadn't occurred to 
the silly twits until now that they might have a problem!
They argued between themselves for quite a while, mostly in what had to be 
unfinished questions, for there were a lot of pregnant silences and glaring 
eyes. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, but I figured that either one 
could get me into trouble, so I just hung in there. Finally, they came up with 
what they thought was a suitable question, but maybe it didn't translate well.
"What do you think is the truth of the matter in which you might think we are 
talking or"
I had to puzzle that out a bit. Then I said, "If this is concerning the matter 
that I think it might be about, I regret to inform you that I made a solemn oath 
to Father Ignacy, who is now the Bishop of Cracow, in which I vowed to discuss 
the matter with absolutely no one. I therefore can't answer what I think might 
be your question."
I had to repeat that three times before Father Thomas dared make a stab at 
translating it. Even then, they talked a long time in Italian before they got 
back to me.
Father Thomas looked at me and said, "I think what they want to ask you is 'What 
should we do now?"
"Tell them that they should talk the matter over with his excellency, the Bishop 
of Cracow. Draw them a nice map. Use small words and big letters. Point them on 
the road and wish them well."
"Yes, sir."
The clergy left and I got back to work. With any luck, the twits would run into 
a Mongol patrol and the next bunch the Church sent, in another ten years, might 
have some of the brains that God surely had intended to give them!
We formed up at dawn on the morning of March first, the training completed. A 
hundred fifty thousand men stood at attention on the great concrete parade 
ground.
I nodded to a priest, who said a quick mass without a sermon. Few of the men 
could have heard him, anyway. Then I nodded to Baron Vladimir, Hetman of the 
Army, and he led the troops in the oath that I had cribbed years ago from that 
of the Boy Scouts. It was fitting. Many of these troops weren't much older than 
Boy Scouts.
We raised our right arms to the rising sun, and a sixth of a million men chanted 
with me:
"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the Army. I will 
obey the Warrior's Code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, 
and morally straight. "The Warrior's Code:"
"A warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent. Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly. 
Obedient, Cheerful, and Efficient. Brave, Clean, and Deadly."
Hearing that many men chant it, well, there was quite a difference from that 
first class of thirty-six men we graduated four years ago.
"Hetman," I said, "advance the army!"
Vladimir raised his voice and shouted to his three kolomels, "Kolumns, advance!"
And the three kolomels, the Banki brothers, turned to their eighteen barons and 
shouted, "Battalions, advance!"
And eighteen barons turned to a hundred komanders and shouted, "Komands, 
advance!"
And a hundred komanders turned to six hundred captains and shouted, "Companies, 
advance!"
And six hundred captains turned to thirty-six hundred banners and shouted, 
"Platoons, advance!"
And thirty-six hundred banners turned to twenty-one thousand knights and 
shouted, "Lances, advance!"
And twenty-one thousand knights turned to a hundred twenty-six thousand warriors 
and shouted, "Warriors, advance!"
And a hundred twenty-six thousand warriors shouted, "Yes, sir!"
It made a nice ceremony with a good crescendo effect. It would have been nicer 
if we could all have swung out right then and there, but of course there were 
the war carts. The men marched out to them, and the first few hundred were 
already on the tracks, but it was almost noon before the last cart went out the 
gate. Not that the departure was disorganized, far from it. We were 
double-tracked and the men moved out at a quick march, but it takes time for 
thirty-six hundred big carts to move down a pair of tracks. The column was 
sixteen miles long.
Yet once moving, they didn't stop. Early on, we had found that eighteen armored 
men could easily tow a war cart filled with their arms and supplies, and with 
the rest of the platoon riding on it, so long as it was a railroad track. A cook 
stove was slung from the back of the cart, and three cooks could keep the men 
fed. There was room for the other half of the platoon to sack out on top of the 
cart or to be slung from hammocks below it. Working three hours marching and 
three hours resting, they could go on indefinitely, making six dozen miles a day 
without ever breaking into double-time. Most caravans were happy to do two dozen 
miles, and few conventional military columns could do that! Actually, providing 
we could stay on the rails, we could probably outrun the Mongols. Providing.
I sat on Anna, watching them go out the gate. There was a big crowd outside 
cheering them on, dependents and refugees who were waiting to move into Hell as 
we left. Odds were that they were cheering more because we had vacated the 
premises than because we were going out against the enemy. Some of those people 
had been out there in the snow for days.
But there were others whose job it was to worry about those left behind. My job 
was with the riverboats. I was about to leave for it when a strange company of 
troops came up. I say strange because they were out of uniform. They had turbans 
wrapped around their helmets. Then I spotted Zoltan sitting on one of the carts. 
I went up to him and rode by his side.
"Zoltan, what the hell are you doing here?"
"Doing. sir? Why, I am riding off to war against my ancient enemies, the 
Mongols! We have many old scores to settle with them as you would say. And you 
must not call me Zoltan, sir. Not here. Now I am Captain Varanian of the 
two-tendy-eighth."
"But I never said that you could join the army! This is a Christian army!"
"True, my lord, but you never said that we couldn't, either. As to the 
Christians, we are not prejudiced, and we keep to our own company in any event."
"There's a whole company of you? How is that possible? Eight years ago there 
were only fifty men in your band, and no children. How can there be two hundred 
fifty of you now?"
"Oh, the word spread of your generosity and our security under your protection, 
my lord. Others of my people who were scattered over the world came to us in 
ones and twos and what could we do? Could we send them back to the cold and 
cruel world? So we took them in, even as you took us in. And now they repay you, 
with their lives, perhaps."
"I thought that there were only a hundred families of you."
"From Urgench yes, my lord. But there were many other cities in Khareshmia that 
is no more. Is it not enough that we join you in this Holy War?"
"Yes, I suppose it is, Captain. Carry on." I just hoped the Church never got 
wind of it.
The last company in line were specialists in cart repair, set up to get 
stragglers back on the road. Once they went by, Anna and I rode the trail beside 
the track and the men cheered us the whole way. I smiled and waved at them until 
my arm got sore, then switched arms. Good. Morale couldn't be better.
Halfway to East Gate, we passed the first of them, and Anna went over to the 
track. She said it was easier to run on the wood than on the ground. Springier.
I got there to find the RB1 Muddling Through just rounding the bend with the 
RB14 Hotspur right beyond her. There were also three companies of troops waiting 
to board them. They hadn't heard about the loss of the RB23 The Pride of Bytom, 
so I told the captain of the company that had been assigned to it that he would 
have to join up with the regular army. His boat fide was gone.
I turned to Anna.
"Well, girl, this is where we part company for a while."
She gave me an "I don't like this" posture.
"Now don't start that again! We talked this over weeks ago. There wouldn't be 
anything you could do on a boat but take up space. Baron Vladimir needs your 
help. You like Vladimir, don't you?"
She nodded YES, but sulkily.
"I know you don't want to leave me. I don't want to leave you either, but this 
is the sensible thing to do. Look, give me a hug."
I hugged her neck, her chin pressed firmly to my back.
"Anna, you know I've loved you since we first met. You've always been my best 
friend, and no matter what happens, you always will be."
She signaled "ME TOO." I felt a tear forming.
"Good. Now be off with you, love, and take good care of Vladimir! I love you!"
She galloped back west.
Captainette Lubinski, the woman commanding East Gate, came out to report to me.
"We have over twenty thousand people in there, sir. I tell you that they're 
stacked up to the stone rafters! We can't possibly take any more!"
"Then don't," I said. "There's plenty of room in Hell. Send all the newcomers 
there."
"But everybody wants to be in here!" she said. "They've all heard that this fort 
is invincible."
"It just might be. But there is a limit as to how many people it can hold. 
You'll just have to shut your gates and tell them to walk another day to Hell. 
It's the only thing you can do! Oh, give them some food and water, of course, 
but send them on their way!"
"Yes, sir, but some of them-"
"But nothing, Captainette! It's not what they want that counts! It's what we can 
possibly do! You have your orders. Dismissed."
She was crumbling already, and the battle hadn't even started. I wondered if I 
should replace her, but I didn't know any of the other women here well enough to 
pick her replacement. Maybe she'd be all right.
The boats pulled up to the dock and their front drawbridges went down. They must 
have been carrying a thousand refugees each.
"Send those people on their way to the Warrior's School!" I shouted to the 
troops standing around. "There's no room for them here!"
Baron Piotr had gotten there before me, and he had his crew organized. He was to 
run Tartar Control, our command and control center, acting as my chief of staff. 
He only had two dozen radio operators and clerks under him, but in fact he would 
be running the Battle for the Vistula-under my occasional direction, of course.
The RB1 Muddling Through was a command boat, the only one we had. It had six 
radios instead of the usual one, so we could cover all the frequencies that we 
used without retuning. It had an operations center with a big situation map, 
plus bedroom space for all the extra people. Aside from that, it was just 
another steamboat.
It was late afternoon by the time the boats had taken on more coal and supplies, 
loaded the troops, and headed downstream. As we left, two other boats were 
coming up to replenish their coal. I gave their masters a chewing out over the 
radio for being so bunched up.
RB1 EG TO RB18 EG AND RB26 EG. WHAT ARE YOU? 
TWO WOMEN WHO MUST HOLD HANDS ON THE WAY TO
THE POTTY? THE NEXT TIME I SEE YOU SO CLOSE TO
GETHER, I WILL PERSONALLY DRESS BOTH OF YOUR
BOAT'S MASTERS IN BUNNY SUITS! CONRAD. OUT.
Our range being as short as it was, the rules were that any boat between the 
sender and the receiver should relay the message onward. In this case, where all 
units concerned were at the same location, it shouldn't have been relayed at 
all, but the substance of the message was such that I knew the radio operators 
would send it the full length of the line, which is what I wanted.
Doctrine was that the boats should be evenly spaced.
We had three-gross miles of river to patrol, upstream and down, with three dozen 
boats. They should have been two dozen miles apart!
We got on the radios and had all boats report their positions and headings. If 
they bunched up, that meant long stretches of the river weren't being patrolled. 
It also meant that boats might be so far apart that radio messages between them 
might not be received, and that could cut our communication lines in half. We 
put markers on a map and started getting things organized. By midnight, we had 
schedules for all of them, where they should be at what time, assuming they 
weren't involved with refugees or Mongols. Even then, they were supposed to try 
to make up the time, since the schedule had them moving at only half speed.
At dawn, the RB9 Lady of Cracow reported a heavy enemy concentration across the 
river from Sandomierz. I told them to make a three-mile switchback, letting them 
hit the concentration three times. They complained vigorously when I ordered 
them to continue the patrol, but the RB20 Wastrel would be on station in minutes 
to take over the load.
The next four boats by there did the same, while we saw only scattered patrols. 
I wasn't going to let a bunch of boatmasters, excited at their first contact 
with the enemy, upset our schedules! As long as we could keep the bastards on 
the west side of the river, we'd get them all eventually.
But when we got near Sandomierz, I saw that they hadn't been exaggerating a bit. 
Through my telescope, I could see the Mongols had troops thirty deep along the 
shoreline. More importantly, at the shoreline men and horses were piled five and 
six high, and dead! There must have been twenty thousand dead along that sector 
of river, but they kept on coming. The riverboats were earning their pay!


Chapter Fifteen
I ran below decks and told Piotr to order the closest dozen boats to join the 
fun. We could just cruise up and down, raking them with everything we had except 
the flamethrowers, which had to be reserved for bridges.
That done, I opened the hatch to go back up on deck. A dozen Mongol arrows flew 
in at me! Four stuck in my armor and by the time I had them pulled out, I had 
been hit two more times. But I wasn't hurt. That armor really worked! So I 
ignored the arrows and pressed on.
On deck, the men looked like pincushions and were laughing about it. The deck 
itself was so filled with arrows that you couldn't take a single step without 
breaking some. Tadaos had the boat running a few dozen yards from shore, letting 
them hit us but making sure that we couldn't miss!
I saw a warrior go down with an arrow in his eyeslit; and another man take his 
place at the gun before the first had hit the floor. But the medics were right 
there and there wasn't anything I could do. Men running up ammunition moved with 
a skating motion that broke off the arrows so they wouldn't have to step on 
them.
The noise was deafening. Both starboard peashooters were firing without letup, 
throwing six hundred rounds a minute into an almost solid mass of Mongol troops. 
Those iron balls had about the ballistics of a carbine bullet. When they hit a 
man, he was wounded or dead, armor or no armor. Shooting into that tangled mass, 
I don't see how any of them could possibly have missed.
The sides of the boat were two and a half stories high, with smooth surfaces so 
they couldn't be climbed. But I saw a Mongol try to get in by grabbing on to the 
paddle wheel. I got my sword out, but before I could swing, the man was killed 
by one of the arrows flying at us. His body continued around and back into the 
water. I sent a runner to get a dozen men with pikes to guard the rear railing, 
and watched it until they arrived.
The Halmans were chunking away, and Tadaos was aiming one himself, laughing and 
shouting with every round that exploded above the mass. It was good shooting and 
better loading, because the loader had to time the fuse so that it exploded just 
above the heads of the enemy. Too high or too low and much of the effect was 
lost. The millions of rounds expended in training were paying dividends. Mongols 
were dying in droves.
The gunners from our boat's company of troops had their three dozen swivel guns 
set up on deck, adding joyfully to the carnage. Their rounds were far more 
powerful than those of the peashooters. You could see rows of three and four 
horsemen go down, all killed by the same bullet!
I'd heard that in modem battles, a quarter-million rounds are fired for every 
enemy killed. We were averaging considerably better! In fact, I never saw 
anybody miss!
And everything we were doing was soon multiplied by twelve, since the men in the 
other boats weren't acting like old maids either!
Any sane army would have run away from us, but these people weren't that sane. A 
modem army might have dug in. but that hadn't occurred to these horsemen, and 
with luck, it never would.
I could imagine Mongol commanders in the rear hearing about the slaughter and 
not believing it! I could imagine them sending observer after observer forward 
and not having any come back. Or better yet, going forward to see for themselves 
what the racket was and doing a bit of dying of their own!
It was likely, since our gunners always went after anyone who wore a fancy 
outfit or looked like he was giving orders. Besides a loader, each gunner had an 
observer whose job it was to point out good targets, and a boat gunner's helmet 
had "ears" on it pointing backward so he could hear what was being shouted at 
him.
After a few miles of this, we started running out of Mongols, so Tadaos had the 
boat turned around and we went upstream for some more gleeful mayhem. The troops 
quickly remounted their swivel guns on the port railing and reloaded. There were 
so many arrows stuck to the inside of the port parapet that they had to get out 
their axes and clear away the gun ports before they could mount their weapons! 
The men on the port peashooters, who had been dying of frustration up to this 
point, got ready to get their inning in.
The RB7 Invincible was coming downstream at us, followed closely by the RB12 
Insufferable, so we had to stay a little farther out in the channel and try not 
to shoot holes in them.
The sun was well up now, and shining in our eyes, but we didn't need accurate 
shooting at this point, we just needed shooting! Even at a gross yards, we could 
hardly miss that mass of enemy troops.
I went to the starboard side and looked over. Since it was only sheet metal over 
wood, there were thousands of arrows stuck in the ship's armor. But I guess we 
had judged the metal gauge right, since none of them penetrated all the way.
On the opposite shore, people on the walls of Sandomierz were waving at us, 
cheering us on. But sightseeing, I wasn't doing my job. I turned to go back down 
to the control room when a plane flew over. One of the oversized message arrows 
thunked into the deck. I picked it up myself and waved at the pilot. He wagged 
his wings and flew off.
Downstairs, I read the message.
"Praty gud!" it read. "Bot they mak a bridge 7 mil downstream of U. Lambert." So 
Count Lambert was finally learning how to read and write! A pity about his 
spelling, though.
I checked the situation board and found that we had no boats between Sieciechow 
and Sandomierz. There should have been, but nobody nearby wanted to miss out on 
the action here. I sent a message to Tadaos to turn downstream again and radioed 
RB17 The Ghost of St. Joseph to follow us.
The RB21 Calypso reported that another concentration of Mongols west of Brzesko 
had been spotted by a plane, and wanted to turn back and investigate. With the 
planes flying, we really didn't have to keep up a steady watch for breakthroughs 
from the boats. Permission granted.
As we proceeded downriver, it was soon obvious what Lambert had seen. Along the 
shore, a long line of small boats was being lashed together, gunwale to gunwale, 
and ropes and logs were being fastened on top of them to form a roadway. All the 
boats on the west bank were supposed to have been destroyed, but I guess that 
hadn't happened. Once completed, they would swing that pontoon bridge into the 
current and fasten it to the opposite shore. At least that looked to be their 
plan.
I called for Captain Targ, who commanded the company of troops we had on board.
"I need three platoons with axes," I said.
"Good, sir. The boys down below have been looking for something to do. It's no 
fun for them, sitting there while everybody else gets to play," he said, 
grinning.
"Such a rough life. Bow landing, you know the drill. And move some of your 
gunners up to the bow."
"Aye, aye, sir."
Piotr sent a message to RB17 The Ghost of St. Joseph to get their troops ready 
to take out the downstream half of the bridge. I went to Tadaos, who was pulling 
Mongol arrows from his deck and saving them.
"Most of these are long enough for me to shoot," he said. "I suppose you'll be 
wanting the flamethrower warmed up." 
"No, we do this one with axes," I said. "We'll give it one pass to soften them 
up, then we put some troops ashore at the middle and cover them as we go 
upstream. The Ghost will take the first half of it."
"You sure about that, sir? I think now's the time for the flamethrowers."
"It's a little late to change things. I've already given orders to the Ghost."
"As you will, sir."
We'd drilled this maneuver last summer, but most of the men were new. The 
knights had been through it, though, and that should be enough.
We went into them with our escort right on our tail. This bunch of Mongols 
hadn't been fired on before, I think, because they didn't seem to take us very 
seriously until we opened fire. Then it was a little late for them.
The river embankment was twenty yards from the shore and pretty high just here, 
higher than the boat, actually, and not too many of the Mongols made it over the 
top. A few tried to outrun us, and we were going pretty slow, but not quite that 
slow. There wasn't much for the Ghost to clean up.
We made a U-turn and headed back to the middle. Of course, playing administrator 
was about as frustrating as sitting below, waiting for something to happen. As 
we approached our touchdown point, I decided what the hell! and ran down to join 
the landing party. It had been years since I had swung a sword in earnest, and 
rank hath its privileges.
I slipped the lanyard of my sword over my wrist as I approached Captain Targ.
"Do you have room for an extra man? " I said.
"Always room for one more! Or eighty more, for that matter."
"I see. All six platoons, huh?"
"I left the gunners up top, but we're so low on ammunition that they don't need 
loaders or spotters. They can take their time because they don't have enough 
bullets to shoot fast anyway."
"But surely you had the standard thirty-six thousand rounds in your carts," I 
said.
"Maybe a mite more than that, sir, but we just did one hell of a lot of 
shooting. We're down to a gross rounds per gun right now, and that's counting 
the boat's stores besides our own."
"I didn't realize consumption was that high. We should have conserved 
ammunition."
"What for, sir? We couldn't have used it better than we did! When every round 
kills an enemy or three, they're doing what they were made for!"
Before I could reply, the boat touched the shore and the front drawbridge 
dropped. We all rushed out and through the knee-deep freezing mud. What with my 
goose-down padding and all the excitement, I'd forgotten how cold it was. We 
started chopping up boats, lashings and any Mongols that showed signs of wanting 
to be alive.
The guns above were ready to give us covering fire, but it wasn't needed. Those 
few of the enemy who had gone over the hill were still going.
The captain and I were at the end of the line going out, and there wasn't much 
for us to do as we walked slowly along the riverbank, keeping even with the 
paddle wheel of the boat. The two hundred men in front of us were chopping 
everything up into tooth picks and hamburger. One of the troops ahead of us 
stopped to cut the purse off one of the Mongol dead, and this annoyed Captain 
Targ.
"Hey, you asshole! You know the doctrine' We don't pick up loot until the 
battle's over!"
As a general thing, he was right, of course. Countless medieval battles had been 
lost because the troops had stopped to loot instead of staying in formation. Our 
rules were that we didn't loot until afterward, and then all loot was divided up 
evenly, no matter who did the looting. But first you had to win, dammit!
But just now, there wasn't any enemy opposition and we really didn't have enough 
to do.
"Captain, maybe he's right. Detail a platoon to take the Mongol purses. Tell 
them not to bother with weapons and jewelry, but let's see what we get," I said.
"Done, sir. Blue platoon only! Start looting! Purses only! Pass the word!"
While he was giving orders, I picked up one of the purses myself. It was full of 
silver and gold, almost half and half, and must have weighed four pounds! I was 
holding everything this bastard had been able to steal in three years of looting 
Russia! Yet in a way, it made sense. While he was pillaging, he had to carry 
everything he gained with him. It wasn't as though there was a bank he could 
have deposited it in.
Doing some crude mental calculations, we must have killed a half-million Mongols 
this morning! If every one of them had two pounds of gold on him, that was ... 
well, given a fifty-to-one exchange rate, silver to gold, and a six-to-one rate, 
zinc to silver, that was ... more than I could work out in my head. But maybe I 
shouldn't have worried so much about the deflated currency. If something wasn't 
done, we were about to see one bodacious inflation!
I picked up eight more purses and was musing on this when all hell shut down for 
payday.


Chapter Sixteen
I saw my error as soon as it happened. The riverbank being taller than the boat, 
our gunners couldn't see over it. They didn't see the horde that was coming 
until it was on top of us. I should have put observers up there. To add to our 
problems, while our helmets offered excellent protection, you couldn't tilt your 
head back in them. The helmet and beaver clamped into a ring around the collar 
of the breast and back plates. The helmet could turn sideways, but not up and 
down. The only way to look up was to tilt your whole body. Most people rarely 
look up in any event.
I think the reason that we weren't all killed was that the Mongols stopped at 
the top of the embankment to let off a flight of arrows. This got our attention.
It also got me an arrow in the eye.
I staggered back, scattering the gold and silver I'd picked up, tripping over 
the wreckage of the pontoon bridge and falling into the freezing mud. For a 
moment, I couldn't figure out what happened, except that I couldn't see out of 
my right eye, and my left was blurry. The pain came a bit later.
I struggled to get up, but kept falling back into the slippery wreckage. I could 
hear the shouting and fighting around me, the peashooters and the swivel guns 
firing, but I couldn't seem to get untangled. I broke off the damn arrow and 
could see with my left eye, I guess it was only that the shaft was in the way.
I was on my left side, and suddenly I was surrounded by legs and boots. But 
those weren't army uniforms! I tried again to get up and something unseen bashed 
into me, knocking me down again into deeper water and mud. I fumbled for my 
pistol, brought it up and aimed at a huge gold belt buckle a yard away. The gun 
fired, but what with the slippery mud and all, it flew from my hand. There 
wasn't time to reload it anyway.
Someone slammed into my side and we went down in a heap. I managed to get hold 
of my sword, which was still tied to my wrist, rolled over onto my knees and 
jabbed someone with red pants in the groin. He went down, but I got another bash 
on the back of the head from somewhere. But while that helmet restricted 
visibility, it sure protected you! I don't know how many times that ring around 
my collar saved my life.
Then I heard an army rallying cry! I saw three pairs of red pants go down as a 
group and then suddenly I was being lifted up into the air by strong arms under 
each of my armpits.
"Can you walk, sir?" It was Captain Targ.
"I think so. How goes the battle?"
"Time for a strategic withdrawal, sir. Or in nonmilitary parlance, let's run 
away!"
"Okay. But don't leave any of our men behind! Not even if you know they're 
dead!"
"Right sir. Standard doctrine. Fall back to the boat! Don't leave our own men! 
Pick up our dead! Pass the word!"
The gunners above us were keeping most of the enemy from getting to us, but 
there wasn't anything they could do about those already on top of us. We were 
hard-pressed to keep up any sort of line, and in that damned mud, a saber had 
the advantage over a rapier. You couldn't get enough traction to lunge!
Fortunately, most of our men had axes and I had my sword. It was only the 
captain and his knights who had serious problems.
With only one eye, I still did my share. I think I must have killed a half dozen 
of the bastards, taking a dozen hits that would have killed me had I been 
wearing lesser armor. The stuff got in the way, but it was worth it.
In minutes, we weren't fighting in the mud anymore. We were fighting on top of 
the enemy dead, and that's treacherous footing. The Mongol sabers bounced off 
our armor, but many of them were armed with a spear that had a long, thin, 
triangular point, and that thing was a killer! Carried by a man on the run, or 
thrown at short range, they could punch right through our armor, and most of our 
serious casualties were caused by them. 
Yet discipline and training held true for us. Our lines tightened up, our dead 
and wounded were put aboard and soon we were safe. I was next to the last man 
off the shore, and I would have been the last, except for the captain.
"My honors, sir. This is my company, and I'll be the last man off!"
He'd earned it, so I clambered aboard and let him follow me.
As Tadaos pulled the boat away from the shore, a medic took me inside and I was 
the last man to be hustled up to sick bay, even though I wanted to see what was 
going on topside. Medics have no respect for the wishes of a wounded man. 
They're all mother hens who are convinced that they know best.
He got my helmet off and tsk-tsked at my right eye.
"Have I lost it?" I said.
"No, sir, it missed the eyeball. But it stuck in the bone just to the right of 
it. You're going to have a scar, I'm afraid, but you'll see again. You were 
lucky."
"I would have been a damn sight luckier if the arrow had missed!"
"There is that, sir."
"Well, open that surgeon's kit' Get the arrowhead out, clean the wound, and sew 
it up! Didn't they teach you anything in medic's school?"
"I never sewed up an eye before, sir. In fact, I've never sewn up anything but 
dead animals in training."
"Well, boy, now's your chance to learn! First, wash your hands in white 
lightning, and then wash around the wound as best you can."
"Yes, sir."
After a bit, I said, "You got that done? Then get the pliers out of your kit and 
pull the arrowhead out. Better get somebody to hold my head still. It'll hurt, 
and I might flinch."
"You, sir? Never!"
"I said get somebody to hold my head and stop acting like I'm God! That's an 
order!"
"Yes, sir, You're not God. Hey, Lezek! Give me a hand! Hold his head!"
"Now the pliers," I said.
I don't know if I yelled or not, but I saw the most incredible visual display 
and I think I might have blacked out for a few moments.
"It's out, sir," he said, holding the bloody thing so I could see it with my 
good eye. The right one still wasn't working, somehow.
"Good. Throw it away. That kind of souvenir I don't need. Now get a pair of 
tweezers and feel around in the wound for any bits of broken bone or any foreign 
matter."
This time, I know I screamed. Having somebody feeling around inside of your head 
without anesthetics is no fun at all!
But he took his time at it and seemed to take out a few chunks of something. I 
wanted to tell him to leave some of the skull behind, but I thought better of 
it. I couldn't see what was happening and so I had to trust to the kid's 
judgment.
"I think that's all of it, sir."
"Thank God! Now, clean it all out again with white lightning. Pour it right in."
By now, the area was getting numb, and I didn't scream. I wanted to, you 
understand, but I could- hold it in.
"Okay. Now get out your sterile needle and thread and sew it up. Use nice neat 
little stitches, because if my wife doesn't like the job you did, she will make 
your life not worth living. Believe me. I know the woman."
"Yes, sir. Try not to wince so much. It makes it hard to line the edges up."
"I'll try."
He put nine stitches in there. I counted,
"That's it, sir."
"Well, bandage it up then, with some peat-bog moss next to the wound!"
"Yes, sir."
Without adhesive tape, the thing had to be held on by wrapping gauze around my 
head and under my chin.
When he was done, I sat up.
"Well. Good job, I hope. Thank you, but now you better get around to the other 
men who were wounded."
He looked around the room. "No sir, I think the surgeons have taken care of 
everybody."
"The surgeons!" I yelled. "Then what the hell are you?"
"Me, sir? I'm an assistant corpsman."
"Then what the hell were you doing operating on my head?"
"But, you ordered me to, sir! It was a direct order from my commanding officer! 
What was I supposed to do? Disobey you?"
"Then what were you doing with a surgeon's kit?"
"Oh, they had extra of those at the warehouse, sir, so they handed them out to 
some of the corpsmen, just in case."
"They just handed it to you?"
"Yes, sir. It's nice to know what some of these things are for."
I found I couldn't wear my arming hat over the bandage, but I could get the 
helmet on.
Before I could leave the sick bay, the chief surgeon came up to me, his armor 
hacked in a dozen places. I could see by the insignia and the fact that he 
carried a mace rather than a sword that the equally battered man standing next 
to the chief surgeon was the company chaplain. In any modem army, both of these 
positions would have been given noncombatant status, but in ours, every man was 
a warrior. This Sir Majinski was banner of the orange platoon, besides his 
medical duties.
"The butcher's bill, sir," he said.
I looked at it. Eleven dead. Twenty-ten seriously wounded, and I wasn't on that 
list. Fifty-one with minor wounds. Had I done it Tadaos's way, with 
flamethrowers, these men would all be alive and sound.
"Sorry about the incident with the corpsman, sir. I kept an eye on him while he 
was working on you, but I had a man with a sucking chest wound on my table, and 
I thought I might be able to save him. But the corpsman meant well, and he did a 
fair job."
"Well, give the corpsman my apologies. The man with the chest wound, could you 
save him?"
"No."
I checked in with Tartar Control. The battle near Brzesko was up to three boats 
now, and the battle across from Sandomierz was still raging, with a dozen boats 
still butchering Mongols. But it wasn't the same dozen. That group, out of 
ammunition, was heading back upstream to East Gate to rearm. I knew the supplies 
we had there and it wasn't going to be enough.
In the history books I read when I was a boy, some said that the Mongols had 
invaded with a million men. Others said that this was impossible, that the 
logistics of the time couldn't have supported more than fifty thousand. But if 
the estimates that I'd made and those I was getting from the other boats were 
anything like correct, we had killed more than a half a million Mongols in the 
first morning of the attack! Furthermore, they showed no signs of thinning out! 
In any event, the numbers involved were so much higher than I had expected that 
I had vastly underestimated the ammunition requirements.
On the other hand, they were showing absolutely none of the tactical brilliance 
that they were supposedly famous for and that I had feared. So far, they were 
easier to kill than dumb animals. Not that they could be expected to stay that 
dumb.
Then too, some of my actions had been pretty dumb as well, and it was my duty to 
see that my last set of stupid mistakes was not repeated.
RB1 TO ALL UNITS. WE HAVE ENGAGED THE ENEMY 
IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT AND LEARNED THE FOLLOWING:
1. WHEN PATROLLING A RIVERSHORE ON FOOT,
PLACE MEN AS OBSERVERS ON TOP OF THE RIVERBANK 
TO WATCH FOR ENEMY COUNTERATTACKS.
2. ENEMY HAND WEAPONS ARE LARGELY INEFFECTIVE 
EXCEPT FOR A SPEAR WITH A LONG, THIN, TRIANGULAR 
POINT. THIS WEAPON IS CAPABLE OF PENETRATING OUR
ARMOR WHEN CARRIED AT A RUN OR THROWN.
3. WHEN FIGHTING ON RIVER MUD, THE RAPIER IS
NOT EFFECTIVE DUE TO THE LACK OF TRACTION DURING 
A LUNGE. OFFICERS ARE ADVISED TO ARM THEMSELVES 
WITH AXES UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES.
4. WHEN TAKING OUT A PONTOON BRIDGE BEING 
CONSTRUCTED ON A RIVERSHORE, FLAMETHROWERS 
ARE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN AXES. 
GOOD HUNTING--CONRAD.
OUT.
Was that worth the deaths of eleven men? Or the maiming of dozens others? I 
swear that I was never meant to be a battle commander.
But something had to be done about the ammunition situation, and there was only 
one place to get more ammo. Our other units. We sent out radio messages ordering 
all units to send one-sixth of their swivel gun ammunition to East Gate, and for 
the Odra boats to send three-quarters of their peashooter and Halman ammunition 
in addition to this. I hated to strip the other units, but as the captain said, 
the ammunition couldn't possibly be spent better than it was right here.
I also ordered that all reloading equipment and supplies be transported from 
Three Walls to East Gate, along with any ladies who knew how to operate it.
I went back up on deck. We were heading upstream again to the fighting at 
Sandomierz.
"How did the battle go, Baron Tadaos?"
"Well, sir, since we was out to destroy the bridge, I guess you have to say we 
won. It's gone."
"We got the whole thing chopped up?"
"The Ghost did all right, but it wasn't attacked. We only got about half of our 
half done. But after we pulled out, the Ghost took out the last quarter with a 
flamethrower. That bridge burned real good. So did the Mongols."
Captain Targ came up. "It was quite a show, sir. Mongols don't like burning to 
death. A lot of them jumped into the water and drowned in preference to it."
"A good thing to know. Captain Targ, you saved my life today. If you hadn't 
killed the Mongols around me and pulled me out of that wreckage, I'd be a dead 
man. I owe you."
"No sir, you don't. I was just paying an old debt."
"Debt? What debt? Should I know you from somewhere?"
"I didn't expect you to recognize me, sir. You only saw me once and that was in 
the dark, plus I was only ten years old at the time. But I'd hoped you would 
remember my name."
"I'm sorry, but I still draw a blank."
"My father told me that if I could do you some personal service, I should tell 
you that once you threw bread on the waters, and that it has come back to you 
tenfold. Well, it isn't really tenfold. If I've saved your life, well, you once 
saved the lives of my entire family."
"I remember now. When I first got to this country, I was lost in a snowstorm, 
and your father let me in to the warmth of his fire. Doing that saved my life, I 
think."
"Perhaps, sir. But the next summer, my father's fields were flattened by a 
hailstorm. We would have starved to death that next winter except you came by 
and gave him a purse of silver. So now perhaps that debt is paid."
"In full, with compound interest, Captain. There were two of you boys, weren't 
there?"
"Yes, sir. Wladyclaw is a banner with the elevendythird."
"And the rest of your family. Are they well?"
"Yes, sir, or at least they were as of a month ago. But my father wouldn't 
evacuate and that region is probably overrun by the Mongols now. There's no 
telling what's happened."
"I'll pray for them." It was all I could say.


Chapter Seventeen
"What are those things?" Tadaos said, as we cruised by the fighting near 
Sandomierz. What with the restrictions on ammunition, we were shooting now only 
on the closer, downstream leg of the circuit. We had ammunition left for one 
pass, so we wanted to spend it well.
"Darned if I know," I said. There were four of them, and they looked sort of 
like big door frames without the doors or the walls, either. They were maybe 
three stories tall, and had a sort of teeter-totter mounted on the cross beam. 
Ropes seemed to be coming from where each seat should have been.
"Maybe they make a playground for giants," Captain Targ joked.
We got our answer shortly when fully two gross men picked up ropes that were 
hanging from the near end of one of the teeter-totters and pulled, all at once. 
A rock bigger than a man flew in an incredibly high arc, and landed a few dozen 
yards upstream of us, kicking up a cold, drenching spray.
"It's some kind of Mongol trebuchet," the captain said.
"They could be big trouble if they get the range right," Tadaos said.
"True," I said. "Captain, have your men target on those catapults, once we get 
in close."
"Right, sir."
Another rock came flying, and another. The rate of fire on those catapults was 
remarkable. They were shooting as fast as they could drag up rocks!
They were set up on a hill for better elevation, and they were shooting at us 
from three gross yards away without difficulty. I had the feeling that their 
ultimate range might be a good deal more.
A second one got into action as we turned in to make our run.
Then a huge rock crashed into RB4 The River Belle, directly in front of us. 
Three more fell into the beach area right on top of the Mongol troops, but that 
didn't slow their rate of fire. It was as though they didn't care if they took 
casualties!
Tadaos and I were on the foredeck as I watched through my telescope. He was out 
of Halman bombs, and there wasn't a good target for his Molotov cocktails, so he 
had his bow out. He'd scrounged hundreds of Mongol arrows and was politely 
returning them to their rightful owners.
Our troops opened fire on the catapults about the time that the other boats 
started to take them seriously. The Mongols had to be close together to pull 
simultaneously, and bunched up like that they were dog meat for the swivel guns. 
Chunks of wood went flying from the uprights as well.
"It looks like it was a paper tiger," I said.
"Yeah, until they get brains enough to mount them things on the other side of 
the hill," Tadaos said. "Oh, shit."
"What?" I said, still looking through my telescope.
There was a huge crash and the deck bounced under me, throwing me off balance, 
tumbling me to the deck. I looked to my left and there was a yard-wide hole in 
the deck fight next to me, right where Tadaos had been standing.
"Tadaos!" I shouted.
"Yes, sir?" he said from my right.
"My God! I thought you were dead."
"I saw it coming in time."
"Then why didn't you warn me?"
"There wasn't much time, and you was safe enough where you was. Could of been 
trouble if you moved."
Then a grappling hook with a leather rope attached came flying at me. It caught 
on the parapet, between two merlons. I got my sword out in time to lean over and 
slash open the face of a man who was climbing up the side of the boat.
"Captain! Get all your men on deck!"
"They're learning," Tadaos shouted as he drew his sword from over his left 
shoulder. "They're maybe a little slow, but they're learning."
Four platoons of troops ran up on deck and fended off what turned out to be a 
concerted boarding attempt. Once, the Mongols actually made it on deck, and had 
to be expelled with a pike charge. Things were interesting for a while, but then 
Tadaos came to me.
"We can handle things up here, sir, but I'm worried about that hole in the 
bottom. That rock went right through, you know."
"Well, I guess I am the best man for that job," I said. After all, I'd designed 
these boats. Who better to fix one? So I changed hats from battle commander to 
steamboat repairman.
That rock had gone through the top deck, through a double bunk on the middle 
deck, through the middle deck, through the cargo deck and through the bottom a 
half yard below that! I had the feeling that if it had hit me on the way, I 
wouldn't even have slowed it down!
The most serious damage was to the bottom, of course, and even that wasn't 
catastrophic. The volume between the cargo deck and the bottom was cut into 
dozens of watertight compartments, and only one of them was flooded. It would 
have been a different story had we been hit in the paddle wheel or the boiler. 
But there was no way to armor against two-ton rocks, so there was no point in 
worrying about it.
Except for the ones in the bow, the watertight compartments were all identical. 
The boat's dining room had three trestle tables that were just the right size to 
fit in the bottom of these. One of my better ideas. I got together a couple of 
crewmen and we lifted the floorboards, sank a table, and nailed it in place with 
all of us standing in the knee-deep water to hold down the table.
We put a portable pump down there and one man was left working it. It leaked 
some, but he could keep up with it. We stopped a moment to admire a job well 
done, when another rock came crashing through not four yards away, taking the 
comer off a war cart before it went through the bottom. Blood dripped through 
the ragged hole from the deck above.
"Do you remember what we did here," I said to the man next to me. He said he 
did.
"Well, do it again over there."
I went up to Tartar Control and discovered that we had a third killing ground 
going north of Czersk. Four boats were on it and the one near Brzesko now had 
six. All the rest were in transit to or from East Gate, to get more coal and 
ammunition.
The Mongols were completely inexperienced in dealing with us and our weapons, 
and paid heavily for the lessons they learned. Yet it was equally true that we 
were inexperienced with them. But with the radios, we could pass fighting tips 
around, while fighting in three separate groups; the Mongols had to go through 
each learning experience three times. And we charged full tuition to each and 
every one of them.
I got back on deck just in time to see the RB10 Not For Hire take a rock square 
on her paddle wheel. She was dead ahead of us and even as she slowed, Tadaos was 
getting a towing line ready. Using one of the Mongol grapnels as a monkey's 
fist, a line was tossed to her by one of the experienced boatmen in the crew 
just as we stopped alongside. Within a minute, Tadaos was calling for full-speed 
ahead and we resumed our way to East Gate. As we towed her home, I caught 
glimpses of the Hire's crew dismantling the wreckage, preparing to rebuild. We 
were taking casualties, but we weren't giving the bastards any trophies.
RB1 TO ALL RIVER UNITS. THE ENEMY RAS A CATA
PULT THAT LOOKS LIKE A TEETER-TOTTER MADE FOR
GIANTS. IT CAN THROW A HUGE ROCK FOUR GROSS
YARDS, WHICH CAN DAMAGE A BOAT. IF YOU SEE ONE,
DO NOT ATTACK UNTIL YOU HAVE TWO OTHER BOATS
TO BACK YOU UP. THEY NEED A LARGE NUMBER OF
MEN WORKING CLOSE TOGETHER TO OPERATE THEM,
SO THEY ARE EASILY SLAUGHTERED BY OUR SWIVEL
GUNS WHEN THEY ARE MOUNTED ON A HILL. THE
PROBLEM IS THAT THEY ARE WILLING TO REPLACE MEN
AS FAST AS WE BUTCHER THEM. IF THEY GET SMART
ENOUGH TO MOUNT THEM ON THE OTHER SIDE OF A
HILL, WE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH THEM ONLY WITH
HALMAN BOMBS AND RIFLE GRENADES. ANY OTHER
USE OF BOMBS IS NOW FORBIDDEN, TO SAVE AMMUNI
TION. IF THEY ARE HIDDEN BY A HILL, THEY MUST
HAVE SOMEONE ON TOP OF THE HILL TO AIM THE 
CATAPULT. TARGET THIS MAN. CONRAD. OUT.
Of course, I wasn't the only one handing out advice, not by a long shot. Some 
ideas were brilliant, some were dumb. But a cumulative learning process was 
taking place,
Darkness fell as we passed Cracow, still safe on the west bank of the Vistula. 
Piotr's crew was radioing the boats, reminding them that we had now lost our air 
cover, and we would have to go back to patrolling until dawn. Fortunately, the 
Mongols seemed to have had enough for one day and were breaking contact. We 
couldn't follow them, so it was a quiet night.
There was only a platoon of boatwrights at East Gate, but they were our best 
boatwrights, and they had plenty of eager if unskilled help. Because we had 
called ahead, an entire paddlewheel assembly was waiting for the Hire, and a 
crane swung it into position even as the troops were running on more ammo, food, 
and coal.
The patches in the bottom of the Muddling Through were inspected and secured 
with lag bolts. Linen caulking was pounded in the cracks and we were pronounced 
good enough. They gave us some boards and nails, and we were told to patch the 
upper decks on our way back to the fighting. Just then the boatwrights had 
better things to do.
Our badly wounded and dead were taken to an improvised hospital and morgue in 
the boat factory. I should have had something better planned, but I hadn't 
expected such heavy losses. I'd thought that our boats would be invincible!
We were almost ready to leave when I saw a Big People come galloping in hauling 
a cart full of swivel gun ammo and four terrified troops. The carts were three 
yards tall and lacked brakes, springs, and a suspension system; they were never 
intended to move at the speeds that a Big Person was capable of. But she stopped 
it in time and gave me a "Hi there!" posture.
"Hi there, yourself!" I said. "Are you Anna?"
She said YES, so I gave her a big hug.
"You see? I told you they needed you! But I've got to run, love. See you in a 
few days. Don't scare these boys too badly!" I ran to my boat and went back to 
the war. I hoped she hadn't noticed my wounded eye.
I sent a message to Duke Henryk that night, telling him that we were holding the 
Mongols at the Vistula, but we could not do it forever. I begged him to advance 
now with whatever forces he had. He did not answer.

FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
Count Conrad's instructions had been quite clear. Duke Henryk was at Legnica 
with his own men, including my father and brothers. Count Conrad had sent him a 
written apology for not being there, along with six crews of radio operators who 
worked out of those little sevenman Night-Fighter carts. Duke Henryk was not 
pleased with us.
Duke Boleslaw was a fifteen-year-old knight who had resolved to defend eastern 
Poland. He was not on good terms with our liege lord Henryk.
If we dropped back to Legnica, as Duke Henryk wanted, we would be abandoning all 
of our factories and forts to the enemy. Our women would have to try to save 
themselves without our help, and the Mongols had long experience taking cities 
that were defended by both men and women. With women alone, well, I had to side 
with Count Conrad.
Yet if we fought alone, we would be a third separate force defending Poland. It 
was necessary that we make contact with Duke Boleslaw and join forces with him. 
But it was also necessary that we do so in such a manner that he supported our 
efforts as well as we supported his.
A combined strategy was necessary, and the young fool had rebuffed our earlier 
attempts at diplomacy. He had heard too many stories about knightly prowess and 
heroic deeds, and he could see no advantage in saddling himself with a "band of 
peasant footmen," no matter how large.
Myself, I think Conrad a fool for not using Countess Francine as his emissary, 
at least on the second try. That woman could talk a hungry dog away from a dead 
pig. But a young husband is often a fool when it comes to his new wife.
As it was, I left Hell with the biggest Christian army in all of history at my 
command, and I didn't know where I was going. All I knew was that Duke Boleslaw 
was somewhere between Plock and Sandomierz, and that somehow I had to join 
forces with him and work out some sort of strategy.
I had over two dozen of Anna's daughters, and I put a dozen of them with good 
riders to search for Boleslaw, men who were scions of the old nobility, men who 
Duke Boleslaw would not dare scoff at.
The other Big People were needed to run messages along my sixteen-mile-long 
train, and to lightly screen our flanks. We went on without stopping, and normal 
horses could never have kept up with us. My old Witchfire, now long in the 
tooth, was safely in the barns at Three Walls, and my love Annastashia was with 
our children not far away from him.
I had pulled a few strings and seen to it, that my mother, my sisters, and 
sisters-in-law, along with all our peasants, were also at Three Walls, since I 
judged it to be our strongest fortification. Rank has its privileges, and I 
meant my family to be as safe as they could be.
We had practiced this business of continual motion last winter with six dozen 
carts, and had continued in circles for a month without mishap. Of course, that 
was with better trained men, men that had been winnowed out to remove the weak 
and the stupid. With this last class, well, they had been given only four 
months' training and we hadn't washed out anybody, except for those who had died 
. Still, their officers had been well trained, and we'd hoped that this would be 
enough.
Supplies of wood had been waiting for us along the roads since last summer with 
remarkably little pilferage. Supplies of water were provided. Crews of greasers 
went down the lines of moving carts, greasing the ball bearings in the wheels. 
The rails were new, the bridges intact, and we made six dozmiles a day on foot.
Some of the men had a hard time sleeping on the move, but experience had taught 
us that when they got tired enough , they would sleep.
By dawn of the second day we had passed Cracow, and still I had no word of 
Boleslaw.


Chapter Eighteen
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
The battle was not going as well as it had at first. As Tadaos said, they were 
learning.
They took out their first riverboat with a tree. During the night, they had 
chopped almost through the trunk of a huge pine tree right on the riverbank, 
then made a demonstration around it. When the RB14 Hotspur attacked, they 
dropped that tree right across her deck, which nearly smashed her in half Then 
they swarmed up the trunk and overpowered the crew.
By the time the RB12 Insufferable got there, the Mongols were learning how to 
use the swivel guns. After an exchange of gunfire, I ordered the Insufferable to 
bum the Hotspur with its flamethrower, and she went up quick. I pray to God in 
Heaven that all our men were dead before that happened.
They had mostly stopped using arrows on us, but they were still using the 
catapults, and still mounting them on hilltops. We kept on mowing down their 
crews and they kept on replacing them with a seemingly complete disregard for 
the lives of their men.
The RB21 Calypso got snagged on an underwater obstruction directly in front of 
one of the catapults. She took more than a dozen direct hits before her crew was 
taken off by the RB10 Not for Hire. By that time, the Calypso was completely out 
of ammunition, and her crew burned her before they left.
We got to avoiding the catapults as much as possible, and at full speed, 
zigzagging, it wasn't likely for a boat to be hit. It took a very tempting 
target to get one of our boats to slow down and stay near one spot, a temptation 
like a concentration of twenty thousand Mongols.
And seeing this, the enemy provided us with targets just to sucker us in! They 
were willing to spend ten or twenty thousand men just to kill one of our boats 
with less than three hundred men aboard! Madness!
Then they learned the best way to take out a riverboat, and we lost six boats in 
front of Sandomierz in less than an hour. Instead of rocks, they started 
throwing sewn-up ox hides filled with burning oil. The seasoned wood of our 
boats went up quickly, and usually we weren't able to save many of the crew. 
They were hurting us.
Yet we killed as many of them that day as we had on the first. I knew the 
ammunition we were using up, and I knew the conditions under which we were using 
it, mostly firing into packed crowds at pointblank range! Even the most 
conservative estimates still came out that we had killed over a million enemy 
troops! Yet they still kept coming!
We got to spraying our boats with water, inside and out, and this helped some. 
Wet wood burned more slowly and sometimes it took three or four fire bombs to 
destroy one of our boats. Fighting an oil fire with water is the wrong thing to 
do, but we didn't have any alternative. Sometimes enough oil could be flushed 
off the deck to save a boat. Sometimes not.
But the battle was on, and nobody ever suggested that we should quit. Even if we 
lost the Vistula, if we could kill enough of them, the rest of the army might 
have a chance. By midnight of the fifth day, we were down to nineteen boats.
We couldn't patrol much that night. All of the boats had to go back to East Gate 
to replenish supplies, and our crews were exhausted, physically and emotionally. 
At dawn, we found three bridges more than half completed across the river, and 
we lost four more boats taking them out. The enemy had found a target that we 
couldn't refuse.
But after that, they were back to throwing rocks at us. Our best guess was that 
they had simply run out of oil.
Yet there seemed to be as many Mongols as ever, despite the fact that there were 
long stretches of riverbank strewn with their dead. Near Sandomierz, the enemy 
dead were more than ten yards deep in some places, and still they kept coming, 
like lemmings to their deaths.
We were hardly patrolling north of Czersk at all, since our boats were generally 
more than half out of ammunition by the time they got there. Our strategy, if it 
could be called that, was no longer to hold the Vistula. We knew we couldn't. It 
was simply to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and that was easier to do 
near our base.
Every night, I sent a message to Duke Henryk, begging him to advance with 
whatever men he had available. And every day, I waited for his reply, in vain.


Interlude Four
I hit the STOP button.
"Tom, I just can't believe the numbers of Mongols he's fighting."
"Believe it. At the time, those tribes of herdsmen had a population of over 
eight million, of which three million counted as fighting men. It wasn't as if 
they had to leave most of their men home to run the factories. Many of the 
Mongol warriors were on garrison duty, but they got most of their front-line 
troops from their conquered subjects. Most of those men Conrad was killing 
weren't Mongols. They were Iranians, Bactrians, Chinese, Russians, and what have 
you. Conrad mentions that they didn't seem to care if they lost men. They 
didn't. The troops they were losing were subject populations that were just 
surplus to them. Throwing them at the Poles was just another way of killing them 
off. Conrad's estimates were too conservative. All told, he killed over two 
million men at the Vistula."
"Those Chinese catapults had crews made up of prisoners, many of them Polish 
peasants. I suppose it's a good thing that Conrad didn't know the truth. He 
couldn't have done anything but what he did, but it would have been rough on his 
conscience."
"Wow. I'd always thought that the Mongols won so often because of superior 
tactics and strategy."
"It didn't take much to have tactics superior to those of the Europeans of the 
time. Like the Japanese of the same period, Westerners simply never trained as 
groups. It was all part of the mystique of knighthood. All their training was 
purely individual training, and one to one, the Europeans were inferior to no 
one. But their only group tactic was to get in a line and run at the enemy, 
mostly all at the same time."
"Also, it's a normal human thing to praise your enemy to the skies. It makes you 
look better if you win and not so bad when you lose.
"I don't know how many times I've heard Americans praise the fighting ability of 
Germans, for example, despite the fact that in all the time that there was a 
country named Germany, the Germans won only one small war, fighting little 
France alone, while losing a lot of big ones that they were foolish enough to 
start. In fact, the Germans were lousy fighters and their strategy was always 
absurd. It just feels better to say that you conquered a race of heroes than to 
admit that you blew away a bunch of damn fools."
"Huh. Another thing. Why didn't the Mongol delegation look Mongolian?" I said.
"Because the Mongolians were originally a Caucasian people, not an Oriental one. 
They only became Oriental after the conquest of China, thirty years after the 
time of this story, in our timeline, when for a hundred years, five or six 
generations, every Mongolian man came home with a dozen Chinese wives. A thing 
like that changes the blood lines pretty thoroughly. The Mongol of later 
centuries was racially and culturally a totally different animal. Devout 
pacifists, most of them."
"Oh."
I hit the START button.


Chapter Nineteen
FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
Finally, we know where we are going! My riders didn't find Duke Boleslaw's army, 
but Count Lambert's flyers did. They were proceeding up the Vistula from the 
north, and it looked as if we could meet up with them near Sandomierz.
When we were within a day of getting there, I collected a dozen of the Big 
People and set out ahead of my troops to talk to the duke. We got there at dusk, 
and were eventually escorted in to see the young man.
"Who were you, again?" Duke Boleslaw said.
"I am Baron Vladimir Charnetski, your grace. We haven't met, but we are related. 
Two of my aunts married two of your uncles, and one of my second cousins married 
two of your aunts, once removed, one on your father's side and one on your 
mother's, after the first one died. Surely you remember your Aunt Sophy and your 
Aunt Agnes. Well, they're my aunts as well."
Reminding him of our family ties seemed like a good idea. Actually, it was no 
big thing. I occasionally think that I must be related to everybody. Coming from 
a vast family helps, sometimes.
"You are the nephew of my Aunt Sophy? I haven't seen the old girl in years! How 
is she? And what of my Uncle Albert?"
"Just fine when I saw them last, a few months ago. They have thirteen children 
now, with another on the way."
"Thirteen! How is that possible? Two years ago, they had only nine!"
"Twins, your grace. Two pairs of them."
"No! That's amazing! And my Aunt Agnes?"
"Not so good, your grace. She's had a bad cough for almost a year now, and we're 
all worried about her."
"I shall include her in my prayers. But look, things are rushed just now, 
Vladimir. What can I do for you?"
"I think it's more what I can do for you, your grace. I am Hetman of Count 
Conrad's army. I have a hundred and fifty thousand men coming to join your 
forces."
"That was true, then? It wasn't some kind of silly joke? He really does have 
that many men?"
"Of course, your grace! Who could joke about such a thing? Anyway, they'll be 
here in a day and you can see for yourself."
"Here in a day? That's disaster!"
"How can that be, your grace? We're on your side, after all."
"It's disaster because I can't feed the men I've got now! The food merchants 
have not come! The cowards have all run away! Even the peasants have gone, and 
they've taken most of the food with them! I can't feed the twenty-five thousand 
men I have now! How am I going to feed a hundred fifty thousand more?"
"Oh, don't worry about that, your grace. We have food for a month with us, and 
all the grain we could ever need at the granaries in the Bledowska Desert. In 
fact, I can easily feed your entire army. I can have tons of grain here in a few 
days. Until then, we can feed your men and horses with what we have with us, but 
more food can be on its way here in an hour."
"How is this possible?"
"Easy. I brought a radio and a radio operator with me. We can send a message in 
a few minutes to the granary. They have mules and carts there. Why, four dozen 
carts a day can feed all your men and animals well. It has to come by rail 
instead of by boat because the boats are busy right now." I sent one of my men 
out to attend to it.
"Yes, I'd heard there was a battle going on at the Vistula. That's Conrad's 
riverboats, isn't it?"
"Yes, your grace, and Count Conrad is with them. They are slaughtering 
incredible numbers of the enemy, but it doesn't look as though they can hold out 
much longer. They say that tomorrow or the next day, the enemy will break 
through. Already, more than half of our men on the rivers are dead."
"Half dead? And still they fight?"
"Yes, your grace. They'll fight until they are all gone, every last man of them. 
I know. I trained them."
"On boats, perhaps. But what can footmen accomplish on a battlefield? Everybody 
knows that battles are won by men on horses! A footman can do nothing but get 
trampled."
"Wrong, your grace. Horsemen can do nothing against a mass of trained men with 
pikes! A pike is six yards long and can knock a knight out of the saddle before 
his lance can touch the footman. Believe me! We've practiced the very thing many 
times in the last five years. Furthermore, I have more than twenty thousand guns 
coming with my troops, and they can kill an enemy at a mile! What I don't have 
is a force of horsemen, but you do. If we can work together, we cannot be 
beaten!"
"Vladimir, we'll have to talk more on this. For now, do you swear that food 
supplies will be here by this time tomorrow?"
"I swear it by all that's holy, your grace."
"Then I'll believe that much at least. I must go and give orders that the last 
of the food reserves are to be handed out and eaten. That will give the men one 
good meal, and after that we are at your mercy."


Chapter Twenty
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
Of all the mistakes I've made, the most serious was to set the number of 
riverboats at only three dozen. We needed six times that number!
Of course, at the time, I wasn't sure if we would be able to use them at all. 
The river might have been frozen over, the water level could have been too low 
to get by some of the rapids, or any one of a number of things could have gone 
wrong. I don't know. I needed sleep, and there wasn't much of that to be had.
There came a time when we were the only boat north of Sieciechow, on a sector 
that hadn't been patrolled in days, and we found that the Mongols had completed 
a bridge across the Vistula. Thousands of enemy troops were rushing across it.
"Baron Tadaos, we've got to take that bridge out."
"Sir, we're out of Molotov cocktails and Halman bombs. We're out of peashooter 
balls. The flamethrower is exhausted. We have maybe a thousand rounds of swivel 
gun ammunition left and those troops outnumber ours by hundreds to one. How are 
we going to do it?"
"We're going to ram it. Captain Targ! Prepare to offload your men and your war 
carts!"
The captain gave a few orders that had his men scurrying, then ran up to me.
"We're going to attack that bridge, sir?"
"We are, but you are not. We're going to ram that bridge, and doing that will 
likely sink us. There is no point in your company going down with the boat. It 
would accomplish nothing, and you are needed elsewhere. You will get your men 
ashore and fight your way south to Sandomierz. Once there, you will join the 
garrison and help defend the city."
He stared at me for a long minute.
"Yes, sir. What about my wounded?"
"Take the walking wounded with you. The others will have to be left behind. 
There's nothing else we can do."
"Yes, sir."
I could see that he wanted to say more, a lot more, but he turned and went to 
obey his orders.
"Tadaos, I can handle the helm alone, but I'll need one man in the engine room. 
See if you can find a volunteer, a good swimmer. Then get the rest of your men 
ready to join Captain Targ."
He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Pig shit!"
Then he spat on my boots.
"Nine years I've been working for you and you don't know me any better than 
that? You might have taken command of this battle, and done some dumbshit 
things, but I am still master of this boat and baron of the whole damn River 
Battalion, or what's left of it anyway! Three-quarters of my men are dead now, 
and you expect me to turn around and run away? This is my damned boat and this 
is my damned duty station and I will damn well stay here until we've won or 
we're dead! And if you think that any man of mine feels any different, you can 
damn well ask them yourself!"
Then he turned his back to me and put a new string on his bow, his hand shaking 
with anger.
I stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I turned to the helmsman, a young 
kid who looked to be fourteen.
"Get out of here, boy."
"No, sir." His face shield was open and he was crying, tears running down his 
cheeks. "No, sir," he repeated and continued to stand his post, though the tears 
must have blinded him.
I turned and went below.
"Baron Piotr, get your men together. I'm going to take out a bridge by ramming. 
You and your men are going ashore with Captain Targ."
He didn't get up from the map board.
"Yes, sir. We heard something about that. But the fact is that we really don't 
know whether the boat will sink or not. Ashore, well, we wouldn't be able to do 
that much good for Sandomierz, since most of us here have been sitting at desks 
and radio sets for years. We are way out of training. But if the boat does stay 
afloat, we're going to be needed here to continue coordinating our efforts. We 
still have eleven boats on the river, after all. So, begging your pardon, sir, 
but we're staying."
"Damn you, Piotr, that was a direct order!"
"Sir. I am a Radiant Warrior, blessed by God to do His holy work. I am not going 
to run away now."
I looked around the room. All of the men were trying to look busy.
"This is mutiny!" I shouted.
"Yes, sir, I suppose it is," a mousey-looking radio operator said. "But it's 
really for the best, sir. Our place is here."
"Damn you all," I shouted and went down to the cargo deck.
One of the crew was flooding the odd-numbered watertight tanks, to give the boat 
more weight, he explained, and never mind about the buoyancy. He wanted to make 
sure that we hit the bridge as hard as possible.
"It'd be a shame to waste our last blow at the bastards, wouldn't it, sir?"
The troops were jamming the war carts up against the forward drawbridge, again 
to increase the impact.
Captain Targ came up to me.
"I regret that I have to report a mutiny, sir. I was afraid that this might 
happen, but the men won't leave. We're down to less than four full platoons now, 
and they've seen too many friends die to run away at this point. It would be 
like dishonoring the dead. Anyway, if the boat hangs up on the bridge, you'll 
need us to repel boarders, so it's for the best."
"God damn you all to hell! But that bridge still has to 90 !:"
"Of course, sir. Speaking of which, we'd better all get up on deck or we'll miss 
the show. Tadaos won't be waiting for orders, you know. AH platoons! Report on 
deck! Pass the word!"
"You are all crazy people!" I shouted.
"Yes, sir," a warrior said as he brushed by me, heading for the stairs. "I 
suppose we are."
I got on deck when we were less than three-gross yards from the bridge. We were 
going full-speed downriver and the helmsman had us aimed dead center.
The bridge was built rather high for such a temporary thing, and the top of the 
roadway was higher than the deck of the boat. It-was built on wooden 
tetrahedrons made of oversized telephone poles that looked to be simply set on 
the river bottom, with the roadway strung on ropes above them.
There were thousands of men and horses on it, rushing across, and while some of 
them were shouting and pointing at us, they still kept coming. There were men 
getting on the bridge the moment we hit.
The impact was enough to knock us all over, and we all went skidding across the 
splintered deck. As I got up, I saw that we had not punched a hole through the 
bridge, as I had expected. We had actually tipped it over!
The part of it that was right in front of us was already in the river, and the 
roadway was caught by the current. On both sides of us, like water breaking over 
a dam, the long flexible bridge was pulled slowly over on its side.
The water was filled with thrashing horses, but with fewer men than you would 
expect. Not that many of the desert-bred Mongols could swim. Those few that did 
make it to shore didn't live long. The captain already had the swivel guns in 
action.
But the bridge was still in one piece and we hadn't gone through it. Tadaos got 
us into reverse and we backed off the wreckage.
A crewman ran up from below and reported to Tadaos, who turned to me and said, 
"The bow is smashed up, but we're still afloat. Maybe you ought to see about 
repairing the damage, sir."
So I went down to play steamboat repairman, again. On the way, I stopped to tell 
Piotr to radio the other boats that a bridge could be taken out by ramming. He 
had already done so.
The next morning, after the other boats had taken out four other bridges and 
lost two of their number doing it, it became strangely quiet, all along the 
Vistula. Some men thought that we had actually won and the enemy had given up. 
Others were sure that it was some kind of a trick. The planes reported that the 
Mongols were concentrating in a dozen groups, each a few miles east of the 
river, but not going back any farther. It was eerie and quiet for the first time 
in a week. Even the catapults were unmanned.
Then, the morning after that, an even stranger thing happened. All at once, 
along the whole river as far as we could tell, enemy troops led their horses 
down to the frozen banks of the river. Holding on to the horse's tail, they got 
the animals swimming across the icy waters of the Vistula, pulling the rider 
behind them.
We steamed through them, drowning hundreds, but they were like lemmings and we 
couldn't begin to stop them all.
Tadaos looked at it in disbelief.
"If they could do that, why didn't they do it a week ago?"
"There's your answer," Captain Targ said, pointing to the west bank. "Every 
horse had a man behind it when it went into the water. Only maybe half of those 
men are still there when they come out."
"Good God in Heaven, you're right! They are deliberately throwing away half of 
their army just to get across! Who could order such a thing? Why do they do it? 
Don't they realize that we no longer have anything to fight with?"
We all shook our heads and watched half of the enemy army die.
I don't know. Maybe they ran out of food. Maybe they just got impatient. It's 
likely they never realized how close to the wire we were. The only thing sure 
was that the Battle for the Vistula was over and the Battle for Poland had 
begun.

FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
We set up a system where each platoon "adopted" up to ten of Duke Boleslaw's 
troops, at least for dining purposes. Later we had to up it to twelve. More of 
them were coming in every day, and many had had a hard time finding us.
The printshop in Cracow made up thousands of little signs that said where our 
camp was; one of the Big People ran them to Eagle Nest and the planes were soon 
dropping them on friendly troops who looked lost. It helped, but as it turned 
out, it also told the Mongols where to find us. Maybe that wasn't so bad. We 
wanted to find them.
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 horsemen 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 
horsemen 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 assist. 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 shipped 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 mass 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 crashing in the distance and it looked likely that we would be 
fighting tomorrow in a cold spring rain. The lightning had been raising hell 
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 vassals of Duke Boleslaw, they had not 
come to the battle, saying that they had to defend the northern borders, which 
was bullshit. 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 shit 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 
titles. 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 shelling to cover our men as they come out, and 
maybe slaughter their horses while we're at it. We'll get some of the bastards 
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 God!" 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 damn 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 damn face closed until we get back to our camp!"
Thunder was crashing overhead and the rains had started.
Once there, I said, "Don't you have brains enough to not shout at a duke, for 
God's sake! And especially a duke who could wreck the whole battle plan if he 
gets a hair up his arse? 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 nobody would see us leave. If he reported that I went on a beer 
run, well, wouldn't nobody 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, pass 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. Dumbshits, 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. Pass 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 nobody 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 nobody 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 nobody 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 damn 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."
"Damn shame. Maybe we'll have some left over for you."
"You'd better." What a dumbshit, I thought.


Chapter Twenty-two
FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
I talked to Baron Ilya in the cold rain at dawn. He reported a successful 
mission and requested more ammunition, most of his being exhausted. I put his 
little carts in back of the north line as a backup in case we were attacked 
there on the wrong side. He could scrounge ammunition from the carts near him, 
but I didn't want to do anything official about replenishing him, not when I had 
just disobeyed a direct order from the duke.
The radios were still picking up nothing but static, so I had all but two of 
them packed away, and their crews put on the battle line. I didn't know what was 
happening on the Vistula or in the rest of the country, but I told myself that 
it wasn't important now. This day's business could be done with horns and signal 
flags. The worth of all that I had done in the last five years would be decided 
today in the time of a few hours and the space of a few square miles.
We ate a hot breakfast in the dark, and the camp city was quickly taken down. 
Everything not essential to combat was packed neatly on the ground. The carts 
were empty except for arms, ammunition, and a light lunch.
I led the men in the sunrise service, even though we couldn't see the sun, and 
we moved out.
I'd picked the spot for the ambush carefully. It was a long, low valley with a 
small creek running down the center. The hills were gentle enough so that our 
war carts could be easily pulled over them, but they provided enough of a 
backdrop so that the carts would not be too obvious against a skyline. The 
valley averaged a mile wide and was ten miles long.
As each war cart got into position, the top was taken off, spare pike shafts 
were set into the armored side of the cart, and the yard-and-a-half wide-armored 
top was slung out to one side as a shield for the pikers. The four great, 
caster-mounted wheels were unlocked from their fore and aft traveling position 
and locked spread out to the sideways moving combat position. Pikes and halberds 
were broken out and distributed. Six gunners climbed in each cart and mounted 
their weapons. The thirty-six pikers and axemen snapped into their pulling 
harnesses and tugged the cart into its final position. Well coordinated, this 
took less than a minute. Then they stood and waited in the rain.
Our war carts stretched more than six miles along on each side of the valley and 
flared out at the end like a funnel mouth, two miles across. Sentries were 
posted behind us and the Big People were scouting to insure that we wouldn't be 
taken unawares. We were all in position by midmorning, and then there was 
nothing to do but wait.
Duke Boleslaw's horsemen had left at dawn, and I was worried about them. They 
were such a disorganized mass that I wasn't sure whether they could all stay 
together enough to get a decent charge at the enemy. But there was nothing I 
could do but wait and worry.
I was worried about Count Conrad as well. I hadn't heard from him in days, what 
with the problems with the radios, and in this rain, the planes couldn't fly 
safely, so I lacked that source of information as well. Until the day before, I 
had always known what was happening. Now, just as all things were coming to a 
climax, I was suddenly all alone. It seems strange to say that, since I had 
about me the finest and largest army in Christendom, but it was true.
After an hour of tense waiting, I saw one of our planes flying low toward us 
from the north, and then I saw another right behind it. Soon, there were twenty 
of them, and they circled low over the valley. Then they proceeded to land!
This was crazy! Planes landed only at Eagle Nest! Anywhere else and they 
couldn't take off again! Not unless we built a catapult on the spot. 
Furthermore, they had landed in the very place where we were expecting a horde 
of Mongols to come charging in at any moment! Those planes were a big sign that 
said "Mongol, run away!"
I had my Big Person, Betty, run me down to the first plane that had landed, its 
propeller still spinning and its engine making enough noise to scare away a 
saint.
"What the Hell are you doing here?" I shouted.
The engine stopped and Count Lambert got out, wearing his gold-plated armor.
"Baron Vladimir, fortunately I couldn't hear that, but you must learn to speak 
more politely to your betters," he said.
"But my lord, you have landed right in the middle of an ambush! The Mongols 
could be coming in any time now!"
"No, it will be another half-hour at the least. We saw them fighting Duke 
Boleslaw's men three or four miles from here. But have your men move these 
planes if they are in the way. Don't worry about hurting them, they'll never fly 
again. Be careful of the engines. They're expensive and they can be salvaged."
All of this made no sense to me, but I galloped to our lines and gave the 
necessary orders to get those planes hidden. By the time I got back to the 
count, a squire had ridden out leading two dozen war horses, all saddled and 
ready for combat. This crazy stunt had been planned!
"My lord, what is all this about?" I said.
Lambert put on a red-and-white surcoat and swung into the saddle. "About? Well, 
you could hardly expect us to miss the final battle, could you? For over a week 
now, we've been in the air, watching you and Conrad garner all the glory while 
we could only look on! We have taken some heavy losses doing it, too! You see 
those twenty planes there? Well, there were forty-six of them to start!"
"That many? What happened to them?"
"Three crashed on landing at Eagle Nest. Two were seen flying too low over the 
enemy and were brought down by arrows. One flew into a thundercloud and we found 
the pieces later. The rest, we don't know. They just didn't come back."
"My God. I didn't realize it was that bad, my lord. But why leave the rest of 
them here? Surely you can't fly them out of here!"
"No, of course not. But don't you see? They're not needed anymore! They've done 
their job! The Mongols are all here. The army is here. The whole affair will be 
settled right here! If we are to get our share of the glory, we have to get it 
now! As to the planes, well, we have wood, glue, and cloth in abundance. We can 
build more later."
"But, but does Count Conrad know of this?"
"Who gives a damn about Conrad? Look, boy, Conrad is sworn to me, not me to him! 
But just now there's a battle to get to. The plan's still the same? Lead them 
through here, then come back in a bit for the kill?"
"Yes, my lord."
"Good!" He waved to his mounted aviators. "Let's go! To war!"
And they rode out of the valley.
Maybe the planes weren't needed, but as I saw it, things were still very much 
afloat. Who could tell what we would need and what we would not! I was almost 
glad that the radios weren't working. I would have hated to have to report this 
piece of insanity to Count Conrad!
We got the planes cleared away and hidden, and then it was wait and worry time 
again.
It was approaching noon, and I was wondering if I should feed the men when an 
outrider on one of the Big People came and reported that the battle was coming 
our way. I signaled "Ready" and "Hide," and could see the lines tighten up, the 
pikes drop, and the flag poles go down as soon as the message was relayed.
After a while, I could see our horsemen coming in exactly as planned, if a 
little late. They were in surprisingly good order, all things considered, and 
Duke Boleslaw himself was at their head, surrounded by his youthful group of 
friends. He was going a bit slower than a full frightened gallop, I suppose to 
insure that all of his men could keep up. A few Mongols had gotten out in front 
of him, but he wisely ignored them.
He came right down the middle of the valley, splashing over the little 
half-frozen creek twice just to keep going in a straight line. The kid was doing 
good! And after him came the vast horde of the enemy, which outnumbered 
Boleslaw's forces by at least twenty-to-one, galloping in a ragged mob and not 
noticing in the least the army waiting for them! It was working!
My station was at the mouth of the funnel, and as soon as the last of the 
Mongols went through, I advanced both our wings to seal it off. As soon as the 
duke's men were out of the trap at the other end, my second in command, Baron 
Gregor Banki, would close the small end and open fire, which would signal us to 
do the same, and the war would be nearly won!
The ends of the wings had more than a mile to go to close the gap, so this took 
a while. As I followed them in, another outrider reported that Count Conrad was 
arriving with what was left of the river battalion, forty-one war carts out of 
the two hundred sixteen he'd started with! I sent the man back with an 
invitation for Conrad to plug the gap in the center. After all that they had 
done, those men deserved the honor.
This delayed things a bit, but there wasn't an enemy in sight and I knew we 
could afford the time. I mounted Betty and rode around to my liege lord. I could 
safely leave my post because now there wasn't a single thing for me to do! When 
the shooting started, everybody would join in. I was no longer needed.
Count Conrad had a dirty bandage over his right eye and he looked horribly tired 
and old!
"My lord, it's good to see you! You look like you need this!" I threw him my 
wine skin. It wasn't exactly a regulation part of the uniform, but rank has a 
few privileges.
"Thank you." He took a long pull. "Things go as planned?"
"Perfectly, my lord. We're only waiting for Gregor to close his end and start 
shooting. It should be any time now."
"Good. We're out of ammunition. Can you supply some?"
"Of course, my lord!"
I gave the orders and runners started coming in with crates of swivel gun 
rounds. As we waited, I told my liege about Baron Ilya's night raid, and about 
Duke Boleslaw's reaction to it.
"You did right," he said. "At least, that's what I would have done."
Then I had to tell the count about his air force, or rather his lack of one.
"Damn," he said, looking more weary than ever. "If we live through this, I swear 
either I'm going to get control of Eagle Nest, or I'm going to build another 
one."
When Conrad's forces were supplied, we still hadn't heard from the small end of 
the funnel. Then horsemen started coming at us, but they weren't all Mongols! 
There were Polish knights mixed in with them, and soon a vast, slashing and 
hacking free-for-all was going on fight before our eyes! Something had gone 
very, very wrong.
The signal flags started wagging, sending the same message to us around both 
sides of the ambush:
BOLESLAW HAS NOT LEFT THE TRAP, IT SAID. ONE OF HIS YOUNG FRIENDS FELL TO A 
MONGOL ARROW. BOLESLAW TURNED BACK AT THE LAST INSTANT AND WENT TO AID HIS 
FRIEND. THE DUKE'S HORSEMEN ALL FOLLOWED THEIR LIEGE BACK INTO THE MONGOL 
FORCES. THEY ARE NOW ALL MIXED TOGETHER. WE HAVE CLOSED THIS END BUT WE CANNOT 
SHOOT WITH OUT KILLING OUR OWN MEN. BULLETS GO RIGHT THROUGH ENEMY AND THEN 
CONTINUE THROUGH OUR MEN WHO ARE BEHIND THEM. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
GREGOR BANKI.
"That's a good question he asks, my lord. What should we do?" I said.
"I don't know. What can we do? Nothing, that's what! We just have to let those 
crazy knights get themselves killed."
"Do you want to take command, my lord?"
"Me? No. This is your show. You do what you think is best. I screwed things up 
enough on the river. Now it's your turn."
"But I had heard that you had killed vast numbers of the enemy," I said.
"Perhaps, but look around you. Of the men I led into battle, not one in five is 
still fit to march. How can that be called a victory? I made mistakes, many 
mistakes. You have command here, Vladimir. Try to do better than I did."
"Yes, sir."
I signaled "Defend Yourself,", "Give Aid," and "Stand By," which meant they 
should not let themselves be hurt, they should help out where they could, and 
then they should wait for further orders. What else could I tell them?
A half-hour later, I told them to break out lunch and eat in rotation, one lance 
per platoon at a time.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
In front of us, like on a movie screen, the Polish nobility was slugging it out 
with the Mongol horsemen. Our men were hopelessly outnumbered, but they were 
giving a good account of themselves. They had some advantages.
They were generally bigger and stronger than their adversaries, and had much 
better arms and armor than the enemy. Most of them had been equipped out of my 
factories, and the poorest page had at least a full set of chain mail, 
doubtlessly a hand-me-down, but better than what many knights wore ten years 
ago. The Mongols, on the other hand, were wearing whatever they could steal or 
scavenge off of various battlefields, and many of them had no armor at all.
The Polish horses were considerably larger and more powerful than those of their 
adversaries, and in shock combat, this counted for a lot.
But mostly, the western knight was trained to fight as an individual, both on 
the tourney field and in battle. This was often to their disadvantage in combat 
with the more sophisticated easterners, but it wasn't that way today. The 
Mongols were showing none of their vaunted organization and discipline. If 
anything, they seemed more disorganized than we were. Perhaps Ilya's men really 
had fragged every Mongol officer.
Furthermore, our men could come to our lines when tired or thirsty or wounded. 
Any Mongol who got close enough to offer a clear shot was killed.
Our men had some advantages, but they weren't enough to offset a numerical 
disadvantage of twenty-to-one.
One by one, the pride of the Polish nobility was dying.


Chapter Twenty-three
The slaughter in the cold rain went on for hours, and watching it and not being 
able to do anything to help was one of the most frustrating things that I have 
ever done. It was equally rough on the men of the army who were looking 
helplessly on.
A group of women came by driving mules that were pulling a standard army tank 
cart filled with beer. They filled all our cooking pots with it.
"Compliments of the Sandomierz Whoremasters Guild," one saucy wench said. "Just 
be sure and save half of it for them fine young knights out there doing all the 
fighting!"
"What is the Whoremasters Guild doing with an army tank cart?" I asked.
"Oh, they was just sitting around, going to waste, when all them handsome 
knights was thirsty," she said. "We figured we'd do us a public service, being 
in that business, you know. Servicing the public, that's our job!"
"They? How many of my tank carts did you take?"
"Oh, there was maybe two dozen of them, and the mules wasn't being used either. 
But your carts? Then you must be that Count Conrad they talk about. You're the 
size they tell. Say, you ain't mad about this beer, are you? I mean, it ain't 
like we stole it to sell or something."
"No, I guess I'm not mad, and I suppose the men need a drink. But look, once you 
share out the beer, come back with that thing filled with water, all right?"
"Right-o, your lordship. Say, why don't we never see you around any? A man your 
size would be a fun one!"
"I'm happily married. But by the same token, what are you doing being a 
prostitute? You know the army is always hiring women as well as men. You could 
get a good job and maybe find a real knight of your own."
"What? Leave the guild? Say, my master'd whup me for even thinking about it!"
"You don't have to put up with that sort of thing! No whoremaster ever dared 
beat a member of the army!"
"What? Not whup me? Then how'd I know he still cared about me? Whoops! The 
cart's four places down already! Got to run, your lordship! Ta-taaa!"
And with that, she waved and ran away. I don't think I'll ever understand some 
people.
Well, at least I could understand the men around me. They wanted to go out there 
and kill somebody! Some of them had been training for this day for years, and 
now there was nothing they could do! We had over twenty thousand swivel guns 
pointed at the enemy, and they were useless! A bullet fired would go right 
through the Mongol it was aimed at, and kill some Christian who happened to be 
fighting behind him! It was all my fault, too. I made those guns too powerful! 
I'd had visions of Mongols charging at us six ranks deep, and our guns ploughing 
furrows through them. I never imagined anything like this!
One of my men looked up at me from the ranks in front of my cart and shouted, 
"Dammit! Do something!"
He was as insubordinate as hell, yet he had expressed the common feeling, and I 
had to answer him.
"Do what? What can we do? If we advance, we'd only squeeze them closer together, 
and our knights need room to fight in! If we shoot, we kill our own men as well 
as the enemy!"
"They're dying anyway!" another man yelled.
"Then better they should die at Mongol hands and not ours! If the knights would 
just get out of there, we could end this in minutes! This is their decision! 
There's nothing we can do!"
That didn't satisfy anybody, but there was nothing they could answer. I looked 
away from the slaughter and saw a strange thing.
A knight rode along the backs of our carts, not in the trap at all. He wore 
gold-washed chain mail of good quality but of the old-style. His barrel-type 
helmet was goldwashed as well, with trim that looked to be solid gold.
He was staring at the war carts and guns like a country peasant visiting the 
city for the first time. But what really caught my notice was his horse. It was 
pure white, but aside from that, it was absolutely identical to my mount Anna! 
The same gait, the same facial features, the same everything!
I had my face plate open when I said, "Can I help you, sir?"
He looked at me and I thought for a moment that he was going to fall off his 
horse! After a bit, he said in very broken Polish, "What ... what this all is? 
Guns and plate armor! Here? Now! How?"
Now it was my turn to be startled, for he spoke with a strong American English 
accent!
"Just who are you?" I asked.
"I am Sir Manuel la Falla," he said.
"In a pig's eye!" I said to him in Modem English.
He almost fell over again, but a commotion out on the battlefield distracted me 
from talking further with the man.
Count Lambert was coming toward me with the battle behind him. There was a 
Mongol spear in his gut, one of those sharp, thin, triangular things that could 
pierce our armor. He was swaying in the saddle, and his horse was staggering as 
well. As I watched, horse and man collapsed to the ground not a hundred yards in 
front of me.
I jumped down from the war cart and pushed my way through the pikers. Tapping 
two of the front-rank axemen and motioning them to follow me, I vaulted over the 
big shield and ran to Lambert's aid.
I swear that my only intention was to drag my liege lord back to safety. I never 
meant to cause what happened. But that strange, crazy foreign knight, whatever 
he was, ran out after me, waving at the lines to advance and shouting in 
English!
"Come on you apes! Over the top! Up and at 'em! Chaaaarrrrrge!"
Somehow, the man had gotten one of our red-and-white surcoats. I suppose they 
thought he was obeying my orders, for I was out in front of him ' They couldn't 
have understood a word of what he said, but his meaning was clear and it was 
what they all had wanted to do for hours!
From a hundred thousand voices came a roar!
"FOR GOD AND POLAND!"
All along the lines, a hundred and twenty thousand pikers and axemen went up and 
over the shields and staged an impromptu infantry charge on three times their 
number of cavalry!


Interlude Five
Tom hit the STOP button.
"Yeah, that was me! I think I led the biggest infantry charge in history, right 
there!"
"To me it looked like a damn fool thing to do!" I said. "An infantry charge on 
cavalry? That's unheard of!"
"It was when I did it, but it happened another time maybe three hundred years 
later, during one of the wars between the English and the Scots, for about the 
same reason and with about the same outcome."
"You see, it was getting late in the day, and if the thing wasn't settled by 
sunset, those Mongols might have broken out. All those horsemen on both sides 
had been fighting for at least eight hours without a break, and the Mongols 
hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. And a horseman has it all over a 
footman, providing the horse can move! Once those pikers got them pushed back 
and jammed together, they were dog meat!"
"Hey, if you'd just gotten there, how did you have the time to figure all that 
out?"
"Well, I got there late. That was obvious, so I did a one day switchback so I 
could be involved in the whole battle. I was with Duke Boleslaw when he rode out 
that morning! I was there for the whole thing! Of course, I was taking stim 
pills to keep up with those youngsters, but that doesn't count. I am over eight 
hundred years old, after all. Then when Conrad went over the shield, I was back 
by his lines. I dismounted and led the charge."
"So you're pretty proud of yourself, huh?"
"I saved the day! There's only one thing wrong, though. The background scenery 
isn't right. That place doesn't look like Chmielnick at all. I know that area! 
That looks like it's about twenty miles west of Sandomierz, and the battle 
wasn't fought there!" 
"Well, it was fought there now!" I hit the START button.


Chapter Twenty-four
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
I stared in horror at the. men running past me. The Mongols still vastly 
outnumbered us, and what had started so well would now end in absolute disaster! 
All because of Duke Boleslaw's stupidity and that crazy foreigner, our army 
would be destroyed, our country overrun, and our families all murdered! I 
yelled, I shouted but no one paid any attention. With all the noise and every 
man shouting, I doubt if any of them heard me. There was nothing I could do, and 
again, I was helpless.
But there was something I could do for Lambert, so I did it. I went over to him.
In falling from his horse, he had rolled clear of the animal, but that was the 
most expensive roll in his life.
"Ah, Conrad. I see that you have your medical kit with you as always. It seems 
that I need it for a change. Damnable thing! The first time in ten years I get a 
chance to get into a fight and this has to happen!" Lambert gestured toward the 
spear in him.
"See? You should have left the fighting to me. I only got an arrow in the eye." 
I ripped open and laid aside his red-and-white surcoat, unlatched his 
breastplate, and pulled it off. The Mongol spear came with it, dripping with 
blood and gore. Then I opened his gambezon and shirt, and surveyed the mess. 
There was a gash in his stomach as wide as both my hands, and deep.
"What? That little hole in my armor and that mighty slash in my gut? How can 
that be?"
"It was when you fell, Lambert. The spear spun around in there. The edges on 
those damned things are sharp."
"Well, that's it, then, and a sad ending it is! Done in by my own horse and my 
own peasant!"
"My lord? How so? I know your horse was wounded. I saw it stagger."
"He wasn't wounded. He was drunk! A half hour ago, I went to our lines for a 
drink. One of my own peasants, only he's a knight now, came out and gave me a 
well needed beer. When I asked for some water for my horse, he said they had 
none, though they had plenty of beer. I hated to see Shadowfax suffering, for he 
had served me well this day. I was in too much of a hurry to take him down to 
the stream, so I bid the man give my horse some beer, and he did, using his own 
helmet as a horse bucket. It was strong beer, and that was my downfall."
"My lord, this wound..."
"I know. I can see it. There's shit mixed in with the blood, so my gut is cut 
open. It will fester and I'm a dead man. Still, it's not a bad way to die, on a 
battlefield. Better than growing feeble and blind and impotent with old age, and 
that's all I had to look forward to. It was getting so sometimes I could only 
take one wench a day, and the virgins were getting hard to service. No, this is 
for the best."
"Shall I find you a priest, my lord?"
"In a while, in a while. I have some time left. I can feel it. I'm glad you're 
here. There are some things I want to talk to you about. I was right about your 
origins, wasn't I? You really were sent here by Prester John to save us from the 
Mongol invasion, weren't you?"
What could I say? "Of course, my lord. You alone had it figured out from the 
beginning." I lied, but it was a good lie.
"I knew it! But tell me, why did he only send one man?"
"Well, my lord, there was only the one invasion."
"What! Oh, ha-ha! Ooooh!" Suddenly his face went white. "Oh. It's like the old 
joke. It only hurts when I laugh. Well. Then there's my estate. I'm minded to 
give my daughter my lands in Hungary, which are twice as large as those in 
Poland, and richer, though not so well run, but I don't want you to be saddled 
with a liege lord who is whoever she marries. I haven't had time to pick the 
man! He might not treat my peasants properly or even service the girls at the 
cloth factory as they deserve, and that would be a shame and a waste! So I'm 
giving my Polish lands to you. Don't look so surprised or say anything. I've 
thought this out and that's the way that I want it. I've had it written all up 
and Duke Henryk himself has approved it."
"Thank you, my lord," Even though it didn't mean anything, it was a nice 
thought. I'd never inherit that land. As soon as the Mongols broke through our 
footmen, I'd die right here next to Lambert. Still, it was a nice thought.
"Just take good care of my vassals and my peasants, and see to it that the girls 
are well loved. They need that."
"We all do, my lord."
"That's God's truth! But do you swear it?"
"On my honor by all that is holy, my lord."
"Good. Well, be off with you, then. You've got a battle to fight. And if you see 
a priest, send him by. I'll spend my time getting my soul together. Be off now. 
No. Wait. You better take these. I won't be needing them anymore." He gave me 
back the binoculars I had given him on the first day we met. I took them. It 
would have been rude to do otherwise.
"Good-bye, my lord Count Lambert Piast, and may God bless you and love you."
I stood up, tears in my one eye, and looked out at the battlefield. The fight 
was a good ways away, more than a mile, and I started walking toward it. I heard 
a familiar whinny behind me and turned around.
"Anna?"
She nodded YES. She was looking at my wounded eye.
"Yes, I got hurt a bit, but it's all right. I'm glad you're here! But come on, 
girl, there's work to be done!"
I mounted and we rode to battle.
A half-mile later, I saw the strange, gold-clad knight back on his white horse, 
fighting two Mongol horsemen who had somehow slipped through the line of Polish 
footmen. I didn't know who or what he was, but he was wearing one of our 
surcoats now and he seemed to be on our side. I drew my sword and we galloped to 
his aid.
I was almost there when one of the Mongols threw one of those deadly spears at 
him. At a dozen yards, it flew straight through his eyeslit and the point 
punched its way out the back of his helmet!
I caught one Mongol unawares and chopped his head off before the other saw me. 
The second was just recovering from his deadly throw, and I got in a blow on his 
horse's neck. One does not have to fight fair with one's social inferiors.
He spilled on the ground and I took his right arm off at the shoulder on the 
next round. That was enough. Let the bastard bleed to death.
I dismounted near the strange knight. I was sure he was dead, but head wounds 
are sometimes surprising. People have recovered from the damndest things. I had 
to pull out the spear before I could remove his helmet and I had to put my foot 
on that helmet to pull the spear out.
There was no breathing, no pulse. The spear had made a ghastly hole where his 
left eye had been and I think it had severed the spinal column as well. He was 
dead. There was something familiar about the man, but I couldn't place him. The 
weird thing was his haircut. He was completely bald back to the top of his head. 
Even his eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, yet there were little cut-off hairs 
laying loose all over his face.
The white horse was acting shocked and nervous. From down here, it was obvious 
that she was a mare. "Are you one of Anna's people, like this girl here?" I 
said. She didn't respond, but then I remembered her rider speaking English. I 
repeated my question in that language, and she nodded YES, exactly as Anna does.
"Then I think it would be best if you came along with us. Your friend here is 
dead. There is nothing we can do for him," I said in my rusty English.
She nodded YES.


Interlude Six
I hit the STOP button.
"Tom, are you all right?" I said. He was staring fixedly at the screen, his eyes 
bulging, and he was making gurgling sounds.
"What? No. I'm not all right, you idiot! I'm dead! Don't you realize that we 
just saw me die?"
"But you know that this is some kind of alternate reality. It's not exactly 
real."
"It's exactly as real as the reality around us! Is that some third me who died 
out there? Or am I going to go back there later, subjectively, and die there in 
my own future?"
"Damned if I know, but if I were you, I'd never go to thirteenth century Poland 
again!"
His hand was shaking as he pushed the COMM button and ordered a double martini. 
A naked serving wench brought it in instantly and he gulped it down. Then he 
sent her back for another, and she was out of the room and back in so fast that 
she must have passed herself in the hallway. Of course, that sort of thing 
happens all the time around here. I ordered a beer and she made a third trip.
"It didn't really happen that way," he said, staring at a blank wall. "That 
spear only glanced off my helmet. I saw it coming and I ducked!"
"It looks like this time you forgot to duck. Tom, why weren't you better 
protected than that?"
"I was! I always am! I wear a bio-engineered fungus coating called a TufSkin."
I was familiar with the stuff. I wear it myself, like most people. It's not only 
a cheap insurance policy but it makes shaving a breeze.
The stuff isn't noticeable, but it has these billions of tiny interlocking 
plates made of crosslinked tubular graphite, the toughest substance known. If 
you are hit from the outside, on impact and in microseconds, tiny muscles 
interlock those plates and give you an armor equivalent to a quarter inch of 
tool steel. Of course, when it does that, it shears off your hair in the 
process, but that's a small price to pay!
Tom was still talking in a dazed sort of way. "The only place it can't cover is 
the eyes, but the helmet I was wearing should have sensed that spear coming and 
slammed shut the eyeslits! Or I could have blinked! I should have been 
completely safe!"
"I guess this time there was some sort of mechanical failure."
His face was still white as he said, "But there wasn't one! My God, is the whole 
universe shredding apart?"
He hit the START button.


Chapter Twenty-five
FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
Looking through my telescope, I saw a knight who I think was Count Lambert fall 
on the field, and another man who I am sure was Count Conrad run out to aid him. 
Surely there could be no other knight of his size!
But then I saw that Count Conrad was leading a charge against the Mongols, and 
doing it without my orders! He had, after all, left me in charge, and one of his 
first rules of leadership was unity of command! If he wished to take command, 
that was his prerogative, but he had no right to do so without notifying me!
And why in the name of all that is holy had he left the carts and gunners 
behind? It made absolutely no sense! Even if the pikers could encircle the 
Mongol horsemen, what could they do to harm them? They might skewer the first 
few ranks, but by that time, the enemy formation would be hundreds of yards 
thick! And completely unharmed! This was madness!
But there it was, and there was no way to call those men back now. If I 
countermanded his order, the results would be pure chaos! Some pikers would be 
out in the field and some of the carts would have no one but gunners to defend 
them. There would be gaps in our lines of footmen, and the Mongols could bypass 
them, cut through those unsupported gunners with ease and escape our trap. 
Already, I saw two Mongols riding behind our footmen, and a single conventional 
knight charging at both of them. My people have sometimes been called fools, but 
no one has ever dared question our courage.
There was nothing for it but to back my liege lord up, and hope that there was 
some reason for this insanity. I ordered "All Footmen Charge," and mounted Betty 
to follow them out.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
When I got to the battle lines, I was astounded! We weren't losing at all! Our 
lines had been six men deep when we started, but as we closed with the enemy, 
the circumference naturally got smaller, and since we had started out in a long 
thin oval, the ends were naturally thicker with men than the sides, which pushed 
the mass of horsemen inside into something of a circle.
As I got there, our men were twelve to eighteen ranks deep, and as pressed 
together as a Macedonian phalanx! I think that if it were not for their 
clamshell armor, many of our front rank men would have smothered to death. 
Certainly, most of the horses died that way. They were squeezed so hard together 
that they could not breathe.
The enemy horsemen were packed so closely together that they could not get out 
of the saddle! Their legs were pinned in! Who could have imagined such a thing!
There were men with halberds and short axes milling around the periphery, 
wanting to get at the Mongols, but not knowing how.
Then one man wearing a turban wrapped around his helmet and wielding a short axe 
screamed and ran right up the backs of the outside row of pikers! He climbed to 
the top of the men and then actually ran down on the tops of the packed rows of 
pikes at the enemy! Shouting a war cry that sounded like the howling of a wolf, 
he leaped to the back of a Mongol horse that was so penned in that it could not 
move.
"El Allah il Allah!" he screamed again, in vengeance fifteen years delayed.
He stretched high as if he was chopping firewood and hacked into the neck of the 
rider. He swung a second time, though it surely wasn't necessary, and the 
Mongol's head flew loose. Then he stepped to the haunch of the next horse and 
repeated the performance!
Seeing this told our men what to do! A human wave of axemen ran up on top of the 
pikers, then across their shoulders and heads to get at the enemy! A lot of 
pikers might have had bruised backs, but I never heard any complaints. In 
minutes, ten thousand axemen and swordsmen were running on top of five hundred 
thousand Mongol horsemen, butchering them without thought of mercy.
It was over in less than a dozen minutes, and none but the Christian horsemen 
were left alive. A half-million of the enemy had been killed in this battle and 
the army's losses were almost nonexistent, a few broken legs and sprained 
ankles, plus one case of what looked like a heart attack.
Then it was over and a strange silence came over the battlefield. The pikers 
were still pushing forward, since they knew nothing better to do. The axemen on 
top of the enemy just looked around dumbfounded, seeing nothing else to kill and 
awestruck at the carnage that they had created. And they all stood there, 
breathing.
Then someone started singing one of the army songs, the one that one day would 
be the Polish national anthem.
"Poland is not yet dead!"
"Not while we yet live!"
Then the song was over and someone started in on "Te Deum." The men backed off 
and the Mongol horses slumped to the ground, asphyxiated or exhausted. Most of 
our warriors went to their knees as well, and gave thanks to God.
The war was over.
Hetman Vladimir came by and we discussed the cleanup. Our wounded to go to one 
place, our dead to another. Some men were detailed to collect booty, others to 
get supper going.
"And the Mongols?" he asked.
"Put their money and jewelry over here, their weapons and anything else valuable 
over there," I said, pointing. "Their bodies on that rise for burning, and their 
heads on that hill. I want a real head count, so stack them neatly."
"Yes sir. What about the Mongol wounded?"
"Once you've put all their heads on that hill and their bodies on that rise, you 
can give medical attention to any that request it."
"Right sir, no prisoners. I just wanted to make sure."
"Well, what could we do with a Mongol prisoner? They have no secrets to tell us. 
We can't keep them, guarding and feeding them forever. If we let them go, they'd 
have no choice but to rob and murder their way home, so that's out. The horde 
would never trade Christians for them. They look on one of their men who was 
taken prisoner. as one who has failed in his duty! They want him killed! Best to 
just kill them now and be done with it."
"Yes, sir. I doubt if there are any of them left alive, anyway." He started 
giving efficient orders and I wandered on.
I saw by his mace that a priest was standing near me and I remembered Count 
Lambert. At first he was hesitant to go two miles away when there were so many 
who needed his services right here, but I dismounted and offered him Anna to get 
him there in a hurry.
She gave me a "I don't like this" pose.
"Look, girl, the war is over and Lambert needs a priest. I'D be okay. I have 
your white sister over here and she can take care of me as well as you can. But 
I'm the only one who can speak her language, so I can't lend her out. You 
understand, don't you?"
She was still sulking when she rode off with the priest. I mounted the white Big 
Person and rode about the field. There was a vast silence about all of us, as if 
a mass were being said and we must not speak. Men were working diligently at the 
tasks assigned to them, but they spoke only when absolutely necessary, and then 
in whispers. Something had happened that was vaster than all of us, something 
great and, somehow, holy.
The gunners had not participated in the final kill. A gunner stood to his gun no 
matter what happened. I told them to stand down and report to the field for 
duty. They passed the word and soon were helping get things in shape.
Beyond the north line, I came upon our battalion of Night Fighters, with 
sentries posted but most of them fast asleep in the rain and mud. I looked up 
Baron Ilya and got him out of his hammock.
"Ilya, you slept right through the battle."
"Our orders was to guard this flank, sir. We done that."
"You missed quite a show."
"Yes, sir, but so did they, last night. We did our part."
"Maybe more than that. But get your men ready to move. I want you to go back to 
the Mongol camp and see if you can secure it, since you have the only well 
rested men we've got."
"Yes, sir. That's an odd horse you're riding."
"Odder than you think. I've found another Big Person."
"There were two of them? Amazing. But for now, sir, I need your permission to 
strip ammunition out of these abandoned carts if I'm going to see about that 
camp."
"Granted." God, but I was tired.
Then I went back to my own cart, set up my old dome tent, and got my first full 
night's sleep in a week.
The next morning, after a breakfast of fresh horse meat, I found that the radios 
still weren't working, but I got the battle report. The amount of booty taken 
was fabulous. Every single man in my army was rich, and there was doubtless far 
more to be had once we cleaned up the killing grounds on the east bank of the 
Vistula. Some accounting would be necessary, but I think that the danger of 
inflation was very real.
Somehow, I would have to make sure that, while the troops were well rewarded, 
the economy was not ruined. I did not want to happen to us what happened to 
Spain after the conquest of the New World. There, so much gold poured in that 
even the lowliest Spaniard saw no reason to work. Farms and orchards were 
abandoned because if you were rich, why should you go out and do grunt-labor? 
But within a few years, they discovered that there was nothing left for their 
money to buy and that the land had been wasted. Spain never did recover.
Our losses were surprisingly light. Out of the whole land army, there were only 
some six hundred dead or missing. Half of the Night-Fighter casualties were 
still alive in the Mongol camp when Ilya's battalion returned. Some had 
retreated in the wrong direction in the dark and some had been knocked 
unconscious by their own grenades and what not.
But after the Mongols pulled out in the morning, our stragglers had taken over 
the Mongol camp themselves! The Mongols had left behind only their most severely 
wounded and the surviving Polish girls they had captured on the way in. The 
stories the girls told our men were so brutal that all the Mongol wounded were 
killed, despite the fact that most of the girls had actually been killed by us, 
in the course of the fragging. It had never occurred to us that the Mongol 
officers would have slave girls with them. In our ignorance, we had slaughtered 
more than three hundred young ladies, our own people.
But while the army's losses were small, the traditional forces were another 
matter. Duke Boleslaw of Mazovia was dead, as was the Duke of Sandomierz. Out of 
the estimated thirty-one thousand men that followed them, less than four hundred 
were left alive, and most of those were severely wounded. Virtually every 
nobleman from the duchies of Mazovia, Little Poland, and Sandomierz was dead!
A new age was coming to my country, but the flower of the past was gone.
The next morning, some of my depression had worn off and I was feeling a bit 
better. I saddled Anna and went to have a look around, with ' the white Big 
Person tagging along. That was another problem that would have to be worked out 
somehow. Anna wouldn't leave me and the new mount had no one that could talk to 
her but me. Yet it seemed a shame to waste the services of a Big Person.
Baron Vladimir had ordered Count Lambert's aircraft sent back to Eagle Nest. 
When I got there, the last of them was pulling out, strapped to the top of a war 
cart with the wing dismounted and roped next to the fuselage. The pilots who had 
flown them were dead, every last foolish one of them.
The Christian knights were being buried, each in his own grave, with a dog tag 
on each wooden cross and another on his arms and armor, neatly bundled for 
return to his family. Someday, we'd send a crew of stonecutters here and have 
proper tombstones made.
It was too wet to get a decent fire going, so the Mongol dead were being piled 
naked in a huge common trench, along with the dead horses. Even the horses had 
been stripped. Baron Vladimir had apparently felt that a half million horsehides 
was a prize well worth taking. If he could get them salted down in time, they'd 
keep the army in boots for many years. I doubt if we had salt enough to do the 
job, even at Three Walls. Likely, we'd have to send men to the mines and get the 
mines going besides.
The heads of the Mongols were stacked separately, as I had ordered. A crew was 
putting them up on stakes made of old lances, in neat squares a gross heads to 
the side, for easy counting. Good. I wanted to make sure that no one ever 
doubted what we had accomplished here. Those heads were a fitting monument to 
this battle.
In a day or two, the cleanup would be done, and we could go home. Well, some of 
us. A contingent would have to be sent to loot and clean up the mess we'd made 
on the east bank of the Vistula. Likely, Baron Tadaos was starting that already. 
If only the weather would clear up so we could use the radios again. But the 
thunder and lightning went on and showed no signs of stopping. It seemed 
unfitting, somehow. Victories should happen in fine weather.
Finally, we found Baron Vladimir.
"Good morning, my lord. The sleep seems to have done you good. You're looking 
better. Have you had a medic examine your eye lately?"
"No, but I suppose I should, at least to change the bandage."
"Most of them are down at the field hospital, at our old campsite, my lord."
"I'll go there next. But for now, I want you to set up a meeting for me with the 
troops, captains and above, for late this afternoon, at six. There are some 
things I have to tell them."
"Done, my lord."
"Is anything coming through on the radios, yet?"
"I'm afraid not, my lord."
"Then perhaps you should put a dozen men on Big People and have them spread the 
word of our victory. Our wives are doubtless worried and Duke Henryk should be 
informed. Tell the duke that I advise sending at least his foreign troops south 
to King Bela."
"I'll see to it, my lord."
"Good. Then I'll see you at six, if not before."
The medic said that my wound was healing well, and it looked like the eye was 
uninjured. The only problem was that when he removed the bandage, I couldn't 
tell the difference. My right eye was blind.
Perhaps it's odd, but somehow it didn't bother me.
After all the death I had seen and caused, well, maybe losing the eye was some 
sort of penance.
The day wound on and it was time for my talk.
I stepped up on the makeshift podium in front of my captains, komanders, and 
barons.
"Brothers!" I said. "I wish that I could address the entire army, and not just 
the officers, but you all know that it would be impossible. Talking to the 
almost eight hundred of you is about all my lungs can handle. I am therefore 
going to ask you captains to each give a similar talk to your men, so I'll thank 
you to take notes."
Notebooks and real lead pencils dutifully came out.
"Thank you. First, I want you all to know that riders have been sent to tell 
your families that you are safe, so they can stop worrying about you."
"Next, I want to praise you all for the magnificent victory you have won. For 
the first time in all of history, the Mongols have been beaten. In the last 
fifty years, those murdering bastards have defeated over fifty armies, and most 
of those armies outnumbered the Mongol invaders. But we went at them outnumbered 
twenty to one, and we killed them to a man!"
"Over a hundred major cities in China, Asia, and Russia have fallen to their 
rape, murder, and plunder, but not one major city in Poland has been lost, and 
all because of you men! The slaughter you worked has saved the lives of millions 
of your countrymen, and millions of other Christians, besides, for had we lost, 
the Mongols would not have stopped with Poland. They would have gone on to take 
Germany, France, and even England, Spain, and Italy. By stopping the Mongols 
here, you have saved all of Christendom! Your children and grandchildren and 
their descendants will be singing your praises for a thousand years!"
"To honor you for this mighty deed, we are changing the name of our 
organization. No longer will we be simply 'the army.' From this day onward, we 
will be known as the 'Christian Army,' the defenders of all Christendom!"
"The Mongol plan was to hit King Beta of Hungary at the same time as they 
invaded us. We don't know yet if they planned to take the Hungarians from the 
east, or from the north through Poland. If the second, you have saved Hungary 
along with Poland. If the first, if the Mongols actually had enough men to make 
both invasions at the same time, we have at least saved the many thousands of 
Christian Knights who are still with my liege lord Duke Henryk at Legnica. I 
have this day sent a message to my liege urging him to release those fighters to 
help King- Beta. It may yet be that a victory to the south will happen, and part 
of the credit for that victory will be due to you."
"Then there is the matter of the booty you have earned. You all know that it is 
fabulous! Though it will be awhile before it can all be properly accounted and a 
fair distribution made, I think I'm safe in promising every man below the rank 
of knight at least a thousand pence! The knights will get twice that, and 
captains eight times that amount! So you are all rich!"
"But you won't get a chance to start spending it immediately. There's still work 
to be done. The River Battalion killed far more of the enemy than were killed 
here on this plain, and there are too few of them left to do the looting, let 
alone the cleanup. But there at least we won't have the sad job of burying our 
own men!"
"And now I want to talk a bit about the future."
"We have won a great victory here, but don't think for a minute that the Mongols 
have gone away forever. These marauders that we have killed had descendants, and 
if we don't do something about it, in twenty years our own children will have to 
try and repeat what we have done here. And next time maybe the Mongols won't act 
as stupidly as they have in the last few weeks."
"Yes, I said that we have defeated a stupid enemy! They lined themselves up on 
the east bank of the Vistula and let us cut them down like a farmer cuts down 
hay I They set up a stupid night guard on their camp, and let Baron Ilya's 
battalion of Night Fighters go in and kill fifty thousand of them, including 
most of their officers' And without those officers, the Mongol troops rode 
stupidly into a trap that got the rest of them slaughtered."
"Well, next time, they won't be so stupid! Next time, they will have learned 
something from the hard lesson we gave them, and next time they might win!"
"Next time, we have to be far stronger than we were here. Next time we must have 
more troops, better weapons, and better defenses!"
"So don't think that you can retire from the army and go back to whatever it was 
that you were doing before the Mongols and I came along. You can't! There's work 
to be done!"
"I have bought up most of the land for five miles on both banks of the Vistula. 
We are going to build a fort like the one at East Gate every five miles along 
the river, all the way down to the Baltic, and on both sides! And after that, 
we'll build them up the Bug as well! Every one of those forts will be manned by 
a company of our men, so the army will not be disbanding. We will continue to 
grow, and you all can continue to look forward to promotions, for not only will 
we have to build and man the forts, we will have to vastly expand our 
manufacturing facilities to equip them."
"The Christian Army that we all belong to will be a permanent organization. In 
the same manner that the Church defends the souls of all Christians, we will 
defend their bodies. We will do our work in the realm of the physical just as 
the Church does its work in the realm of the spiritual. We will be doing God's 
work, and every one of you will be needed."
"Yet no man will be forced to stay in the army. Once we have finished with the 
cleanup, any man who wishes to leave may do so. I simply promise any man who 
leaves that he will regret it later, when he is a peasant and his old friends 
are knights and barons!"
"In times to come, we will not only be defending Christendom, but we will 
eventually be able to take the war to the enemy. Millions of souls in the 
Russias and elsewhere are now living under the Mongol's brutal tread. We are 
going to go out there and free them, and make proper Christians out of them 
besides!"
"I promise you all interesting times!"
"That's about it. Have a talk with your men and then get a good night's sleep. 
Like I said, there's work to do!"


Interlude Seven
The tape wound to a stop.
"That's it? There?" Tom said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"But it didn't end there! Not when I was alive!"
"Tom, I know that this thing has been quite a shock to you. You need to unwind, 
to relax for a while. Then things will be clearer for you. Look, let's have a 
few more drinks, then take a steambath and maybe invite in a few of the wenches. 
After that a good rubdown and some more girls and I know you'll feel better."
"You think I'm crazy, don't you? I'm not! Something Conrad has done, or 
something about him has shattered the temporal continuity of all creation! Can't 
you understand that I built the first time machine and I don't understand what 
is happening!"
"Tom, I don't understand what's happening either, but I do know that a drink and 
a wench never hurt anybody. Come on." I took him by the hand and led him out of 
the room.