CONRADS QUEST FOR RUBBER - Leo Frankowski

At about this time, the radio died for good. The wet, the funguses, and the insects did electronic components no good at all. With the old style spark-gap transmitters and coherer-type receivers, you could putter with the things and completely rebuild them when you had to, and in time it would work again, after a fashion. With these modern things, well, once a tube burned out, it was useless, and no amount of fiddling, hard work, or prayer did you any good at all. We were out of tubes, and everything else was rusting vigorously.

Other things on board were wearing out and rotting much faster than usual. I was finding mushrooms growing in my locker, and any food that was not sealed in a glass jar or one of the new metal cans was rotten. It was good that we had mostly stopped wearing clothes, because our supply of uniforms wouldn't have lasted out the season, let alone a whole year.

The wood that our boat was made out of was starting to rot, as well. It was brand-new, first-quality oak, most of it, and it was rotting! Before long I had three men navigating the boat, and eleven more working to keep it repaired!

With the four trading posts we had set up — with a lance of men at each — I had only two lances left on board. The plan was to go another gross miles upstream, map the river, and set up a fifth post if we found a suitable site. Then we would go back and visit the other posts. I hoped that at least one of them still had a working radio.

We rounded a bend in the huge river and found ourselves steaming across a huge lake. At least two other boats should have been ahead of us, but when we had a radio, neither of them had mentioned the lake to us. Still, they could not possibly have missed it.

Besides being very large, the lake had other peculiarities as well. There were trees growing right out of the water, and in some areas they grew so thick they blocked out the sun. The trees back home would drown if their roots were flooded, but there were thousands of kinds of strange trees in this forest, and most of them seemed to be healthy.

Jane could offer no advice, since her home was a gross miles away. Being a primitive, she was much like a peasant in never before having been far away from home. The lake was as new to her as it was to us.

We steamed on, keeping the north bank in sight in accordance with my instructions. We were surprised to find that some of the huge trees in their watery meadows had people living in them. I would have investigated further, but other problems surfaced.

Two men acquired painful infections in their privy members, with a white pus dripping out. I had never seen the like of it, and there was no mention of it in the medical manual. The salves we had were ineffective, and there was nothing for it but to wait and see if it went away.

The next day, eight of the sixteen people we had on board came down with a severe fever. Often delirious, they could do little but lie in their beds and either shiver or sweat profusely.

Again, none of our medications did these men any good, and their temperatures grew alarmingly high.

The day after, four more people were down with the fever. There were no longer enough of us to manage the boat, take care of the sick, and map the shoreline. When I felt myself getting light-headed, I had the boat tied up to one of the trees in the middle of the lake. There was nothing left that we could do but go to bed and see whether or not we would survive.

The fever came and went for many days. Most of the time, you were flat on your back, unable to move. Occasionally, you felt almost normal, for a while, and then you could get up and help out with those who were more badly off.

Only Jane stayed healthy, and I think that without her we all would have died.

I don't know how long we stayed tied to that tree. I lost all sense of time, and often there was no one awake enough to keep the logbook up to date. Jane by this time was speaking a mixture of Polish and Pidgin, but no one had even begun to teach her to read or write. As it was, she did yeoman service keeping us in water and food.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN MARCH 10, 1251, CONCERNING DATE UNKNOWN, 1250

AFTER I don't know how many weeks or months, I awoke feeling almost healthy and certainly hungry. I called out, but no one answered. The room was dark, more so than the lowered blinds could account for. The bed wasn't level. As I looked around in the gloom, it seemed the floor had an undulating quality about it, and that the walls were no longer straight.

Sure that I was still delirious, I closed my eyes again and slept.

When I awoke once more, the room was somewhat lighter, but all else was the same. The floor really was bumpy and bent, the screened walls were far from straight, and the ceiling sagged. There were strange forest sounds about me, and I was sure the boat was no longer afloat.

I went to remove the sheet that covered me, and for the first time noticed my hand. It looked ancient and wrinkled, and my fingernails were incredibly long, longer than they had ever been, longer even than those that some European highborn ladies cultivate to prove they never have to work.

I fumbled for my bayonet, on the nightstand, to trim my nails with. When I pulled it from the sheath, it was rusty. I dropped it, and it knocked a deep dent in the floor.

Had months gone by? Years?

I touched my face, my beard, and found it to be very long, longer than my fingers. Before I fell sick, I had been cleanshaven.

I called out again, and again, no one answered.

Was I truly alone? Could all the others be dead? Surely they would never abandon me!

With great effort, I sat up in the bed and twisted so my feet were on the floor. I marveled at how thin my thighs had become. I felt my chest, and could feel every rib under my fingers.

I stood, shaking, and slowly made my way to the kitchen, expecting to see the remains of bodies scattered around. It was not as bad as I feared. Most of the beds in the common room were gone. There were four beds left, and they showed signs of use.

The kitchen was untidy, the breakfast dishes unwashed, but the scraps on them were no more than a few hours old. There was cold food left in a pot. I found a spoon, sat down, and ate. I drank a canteen filled with water, and then stumbled to the door to relieve myself in the latrine at the stern. The forest came right up to the doorway. There was no sign of the lake that we steamed in on. The Magnificent Maude was sitting on the forest floor, her formerly straight lines all bent and slumped, and she was in the process of rotting away. Ants swarmed over the hull.

I fought my way through the thick bushes to the latrine, only to find vegetation growing up through the toilet seat. I ripped the leaves away and sat down.

None of this made any sense at all.

My ears hummed with bird sounds, insect sounds, and what might be the distant scream of a monkey. Then, in the far background, I heard what had to be the regular thumping of an axe. It was a man, swinging an axe. Some of my crew were still alive, they were out there somewhere, doing something important.

Exhausted, but greatly relieved, I went slowly back to my bed and fell asleep.

I awoke to find Tomaz standing above me. He was dirty, bearded, and except for a silver cross hanging around his neck, he was completely naked. He had lost a third of his body weight since I had seen him last, but despite everything, I could see that he was healthy, or at least getting that way.

"Are you feeling better, sir?"

I said that I thought so, and asked how long I had been away.

"We are not sure, sir. For a while there, there was no one mobile and sane enough to keep up the log. Several months, at least."

I asked how many of us were still alive.

He sat down on the edge of my bed.

"There are five of us left, sir. You, me, Jane, Gregor, and Antoni. The other eleven are dead. They weren't even buried properly. The two priests were the first to die, so none of them were given extreme unction. Jane was alone through the worst of it, and there wasn't anything she could do but throw the bodies overboard. That was before the water went away."

Seeing the quizzical expression on my face, he continued.

"We weren't sailing across a lake, sir. We were going over a flooded forest. In a few months, once the rains stopped, the water all drained away and the forest became dry land again. It was just as well, because by then the boat was sinking, just rotting away. Something in this land doesn't like our northern lumber. Even the handles on our knives and axes have had to be replaced. Some of the local timber is pretty good, though. Jane has been a big help, there, since the trees around here are a lot like those around her home."

I asked about the chopping I'd heard earlier.

"There is a fair-sized river about a mile from here. Jane is showing us how to make a dugout canoe, a boat of the sort her people use. You probably heard us working on that. We have been trying to spend half our time on it. The rest is needed to find food. Most of our stores rotted, of course. All the dried peas and beans, all the grains. Only the canned and bottled things are left, and not much of them. When she was taking care of us all alone, Jane didn't have much time to go hunting, and in her tribe, it's the men who do the gathering. Luckily, she knew enough about what to look for to show us what to do."

I said that he made it sound like she was in charge.

"I suppose she is, sir, in a way. She knows this country, and we don't. She hasn't been giving orders, exactly, but when she makes a suggestion, we usually follow it."

I said that despite all that, she was still an outsider, and we were regular army. I supposed that I would have to do something about our command structure.

"Sir, you are not going to do anything about anything, not for a week at least. That's how long it took each of the rest of us to get to the point of doing useful work. That's all you have to do for now. Get well. Once you are up on your feet, I will relinquish my command to you, but not until then."

I asked him if he had taken command.

"To the extent that five naked, starving people constitute a command, yes. I had to. I am senior lance leader, after all, and the only knight you have left. Until recently, you have been out of your head, when you weren't comatose. Just relax, sir. In a week, you'll likely be up and around."

Five days later I was able to hobble all the way down to the site where they were building the new boat. Jane had selected a huge tree as being suitable, and it had been chopped down. Although her methods called for burning it down, the men did it their way, but on later reflection they weren't sure which would have been faster. Certainly, burning would have been less work. The bark was removed, and with fire and axe they made the outside look like a double-ended boat.

Fires were started on the top of the log, while the outside of the boat was kept wet. By judicious burning and scraping, the thing was being hollowed out. Jane estimated that in two weeks they would be ready to leave.

It seemed to me they had built on a grander scale than necessary to carry five people. They said they planned to take all of the remaining trade goods with them, to trade with the other tribes along the way. Also, there had been six of us when they started the boat. Yashoo had died a week before I regained consciousness.

Moving the completed boat on rollers proved to be impossible without a block and tackle, and those aboard the Maude had all either rotted or been eaten by the ants. Again, the native way worked. We dug trenches under the boat and slid logs under it, which supported the thing as we dug a pit under the whole boat. Then we extended the pit into a canal all the way to the river. Water filled the canal, we dug out the supporting logs, and floated the boat out.

I found it remarkable that the native people had worked out whole technologies to get around their lack of a good cutting edge.

As we were loading the canoe with everything we would be taking with us, we came across the only item made of northern wood that had not rotted to uselessness. The whiskey barrel. It was completely sound, as were its contents. This was a pleasant surprise, for Lord Conrad had mentioned that a small amount of whiskey would purify water without the need to boil it. We toasted the old Maude, as well as our lost comrades, and then rolled the half-empty barrel down to the canoe.

We pushed off at dawn.

The dragons had always avoided us when we traveled in the Maude. I suppose that we frightened them. But they had seen a lot of native canoes, and they weren't afraid of smaller boats. We had to shoot dozens of them when they came too close, but dragons have a slow learning curve, and we had to thin them out everywhere we went. Their tails were good eating.

We made good progress downstream for the first few days, but there hadn't been any rain for some time, and the level of the water was dropping alarmingly. What had been a deep river became a sluggish creek. We often had to get out of the canoe and pull it through the shallow, muddy water. This was required more and more often as the long days wore on.

Eventually, we were reduced to unloading the boat in order to drag it farther. It soon became obvious that we would either have to stop our journey, until such time as the water level rose, or to abandon most of our weapons and supplies and try to make it back on foot with only what we could carry on our none too strong backs.

In this jungle, without our supplies, I did not think we could have survived a week.

On the other hand, finding enough food was no longer a problem. What little water was left in the river bottom was filled with fishes. Our food stocks were never very good, and while the fish were available, we set out to smoke as many of them as possible, for future use.

The water eventually got so low and the fish got so thick that you could just wade into the mud and grab them with your hands. We were doing that when Antoni started shaking uncontrollably and screaming. He had a fish in both of his hands and he couldn't let go of it! Gregor went to help him, and then suddenly Gregor couldn't let go of Antoni!

I'd seen something like that once when a man touched the wires on a big electrical generator. I knew that this couldn't be the same thing, but I didn't know what else to do. You can stop anything electrical by opening the circuit, so I got out my machete, which we all carried now in lieu of a sword, and chopped the fish in two.

Both men immediately fell into the muddy water. When I got to Antoni, I found that he wasn't breathing and didn't have a heartbeat. I dragged him to shore and administered CPR, while Tomaz went after Gregor.

Gregor's life signs were missing as well, and we worked on both men for almost half an hour. Eventually, Tomaz was successful with Gregor, and he lived. I failed to bring Antoni around.