Lord Conrad’s Lady

by Leo Frankowski

  Chapter Fourteen

  Captainette Lubinska’s trial went on for five days. I managed to scrupulously avoid it, except when I was called in to testify as to exactly what orders she had been given. Baron Vladimir spoke at length in her behalf, but when the sorry affair was over, a jury of her peers, twelve captains and captainettes, found her guilty. According to the code of military justice that I myself had written, the punishment was death by hanging, and that’s exactly what Baron Pulaski sentenced her to, to be carried out first thing in the morning.

  My own rules required a speedy sentence, provided that the case could be reviewed in time, since to keep a condemned prisoner waiting for months or years, as is often the modem practice, seemed to be unnecessarily cruel to the criminal. Enough time for the condemned to say a good confession, go to mass, and spend a night in prayer was all that could be morally justified. Also, much of the reason for punishing someone is as an example to others, and if the thing drags out for years, people forget what the crime was all about. The hanging, when it finally happens, becomes a simple, needless murder by the state.

  Baron Vladimir came to see me that evening. He repeated all the arguments he had made before, and also said that much of the fault for the incident was mine, for I had put a weak and stupid peasant woman into a position that was too far above her.

  “My lord, if you loaded ten tons of iron onto the back of a mule and it collapsed, would you blame the animal? Would you kill it for having failed in its duty?”

  “We’re not talking about a dumb animal here, Vladimir. We’re talking about a human being!”

  “True, my lord, and I would not be arguing so strongly if it were only a dumb animal you were abusing, though I would still call your failings to your attention. You are my liege lord, and I am obligated to give you my best counsel, even and especially when you don’t like it! Furthermore, the difference between a dumb animal and a dumb peasant is less than you may think. We are knights, you and I. Our function is to protect the peasants, not to hang them for being peasants!”

  So that was the crux of the problem. Baron Vladimir was a traditional member of the old nobility, while I was a man born in the twentieth century. Vladimir was a good friend and a valuable subordinate, but his world outlook was very different from mine. And he hadn’t stopped explaining things to me yet.

  “We were put here by God to protect women, my lord, not to kill them for having feminine weaknesses! I say again that the fault is yours for putting her in the position that you did, for elevating her far above her station, and for trusting a woman to do a man’s job. You had men who were sound of mind but could not join us in the field. Baron Novacek, for one. He may not have hands, but he could have commanded East Gate and done a good job at it. Why you insisted on having all your women’s companies led by women is beyond me.”

  Why indeed? It had seemed good for morale, and it ensured that a man wouldn’t take advantage of a female subordinate, but the main reason was my twentieth-century belief in equality. If women were doing the defending, they should lead the defense as well. Now it seemed that I was equalizing the captainette right out of her life.

  I let Vladimir continue until he started repeating himself, then I said, “Baron, I don’t know what I’ll do about this mess yet, but whatever I do, it won’t be done lightly. Tell me, that courier who missed you in the dark near Sandomierz. What did you do to him?”

  “Him, my lord? Well, he was incompetent as a scout or messenger, so I could hardly leave him with a Big Person, but he had done his best within his limitations. I let him sleep while we recrossed the Vistula and then put him back down in the ranks as a pikeman. It doesn’t take much brains to do that job, simply courage, strength, and obedience, things that a peasant is often good at.”

  “But you didn’t punish him?”

  “Would I punish a fish because it couldn’t fly? Peasants are stupid! You can’t expect one to do a nobleman’s job.”

  “I see. To change the subject, what about you, Baron Vladimir? You’ve done a wonderful job these last six years with the army. Have you done any thinking about what your reward should be? About what you want to do now?”

  “Hmmm. I’ve had some thoughts, my lord, or perhaps I should call them dreams. I have saved much of my salary over the years, and I’ll get my share of the booty. I wonder, well, there is the castle you got from Count Lambert, the one Baron Stefan used to hold. You’ve never used it for much of anything. Would you consider selling it to me?”

  “No, but I’d give it to you if you wanted it. You’ve certainly earned it, and as you say, it’s just going to waste. Or better still, how about the new castle I built for Count Lambert at Okoitz? It’s a dozen times larger and comes stocked with a renewable supply of attractive young ladies. ”

  “A portion of me is tempted by Okoitz, my lord, but my better parts say that I’d be happier with my wife and family without the count’s fabulous harem. You see, what I want is to live in the old traditional way, with the wife and children that I haven’t seen enough of these past years. My oldest boy is eight years old now, and he has seen very little of his own father. I don’t want to live as Count Lambert did, and I certainly don’t want to live like you! Further, I think that there are a lot of the peasants on the lands that you’ve gotten that prefer the old ways as well. With your permission, I would gather together those peasants that would swear to me and take them from these mines and factories of yours.”

  “Permission granted, old friend. From my standpoint, you’ll be relieving me of some of my malcontents. The castle is yours, along with as much land as you can find men to farm it.”

  “And a bit more, some forest for a hunting preserve, my lord?”

  “Fine, so long as you don’t go and reintroduce wild boars and wolves on it. And the people you talk into joining you, well, don’t get too traditional on me. I’m going to insist that they have schools, stores, and modem fanning methods. ”

  “Of course, my lord. I never intended to throw out any of your improvements! It’s this business of changing jobs all the time, and promotions, and not knowing the grandsons of your grandfather’s friends that troubles me. I don’t know quite how to put it, but it’s as if things have gotten like a river that is running too wide and too shallow! I want to go along in a deep, old channel, where the human things go on as they always have and always will. Glass in the windows and flush toilets and good steel plows are fine things, and a man would be a fool to not use them, but it’s the human factors that I worry most about.”

  One of the failings of the communists was that they had a vision of the future that they thought was good, and they tried to make everybody conform to their ideas of goodness. To my own mind, well, it’s a big world and it takes all kinds of people to fill it. If some peasants prefer a life-style that I would find oppressive, well, as long as nobody is forcing anyone, I say let them do as they wish. I don’t need everybody on my bandwagon.

  “Then you shall have it as you want it, Baron. Just remember the ancient right of departure. Some of the children of the men who swear to you may not feel the same way as their fathers. But I’m not minded to lose your good services entirely. If you wish to live in a feudal manner, then you must do feudal duty to me. What I want you to do is to command the active reserve forces of our army. You see, this time we had warning about when the enemy would attack, but next time we might not be so lucky! Now, my plan is… ”

  We talked for hours about what the reserves should be, and when we parted, we were in agreement.

  At least about the army.

  As he left, Vladimir said, “Do you know yet what you are going to do about the captainette?”

  “No.”

  I left word that I must be up before dawn and sent notes to both Baron Pulaski and Baron Gregor that the execution must not take place without me. God forbid I should cause a woman’s death because I overslept.

  Then I tried to sort out the problem of Captainette Lubinska. I sent awa
y the servant girl I found in my bed, and I tossed and turned for half the night. On the one hand, Lubinska was legally guilty of abandoning her post during time of war, and that had started a chain of events that had ended in a terrible massacre.

  On the other hand, Vladimir was right. She had been put in a situation where she was in way over her head. But then, every person in the army had been thrown into deep water, including Vladimir and myself. A lot of people had died because they were too weak or too stupid to perform the task before them. A lot of people had died because they had a problem that nobody, no matter how strong or brilliant, could possibly have solved. I saw one boatman get squashed flat when a two-ton rock came down on him, and where was justice then? Nowhere, that’s where. But had he lived, he wouldn’t have had to stand trial for not stopping that rock.

  So why do we try anybody?

  It has often been argued that a person is the result of his heredity and his environment, that we are what we were made to be and therefore are not responsible for our failings.

  Well, if human beings are just things that were made, then it doesn’t matter if they are punished or not. It only matters whether they act as desired. If a pot was made badly, throw it out! It’s not the pot’s fault, but that doesn’t matter. The whole idea of guilt doesn’t come into it at all. Once you think about it, you have to conclude that people don’t matter at all unless you grant them a moral sense, unless you grant them a soul. Maybe that was the root cause of many of Stalin’s atrocities.

  I gave up trying to sleep. I put on some clothes and walked to the church. I sat down in a pew, but soon I was on my knees.

  Well, then. You can say that God made people and everything else. It’s all His problem! Let Him solve it! Why should we poor fallible mortals ever judge anybody? What right do we have to judge His work?

  Except that we all know that if nobody was ever punished for doing anything, crime would soon be so rampant that nobody would be safe. Many people would live by stealing, and people would be murdered every time somebody got angry. Life would hardly be worth living in such an environment. Like it or not, we sad, confused, and fumbling mortals have to do something about criminals. We have to do it for simple, practical reasons. We can’t blame it on God, and we can’t let Him do the punishing, since He waits until the sinner is dead before doing the job of judging him, and that’s a little late by human standards if we want to have a safe society.

  Good. This was getting me closer to the mark. Forget about the moral reasons for punishment. They rest on sandy ground. We have to punish wrongdoers in order to (A) stop them from hurting the rest of us again, that is to say, in group self-defense, and (B) as an educational mechanism to convince others that they should not imitate the wrong-doer.

  So. Were we going to hang Lubinska because she was likely to abandon her post again and get another 21,000 women and children killed? Of course not! Well, obviously, she should never be trusted with an important post again, but we wouldn’t have to kill her to accomplish that. Discharging her or busting her down to the lowest rank would be sufficient. Certainly she presented no further danger to society.

  So we must be killing her as a teaching aid. Well, would it be an effective teaching aid? By this time everybody knew how and why she had screwed up. Everyone realized now that to abandon a post can cause a great tragedy. Would one more death added to 21,000 make any difference? No. It would be insignificant.

  Then what were we gaining by hanging her? Were we providing ourselves with a sacrificial lamb to cleanse the guilt from our hands? A scapegoat? I never could go along with that strange bit of theology.

  Actually, you couldn’t blame the captainette for the deaths of all those people, not directly. The Mongols had killed them, and we had killed the Mongols. Case closed.

  The Mongols had been let in by Count Herman’s wife, and they had killed her for it. Again, case closed.

  The captainette had believed the wrong person as to who should be in charge at East Gate. She had believed her traditional boss instead of me. She had been given her command by me, and I had done it because Baroness Krystyana had recommended her.

  Night was fading into gray dawn when I finally knew what I had to do. Somehow I was immensely comforted by the certainty of it.

  There was quite a crowd in front of the outer wall when I got out there. The sun was about to peek over the horizon, a gallows had been built, and a lot of people were standing around it, including all of my barons who were at Three Walls. The Lubinska woman was near the scaffold, attended by a priest and two guards. I went to her and said quietly, “You’re not going to die this morning.” Stunned and unbelieving, she looked at me and said nothing.

  Baron Vladimir led us in our morning services, and a priest, not the one attending the captainette, said a very quick mass without a sermon. The people were expecting Captainette Lubinska to climb the scaffold, but she didn’t.

  I did.

  Chapter Fifteen

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF COUNTESS FRANCINE

  The job of writing the articles for the magazine was done in but two days, and work had already begun on the casting of the drums of type to print it. But then the time seemed to drag, for there was much work to be done in the casting of type and the printing of the half gross of pages that the magazine would contain, and none of it could be done by me.

  It would be a plain magazine, for there was no time to carve the woodcuts that usually adorned its pages, except for a few old commercial messages that were used to fill otherwise blank space. Since there was no time to contact the merchants and obtain payment from them, you may be assured that all the “ads” that we used were from my husband’s factories.

  Indeed, it seemed for a time that the cover, too, would be blank, until a friar named Roman came down from the cathedral and painted three lithographic blocks for the purpose. He was a merry man, grown pudgy and red-nosed from drinking too much wine, but he was a fine artist for all of that. The cover he made had on the front a fine portrait of Count Conrad in his armor and with our battle flags flying behind him, and on the back a lively scene of our gunners shooting at the Mongol enemies over the heads of our footmen. Further, all this was done in inks of three colors, the first cover that had been done so. I think that some may have purchased the magazine only to have the fine artwork!

  I persuaded the abbot to give his men dispensation from the saying of their prayers eight times a day so that they might spend the time in work, and I made arrangements with the inn that they should be fed as they worked at the machines that Conrad had built for them. The monks were at first much taken aback by this, for the waitresses of the inn did their work, as always, nearly naked. Yet there were soon far more smiles on the monks than scowls, and I bade the waitresses to continue as they had. I was something of a heroine to these young ladies, for I had once been of their number and now was of the high nobility. I suppose that my success fed their dreams. Yet when they asked that I dress in their fashion and help serve, I must needs turn them down. My waist had grown too large with pregnancy, and anyway, Conrad would certainly not have approved! Still, I was tempted.

  The monks worked from before dawn straight through to the dark of night, but still, the job would be a week in the doing, and always I feared that Duke Henryk would arrive and take the whole thing into hand himself.

  I took myself to Wawel Castle and spent the day there talking to any that I could meet about the seym that was soon to be held in Sandomierz. All that I met, the old and the infirm, were enthusiastic for Conrad’s enlargement, yet there were very few of the nobility there. All too many were gone or dead.

  The city council came to me with the plea that Count Conrad should be their duke and protector, and we talked long as to how this could be accomplished. They then sent representatives to every incorporated city in eastern Poland to plead for our cause, and they did this at their own expense, as well! Not that I was in lack of funds, but when those tightfisted burghers had their own money invol
ved, you can be sure that they would give it their best effort!

  While I was thus employed, Sir Wladyclaw was also busy. The weather was now fair and the radios were at last working properly, so his men were no longer needed as messengers. Keeping only one at his side, he sent the others about the countryside in search for Mongols and, when time permitted, to tell the gentry of the victory won by Count Conrad and of the seym to be held at Sandomierz. They found no large groups of the enemy, and we were growing daily more certain that victory was truly ours, but more than once scouts brought back heads barbered in the strange Mongol fashion as proof of their prowess!

  I sent occasional messages to my husband, telling him that I was well and that I was helping to organize a meeting of the seyms of eastern Poland, since because of my association with the old duke, I knew so many of the people in this area. I never exactly told him that the feeling here was that he should be duke of all three duchies, for fear that he would decline the offer before it was even made to him. Bishop Ignacy was entirely too accurate in his estimation of my husband! When the time came, I wanted him to think that the nomination was entirely spontaneous and that it was his duty to accept it.

  Until the time was right, I wanted him to stay in Three Walls, doing his little engineering things!

  He should come to Sandomierz, I told him in the messages I sent, for he did have lands that he had purchased along the Vistula, and thus he was obligated to come, but to be there a little late would cause no harm, I said. My intent was that when he got there, the matter would be already settled. Once he was duke, he would find reasons of his own for remaining duke. I knew it as I knew him.

  When the print run was almost done, a scout brought back from the army camp west of Sandomierz a list of the Polish nobility that had survived the battle there. To publish a list of those who had died would have taken a book three times longer than our entire magazine, though we promised that such a magazine would be published in the future. For now, all that we could do was add eight pages with the names of the living. So few!