((OOC: Aww... warm fuzzy MrT. I'm inspired to write up my post for the day early.
))
I shall never, as long as I live, forget my final meeting with King Georg before he went off to the war.
He was smiling. At least, his teeth were showing and his lip was curled in an upwards direction. There was a light in his eyes that sparkled and danced as he talked. His skin was... well, not red, but he seemed to glow. I had the sense that this was a man whose entire life had been building to this purpose, and now that he had arrived he meant to enjoy it.
"Ivan... to you I entrust Lupinstadt. Keep it safe for me. I shall return." He clapped me on the shoulder affectionately. Peace is where your talents lie, and I was wrong to deny you that. But war? War is where I shine. Let me handle it."
I only grinned, hesitantly.
"The border reports some 150,000 Christian troops, all told, pouring across in various directions, from various countries. We have some 25,000 under arms. We're in trouble, Ivan, I won't deny you that." The king kept smiling, oddly.
"I do not care what you have to do to this grand old city, Ivan. Keep the reinforcements coming. Break up families, burn houses, threaten children if you must, but we must fight here. If you keep me supplied, I'll win this war."
I stared into this madman's eyes, and realized finally that my king had lost connection with reality. But I still said, "Yes, sire."
And thus, I became acting despot of Lupinstadt. It was, I must admit, a heady feeling to be in position to give unquestionable orders to all I saw. I only wished I had more control of the world outside the city walls. But there, I was limited to news despatches. Although countless histories will talk of the great Crusade, it probably is worthwhile to speak of what I learned from the despatches.
King Georg had an impeccable strategic and tactical mind, I must admit. He saw at once that the Crusaders were broken up into four factions. The Polish faction included themselves, Moldavia, and Lithuania. They fought to gain Ruthenia, Bujak, and a say in the fate of the Balkans. The Venetians led another, with the Pope and Bosnia licking their heels. They only got involved because of our expansion into Kosovo and Krain; they saw (correctly) that we were advancing to the Venetian homeland and the Adriatic coast, and fought for a buffer zone.
The third faction was Hungary's. The smallest and weakest, they signed onto the Crusade to, obviously, regain what was theirs. The last faction was also the biggest. The Austrian faction. They led themselves, the Bosnians, Bavaria, and the rest of the German principalities that joined. Theirs was perhaps the most morally pure motivation; I believe even now that they wanted to reclaim the land for Christendom and stamp us out.
Georg's genius, however, lay in realizing that the various factions were as often as not working at crosspurposes. The Hungarians and Venetians, for example, both desired Krain; the Poles, Bohemians, and Hungarians all wished to have the Carpathian foothills. And so forth. Georg decided at once to allow the border forts to try to hold back the tide of Christendom long enough on three fronts to decisively defeat them on a fourth. For his first foray, Georg targeted the Venetians, particularly their Bosnian allies. The Bosnians had been preparing this for a long time, I realized in retrospect; certainly several years. Their 30,000 man army contributed almost 1/5 of the strength of the Crusading armies. Georg took his entire 25,000 man army south into Serbia to meet them.
It seemed that the Bosnians had spent all their money on equipping a vast number of peasants with substandard armor and weaponry to cow towns into submission by sheer weight of numbers. When a professional army of peasants, tirelessly drilled by some German werewolves who had been drill instructors, charged at their center full bore, they disintegrated into full rout in a matter of hours. Only fifteen thousand Bosnians kept their head long enough to retreat into the disputed province of Kosovo, and besiege Nish. Obviously, the correct strategy would be to pursue the Bosnians until they broke entirely. But King Georg was rarely correct.
He fought his way through Hell and back with three simple words; Attack, attack, attack.
Instead of the defensive move; save Nish and destroy the Bosnian army, he went offensive and attacked Bosnia itself. The dispatches talked of Georg's bravery and talent at siegecraft- for all that, I think it was just dumb luck. Bosnia surrendered on July 2nd, 1452, giving up all claim to any sovereignty, their royal family, and so on. In what was for Georg a remarkable display of patience, he moved on the Bosnian army at Kosovo the next day. But what he did was so out of character, it amazes to this day. He, "persuaded", if I may, the Bosnian king to deliver a by all accounts stunning speech exhorting the Bosnian troops to defect to the werewolf army.
About two thirds of them did. The rest died tragically on the long, perilous, forested path back to Bosnia. Completely naturally, of course.
With his newfound strength, Georg moved on the 20,000 strong Venetian army that had been gathering in Dalmatia. Now fortified to 40,000 or so men, he placed his not reliable fresh Bosnian troops in the front. The slaughter was enormous, but in the end the Venetians were harried into a peninsula, trapped against the sheer cliffs leading down to the sea and the werewolf army.
Georg asked for surrender.
The Venetian commander replied, "Death first."
True to his word, Georg had to push the Venetians off that peninsula. No prisoners were taken. Thousands fell from the cliffs to break on the rocks below. The bloodletting had its desired effect though; the next day, the Venetians ended the war
status quo ante bellum, taking the Pope with him. But Georg had not seen the end of war.
All was not well in the north, however. A lightning Polish advance had taken Ruthenia, and the Lithuanians based in Jedisan had taken Bujak. Carpathia was under siege by Bohemia. The Austrians had taken the Hungarian territories of Presburg and Odenburg, while the Croats had almost taken Krain. In interim, several territories had mass peasant uprisings in support of the Christians. I dismissed them as an aberration at the time, but no... they were the harbingers of a far less pleasant future.
I had some 9,000 hastily conscripted infantry waiting for Georg in Lupinstadt. Not even I could call a horse regiment into being, though. It was enough; Georg blew through the area, picking his troops up, without so much as a thank you. I don't suppose I blame him.
The Polish campaign started with great promise. He captured and annexed Moldova in a few months. But when he went onwards into Poland, the errors accumulated. Poland was no Venice, to be subdued with a battle. Georg tried it, but again and again the bulk of the Poles slipped deeper into Poland, always beckoning Georg in deeper. And the daft bastard kept onward. Finally, he was caught in a trap by a Polish army five times his size, attacking from all sides in the desperately cold wastes north of Krakow.
Somehow, he escaped with his life and about 5,000 troops out of the 35,000 he started the Polish campaign with.
Retreating through Lupinstadt, he picked up another 4,000 troops I'd scrounged, and defeated a few ragtag peasant regiments in the center of the kingdom before moving west, to Austria. About this time I visited the lady Katerina again. I said outright that Georg would ruin the country, and that the people would support her now 8-year old son as king. She looked at me with mournful eyes and just told me to leave.
I will grant King Georg this; as mad and as idiotic as he was at politics, he fought like a man possessed. In the Austrian campaign he wheeled around the Austro-Transylvanian border, engaging and routing small units almost weekly, liberating villages. And, most noteworthily, drafting fresh troops from the liberated villages, which sometimes ceased to exist because of his conscription. After a year of this low-key struggle, something seemed to twist in Georg's mind. Some demonic little voice, whispering in his ear; "Go for the throat."
So Georg took his bedraggled army of 15,000 and besieged Vienna itself. Once there, he used the ten thousand infantry to seal off Vienna, while his five thousand cavalry roamed the rest of Austria, breaking up armies that were forming to attempt to relieve Vienna. Miraculously, Georg's mad plan worked, and in January of 1455, Vienna surrendered to King Georg. This was the height of Georg's prestige and military renown; I would hear, in later years, that the Austrian campaign had become required study in all the military training across Europe. Although the Holy Roman Emperor himself was not in Vienna (a fact which Georg went into a legendary frenzy of rage over), he dictated a peace to the entire Austrian block; the werewolves would recieve some 100,000 ducats in exchange for peace. Quickly, Hungary rushed to a white peace after learning of their patron's desertion.
After five years of warfare, the Christian crusade had all but foundered. All that remained in the field was the not inconsiderable might of the Poles and Lithuanians. Those two nations had gathered almost a hundred thousand troops between them for a final smashing blow into Transylvania to end the war. In front of Lupinstadt, King Georg dug in for the first defensive fight of his life with a paltry twenty thousand troops. All flags were furled in Lupinstadt. Nobody laughed, or cheered. Everyone went about their business grimly, as if already under siege.
Finally, the Poles came. For months waves of frenzied Polish troops hurled themselves against the fieldworks of Georg. But they never broke through. The Poles retreated to their forward base in Moldova to await reinforcements.
Unfortunately, we could not pursue. Now six years of warfare had gone by without respite, and the people were not happy with the taxes, the devastation, and the death. Every few weeks another area of the empire rose against King Georg, but we could not put them down for fear of abandoning Lupinstadt to the Poles. So they remained in revolt.
March 15, 1456. Another of those days I remember all too clearly. In the morning, disaster. The Turks had stabbed us in the back.
King Georg came back to the castle to hear the Ottoman ambassador speak, but seemed not to hear or believe. He didn't want it to be true, so for him, it couldn't be true. Simple. We recieved reports all through the midday of tens of thousands of Turks pouring over our completely undefended southern border.
In the afternoon, I went for my last visit to see the Lady Katerina. She'd been crying, I could tell, the entire morning. When I asked why, she showed me a letter; her husband had been commanding the garrison in Bucarest, and contact had been lost in the Turkish onrush.
"Your son, milady... he is twelve, now, isn't he?" I felt like a monster for asking this question at this time, at this place. But it had to be done.
She nodded.
"My lady... you have to agree, there's no more choice. The kingdom needs peace. Georg, however brilliant he is, can simply not countenance peace without victory. And, my lady, this is a war we cannot find victory in."
"Ivan... for the longest time, I could not understand you. You're human, but you serve a werewolf more fanatically than any." She rubbed her face, worn out emotionally. "But I think, now, that I realize what you're about, Ivan. You do not serve the king. You never have, and you never will. Don't interrupt."
I shut my mouth.
"You have it in your head that werewolves are innately better than humans. But you look around you and you see werewolves being stupid, being petty, being all the things you think are wrong with humanity. How, then, can you reconcile your thought with your senses?" She laughed mirthlessly. "Ivan, you serve some mythical perfect werewolf. One that's brilliant, handsome, noble, and always acts for the benefit of his people. Willem was probably the closest we'll come to that ideal, and you loved him like a brother."
She dabbed some at her eyes. "And so I will concur to Georg's removal as king and the installation of my son, with one condition. Because you do serve that impossibly perfect werewolf, it's safe... Until his majority, you, Ivan, and no other will rule the country as regent and teacher and guardian of my son."
I was shocked, unable even to argue.
"You cannot murder Georg, I know. Leave that to we imperfect and ignoble, Ivan. Promise me."
"I... I promise, my lady" What was I saying? In a daze, I left the room.
That evening, I was fetched to the throne room to dispose of the body of the lamented King Georg I, who had been stabbed several times with a silver dagger. I immediately sent out ambassadors to all attacking nations, effectively surrendering. Perhaps wary of our renowned talent at recovering from defeats and winning wars, we got off lightly. To Lithuania, the province of Bujak; to Poland, the province of Moldavia; to the Turks, 50,000 ducats. And the rebel peasants were made pleased by the end of war.
It never occurred to me to ask the new young king's name until I heard, at the coronation, "King Victor II". I suppose it was natural, or symbolic, or something else. I was named regent of the kingdom, and for five years I would rule the werewolf kingdom as a human, and bring up a werewolf. Not just educate, mind you. The war hadn't finished taking its toll.
Lady Katerina was discovered dead by her own hand after learning of her husbands death in Bucaresti before the peace. Found near her was a scrap of parchment with the words, "You promised." on them. Not even addressed to me, but still I knew.
I had, after all, promised.
