Conrad Starguard - The High-Tech Knight Part 13

Lambert couldn't read, but Sir Miesko promised to read my letter to him before explaining the other side of he story.

Sir Miesko said, "I've been thinking about this and I've had another look at those children. If somebody did that to my kids, well, they'd have to kill me first."

"Thinking about it, their fathers are all dead, aren't hey. Conrad, know that I'm behind you in this mess you've made."

He turned to his horse, but then turned back quickly.

"But don't expect too much! I've got my own family to think of!"

So Sir Miesko left for Okoitz, the children were sent with some trusted men to Three Walls and my original party resumed its journey to Sacz. By noon, we approached the turnoff to Vladimir's folks' place.

"I know I invited you all to my father's manor, but I wonder now if that would be wise at this time," Sir Vladimir said. "In another hour we could be at Oswiecim, and if we push on till dusk we should arrive at the monastery of Tyniec. I think the monastery might be best."

"Why a monastery?" I asked. "They'd have us sleep with the other men and the girls would be lonely."

"True. But the monastery gives us the protection of the Church, which might be needful. We still don't know, how the matter sits with Count Lambert, or what the Crossmen are going to do. Tyniec puts us beyond Lambert's territory and the Crossmen would never violate Church property."

"Never?"

"Of course not. After all, they are a religious order."

"A religious order? You call that bunch of murderers, who ma.s.sacre villages, enslave children, and trade with the Moslems a religious order?"

"It does seem odd, doesn't it? But they are sanctioned by the Pope and follow the Order of Saint Benedict, except for the fighting, of course, and the merchandising."

"Painting a wolf brown doesn't make it a cow. They're a bunch of d.a.m.n murderers even if they do wear crosses on their shirts."

"I still don't see why you don't want to visit your parents. We were all looking forward to it, especially Annastashia. Surely we'd be safe enough there," I said.

"Safe, yes, but the timing isn't fight. May I speak frankly? You know that I wish to persuade them to permit my marriage to Annastashia. I want them to be in a good mood when I broach the subject. But just now, I'm under something of a cloud."

"I don't understand that."

"Well, you see, my father is also my liege lord. He swore to keep the trail safe for merchants. By aiding you yesterday, I violated his oath. I dishonored him. He would be well within his fights to have me hanged! Oh, my mother would never let him do it, but he certainly won't be in any mood to grant favors. In fact, I think it best to avoid him entirely until this matter is settled and we are either proved innocent or are dead."

"If you don't want to visit relatives, fine, but the monastery is out. There must be an inn nearby."

"Not a clean one."

I'd been without fleas for months and I suppose the monastery would be an interesting experience for the girls.

As we rode into Cracow the next morning-, the guards at the gate stiffened up and saluted. The last time I was here, they had haggled with me and charged me a toll to get in. Obvious wealth and rank have their privileges.

The girls were thrilled. The big city at last! Hundreds of colorful things to see and do. Huge cathedrals, ma.s.sive stone castles on Wawel Hill, more shops than anything imaginable!

To me, well, take a few dozen historically interesting buildings, put them on a hill with a fine view and populate it with a few hundred gaudily dressed n.o.bles and you have all that was attractive to the eye.

Then surround this with a squalid town of ten thousand uneducated and underfed people and cover it all with a half yard of s.h.i.t and you have the reality of the situation, With plumbing, sewers, and street cleaners, it would have made a fine tourist trap.

As it was, I preferred the forests.

But the girls deserved a treat after all they'd been through lately. They had done a fine lot of work at Three Walls and they'd seen their first b.l.o.o.d.y combat, which shook them up a lot more than they wanted to admit. And they were a lot more worried than I was about the upcoming trial, so I worked at keeping them cheered up.

The girls wanted to go shopping and sightseeing and Vladimir felt that it was important to report in at Wawel Castle as soon as possible. I wanted to go see Father Ignacy at the Franciscan monastery. He was the only friend I had in this century who knew that I was from the future. He was my confessor, and I was in need of his services. And there was a certain matter of a Church inquisition into whether I was an instrument of G.o.d or an instrument of the devil.

So we compromised. I gave the girls each a handful of silver (their back pay really, but they didn't look at it that way. They were thrilled), had Vladimir take them shopping, and agreed to meet them at the monastery at noon. Then we'd go to the castle.

A monk who had considered me a klutz when I worked here now greeted me effusively, like a combination great lord and long lost friend. The outfit, again.

Father Ignacy met me in his cell and he, at least, was unchanged.

"Welcome, Conrad."

"Thank you. Father, you said that you would file a report on me with the proper authorities in the Church. How is that going?"

"Quite well, my son. I wrote my report even within the time you were still here last December, and delivered it to my abbot. He delayed it hardly at all, but dispatched it within the month to the Bishop of Cracow."

"His Excellency acted with surprising speed and tact and within two months sent the letter back to my abbot, suggesting that it would perhaps be better to go through the regular arm of the Church, rather than through the secular one. That is to say, he felt it should go, not through his office, but through the Franciscan home monastery in Italy."

"We were able to find a messenger going to Italy in much less time than you'd think, and by June the report was speeding its way to Italy."

So nine months had gone by and the report hadn't even been delivered. And I'd thought the Russians were screwed up.

"Thank you, Father. A great deal has happened to me since we last met."

"You wish to confess? How long has it been since your last confession?"

"Only about a week, Father. But-I suppose it's wrong to say this, but my confessions since I last saw you haven't felt right. It's almost as though I didn't really confess at all."

"This might be caused by the promise of silence I required of you. You could never tell the whole truth."

"That might be it, Father."

"Well, the reasons for that promise are still valid, you must live with it. But now I want you to confess since our last meeting."

And so I did. I told him of all the things I'd built, the omen I'd had, and the men I'd killed. Confession with Father Ignacy is never the rote affair it is with some priests. He digs into things for hours if need be, but always arrives at the truth of a situation. Once we were through, he looked down and shook his head.

After scolding me about Krystyana and the other ladies-in-waiting, he said, "All this fighting! I hope you realize that I never thought that you would be in such anger when I found you that position with the merchant, Novacek."

"I've never found fault with you, Father."

"You are generous, my son. So. You attained wealth, lands, and power of a scope that most men can only ream about and it seems that two days ago you threw it all away."

"What is this problem you have with the Knights of the Cross? On your first day in this century, you insulted one of them and got your head bashed in the bargain. Now you have attacked one of their caravans and caused the death of five or six of their number. You should know hat very few men are truly evil, and certainly there could not be an entire order of them. The Crossmen do valuable service to our country, keeping the Mazovian orders free from invasion."

"They do it by murdering entire villages."

"Then we both know that such an event was probably in retaliation for some atrocity by the Pruthenians."

"Father, I know nothing of the sort."

"Do you think that the northern barbarians are innocent, peaceful dwellers of the forests? They are heathens and worship barbarous G.o.ds."

"There must be better ways to convert them."

"One would think so. Many missionaries have tried it over the past three hundred years, but to no avail. Many have died, martyrs to Christ."

"It's not some simple matter of putting a new image in their church. Those people practice human sacrifice! And cannibalism! Those 'innocent children' you 'rescued' have every one of them eaten human flesh!"

"Now that's news to me, Father. But I'll make Christians out of them. And no matter what the heathens have done, it doesn't excuse what the Crossmen have done. You don't know their whole history."

"Perhaps you should tell me about them."

"Well, you know that their organization was formed forty years ago in Jerusalem, a German imitation of the Knights Templar. They soon lost interest in the Holy Lands, I suppose because there wasn't much profit in it."

"They tried to set up in Hungary, but King Andrew found out the truth about them in time and threw them out. Duke Conrad of Mazovia wasn't that intelligent. He invited them in-what?-seven years ago?-to guard his northern borders. Their way of doing that has been to murder every non-Christian in sight and to take as much Polish soil as they do Prussian."

"In the future, they will do nothing but grow and many of the most murderous battles of the medieval period--"

"The what?"

"Forgive me, Father, but that is what this current period of history will eventually be called. The middle period between the ancient world of the Romans and the Renaissance, or awakening, that led to the modem world."

"Now that is a shock. I'd always thought of this as being the modem world."

"Hmm. Then again, I don't know what generations future to mine will call my own civilization. Perhaps they won't be as polite."

"Some time you must teach me more of your history. But for now, return to your story of the Crossmen."

"Yes, Father. Eventually their murderous ways became so notorious that they were censored by the Pope. This didn't bother them a bit. They simply became a secular order and went on doing as they had been. Many long wars and b.l.o.o.d.y battles were fought by the kings of Poland against them."

"Then Poland will again have a king?"

"Of course, Father. We're but a century from the time of King Casimir the Great!"

"Praise G.o.d! But continue your story."

"Eventually, they were defeated at the Battle of Grunwald or Tannenberg, it's sometimes called. This was -will be-the bloodiest battle fought by Christians in the Middle Ages."

"The surviving Crossmen became va.s.sals of the Polish Crown, as the Duchy of Prussia. By that time they had completely eradicated the Slavic tribe of Prussians, or Pruthenians as they are sometimes called, and had taken that name for themselves, the way a barbaric warrior takes the clothing of his victim."

"But despite their va.s.salage, they never became Polish. Six hundred years from now, they were instrumental in organizing and dominating all the German states."

"Their spirit was that of another German group, the n.a.z.is, which conquered Poland as well as most of the rest of Europe. Their crimes were so horrible as to be unimaginable. Not far from where we sit, they built a death camp called Auschwitz where they systematically killed four and a half million people. That is half again as many people as there are in all of present-day Poland."

"This was not a matter of the sack and slaughter of a city, done in the heat of pa.s.sion. This was a matter of Germans going to work each day for four years and killing their quota of men, women, and children."

"And that was not the only camp, and the camps were not the only atrocity. In the end, more than fifty million people died in six years. That's twice as many people as lived in the entire Roman Empire at its peak."

Father Ignacy was silent for a while. "I cannot comprehend the numbers of people you speak of, but I have never known you to lie. You are saying then that this is a great evil that must be fought?"

"Yes, I guess so, Father."

"I take it then that you are not intending to run away, as many men would."

"I don't see how I can. If I did, they'd probably take those children back and sell them to the Moslems. I can't have that on my conscience."

"No, I don't suppose you can. But you are only one man, and they are many thousands."

"I know that I can't lick them alone," I said, my eyes blurring with tears. "But I intend to do everything that one man can. If I die, well, I die. Father, you once told me that I might be an instrument of G.o.d, and I didn't believe you. Well, in this matter, I know that I have G.o.d on my side." I think I was crying a little.

"Very well, my son. For what small worth it might be, know that in this matter you have me on your side as well. Go with G.o.d, my son. I give you no penance for your sins, for I think that you will soon be punished more than you deserve, and more than you can bear."

I had to stop a while in the vestibule to compose myself before I joined the others.

It doesn't do to be tear-streaked when your friends are worried about you.

But the others were in a merry mood when I joined them in front of the monastery, and the girls were prattling about all the wondrous sights they'd seen.

I leaned back on Anna and soaked up their gaiety. I needed it.

Vladimir informed us that the dinner hour at Wawel Castle would be over by then, and we hadn't eaten lately. I suggested an inn that I had stopped at last fall.

A healthy-looking, well-filled-out young woman took our order, then did a double take at me.

"Oh my G.o.d! You're Sir Conrad!"

"Guilty. Then you must be Malenka."

"Oh my G.o.d! Zygmunt! Zygmunt! Quickly! Look who's here!"

She ran out of the room to get her husband.

"What was that all about?" asked Annastashia.

"Oh, once I played matchmaker," I said.

The innkeeper came back with his wife, wiping his hands on his ap.r.o.n and smiling. Introductions were made and he announced that the meal was on the house and so were the next five, if we'd come back.

Soon, their other duties called them away and we could eat.

"They certainly were happy with you," Krystyana said. "How did you happen to bring them together?"

"Well, I hired her."

"Hired her?"

"Hired her."