"The place was empty when we got here first thing in the morning. Empty of living people, anyhow. You could see where there'd been a fight in front of the boat house, and our boys sold their lives pretty damn dearly, let me tell you. But there wasn't no fight around the castle. There was just a massacre, I think the worst massacre the world has ever seen! I just come back from there, and what I saw would make the worst sinner in the Christian world fall down and cry!"
"There must be twenty or thirty thousand people dead in there, sir, and every one of them women or children or a few old gaffers. Ain't a one of them could have done the Mongols a bit of harm, but the filthy bastards murdered them all, anyway. Shit, sir, I ain't got words bad enough for them. them… whatevers."
Chapter Seven
The baron was crying, and I let him have a few moments to get a hold of himself. After a while he continued.
"Sir, I didn't find any of my people, but there was so many dead in there that I knew we'd be weeks sorting them all out. I figured my family was done for, but then some of the troops found this young feller, and what he says is that it wasn't our people who was murdered in there. I mean that they wasn't army families. He says that all them women and kids was the families of nobility from Cracow, Sandomierz, and points in between! But maybe you better hear about it straight from him."
"Maybe I'd better, Tadaos. How about it, son? Are you up to repeating your story for me?"
"Yes, sir. I think so, sir. I was a corpsman working in the hospital that was set up in the loft of the boat house, I mean the Riverboat Assembly Building."
"Relax, son," I said. "You're among friends here. Just tell us the story the way it happened. And tell me, how old are you?" It was maddening to take all this time listening, but unless I knew what had happened, I wouldn't know what to do next.
"Yes, sir. I just turned fifteen. Anyway, I heard my captain telling one of the banners that he had just come back from the fort and that they couldn't give us any help. He said that the women's army contingent there was pulling out with all the commoner refugees in the whole fort. He was pretty mad about it, but he said that there was nothing he could do to change things. He didn't command the stupid cunt in charge of the fort. Excuse me, sir, but that's what he called her."
"Yes, yes. But why was she abandoning her post?" I said. A captainette was the woman left in charge of an installation when the men went off to war. It was an unusual position in that it was temporary in nature. For example, Captainette Lubinska, who had been in charge of East Gate, was ordinarily in charge of the accounting section there, and during normal times she had no authority at all outside of accounting. But once the men went off to fight the enemy in the field, she was in absolute charge, subject only to a clearly defined chain of command that ended with me. She even outranked the six baronesses that ordinarily lived at East Gate, for example, and they were expected to obey her orders.
The reason for all this was that men rarely chose their wives for their ability as battle commanders, and it was important to have the most competent woman in charge, no matter who she had married.
But nobody except me and Baroness Krystyana could have legally ordered Captainette Lubinska from her post.
"Sir, I was just overhearing somebody else's conversation, and my captain's at that, even though he was pretty loud about it. He said that Count Herman's wife came up with a few dozen bodyguards and a large group of other noblewomen, and the captainette wouldn't let them in. She said that fort was full and that these new refugees would have to continue on down to Hell, I mean the Warrior's School, thirty miles away, for shelter. But the countess talked the captainette into coming down and talking to her, and then the countess said that the fort wasn't your property, sir, so it wasn't army property. The fort really belonged to Count Lambert, her brother-in-law, and Count Lambert wanted her to take it over and shelter there, since it was the strongest fort in Poland, and everybody knew it."
"That wasn't true," I said. "Count Lambert paid for the fort, but I was to see to the manning of it. He wouldn't have changed that without talking to me about it. I can't believe that he would ever have given anything to the countess. He hated her! Not that we'll ever know for sure. Count Lambert died days ago on the battlefield west of Sandomierz."
"Yes, sir, but she got the captainette to believing her, anyway. They went into the fort. Then an awful lot more nobility kept coming, and the countess turned every commoner out the fort to make room for them. Some of them went on to Hell, or the Warrior's School, I mean, and some went up to the hills to take their chances up there."
"And this happened three days ago?" I asked, trying not to vent my anger at the captainette. It was really all my fault for appointing that woman to so important a post in the first place. I'd had a bad feeling about her, but I'd done nothing about replacing her.
"I think four, sir. Then about noon yesterday, I was outside taking a breather, and I saw about a hundred oldstyle knights ride up in chain mail and all. I thought it was kind of funny because they were all riding little horses, but their leader spoke real good Polish to the sentry, and their shields were all painted with Polish arms. Anyway, the leader said that they had word from Cracow, and I heard the countess yell that they should be admitted. I saw the gates go up and the drawbridge go down, but then my break was over and I had to get back to tending the wounded. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I guess I should have. That must have been how the Mongols tricked their way into the fort."
"Then, about a half hour later, one of our men came up shouting that the place was crawling with Mongols, that they were streaming in on us from the south. We all armed ourselves, but my captain said I was to take care of the wounded, since some of those men were badly hurt. I was the only corpsman left behind. I didn't like it, but orders were orders. I could hear screams from the castle and shouts from the fighting down below. All the wounded who could move had gone down to join the fight, even some guys with only one arm, but there were still more than two dozen of them up there that were helpless."
"A while after that, one of my patients started shouting that the building was on fire, that we all had to get out somehow. From the smoke and the smell, I could see he was right, but there were so many of them and only one of me! I picked up one of the men who was near the stairway and carried him down to the ground floor and outside., but the fighting was so bad out there that he was killed by a Mongol arrow before I got out the door."
"I went back up, and the fire had gotten real bad. Men were crying to me, begging me to not let them die by burning to death. One man, a captain with his legs both messed up, he grabbed me by the arm. 'You know what you've got to do!" he says, and I said that I didn't. He says, 'You can't let all these men die by fire! That's the worst possible way to go. It's so painful that any man doing it would die with a curse on his lips, and then what happens to his soul? You've got that axe, boy. Use it! And use it on me first!'
"Then he starts singing 'Te Deum,' sir, real loud, and the rest of the men starts singing with him, those who were conscious. I'd armed myself when everybody else had, and my axe was sharp and new in its sheath. I'd never used it, not till then, anyway."
"Sir, I chopped that captain straight across the neck, and it took his head almost off. Then I went down the line of wounded men and did the same to almost every one of them. They kept on singing until I was done. Some of those men I killed were already unconscious. Some of the others gritted their teeth as I came up to them, and a few nodded to me that it was okay, what I was doing, but only one of them said I shouldn't do it. He was Robby Prajinski, and I knew him because he was from my own village. He screamed and begged me not to hurt him, so I didn't. I just went to the next man. I guess the fire was real bad, because I couldn't see so good. Maybe it was the smoke, or maybe I was just crying, but I hit every one of those poor men square, sir, even the last one where the floor burned out under us. He was singing until I hit him. I guess that's where I got these burns."