General Turhan encountered the Dragon in the field three times that I am aware of. I have prepared a brief translation of the entries from his seventh diary corresponding to his first encounter with the Dragon. I regret being unable to preserve the original meter of his more poetic entries; General Turhan’s sudden death regrettably prevented him from pursuing a retirement hobby in verse.
—Your friend, A.Q.
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The news from north of the Istros is that the Vlach prince has died, and his brother returned to the kingdom, late from the Gothic court. As the distant and barbarous Gothic Empire bows to the priests in the old western Rome rather than to the House of God, it is sure that the new prince’s ears are well-poisoned against the Sultanate, and an expedition—or the threat of one—will surely be required to restore a proper tributary relationship.
As the news traveled upriver to reach us in Dunonia and generally moves faster downstream, I would not be surprised if it has already reached Orestias. In anticipation of future orders from Orestias, I have begun the rationing and conservation of coal—I have only three higher-grade mechs with doubled firebox boilers, but a deployment of our coal-fueled contingent could be a highly effective show of force. The Vlachs are poor and rarely fight with mech support, and the presence of a sufficiency of ours should decisively head off any thought of real action.
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It is an unusual day today. This morning, Ziva made a mess of the coffee as she was excited over her new protective amulet—it is a fine jeweled choker and looks fitting on her, yes, but like any woman, she could not stop chattering about it with my other servants. I was perversely pleased when she spilled the pot, for she chastened herself severely and was uncommonly well-behaved and attentive the rest of the morning.
Then, having been perversely pleased by a ruined pot of coffee, I was perversely vexed by the arrival of a courier bearing what was unequivocally good news. It has been an altogether backwards day.
The news was simple: The Vlach prince’s tribute arrived before the sultan sent a message to demand it—it seems he is a smart fellow and wishes to immediately resume his predecessor’s arrangement—but the sultan, in his wisdom, neglected to send me any direct news at all. And here I have irked the villagers and servants by putting away a third of the season’s coal supply. Of course, now that the sultan has bothered to send word, the winter weather is over.
I may as well retain the collected reserve fuel and powder against a future occasion, and whenever action takes place, I will doubtless be pleased by my foresight in bringing together my few skilled hammermen with a whole cadre of novices for powderless drills with pole-guns1 and bombards.
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Pleasantly bad news—having prepared supply for an expedition against the Vlachs to put their new prince in his place, I have been ordered to take advantage of his swiftly proffered vassalage by undertaking a joint expedition, traveling down the Istros, up the Alutus River, and through a pass into Avaria, with Vlad “The Dragon” (as he calls himself) supplying a cohort of his finest men for seasoning with battle.
This will provide the greater opportunity for glory; the sultan is always pleased to have cause to redecorate his map collection, and I will be pleased if I can earn enough glory to earn a more pleasant assignment than watching over the Istros in the northwestern corner of Rumelia. If the river were narrow enough to enforce a toll, my position would at least be lucrative, but as matters stand, this province is neither fruitful nor prestigious.
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There is nothing quite like sailing down the Istros—the current makes everything go by quickly. Oh, the blue Istros! I find myself wondering what kind of hospitality Prince Vlad will offer us—if he was so quick to offer tribute to the sultan, he is a canny man, and a canny man will know that a bey’s favor is worth a special gift of some kind. I look forward to meeting him.
***
Vlad may call himself the Dragon, but I think it better to say name him as the Snake. Flowery words and a single ship laden with tribute do not make for an obedient vassal; he is obliged to come forth to fight on behalf of the sultan, and not a single Vlach soldier has come to join us. I have spent three days waiting at the rendezvous point and he has sent nothing but messengers with excuses—and by now the Avars will have heard reports of my force waiting at the pass. My choices are to strike north on my own without his support and the Avars having gained three days of warning, or to turn on Jidava and bring the Snake to heel. It is insensible to leave a treacherous snake in my rear quarter, leaving only the latter choice as pragmatic, even if it is not what the sultan ordered.
The sultan will be displeased in either case, but if the Snake comes promptly to heel like the dog that he is, there could still be time in the campaign season to strike into Avaria and begin the process of seizing the central valley of the Sarmatians.
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Jidava’s walls were no bar to us; the people, having no real defense against a force with a mech vanguard, offered no resistance. They simply opened the gate and greeted us with fearful obeisance. The prince’s men retreated up into the hills north the day before we arrived. My scouts reported that his army was of disappointing size—less than thirty knights and less than a hundred men-at-arms in total. I have given leave to my officers to requisition freely from Jidava’s stores and people—it is nothing less than what the Snake Prince owes—and have sent the scouts ranging out after the trail of his men to make sure of their location.
We will march on the morrow.
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It falls upon me to reflect carefully now upon the events of the preceding three days, for I made sport of the first day of our pursuit and skipped my usual journaling, and the following days have been unfortunately hectic. However, while the facts are fresh in my mind, I must set them down and apologize to myself later for the shakiness of my script when I prepare a report for the sultan. I pray only that this is not the last thing I enter into this diary.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Our scouts found the prince’s men camped a distance that would have been a full day’s march on flat ground, within an old ruin, which they were actively improving as a defensive position and a shelter. Aware of the strain of a hilly hike, I paced ourselves for a day and a half of marching, but to ensure we did not alarm the Vlach cowards with the glow of a fire in the distance, I ordered no open fires at our camp, but for the mechs to be run idle through the night for cooking heat and warmth, sending dark smoke into the sky that would not be lit from below by flames. Our supply of coal was generous enough that I did not fret using coal power in place of wood fires.
Unless my orders were disobeyed without my knowledge, the only lights in camp were those inside the command tent, where I hosted several of my officers and discussed strategy by lamplight. The command tent had felted walls but a small hole in the top for ventilation, through which a little light might be visible from directly above.
First, there was a sudden strong gust of wind that rocked the command tent and a noise like a rippling sail, which faded rapidly. Then it grew a little louder, and the tent rocked a little bit from a weaker gust. The pair of newly impressed camp followers who had been tasked with serving drinks and snacks during our strategy session spoke in their local Vlach dialect in hushed tones with one another and then ran out of the tent together, a move that so surprised us that we did not pursue. It was a chilly night, they did not even have sandals on, and we were in the middle of an encamped army full of men who could be expected to take sharp notice of a pair of unclad maidens bouncing through the darkness—in a situation where runaways would be so easily caught, why would they choose to try to escape?
I had barely stood when suddenly, the right-hand side of the tent flushed with a dim orange light, as if the men outside had lit a great bonfire nearby. Screams split the night as I ran out of the tent. Ahead, I could see the flicker of a cluster of pale limbs moving away, the camp followers’ skin so pale as to practically glow against the dark of night as they dashed past wakeful soldiers whose attention was drawn elsewhere. To my right, a dozen tents were burning merrily, and I could see a few smaller fires on the ground. As I stared, one of the smaller fires stood up and staggered towards me, flapping its arms in panic as it screamed “Put me out!” in the Slavonic dialect common to many of the Rumelian troops I had recruited from within my province.
The noise like a rippling of a sail sounded again behind me, then it was directly above me while screaming pierced the night behind me. I looked up in time to watch the moon and stars come back into view, something large and dark passing overhead. Behind me, the command tent had collapsed and was on fire. Underneath the collapsed burning tent, I could hear a cacophony of voices, my three most trusted officers and my darling concubine Ziva trapped within.
“We are attacked from the air!” I cried out. “Get bows and loose when you can see it! Hammermen, fetch your pole-guns!” A pole-gun is usually braced at an angle. The idea that struck my mind then, I think rightly, was that a pole-gun would be, if anything, easier to fire at an angle near the vertical, even if it is not the task one usually drills into hammermen and pole-guns are not commonly used for hunting birds—at best, one uses a half-upright angle for maximum range. I should someday test this with experienced hammermen, perhaps looking to the top of a tree for a near-vertical practice target.
Unfortunately, that idea was the last thing in my mind through the end of the attack. As soon as I ordered hammermen and archers to respond, a blast of some kind knocked all sense out of my mind, replacing it with darkness that lifted only when I awoke on the chilly ground. I can only assume a powder barrel had gone up, or perhaps a powder cart. When I came to, it was fairly dark and quiet, my army having scattered and only the earliest pre-dawn gray illuminating my surroundings. A light rain was falling, the ground muddy and churned.
Underneath the remains of the command tent, two of my officers were charred beyond recognition; a third was only partially charred, and Ziva, protected partly by the magic of her amulet, seemed merely to have been cooked to death, her body only lightly browned and easily identified, which somehow seemed worse. She looked delectable even in death, but she was clearly and unequivocally dead. There were other dead and other survivors.
I had a light, mournful breakfast with the dawn. Another hour of searching after dawn had allowed us to scour the camp and take full stock of the damage. Perhaps one man in ten out of my army was dead; it was not easy to tell. Of the living, I had gathered together fewer than a tenth of my men and barely a dozen horses, the rest having scattered into the night in all directions. I still had my mechs with me, as they had survived the chaos of the nighttime fire attack, but for managing them I had only one adequately trained mage, two basic command rods, and a pair of well-born men who, like me, had the capacity to use a command rod as a focus wizard to compel the obedience of the bound elemental spirits that inhabited our mechs.
In principle, I could advance uphill. I would still have the advantage on the prince’s men if I were to meet them in an open field, and my mechs could counter whatever flimsy fortifications they had erected in the ruin they had hidden in. However, the night’s attack worried me more. The prince was no snake—he was a deadly viper, or perhaps a monstrous serpent. A wyrm? I fear he has chosen his own name correctly and is, in truth, a dragon. The locals have a legend that the prophet George slew a dragon with his spear—apocryphal or not, I am no George.
So, I found myself obliged to prudently retreat, sweet Ziva’s mortal remains wrapped in a rug and hung across the back of one horse. I loaded up several carts with coal and, past that, the most useful and easily salvaged bits of supply that I could find. The rest of the dead and the scattered supplies around the campsite had to be left behind. I hoped I could reassemble more of my army but feared I might not be able to.
It has turned out that much of my army fled downhill; along the way to the river and to the boats that would take us downstream to the Istros, I gathered perhaps another seventh part of my original army along the way to the river, adding up to one man in four out of the expeditionary force I had brought with me. I could—perhaps should—have waited to gather more, but the morale of the men was broken, and I do not know how to counter a flying attacker who brings fire by night.
If I survive this dreadful failure and the sultan’s displeasure, I shall make a study of this topic.
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1.Translator’s note: The term midfa is used now for arquebuses with striking hammers attached to the weapon right next to their phoenix stones, but it is clear that Turhan’s account refers to the older pole-guns that were in fashion before hook-guns (arquebuses), which required the use of separate striking hammers.