Robert Adams - Madman's Army

“I emerged, well armed you must believe, Milo, onto the deck to see with surprise that a double-masted schooner lay rocking in the swell some two hundred meters out from my vessel, and between us, a small boat was being rowed toward me—six oarsmen and a steersman, plus two other men. The glasses showed me that none of the men, neither in the boat nor on the deck of the schooner, looked so scruffy as had the lot off the coast of Gascony. Their clothing looked to be at least clean, and their dress was close enough alike that it might be a uniform of some type, I thought.

“Two of the men in the boat wore sidearms—heavy cutlasses and short daggers or dirks—but none of the others bore anything of a more threatening nature than belt knives of fifteen centimeters or so in the blades. Looking at the schooner, I could see at least a dozen of what looked amazingly like swivel-guns mounted along her rails, men standing beside them with coils of smoking slowmatch in their hands. Her flag was unclear, despite my binoculars, being mostly of a faded red and rusty black, insofar as I could determine.

“Some thirty meters off my port bow, the small boat heaved to and one of the men stood up in the stern and began to bespeak me through a leather trumpet! I was expecting the Breton dialect of French, and it took me a moment to realize that the language he was using was a very atrocious and thoroughly ungrammatical form of Russian. Recognizing his thick accent after a few seconds, I took up my own trumpet and asked him how long he was out from Hamburg. He was obviously startled to hear the good, Frisian dialect, but he became much friendlier, and, after exchanging a few more words, I agreed to allow him and one more to come aboard, but the boat to stand well out from my vessel when once those two had been put aboard, and they all complied with my orders.

“Milo, my friend, fortune assuredly was sailing with me on that day. The schooner, Erika , was an armed merchantman out of the Independent Aristocratic Republic of Hamburg. Hamburg was, I was soon to learn, one of the very few large German cities not seriously damaged in the brief exchange of missiles or the drive of Russian forces across Western Europe which followed.

“After breaking a few fangs on Switzerland, the forces of the Bear had bypassed it to sweep on into and through the vaunted but not at all effective French forces, then up through the Low Countries, whose tiny armies did not even try to resist. The German Federal Republic, however, though beset on every hand, still was not only holding its own but had, in certain sectors, begun to actually push the Russians and their satellite armies back, when the Great Dyings began to more than decimate both aggressors and defenders, impartially. The sole missile that came down in Hamburg was launched, surely from beneath the North Sea, very late in the game and in any case failed to explode, Gott sei dank.

“The great Russian-led invasion had ebbed as it had flowed, but if any of them returned to Russia, it must have been a miracle, so fast did they drop along the way to die. For some reason, a goodly number of Russians remained in the coastal departments of France, eventually taking Frenchwomen as spouses or concubines, and, therefore, France had become, by the time of my arrival in its coastal waters, a bilingual land, for all that it was as splintered and politically fragmented as any other European nation of that period, perhaps a little more than most, though, really, since the French have never had a stable, central government for any long period since they murdered their king and butchered their nobility at the close of the eighteenth century.

“By the time of my arrival, Milo, a few generations of breeding had brought the population of Western Europe back up to a fraction of its earlier size, but at least such progress had encouraged the people, had made them to think that perhaps mankind was not irrevocably doomed as a species. As the largest remaining port city in all of northwestern Europe, Hamburg was becoming something of a power, and its ships sailed out in every direction, just as its land merchants traveled the roads and byways of the continent with their heavily armed and pugnacious escorts.

“Of course, in times of such uncertainty, ships needs must sail well armed and, often, in convoy, shipping along larger crews than would have been necessary simply for working the vessel. Erika was such a ship, standing up from one of the Basque kingdoms with a mixed cargo and bound for home, Hamburg.

“My greatest good fortune was to be able to sail to Hamburg under Erika ’s strong protection through the waters of the Dutch and English pirates, as well as up the Elbe, where had I not been in company with her I would likely have been blown out of the water by the line of powerful cannon-and catapult-armed forts or boarded in force by the river patrols and either killed or enslaved.

“After so many long years of either total solitude or companionship of only a few, pitiful survivors of all of mankind’s disasters, I found that new Hamburg to be most stimulating in all conceivable ways, Milo. It was, of course, as always, a booming, bustling center of commerce, but now much, much more than just that.

“Some twenty thousands of men and women and children were resident within the earth-and-wooden perimeter walls that were fast being replaced with dressed stone. Protected by well-armed guard ships, the fishers sailed out and came back up the Elbe, bearing heavy catches of stockfish to be smoked or salted or pickled; others of them brought in barrel on precious barrel of whale oil. Other ships brought in lumber for the flourishing shipbuilders, or sailed in laden with broken pieces of old statuary, bells and other bronze or brass scrap, copper, tin and zinc for the cannon foundry, sulphur and niter and charcoal for the powder mills. All of the rest of the world might be sinking into a slough of despair and barbarism, but Hamburg was keeping lit the lamp of true culture and civilization.

“The master of Erika, Kapitan Klaus Hauer, and his son and first mate—the fine young man who had rowed over to my vessel—Fritz Hauer, escorted me to the new seat of government and introduced me to him who just then was serving as Präsident of the Aristokratisch Sammlung of Hamburgerstadt, Herr Hubert Klapp-Panzertöt, whose surname was derived of his grandfather, who had been a great hero of the stand against the Eastern European hordes that had invaded Germany.

“When once Hubert learned just how much I in my mind held of the old, near-forgotten technologies of the world of almost, by then, three full generations before, he saw me declared an aristocrat and we two worked together for years until his death, at which time I moved on, traveling with merchants as far as Westphalia. I lived there for some years, a client of the Graf, to whose retainers I taught refinements of swordplay and oriental martial arts. After some years there, I moved on; of course, you know how and why it must be so, Milo.

“For longer or shorter times, I lived all over the German lands, in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Rumania, the Baltic States, the Russian princedoms, all of Scandinavia, the Kingdom of Ukrainia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia and, finally the Peloponnese.

“By then, nearly two hundred years after the Great Dyings, the Greeks were once more getting a bit crowded on their poor and rocky holdings; despite their idiosyncratic perversions, no one ever has been able to fault Greeks at the act of breeding. Unable to feed themselves by way of farming or fishing, many of the men of Greece were become pirates of shipping and consummate raiders of other lands, and my own fleet was one of the largest, strongest and most feared, incorporating as it did techniques and relics of times past which gave it a distinctive edge over its opponents.