CONRADS QUEST FOR RUBBER - Leo Frankowski

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN JANUARY 24, 1249, CONCERNING MAY 2, 1241

SIR ODON would not hear of my resignation from the army, not then, anyway. He said we had a month's leave coming— with pay — and after I had spent the time thinking it over, he would listen to me then.

For now, he was signing me up for the last eight months of the Warrior's School, and that was that.

We left our war carts at Sandomierz for the battalion that was forming up there to protect the duchy and heard the news.

Count Conrad was now Duke Conrad, and furthermore, he was a duke three times over! He was Duke of Mazovia, Duke of Sandomierz, and Duke of Little Poland, the area around Cracow.

It seems that most of the noblemen of those duchies had been killed in battle, and most of their dependents had been slaughtered by the Mongols who had tricked their way into East Gate, where they were sheltering.

There wasn't anybody else left to rule half of Poland, so now it was Lord Conrad's, and therefore, the army's, we supposed.

The people of Sandomierz were well-disposed toward the men of the army, and we spent a week there before we headed southward again, for home.

We had a remarkable time. We had not received any of our pay yet, much less our share of the booty, but the lack of money didn't seem to matter. Everything seemed to be free to members of the victorious army, and from the first, we got uproariously drunk.

I had been drinking beer all of my life, of course, and I'd often been a bit tipsy, but this was my first experience with drinking so much that I couldn't dance upright, or crawl a straight line, or even see the same thing with both eyes!

It was my first experience with another thing as well, and pretty little Maria was a wonderful instructor.

It was the first time I had ever felt, in a loving way, the incredible softness of a woman's breast, or the unbelievably welcoming smoothness of her lower parts.

Sometimes, lying abed in the late morning, we fantasized about a wonderful life together. She was recently widowed, she was fairly wealthy, and she owned what had been a thriving tailor's shop.

The laws were such that a woman alone found it hard to run a business. She needed a husband, but she needed more than just an agreeable young man

She needed someone who could take over her property and manage it profitably, and I knew nothing about tailoring. I think that if my father had been a tailor, or if her dead husband had been a baker, I would have married Maria. We might have spent the rest of our days happy in Sandomierz, but such was not to be. After five delightful days together, the reality of our situations finally came home to us.

We parted the best of friends, and we have written each other ever since, although not often for she soon found a tailor from the first platoon of my own company who satisfied all of her needs.

She writes that they are still very happy.

I found the others of my lance just before they left without me, and we were lucky enough to get a ride back to East Gate on a riverboat, one of only three left on the Vistula. From there, the railroad mule carts from East Gate to Coaltown were operating again.

We went as far as Three Walls to collect our pay and a hefty advance on our share of the booty. They were handing out a thousand pence — three years' pay! — to any soldier who would sign for it. They still hadn't figured up how much we each had coming, since more loot was still trickling in.

While we were there, we stopped at a special army warehouse to select our share of souvenirs. I got a yak-tailed banner, two heavily decorated swords, and some jewelry that I planned to give to my mother and sisters. As things turned out, the fine young ladies of the cloth factory ended up with almost half of it.

Finally, I put my armor and weapons in storage, signed for two sets of class A uniforms, and caught a mule cart for Okoitz.

I had been writing my mother regularly, although for the last two months I hadn't been in one place long enough to have a return address. Without one, she couldn't write back to me, but at least they knew I was alive and well, and that I was coming home. Someday, the army would solve its problems with regard to the mail, but it hadn't done so yet.

My father and brother had been home for weeks, as were most of the other men from Okoitz. Things were almost back to normal, but they gave me a big welcome home party anyway. More men than I could remember came up to shake my hand, and I was kissed and hugged by hundreds of women, and some of them were pretty.

When all of this was added to more drinking, eating, and drinking than was prudent, or even sane, well, it was the afternoon of the next day before I finally had a chance to talk with my father and my brother.

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!

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.