Lady Natalia came in after a while and asked me if I wanted my dinner brought up, but I decided that the men should see that I was still alive, and we went down to the cafeteria, not that there was any " cafe " to justify the name.
The chow lines there were absurdly long, worse than what happens when the communists try to sell six refrigerators in Warsaw. I told Natalia that she should put out the word that the cafeterias would have to be restricted to dependents, officers of the grade of captain and higher, and men who had originally worked at Three Walls. All others would have to eat at their war carts, though the cooks could draw on the stores here. Natalia and 1, of course, took cuts in front of the line. RHIP.
The next week was spent in meetings and similar boring but important trivia. The aircraft had found no trace of other Mongols, even though we all knew that there had to be a lot of stragglers hiding out there somewhere. Francine was in Cracow playing hostess to some political nonsense, but she seemed to be having fun and staying out of trouble. I supposed that she needed to get away from it all for a while after the tensions of the war, and I let her have her own way. The cleanup at Three Walls had been completed, and the original workers from each of my other installations were sent home to get things productive again. Getting things back to normal seemed to take as much work as getting us on a war footing had.
Then Baron Vladimir arrived.
I gave him a hug when he got to my office. "God, Vladimir, it's wonderful to see you! What took you so long?"
"What took me so long, my lord? I think that the problem started when I was entirely too efficient in getting across the Vistula. You recall that as we left the battlefield west of Sandomierz, you were to return the booty here to Three Walls, and I was to take the larger group of our men to cross the Vistula and clean and loot the killing fields there. We found no riverboats running, but we found two of those river ferries of the sort you invented so many years ago, during that delightful journey we made with our ladies to the River Dunajec. You know, the sort that uses a long rope to force the river itself to carry one back and forth. Three dozen big river barges were available at Sandomierz, as was a good supply of rope, so we quickly built three dozen more of the things. By dint of efficient organization and hard work, I was able to get my entire command across by midnight."
"Now I have a question for you, my lord. What ever possessed you to entrust so important a message as the fact that Cracow was burning to an absolutely untrained peasant? The silly fool had never before in his life been more than six miles from the village in which he had been born! He had never been on a Big Person before. He had never even seen one! Is it any wonder that he never thought of telling her who they were trying to find? He had not the slightest concept of geography, and he couldn't have read a map even if he'd had one! He couldn't read, period! Is it any wonder that he missed us in the dark and rode all the way to the Crossman city of Turon? He was two days finding us! Why did you do this thing to me? Two-thirds of your men missed out on half of the war!"
All I could do was to bury my face in my hands and say, "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. " Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
"Baron Vladimir, I'm sorry. At the time he was simply a man on a Big Person, and I didn't even think about what I was doing. A courier had come in badly wounded with the news about Cracow. One of the officers assigned a man to ride the Big Person and help out our flankers. Then I realized that you must be told as soon as possible, and so I changed the man's orders. I never stopped to think about how limited, how restricted the average peasant is. I'm sorry. "
"And I accept your apology, my lord. You made a mistake, but as it turned out, no great harm was done. You had sufficient forces with you to handle the problems that happened to come up. My men could have given you more power, but they could not have given you more speed. Yet it could have turned out otherwise! The Mongols might have caught you strung out on the road with your men half-armed and armored, with your pikes stored for transit, and your guns unmounted. They could have met you with locally superior forces and wiped you and all of your men out! You were lucky. But while I was waiting to see you-"
"They made you wait?"
"The Baroness Natalia is sometimes overly protective, my lord. But while I was waiting, I heard the tale about Captainette Lubinska. She made a mistake as bad or even worse than yours, and she didn't have your luck! Now you plan to have her hanged for it. Do you realize that she was born a peasant girl on a farm just outside of Cieszyn, where Count Herman's wife held sway for so many years? For all of Lubinska's life, the countess was an authority figure whose word was not to be questioned. Then, one day, the countess lied to her, usurped her authority, and ordered her away from her post. Is it any wonder that she obeyed the countess's orders even if they weren't exactly legal? What did the captainette know about the law? She was only a peasant, for God's sake!"
"Again you shame me, Vladimir. Look, I've turned the matter over to Baron Pulaski. Why don't you speak to him, and also speak at her trial?"
"All right, my lord, if you wish it. But remember, the right of high justice is yours now. You may delegate the duties, but not the responsibility!"
"You are entirely too right. For now, though, what happened once you got the word about Cracow?"
"Well, once I got the message out of the peasant-he hadn't slept in days and was babbling-we had to drop everything and recross the Vistula. The railroad tracks are on the west bank only. I sent troops south in battalions at a walk until the rest could catch up. After that we went to double time. When we got to the company you left behind to guard the booty, we absorbed them in our van, since they were fresh by then, and eventually left our hindmost company on guard. At Cracow I left a battalion to secure the city and relieve the wounded you left behind there. We had just arrived at East Gate when we got the word about your victory here. As per your orders, we cleaned up East Gate and sent men back to the dumped booty to pick it up. Half of my men are now on the way back to clean up the killing grounds on the east bank of the Vistula. Also, I sent a battalion west to the salt mines to dig and bring back all the salt they could. We'll need it if we're to save the horsehides we've taken. The rest of them are here now with your booty and what we collected at East Gate."
"What booty at East Gate? We lost there!"
"Many of those women and children had jewels and money secreted about their persons, my lord. Perhaps the Mongols were in too much of a hurry to search them all properly. But for whatever reason, there was quite a lot of it, and policy is that the dead should never be buried with anything of value, not if you want them to rest undisturbed. "
"You're right, of course. Is there any chance of returning the money and jewels to their next of kin?"
"No, my lord. Only a few of them could be identified. We never thought to-issue dog tags to noncombatants."
"Well, we can hardly keep it for ourselves. Looting Mongols is one thing. Robbing the Christian dead is quite another. Perhaps we should donate it to the Church."
"That was to be my suggestion, my lord."
"Well, get some rest and see your family. There's a meeting at one tomorrow that you should attend, and then I guess you'll be going back to the Vistula."
"I can delegate the cleanup, my lord. I have a trial to attend first."
Interlude Two
I hit the STOP button, leaned back, and stretched. Tom still hadn't gotten here. I was almost to the point of worrying about him, but not quite.