CONRAD'S QUEST FOR RUBBER taocs-7

by Leo Frankowski

  Lord Conrad turned and looked up at her, apparently as surprised by her action as I was.

  "Are you going to be all right up there?" he asked.

  "Yes, your grace."

  He was about to object further, but then he just shook his head, lifted his binoculars, and looked back at the battle.

  I tried to put her strange actions out of my mind. My instincts told me to protect her, to keep her from all danger, and yet Maude seemed completely relaxed and totally confident. There wasn't anything I could do to change anything, so I didn't try.

  I looked at the battle going on up ahead. Or perhaps I should call it a slaughter. The enemy cavalry had been advancing up the road in a column two men wide, and our men had come at them, also two men wide.

  Our opponents had apparently dropped their lances to charge, but hadn't gotten very far, since our men pulled out their submachine guns and began spraying bullets at the Germans. I say spraying because I don't believe they could possibly have been aiming and shooting properly, not at a full gallop, with a submachine gun in each hand. I noticed that the Big People had the sense to drop their heads down low while this procedure was going on.

  The pair of warriors at the head of our column were perforce doing more shooting than the rest, and when their guns were emptied, they dropped off to the side of the road to let those behind them pass while they reloaded. Those men who passed them soon dropped out in turn, with the result that we quickly had a column of two charging at a gallop between rows of men who were reloading.

  When the balance of the first platoon, some forty-three men or so, had passed, the first pair took a position at the end of our column. It was a sort of continuously recycling action.

  When the two columns met, the front ranks of the enemy were dead, many times over, and our troops continued onward, on both sides of them, pushing the zone of slaughter ever backward, almost as fast as the incredibly swift Big People could run. Any fallen enemy who showed signs of life was soon shot again by the troops racing past him.

  The other platoons were catching up to the first, and they joined in on the recirculating battle.

  Lord Conrad motioned for us to reenter our column, near the end, and we went forward to get a closer view of what was happening. For the longest while it was just a matter of riding with the flag in my left hand and a pistol in my right, beside a long line of dead men and horses, none of them ours.

  I often glanced over at Maude, anxious for her safety, but she was standing on the rump of a galloping Big Person, looking as calm as if she were standing in line at the mess hall.

  The great majority of the fallen were wearing plate armor, of the sort the army sold to anyone who could afford it. They had worn it in the same fashion as our traditional Polish nobility did, brightly polished and on the outside.

  Everything in the center of the road was perforated and bloody. Everything toward the sides was trampled into blood pudding. Even the weapons and armor were so badly mangled that few of them would make good trophies to hang on a wall.

  Eventually, we ran out of dead men and dead horses. Now it was just dead men. We had come up on their infantry, pikers, most of them — just as I had once been — with the second most popular weapon being a huge, two-handed broadsword. They were still all on the road, still mostly in ranks of four.

  They hadn't tried to run away, but I think it was not due to any great courage on their part. I think what was happening to them was all too strange and had happened all too quickly for anyof them to react to it. Indeed, most of the swords I saw were still in their sheaths.

  The shooting was going on ahead of us throughout all of this, and troops who were reloading and waiting for their turn again lined the side of the road. When we were about twenty men from the front of the line, the shooting slowed, then almost stopped.

  Soon we were passing the baggage train, horse-drawn wagons, hundreds of them, with men, women, and even some children in the drivers' seats, or on top of the baggage. They were all holding their hands up high above their heads, wide-eyed and frightened, but still alive. I was glad to see that our men had the decency and good sense to spare the noncombatants.

  But riding past the prisoners without shooting meant that none of our men were stopping to reload, which had the unexpected effect of leaving behind live enemies — the only prisoners we had — completely unguarded!

  I was about to mention this to Lord Conrad when he noticed the problem himself.

  "Damn!" he shouted. "Nothing ever works out right the first time! Halt!" He stopped about fifty men to guard the baggage train, and had them shouting to those who passed by that living enemies had to be guarded. He sent the rest on to continue the destruction.

  Getting this sorted out put us at the back of the line again, and by the time we got to the front, some two dozen of our men were surrounding a very ornate carriage. We had captured the Margrave of Brandenburg, himself!

  Again Lord Conrad took charge, while most of our people, some one hundred men or so, went on to murder the enemy's rear guard. The remaining two hundred were doing guard duty back up the road.

  The margrave was a great, obese man who was dressed in a heavy blue and burgundy velvet doublet that I thought must be very warm for the weather, and indeed he was sweating profusely. Between his massive gold necklace and the gold on his belt and weapons, he might have been wearing as much wealth as the average soldier in our army did, or at least one who had fought against the Mongols.

  He'd had three ladies with him in his oversized carriage. They were all attractive young women, if overdressed, but none of them gave Maude the slightest competition.

  Maude, incidentally, was still standing on Silver's rump, still smiling, and still wearing nothing but a part of a tablecloth about her hips. She had ridden there, standing up, throughout the entire fight!

  As chance would have it, none of the troops guarding the margrave at the moment spoke any German, and neither did Lord Conrad. A call for someone bilingual in German went out, but the problem was soon solved by one of the men riding in a slightly less ornate carriage, just behind the first one.

  This rather pompous person introduced himself thusly:

  "I am the King of Heralds at Brandenburg, and I offer my considerable services in translating for you."

  "Thank you. Your 'considerable services' are needed. I am Duke Conrad of Mazovia, Sandomierz, and Little Poland, Hetman of the Christian Army. I take it that this man is the Margrave of Brandenburg, and that these other men are notables on his staff?" Lord Conrad said, without bothering get down from Silver, and with Maude's bare breasts bobbing above his head.

  "Quite so, your grace. May we offer you our parole and our promise of our good conduct, until such time as we can pay our ransoms?"

  "You may offer, but I will not accept. You men are all under arrest. The charges are rape, murder, arson, assault, battery, breaking and entering, robbery, disorderly conduct, and such other crimes as I may later think up. Komander Wladyclaw! Strip-search these men, and once they're naked, tie their hands behind their backs and march them, under strict guard, back to Lubusz for trial."

  While the herald was busily translating to the increasingly horrified margrave, Komander Wladyclaw said, "Yes, sir. What about these ladies, here?"

  "Put them with the other noncombatants. Tell all those people that we are going to let them live, providing they obey orders, and that we will release them after they have done their Christian duty to their own dead. Then put that whole crowd to work, cleaning up this mess. Have them strip and bury the dead men and horses along the side of the road."

  "Do you want the heads up on pikes, sir?"

  "What I want really doesn't matter here, I'm afraid. This army was Christian, and the Church would have a fit if we decapitated them all. But see to it that every grave has a big cross over it. That should have a sufficient psychological effect. Oh, and send a rider back to Lubusz with the news, and have them send up the infantry as soon as possible to
help out here. Send other riders with spare Big People to the villages that were burned by the Germans. Try to bring some witnesses to Lubusz."

  "Yes, sir. What would you think of putting the dead warhorses' heads up on pikes?"

  "An excellent suggestion, Komander. Act on it."

  "Thank you, sir. What if any of the Germans are still alive?"

  "Give them medical attention, by all means. What we want here is as many people as possible telling how just one of our companies ripped up an entire invading army," Lord Conrad said.

  By this time the herald and the margrave had finished being astounded at Lord Conrad's pronouncement, and the troops were carrying out their orders over loud protests in German.

  The herald said, "But Lord Conrad, this is madness! How can you accuse us of such crimes?"

  "While you were invading my country, your troops sacked and burned at least eleven villages. That's enough arson to get you all hanged. I don't have proof of the murders, rapes, and the rest of it just yet, but I'm sure that we'll have it by tomorrow."

  "But that was a simple act of war! Who cares about the damned peasants?"

  "I do."

  "But it was the soldiers who killed those peasants, not us!"

  "You ordered them to come here, so the responsibility is yours. If it makes you feel any better, we've already killed all of your soldiers."

  "But surely, Lord Conrad, when you consider the size of the ransom that the margrave could pay, well, he's one of the richest men in all of Christendom! Surely that can convince you of the folly of your path!"

  "I just had six thousand men butchered. Do you think that I did it for money? No, I don't want the margrave's money. I have plenty of my own. Actually, it's possible that I'm the richest man in Christendom."

  "But the emperor, Frederick the Great, will never stand for this!"

  "All Frederick can do is send in another army just like this one. If he does, it will meet the same fate. I don't think he is as much of a fool as the margrave is. Was."

  "But you can't go killing a margrave! It's unheard of!"

  "I can kill him, and I will. What's more, I want as many people as possible to hear about it. Your class of 'noblemen' seems to think that war is just an amusing game, a pleasant way to spend a summer. Well, it is not, not anymore. I need to communicate to people like you, in a meaningful way, the idea that murdering a lot of peaceful, innocent people wholesale, in war, is just as evil as killing them one at a time, in peacetime."

  "But it's always been done that way."

  "You just don't listen very good. It's not done that way anymore. But enough of this. It doesn't matter if you understand or not, because you are not the recipient of my message. You are part of the message itself. Guards, march these men away."

  "But you can't do this to me! I'm a herald!"

  "Bet?"

  I watched seven naked old men walk barefoot back along the length of their slaughtered army, thinking — I'm sure— that this couldn't possibly be happening to high and wonderful noblemen like them.

  Already, some of the people from the baggage train were stripping the dead, putting valuables, weapons, and clothing in separate piles. The dead were being laid out neatly by the side of the road. Chaplains from both armies were going down the rows, giving extreme unction. Behind them, men were digging graves.

  Komander Wladyclaw came over and reported in to Lord Conrad.

  "Your orders are being carried out, sir. I notice that some of the prisoners are stealing money and jewels from their own dead, sir."

  "Let them. When the job is all done, probably sometime tomorrow, I want you to strip-search all of the noncombatants. Then I want you to give each of them five days' food from the captured supply wagons, and march them to the border, naked. The idea is, I want them to have some very vivid memories of what happened here. I want them to tell everybody who sees them that attacking Poland and the rest of the Christian Federation is a bad idea. Stripping them naked will force them to explain themselves, as well as let us recover our booty."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

  WRITTEN JANUARY 15, 1250, CONCERNING JUNE 3, 1249

  THAT EVENING, when the last of the petty details had been handled, I was still in Lord Conrad's tent, because no one had thought to dismiss me. He was sitting on a camp chair, slumped over and looking very tired.

  I asked him if he knew that Maude could give a most refreshing back rub.

  "That is an excellent idea, Josip. A truly wonderful idea. Yes. Maude, would you please oblige me?"

  He was soon stretched out on his back on the carpet, enjoying Maude's calm ministrations. Maude had removed her skirt as soon as the last visitor had left, and I wondered at this strange preoccupation of hers. Still, it improved the view.

  "Sir Josip, tell me, what are your thoughts on this day's events? Was I too brutal?"

  Lord Conrad wanted my thoughts? I said that I was mostly impressed with the new armaments, especially those submachine guns. I had heard that in ten years' time every man in the army would be paired with a Big Person, and when that happened, we would be truly invincible. No one would dare to bother us.

  "It's actually more like five years from now, not ten," he said. When he saw my surprised expression, he continued, "Just now, there are almost five thousand Big People. Most of them are involved with civilian occupations. More than four thousand of them are used to carry the mails, throughout Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ruthenias. We have a school with a post office in almost every village in the Federation, and almost every one of them is visited by a Big Person five times a week. King Henryk has four dozen Big People for his entourage, so Prince Daniel, King Bella, and Tzar Ivan all have to have the same, or they pout.

  "Very few Big People are involved with the military. Too few, as it turns out, but I never thought that the margrave would pull a stunt like this. There are about two thousand new Big People coming on line in the next few months, and they will all go to the Wolves, or similar groups.

  "In a few years we'll be invincible, all right. That's what an army is really for, Josip. To be so big and so strong that it never has to hurt anyone. What happened today was an aberration. One noble fool, who didn't believe what people had told him about us, and was too proud to visit us peacefully, decided to attack us without warning. You see, I've often invited the margrave to visit us, to see what we've got, and he wouldn't do it. But I asked you about the brutality."

  I said that once the attack had started, I didn't see how he could possibly have called it off. And if we killed all of them, well, wasn't it their idea to kill all of us? Wasn't that why the Germans crossed our borders in the first place?

  "True. The attack went better than I expected. But I was referring to what I did later, to the margrave himself and his staff."

  I said that I was a commoner. My knighthood notwithstanding, I was still just a baker's son. It always troubled me that the rich and the powerful people in this world could do unpleasant things to the likes of me and not be held respon-sible for it. They were not punished for the crimes they committed, if they were committed on some peasant. I said that I was glad at what he did to those fat old men! And that I'd be even gladder when I saw them all hung up by their necks on the scaffold.

  I was just as glad when I found that our troops hadn't hurt those people on the baggage train. And I said I was gladder yet that he was going to let the noncombatants all go free, the next day. I said I would have done just the same things he had, if I had been in charge, and if I'd been smart enough to think fast on my feet, the way he always does.

  "Thank you. You've relieved my mind, a bit. So tell me, what will you be doing next, Josip?"

  I was surprised, and said that it was up to him, or maybe some assignment clerk somewhere. I guessed that I'd spend some time at the Explorer's School, and then go out with my lance to some strange new place or other.

  "Where would you like to go?" He closed his
eyes and smiled as Maude worked her magic on his body.

  I said that I didn't really know, but that when we were spending last winter near the Arctic Circle, my lance made itself — well, I couldn't call it a vow, but a promise. We wanted our next job to be somewhere where it was warm! And after that, we wanted it to be a place where a man could find a drink and a willing young lady on occasion!

  Lord Conrad laughed and rolled over so Maude could do his back. "Josip, you are truly the salt of the earth. But yes, there is just such an assignment in the offing. I don't know if you'll like the native brew, but I don't object to your bringing in your own supply, within reason, of course. I guarantee that the climate will be warm, maybe too warm, and while I can't make any promises about the quality of the ladies you'll find there, I will warrant that they do exist in quantity. And, as a bonus, none of them wear any more clothes than our lovely Maude, here."

  I said, "Then in the name of Sir Odon's lance, sir, we hereby volunteer for duty."

  "You'll get the assignment, especially since you all are very experienced with riverboats. I'm going to send Captain Odon up the biggest river in the world. Along with Knight Banner Josip, and certain others. But you'll hear more about it once all the plans are solidified. For now, well, I noticed that you were taking a certain interest in Maude, here."

  Maude continued at her work as though nothing had been said about her.

  I said that it was more than just that. I said that I loved her.

  Which, of course, is a hell of a thing to say right in front of a woman, when you haven't ever said it to her in private up till then. But it just sort of blurted itself out! And Maude still showed no reaction!

  "I thought so. You have all the symptoms. First off, I want to say that whatever the two of you want to do, it's fine by me. But. And it's a very big but. I want you both to go as slowly as possible on this. There is a lot that you both don't know about each other, and if you get your emotions too involved before your heads are properly in gear, you will cause each other a lot of agony. I'm going to get some of those things out in the open right now, hopefully, to save you both a lot of future confusion and pain."