Kiejstut was a Lithuanian who had come because he heard that the army would arm, armor, and train him to fight Mongols. A year earlier, Mongol raiders had killed his father and one of his brothers, kidnapped his youngest sister, and burned down his entire village. He wanted vengeance, even though he was by nature a rather quiet, reserved, even shy person, one who was always careful not to give offense.
The sixth member of my lance was Taurus, a Ukrainian whose family had once lived north of Kiev. He was the only one of his large family who was still alive. Hatred and bitterness seemed to radiate from him. I never once saw him smile, and I never heard him laugh, not until we saw combat and he started killing Mongols. Sterner and far more exacting than our knight, Sir Odon, he was always quick to chastise the rest of us for any slackness during our training, and even for any levity.
Our training went on for four months, and at the time it seemed forever. Sir Odon said that we were getting only a special short course, and if we wanted to stay in the army, we would have to come back here sometime and take another eight months of this.
We all groaned at the thought of an additional eight months in Hell. Almost as an article of faith, we soldiers complained about everything we did or had done to us. This was even true of those grunts (for that was indeed what they called us) who did not come from Lord Conrad's lands, about three-quarters of those in my company.
I had noticed these generally older men when we were first joined together to form our company. Mostly, they were less healthy than the rest of us, thinner, and poorly fed. Also, it seemed to me that some of them were mentally duller than the people I had grown up with. Now they were wearing the first pairs of leather boots that some of them had ever owned, and almost all of them had put on healthy weight, but they still felt obligated to complain, so they did so.
Privately, I think they were impressed by the wealth of the army, and that most of them had resolved to stay in, if they could possibly manage it.
At the end of February, when final preparations were being made, when weapons, ammunition, preserved food, and everything else we would need for the months ahead was being issued, one of the warehouse workers handed me a white leather kit with a red cross on it.
I asked what it was.
"It's a medical kit," he said. "We usually hand them out only to people who have completed the surgeon's course, but someone had too many of these kits made up. The captain said to hand them out to one man from each company, just in case you need it."
I said that I was in the fifth lance, so I'd had the first-aid course, but that was just to help the wounded until somebody got there who knew what he was doing. I didn't know anything about really fixing people!
"Everybody who does already has a kit. Keep it. Clip it on your belt, just in case."
I did as I was ordered, and I quit wearing my smaller first-aid pack since everything in it was also in the big medical kit.
I soon discovered there were advantages to wearing the kit, since real medics were rarely sent out to do the dirtiest jobs, such as cleaning the latrines. Once I had the kit, people assumed I was trained in its use, and thus my life became a bit easier. No one ever asked me if I had taken the proper course, so I was never even tempted to lie about it;
Our company was part of the River Battalion, the men who would be manning the riverboats on the Vistula. This intrigued me, since I had often heard of boats, but had never seen one. In truth, I had never even seen a river.
We wouldn't be actually operating the boats, of course; that was the job of another group entirely. We had only to ride along, we were told, and to obey the orders of our knights and captains, who had vast experience on the dozens of steam-powered boats the army had.
Well, my knight, Sir Odon, was the same age I was, but had joined the army a year earlier, and I don't think he had vast experience in anything. My captain, Sir Stashu, looked to be perhaps eighteen and was no gray-bearded repository of wisdom, either, but I kept my mouth shut, as my father, a wise man, had taught me.
Grunts bitched about everything, but we learned that there were a few topics of conversation that could get you chosen to shovel out the garbage, or to wash a few thousand dishes, and that among these was the inexperience of our leaders. They knew it themselves, and preferred not to think about it.
Chapter Three
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 19, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 15, 1241
AT LAST, we said our final Sunrise Service in Hell, and we marched out to war.
Well, we had to pull our war carts behind us, there were only two railroad tracks to pull them on, and there were a sixth of a million of us troops to move out. An hour went by before we finally left Hell, and we were near the front of the line. Our doubled column was over sixteen miles long! Even at a brisk walk, it took almost six hours for us to march by!
Once we finally got on the tracks, it wasn't all that hard to pull the big cart, even loaded as it was with the tons of guns, pikes, and all the other material we needed to fight with. Counting our six knights and the knight-banner who led us, there were forty-three men in our platoon.
Our cart could be pulled by eighteen of them, with the rest of us riding aboard, resting, eating, or even sleeping. This let us continue onward right around the clock, doing over six dozen miles a day without ever once breaking into a run.
The six carts of my company pulled off the main road when we got to East Gate and left the main body of the army to go on without us.
A great crowd of civilians was leaving the dock area. There must have been thousands of them, mostly peasants, but with a scattering of well-dressed people as well. They were all walking back the way we had come; refugees who would shelter at the Warrior's School, we presumed.
I had heard much about the castle that had been built at East Gate, how it was made entirely of reinforced concrete, and I was eager to examine it closely.
I never got the chance for we were marched straight onto our boat, the RB1 Muddling Through. The tracks went right up to and over the big drawbridge at the front of the boat and right into the cavern of a hold that made up most of the lower deck. We could hardly see the huge boat as we went aboard it.
The drawbridge door was closed behind us, leaving us in the dark, and our riverboat pulled out immediately to let the next one up to the dock to be loaded. It was like being locked up in an oversized barn, filled with six war carts and the almost two gross of men of my company.
We soon found out that we were riding in no ordinary steamboat, but in the craft that held the commanders of the entire river flotilla, all three dozen boats. We had two army barons aboard, as well as Sir Conrad, now Count Conrad, himself.
Captain Targ didn't want his troops getting in the way of all these high personages, so he had us stay down below on the cargo deck, just in front of the engines. The second deck had the radios and the war room, called Tartar Control, as well as the kitchen and the sleeping rooms for the officers.
There was a fighting top above that, and a few hours after we were aboard, the sixth lance of each platoon was sent up there with their guns. So were the fourth lances, who acted as loaders for the swivel guns, and the third, who acted as spotters.
My own fifth lance acted as corpsmen, assistants for the surgeons, and we wouldn't be needed until somebody got shot. This meant we had to stay inside, cooped up without even a window, until somebody had the courtesy to get decently wounded so we could go outside and do something.
That night I was one of the few men below who couldn't sleep. I was standing near the stairs with my helmet off when a tall man walked by with a line of white circles down the armor on his back. I snapped to attention.