The Flying Warlord

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.