by Eric Flint
He wondered if he’d be remembered as long as Horatius.
Leopold at the bastion.
Probably not. Horatius had survived and his Rome had gone on to dominate the world for centuries thereafter. Leopold was pretty sure he was going to die today and would enjoy the same posterity as the Greek noblemen who led the defense of Constantinople when the Ottomans seized that city.
What were their names?
Who knew?
Who cared, for that matter?
Chapter 40
Vienna, capital of Austria-Hungary
As his airship drew nearer to the fortifications after having made a long slow turn over Vienna, Moshe Mizrahi could see what was happening again. The assault against the westernmost of the two bastions that had not been struck by fire bombs had stalled. From what he could tell, he thought the airship assigned to bomb that bastion had either failed entirely in its mission or had only dropped some of its bombs on the soldiers guarding it.
If those soldiers had fired as effective a volley as the one that had struck his own airship, Moshe was not surprised. It was now clear that the officers commanding the airship force had seriously underestimated the risk posed by musket volleys if the vessels flew too low. In the future, they would either need to fly at a greater altitude or attach some sort of armor to the gondola floors—preferably both, as far as Moshe was concerned.
Mordechai Pesach came up next to him. “How’s your arm?”
Moshe glanced down at the bandaged limb. They’d had enough time while the airship was coming around to attend to that problem, and the bleeding seemed to have stopped entirely.
“Hurts,” he said, “but not too bad.”
Mordechai pointed to something in the distance. “Look! Their armored wagon is way back there. Not even close to the bastion.”
Moshe saw that he was right—and, again, was not surprised. He’d been doubtful the war machines would work that well. Being driven by a steam engine while floating through the air was one thing. Driving such a great heavy brute of a wagon across land, something else entirely.
Mordechai now pointed to a different bastion, farther to the east. That was the second of the two bastions which had been left unharmed by fire bombs, so that the janissaries could storm them. It was the bastion they were supposed to have bombed. “Look at that war wagon, though!”
Peering in that direction, Moshe could see that a war wagon had managed to reach the glacis without breaking down and was now starting to climb it. He couldn’t help but wince with sympathy for the crew. The steam engine driving the wagon was based on an American design, which was quite different from the one driving his airship. The secret to the greater power generated by those engines was mostly crude and simple—they ran the boiler under much greater pressure. If it exploded, in the close confines inside that wagon…
At least they’d die quickly. In horrible agony, but it wouldn’t last long.
He shook his head, shaking off the thought at the same time. It looked as if the assault on that bastion was going well. He and Mordechai needed to concentrate on the bastion just ahead of them. The janissaries were still far enough away from the glacis that if they dropped their bombs accurately, they wouldn’t hit any of the Ottoman soldiers—and might even clear the way for the assault to succeed. That would go a long way toward improving their status in the eyes of the sultan, if Murad was angry over the failure of their first bombing run.
“How high do you think we are now?” he asked Mordechai. “Over the bastion, I mean, once we come over it.”
Pesach pursed his lips, gauging the matter. “About seventy-five kulaçs, I’d say. Certainly not more than a hundred.”
“That’s what I figure also—and it’s too low. The only way we can be sure of hitting the target is to stay right above it without moving, and I’m not taking any chances of getting hit by another volley. So let’s drop some more ballast. I want to be at least one hundred and fifty kulaçs above the bastion. At that height, even if they hit us, I don’t think the balls will penetrate the gondola.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” said Mordechai.
* * *
For a while, Leopold thought they might be able to drive back the Turks. The Austrian cannons were slaughtering the bastards, the way they were coming such a great distance across open ground with nothing to shelter behind.
It was the tank that turned the tide. Once the armored wagon started up the glacis, the Austrian soldiers got very anxious. There was something unnerving about the way the machine slowly and stolidly kept coming. Bullets bounced off it—even being hit a glancing blow by a cannon ball didn’t seem to faze the thing.
Thing? It seemed more like a living creature, full of malevolence.
Still, Leopold kept the men steady enough—until the tank was no more than twenty yards from the walls and a Turkish soldier emerged from the central hatch holding some sort of peculiar-looking tubular device. A torch of some kind?
The tube spouted a long tongue of flame that reached all the way over the walls and fell on some of the men sheltered there. They began screaming hideously, running toward the stairs leading off the bastion. Still alight, like moving torches.
Leopold realized instantly that the Ottoman weapon was using some variety of Greek fire—napalm, whatever. And he realized at the same time that it couldn’t possibly be that effective a weapon. Not just one of them, at least. All they had to do was shoot the soldier wielding it.
“Stand your ground!” he shouted, charging up to the wall and waving his sword. “Fire a volley at the wagon! Kill the bastard!”
But it was hopeless. The men had already been badly hammered by enemy fire. Among the many unpleasant surprises of that day, the janissaries were now armed with muskets that were far superior to what had been expected. Now the morale of the Austrian troops shattered and they started racing off the bastion.
Leopold himself was knocked down by several of the routed soldiers. He might have been trampled except one of them—a very big fellow—took a moment to grab him by the collar and haul him back onto his feet.
“It’s no use, Your Grace,” the man said. “Just try to save yourself, all you can do now.”
And he was gone. After a brief hesitation, Leopold realized he was right and followed the soldiers off the bastion.
What should he do now? Where should he go?
Cecilia Renata. He had to find out what had happened to his sister and the other two women. Do what he could to get them safely out of the city. There might still be time. The Ottomans hadn’t surrounded the city, they’d concentrated all their forces against the southern walls. If he could…
If—if—if—
Once he was off the bastion, he started running toward the Hofburg.
* * *
To Hussein’s astonishment, the final charge up the glacis was unopposed. Until that moment, the Austrian resistance here had been ferocious. He wasn’t certain, but he thought it was the armored wagon which had made the difference. If so, the stupid thing turned out to have some use after all.
But he’d figure out later if he owed the zimmi crew an apology. Right now he just wanted to kill some Austrians. The swine had been butchering them and he looked forward to returning the favor.
As soon as he came over the bastion wall he spotted a wounded Austrian soldier trying to lever himself upright with a musket. Hussein rushed at him with his yataghan. Finally, he’d be doing the butchering.
But the man collapsed back onto the stone floor and Hussein’s swing went wild. He tripped over the Austrian and almost fell himself. Now furious, he spun around to deliver the death stroke.
The muzzle of the musket was pointing right at him, held by the enemy soldier as he lay on his back. The Austrian’s finger pulled the trigger and Hussein saw nothing more.
* * *
“Let’s do it,” said Moshe. He and Mordechai started dropping the bomb jars over the side. The wind was slight enough that they could both work at i
t for perhaps a minute before having to make adjustments in the thrust to keep them over the target.
The bombs were heavy, each one weighing about half a kantar—a kantar being roughly the weight of a woman or a small man—and they had to be lifted off the ledges they were resting on and over the side. But for two men working together, the work could be done quickly.
As they did so, Moshe saw that one of the ledges had been struck by a musket ball. He hadn’t noticed earlier. Those ledges had been added despite the additional weight in order to keep the bomb jars from rolling about. But he now saw that the ledges also served as additional shields. If the jars had simply been resting on the floor of the gondola when the musket balls punched through, it was very likely at least one of them would have been shattered.
Would that have been enough to explode it? Probably not. But Moshe tried to imagine what would happen on an airship carrying fire bombs, if one of those jars was burst by enemy fire. Even if the impact didn’t set the liquid afire, you’d still have the gondola floor awash in the hideous stuff, with an open flame no farther away than the steam engine.
Which, yes, you could shut off. And then what? Be adrift and completely helpless before the wind.
“We need to armor these things better,” he grunted, as they heaved another jar over the side.
“We’re starting to drift,” was Mordechai’s only response.
* * *
.They didn’t drift much, though—not at all, so far as the Austrian soldiers two hundred and fifty yards below them could tell. They’d fired two volleys at the airship, but at that height only half a dozen balls had struck anything—all but one, the envelope—and none of them had done any damage.
The height from which they were being dropped meant that the bombs weren’t hitting all that accurately, either. At least a third of them missed the bastion entirely. But enough of them fell to complete the demoralization of the troops manning that part of Vienna’s fortifications, and they began to run also. Within less than a minute, all of them were routed off the bastion.
* * *
Murad’s telescope was so large that it needed a tripod to hold it steady. But the sultan didn’t mind the cumbersome arrangement. Even at that distance, a bit more than a mile away, he had an excellent view of what was happening on the walls of Vienna.
Both of the targeted bastions were now clear, and one of them was already being seized by his janissaries. The other, the one which had just been bombed by the returning airship, would be very soon.
He stooped a bit, in order to raise the angle of the telescope. It took him a few seconds to bring the airship into view. When he did, the inscription on the side of the envelope was quite visible, because he was looking at it from an angle.
He’d ordered the airships to be named after Ottoman victories. This one was the Chaldiran, in honor of the great triumph more than a century earlier over the Safavid heretics of Persia.
He stood up straight. “Have the crew of the Chaldiran brought before me after they land. Along with the crew of the Esztergom.” That had been the airship which had failed in its mission to bomb the bastion that the Chaldiran had just struck.
“Bring them here, My Sultan?” With a little nod of his head, the officer indicated the sultan’s headquarters tent.
Murad smiled, very broadly. “Certainly not!” He pointed to the city in the distance. “Have them brought to me in my new palace. What the Austrians used to call the Hofburg.”
* * *
When Leopold reached the Hofburg, all he found were some looters—three civilians who’d stayed behind to help in the defense of Vienna and who had apparently now decided to reward themselves with some of the palace’s valuables before escaping the city. All the other civilians Leopold had seen on his way here had been racing to get out of Vienna before the Turks got their hands on them.
As soon as the looters spotted Leopold, when he entered the palace, they fled. They looked almost comical doing so, the way they were weighted down with ungainly treasure. One of them was even carrying a table piled high with his gleanings. He wasn’t moving any faster than a man could walk.
“Idiots,” Leopold muttered. As slowly as they were moving, they probably wouldn’t make it out of the city before the Turks caught them. At which point they’d lose everything they’d stolen and probably their lives in the bargain.
But he had much more important concerns than a trio of looters. He raced up the stairs, heading for his sister’s chambers.
She wasn’t there—but from the look of her bed, she had been. And not so long ago, he thought.
He was sure Minnie and Judy were still with Cecilia Renata. They were not women who would abandon her in these circumstances.
So where had they gone? Were they trying to flee the city?
Possibly—but not probably, he thought. Not given his sister’s injury. Instead, he suspected they’d made for the safety of the cellars in the detached wing of the palace. He’d go search for them there.
If he did, though…
He hurried to the window and looked out. He couldn’t see the fortifications, but even at this distance he could hear the sounds of the Ottoman victory. The enemy would be pouring over the walls, except in those places where the flames from the fire bombs still hadn’t died down.
The worst of the sounds were the screams of wounded Austrian soldiers who hadn’t been able to escape and were now being butchered by the janissaries. But there weren’t very many of those. Mostly what he heard were the triumphant shouts of enemy soldiers.
They’d be at the Hofburg very soon. If he took the time to search the cellars looking for Cecilia Renata, he’d have to stay there even if he didn’t find her. There wouldn’t be time to escape from Vienna.
So be it. The cellars would make an excellent hiding place. And if he could…
He just had time, he thought. He ran out of the room and raced up the stairs to the next floor. Then, down a long hallway and around a corner and he found himself in the radio room.
The radio was still there, he was relieved to see. He gathered it up in his arms, after detaching wires which did… whatever they did. Leopold knew very little about how radios actually worked. But he’d have plenty of time to learn, he figured, since he’d be trapped in those cellars for weeks.
At least. Maybe months.
Some small treacherous part of his brain added in a whisper: maybe forever. But he paid it no attention.
He hurried back down the stairs and out into the courtyard. There, he paused for a few seconds, listening intently.
The Turks were getting close, he thought. But he still had time to make it into the cellars. Burdened by the radio—which was bulky and clumsy more than heavy—he wasn’t able to move faster than a sort of brisk half-shuffling trot. But he didn’t have all that far to go.
Still, he was relieved once he reached the detached wing. Again, he paused for a moment, this time not listening but looking around carefully, to make sure no one was watching him. He couldn’t afford to be seen entering—not even by other Austrians, who could be questioned if captured by the Turks. If the Ottomans ever suspected that there were hidden cellars here, they’d surely find them no matter how well disguised the entrance was.
But he saw no one. He turned and entered; then, hurried toward the stairs leading to the upper floors of the tower. The hidden entrance to the cellars was located one floor above, and two floors below the small chamber at the top of the tower with its four narrow windows.
He had to be careful, here. He couldn’t afford to leave any trace of his passage, and if he dropped anything he’d have to make sure—
“Leopold!”
Startled, he looked up and saw Judy Wendell at the next landing, peering down at him around a corner in the stairwell. She had a strained look on her face—and, he was a bit startled to see, a pistol in her hand.
Which was pointed at him. But she lowered it right away.
“Hurry!” she said. “Do you ne
ed help?”
He shook his head. “No, just make sure the door is open. It’s… cumbersome.”
The door was designed to be cumbersome, of course. It was very heavy, with stone facings that matched the stone work of the stairwell. The door opened outward, so that once it was closed there would be no way to smash it in—or even to realize a door was there—without smashing in a good portion of the stone wall. It was then held shut not only by several latches but by an ingenious arrangement of bolts and chains that allowed someone inside to tighten down the door to the point where it would be quite impossible to pry it open, or even to see that a door existed.
When he reached the door, Judy was holding it open. After he passed through, she came behind him and started to pull it shut.
“Not yet,” he said, starting down the staircase beyond. He was moving slowly and carefully, because he couldn’t see very well. “That’s the only light we have until we get some candles or lamps. There are a lot of them down here, you know. Is my sister with you?”
“Yes. Minnie’s taking care of her at the moment.”
“How is she?”
“She’s been better. But she’ll be all right, I think.” Judy was now following him down the staircase. Once they reached the floor of the cellar she pointed to the left. “They’re in that chamber. I’ll go back up and keep watch.”
As he neared the chamber, moving very slowly and feeling his way in the darkness, he could see a bit of light ahead. Minnie must have at least one candle burning.
She had two, as it turned out. And, like Judy, was waiting for him with a pistol in her hand—but not pointed at him, thankfully.
“I just wanted to be sure it was you,” she said, rising from her chair and returning the pistol to some hidden recess in her garments. He hadn’t realized she had one in her possession.
Cecilia Renata was lying on a narrow bed next to Minnie. She was asleep, he saw.
He looked around and spotted a sort of narrow table—more like a tall bench, perhaps—against one of the walls. He went there and, with a small sigh of relief, set the radio down.