Poland: A Novel Part 5

'Send him forth,' the king said, and Kazimir left the court and journeyed the relatively short distance to his castle along the Vistula, where he summoned Pawel of Bukowo to meet with him.

This Pawel was a petty n.o.bleman with three horses, a castle that was mostly in ruins and the heavy gait of a farmer. He had almost no neck, sloping shoulders and hands that hung out from his hips. Also, he wore his hair cut straight across his eyebrows, so that he created an appearance that was far from attractive, but if one looked at him carefully, one noticed the shrewd eyes that absorbed most of what occurred about him.

'Pawel,' Kazimir asked, 'how would you like to buy amber for the king?'

'Why doesn't he buy it himself? There's plenty in Krakow.'

Very quietly Kazimir said, looking Pawel directly in the eye: 'He would prefer a better quality. Say, from Lembok.'

Pawel folded his hands over his belly, rocked back and forth a couple of times, and said: 'He wants me to spy on the Teutonic Knights.'

'I doubt that he would express it that way, Pawel-'

'Where do I get the money?'

'That will be provided.'

'You know what they say, Pan? That not a bead of amber leaves Lembok any more except through the knights' hands.'

'We want you to buy it from them. In the end, that is. We want you first to see if you can buy it from the Lithuanians. So that you give the appearance of an honest dishonest trader.'

Again Pawel rocked back and forth, a.s.sessing this dangerous mission. 'And when I do that, the knights arrest me. They drag me off to their castle in Malbork and I get hanged.'

'Up to the point of hanging, that's what we want. We want you to be arrested. We want you to see Malbork. But we also want you to come back to us with your story.'

Pawel dropped his chin onto his fingertips and studied his master. 'How do you propose arranging that?'

'You carry with you a letter from the king himself, authorizing you to buy amber-from the Lithuanians, if possible.'

'That guarantees my hanging.'

'No, the knights will want to use you to send a message back to the king.'

Pawel rose from his chair and moved about the castle room. 'They'd see through such nonsense in a minute. The Germans aren't stupid.'

'Of course they'll see what we're doing. But they'll also see that King Jagiello wants to establish contact with them.'

'Why not send an amba.s.sador? As you did in the past?'

'Too formal. Too weighed down in heavy protocol. When the knights see an amba.s.sador coming, they freeze up. With you, they'll talk.'

'Do you want me to do this, Pan?'

'I do.'

'Then I'll do it.' He rose and moved toward the door. 'But I will want Janko to accompany me. He's very resourceful, Janko.'

So it was agreed, and the king's letter was composed, and the two suede bags of gold coins were delivered, and on an April morning in 1409 square-faced Pawel of Bukowo started eastward toward the Amber Road, which led by ship from Constantinople to Odessa, by land to Kiev to Minsk to Wilno to the beautiful seacoast town of Lembok, where precious amber was collected for the bazaars of Persia, India, China and j.a.pan.

When Pawel and his attendant Janko, also of Bukowo, had been on the Road one day, spies hurried northward with reports to the castle at Malbork that two mysterious Poles were on their way to Lembok: 'We shall follow them closely and inform you of their doings.' But at a stop near the town of Mozyr, Pawel told a Polish spy who was awaiting him: 'Inform the king's counselor Kazimir of Gorka that the knights have noticed us and are sending messengers north to keep Malbork informed of our movements.'

It must be understood that the Teutonic Knights who crept out of Germany to occupy the Baltic seacoast-which should normally have been a part of Poland-acted under a signed commission of the Pope ordering them to Christianize the pagan lands in that region, so that regardless of how they behaved, they acted with papal authority and the approval of G.o.d Himself.

Their Order had been formed near Jerusalem in 1189 by a group of crusading knights from Bremen and Lbeck, and their intentions were the n.o.blest: to provide medical services to Christian soldiers striving to wrest the Holy Land from its infidel possessors. The orotund name they took at their beginning testified to their intentions: 'Knights of the Teutonic Order of the Hospital of St. Mary in Jerusalem.'

The Order achieved little success, and by 1210 boasted of less than ten members who could move into battle fully armored and mounted. What was more ominous, the Catholic church was beginning to move against the Templars and other orders which had proved difficult to discipline, and it seemed likely that the Teutonic Knights would quietly vanish.

But at this critical moment the Order selected as its Grand Master one of the truly great men of the Middle Ages, Hermann von Salza, who combined piety and managerial ability to a high degree-with more of the latter than the former. In a brilliant move he shifted the Order out of the Holy Land, where they were accomplishing nothing-primarily because it was too far for knights from Germany to travel-and into Hungary, whose savage land awaited Christianity and colonizing. Within fifteen years Von Salza threatened to become more powerful than the King of Hungary, Andreas II, who, with practically no warning, banished the knights from his territories. Homeless, but still possessed of great organizing skill and military prowess, they looked all through Europe for a theater in which to exhibit their abilities, and by the most fortunate chance they heard of a Polish duke who was having trouble managing the pagan barbarians on his northern borders.

In 1226, the year after they were expelled from Hungary, Conrad of Mazovia in northern Poland begged the knights to enter his domain for a brief spell to help him subdue his pagans, and in grat.i.tude for their a.s.sistance, he wrote some unfortunate letters that could be interpreted as an invitation to stay permanently and also as a grant of land on which they could build a headquarters from which to Christianize territories that he, Conrad, did not own.

Hermann von Salza had brought his first German knights to Poland in 1226, with the presumed intention of staying a year or two. Nearly two hundred years later they owned most of the Baltic coast, including the lands of the Latvians and Estonians, and showed every intention of soon controlling Lithuania, Poland and much of Russia. Superior in military might, managerial ability and commerce, they excelled in diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe-especially with the papacy-and seemed destined to rule eastern Europe.

Their first Christianizing mission involved the Prussians, a handsome, barbaric, rural group of people who controlled the amber trade along the Baltic. All Europe applauded when the Teutonic Knights brought civilization and the church to these heathens, and it was upon this laudable beginning that the Germans erected their powerful structure.

They Christianized the Prussians in a most effective way: they eliminated them. Dividing the tribes, they dealt with them one by one, driving some into the sea, others into slavery, others into the wastelands of Russia. Those who remained on soil the knights wanted, about half the number, were converted into serfs and forbidden to marry, so that no further Prussian children would be forthcoming; they were to work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week until they died off.

The knights always held the Prussian barbarians in contempt, but when the latter were annihilated, the knights a.s.sumed their name and many of their characteristics. In later centuries, when Prussia became a name famous throughout Europe, there was hardly a true Prussian alive.

From this secure base, not very large, the Teutonic Knights launched two campaigns of real brilliance. Avoiding the pitfall which had overtaken early Poland and which would always contaminate its political processes-that of refusing to identify and follow one competent leader-the knights adopted the policy of electing one capable man Grand Master for life and then following his guidance for better or worse. With extraordinary luck, they picked a chain of men who were perhaps not as brilliant as the great Hermann von Salza but certainly as single-minded and as devoted to the Order. Prussia, under the Teutonic Knights, was the best-governed unit in Europe, and not once was there any war of succession, rebellion by contending claimants or uprising by the general population, for with great prudence the knights had replaced the vanished Prussians with loyal Germans imported from the homeland.

Once Prussia was established, a chain of impeccable military campaigns pushed the boundaries of the tiny original grant outward, so that the Teutonic state was fabulously enlarged, with its new areas also filled by German farmers imported from the west. Pomerania was captured, Chelmno Land, Dobrzyn, Samogitia; always the pressure was maintained, the civilized west encroaching upon the savage east.

These military campaigns were an unquestioned success, but it sometimes seemed that the Order's diplomatic triumphs were more fruitful, for the knights repeatedly circulated through the courts of Europe glowing written reports of their extreme piety, their unfailing courage in the face of barbarian enemies, their success in introducing Christianity to alien lands: We fight against the savage Lithuanians, the pagan Poles, the heathen Latvians and the Estonians who know not G.o.d, and a score of darkened lands between. Especially we war against the Muslim Tatars, a branch of the same infidel nation that controls the Holy Land where we fought for so long. We are the right arm of G.o.d, the successful extension of Rome, and all who long to fight for Jerusalem but cannot get there are invited to join this greater crusade at home.

As a consequence of this constant insistence on the virtue of the Germans and the barbarity of all others, a flood of knights from other countries sought to join the Order, and though they were refused full membership, they were granted honorable affiliation, so that when the knights went into battle against a country like Lithuania they had in their ranks young men of n.o.ble family from France, England, Luxembourg, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and the Low Countries, and each man was satisfied that he rode under the banner of Jesus Christ to subdue an inferior civilization and bring it into the glorious fold of the Christian church.

The propaganda campaign was especially vicious against Poland, which had become Christian officially in A.D. 966 and unofficially perhaps fifty years earlier, and it was impossible in this year of 1409 when Krakow had a fine university, a sophisticated court and a strongly entrenched church for Poles to think of themselves as pagan. But that was the report circulated through the knightly circles of Europe, and it was to rescue Poland from darkness that many of the alien knights volunteered to help the Germans.

If one asked a hundred courtiers throughout Europe what the Teutonic Knights did, the answer almost universally would be: They carry Christianity to pagan lands. They are the right arm of G.o.d.' And if one asked: 'Who are these knights?' the answer would be: 'They are ordained priests who have taken the vow of chast.i.ty and poverty, and they do only as their leader, the Pope in Rome, commands.'

The truth was somewhat different. At Marienburg, not far from Danzig where the Vistula River enters the Baltic Sea, the Teutonic Knights had erected within a semicircle of high brick walls-a river forming the other half of the wall-the most powerful fort in Europe, a magnificent red structure that ran more than three thousand feet from northeast to southwest. It consisted of two great central castles, many-storied and battlemented, and, north and south, two immense walled courtyards filled with administrative buildings. In time of stress, the fortification at Malbork could bring within its protection about ten thousand defenders, with adequate food and cistern water to withstand a siege of months or even years.

This was not a monastery fortress such as one might see at Cluny in France or York in England; this was a tremendous battle station, infinitely rich in possessions and power, and it was ruled by hard-headed men determined to use it as the nucleus of a vast temporal kingdom.

The knights had forewarned the world of their intentions early in their occupancy of the castle. In 1308 the nearby town of Danzig had given trouble, so the knights marched there singing 'Jesu Christo Salvator Mundi' and killed most of the citizens, about ten thousand in number, replacing them with German immigrants who gave them full allegiance.

It was difficult for the Poles to inform Europe about such matters, because the Teutonic Knights always got their report in first, and also because every settlement in Prussia bore two names, the German and the Polish, and this would continue throughout history, as the following table compiled by a Polish scribe in 1409 testified: Its real name is Gdansk but they call it Danzig Its real name is Malbork but they call it Marienburg Its real name is Pomorze but they call it Pomerania Its real name is Klajpeda but they call it Memel Its real name is Szczecin but they call it Stettin Its real name is Krolewiec but they call it Koenigsberg Its real name is River Wisla but they call it Vistula River [And so on, for more than a hundred altered place names]

In certain cases the German version was superior; for example, Marienburg bespoke a fortress dedicated to Mary the Mother of Jesus from which the teachings of her son were promulgated, while Malbork conveyed none of the gentleness of Mary. In a way, of course, this might have been more appropriate, for of a hundred persons residing in the castle at any one time, the distribution was this: Grand Master, one; his immediate council, seven; knights from Germany, twenty; knights from other nations, nine; squires, pages and other a.s.sistants to the knights, eighteen; full-fledged priests, three; friars, six; paid soldiers, eight; servants of all kinds, twenty-eight. And if one distributed the gold pieces in the castle coffers among the twenty-nine knights, each would receive more than three thousand pieces, but even this would be deceptive, because the Order maintained numerous subsidiary castles, often of considerable strength, in Prussian towns like Frauenberg (Frombork), Marienwerder (Kwidzyn) and Rastenberg (Ketrzyn), not to mention a dozen lesser ones erected in what had once been Polish towns but which were now occupied by the Order. The fortune of the Order was tremendous, but so were its expenses, and by careful manipulation and the constant watchfulness of the Grand Master, it avoided sending any great t.i.the to Rome. It was, in fact, a nation unto itself and it intended staying that way, always growing, always encroaching upon the lands of its neighbors.

Said Ulrich von Jungingen, the brilliant Grand Master who controlled the Order in these exciting years: 'We are, as we say, the forward arm of G.o.d Almighty, but we are also the forward arm of German settlement, and that combination is irresistible.' It was upon this powerful state that dumb-looking Pawel of Bukowo was presuming to spy.

He discovered the power of the Teutonic Knights when he left the city of Wilno on his way to the little amber town of Lembok, which lay to the north of the powerful German town of Koenigsberg. From Wilno, the Amber Road pa.s.sed through villages only recently occupied by the knights, and when he and Janko spent the night at a Lithuanian farmhouse, Pawel learned of their harsh rule.

'We cannot give you good bread,' the wife lamented, 'because they've broken our quern.' And she pointed to the shattered pieces of what had once been her most valued possession: the hand mill, consisting of two flattened stones, the upper of which revolved upon the stationary lower, grinding wheat into flour.

Explained the husband: 'The knights have given orders that we must henceforth sell all our wheat to them, at the prices they state. And they've smashed our querns to enforce that law.'

Later the wife said: 'They're going to allow us to keep our spinning wheels for the time being, because they can't find women to spin for them at Malbork, but they've smashed our looms because only they will be allowed to weave cloth.'

'It's about the same with cattle,' her husband said. 'I had nine, but now I'm allowed only four.'

'Did they pay for the five they took?' Pawel asked.

'Pay?' the husband snorted. He stared at Pawel, one farmer to another, and after a while Pawel asked: 'What are you going to do?' and the Lithuanian said: 'When the word comes, I take my scythe and I help you Poles when you go looking for Germans.'

'Who said we were going to do that?' Pawel asked, and both the husband and wife wanted to speak at once. They said that with Witold at the head in Lithuania and his cousin Jagiello ruling Poland, it was obvious that something must happen, and soon. 'We can't let the knights gobble up our countries, can we?'

'I know nothing of such things,' Pawel said honestly, but he was learning.

At the next village they saw three burned cottages and a woman hanging from a tree, and when Pawel inquired as to what crime she had committed, the Lithuanians told him: 'She hid her quern, and the knights caught her grinding illegal grain.'

That night three families sat late with the travelers, telling of the terrible repression that had settled over their lives after the knights captured their territory: 'Cattle were confiscated. Our mill was burned. Now we must pay to cross the bridge. My sons were taken to Lidzbark to work as servants in their castle. And all trade must pa.s.s through their hands.'

'Do they leave you any rights?' Pawel asked.

'None. They say we're pagans and that they're doing all this to save our souls. For four generations my fathers were Christian ...'

'Way to the east,' one of the women said, pointing in that direction, 'there are still pagans. And because those few remain after Jagiello converted us, the Germans say we're all pagans and that whatever they wish to do is all right, because they're saving us.'

Late in the evening one farmer voiced the real complaint of these people: 'What hurts more than the loss of the cow is the fact that they treat us with contempt. They treat us like slaves, because we aren't German. And they leave us no hope, because we can never become German, and we see them taking all the good land and moving their farmers onto it, and pretty soon there'll really be no place for us. My farm will go, and his, and his.' He halted his recital, clenched his hands, and said: 'They treat us with contempt.'

After nine days of travel through these newly acquired German territories, Pawel and Janko entered the coastal areas which the knights had held for many years, that chain of beautiful little seaports on which the amber monopoly operated by the knights centered, and Pawel saw at once the superior quality of any place controlled by the Germans. Everything was clean. Order prevailed. The shops were small but they were neat, and people behaved in an organized manner.

As they moved from one seacoast town to the next, always in a northerly direction as if trying to escape the German domination, Pawel became aware of a very large dark-haired knight who seemed always by accident to be traveling in the same direction, and he set Janko the task of determining who this Teuton was. It was not difficult, because the first peasant Janko spoke to in the barbarous melange of words he had acquired-Polish, German, Lithuanian, Prussian-told him that the impressive knight was Graf Reudiger, commander of the Baltic coastline and enforcer of the amber monopoly, which allowed sales to officials of governments but not to random individuals. When Pawel heard this he smiled, because it was now obvious that Graf Reudiger was trying to catch Pawel circ.u.mventing the amber laws, and Pawel was trying to be caught so that he would be hauled off to the legendary castle at Marienburg.

An amusing game developed, with the two Poles asking obvious questions of persons who might be expected to report them to Reudiger, and the big knight trying to look inconspicuous as he trailed them. In this fashion the three came to Lembok, a village of the greatest charm and with the finest amber, and after two days of rest Pawel eased himself into a small building by the clock tower where the amber trade flourished, and there for the first time he saw why it was understandable that an entire roadway across Asia and Europe had been established to trade in this precious substance, more beautiful than silver, more valuable than gold.

The merchant, a German, had on his wooden counter a selection of pieces brought to him over recent days by the Lithuanian fishermen who prowled the sh.o.r.eline searching for any amber that the waves might wash up and by other Lithuanians who actually mined for deposits laid down long ago. Pawel had no clear idea of what amber was, except that Polish ladies cherished such occasional samples as the knights allowed to filter into that country, and when he was actually permitted to handle a fragment he was surprised by its light weight, soft surface and radiant color.

It did not sparkle harshly, nor was it luminescent when sunlight struck it. A golden brown, it gave forth a soft radiance, but whatever its physical character, it created an impression of worth and loveliness and candlelight. The first piece Pawel handled was opaque, filled, it seemed, by a thousand white bubbles of air, and when Pawel asked about this, the German nodded: 'Exactly right! When it formed, it was filled with tiny bubbles, and there they stay, forever.'

So Pawel, looking the big dumb peasant with a few gold pieces from his master, asked: 'How did it form?' and the German became pleasantly excited; he enjoyed answering that question, for he was the expert.

'Have you ever worked with trees?' he asked. 'Good. Have you ever worked with pine trees? The ones that give off sticky substances? Good. That liquid is resin, and when you collect it you can do many things with it.'

'But how do you make amber from it?'

The German laughed and jabbed Pawel in the ribs. 'You can't make it and I can't make it, but if you put it in sand under the sea for a hundred years ... two hundred years, it binds itself together and hardens and makes amber.'

'You mean that this wonderful thing was once the stuff that makes my hands sticky when I cut a pine tree?'

'Yes! And to prove it, I'm going to show you something extremely precious,' and from a little suede pouch he placed on the counter a piece of flawless amber, about the size of a pigeon's egg, completely transparent and with no interior bubbles, colored like the coat of a fawn and hiding in its center perfectly preserved in every detail a single fly with wings extended.

'May I touch it?' Pawel asked, instantly appreciative of its rare form. When he had inspected it from all angles, allowing sunlight to dance past the suspended fly, he asked: 'How did you get the fly in there?'

This time the German laughed boisterously. 'You think I put it there with my big, heavy fingers? No, my friend. That fly landed on the resin while it was still sticky and it got caught. This was a hundred years ago. And more resin flowed about it, and then the whole thing was left in sand underwater for another hundred years and it became amber.' He admired the lovely bead and said: 'The fly holds his wings forever ready to soar again the minute the amber lets it go. But it will never let go.'

'Is such a piece ... well, is it valuable?'

'A piece like this? It goes to China, where they appreciate such perfection.' And from another pouch he produced a set of beautifully matched nine globelets of golden amber, none with flies, but so radiant in their purity that they formed a kind of halo. 'For the Sultan of the Turks,' and he spit as he said the infidel words.

Finally he produced the piece which he himself had selected as the nonpareil, the one he had held back until the Pope himself or some great king came by to claim it. It was the size of a small hen's egg and similarly shaped; its color was a soft gray-gold and radiant. Perfectly translucent, it seemed to break ordinary light into myriad colors, and yet it did not shine of itself. Said the German: 'It longs to be held by a golden chain below the throat of a beautiful woman.'

'What will you do with it?' Pawel asked.

'Wait.'

'For what?'

'Just wait.'

Pawel took such a liking to this trader, a man who obviously loved his work, that he returned to the center many times, and during one visit the German said: 'I suppose you're an official of your government. I suppose you have papers authorizing you to buy.'

'Oh, I have!' Pawel lied. That night-with the connivance of Graf Reudiger, who hurried in shortly after each of Pawel's visits-it was arranged that a set of six amber beads would be sold to Pawel. They were extremely beautiful objects, not so large as the special ones set aside for the Sultan, but each matched nicely with the others, as if all were golden-skinned sisters from some remote Asian village.

'They were formed a hundred years ago,' the German said, 'and they've been waiting for you.' Then, as he held them in his hand for the last time, he said: 'I sometimes think it must have taken much longer than a hundred years ... for something like pine resin to make something like this.' He was right. It had taken some sixty million years; that insect imprisoned in the other piece was not a fly as Lithuania now knew flies; it was some nameless progenitor that had flown through a pine forest those millions of years ago, and if the amber which held it was indeed more valuable than a similar weight of gold, there was good reason, for amber had a subtle, woodland, sunset beauty that nothing else could match.

After Pawel had wrapped his six beads in linen and then in heavy cloth, he told the dealer: 'I shall be very nervous carrying these to Krakow for our king,' and the German said with a certain sad cynicism, for he had come to like this stolid Pole who reacted so enthusiastically to the amber: 'Yes, you will indeed be nervous.' And as soon as Pawel stepped out of the little building beside the clock, servants of Graf Reudiger grabbed him and Janko, and the big knight, now dressed in full regalia with the black cross embroidered on his tunic, stepped from behind a door and said in a loud voice: 'You are arrested. For trying to evade the amber laws.'

It was more than a hundred miles from the seaport of Lembok to the capital at Marienburg, and since Pawel was obviously not a full-fledged knight, he was owed no great consideration. He and Janko were allowed to keep their horses but they were lodged wherever Reudiger could find them a bed, and they ate poorly. It took six days to cover the distance, and occasionally the big German knight would ride with them, never abusing them but telling them frankly that at the end of the journey they would doubtless be hanged and their bodies shipped back to Poland-or at least their heads-as a warning to other Poles not to try to breach the Order's monopoly of the amber trade.

Late in the afternoon of the sixth day Graf Reudiger began to spur his horse and commanded the others to do the same, and one of the knaves explained: 'He wants to reach Marienburg before night falls,' and as the sun was setting, the little company of travelers rounded the side of a hill and saw before them the mighty battlements of Marienburg Castle glowing red, a fortress of such size and strength as to immobilize the courage of any foe who happened to approach it.

Vast, mighty, thick-walled and impregnable, it would stand five hundred years without being taken by siege, both the symbol and the reality of German power in the Baltic states. Pawel, looking at it when it seemed part of the coming night, shuddered to think that within those ma.s.sive walls he could be imprisoned for the rest of his life, like the fly in amber, or tortured, or even hanged. Janko, less imaginative, compared this tremendous fortress with the scrawny castles he knew along the Vistula, the ones that had been regularly destroyed at fifty-year intervals, and said: 'n.o.body could ever knock this one down.'

They approached it by the eastern gateway, where guards told Reudiger: 'You're lucky. Fifteen more minutes ... closed.' And before they left the inspection courtyard, the ma.s.sive iron gates clanged shut for that night.

With torches they were led through devious pathways which would be difficult for a stranger to follow, and impossible to penetrate if they were defended, and into a walled northern area of staggering size where the heavy shops for the fabrication of swords and armor were located. From here they were led across a wide wooden drawbridge to the ma.s.sive gateway seven tiers deep, each graced with carved figures, and into the beautifully walled courtyard of the first castle, itself bigger than anything Pawel had seen or heard of in Poland.

They traversed this courtyard without halting and left the first castle altogether, pa.s.sing through a low archway, easily defended, into the great castle itself, and there Graf Reudiger directed a herald to sound a signal indicating his arrival. Trumpet sounds echoed through the enclosure, bouncing off a dozen walls and making strange melodies, at which a small, heavily ironed doorway in the western wall slowly opened, revealing the tall, severe figure of a knight dressed all in white, except for the black cross upon his breast.

This was Ulrich von Jungingen, brilliant leader, fearless warrior and Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights for the duration of his lifetime. 'Brother Reudiger, you have done your job. To the dungeons.' Saying no more, he retired.

The dungeons of Marienburg Castle were s.p.a.cious affairs, larger than most inns and capable of holding more people. They were not composed of individual cells, except for a few reserved for prisoners of major fault, but of huge stone-walled rooms, four of which served a very special purpose: they were packed with large wooden logs which prisoners fed into furnaces that had brick-lined ducts leading to important rooms in the castle. Thus when a single fire raged in the cellar, heat could be delivered to rooms far distant and high above the dungeons.

Pawel and Janko were thrown into one of the lesser compartments, but Pawel complained to the guard that this was improper, since he, Pawel, was a knight and not accustomed to sleeping with peasants. The Germans, taking this complaint seriously, moved him to better quarters, where there was straw upon which he could sleep.

But his nights were wakeful, for he tormented himself with speculating as to what was going to happen to his six amber beads, which Graf Reudiger had rudely taken from him at the time of his arrest, and he conceived the curious idea that his safety, the continuance of his life on earth, depended upon his custodianship of those amber beads. He devised a score of ridiculous plots whereby he might recover them and smuggle them through German lines to Krakow, but he knew they were futile because all depended upon his escaping from this tremendous fortress, and that was not likely.

He could not tell how many days he had been in the dungeon, and it seemed that most of the men who shared it with him had lost sense of time, for they had been there for years: Lithuanian farmers who had tried to avoid delivering their grain to the knights; Poles captured on raids to the south; other Poles caught visiting the city of Danzig; Danish sailors who had attempted to fish the Baltic; and a few Tatar infidels taken on raids into Russia. The dungeons of Marienburg formed a map of German power in the east.

On the sixth or seventh day, when his eyes were accustomed to the gloom, he was dragged forth, allowed to wash, given fresh clothing, and taken to a room where two remarkable men sat awaiting him. The first and tallest was a proper knight, Siegfried von Eschl, forty years old, a traveler to Jerusalem and Rome, scion of an ancient German family occupying various castles along the Rhine, a man devoted to the welfare of the Order and one of its ablest commanders. The second was of a smaller size and a less distinguished bearing, but in some ways he was the more impressive, for he could read and write. He was Priest Anton Grabener of Lbeck, younger brother of a master merchant in the Hanseatic League.

The two indicated that Pawel was to sit on a small chair on the opposite side of the table, facing them, and to answer honestly all questions put to him by Priest Anton, who spoke Polish in addition to Latin, French, Italian and Lithuanian. Since Pawel had been carefully coached in Castle Gorka as to what he must reply when questioned, he was prepared for this interrogation, but to his astonishment it proceeded along lines no one in Krakow could have antic.i.p.ated: PRIEST ANTON: Is it true that your King Jagiello is covered with heavy body hair from his neck to his toes?

PAWEL: I've seen him only a few times, but once was when he stayed at Castle Gorka for three days, and I saw no such hair.