trouble in svardovia 15

 sorry to be a little late, I overdid things in the garden rather, and I am paying for it 

Chapter 15

 

“We might have overcooked that,” said Dmitry.

“It didn’t touch the servants’ hall, and that’s all that matters,” said Sophie. “Look, the guards have run towards it.”

“The crew should be asleep,” said Karol.

They ran up the access ladder to the Gargantua  and the girls pulled it up, whilst Dmitri and Karol looked over the controls.

“It’s an engine on the principles of Herr Rudolf Diesel,” said Karol. “It’s a compression-ignition engine so it should work without trouble in any weather.”

“Well, very nice, but lecture me on your perversions later and get the ruddy thing going,” said Dmitry. “You don’t have to fondle it, only drive it.”

Karol turned a key in the dashboard and the engine roared into life.

“Like that?” he said.

“It’s a good start,” said Dmitry. “Girls, I believe the pods to each side are for the gunners; I know Sophie knows something about Nordenfelts, what about you, Svitelina?”

“If soldiers and sailors can learn how to use them, I’m sure I can,” said Svitelina.

“If it jams, stop firing,” said Dmitry. “Pull the cocking lever back to eject a dud, and if it works, good, if it doesn’t, you’re stopped until we have a workshop. Every third round should be tracer so you can see where you’re firing. If we have to.”

“We’ll find something to shoot up, just to get the practice,” said Sophie. “That’s a lot of engine; it takes up most of the vehicle. This control area is tiny.”

“It will take a lot of engine,” said Karol. “I think we’re supposed to operate one leg each.”

“It’ll be like three-legged races back in Winchester,” said Dmitry. “We count One-And-Two, like we did when we won twenty guineas off those senior boys.”

“Good times,” said Karol. “Fine, you go first as always.”

Sophie found a loudspeaker, and one which relayed the sounds from outside. Someone was shouting, “Look, the machine! It is moving!”

“Ach, you fool, Hansel, it is moving away from where it might be damaged with explosives, it must be the pilots in there, nobody else could drive it without practice.”

“… and TWO and one and TWO!” Karol and Dmitry were counting.[1]

It seemed to work very well.

“Polonaise to right wheel,” said Dmitry.

“Whistle a good dance tune for me,” said Karol. Dmitry complied.

The machine dipped alarmingly as the pair polonaised on a curve.

“Kick in the gate, or stomp on it?” asked Karol.

“See if it will stomp,” said Dmitry. “There’s something very satisfying in breaking things belonging to enemies. I had a great deal of fun throwing Victorina’s collection of Meissen figurines at her; ugly things, anyway.”

“Worth a small fortune, though,” sniggered Karol. “What had she done?”

“Trapped me in her bedroom and stole my clothes,” said Dmitry. “We were staying there and I got ‘accidentally’ wet. She arranged it, of course. I was naïve, then, and foolishly accepted the offer of a hot bath, and when I got out, my clothes were gone, and Victorina was naked on the bed. I tried to sidle out and she went on the offensive.”

Karol sniggered.

“I can just imagine you, dressed in an inadequate little towel, steaming gently, and seizing on the first thing to hand as she advanced, titties akimbo, with her too, too solid flesh.”

“Svetelina,” said Sophie, “They haven’t grown up from being schoolboys, have they?”

“Well, I knew Karol hadn’t,” giggled Svetelina.

“You love me youthful and insouciant,” said Dmitry.

Sophie giggled.

“Of course I do,” she said.

“ONE two, ONE two, STOMP stomp,” counted Dmitry. The gate dutifully buckled under the monstrous steel feet of the gargantua.  The boys were laughing and whooping.

“He’ll be hard pressed to call out anyone until the fire is under control,” said Svetelina. “It’s an inferno; you didn’t do that just with dynamite, did you?”

“We might have nipped down to the cellars and used most of his supply of schnapps,” said Sophie. “We doused everything we could, including the landing carpet.”

“Well, I must say, you know how to set a good diversion, my princess,” said Karol. “Svetka, my sweet, why are none of your schoolfriends as resourceful as Sophie?”

“No idea,” said Svetilina. “Go to England as ambassador and find another English girl with the winning of wars on the playing fields of… of Roedean.”

“I’ve played field hockey in an informal match against a ladies’ team; never again,” said Dmitry. “They’d scare Bismark’s crack troops.” [2]

“We played lacrosse, when I was at school in England,” said Sophie, demurely. “It’s not as gentle as field hockey.”

They all laughed.

The men had their rhythm now, without needing to count, and strode across the countryside, keeping to fields below the ridges where they could, so as not to be seen on the skyline, but avoiding the valley bottom where the railway ran for now, in case vigilant railway men saw their passing, and their route was analysed. It seemed to be going well. 

Until the engine started sputtering and coughing.

“Hell! It’s out of juice,” said Dmitri. “Squat the damn thing, or we won’t ever get out.”

“Right, girls, wedge your cameras for long shots, and take every angle from outside,” said Karol. “I’ll rely on the battery having enough charge to photograph the engine compartment. Dmitry, see if you can get the heat-ray off, even if we can’t take it with us, we can photograph it. Thank goodness there’s a moon.”

The young people sprang into action. Sophie concentrated on shots of the legs, and the arrangement of the external gearing, as Svetelina took photographs of front and rear, her camera propped up securely, as each photograph would take six or seven seconds in the less than ideal conditions. Dmitri found a tool kit and set to work dismantling the heat ray. 

“Karol! I can’t get it into elements less than six feet long, because I don’t know what is important, and what isn’t!” said Dmitry.

“We must take it back with us!” said Karol.  “Fate put it in our hands, we can’t just lose that advantage.”

“Well, all I can think of, is to pray for a miracle,” said Dmitry. He sounded a trifle frazzled.

“Dmitry, how far are we from the railway?” asked Sophie.

“About a mile,” said Dmitry.

“And from a village where the milk train stops?”

“Two, maybe three miles; but we can’t take the thing in the train. We’d be arrested immediately.”

“Not if two men were carrying the wife of one of them on a stretcher, to go to the hospital; she’s been in labour for hours and you were getting scared.”

“My bride is a miracle!” cried Dmitry.

“I can act that,” said Svetelina. “I am otherwise the lightest of us, I think.”

  “We need to stuff something up your skirt to look like pregnancy,” said Sophie.

“Karol, go and requisition a wine skin from some peasant,” said Dmitry. “Leave gold, but get me a sewn up dead goat with wine or oil in it, I don’t care which.  Something that will wobble properly but not give too much.”

Karol set off as if such instructions were quite normal.

“Does he know how to procure such a thing?” asked Sophie.

“Of course he does; he’s been my scrounger since we were at school,” said Dmitry. “I don’t have to tell Karol how to procure anything, I just tell him what I need and he gets it.  Cut some ribbons or tapes, my dear, you’ll be attaching the top end round Svetelina’s waist and the bottom end round the tops of her thighs and I can hardly help with that.”

“You had better make the stretcher, then; tape two alpenstocks together with medical tape and then use bandages or something to make a bed.”

“That, I can do,” said Dmitry. “It’ll take most of our medical kits.”

“Better that than needing them because we’ve been pinned down, and by the way, we should move away from here as soon as Karol returns,” said Sophie.

“Yes, and let us lurk in that spinney anyway,” said Dmitry.

The spinney was a small stand of trees on a hill between field and road, and Dmitry’s heart froze to hear the sounds of marching feet.

“I wish you will tell me what I am supposed to have done,” Karol’s voice complained, loudly. “I was going to pay for my provisions. I’m on a walking holiday.”

“Be silent!” snarled another voice. “You will have time to talk soon, and then you will beg to tell all you know, and where your women are, and you will be recognised as Major Ónodi, and you can tell us why you blew up the palace and stole the Gargantua.”

“My dear chap, I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Karol. “My name is not Ónodi; you have mistaken me for someone else.”

Dmitry had moved rapidly through the spinney to overlook the road, the girls with him, where Karol was being marched between two men, with four others in front of him, and two behind him.

“And who else would go for succour to the nearest dwelling from where the machine was left?” demanded the military voice, in scorn. “We were sent by telephone, as soon as the position of the machine was determined by radio-location.”

“That’s how they found us,” muttered Dmitry, grimly.

“I know nothing of any machine,” said Karol. His voice dropped in pitch as they marched away.

“He was warning us to leave,” said Dmitry. “And he was right, there will be soldiery all over the machine soon. If we bury the heat ray machine, and you girls go to the railway, and just take a train, I will go and see if I can rescue Karol. It’s possible they’ll buy his story, as he won’t be recognised as one of Ferdinand’s visitors, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

“We’ll bury it in leaves here, but we’re coming,” said Sophie. “You might need us, and it will do Svetelina no good to be worrying over her brother.”  She sniggered. “The ones at the front were just marching; if we could get ahead of them by slithering down the slope on the other side of this road, where it doubles back, going into the valley, we could jump the two at the back, and then the two with him, and Svetelina could draw Karol off the road, and we just lie low.”

“I like the measure of brutal simplicity,” said Dmitry. “It’ll be a massively crazy scramble, but I think we have time.” He was already throwing leaves over the stretcher on which the weapon lay, and the girls joined him. Then, the were running across the road and half-running, half slithering down the steep wooded slope to where the road snaked down from the hogsback they had been following. They reached the treeline as the marching soldiers came into view around the corner, and snaked forward towards the road, on their elbows.

“At least the inn is just around the next corner,” grumbled one of the front soldiers. “Marching up and down hill overnight isn’t my idea of fun. The idiot is one of those walkers, you’ll see, and the captain, made to look foolish.”

Dmitry grinned; that should make it easier if the ones at the front were heading firmly for an inn. Presumably here would be transport, since to call the snaking way up the hogsback a ‘road’ was to be unduly generous in its description.

   As the inn was not even in sight on this part of the track, they should have time.

Dmitry gave an owl hoot, and then they were moving, running on their toes behind the two soldiers at the back, who went down to brutally-applied pistol butts to the backs of their heads. Karol had started singing a gay tramping song to cover any noise.  He stamped his feet and kicked them up, displaying as he went to slap his shoe that his hands were bound.

Svetelina helped Sophie catch hers and ease him to the ground, and Dmitri ran forward. The captain went down, and Karol turned to smash his head into the face of the other. Dmitri hit him too, and the girls pulled the stunned men off the road, into the rank weeds that edged it whilst Karol continued his song.

The four at the front marched on, oblivious.  Karol yodelled happily.

Dmitry slapped his hands together loudly.

“Silence, you!” he said.

“Just trying to jolly you lot up,” said Karol.

Then they slid off the road and went back to join the women, who were trussing up the captain and his men efficiently and ruthlessly. Dmitri and Karol went back up the hill for the stretcher and its precious load, sliding it down as they returned, whilst the girls watched their prisoners.

Karol was sniggering.

“I’m just imagining the scene when they get to that inn in the village around the corner,  saluting and reporting in as the prisoner escort under Captain Von Furzarsh, or whatever his name is,” he said. “And some officer saying, ‘But where is this prisoner you were escorting, private?’ and then they turn round, and there I am not.”

“And there you had better me not in a hurry before they come back looking,” said Sophie. “Over the road and keep going down, which should bring us to the railway.”

“And the village they were taking me to,” said Karol.

“Which is the last place they will look for you, but you and Dmitri should take the trousers of two of our prisoners as the lederhosen are now out of place,” said Sophie.

They took the trousers and then moved off; they could dress elsewhere, but it was likely to become a little busy on this part of the road before long.

Once the Tyrolean hats and lederhosen were discarded, and the soldiers’ trousers were assumed, the men, at least, would pass for any male peasant.

“Quickly, onto the station, and into the ladies’ rest room,” said Sophie.

“But we cannot go in there, it says ‘women only,” said Karol.

“Of course it does! And will the Germanic mind consider disobeying?” said Sophie, impatiently.

“Good point,” said Dmitry.

 Here they might get their breaths and plan.

“We also need clothes,” said Sophie.

“There will be a room for luggage which is being sent ahead, or sent for, for people,” said Dmitry. “If we are to travel by rail, jackets and hats would be appropriate.”

“Yes, because we have no porter’s uniform,” said Sophie. “I think we need to transform one of you into an old man, with chalk in your hair and whiskers.”

“Cinders too, if we can, to grey it,” said Dmitry. “What are you thinking? An old man seeing his daughters to school and his valet?”

“Something along those lines,” said Sophie. “Svetelina and I will look, whilst you do artistry to your faces.”

“So long as I don’t have to be his wife; I’m partial to my whiskers and they are virginal and untouched,” said Karol. “Though, if it came to it, I’m more partial to my life.”

The girls slid out, and into the luggage room; and Sophie saw a familiar trunk with a label on it, ‘For attention of the Archduke.’

“Well, the long arm of coincidence,” she said. “That’s my school trunk! Zbignevosky must have had it sent for, to see what he could find out about me.”

 

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[1] It’s steampunk. If I knew how it worked I’d be writing to the patents office and making a mint.

[2] My brother’s opinion, he being a lifelong hockey player.