CONRADS QUEST FOR RUBBER - Leo Frankowski

Both Father Thomas and Sir Conrad praised our diligence. They should have praised our father.

As interesting as Sir Conrad was, his horse received even more attention, from us boys, at least.

Anna was a huge animal, even bigger than Count Lambert's favorite charger. But while Whitefoot was dangerous to be near, ever eager to nip off an ear or to crush a rib cage, Anna was the most gentle of creatures, provided that you treated her politely.

Well, she kicked Iwo's father when he whipped her to get her back into her stall after Anna left it to relieve herself outside. Anna was very clean in her habits, and never soiled her stall.

He did not hit her hard, and with most animals of that size you have to hit them just to get their attention. With Anna, on the other hand, all you had to do was ask her, and she was happy to do just about anything for you. And to be fair, she didn't kick the man very hard, for he lived and was able to go back to work in a few days.

Later, when we asked her about the incident, she said that she had objected to being sworn at as much as being struck, and that in any event, it wasn't polite to interrupt a lady while she was attending to private matters.

You see, we boys soon discovered that Anna could understand the language perfectly, and although of course she couldn't speak it, she would nod or shake her head to answer yes or no to any question asked her. It sometimes required a lot of questions to get the whole story out of her, but that was generally our fault and not hers.

She was as intelligent as any of us boys, and we considered her to be much smarter than most of the grown-ups around.

Also, like her owner, Anna seemed to positively like children. I think that much of it was because grown-ups think they are much too busy to bother taking the time a conversation with Anna necessarily took, assuming all the while that they were among the minority who believed what we told them about her. We children were delighted that someone as big as her would take the time to fully answer us.

And, perhaps, we really did have more spare time than the older people did.

We soon learned that she was a good friend to have. Whenever a grown-up was spanking a child, or even shouting at one in public, Anna would walk over and stare at the adult doing the spanking or shouting. She never made a sound or actually did anything. She just stood close by and stared at them, and that was generally enough. Having this huge animal stare at you was very intimidating, and any urge to chastise the less fortunate soon evaporated.

We boys speculated that if someone tried to do actual harm to one of the children of the town, Anna's response would have been more active and indeed deadly. Since no one in memory had ever been that evil, we were never able to confirm our suspicions.

Still, we were glad she was there.

Some of the peasants complained to Count Lambert about this habit of hers, saying it was unholy, but Lambert just laughed at them. He said that everything with eyes has to look at something, and that "something" is usually the last thing that moved. If being looked at troubled the peasants, the cause of it must be their own guilty consciences. He said that they were well-advised to seek out the priest and go to confession!

In all events, my parents were never forced to endure Anna's staring, since to my memory they never had to severely chastise any of their children, and in turn, none of us ever wanted to displease them.

Simply put, they were good parents, and we were good children. I think this made us unusual.

At the time, our cheerful obedience seemed quite ordinary to my brother and sisters and me, and I occasionally questioned other friends of mine as to why they wanted to get into the various sorts of mischief they always seemed to be involved with. They could never satisfactorily explain their motivations to me, nor, in truth, could I explain mine to them. To anger my father seemed as silly to me as eating dirt. I simply had no desire to do such a thing.

Strange to say, one of the boys in the town, Iwo, actually did just that, once. He went into the bailey, sat down on the ground, and proceeded to eat dirt for no obvious or conceivable reason. His father was angry and spanked him. On this occasion, Anna was tardy in going over to stare. She was as mystified as the rest of us.

But my story is not about Iwo, and he came to a bad end, anyway. A few years later he ran away, and somebody eventually said that he was hung in Gniezno, although they didn't know why.

Sir Conrad left in the spring with Anna and some girls. (A boy of seven generally has little interest in girls, except, perhaps, for occasional target practice.) He went to build the city of Three Walls on the land that Count Lambert had given him, and we were all sad to see both of them leave. They returned for a few days almost every month, and over the years, Anna saved many a boy from the beatings that most of them undoubtedly deserved.

A different kind of beating happened during the first Christmas after Sir Conrad left us. I remember it clearly with all of my childish impressions still attached.

The story circulated that Sir Conrad found a caravan bound for Constantinople that was owned and guarded by the Teutonic Knights of the Cross. He found a gross of pagan children that the Crossmen were planning to sell to Jews and Moslems, who must have been terrible people, we imagined, although we had never met one. We children understood that something bad would then happen to the young slaves, but no one would tell us exactly what that bad thing was.

Conrad beat up the Crossmen guarding the caravan and saved the children, because he was a hero. Then he took them back to his city, gave them to good families, taught them how to speak, and made them into good Christians, people said.

The Crossmen didn't like him doing all this, so they came to Okoitz, a thousand of them, and Sir Conrad came here, too, for a trial by combat. It seemed to me that everybody else in the world came as well, and all of them needed bread to eat, so we bakers hardly had time to sleep at all. Whenever I looked outside the bakery, which wasn't very often, all I could see was that everything was packed solid with people. My whole family had to sleep in the bakery, since Count Lambert had lent our house out to a bunch of other people we didn't even know.

There was a kind of festival going on then at Okoitz, not that I got to see much of it. But when the trial by combat between Sir Conrad and the bad guy happened, well, my father made sure we closed the bakery in time for all of us to go and see it.

Sir Conrad and Anna beat up the bad guy and chopped his head off. They chopped his horse's head off, too, because it was crippled.

Then a bunch of the other Crossmen went out to kill Sir Conrad, when that wasn't allowed, and God made a miracle happen! Golden arrows came down from the sky and killed every one of them in the heart! I was there and I saw it myself, and so did two bishops and the duke and everybody else.

They say that after that, nobody ever tried to bother Sir Conrad again. No Christians, anyway.

The town of Okoitz was constantly changing, all through my childhood. From the time we first got there, when our town was nothing at all except a clearing at the side of the road that went from the Vistula to the Odra, something was always being constructed.

My father's bakery was almost the first thing built, since people need to eat before anything else can happen. Then the outer wall was built, with the houses and stables each side by side against it, and the blockhouses at the four corners. Then the church and Lambert's castle went up, and most people seemed to be happy with the thought that the job was finally done.

That was when Sir Conrad arrived, and all the men of the town were soon out chopping down trees with which to build a huge windmill, the likes of which no one but Sir Conrad had ever seen. A big cloth factory went up, and a lot of girls came to work there, and then they made a second huge windmill, until everyone said that if they kept on building, there wouldn't be any room left in the town for the people!

But soon they started on Lambert's new castle, which when completed turned out to be three times bigger than the whole rest of the town, and much taller, besides, so they had to make it outside of the walls themselves. It was four years in the making, and long before it was done, my family and even the bakery was moved inside it.

All of this civic growth was good for my father's business. He was forced to take on apprentices and even journeymen from outside of our family to satisfy the needs of his growing number of customers.

When a second baker came to town with Count Lambert's permission, my father wasn't worried about the competition, but instead they immediately formed a guild in the manner of the big city guilds, to do proper charity work and see to it that there was employment and plenty for all.

With father now a guildmaster, our family prospered. My sisters began to receive substantial dowries when they were married. My brother and I soon realized that one day there would be a considerable inheritance for us and a respected place in the community. He liked the thought of all this, but I was of mixed mind about it.

Oh, I was pleased that my family prospered, but it was obvious that to do well, a baker had to stay in one place. All of my life, the interesting people I saw and occasionally was able to meet were those who traveled, who went to strange places and saw strange things. I heard magic, faraway names like Cracow and Paris and Sandomierz, and I wanted to see these mystical places. I yearned to go with those far travelers, to join with the caravans of merchants, soldiers, and priests who were always coming and going from our gates.

I wanted adventure.

And my father, whom I loved and wanted to obey, would not even discuss the matter. We were bakers, we always had been bakers, and we would always be bakers. Nothing more could be said.

Chapter Two

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN JANUARY 17, 1249, CONCERNING OCTOBER 10, 1240

IN THE fall of 1240, the call went out. It was time to prepare for war. Together with my brother and my father, and the last fifty-five other sound men from Okoitz, I made the day-long walk to Baron Conrad's Warrior's School, commonly known as Hell.

I had long wanted to make the trip. All of the other boys of my age from Okoitz had joined the army the year before, as soon as they turned fourteen. Their letters to me bragged about how they would be knighted by the time I got there and how I would have to serve under them, do their bidding, and polish their boots!

I had begged my father's permission to go with them when they were leaving, and my brother had been begging for two years, but while father had always been so generous with us in so many ways, on this subject he was absolutely unshakable.

We were a family of bakers, he said, not warriors. We fed people. We did not kill them. In time of war, if our country and our liege lord needed our help, we would of course go, but only when we were absolutely needed.

Ironically, my mother and sisters had been issued weapons and armor over two years before, and they trained for one day of every week to defend Okoitz when we men finally went out to face the enemy.

To me, it had seemed strange and unfitting that my youngest sister, only two years older than me, should be war-trained when I was not, or that my mother should wear a sword over her broad left shoulder when my father had none, but there it was.

My father was a man of peace, and in the family, he ruled. He had kept us at our normal work for as long as possible, but now Mother ran the bakery with the help of my sisters and a dozen other women, and we men walked away through the first snow of the year to answer the call.

We men were all in our oldest, shabbiest clothing, for we had been warned that we would be issued uniform clothes, and that anything we had with us would be thrown away. The women were dressed in their best to see us off, and the difference in clothing was somehow unsettling.

All of us, the men as well as the women, were soon crying at the shock of this first sundering of our family. My people had never before been parted for more than a few hours, and now we would be separated for months even if all went well.

If it didn't, we might never meet again.

Strangeness, the seeing of new things, the hearing of new sounds, the sampling of new smells, does odd things to one's sense of time. A day spent in the bakery, doing the same things I had done on countless other days, went by in a seeming moment. A year spent in mixing dough, baking it, and selling bread seemed to go by even faster.

That first day away from home — walking over a trail I had heard about all of my life but never seen, except for the few hundred yards of it visible from the gates of Okoitz — took forever.

Even years later I can remember with crystal clarity the shape of bare oak branches, the flecks of rust on the railroad tracks we walked beside, the squish of wet snow beneath my sodden birchbark shoes.

I can close my eyes and see the white clouds forming from my breath, smell the tang of fresh-cut pine trees, and feel the cold breeze against my back. Yet of my father's old bakery, where I had worked for years, I find I can remember very little.

An odd thing, memory.

A long walk has healing powers, I was convinced of it, even though I had never been out of sight of my hometown before. Not accustomed to hours of walking, I was sore and tired, yet I felt less lonely and depressed by the time we arrived at the Warrior's School.

A friendly guard at the gate directed us to the Induction Center, where they gave us a meal, warned us a bit about what to expect, and found us a place to sleep for the night. In the morning they had us line up and raise our right hands to the rising sun. They led us through the army oath:

"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the army. I will obey the Warrior's Code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight.

'The Warrior's Code:

"A Warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent. Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly. Obedient, Cheerful, and Efficient. Brave, Clean, and Deadly."

We were told that we would be repeating that oath every morning for the rest of our lives. My father said nothing, yet I could see a bit of doubt in his eyes.

I had heard all sorts of descriptions of the Warrior's School, but none of them prepared me for the unbelievable number of people we found there, or for the organized confusion that prevailed.

People in apparent authority were constantly shouting incomprehensible things at us, talking so quickly, in so many strange accents, about such unfamiliar things, that it seemed almost as though they spoke some foreign language. When they did say something simple, something we could understand, it was such a rare event that we did not at first react to it, and then the shouting got only louder and longer.