we ran, the circle got shorter and shorter, and our lines, five men deep at first, got thicker and thicker. Eventually, there was a great seething mass of mounted men, I don't know how big around, and they were surrounded by a mass of army troops at least three dozen men deep, pushing them tighter into a circle.
I think that if it wasn't for the breast and back armor we all wore, none of our people toward the center of that mess would have been able to breathe. As it was, we found out later that most of the horses we had surrounded did die because they were squeezed too hard. At least they were dead without a mark on them.
But while we had the Mongols surrounded and pressed in, we weren't really any better off than before. We still couldn't get to most of them. Oh, the outer few yards of them were within range of our pikes, but most of the enemy still couldn't be reached.
Then one trooper figured it out. I think he must have been wounded, for he had a big bandage wrapped around his helmet, but he started screaming something that sounded like the howling of a wolf. He ran
He ran onto the back of a horse that was so squeezed in it couldn't take a step. The Mongol riding it was so pinned in that he couldn't move his legs, either! The soldier with the bandage started swinging his axe like he was chopping wood, and he took the head off that Mongol in two hacks.
Then he stepped over to another Mongol and repeated the process.
The rest of us weren't slow once somebody had given us a hint, and Taurus, who had stayed beside me during the whole charge, was now out in front of me. We dropped our pikes, pulled out our axes, and ran on top of our own men to get at the Mongols!
The whole affair was over in a few minutes.
We all looked around at the blood and gore, amazed at what we had done. Then the men at the edges sort of relaxed, and the whole mass of dead men and dead horses sort of slumped under my feet.
Somebody started to sing, and most of the rest of the guys joined in, but me, I just sat down and took off my helmet. I put my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.
I was tired. Very, very tired.
Taurus came over to me. He wanted to know how much was one hundred twenty-one plus eighty-four, but I was too tired to think. I told him, 'Too many.'
Chapter Seven
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 23, 1249, CONCERNING MARCH 8, 1241
THEY TOLD the River Battalion to stand down, go back to our war carts, pitch camp, and rest. There was still a lot of work to be done, but there were plenty of nearly fresh troops to do it.
The next day, we watched as the rest of the army cleaned up the battlefield.
The Christian wounded were cared for as best as we could. There were relatively few of them, and we actually had more surgeons than there were wounded people for them to tend.
The Christian dead, almost all of them noblemen, since the army had taken almost no casualties at all, were properly buried, their arms and armor neatly bundled for return to their next of kin, and such of their horses as were uninjured were simply set free, until they could be later collected up, sorted out, and returned home.
The Mongol dead were stripped, their arms and armor thrown into one pile, their purses and jewelry thrown into another.
After that they were all beheaded and their heads stuck up on broken pikes and lances, in neat squares a gross of heads to the side for easy counting.
They tried to burn the bodies, but with the rain that had been falling for days and the general lack of firewood locally, they gave up on it. They just dug a huge, long pit and threw the naked, headless Mongol bodies into it.
Not a very polite thing to do, I suppose, but it wasn't as though we had
The amount of booty collected was simply fabulous, but I had known how that would go since before that battle on the east riverbank. We were told that once the loot was all collected and divided out, we would all be rich.
I had to think about that, because I wasn't really sure just what 'rich' meant. Did it mean I could have a castle like Lambert's?
But then who would live in it with me? Who would do all the work that it took to keep the place up? I mean, every man I knew was now in the army, and so every one of them would be getting at least as big a share of the loot as I was.
Somebody would still have to plow the fields, or we'd all starve, that was plain enough. And somebody would have to bake the bread, and I knew that that somebody would be my father and his family.
That had to be the way of it. If everybody was rich, then nobody was rich. All it meant was that we'd all have lots of pretty gold jewelry and things, but we'd still be working people all our lives.
I tried to explain my reasonings to the other guys around me, but none of them believed me. They called me a pessimist and went on talking about their big houses, their vast fields, and their numberless herds of cattle. In an hour they all had fine horses, beautiful wives, and dozens of even prettier servant girls.
As if the Mongols had brought a few million extra pretty girls with them from wherever it was they had come from!
Any fool could see they had brought the gold and silver they had stolen from the Russians, and their swords and other weapons, and that was about it.
Well, they had brought their ponies, too, and those that were still alive had all been relieved of their saddles and released for lack of anything better to do with them. We didn't have the harnesses we'd need to hitch them to our war carts, and anyway, they would have slowed us down. With men pulling the things, we could keep going around the clock, and no horse except Anna's kin could possibly do that.
I supposed that come spring, a lot of poor peasants would be using Mongol ponies to pull their plows instead of making their wives do it. That would doubtless be an improvement, but I wouldn't call it 'rich.'
But a pony wasn't of any use in a bakery, so I stopped thinking about it and went to sleep.
The next morning the battlefield was cleaned up. It is amazing how much work a sixth of a million men can do when they are organized properly.
One komand of six companies was being left on the battlefield to take care of the wounded and keep an eye on things, half of the rest were going back with the booty to get the factories going again, and the remaining seven battalions would be going east of the Vistula to see about cleaning up the mess we'd made over there.
A few million unburied dead bodies lying around can start a plague, they told us, and there was probably more gold over there than had ever been brought to this side of the Vistula.
And since the River Battalion knew where all the bodies weren't buried, we would be going back to show the rest what to do. Apparently, we would not be among the idle rich for a while yet.
The first problem we faced was that we couldn't find the riverboats to take us across the river. It seemed that the rains and thunderstorms of the last week had made our radios not work, somehow. The boats had to be out there, somewhere, but they didn't know we needed them.
Fortunately, someone found some big barges at the docks of Sandomierz and a lot of rope in one of the warehouses. With these things, they made up six of the sort of ferryboats that Lord Conrad had invented ten years ago.
The idea was that you tie a boat to the bank with a long rope, with the centerline of the boat at an angle to the river. The force of the river's flow will then push the boat across, the way the wind moves the sails of a windmill. Change the angle around, and the boat will go back again.
I know this works because they decided that the River Battalion should be the ones to work them. Since this was a task far preferable to stripping and burying dead Mongols, we took on the unfamiliar job with alacrity.
By night we had all seven battalions east of the Vistula. A company from the River Battalion was left with
