"05 - Lord Conrad's Lady" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

The Night Fighters used a smaller war cart than did the rest of the troops, pulled by a seven-man lance rather than a forty-three-man platoon. With only four men pulling, they were having a hard time keeping up with the other, more efficient full-sized carts. Over Baron Ilya's protests, the Night Fighter Battalion was disbanded, the carts put off the road, and the men distributed to the other five battalions as replacements.
It wasn't as hard on me as it was on most of the men, since I was one of the few who were mounted. I felt guilty about it, but I didn't lend out my mount, since it was my job to be alert for any emergency. Easing the pain of one of my men could get thousands of them killed if we were ambushed and I wasn't ready to give quick orders. Yet it was still vastly tiring, and I was older than most of the men under me.
Extreme fatigue always gets me first in the eyes, and now, what with the wound I had gotten from a Mongol arrow, I had only one eye left. It felt like there was sand in it and that the sand had been there forever. At night, since there wasn't much to see, anyway, I closed my eye, held on to the saddle, and trusted to the incredible night vision of my new white mount.
We were all exhausted, the men worse than 1, but I knew that once the battle was joined, we'd be awake enough. God always has a last supply of adrenaline for a man when his life is on the line.
It was gray dawn and the towers of Brzesko were on the skyline to our left when the first scout came back to report. Cracow was indeed burning, and the outer walls had fallen to the enemy. The lower city was filled with fighting, but Wawel Hill, with the castle and the cathedral, still seemed to be in friendly hands.
As a hint of the sun came over the horizon, I had the semaphores signal SAY YOUR VOWS ON THE RUN. We had all sworn to repeat our vows every morning, but I wasn't going to let anything slow us down. I could hear the troops near me gasping for breath as they chanted:
"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 awake, 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."
They meant it, too.
Most of the towns and castles along the Vistula were set right on the river to make them easier to defend. Our new rail lines had to swing out and around them, to the north at Brzesko and Cracow. After the scout reported, I sent him to Brzesko to see how things stood there. He reported shortly that the castle and town were a smoking ruin, with no one there left alive. We pushed on.
I couldn't understand how all this was possible. Until the big battle near Sandomierz we had had aircraft patrolling the skies and riverboats on the Vistula. How could they have possibly missed an entire Mongol army? We had lost the planes through sheer vanity and stupidity, but what had happened to the riverboats? There had been at least nine of them left when I had parted company to join the land forces. They were equipped with lights and didn't stop for the dark. The railroad paralleled the river. Why hadn't I seen a single boat all night long?
Dear God, just what the hell was going on?
It was midmorning when we sighted Cracow, although we'd first seen the cloud of black smoke above it an hour before. The railroad was a mile north of the city walls, and the land intervening was a suburb of burned-out cottages, orchards, and smoldering barns. Not the sort of terrain where we could easily use our war carts. Furthermore, the fight was going on within the walls, in the city itself, where the narrow, twisted streets would make the carts useless. I stopped at what would be our center once we got into position. When the tail end of the line was about as, far from the city as the front, I had the semaphore operators signal ALL STOP, FULL ARMOR, ABANDON CARTS ONE GUNNER EACH, and HOSTILES TO THE LEFT. That meant that we were also abandoning our swivel guns, with one gunner left behind on each cart to guard them. The guns had to be mounted on the carts to operate, but we couldn't get a significant number of carts into the city, anyway, and I didn't think the Mongols would be defending the wall against us. Not their style. I hoped.
My men were each armed with halberds or six-yard-long pikes as primary weapons and axes or swords as secondaries. All were in full plate armor, proof against Mongol arrows. Despite their fatigue, discipline was still good. In less than two minutes my entire command was lined up and ready. I signaled ADVANCE.
What with the broken terrain, I did not dare order double time. The men were tired, and we would soon have gotten scattered. Also, away from the carts we were down to bugle calls for communications, and there was no point advertising our existence. It wasn't likely, but maybe the Mongols didn't know we were here yet.
We spent two dozen quiet minutes getting to the city wall, but those minutes were not pleasant. This was the first time we had seen what the Mongols do to a civilian population. It hurts me to write about it, to even remember what I saw. Forced by necessity, I can be as hard and as brutal as the situation requires, but for the love of God I cannot comprehend the needless murder of helpless civilians, the senseless torture of women and children. Why would any rational beings do it?
The atrocity that burned most deeply into my soul was in a small hamlet. A young woman had been stripped naked and nailed by her feet to the lintel of the door frame of her cottage. Around her were the mutilated bodies of what must have been her aged parents and her four children. The youngest of them might have been a year old, her head bashed open on a rock. The woman's belly had been torn open from crotch to breastbone, and dangling amid her slashed intestines was a six-month-old fetus. She was still alive, barely.
I dismounted and went to her. She seemed to want to say something, and I bent close to her to hear.
"Kill me," she whispered. "Please kill me."
The laws of God and the Church make no provision for mercy killing. To grant her wish would make me a murderer, fit only for hell. Yet despite the fact that I knew that God would damn my immortal soul for the act, there was nothing else I could do.
"A place waits for you in heaven," I said, the tears running down my face. I drew my sword and cleanly slit her throat. "Though a place no longer waits there for me."
Nor was that the only atrocity that I saw on that walk to Cracow. I do not know why an army would want their enemies to hate them. I do not know why they would want to turn fifty thousand tired troops into fanatics bent on their destruction. But they did, and we were!
The city wall was an old, crumbling, useless affair only three stories tall. The city hadn't been seriously attacked for hundreds of years, and the city fathers had been slack in their duties. There were enough hand-holds on the old bricks and stone to let my warriors climb up them, especially since wall climbing was part of the training they'd been through. And up they went, without waiting for orders to do so. The troops had seen the same atrocities that I had, and there was no stopping them now. Nothing would stop them until either all of the enemy were dead or every one of the warriors had died trying to kill them!
The warriors were moving, and I could see that they would be uncontrollable until the city was theirs or they died in their armor. Not that I wanted to control them. They knew what to do!
This meant that I had no further duties as their commander and was free to join in on the fun. I headed through the increasingly heavy rain for the nearest city gate, the Carpenter's Gate as memory served, since I wanted to have a Big Person under me in the battle, and while these bioengineered horses had some amazing abilities, wall climbing wasn't one of them. I hoped that this new mount was as good as Anna in a fight.
The upper city, Wawel Hill, was in the hands of the nobility, but the lower city was governed and defended by the commoners. Each city guild had its own gate, tower, or section of wall to defend, and each of these defenses had been named for a particular guild.
The wall was lightly guarded by Mongol archers, with more arriving every minute. The troops ignored them, and some had a half dozen arrows sticking in their armor as they went over the top. Pikes and halberds were tossed up to them, and they made quick work of clearing the ramparts. I saw one halberdier take the heads clean off two of the enemy with a single sideways blow and then stop and stare at what he had done, unable to believe it.
"Yes, Yashoo, I saw you do it, too!" a man beside him shouted, "now come and help us with these other ones!"
The Carpenter's Gate was ours by the time I got there, and I just rode straight through. Some of the officers had been training for battle for five years, and now they finally had a chance to put that training to use. They were in high spirits, and the mood was infectious, doubtless aided by the giddiness that is caused by the lack of sleep. Seeing the men now, no one would have believed that they had been awake for two days and had spent much of that time at a dead run. Some of our troops were laughing and a few were crying, but none of them were holding back.
Most of the Mongols were on horseback, but they soon learned not to attack our ranks. I saw three of them charge splashing through the puddles at a dozen of my warriors, or at least charge as best they could in the narrow winding streets of the lower city., Rather than cowering from the horsemen as the Mongols had obviously expected, our men fairly leapt at them. Grounded pikes skewered horses and riders! Axes and swords swung no more than once each, and all three of the enemy riders were dead before they hit the ground. None of the good guys were injured.
"Hey! That really works!" one knight shouted. "Let's go find some more of the smelly bastards and do it again!"
They left at a trot. I went over and inspected the fallen enemy soldiers. None of them had been wearing armor, though even in the rain it was obvious from the wear patterns on their clothing that they owned chain mail and had left it back in camp. My guess is that they had planned to spend the day murdering the seven thousand women and children who lived in the lower city. Encountering fifty thousand of the best-armed, best-armored, and best-trained troops in the world hadn't been part of their daily game plan!
It was soon obvious to me that if I was going to accomplish anything, I was going to have to get out ahead of the foot soldiers. That wasn't easy to do in those tangled streets. Mongols were soon abandoning their horses and taking refuge in the buildings. Seeing this, our warriors started a house-to-house search. Some were using impromptu battering rams, but a quicker technique was more often used. This was for an armored man to run at a barred door full tilt and at the last instance to flip around and smack the door flat with his back. This usually took down any ordinary doorway, and six of his friends ran through right on top of him. If it didn't work the first time, they'd try it again with two men flying backwards. There's something about good armor that gives a man the feeling of indestructibility, and he'll willingly take more actual abuse while wearing it than he would without.
I finally got ahead of most of my men and into a section of the city that was burning fiercely. The smell was enough to make me want to vomit. I might have done just that, but I thought about the results of heaving inside a closed helmet and somehow held it in. Like all the other old cities in Europe, Cracow had no sewage system. For hundreds of years people had been dumping their garbage and shit directly into the streets, and now the mess was going up in flames along with the wooden buildings around it. Actually, a good fire was what this place really needed.
Urban renewal, medieval style!
I got past the worst of the fires and into a section that was mostly burned over. One of the few buildings standing was the Franciscan church and the monastery attached to it.
There was a fight going on in front of it, a crowd of Mongols attacking a band of monks in brown cassocks. We galloped to their aid, my mount and 1, and as I approached, I saw that the man leading the monks was my old friend and mentor, Bishop Ignacy.
Just as I reached the fray, a Mongol horseman swung his sword, and the good bishop went down!
Chapter Five
We chopped into the fight, my Big Person and 1. 1 took the head off one of the Mongols and the arm off another before most of them noticed that I was there. My mount was not being a slouch, either, being every bit as good as Anna and doing at least as much damage as I was. Thunder rippled across the sky but couldn't drown the crash of sword on shield, the popping squish of a human head trampled beneath a horse's hoof.
Once the enemy noticed us, though, things got a bit hairy. I was soon surrounded and had to spend most of my effort fending off their blows rather than delivering my own. But they'd never seen a horse that could fight like mine, and she did in four of them before I could score again. Yet every time a Mongol went down, another was all too eager to take his place. I began to realize that I was growing too old for this sort of thing and that getting ahead of my own troops was maybe not such a good idea.
The cavalry came to my rescue in the form of my captain of scouts, Sir Wladyclaw, the oldest son of my good friend Sir Miesko. He was riding one of our Big People, one of Anna's progeny, and was slewing and sliving as I had done before I had become the center of the Mongols' attention. Didn't the idiots ever put out sentries?
He soon made it to my side, and while we were still surrounded, at least now I didn't have to try to watch my own back. We were soon fighting to good effect, and I think that I killed six more Mongols before things quieted down. That wasn't enough to extract full vengeance for what these bastards had done to that woman in the hamlet, but it was enough to get me a good honor guard into the hell I'd earned for putting her out of her pain.
"Well met, Captain Wladyclaw, and thank you! How did you manage to find me?"
"I didn't, my lord. This is Anna! She's been looking for you and disregarding everything I've wanted to do since we got through the city gates!"