Sturm Strike (Musket Men Book 10), page 13
“We don’t even know if they’re going to attack tonight,” Sturm reminded him. “So, we set up camp and we get ready. The teamsters can cook the meals. If we get attacked before everyone eats, that’s fine. But if they come in later, our men are fed and ready for action.”
Lima nodded grudgingly. He’d been in a bad mood, Sturm noticed, since he lost the argument to stop pushing forward and defend what they had already taken. He wondered if Grandmaster Carvalho would agree with Lima or side with Sturm. It just didn’t make any sense to take an action that he knew would end in his eventual defeat.
“I’ll give the orders,” Sturm said, ending the conversation.
After several days on the trail, he’d developed a standard camp layout that put the most vulnerable people in the interior, put the regular army pikemen and the militias in the next ring, and placed the musket men in four groups—one at each point of the compass on the outside of camp. The cavalry served as a reserve at the north and south of the camp, closer to the center than the musket men, but still in significant danger if they were attacked. He wasn’t certain he had chosen the proper course of action. A case could be made for putting his weakest units in the outer ring to buy his better units time to organize for battle if the enemy struck. But that seemed to guarantee him losing a lot of men both to enemy action and desertion. Only time would tell if he’d balanced his problems appropriately.
He watched the wagons moving into a large circle, granting a wall of protection to the teamster’s horses. Soon, his army would be as secure as he could make it under the circumstances.
If the nomads went ahead and attacked tonight, they would see if his precautions were enough.
Sheik Kaan reined back hard when the enemy came into view. Despite the fact that there remained more than two hours until sunset, he had pulled his wagons into a defensive position and made camp.
“What are you stopping for, Father?” His younger son, Murat, asked.
Kaan decided to take the time to educate both of his boys. They were young men—rash and anxious to build a reputation for themselves as warriors. “The northerners are no longer strung out along the road. My strategy was for us to cripple their wagons, but pulled up into a circle like that, the northerners may have done what we wanted them to without even making us shed their blood.”
“I thought we wanted them to die,” Kaan’s older son, Demir, observed.
“Death will come to them,” Kaan promised. “We simply have to wait now for the sun to help us.”
“That could take a long time,” Murat protested.
“If we wait too long,” Demir added his own complaint, “other tribes may come and try to share in our bounties.”
“If another tribe comes, we will chase them away,” Kaan tried to placate the boys. “The position they are in now is a lot easier to defend than the one where they were strung out on the Spice Road.”
“We could speed things along,” Murat suggested, “by shooting our arrows into the horses inside that wagon circle.”
“You want to kill horses?” Kaan asked.
“No,” Murat corrected him, facing his father’s outrage with commendable courage. “I want to injure several of the horses so that they stampede, frighten the other animals, and break apart their circle of wagons.”
“That’s a good idea,” Demir complimented his brother. “They have hundreds of horses. They will not only break open holes in the circle of wagons; they will hurt a lot of men as they flee in panic.”
“That could produce opportunities,” Kaan agreed. “But I have been warned that these long weapons of the Alkhudar have a range that is greater than that of our bows. Sheik Ismael told me how they will fight. They will line up in long rows and fire into our men as they pass, killing and injuring many before they have to reload.”
“How quickly can they reload, Father,” Murat asked.
“Ismael said they were quite quick—reloading in well under a minute,” Kaan reported.
“That is more than enough time for me to lead our brave warriors in close enough to stampede their horses,” Murat predicted.
“You will not be the one to lead the warriors,” Demir objected. “I am the elder. I will lead them.”
Kaan had not stopped considering Murat’s plan. The different groups of men with the long guns truly were widely separated. It might be possible for him to thread the needle and get in and out without any group coming close enough to badly injure his people, but at worst, only two of the four should be able to do so. That was half of the fifteen hundred long guns that Burak had warned him of. And even that was a worst-case scenario for what had Ismael said? Their weapons could fire twice the distance of a bow—say, two hundred yards—but there were many hundreds of yards between any two groups.
“You will both lead the warriors,” Kaan decided. “You will both ride beside me.”
Neither of his sons looked completely happy with his decision, but neither did either complain and risk being the one left behind.
Sturm watched the nomads approach as Faust’s militia shield men hurried forward to defend the musket men, leaving the southern militia and the regular army pikemen as the last line of defense of the wagons. But something wasn’t right about the enemy’s approach. They weren’t coming straight at Russel as he had first anticipated. They were going to try and skirt him as they came in, passing some three hundred yards north of him—well out of musket range—but were they approaching the circle of wagons or planning to swing back toward Russel and envelope him from multiple directions? Or was all of this to pull Russel and him out of position to open up another part of the circle for attack?
Russel had command of the companies stationed to the south. Sturm had taken direct command of the companies stationed to the east figuring that that was the direction likely to see the most action. He also had companies at the other points of the compass in the north and the west, but unless he missed his guess, they weren’t going to see the first spark of combat.
“The companies will advance,” he decided and marched his five ranks of seventy men forward, closing the distance even as the front riders of the nomads began to penetrate the camp parallel to Russel. If they continued forward...
Sturm abruptly realized what they planned to do. It was insidious in its simplicity and it was probably impossible to stop them from enacting their plan. But that didn’t mean it was impossible to make them pay a price for what they were doing.
“Companies halt!” he shouted. “Turn and face the wagons. Now, double-time!”
He began to move his men quickly and efficiently back toward the wagons even as the nomads successfully used the space between Russel and him to ride within a hundred yards of the wagons and unleash their bows.
“Get them!” Murat shouted gleefully as he, Demir, Kaan, and their warriors drew arrows from their quivers.
Sheik Kaan grinned in anticipation as he fit his missile to his bow and fired—not into the body of the shield bearing infantry that had assembled between them and the wagons but over the heads of the soldiers, over the tops of the wagons, and into the space behind.
Horses immediately squealed in fear, pain, and protest, and then—just as Murat had predicted—they began to stampeded. Running forward and kicking backward where there was little room to maneuver added to the chaos. Wagons shook as equines banged against them. Almost, Kaan changed the plan and continued to charge forward, but that would bog his riders down and permit the men with the long guns to bring them into range.
The sheik turned his horse to retreat only to find that one of the groups of Alkhudar with the strange new guns was hurrying toward him. It was tempting to ride close enough to drop more arrows into those men, but the path to his escape was clear. They would head out again on a path north of the approaching soldiers. Perhaps they had come close enough to get a brief window of opportunity to fire upon them, or perhaps they would not.
In any event, as the rampaging horses broke apart the Alkhudar camp, Kaan and his men would escape to plan their next move.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Sir Friedrich Kohler
Cidade Fortaleza, Al-Andalus, Kriegsturm
The Flower Moon, Day 31, Year 1197
“It is a particularly fascinating problem you have, Captain Muller,” Sir Friedrich Kohler observed. He was a very thin man with a shock of white hair which conversely appeared to have far more color than his cadaverous face did. “The only place that slaves currently exist in Al-Andalus is in the countryside, and yet, if you purchase them and attempt to pass through the city to get them onto your ships, they become free before they reach them. Have you considered assembling them near the shore and ferrying them out to your ships by longboat?”
“Risky,” Countess Gudrun warned as she sat across from the two men in her home three days after having first met with Muller. “It’s been the law of the land ever since I’ve lived here that all of the ship trade must go through the port of Cidade Fortaleza or the Fortress of Fortaleza so that proper custom can be paid. If you are caught trying to sneak the slaves out by longboat as Sir Friedrich suggests, you would be charged with smuggling, tried in the earl’s court because of his emergency powers, and lose not only your cargo but your ships.”
Muller doubted very much that he would lose his ships because if they were somehow caught he would simply sail away. But that would still mean going back to Mr. Adler without the cargo he had been charged to obtain.
“Have you considered the overland route through Kasteel?” Sir Friedrich suggested. “It would take a lot longer, but it is completely legal.”
“And if the ban on having slaves in the city is lifted while I am enroute, we probably wouldn’t make enough on the slaves to justify the increased cost of the journey,” Muller worried.
“You don’t have to sell them in Sturmkuste,” Sir Friedrich reminded him. “You could sell them in Kasteel, Eisenland, Graanland, or Aachen. It’s my understanding that many of these slaves end up in Eisenland anyway, working in the mines.”
“That’s true,” Muller admitted. “But you are talking about weeks of walking, with chains weighing them down if we go the overland route. That’s a lot of wear and tear on the merchandise that will also lower the price.”
“Forgive my saying so, Captain Muller,” Countess Gudrun interjected, “but I doubt very much that you have the skills or the experience required to bring slaves hundreds of miles overland. It’s a specialized profession. You’d have to hire someone to do it and he’d have to hire guards to help him keep the slaves in line and well...”
She trailed off, not needing to complete the thought. He wasn’t going to try and bring the slaves overland.
“You know what’s really a shame?” Sir Friedrich said. His pale face never seemed to show any expression. “We have thousands of orphans here in the city, always under foot, costing the governor a fortune in food—money that really comes from us through our taxes.”
“I don’t understand what you are talking about,” Muller confessed.
Countess Gudrun leaned forward as if the idea excited her. “That’s right, Sir Friedrich,” she gushed before turning her face toward Muller to explain. “Thousands of adult Southies were killed during the madness of the Midnight Bloom. The earl took charge of all of the orphaned children. There are literally thousands of them—and many of the older ones—say between ten and fifteen—would make perfectly good slaves.”
“It would still take a little trickery to get them to the ships,” Sir Friedrich considered the problem. “But if we put them in barrels and pretended they were some other good—well, the guards don’t inspect commodities going out of the city, just the wares coming in.”
Muller slowly nodded. “It would be a big operation.”
“Not necessarily,” Sir Friedrich corrected him. “A half dozen relatively small crews of say two-to-three men each ought to be able to catch forty, or maybe even fifty orphans a day.”
“All of whom would need to be paid,” Muller grumbled.
“You would expect to pay fifteen or twenty crowns for a young child and thirty-five or forty for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old,” Gudrun pointed out. “If you pay a crown per child to each of the finders in Sir Friedrich’s crews and two crowns to Sir Friderich per child, your cost would be only four to five crowns per slave—a bargain price if I ever heard one.
“I’d also need to buy up a lot of barrels,” Captain Muller thought through the logistics of the plan.
“Which are always in plentiful supply by the warehouses and the docks,” the countess reminded him.
“Forgive me, Countess Gudrun, but you have forgotten to include yourself in Captain Muller’s expenses,” Sir Friedrich pointed out.
“No, I have not,” the countess insisted. “Captain Muller is going to pay me a clean five hundred crowns for having put the two of you in contact with each other. I really don’t care what the two of you do after that. I am not going to be involved.”
Muller almost coughed when the noblewoman said five hundred, but he quickly got control of himself. That came to less than two additional crowns for each child they hoped to kidnap for a total expense of just under six to seven crowns per child, plus the barrels. His profits in Kriegsturm were going to be extraordinary. Mr. Adler would be so pleased!
“Five hundred crowns?” he repeated. “I agree.”
Chapter Twenty-Six: A Spontaneous Trap
Shamal Intimad, Ahl-Alnaar Ashomal
The Flower Moon, Day 31, Year 1197
Lima watched the enemy approach with a growing feeling of unease. It occurred to him that Earl Sturm—much as he had grown to like the man—really didn’t have any experience commanding an army this large. His notable actions in Steil Pass, in conquering Hekt, and in defending Cidade Fortaleza and retaking Forte Firme and Vigilância Sul had all been with much smaller forces composed primarily of his musket men. Oh, he had led the defense of Hekt with more than a regiment—but that was behind fixed defenses. It was nothing at all like what they faced here.
As Lima watched the nomads darted in between Sturm’s southern and eastern groups of musket men heading toward the circle of wagons. In an instant, Lima understood their plan. They would start a stampede and then ride out again forming a V-shaped route that led them in south of the companies under Sturm’s immediate command and out again north of it between Sturm and Captain Ledger. Except the Granite Knights were also north of the camp and wasn’t this the perfect opportunity to throw some confusion into the nomads’ strategy?
“Filipe!” he shouted and the southern brother immediately appeared beside him.
“Knight Captain.”
“Ride immediately to Captain Ledger and order him to follow the Granite Knights into battle, staying always to the east of us so that he can fire on any men who escape Earl Sturm’s trap.”
He knew Sturm hadn’t really planned this, but if they survived the rest of the day, it could not hurt if this battle further enhanced the earl’s reputation.
Filipe was already moving as Lima turned to the rest of his men. “The nomads are going to skirt the edge of Earl Sturm’s musket men, riding out there!” He pointed so his men could see what he was talking about. “We are going to block that point of egress and drive them back toward the wagons and the musket men. Do you understand?”
The Granite Knights cheered and Lima dropped the visor down over his helmet. That made the world feel ten times as hot to him, but centuries of fighting the Naar worshippers testified that the cold faceless helmets of the Granite Knights drove fear into the hearts of the southerners.
He touched his horse’s sides with his heels and the whole force of three hundred knights started forward at a gallop, readying their lances and shields.
Major Russel understood that the Sturm Front’s plan had failed. The horses were breaking loose at the center of the camp and even though he had tried to position his musket men at strategic points which maximized the amount of territory they could guard, there just weren’t enough men for the job.
The nomads had gotten through. But that didn’t mean they still couldn’t hurt them, because for some reason that Russel didn’t understand—even though they only needed a few flights of arrows to drive the horses mad, the nomads had brought their whole army in to join the attack—an army that didn’t seem to understand that the men Russel was even now bringing into range of them could still cause some very substantial damage.
“Companies halt!” Russel called out. They were about two hundred yards away and as the Sturm Front had instructed, they were formed in five ranks seventy men across.
“First rank,” Russel shouted. “Aim at the bastards! Fire!”
Seventy double-charged muskets fired from two hundred yards and nomads began to fall.
Marshal Sturm had gotten his men into position seconds too late to attack the leaders of this nomad army, but that didn’t stop him from firing his first rank into the men twenty yards behind them. The range actually wasn’t terrible here—no more than a hundred and fifty yards and with five ranks of musket men firing volleys every six seconds he was going to extract a withering toll upon these southerners.
He just hoped that it was worth the price that his stampeding horses were even now inflicting on his army.
“First rank, fire!”
Sheik Kaan grinned broadly as he led his men back out of the heart of the enemy.
“We made fools of them!” Murat shouted. “They thought their new weapons could frighten us but—”
The sound of charging horses that every son of the Göçebe Insanlar knew well came to his ears—but it was not the sound of their own steeds.
The sheik’s eyes darted northward to confirm his fears. The Granite Knights were bearing down upon them, armor shining in the evening sun, shields ready, and lances dropping horizontal to the ground.
“It was a trap!” Kaan’s son Emir screamed in a manner unbefitting the son of a sheik no matter how surprised he was by the turn of events.
