Catherine, Czarina of all the Africas (1st story)

Lord_Iggy said:

Heheh, Yu-Kahn. I'm honoured.

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Drake_Rlugia said:

The way your write makes it seem like an actual world, not just a game

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BuckyRea said:

Thanks. I'm a history teacher, so my brain just works out the story that way. I'm trying to capture why I love this game; it's fractile so that the closer you look at any single move the more details there are to discover in what it might represent.

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Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Eight: Bloody Faith

With Egyptian troops driving into Englandia from the west, Minister of War Prince Vodkapolya again pressed Lord Mikshagrad to press onto York. But Mudok of Mikshagrad was a cautious man and preferred drilling his troops, including the untested Cossack units, to avoid disaster. In frustration, the war minister went to the Prime Minister and demanded Mudok's head.

"Taking York should be easy, your excellency," he argued. "It's like sending Kolvitz to Newcastle." Altho militaristic in policy, both men were sorely lacking in actual combat experience--a trait that perhaps made their love of war understandable. In fact, the campaign to take Newcastle was a hard three year slog thru mud and snow and the success came in a heavy cost of blood and treasure. But having not seen the blood and having never known for a want of treasure, Prime Minister Kustik was all too ready to order a new campaign.

"We need more successes," he ordered his deputy, "Fire Mikshagrad and promote Kolvitz to Field Marshall. Send our knights and Cossacks into the steppes and let no man come back without glory or gore."

The mighty Iron Generation, now a decade older and hardened by war grabbed their lances and swords and blunderbusses and rode into the fury under their gallant new general. However the aging and ruthless Lord Bennyhill was ready for Kolvitz's foolhardy charge. Bennyhill's forces, altho outnumbered, took the high ground at Faith Hill and waited for the Russian charge. Kolvitz, less an advocate of the new Cossack units, had Lord Mikshagrad's best troops arrayed in the rear of his column to serve as defenders in case of a retreat. When the English knights routed Kolvitz's vanguard, the Cossack guard, with their superior firepower, saved the regiment from decimation, but the failure to place them up front cost the Russians a needed victory.



As Kolvitz rested beyond Faith Hill, Bennyhill readied a finishing blow, a full on charge on the Russian camp. But fortune favored the undeserving Russian army that afternoon. Egyptian knight armies under Lord Duwai Haphtu charged in from the west, meeting Bennyhill's knights and musketmen before they could finish off the Slavic army. Lord Haphtu's army took York the following month.



Despite the last minute rescue from the Gypsy golden knights, losses to the Russian army were devastating. The heaviest losses fell on the elite Slavic knight units--the ones whose ranks typically attracted the best of the young nobles of the Iron Generation. Kolvitz's army would go on to greater glories in the east, but the lessons of the Battle of Faith Hill lingered. The knights of old could not sustain warfare in the bloody 16th century. Many a young baron saw the best and bravest of his comrades slain that day and his bones left to bleach in the harsh English sun. New tactics were needed and a renewed attachment to use of the mounted Cossacks swept thru the Russian officer corps.

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Without Honor
by Mikhail Herskowitz

Chapter Ten: Endgame

In Moscow, the Duma railed against Prime Minister Kustik's interference in the conduct of the war. Sacking a popular general and replacing him with a "rust-shirt" leader like Kolvitz was the height of arrogance, the nadir of statesmanship, the opposition Corn Reform party leaders started to mumble. But before the Corn party could work up their whiggish nerves to challenge the Prime Minister's government, Minister of Law and Government Zalupo Krashkartski, Kustik's more capable lieutenant announced that an English spy ring had been discovered in Moscow. In a swift crack down, all suspected traitors and conspirators were rounded up and opposition newspapers shut down. When the emergency passed, Minister Krashkartski revealed that this time the nefarious Engli were plotting to poison the Russians' beloved yams and a second scheme to poison the empire's mango harvest was also afoot.

In this environment, no one felt right challenging the Prime Minister on his authority to safeguard the people, no matter how inept he sometimes seemed. The Corn party quieted down and no one stood up for Mudok the Elder of Mishkagrad when he lost his pension.

After the Egyptians took the old capital of London, Prince Vodkapolya ordered Kolvitz to push onto Hastings, where the young King Winston was now personally rallying the troops. The English had upgraded most of their defenders in the motherland to musketry, so Kolvitz wisely chose to send in Cossacks in force this time.



There they met with and attempted to coordinate with the Egyptian knights rushing from the north and the advanced Roman mounted muskets riding from the south. With his Cossacks and elite knights checked from taking the fortified city of Hastings outright by Winston's formidable defenses, General Kolvitz camped early and made the cold calculation to let the isolated and less numerous Roman and Egyptian allies exhaust themselves in assaults on Hastings first.



The gambit worked. After the Egyptians wiped out the strongest English defenders and both sides exhausted their limited gunpowder supplies, Kolvitz felt confident about sending in his refreshed Cossack units to capture Hastings and then push north past Roman occupied Warwick toward King Winston's "temporary" capital of Nottingham.



The English empire was wounded severely and her enemies were circling like whales about a sinking galley.* Kolvitz pushed north toward Nottingham and the endgame. He now placed full confidence in his Cossacks (one company led surprisingly by a 19 year old prince named Mudok the Younger of Mikshagrad).

"Kustik's Panthers" swiftly consumed the distance between occupied Warwick and fortified Nottland. Their speed was aided greatly by the decision of many Cossack officers to unburden themselves of the heavy armor of traditional Russian knights. With increasingly accurate and powerful firearms coming into circulation at this time, the more foresighted of the cavalrymen was that chestplates were only cumbersome, not useful, a vestige of the past when loyal Russians should be looking to the future.

Expecting a battle as hot as Faith Hill before them, the Cossacks were surprised to find Nottingham only barely defended, reeling in chaos, and the king dead at the hands of his own war council. In their darkest hours, the English apparently turned on one another, lacking the character of pulling together in times of struggle that is the hallmark of any great people. The city fell after a few brief scuffles with local resistors, the newly crowned monarch resigned, abdicated, and was put to death. Altho scattered splinter princedoms and resistance movements among the Engli would continue for two generations, the war against Englandia was over and the once great empire was no more.

A victorious and ebullient Russian nation celebrated their great victory and the people prepared to enter what many believed to be a coming Golden Age.



The year after the war ended, Prime Minister Kustik retired back to his ranch in Congorus, older but no wiser, and convinced he had done an honorable thing in prosecuting a war against weaker enemy. In the years since, we have come to learn that the plague that attacked Moscow in 1525 was not caused by poisoned apples--the entire claim was, as we southerners like to say, "a nag with no shoes."

The plague were carried by rodents and the germs that they carry. Traders were circling the globe for the first time and strange diseases were traveling toward unprepared populations with the cargoes they brought. We may never know for certain, but there are those of us who knew Count Kustik who will continue to believe he knew his accusation against Englandia was false. Yet Kustik remained a hero to many people--those who believed in the upward progress of the Russian nation and those who saw the sword as man's purest invention. But they were wrong. Honor is man's greatest invention, even if it was the one form of Russian progress that Dolboyob Kustik never believed in.

But he won a war. So he got a monument.

* It was commonly believed when Herskowitz wrote this in the 1580s that whales were vicious maneaters who would attack ships. A better anology today would be of sharks circling a prey, but medieval Russians knew little of such things.

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Unfortunately with me in Africa & India and Yu-Khan way on the other side of the world, I don't think we'll see much action over there. But then, I've only played up to about 1700ad so far. In your honor I'll see if I can't at some point send an armada over to your homeland in the next couple of centuries and slaughter thousands of innocent civilians in your province. I mean, what the hey, it's Easter, right?

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mrtn said:

Nice story, I like the names.

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