The Boy Who Wanted Wings

by James Conroyd Martin

  After several minutes, the chaplain called on God to bless the day with a victory for Christianity. Then, from atop Palasz—his bay stallion—and in view, King Jan Sobieski held aloft a cross and spoke in his loud, clear voice: “Let us ever fix our eyes upon this sign, and let us remember that by it we shall always conquer.” The words of the priest and king were abbreviated, Aleksy surmised, because playing in counterpoint from below were the repeating and shrilly reverberating shouts of “Allah! Allah! Allah!”

  “Go with God!” the priest cried in a final, full-throated voice.

  And then the men turned away and within a quarter of an hour the movement of horses and seventy thousand men began to flow down, slowly, relentlessly, and deadly—like lava from a volcano.

  His brother at his side, Roman directed Flash down the steep hillside, the brothers part of the first line behind the king. He knew the king’s orders and he bristled with contempt.

  Word came that at the northeast of the Kahlenberg ridge, the Duke of Lorraine and part of the Imperial Army had begun to descend, with Nussdorf, the village nearest the River Danube, the target of the left flank. Roman knew that the front line of these Austrians carried a white flag with a scarlet cross, a flag that must be visible to those awaiting relief on Vienna’s walls.

  Further inland, the center forces—Bavarian, Franconian, and Imperial—began negotiating the downgrade, pulling behind them their light guns, their sights on a wide swath of Ottoman-held redoubts.

  Both the left and the center Christian allies had shorter distances to travel and this was the source of Roman’s irritation. They would likely engage the enemy well before the arrival of the three armies of Polish forces on the right flank because the Poles were left with the most difficult of descents.

  According to the sun’s position in the eastern sky, Roman was gauging the time at 8:00 a.m. when Marek whispered something and directed Miracle to halt. It was not a difficult thing to do, for the lines were ragged because of the folding terrain. “Listen, Roman!” he hissed. Roman drew up Flash. Others were pausing, too, in the long, circuitous, and painstakingly hazardous descent.

  From the far left came the sounds of guns. Roman doubted that a Christian general gave the order to fire, conjecturing instead that the Ottomans must have staked out positions on the lower slopes and were initiating a series of skirmishes. Exclamations could be heard on the wind now, wind that carried the smoke from the guns and cries of “Allah! Allah! Allah!” The proximity and strength of the returning salvo of “Jezus, Maryja!” led him to believe both left and center forces were under fire.

  As they resumed their descent, Roman cried out, “Chrystus’s wounds!” He ignored a caution to be quiet from Marek, little caring whether the king would hear him and note his displeasure. “We’re not even close to the plain yet! Why should we be the last dog to the fight?”

  By mid-morning the sounds of the skirmishes had become louder and without respite. King Sobieski maneuvered Palasz to the front of his forces. He raised his hand and motioned his men forward.

  The front line of hussars moved in formation, the Halicki brothers among them. “Roman,” Marek began, “about Aleksy—”

  Roman’s head whipped around to his brother. “What about him?”

  “You’re not going to do anything to him, are you? Your threats—”

  “It’s Aleksy that poses the threat to our family, my brother.” He swiveled about in his saddle to see Ludwik and Aleksy, who were riding with the last line of cavalry. Aleksy was trying to balance his lance atop the little steppe pony. “What is it they say? People can only become a threat if you let them. I don’t intend to allow that to happen. He’ll not see Kraków again.”

  “But, Roman—”

  Roman raised his open hand to his brother, a signal for silence. “Look there, Marek!” They had come to a little shelf of land in the hills, hills that rolled and dropped, dropped and rolled. From here they could see the Grand Vizier’s Tatar forces and they seemed as numberless as the grasses, even more than the twenty thousand the king had estimated. And they were waiting just below. He heard Marek give out with a little gasp. “Those are Aleksy’s people, Marek—we’re not. It looks like they will provide our first contact. Ironic, isn’t it? I may have to do nothing to Aleksy. Do you think he—with his lack of battle skills—will survive against his fellow Tatars?”

  “He’s good with his bow.”

  “Damn his bow! He’s a filthy Mongol!—And when did you start defending the Tatar who brought dishonor on our house? First Father—and now you!”

  “And would it not be dishonorable for you to take matters into your own hands?”

  “I told you—his own Tatars will finish him off unless he’s coward enough to remove that sprig of hay you gave him and turn traitor. Has he placed it in his helmet?”

  “He has.—I hardly think—”

  “Dog’s blood! Don’t think, Marek, and have done with this subject!”

  The sounds of the skirmishes far to their left had become louder as the Christian allies clashed with the Ottoman Turks.

  “You’re brooding, Roman,” Marek said, his head turned toward the tumult of battle. “We are the most important part of the Holy League. We’ll have our chance.”

  Roman scowled at his brother. “We have reason to brood.”

  Aleksy looked down the steep mountainside at the camp peopled by thousands of Tatars. They wore caps and many were coated in sheepskins with the fleece sides worn out for summer, making them appear like great woolly beasts upon their steppe ponies. There were those with lances, sabres, war hammers, maces, muskets, and pistols. Unlike the majority of the Christian forces who had abandoned the bow, nearly everyone below—to a man—carried one. These were the recurve bows about which Aleksy had heard a great deal. The Tatars were positioned on the very part of the plain upon which the Polish forces would soon find themselves. His hand absentmindedly moved up to lightly touch the sprig of hay attached to his helmet, his protection from being misidentified as an enemy to the Christian soldiers.

  Earlier he had heard Roman and Marek complaining of the extra time it would take to descend this part of the Kahlenberg and that the Imperial forces, buttressed by Saxons, Bavarians, and Franconians, would make it to the plain long before the Polish. He felt the same sense of frustration. What if the Poles came too late to savor the victory? Or worse, what if they came too late and the cause was lost because of their tardiness?

  However, seeing the massive display of Tatars below brought him up short. These were men of his background, his ancestry. What a turn life had made for him seventeen years before when his family’s tribe had been decimated by Cossacks and he had been taken in by Polish Christians. His dying Tatar father had made that choice, but Aleksy himself had chosen to be baptized and to accept Catholicism, just as he had wholeheartedly accepted his new Polish identity. How could he know that one day he would face Tatars in war? He could see that they were making preparations for their defense now. Clearly, he would have to kill Tatars—or be killed by them. It was an unsettling thought. And that many of them relied on his weapon of choice—the bow—further clouded his emotions. He should be happy that one bowman against another could be a level playing field—but what of the difference between the bows? He had once asked Szymon if the recurve bow was superior to the European longbow.

  “Ah, boy,” the stable master had said, “the Mongols’ recurve bow is a clever one. It has tips that curve away from the archer when the bow is strung. The extra curve isn’t natural-like because of that backward bend, but it’s just that difference that gives the weapon a dash of extra speed, you hear? So—why didn’t I show you how to make one of those? It’s because the longbow has more stability. Its single bend is natural. It doesn’t have that extra bend that can sometimes cause just a little wobble and throw your shot off kilter. That’s why. Oh
, the Mongols are masters of the thing, but I’ll suffer a bit of speed to be more certain that my bow is stable and my shot flies true.”

  “You were right, Roman,” Marek said. “Word’s come down that the Lithuanians with their Lipka hussars still have not arrived. They are to miss the action.”

  Roman spat upon the ground. He recalled the swagger of the Lipka at the wedding reception. All the dark faces—like Aleksy’s. He grunted. “How many of them would have gone over to the Turks’ side?”

  “Some, I suspect,” Marek said.

  Roman looked to his left, where color and movement had drawn his eye. He caught Marek’s attention and pointed down at the plain. Ottoman cavalry reserves were being moved to the area surrounding the village of Türkenschanz, southwest of the Nussberg, known as “Wine Mountain,” and precisely in line with the descending center troops. A scarlet tent was being set up, and in front of it, the Standard of the Prophet. The Grand Vizier himself would rally and direct his men from there.

  “It could mean,” Marek said, “that they are unaware of us. What a blessing that would be. What do they call Sobieski—the ‘Lion of Poland’? We would come at his left flank from the rear.”

  “A lance in Kara Mustafa’s backside?” Roman laughed. He turned in his saddle now to view behind him the descending hussars with banners flying from the ends of their vertically-held, seventeen-foot lances, then the pancerny—the light cavalry with their bows and shorter, solid lances—then the infantry and twenty-eight cannons of three Polish armies as they moved over ground that sloped, flattened out, and sloped yet again, allowing for the flow of men to appear, disappear, and appear in a seemingly unceasing stream. “No, brother, look behind us. They’re not likely to miss this sight. To them it must look like the mountain has released endless currents of soldiers—and hussars into the bargain!”

  Marek turned about in his saddle. “Chrystus Almighty!” he cried. “Endless is right.”

  “Yes, but too slow. Just too damn slow.” Roman looked to the sky. “It’s an hour from noon and we’ve heard fighting for—what?—four hours? We can’t leave it all up to the Duke of Lorraine on the left, and to the center with his hodgepodge of princes, for God’s sake! And here we are picking our way through tangled brush and vines and watching for rocks and gullies and streams.” As he had at the Lubomirski wedding reception, Roman went on to question the king’s leadership abilities, pointing out that he was now a commander whose age and girth slowed his ability to lead on the battlefield. In years past, he had had extraordinarily good days—winning days—on the battlefield, but those days were behind him, Roman insisted.

  The descent continued under searing heat of high noon. Aleksy was soaked with perspiration as the Polish forces moved down from the heights on either side of the Alsbach, a tributary stream. He was finding out just how difficult it was to wear armor. He wondered how the hussars must be dealing with the heat, for over their armor they wore additional coverings of tiger and leopard hides, meant to both reflect their status and incite fear.

  At an hour past noon, the Sobieski forces were descending close to the village of Dornbach, and although they were not yet on the plain, the forest and hills were thinning, and they could see Hetman Jabłonowski’s column to their right and Hetman Sieniawski’s column to the left—and beyond that the Christian allied forces stretching the length of the Kahlenberg to the Danube. And as those forces became visible, so too did three Polish columns, hussars at the front, become visible to the other allies, who were no doubt buoyed by the appearance of the Poles and from whom a great round of cheers went up. All eyes went to the Vienna walls and ramparts now, for the cheers were being seconded by the survivors of the long siege, who waved banners from the tower of St. Stephen’s, their hopes for their salvation revived by the fluid might the great Kahlenberg ridge was releasing.

  The lances of the cavalry bore the pennants of the national colors so that when the black and gold pennants of the husaria appeared on the hilltops it became clear to the enemy that—against speculation—King Jan III Sobieski had indeed arrived.

  “Oh my God,” Ludwik said, half an hour later, his mouth open. “Look!”

  Aleksy looked to where his friend pointed. Below, in the Tatar camp, something was stirring among the twenty thousand. Men were mounting their horses, but—oddly—their tents were being struck, wagons were being made ready and camp followers and slaves organized. Even to novices, none of this fit a battle plan so that Aleksy and Ludwik were initially at a loss to understand. “Holy Chrystus!” Aleksy whispered, looking to Ludwik, whose mouth still gaped.

  The entire Sobieski force hesitated, too, in fascination at the sight. Murmurs ran through the columns of men. And then a strong voice from the front line shouted: “They’re leaving—the devil be hanged—the Tatars are leaving!” Aleksy recognized the voice as Roman’s. “The Tatars are not going to risk their lives against the hussars to save the hide of Mustafa!”

  A great cheer went up from the three Polish columns, but as the first wave of it died, the king’s voice could be heard. “No cheers!” he called. “No cheers! Let’s leave their tails where they are—between their legs. We don’t want to provoke them into staying.”

  “Is he joking?” Ludwik asked.

  “Not certain,” Aleksy said. “But I think he had a smile, ear to ear.”

  Only after the battle would it be learned that the Tatar leader, Khan Murad Giray, had gone to the Grand Vizier’s tent and berated his superior for not having taken his besieging army away from the mining operations in the tunnels and shored up the forces posed to fight the descending Christian forces. “I can tell you,” the Khan said, “that Sobieski leads them all. And do I need to tell you that in recent history Sobieski and his damn hussars have run their lances through us at every battle?” The Khan knew that his speaking so was insubordinate and that he was risking his own head.

  When Kara Mustafa assured him that the Tatar forces would repulse the Poles, the Khan left the tent shouting back that he had no intention of staying to test the matter. “Sobieski wins,” he shot back. “Sobieski always wins!”

  Thus, as the Poles resumed their slow, painstaking descent, they watched in awe as the train of twenty thousand Tatars left the battlefield and proceeded to march in a southeasterly direction—toward the River Vienna and a friendly Hungary. Aleksy gaped at the prisoners who were placed in tow, tied to the horses’ tails.

  Another hour passed and as the amazement of the Khan’s betrayal lessened, Polish leaders threaded their way through the ranks in an attempt to allay over-confidence, assuring the hussars, the cavalry, and the infantry that this would still be no easy win. The Turks still vastly outnumbered the Christian forces.

  The Polish forces painstakingly picked their way downward so that by mid-afternoon the shelf of the plain spread out before them. Roman took note that after the retreat of the Tatars, the Grand Vizier did shore up the forces that awaited the Poles with numberless Sipâhis and Janissaries.

  The Sipâhis were the most elite of the Ottoman cavalry and looked menacing. The richest and most highly placed among them were fully armored, as were some of their horses. They seemed lightly equipped with sabre, shield and pistols. The infantry—the Janissaries—provided the Sipâhi support and some of their muskets were reportedly of the latest design and deadly in accuracy. They were also armed with sabre and shield and a good many carried a bow case and the Mongolian recurve bow. Head gear was a mix of caps and turbans. Long coats or vests were worn over loosely draped pants which fit into boots or soft leather shoes with upturned toes. These were uniforms they wore, Roman assumed, but colors depended upon battalion and rank so that the field was a stationary rainbow, baited and waiting to go into a dancing prism of motion. Nearly everywhere, on both tents and staffs, flags and pennants featuring the Ottoman symbol of the crescent undulated in the hot breezes.

 
Contact with the enemy was now imminent.

  On a jutting shelf of land, King Sobieski wheeled his horse around, urging it to rear up in front of the first line of the husaria. The men drew up their mounts, silent as the skies, tense as stalking tigers. Roman could not explain it, but had to admit to himself that the king’s great girth somehow made him seem even more impressive upon his massive stallion.

  “Ten years ago next month,” the king called out, “some of you were with me at the Battle of Chocim. Remember the glory of that day! Do you hear me? Answer me—do you remember?”

  From his veterans came a great volley of affirmations.

  “I hear you, my men, my patriots! On that field we defeated the Turks in resounding fashion!”

  Great cheers went up all around.

  He waited for the cheers to die away. “I was your hetman then and you followed me with God-given courage!”

  Cheers again.

  “Today—here at Vienna, I am your King. The crown came through you and through the courage you showed at Chocim!” He paused, allowing for another round of cheers, loud enough to travel down the mountainside. “But today,” he continued, “you fight for a different king. You fight for the King of Kings and for all Christian Europe. You fight for the Chrystus! You must endure, you must summon your strength, you must win!”

  An eerie few seconds followed another round of cheers, and then came the drub of drums and the staccato thump and dull repetitive clang of metal weapons upon wooden shields.

  The king waited again. “For those of you young bloods who were still at the hems of your mothers’ dresses ten years ago, this is your chance, this is your time—your time for glory!”