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.'
