Conrad's Quest for Rubber

by Leo Frankowski

  They had tried to keep such records once, but as the army grew, the task became impossible. Sir Odon said that maybe after we won the war, we would have time for such things. I did not find this to be comforting.

  I often wrote to my mother, and I was sure she was writing to me, but the mails were all fouled up. Delivering them was one of the things the army did in times of peace, and I could understand we had other priorities now. In four months I got only two letters from her, and neither of them seemed to contain any answers to my questions, like "What is my father's address?"

  The fact that she had my address meant she must have gotten at least one letter from me, and surely my father must have written to her as well! All I could think was that perhaps my questions had all been answered in some earlier, undeliv­ered letter.

  Yet all things fade, including the loneliness in my heart and the fog that surrounded my head. Slowly, I began to take notice of the other men in my lance, in my platoon, in my company. I began to realize I had new friends now, and in some ways they were better than those I had left behind.

  At least they were more interesting, none of them being bakers.

  The fellow in the bunk above me, Zbigniew, had worked on Lord Conrad's ranch, where they had a large herd of slightly domesticated aurochs. He had been one of the Pruthenian children Lord Conrad had rescued from the Crossmen.

  The guy in the bunk below, Lezek, came from the neigh­boring ranch where all of Anna's children were raised until they reached their fourth year.

  At that age, they somehow "remembered" everything that their mother had known up to the time they were con­ceived, even though there wasn't a stallion involved in their procreation.

  Unlike people and just about everything else in the world, Anna and her children had offspring whenever they wanted and did it without the help of the opposite sex. In fact, the op­posite sex didn't exist for their species, a thing that made most of the men in my lance claim to feel sorry for them.

  You see, sex was a subject that was often discussed among us, though I suspected my lance mates had as little real knowledge of the subject as I did.

  In any event, Lezek was impressed with the fact that I had known Anna herself since I was six years old, and he ques­tioned me for days about every incident I knew of concerning her. Even though his father had worked with the Big People for years, no one he knew had actually talked for any length with Anna herself.

  While there were only twenty-nine adult Big People at that point, there were three hundred sixty-four young ones at the ranch, managed by a young woman named Kotcha, whom I vaguely remembered. Once, she had lived a few doors down from my family's house.

  Lezek said that in ten years there would be twenty-four thousand adult Big People, and ten years after that everybody would have one. I'm not sure if anyone believed him, but that's what he said.

  The other three men in our lance were less talkative, since none of them spoke much Polish. Fritz was a German who came from a farm not far from Worms. He could read and write our language well, since he had been reading Lord Conrad's magazine every month for five years, but his pronunciation still left much to be desired. He had come to join our army, he said, because the chances of rising in the world were better here than anyplace else, and that being a farmer was mostly a matter of walking behind a plow and staring at the ass end of a pair of oxen for most of your life. And anyway, he had more brothers than his father had farmland for them to inherit.

  Kiejstut was a Lithuanian who had come because he heard that the army would arm, armor, and train him to fight Mon­gols. A year earlier, Mongol raiders had killed his father and one of his brothers, kidnapped his youngest sister, and burned down his entire village. He wanted vengeance, even though he was by nature a rather quiet, reserved, even shy person, one who was always careful not to give offense.

  The sixth member of my lance was Taurus, a Ukrainian whose family had once lived north of Kiev. He was the only one of his large family who was still alive. Hatred and bitter­ness seemed to radiate from him. I never once saw him smile, and I never heard him laugh, not until we saw combat and he started killing Mongols. Sterner and far more exacting than our knight, Sir Odon, he was always quick to chastise the rest of us for any slackness during our training, and even for any levity.

  Our training went on for four months, and at the time it seemed forever. Sir Odon said that we were getting only a special short course, and if we wanted to stay in the army, we would have to come back here sometime and take another eight months of this.

  We all groaned at the thought of an additional eight months in Hell. Almost as an article of faith, we soldiers complained about everything we did or had done to us. This was even true of those grunts (for that was indeed what they called us) who did not come from Lord Conrad's lands, about three-quarters of those in my company.

  I had noticed these generally older men when we were first joined together to form our company. Mostly, they were less healthy than the rest of us, thinner, and poorly fed. Also, it seemed to me that some of them were mentally duller than the people I had grown up with. Now they were wearing the first pairs of leather boots that some of them had ever owned, and almost all of them had put on healthy weight, but they still felt obligated to complain, so they did so.

  Privately, I think they were impressed by the wealth of the army, and that most of them had resolved to stay in, if they could possibly manage it.

  At the end of February, when final preparations were being made, when weapons, ammunition, preserved food, and every­thing else we would need for the months ahead was being issued, one of the warehouse workers handed me a white leather kit with a red cross on it.

  I asked what it was.

  "It's a medical kit," he said. "We usually hand them out only to people who have completed the surgeon's course, but someone had too many of these kits made up. The captain said to hand them out to one man from each company, just in case you need it."

  I said that I was in the fifth lance, so I'd had the first-aid course, but that was just to help the wounded until somebody got there who knew what he was doing. I didn't know any­thing about really fixing people!

  "Everybody who does already has a kit. Keep it. Clip it on your belt, just in case."

  I did as I was ordered, and I quit wearing my smaller first-aid pack since everything in it was also in the big medical kit.

  I soon discovered there were advantages to wearing the kit, since real medics were rarely sent out to do the dirtiest jobs, such as cleaning the latrines. Once I had the kit, people assumed I was trained in its use, and thus my life became a bit easier. No one ever asked me if I had taken the proper course, so I was never even tempted to lie about it;

  Our company was part of the River Battalion, the men who would be manning the riverboats on the Vistula. This in­trigued me, since I had often heard of boats, but had never seen one. In truth, I had never even seen a river.

  We wouldn't be actually operating the boats, of course; that was the job of another group entirely. We had only to ride along, we were told, and to obey the orders of our knights and captains, who had vast experience on the dozens of steam-powered boats the army had.

  Well, my knight, Sir Odon, was the same age I was, but had joined the army a year earlier, and I don't think he had vast experience in anything. My captain, Sir Stashu, looked to be perhaps eighteen and was no gray-bearded repository of wisdom, either, but I kept my mouth shut, as my father, a wise man, had taught me.

  Grunts bitched about everything, but we learned that there were a few topics of conversation that could get you chosen to shovel out the garbage, or to wash a few thousand dishes, and that among these was the inexperience of our leaders. They knew it themselves, and preferred not to think about it.

  Chapter Three

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF JOSIP SOBIESKI

  WRITTEN JANUARY 19, 1249

  CONCERNING FEBRUARY 15, 1241

  AT LAST, we said our final Sunrise Service in He
ll, and we marched out to war.

  Well, we had to pull our war carts behind us, there were only two railroad tracks to pull them on, and there were a sixth of a million of us troops to move out. An hour went by before we finally left Hell, and we were near the front of the line. Our doubled column was over sixteen miles long! Even at a brisk walk, it took almost six hours for us to march by!

  Once we finally got on the tracks, it wasn't all that hard to pull the big cart, even loaded as it was with the tons of guns, pikes, and all the other material we needed to fight with. Counting our six knights and the knight-banner who led us, there were forty-three men in our platoon.

  Our cart could be pulled by eighteen of them, with the rest of us riding aboard, resting, eating, or even sleeping. This let us continue onward right around the clock, doing over six dozen miles a day without ever once breaking into a run.

  The six carts of my company pulled off the main road when we got to East Gate and left the main body of the army to go on without us.

  A great crowd of civilians was leaving the dock area. There must have been thousands of them, mostly peasants, but with a scattering of well-dressed people as well. They were all walking back the way we had come; refugees who would shelter at the Warrior's School, we presumed.

  I had heard much about the castle that had been built at East Gate, how it was made entirely of reinforced concrete, and I was eager to examine it closely.

  I never got the chance for we were marched straight onto our boat, the RB1 Muddling Through. The tracks went right up to and over the big drawbridge at the front of the boat and right into the cavern of a hold that made up most of the lower deck. We could hardly see the huge boat as we went aboard it.

  The drawbridge door was closed behind us, leaving us in the dark, and our riverboat pulled out immediately to let the next one up to the dock to be loaded. It was like being locked up in an oversized barn, filled with six war carts and the al­most two gross of men of my company.

  We soon found out that we were riding in no ordinary steamboat, but in the craft that held the commanders of the entire river flotilla, all three dozen boats. We had two army barons aboard, as well as Sir Conrad, now Count Conrad, himself.

  Captain Targ didn't want his troops getting in the way of all these high personages, so he had us stay down below on the cargo deck, just in front of the engines. The second deck had the radios and the war room, called Tartar Control, as well as the kitchen and the sleeping rooms for the officers.

  There was a fighting top above that, and a few hours after we were aboard, the sixth lance of each platoon was sent up there with their guns. So were the fourth lances, who acted as loaders for the swivel guns, and the third, who acted as spotters.

  My own fifth lance acted as corpsmen, assistants for the surgeons, and we wouldn't be needed until somebody got shot. This meant we had to stay inside, cooped up without even a window, until somebody had the courtesy to get de­cently wounded so we could go outside and do something.

  That night I was one of the few men below who couldn't sleep. I was standing near the stairs with my helmet off when a tall man walked by with a line of white circles down the armor on his back. I snapped to attention.

  You see, the army used a color code for the numbers of its lances, platoons, companies, and so on. One was red, two was orange, three was yellow, four was green, five was blue, and six was purple. The buttons on our uniform jackets used these colors to define where we were in the army's organization.

  The top button was your position in your lance, the second, your lance's position in your platoon, the third was your pla­toon's place in the company, and so on. The buttons on my jacket went, from the top down, orange, blue, blue, yellow, orange, red, green, blue, and red. This meant that I was the second man in the fifth lance, of the Fifth Platoon, of the Third Company, of the Second Komand, of the First Batta­lion, of the Fourth Column, of the Fifth County, of the First Division of the army.

  The leader of any group used a white button in that posi­tion. That is to say, Sir Odon's buttons were the same color as mine, except that his top one was white. Captain Targ's top three buttons were white.

  On our armor, which zippered together, there were big spots, a different shape for each color, running down the chest and the back, painted in the same colors as our buttons. Otherwise, we all looked the same in armor, and with the faceplates closed, you couldn't tell who was who. Once you got used to it, you could spot your friends quickly.

  Also, if someone was impersonating a warrior, before long his button colors would get him caught by someone who knew he wasn't who he was supposed to be.

  So when I saw a line of nine white circles on the man's back, I knew he had to be Lord Conrad himself. I came to at­tention, as I had been taught, and he stopped, turned, and looked at me.

  "I know you, don't I?" He said, "Yes, you are Josip, the son of the baker from Okoitz."

  I said that I was, and that I was surprised so great a person as he was had actually recognized me.

  "I am just another man, Josip, not much different from you. I think that mostly I remember you because of your sur­prise and your laugh when I showed you that top I made for you."

  I said that I had been six years old then, but yes, I remem­bered it, too. I said I still had that toy, carefully stored away, and that if I ever had a son, I would give it to him.

  "It feels good to be appreciated. But tell me, Josip, is there anything I can do for you now?"

  I said there was, and explained to him that I had been on the boat for twelve hours now, and they said that the boat was on a river, but I had never in my life actually seen a river. Could I perhaps have permission to go up and have a look?

  "You never... ? I'm sorry, but I sometimes forget how re­stricted the life of a commoner can be. I'll do better than just let you topside. I'm doing an informal inspection just now. Come with me, and I'll give you the threepenny tour of the Muddling Through."

  And with that he took me all around the boat, starting with the engines, where the engineer had forbidden us troops to go. But who would dare stand in the way of Lord Conrad, or even the lowly grunt who was accompanying him?

  I was surprised to discover I already knew the baron who was in charge of the radio room. He was Piotr, whose parents had the room two doors down from my father's. Eight years older than me, he had once been one of the "big kids," al­though he had been the smallest "big kid" at Okoitz, and now I was a head taller than he was.

  He said he remembered me, but somehow I don't think he really did. He was just being polite. Truthfully, I doubt if I could remember any of the little kids there who were eight years younger than I was!

  The dawn was breaking before we finally got all the way up to the fighting top, and at last I saw what a river looked like. The Vistula was as beautiful as they had always told me it was.

  That morning, word went out that those of us below could go up topside, one platoon at a time, whenever there wasn't a battle going on. I'm sure that order came from Lord Conrad.

  I was below at noon, when all of the guns above us started shooting, not just the three dozen swivel guns my company manned, but the steam-powered peashooters that quickly spat out thousands of small iron balls, and the Halman Pro­jectors that threw bombs high over the enemy. It went on for an hour before my lance was called up to the ready room. After a few minutes we were needed up on the fighting top.

  The gun smoke was so thick you had to gag, and after the darkness below, the sunlight was blinding. The noise could make a man go deaf, and the number of arrows being shot at us was simply unbelievable. They were stuck all over the deck and looked almost like wheat ready for the harvest. We found that we had to walk with a sort of sliding motion, breaking off the arrows as we went, to keep from tripping over them.

  All of the men on deck had arrows sticking out of them, a frightening sight! But we soon realized they were all right. Our armor was of plated steel, heavily waxed and covered with thick canva
s. It was proof against the Mongol arrows, although those missiles tended to stick in the wax and canvas.

  What I had taken at first for convulsions was in fact the men laughing about the whole situation!

  A gunner signaled for help, with an arrow in his upper arm that was squirting blood. Somehow, it had managed to slide up his brassard and get under his pauldron. Not a deadly wound, but it needed tending. Fritz and Zbigniew helped him below, his loader took over shooting the gun, and the spotter took over loading the twenty-round clips into the gun, and then reloading the empty clips from the ammunition boxes.

  I had nothing better to do, so I felt free to stand behind them and act as their spotter. It gave me a chance to see what was going on.

  A great mob of Mongols was on the bank, crowding right down to the shore. They were trying to kill us with their ar­rows, which were obviously ineffective. We, on the other hand, were hurting them, hurting them badly.

  Three dozen swivel guns were each shooting twenty rounds a minute into a packed crowd of men and horses, and you could see where individual bullets were killing three and four of them in a file at a time. The two peashooters on that side of the boat were spraying away, taking out Mongols in horizontal ranks. And the Halman bombs were bursting above them, each explosion knocking down a circle of the enemy a dozen yards across!

  The enemy was being shot so fast that no attempt was made to remove the dead and wounded. Those that fell were just left there to be trampled, to bleed, and to die.

  And the fools kept coming! They made no attempt to run away, or to hide behind something, as any rational creature would, but instead were actually climbing on top of their own dead in order to get at us!

  I tell you that in some places they were sitting on horses that were standing on three and four layers of dead men and dead horses!

  And once there, there was nothing they could do. Their ar­rows couldn't really hurt us, and when some of them went into the water to get at us, those that didn't freeze immedi­ately soon found that the sides of the boat were six yards high, and made of smooth metal that couldn't possibly be climbed.