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.