John Carr - Siege of Tarr-Hostigos

"But not so interesting, or profitable. I don't trust either Sestembar or my father; nor, I suspect, do they trust each other! When I return to Hos-Zygros, it won't be to further my father s ambitions."

This year the snowfall in Hostigos had been heavier than usual so Kalvan was unable to complete Royal Infantry bayonet training drills. Nor had the War of Three Kings allowed a demonstration of the new massed firepower tactics, since they'd been fighting barbarian armies of combined arms, including chariots, horse-archers, lancers and warriors of every stripe, including many that wouldn't have been out of place on the battlefield of France under Edward III and the Black Prince at the Battle of Crecy!

It was the Royal Army pikemen who were giving Kalvan fits. They felt that using an arquebus or musket was a demotion; it was going to take time and success on the battlefield to convince them otherwise.

He'd had more success with the blacksmiths. His new leaf springs had made everyone happy, from the guild masters to the wagon drivers. The design had been based on the springs of a side-swiped Amish carriage he'd once attended to while a Pennsylvania State Trooper. No one had been badly hurt in the accident and he'd had ample opportunity to inspect the buggy's undercarriage.

The leaves of the springs had been easy to duplicate, but it had taken over a year for the Hostigi blacksmiths to figure out how to connect the leaves at the end of the spring. Once they'd solved that problem, the local artisans were soon at work fitting the Conestoga-style wagons they used locally with springs. They'd even installed them on the Royal Coach. The springs would be a good source of export income the day the Fireseed Wars came to an end.

The new semaphore system was up and running, and he was able to send and receive messages to the Royal Army of Observation based in Beshta in less than an hour, instead of a day by way of pony express. Now they could follow the movement of Styphon's Grand Host, as the Harphaxi were calling it now, when the campaign season arrived. The Hostigi army command would have as close to instantaneous communication with the Beshtan border as was possible here-and-now.

Styphon's House had been a faster learner and nastier opponent than he had expected in the military department. Not only did they have good generals in Grand Master Soton and Captain-General Phidestros, but some of the best troops in the Seven Kingdoms in the Order of Zarthani Knights and the Sacred Squares of Hos-Ktemnos. Phidestros' surprise capture of Tarr-Veblos had been a great propaganda victory for the Harphaxi as well as a big morale boost. Suddenly Great King Kalvan didn't look invincible anymore, even though he'd been a couple hundred miles away when the castle had been taken. Of course, since when had truth taken a front seat to the Big Lie..?

It didn't help that the war against Styphon's House was taking a lot longer to wrap up than anyone had predicted, even on the other side of the divide. That Styphon's House had deep pockets, with the Temple Treasury and Styphon's Great Banking Houses, was no surprise. What Kalvan hadn't expected was Styphon's House initiating a Counter-Reformation in the guise of Archpriest Roxthar and his Holy Investigation, a brutal witch-hunt that echoed Torquemada's Inquisition. The rumors were vile enough to make Kalvan and everyone else in Hostigos glad they lived a long way from Balph.

The recent illness of Sesklos, Styphon's Own Voice, had hit the Inner Circle like bacon fat on a campfire. According to Skranga's spy network in Balph, there was growing resistance to the Holy Investigation among the Inner Circle. Unfortunately, there was little good news for Kalvan with this development as both parties were intent on dismembering Hos-Hostigos and the 'Daemon Kalvan' should he be unlucky enough to survive the defeat of his forces.

The surprising news was reports of growing resistance among the normally placid inhabitants of Hos-Ktemnos towards the excesses of the Investigation. Unfortunately, it was too little and too late to help Hostigos. Great King Cleitharses' reputation as a bookworm meant that he'd rubber stamp any proposal Styphon's Inner Circle proposed regarding the forthcoming spring campaign. It was unfortunate for Hos-Hostigos that the Ktemnoi tercios, man for man, were the best troops in the old Five Kingdoms.

Kalvan was all for the venal and greedy Old Guard; they were easy to understand and counterattack. Reformers like Roxthar bred discontent and fanaticism. The Investigator's excesses were worse than those of Savonarola, and it appeared to Kalvan that he had out-heroded Herod- the tyrant who destroyed all the babes in Bethlehem. Hostigos needed a gung-ho Styphon's House like it needed an outbreak of the Great Pox!

The Plague was another one of his ever-present worries, considering the sorry state of here-and-now hygiene. He had, with Rylla's enthusiastic help, introduced soap to the middle and upper classes, but it was too expensive for the average Hostigi to buy. Once this war was over he was going to see that every Hostigi got ten acres, a plow and a bar of soap.

Outside, the wind howled past the tower. The fire blazed, and in the sudden illumination, Kalvan hefted the chunk of limestone from the nearby Heartridge Quarry and studied its surface as though it might reveal the key to how it was turned into Portland cement. He'd lived among cement buildings and driven over cement roadways, but he had not given any thought to how it was manufactured. Just a quick trip to the hardware store in Bellefonte to buy a bag of concrete: mix with sand, gravel and water-voila, cement!

He seemed to remember something about baking the limestone, but the new iron smelters had proved too hot. The limestone had to be ground into a powder, but they had gristmills for that. Thankfully, the waterwheel was commonplace here-and-now. Kalvan had given a lot of thought to introducing steam engines, but he had to be careful how quickly he accelerated the pace of mechanical innovation. The last thing he wanted to see was the lovely Pennsylvania countryside filled with smokestacks, sweathouses and tenements like Nineteenth Century London. It could happen-look at New Delhi or Hong Kong.

Maybe concrete wasn't such a wonderful idea after all! Unfortunately, with the introduction of gunpowder and cannon shells he'd already released the Genie of Modern Technology. Maybe he'd have to come up with some kind of atonement, like Albert Nobel with his Peace Prize, after the newspapers confused his brother's death with his own and he got an 'opportunity' to read his own obituary. Somehow the Lord Kalvan Peace Prize didn't have the same ring to it, not with here-and-now armies growing from late medieval minuscule numbers to the massed ranks of the Thirty Years' War-all within the space of a few years!

Kalvan sometimes wondered what would have happened if the sideways time traveling machine had spit him out while he'd been stationed in Germany, during his remaining tour of duty after the Korean Armistice. Judging from the fact that there was no known contact with Europe or Asia, things must have taken a very different turn in Europe from his own world. It was possible that the Indo-Aryans, who'd migrated over the Himalayas through the Gobi desert and across the Aleutians, were the ones who'd settled Greece-the Dorians. He remembered his freshman history professor telling the class that the Shepherd Kings, the Hittites and even the Medes and Persians were Indo-Europeans. Had the ancestors of these civilizations bypassed the Middle East for a migration route to the New World? If so, how would this have changed the course of European/Middle Eastern history?-profoundly, if the civilization here in North America was any example.

The lack of contact between the Old World and the New World told him, using Occam's Razor, that Europe was still in a pre-industrial state. He had heard rumors of a warlike people who lived in the far north of Hos-Zygros and spoke a strange tongue, which sounded similar to the Norsemen-but it was all hearsay. When the war with Styphon's House was over he meant to travel as far as Labrador and find out for himself.