Conrad's Quest for Rubber

by Leo Frankowski

  It seems that they were trained in a company near the northeast corner of the Warrior's School (my father never called it "Hell"), while the River Battalion was at the south­west corner. We were a mile and a half apart from one an­other, separated by what was actually, at the time, the biggest city in all of Christendom. It was little wonder that our paths had never crossed.

  The same was true at the Battle of Sandomierz, where we had all fought, but were stationed five miles apart.

  They were impressed by the fact that I had served in the River Battalion, for the stories about what we had done were told again and again throughout the rest of the army.

  For my part, I was eager to hear once more about what had happened at Cracow and at the Battle of Three Walls, where my father and brother fought, side by side, and had taken part in the annihilation of the second Mongol army. In truth, I en­vied my brother for being able to serve with his own father by his side, and I told him so.

  Late in the afternoon, my father suggested that I might want to take a few days off, to rest, before I resumed my job at the bakery.

  At that point I had to tell them about how the River Bat­talion was being sent through the rest of the course at the Warrior's School, and how I was signed up to start there in three weeks.

  My father's reaction was about what I had expected, or perhaps I should say, what I had feared. He became angry, and told me I was being a fool.

  "You have the right to leave the army, and that is exactly what you should do. It is what you will do!" He said, "Why should you want to go and spend eight more months in stupid training when the Mongols have been totally defeated. Training to kill who? After what has happened to all the Mongols, no­body will ever again dare to molest Poland!"

  I had to tell him I could not answer his questions, and that I wasn't really sure what I should do.

  He said, "If you are not sure, well then, I am! You should obey me, as a good boy should always obey his parents."

  He walked away then, which was just as well. I didn't want to confront him, but I didn't want to lie to him, either.

  My brother just told me to take some time and think it all over carefully. Together, we went over to the Pink Dragon Inn, got roaring drunk, and tipped the lovely waitresses there more than they were used to, since he had as much surplus cash as I did.

  Later, we found two willing girls from the cloth factory, and eventually spent the night with them in their room in the castle. In the arms of a lovely woman, I went to sleep that night thinking that being a baker at Okoitz might not be such a bad life after all.

  After spending two weeks working in the bakery, I was no longer sure. In truth, doing again and again the same dull things that I had done for most of my life, I was bored, bored almost to death.

  When I thought on the things I had done in the war, the friends I had known, and the things I had seen, there seemed to me to have been a certain ... greatness about them. It seemed that somehow the army and the war had lifted me up to a higher level of being. That I had, for a short while, been like one of the heroes they told about in the old fireside tales or even like one of the ancient pagan gods!

  When I thought of the friends I had made in those few months, I was amazed at the closeness I felt for them, and how much I truly missed them all, even Taurus's craziness and Kiejstut's sullen quietness.

  I stood there, my face and hair dusted with rye and wheat flour, my arms buried up to the elbows in sticky bread dough, trying to be polite to Mrs. Galinski, an annoying lady customer.

  Was this the way I wanted to spend the rest of my entire life? The only life God would ever give me?

  No.

  Better to live the full life for a year and have it end with my breast pierced through by a Mongol spear, than to have it slowly ground away to nothingness by the bitchy Mrs. Galinski!

  I would not be a baker. I would go to the Warrior's School and see where life would lead me.

  And perhaps my father would forgive me.

  I talked it over first with my brother. He said if this was truly my wish, then he would do everything in his power to smooth the way for me with the family, and especially with our father.

  He also said he was not being entirely altruistic in all of this, because it would probably mean that he would one day inherit the bakery alone, rather than having to share it with me.

  I said that if he stayed here, working in the bakery, then he would have earned his inheritance, and he should enjoy it with my blessings. Furthermore, if he ever needed help taking care of our parents once they got old, he should feel free to call on me to help out with the expenses. We shook hands on it, and I've never regretted the decision we made that night.

  I told my mother about our agreement, and I could see we had made her very sad. She left for a while and came back tearstained, but she said that if this was what I wanted to do, well, I was no longer a boy and must make up my own mind about what was right for me. She said she would miss me, but that I had her blessings. I could tell she dreaded breaking the news to my father as much as I did.

  Indeed, I dreaded telling him so much that every day for a week I kept putting it off. I procrastinated.

  I kept on procrastinating until the morning of the last day possible for my departure. Then I simply showed up at the bakery wearing my uniform.

  My father looked at me, shook his head, and walked away without speaking to me. I looked for him for hours, but I couldn't find him.

  I had to leave home without his blessing.

  Chapter Nine

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF JOSIP SOBIESKI

  WRITTEN JANUARY 25, 1249

  CONCERNING JUNE 4, 1241

  AS I suspected would happen, my entire lance showed up for the second part of our training, and Sir Odon didn't even say "I told you so" when I arrived at the last possible moment. We all looked at each other and smiled. Even Taurus smiled, the first time I ever saw such a thing. We all had the warm feeling that our family was together again.

  The course of study in Hell was much different from the one we'd gone through a few months before. Then, there had been very little in the way of classroom work. Everything we had learned was to teach us how to kill Mongols and how to stop them from killing us.

  Now things were different. Fully half of our waking hours were spent in the classroom. Many of the courses were on ex­pected subjects, that is to say, military in nature. How to plan an ambush, how to arrange for supplies, how to take care of and repair weapons, clothing, and armor.

  Some subjects were less concerned with immediate mili­tary operations, like military law and what constituted a legal order.

  I was surprised to find that there are some orders that are actually illegal to obey, such as an order to kill an unarmed and nonviolent noncombatant.

  If your commanding officer ordered you to do an illegal act, you were required to disobey, and if you were not actu­ally in combat with the enemy, you were required to arrest your own officer!

  You had to be deadly careful with that law, however, because if you invoked it, there would be a mandatory military court-martial that would be the end of someone's career, and quite possibly the end of somebody's life. Maybe yours, if you were wrong!

  Other courses included map reading and mapmaking, mathematics, the operation and repair of steam engines, the operation and repair of radios, the construction of roads and bridges, and other suchlike things. They weren't trying to make us masters of all of these arts, but to teach us enough to get started and to know which manual to get to teach you all the fine points when you needed them.

  But then there were a group of subjects I never thought would be important to a warrior. We took courses on both military courtesy and social courtesy. If you were invited to dine with the local baron, your manners had better not embarrass the Christian Army! We took courses in playing musical instruments and even in dancing, since a true warrior was expected to be as competent with the ladies as he was with the enemy!

&nb
sp; Of course, the other half of the day was spent doing physical things, and it was as demanding as it had been before.

  But even here, there were differences. For one thing, they finally issued us swords, and we spent at least an hour a day working out with them. The sword the army used was not the horseman's saber, but the long, straight infantryman's épée. It had very little in the way of a cutting edge and was pri­marily a thrusting weapon, but once you knew how to use it, you could even defeat a man in full armor. Once you were fast enough, and accurate enough, you could hit the cracks in his armor, his eyeslit, the places where one plate moved over another.

  It was worn, not at the belt, but over the left shoulder. A leather tube was fastened to the epaulet to protect the forte section of the blade, and a long, thin knife sheath at the right buttock covered the tip. It came out quickly enough, although it took a bit of squirming (or a friend) to resheathe it.

  Much time was spent studying unarmed combat, on the theory that a warrior was always a warrior, even if he was naked.

  That, and they finally taught me how to swim.

  Since there were many fewer people in Hell than there had been last winter, we ran the great obstacle course at least once a day. Last winter we were only able to get to it about once a week.

  Lastly, there was much more emphasis on religion than be­fore. If you didn't have a thorough grounding in Christianity before you went to Hell, you certainly got it there. This produced several problems for the men of my lance.

  For reasons that I don't understand, throughout our first training session and the war that followed it, we had never talked much about religion among ourselves. Lezek, Fritz, Zbigniew, and I were all Roman Catholics, we had always lived where everybody was a Roman Catholic, and none of us had a clear idea about how anybody else could possibly be anything different.

  We were surprised to discover that Taurus was a Greek Or­thodox Christian. He'd been going to church with the rest of us because there wasn't one of his faith available, and he fig­ured that it wouldn't do any harm.

  Kiejstut was the quiet Lithuanian who spoke so little that it was easy to forget that he was there. It turned out that he wasn't a Christian at all!

  He was some sort of pagan, and had been going to church with the rest of us because he was afraid of what we would do to him if we found out the truth! Once the truth came out, it took us, and the priest who was teaching the class, a long time to relieve him of his anxieties. It was only when I told him to relax, that we weren't going to eat him, that he finally did calm down.

  Secretly, I believe he really was worried about being eaten! That either his tribe or some of those around his people actually did eat human beings. Or maybe his tribal shaman, or whatever they had, had told him Christians ate people, I don't know.

  But when the priest asked him if he would like to take some extra study, and then be baptized a true Christian, he jumped at the chance.

  Long before the school was over, we all went to his christening.

  We learned one very sad piece of news in the fall of 1241. Captain Targ was missing and presumed dead.

  His parents had a farm west of Sacz, near the Dunajec River, and with Lord Conrad's blessings he and his brother, a platoon leader from another company, had borrowed a pair of conventional army horses and ridden east to visit them and see to their safety.

  And that was all we knew.

  They were never seen again. A lance sent out to look for them found nothing except the farm, which had been burned out by the Mongols, apparently in the early spring. There was no sign of Captain Targ's family, either.

  With both our captain and our platoon leader dead, my lance felt that it was orphaned.

  When most of the course was over, we all underwent an or­deal and a blessing. Sir Odon was included with us, since he had not yet performed this ceremony. After a day of prayer and fasting, with our souls in a State of Grace, we walked barefoot across a big bed of glowing coals. We were not harmed, being protected by God.

  The others were perhaps more impressed by this miracle than I was, but then they had not seen golden arrows come out of the sky to kill four Crossmen who would have harmed Lord Conrad.

  Then we did a night's vigil, praying on a hilltop outside the Warrior's School, and in the morning we looked down on the fog in the valley below. Each of us saw a halo, great rays, or horns of light, around the shadow of his own head, but not around the heads of the others. We had been individually blessed by God and were all knighted, and made Knights of the Order of the Radiant Warriors!

  The next day, we were issued the army's new full-dress red and white uniform. We were amazed at the amount of gold that one wore on it.

  There was a big, heavy medallion on the front of the peaked hat, and a band of solid gold below it. On the jacket there were golden tabs on the collar, huge gold epaulets on the shoulders, and solid gold buttons. Over it, one wore a belt with a solid gold buckle from which hung a fancy dress saber with a solid gold hilt and handle, and a matching dress dagger with matching gold trim..

  Pinned to the jacket there was a huge and glorious gold medal, as big as your hand, announcing that we were mem­bers of the Order of the Radiant Warriors, and two smaller gold medals, one for the Battle of the Vistula and one for the Battle of Sandomierz.

  Personally, I thought we should have been given a medal for the really tough job that we did, cleaning up the bodies east of the Vistula, but that didn't happen.

  We even had golden spurs, like the French knights are said to wear, although ours had a rowel at the back, rather than the cruel spike they used. Not that any of us had been on a horse even once during our entire time in the army.

  All told, we were to walk around with over eight pounds of gold hanging about our persons! I was relieved to discover that it was customary to wear this finery only at very special ceremonies and to otherwise leave our decorations locked up in the company vault.

  Of course, we all planned to wear it home, at least once, and on any occasion when it was desirable to impress the ladies.

  Once, I had told myself that the gold we got from the Mon­gols would only mean we would wear more jewelry, but somehow in the course of things, I had forgotten my own prediction!

  There was one major sour point in all of this, however. De­spite the fact that we had been knighted as part of our induc­tion into the Order of the Radiant Warriors, and despite the fact that we had golden spurs, as only knights wore in France, and despite the fact that we had completed a course of study that resulted in the knighting of everyone else who had taken it before us, despite all of this, we were still not officially knighted, not as far as the army was concerned.

  Sir Odon was still just a knight, not a knight-banner, as he had assumed he would be, and each of the rest of us was only a squire, at four pence a day, rather than a knight at eight.

  "They hang eight pounds of solid gold on each one of us and then they are too cheap to pay us another four pence a day?" Zbigniew said.

  We complained, but we didn't get very far, since every­body else was complaining about the same thing.

  "It's the new policy," the baron's executive officer said to an angry crowd of us. "The graduates before you were pro­moted to knight because they would be immediately each given a lance of men of their own to train. Back then the army had to expand very rapidly to be able to meet the Mongol threat. But until we finish the training of everybody who took the short course just before the war, we will not be adding very many new members to the army. It only stands to reason that promotion will be slower."

  Maybe it was reasonable to him, but it wasn't so to us. We locked away our new dress uniforms, put on our old class B uniforms, and went out and got roaring drunk.

  We had orders to report for duty at East Gate in two weeks. Sir Odon, Zbigniew, and Lezek elected to go home on their leave, but there wasn't time for Taurus, Fritz, and Kiejstut to do so. They had, however, heard wonderful things about the girls of Okoitz, and I sugge
sted they accompany me home.

  We rented two rooms at the newly enlarged Pink Dragon Inn for the four of us, and I left them in the taproom staring at the nearly naked waitresses while I visited my family.

  It was not a joyous homecoming.

  Most of my family was eager enough to see me, but my fa­ther would not say a word to me. He came in, stared at me for a moment, then turned around and walked out.

  It hurt.

  I visited twice more during my leave, but nothing changed. My mother, my sisters, and my brother all promised to try to talk to him, but none of it did any good.

  My friends had a marvelous time at Okoitz, and by joining them, I mostly had a good time, too. The ladies of the cloth factory seemed to think that being a Knight of the Order of Radiant Warriors certainly made one a true knight, and that anyway, any man who walked around wearing eight pounds of solid gold had to be worth spending some time with!

  We discovered also that music was almost as good an aphrodisiac as wealth, and our new-taught musical skills did us yeoman service in the cause of Eros.

  Since it was winter, the cloth workers dressed warmly enough at the factory, and they wore a long, heavy cloak to go between the castle, where they all lived, the factory, where they all worked, and the Pink Dragon Inn, where they all played.

  But all of the Pink Dragon Inns were kept very warm be­cause of the outfits their waitresses wore. Or rather, the out­fits they pretty much didn't wear, since it consisted of little beyond high-heeled shoes and a loincloth.

  As a result of the competition at the inn, the cloth workers usually wore only a very short skirt, with nothing above it. It was a lovely style, and well appreciated by all of us men.

  Suffice it to say that for two weeks not one of the four of us ever slept alone, and it looked for a while as if Fritz was going to get married, although that affair soon fell apart. We were all happy when we left for East Gate, and would have been happier still if our heads had not hurt so badly.