Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Quest for Rubber Part 14

I said, could you tell me what is happening?

She said, "Yes."

I said, can you say anything besides "yes"?

She said, "Yes."

I gritted my teeth, and thought about it for a while. Something like this had happened to me a long time ago, when I'd tried to question Anna, the first Big Person. I said, please tell me what is happening; specifically, what is the cause of the alarm in the first place, and what does Lord Conrad plan to do in response to whatever it is that is happening?

And she said, "I thought you'd never ask! One of the airplanes that the Eagles fly was on its usual dawn patrol. It was this morning. It flies along the border between Poland and the Holy Roman Empire.

It goes from Szczecin to Eagles Nest. The pilot noticed some unusual activity. He went down to investigate. He saw an army. It had two thousand hors.e.m.e.n. It had four thousand foot soldiers. It was proceeding from the direction of the March of Brandenburg. It was heading toward the frontier castle town of Lubusz."

I asked if that was one of Lord Conrad's "snowflake" forts.

"The building program is proceeding north on the Odra. It hasn't gotten that far yet. Lubusz is a traditional stone-and-wood fortification. It's manned by the traditional n.o.bility. Lord Conrad thinks that this attack was intended as a preemptive strike by the Margrave of Brandenburg. He wants to gain the territory before we can properly fortify it. The enemy has already burned several peasant villages in their path. That was why the pilot noticed them in the first place. Lord Conrad has called up the thirty-six companies nearest to the invasion point. Those farthest away are being taken forward by the twenty-two riverboats available for service on the Odra. The first units should have already arrived at Lubusz. The balance will be there by tomorrow night. This company should arrive on scene by midnight. Noncombat-ants are being evacuated-"

I interrupted her, saying thank you, and that she was very informative. There was an amazing amount of stuff in this pretty little bottle, once you got the stopper out of it!

I asked her if she was new to Okoitz.

She said, "Yes." She was still smiling.

Not this again, I thought. But last time, when I said please, she answered in full. More than full. So I said, please tell me everything about your life before you got to Okoitz.

"You can't mean everything. I will tell you that I worked for Tom. I took care of his apartment. I kept it clean. I ordered supplies. I cooked for him and his guests. I did everything else that I was told. I served Lord Conrad for two weeks when he was there. I liked him. Lord Conrad wanted a certain book that Tom had. Tom didn't want to give it to him. I put the book into Lord Conrad's suitcase.

Tom was not happy with me. He had me retrained as a bodyguard. He sent me to Lord Conrad. I got there today."

This Tom must have been a remarkable man, a duke, at least, to have so many beautiful servants that he could give them away when they annoyed him!

I said that she seemed to be a very talented lady, and asked her to please tell me how the women dressed in Lord Tom's domains. Of course, what I was after was some hint as to why she seemed to think that riding off to war, naked and in the arms of a complete stranger, was an ordinary thing to do.

What I got was a quarter hour's worth of long descriptions told in short sentences, concerning a series of the most outlandish costumes I have ever heard of! It was only with great difficulty that I was finally able to interrupt her. I asked her to please tell me what she wore back there.

"Nothing."

I asked why she wore nothing when all the other ladies wore such diverse clothing. Please.

"Because I am not a lady. I am a wench."

So the n.o.bility wore clothing, but they forbade it to the commoners? And I had thought that our n.o.bility had too many privileges!

I said that now that she was with us, she could dress as she pleased.

"No. I cannot. Lord Conrad says that I must wear clothes to church, and also to other places."

I said that I should hope so! Of course she had to wear clothes to church!

"Why is that? What is church?"

I was totally flabbergasted. She didn't know what a church was? She had never even heard of religion? I had to ask her three or four times in different ways to make sure I understood her properly.

I mean, religion has always been so big a part of my life that I rarely even think about it. I am not even sure if I've mentioned it in my journals, any more than I have mentioned the fact that I was breathing. But this beautiful woman had never even heard of G.o.d! She didn't know who Jesus was!

I was shocked, and there was nothing for it but to spend the rest of the day and much of the evening talking about religion.

At first Maude was as surprised as I was. In all her life, she had never wondered at how the world got here, how we humans came to be, and what it was all for. It had never even occurred to her that these things should be wondered at. But once I explained the basics to her, she was absolutely fascinated!

After a few hours, we stopped at a clear stream to let the Big People drink and eat, and to have a quick bite ourselves. I was glad that I'd brought some field rations with me, because no one even suggested that anyone should cook some food. I found out that the riders with us were all members of the old n.o.bility, who would rather eat dried meat than demean themselves by cooking it.

I asked Maude if she was hungry, offering what I had; some dried fruit, dried meat, and hard biscuits.

"You eat this?" she said.

I said yes, when necessary, when there wasn't time to cook something better. "Then I must eat it also."

And eat it she did, chewing tough beef jerky as though it was a delicate pastry and she was famished. She quickly finished most of my three days' supply, slowing only when she noticed that I wasn't keeping up with her. Soon, between us, we emptied the pouch of everything but the money I'd left at the bottom. I'd had to explain what that was, because I feared that she might try to eat it, too. This was a very strange lady! Still, a man can put up with a lot if the girl is pretty enough.

She then drank my canteen dry, and when I refilled it from the stream, she was surprised that water was available there. When I asked, she said that she had never seen a stream before. I could now sympathize with Lord Conrad when I'd told him that I'd never seen a river.

Since I didn't know what to make of all of this, I said nothing, and once we were under way again, I renewed our discussion of religion.

I think that I quite outdid myself in my eloquence, for nothing so encourages a young man than to have an eager, beautiful young woman breathlessly listening to his every word. I did good work that day in the cause of Christ, for by day's end Maude was well on her way to becoming a good Christ ian.

And I did good work in my own cause as well, for by nightfall I was sure that she was as in love with me as I was with her.

By the time we got to Lubusz, at midnight, talking so long in the wind of our travel had made my voice quite hoa.r.s.e. We had made only two quick stops during the day, and seven hours in the saddle is a lot. My body ached. Having even a small lady on my lap as well as a large flag in my hand, well, they did not help.

Worse still, my armor had been designed for an infantryman, and not for riding on someone who looked like a horse. My b.u.t.tocks were covered with chain mail inside a canvas covering. This was not uncomfortable to occasionally sit down on, but after a long day in the saddle, I think that the individual rings had worked their way right into my privy members! Also, the thigh plates and knee caps were not made with a horse in mind, and had abraded vast areas of the only skin my mother had given me.

I was sore of body, but I really didn't mind, for I was in love.

I pitched a small dome tent next to Lord Conrad's great one, at his bidding, and went gratefully to my bed. The wiser heads, the captains and the lords, would be up for most of the night, conferring about the military situation, but young fellows like me had nothing to do but obey orders when the time came.

Maude stood behind Lord Conrad, to guard him, but from what little I heard through the walls of the tents, I think that perhaps her nakedness bothered some of the local officials. Lord Conrad bid her go to sleep. Having nowhere else to go, she came into my tent, and since it was too small for her to even stand up in, she lay down at my side.

I had stripped off my armor and gambezon, and when she laid a hand on my back, she said that my muscles were sore and tight. I had to admit that this was true, and she said that she had the cure for it.

I'd had my back rubbed before, but it was nothing like this! She started at my toes and fingertips, and worked her way upward and inward, carefully loosening every muscle, every tendon, every joint. Softly, she ma.s.saged back to life every square bit of skin on my entire body. She eliminated pains I had not even known I had, and replaced them with the most sensual of all glowing pleasures. I gloried in her golden touch.

I told her that I no longer had to wonder at what Heaven would be like, for now I knew!

I offered to return the favor on her body, but she said no. She had worked to relax me, and would not see her work wasted. I thought of suggest ing s.e.x, and thought that if I asked politely, she would oblige. But then I thought better of it. Best to put that off, for the time, for this was the woman I would marry.

Chapter Twenty

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski JANUARY 14,1250, CONCERNING JUNE 3, 1249.

THE BUGLES got us up at dawn. Maude and I went to ma.s.s, and I said the Army Oath with the other troops. Maude stood with us, listening but of course not joining in. We ate a quick breakfast, with little Maude again eating three times as much as I did, and I was barely in my armor when Lord Conrad came by.

"There isn't time to teach you how to operate a submachine gun, but you might as well take these,"

he said, handing me a pair of the six-shot pistols and holsters that his new company wore. "They use the same ammunition as that single shot of yours, and their action is simple enough. Just point it and pull the trigger. To load, they break open like your old gun. As for you, young lady, some of the natives have complained about your choice of costume, so tie this around your waist."

He handed Maude a strip of cloth that I recognized as part of the tablecloth in his tent. With poor grace, she took off her weapons belt and wrapped herself from waist to knees.

"This morning, we are going to conduct a raid on the Brandenburg vanguard. This company is a prototype for what the entire army will be like in ten years, and I need to know just how effective it is in actual combat. Josip, stay to my left no matter what happens. Your main job is to hold the Battle Flag high so that anyone who needs me can find me. After you've done that, try to stop anyone who is trying to kill me, or you, or Maude. Maude, your job is to stick close to us and stop anyone from the other army from hurting us. Got that, you two? Your function is to be defensive only! No stupid heroics allowed, and never leave my side!"

"Yes, sir, your grace."

"Good. Mount up."

While I saddled Margarete, Maude put her weapons belt back on. She carried a pistol like those I now wore, a long, thin sword with the handguard removed, a small dagger and two small throwing knives, all without hilts, and a small, one-handed shield of the sort called a buckler. I asked her why she didn't like handguards or hilts.

"They waste weight and s.p.a.ce," she said.

I asked if she wasn't afraid of getting her hand cut.

"No."

I gritted my teeth, said please, and asked why she would not get her hand cut by her opponent's blade.

"Because I will not put my hand where my enemy puts his weapon."

I asked if a similar theory was working with regard to her lack of any sort of armor.

"Yes."

I said nothing, since there wasn't anything I could do to change the matter, even if I managed to win the argument, which wasn't likely. With Maude again on my lap, we were at Lord Conrad's side long before the rest of the company was ready. We could have taken longer with breakfast.

We rode out, as before, with Lord Conrad and his humble flag bearer in the lead. During the night, thousands of army troops had come up and made camp surrounding the old castle town of Lubusz.

They cheered us on, but we rode out without them. Apparently, Lord Conrad's idea of a fair fight, or at least an amusing one, was to attack with odds of six thousand to three hundred-twenty to one-against us.

As before, a platoon soon pa.s.sed us to take up the point. A bit later one of our aircraft, a graceful machine with two engines, flew overhead and dropped a short spear with a long red ribbon attached. One of our troops broke ranks, retrieved it, and brought it to Lord Conrad. He unscrewed the head, removed a message, and read it. He nodded, put the paper in his pocket, and discarded the spear. We rode on.

In perhaps a quarter hour we heard gunfire up ahead of us, gunfire like I had never heard before.

The submachine guns fired at an incredibly fast rate, each one of them spewing out hundreds of bullets a minute!

We got to a rise where we could see what was going on up ahead, and Lord Conrad motioned for me to stop there with him. Then, somehow, Maude was no longer on my lap. She was standing on Silver's rump, behind Lord Conrad, and I had not seen her traverse the s.p.a.ce between the two points!

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 pa.s.s while they reloaded. Those men who pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 n.o.bility did, brightly polished and on the outside.

Everything in the center of the road was perforated and b.l.o.o.d.y. 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 any of 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 pa.s.sing 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.

"d.a.m.n!" 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 pa.s.sed 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.