Лео Франковски - Lord Conrad's Crusade

Lord Conrad’s Crusade

Leo Frankowski

Rodger Olsen

September 14, 2005

Lord Conrad’s Crusade

Special Thanks

Prologue: The Taking of Alexandria

Some Papal Bull

The Open Road

Sir Piotr’s Story: Meanwhile, Back at the Castle

Down to the Sea in Ships

Making a Clean Break of It

Sir Piotr’s Story: Again, Back at Okoitz

Conrad’s Tale: On to the Amazon?

Sir Piotr’s Story: Back at the Castle, Again

Hunger, Thirst, and Death

In Uncle Tom’s Control Room

Sir Piotr’s Story: Once More, Back at the Castle

Slavery

Sir Walznik’s Rescue

To Escape from a Barrel

Sir Piotr’s Story: Back at the Castle, Again

Sir Walznik’s Rescue: Captain Walsnik’s Search

Naked Rebellion

Sir Piotr’s Story: Sir Piotr’s Office

Sir Walznik’s Rescue: The Search for Conrad

The Two Towers

The Slaughter of the Slavers

The Fruits of Victory

On a Staircase, Going Down

Playing the Palace

The Devil is in the Details

Omar’s Conjugal Visit

Building a New Christian Army

Progress

Sir Walznik’s Rescue: The Search for Conrad

Juma Finds a Bride

The Africa Corps Moves North

In Uncle Tom’s Control Room

Along the Trail

Pigeon Polish and Rhino Rampage

Twisting the Tail of One City

Sir Walznik’s Rescue: The Trip to Timbuktu

Into the Mountains

Taking Shangri-La

Sir Walznik’s Rescue: Rescuing Conrad

Looting Shangri-La

North to the Sea

Silver, Midge, and the New Old Christian Army

Old Friends

Re-equipping – ‘A Man Must Wear His Loincloth’

Retraining – Whiskey and Women, Juma Takes a Ride

Many Departures – We Go To War!

In Uncle Tom’s Control Room

Leaving My Ladies for War

In Uncle Tom’s Control Room

Special Thanks

To LTC Dave Grossman

For his help, editing, and advice

To Chris Ciulla

For his help in getting this to the public

To Mike Hubble

For his help, editing, and advice

And

to the dozens of people who helped with editing, critique, and encouragement

Prologue: The Taking of Alexandria

Heavy artillery, aerial strafing, and bombardment are all very well, but there comes a time when you must go in there and clean a city out, and for that, I personally prefer to use a sword. For one thing, you don’t get killed while you are reloading.

Why does the human mind insist on multi-tasking? Since fighting for my life took only half of my brain, the other half was free to distract me. I don’t know why they call it “thrust, beat, and parry.”

The next opponent was coming in on my left. I blocked him with my shield and hacked his arm off. That was definitely “hacking.” Poor bastard. Why didn’t he just stay home? Why couldn’t they have just accepted our offer? We said that if they would free all of their slaves, we would take care of these people, send them home, and leave the inhabitants of Alexandria alive and in peace.

Faced with an overwhelmingly powerful army, navy, and air force, why was that so hard to accept? Well, yes, we had also demanded their obedience, but we had been very nice to the other places that had gone along with our program. We’d even left their leadership intact.

So, I just hacked his arm off. The next one was to my right. Small bugger. My sword knocked his aside – okay, that’s “beating,” but then I swung for his breastbone and damned near cut him in half. That was definitely “hewing.” When you cut something down, you are “hewing.” Okay, now a low forehand to this man’s leg and a backhand to that guy’s leg. That’s a “backhand.” So there I was, hacking and hewing and backhanding my way through an army of men I didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to kill, in a back alley of a city that I never really wanted to conquer.

Battle is tiring work. Half of the battles in history must have ended because the combatants were just too damned tired to swing their swords one more time. Unfortunately, my bright golden armor and polished sword seemed to attract a lot of attention. If I died on this vacation it would be because I was overdressed.

I badly needed to disengage and rest my arm. Unfortunately, my backward steps encouraged my opponents to rush harder at me and caused more work. Thankfully, red and white uniforms moved in front of me and closed the line behind these last two opponents. One went down to a throat slash. The other backed up and got a surprised look on his face when he backed into the Christian soldier who had closed the line behind him. If he had dropped his sword, he would have lived. As it was, I had to be very careful to cut him down and not take out my own man behind him. My sword is very sharp.

My time traveling Uncle Tom made it for me. Well, actually, he was my second cousin, but he was older than me, and I’d always called him “uncle.” Since it was a one-off, and used technology far beyond anything that we could duplicate, I was the only person who could get one.

Basically, it was a good, watered steel scimitar that had been split in half the hard way. Then, a fifty-angstrom thick layer of pure diamond was placed down the length of the blade, and the sandwich had been permanently bonded together. There was no way that we could make another one, here in the Thirteenth Century. Or in the Twentieth, for that matter.

Then I was able to step back a few paces. I dropped my sword to waist height and stood there panting. The battle was moving slowly away from me. If you ignored the pain, loss of blood, filth, cold, hard labor, hacking and hewing, this was not the worst vacation that I had ever taken, but I decided that next year I would go fishing.

I wished that I had some arrows left. My bow weighed less than my sword, and it doesn’t attract the unwanted attention that a firearm does.

The whole thing had started one day in my castle, or palace, or whatever it was.

Some Papal Bull

So there I was. The Duke of Sandomierz, the Duke of Cracow, the Duke of Mazovia, the hetman of the Christian Army, and a long way from what once was home.

‘Home’ used to be in Twentieth Century Poland for me, a decent engineer named Conrad Schwartz. Then I managed to fall asleep, drunk, in a time machine. I woke up in the Thirteenth Century, nine years before the Mongols were due to arrive and kill a third of the population of the whole country in a few weeks. By dint of some modern organization, decent technology, nine years of hard work, and a little help from my time traveling uncle, we had managed to defeat them, barely, over twenty years ago. Now, home was my headquarters and palace at Okoitz, where my two formal wives lived.

So now, I was Conrad Stargard, a kingmaker. I was the wealthiest and most powerful man in the Western World, and I was more than slightly miffed at the letter before me.

My old friend and mentor, Father Ignacy, had long since been elected pope, taking the name of John Paul. He had probably gained that exalted status because for many years, I’d been publishing the only magazine in Europe, and I had been distributing it across the continent. He wrote a monthly article in it. My publicity had made him what he now was.

In return, he was prevailing upon me to start a crusade to regain the Holy Lands. It seems that the Muslims had taken Jerusalem back from the last bunch of crusaders who took it from them, and the pope wanted it back again.