Ring of Fire III(46)
* * *
She got there in a minute and half. Looking up, she saw that the first ship—they were huge, now, huge—had come right overhead.
This was so marvelous! For the first time since childhood, she started jumping up and down with glee, clapping her hands.
Then, frowned. Not worried yet, just puzzled. Why were they dropping things from the boats? They looked like jugs or some sort of pottery.
Understanding came, and she made a small moue of disgust. Thank God she’d gotten out of the village! It was going to stink in a few seconds.
She was a little sad, though. A little upset, too. She wouldn’t have thought that people who could do such a wondrous thing as fly through the air would be so petty and spiteful that they’d drop their chamberpots on their enemies.
Ursula couldn’t help but giggle, though—and then realized that might be the first time she’d done that in years, too.
Colonel Johann von Troiberz was in for a rude awakening. He was about to get shat upon by leviathans.
Chapter 16
Ursula was wrong. Colonel von Troiberz did not get a rude awakening.
He didn’t wake up at all. The tavern was one of the first buildings hit by the firebombs and it was hit by no fewer than four of them—two dropped by the Albatross, and one from each of the airships that followed in the bombing run. Within less than five minutes, the building was an inferno. Von Troiberz had been so drunk when he fell asleep that he died of smoke inhalation without ever regaining consciousness.
Most of the soldiers in that building died. Only five made it out alive, and two of them died immediately thereafter when the eaves of the tavern collapsed on them while they were still in the courtyard.
The very worst casualties were inflicted on the soldiers two buildings over. There were eleven of them crowded into that house. It had been the “party house,” where those soldiers went who were in the mood to carouse—and they’d started carousing before noon. Only one survived and he suffered horrible burns that left him badly scarred.
Within fifteen minutes, the entire village was on fire. Almost three dozen cavalrymen had been killed, twice that many injured—and the stables were burning too. Luckily for the horses, a sober and conscientious sergeant had raced about unlocking all the doors in time for most of the beasts to escape.
Having made their escape, though, the horses were in no mood to stay in the vicinity of the holocaust. They scattered across the countryside, leaving all but nine cavalrymen stranded on foot.
In January. In the Little Ice Age. As night was falling. Most of them without having had time to don heavy clothing. A number of them bootless. And with nowhere nearby to spend the night indoors that wasn’t smoldering.
Some of the men just wandered off, but most of them gathered together near the village when the fires began dying down. Their commanding officer was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the two captains who had been with them. Of the officers who’d been in the village, only three lieutenants were left.
After some discussion, they agreed that the best course of action was to join Colonel von Schnetter’s infantry. Insofar as they knew where that camp was located, a subject on which there was considerable dispute. The lieutenants, in particular, were quarrelsome men. In the end, three different parties went their separate ways.
One of the parties found the camp. Another eventually stumbled across a deserted village two miles away before any of them had died, although some wound up losing toes to frostbite.
The third party died of exposure. The last man went at three o’clock in the morning.
* * *
Watching this all unfold from above, Rita was aghast. She’d had no idea—never once imagined—that the bombing run would have such horrific success. She’d thought that most of the bombs would miss entirely, first of all. Some would hit the target, certainly, but few enough that by the time the fires really began spreading most of the men down there would have been able to escape.
She hadn’t even thought about the horses. Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood how deadly it could be for a man to be stranded in winter without a horse. But she’d come from the end of the twentieth. “Being stranded” meant running out of gas and hitching a ride with the next car to come by. In a rural area like Grantville, people would usually stop for you. Especially in winter.
What had thrown her off, again, had been watching too many newsreels. She’d seen documentary footage that depicted bombing runs from World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm. Planes moving hundreds of miles an hour when they dropped their bombs; the trajectory of those bombs themselves covering a great distance before they finally hit the ground.