Лео Франковски - Conrad's Last Campaign

A company of Wolves formed the center. Like the knights, they were noblemen trained from birth to be warriors. Unlike the knights, they went on to be trained as professional soldiers. They sat relaxed on their Big People and surveyed the battleground. Each of them held his shield close in front of him and rested his Sten gun or his sword on his pommel.

I didn’t really want to attack Jerusalem, but they left me no choice when they had decided to fight rather than surrender. You would think they would have learned by now that everybody conquers Jerusalem. David took it from Canaanites and slaughtered the inhabitants. Then came the Egyptian pharaohs, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Saladin, and a bunch of others along the way .

Want to be a Boy Scout? Earn some merit badges. Want to be a scholar? Read some books. Want to be a conqueror? Sack Jerusalem. For extra points, send the inhabitants into exile for a few hundred years. It’s tradition, and now it’s my turn.

I had instructed the artillery to concentrate on the city walls only. If we damaged holy sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or the Temple Mount, it would make it harder to govern the city later.

When the smoke from the last artillery barrage cleared, the knights would start the charge. However, Silver and I would be first through the wall, flanked by the Wolves. I reached down, clipped my Sten gun to my saddle, and drew my sword. This would be a historic battle, and history deserved to be written with a blade.

It was the early fall of 1263 AD. I was the Duke of Sandomierz, the Duke of Cracow, the Duke of Mazovia, the Hetman of the Christian Army, a Crusader, and a damned long way from home.

The Reluctant Crusader

Compared to the slave pit I had been chained in for the past year, my new home was a palace. In fact it was the Royal Palace of Jerusalem. It had become available when the old owner died suddenly and unexpectedly while charging a Christian Army line.

It had gilded furniture, rich drapes, grand halls, marbled floors, hot and cold running servants, and every luxury a man could want, except for a working toilet and clean running water. The Roman sewers hadn’t been well maintained since the Byzantines left a few hundred years ago.

My office was on the third floor. From my balcony, I could see the Wailing Wall off to my left and, if I craned my neck to the right, I could see a little piece of the city walls between the buildings. For a second, I wondered if I was looking at the original city wall, the Roman city wall or the Crusader wall. There were lots of walls.

In the distance, work was proceeding on the twelve hexagonal snowflake forts that would ring Jerusalem. Each would be manned by a company of men, with their families. The pope, my old friend Father Ignacy, had wanted these very badly, to defend the Holy City. Five of them would be manned by our Jewish troops. That he didn’t want.

The pope was becoming more conservative by the day. He was unhappy with my decision to allow everyone access to Jerusalem. He had expected the Muslim and Jews to be barred from the city or, better yet, killed. As I do not lead a Mongol army, I had declined the suggestion for mass murder. I guess I just don’t have the proper attitude to be a crusader in this century.

I found myself staring down at the hand holding my whiskey. My right hand looked just like my left, but you could tell it was less grizzled and calloused. It took me a year to re-grow it after the slavers cut it off. Thanks to Uncle Tom’s modifications, the hand grew back and my scars were gone, at least the visible ones were.

I had spent months as the engine of a piece of machinery, a water pump. How bad was it? The height of toilet protocol for pump slaves was to piss to the side so you didn’t splash your fellow pumpmates. Your excrement you stepped over or walked in. That bad.

It’s one thing to know slavery is an abomination and quite another to experience being sold naked at auction - at a discount, no less, because some Tuareg bastard had lopped off my right hand! The bastard who did it didn’t know it would grow back and couldn’t care less.

It wasn’t the best time I’ve had in this century and for the first time in years, I felt homesick.

Home was my headquarters and palace at Okoitz, where my two formal wives lived .

Home used to be in 20th century Poland, but I once brilliantly managed to fall asleep, drunk, in a time machine. I woke up in the 13th century. It had been an interesting twenty years since then.

Now I was leading a Crusade. Not my idea. When Pope John Paul, formerly known as my friend Father Ignacy, ordered me to go on Crusade I had skipped town to avoid attacking innocent Muslims. That’s how the damned slavers got me.

Fortunately, on my way home I met up with a crusading Christian Army. They were headed for the holy land and, since they were headed in my direction, I decided I might as well lead the Crusade as follow.

Before I even joined them, This Christian Army had conquered southern Spain and most of Northern Africa without much trouble. Since then, we had since taken the Holy Land, and were now working our way north on the Mediterranean coast on our way to the Christian city of Constantinople. Mostly, we were just stringing the old Crusader States back together again. By accident, we were also protecting the Roman Empire and giving them an opportunity to reclaim a lot of lost land.

For now, I had time to relax and get back to being an engineer. For the first time since I broke out of Timbuktu I didn’t have to fight anyone tomorrow and I was thoroughly happy sitting at a desk with papers scattered in front of me.

We were waiting for supplies and more manpower from Poland. We could probably finish off the Muslim states without it, since we had airplanes and machine guns and rifled cannon up against their swords, pikes and occasional muzzle-loading cannon, but there was no point in rushing to get men killed. War was exciting, but I preferred building to destroying and we were going to need a lot of building if we were going to hold the Middle East.

I was also secretly hoping that, given a little time to see how prosperous the former Muslim states got from being part of Europe, the Muslims might not fight so hard or at least would have armies full of men who saw an advantage in having railroads and light bulbs and access to European markets.

So, part of our war was building railroads. To take the region, we’d need to travel through some very difficult terrain. We’d have to build railroads as we went to move our troops and supplies. We were already laying tracks along the north coast of Africa, from Marrakech through Cairo to Jerusalem. From there, plans were to go north and west to Constantinople, and perhaps give those people a hand against their enemies.

To keep the territory we’d taken, we had to show the Arabs that they could prosper under our rule, and nothing contributes more to that than good transportation, although the lack of tariffs and low taxation helps, too. Shipping costs on one of our railroads were a tenth of what they were on a camel caravan .

To keep the prosperity rolling, I had just approved plans for the building of two Liner-class harbors, with housing, storage, and repair facilities, on the north and south sides of the Suez peninsula. A double railroad track would stretch between them, one going north and one south. They would transport troops, supplies, and eventually our trade goods. Our ships would still have to travel around the Cape of Good Hope, but they would only have to do it once!

After that, the crews would be rotated, but the ships themselves would stay in the Indian Ocean for the rest of their working lives, probably.