Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  "And you are doubtless better off without it. But you are an officer in your military, aren't you? And a king's man besides? Knighthood would seem to be the equivalent."

  "We don't have kings! There's an elected body that—"

  "An excellent system. Oh, yes, don't mention the future to these men. It might frighten them. If they ask, tell them that you're Spanish."

  "With blond hair?"

  "Why not? Many Spaniards have blond hair. Or better yet, tell them you are English. You could easily pass for an Englishman."

  Before I could reply, we broke through the brush and were on a rocky beach. In the middle of the river, a boat was securely wedged between two large rocks. The boat was about eight meters long and three meters wide and was pointed at both ends. A brightly garbed slender youth, wet to the waist, was clambering on board. Another man, in a wet gray tunic, was standing at the stern and looking at us. He held a longbow in his left hand and had an arrow fitted. There was something odd about the way he held it.

  "Put away your weapon, boatman! We mean you help, not harm!" Father Ignacy held his book pouch above his head and waded into the water.

  I unslung my pack and belt, held them high, and followed. That water was cold! I would have been prepared to swear in a court of law that it was below -10°C, if there had been any courts. My legs were numb before we got to the boat. Father Ignacy put his pouches aboard and clambered on after them. I did the same.

  "Good afternoon, good boatman. I am Father Ignacy Sierpinski, and this knight is Sir Conrad Stargard."

  "Good afternoon, good father and good sir knight. I am Tadaos Kolpinski, and I am at your service."

  "A pleasure, Tadaos Kolpinski. We are bound for Cracow. What is your destination?"

  "The same as yours, Father. Down the Dunajec and up the Vistula. Always ready to take on paying passengers, that's my motto, sirs." He ignored the poet.

  "Well, you must understand our means are limited." Father Ignacy sat on a sack of grain. "Sir Conrad, I believe we were talking about Saint Augustine. Now, in The City of God—"

  "But Father," Tadaos said, "you understand that we are having this difficulty—"

  "And you feel that we should work for you, to help you out of it. This is acceptable to us, and there is only a slight matter of agreement on our wages."

  "Ah, Father, I am a benevolent man, and if you will both assist me on our way to Cracow, I will feed you as well as I feed myself and depend only on your generosity for my remuneration."

  "But surely it is written that a workman deserves his wages, and we are hardworking men, but poor. Yet we can get to Cracow on foot without the burden of hauling your grain. Shall we say food and six silver pennies per day per man?"

  Tadaos gagged. "Please understand, Father, that I too am a poor man and that I have a wife and five poor children to feed. Surely you would not want to take food from their mouths with winter coming on. But perhaps one penny."

  The bargaining went on for better than twenty minutes, with the boat hung up on the rocks and all of us sitting down. I could see that it would be difficult to get the rational principles of socialism across to these people and, further, that if I wanted to survive, I had a lot to learn. In the meantime, I set my mind to the technical problem of freeing the boat.

  Eventually they settled on the wages of food and three pennies a day. Much later, I discovered that this was an excellent wage for an experienced boatman, which I wasn't but which Father Ignacy was. He turned to me and said, "Now then, Sir Conrad, have you solved our problem?"

  "No, but I know what to try. Do you have a block and tackle? No? Then the first thing to try is brute force. We all get into the water and try to pull it off the rocks."

  This is what Tadaos had in mind, so there were no objections except from the poet. It was mutually agreed that his opinions didn't count, so we all went over the side. The poet—with assistance—went head first. I mean, Father Ignacy was already in the water when the kid, who was standing between the boatman and me, began to make some rhymed objection. The boatman looked at me, and I nodded. We picked up the poet and threw him in.

  It was freezing. We tried lifting from the front, but the boat wouldn't budge. We tried pulling from the back, but no go. We rocked. We jerked, but it was no good. Stuck.

  Shivering, we climbed back aboard.

  "Well, that didn't work," I said to Tadaos. "How much rope do you have aboard? And do you have any grease?"

  "I have some cooking lard and maybe a gross of yards of good rope."

  "Okay. Give me the lard and tie this rope to the back of the boat."

  "The stern."

  Yachtsmen are the same everywhere. They've got to have their own idiot language. "The stern. I'll be back soon." I had picked out a rounded vertical rock perhaps fifty meters upstream of the boat. I went over the side and waded toward it. Damn, but the water was cold! Small bits of ice were floating in it! The rock was just what I wanted—rounded on the upstream side and slightly concave. I greased the surface liberally and pulled the rope around it. Then I greased about ten meters of the rope, from the rock toward the boat, keeping the rope taut.

  The boatman jumped into the water and shouted, "Okay, here we go, you men!"

  "What are you doing?" I yelled. "Get back into the boat!"

  "What do you mean? We have to pull ourselves off!"

  "Yes, but the place to pull from is inside the boat."

  "That's stupid, sir knight! We'll add our weight to the boat and make it harder to pull!"

  "True, but our weight is small compared to the weight of the boat and the grain. And if we're inside the boat, we double our leverage. Be reasonable. Do it my way."

  "Okay! We try it your way, just to show how dumb you are!"

  I handed the rope up to Father Ignacy, and we struggled aboard.

  "What do you think we'll do when this doesn't work?" the boatman asked.

  "If this fails, we unload the boat one sack at a time and carry it to the shore. Then we try this again, and if it works, we load the boat back up again."

  "That would take days! We'd lose half of the grain by dropping it in the water!"

  "I know. So we try this first. Line up, you men. Pull!"

  The boat moved, a centimeter at first, then two, then ten. Once off the rocks, it moved easily. After ten meters, the boatman belayed the line around the sternpost and ran up to the bow. "She's not taking in any water!" Soon, the line cast off and hauled in, we were on our way.

  I soon noticed that along with the normal oarlocks on the sides, the boat had additional locks on the bow and stern. Their function was explained when Tadaos set an oar in each. He took the stern oar and put Father Ignacy on the bow. They used these to paddle the boat sideways in order to avoid obstructions in the river. Once he was sure that all was well, the boatman motioned me over to him.

  "The good father knows his job well, and as for you, sir knight, that was as fine a piece of boatmanship as I have ever seen. I hope you'll accept my apologies for the rudeness I showed to your knightship."

  "No problem. We were all under stress. Your apologies are accepted, sir boatman."

  "Well, hardly that, Sir Conrad, but I have had my share. Why, there was this girl from Sandomierz, a blonde she was, that . . . but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to find out why you think that we pulled twice as hard standing in the boat as we did standing on the bottom."

  "I wish I had a pencil and paper."

  "Huh?"

  "Some way to draw pictures for you. It wasn't that we pulled twice as hard; we didn't. Look at it from the point of view of the boat. We were pulling the rope, right? So at the same time we were pushing on the boat with our feet. Right?"

  "Okay."

  "Also, the rope went around the rock and came back and pulled on the boat, right?"

  "So, we pushed it and pulled it at the same time. We got twice as much for nothing!"

  "No, we didn't. When we pulled that rope for one of your yards
, the rope pulled the boat only one half a yard. We got more force but less distance."

  "So we broke even."

  "Less than that. We lost some power rubbing the rope against the rock. It would have been better if we could have had a wheel on the rock."

  "Like a pulley, you mean?"

  Now, how in hell can an apparently intelligent man know about rope and pulleys and not about mechanical advantage? "Yes, like a pulley. Would you mind if I got out of these clothes? I'm freezing."

  "Do what you will, Sir Conrad." Water was running off his clothes onto the floorboards and freezing there.

  I couldn't do anything to help his wet clothes, but it would have been stupid for me to be uncomfortable with no gain for the others. I went to my pack and dug out my tennis shoes, light trousers, spare socks, and underwear. I changed quickly and stretched my wet things out on the grain bags. Actually, most of my things were wet.

  I took stock of my gear. A pair of lightweight 7 X 25 mm binoculars. A Swiss army knife. A small hatchet. A good Buck single-bladed jackknife in a leather belt pouch. A canteen. A dented cooking kit. A compass. A few days' food. A sleeping bag. A ripped knapsack. A sewing kit. A first-aid kit. A stub of a candle. A few coins that might be worth something. Some paper money that probably wasn't. A smashed flashlight that I pitched over the side. With these few things, my total worldly possessions, I was to face the brutal thirteenth century.

  I laid all of it out to dry.

  At the bottom of the pack, I found the idiot seeds. That incredible redhead! It seemed like years ago rather than only forty-eight hours.

  Chapter Four

  The river grew increasingly interesting as the afternoon wore on, and I was glad that we had our experienced men at the helm, fighting our way past rocks and rapids.

  I crawled under my still-damp sleeping bag and watched the scenery, which was pretty spectacular. The River Dunajec cuts through the Pieniny Mountains, and it was one gorgeous vista after another, with white marble cliffs thrusting up through the pine forest and sudden meadows with sheep grazing.

  A castle clung high up on the slopes of a three-peaked mountain. I fumbled for my binoculars.

  "That's Pieniny Castle," the boatman shouted. Pieniny Castle! I had toured its ruins once. Now, "dunce caps" topped the towers and the drawbridge was intact. It was here—will be here?—that King Boleslaw the Bashful took refuge after he lost the Battle of Chmielnik to Batu Khan, and Poland was left open to the Mongol invaders. That was—will be—in the spring of 1241, nine and a half years from now.

  "What is that thing you're holding in front of your face?" Tadaos asked.

  "Binoculars. They make things look close. Here, take a look."

  "Later, Sir Conrad. I've got my hands full."

  And he did, steering that overladen boat through rapids and eddies. I was dreading my turn at those oars.

  It was dusk when he finally said, "That's the worst of it. It'll be clear sailing until tomorrow afternoon. Good Father, give your oar to the poet. Sir Conrad, come take mine. Just keep her toward the middle and you'll have no problems."

  It was dark half an hour later when we slid quietly past the castle town of Sacz. It was lightless, and we saw no people.

  I was back into my heavy clothes, dried now to mere dampness, but the kid at the bow was still shivering. He had been silent since his dunking, and I felt sorry for him. I supposed that I was just prejudiced. I had never met a goliard poet before, but I knew the type. He was exactly the same as the Lost Generation and the hoboes and the beatniks and the hippies and—what was the current group?—punkers, I think. Every decade or so, they all adopt a stranger slang, put on a different uniform, and say that I am a conformist and that they are doing something wondrous and new!

  Groups who change their names every ten years do it for a good reason. People have discovered that they are bums, and they need new camouflage. Now, I'm Slavic and proud of it. "Slav" comes from an old root meaning "glorious," but during the first millennium, Western Europeans enslaved so many of us that the word "slav" came to mean "slave" in their languages, which is about as derogatory as you can get. A people without a strong sense of self-worth, like the American Blacks, would have repeatedly changed their own name trying to erase the smudge, but of course we didn't. Try to get a Jew to call himself something different. Same thing.

  Still, it probably wasn't the kid's fault that he was worthless. So when we were relieved to eat our supper—oatmeal and beer, but a lot of it—I sat down next to him.

  "Look, kid, I'm sorry about throwing you into the river. It's just that there are times when you should not argue."

  "That's okay, Sir Conrad. One gets used to insults following the muse."

  "Yes . . . well. Look, are those the only clothes you have?"

  "You see upon me all of my worldly possessions." He wore cheap red trousers and a thin yellow jacket with decorative buttons and worn-through elbows. He had a raggedy shirt that once might have been white. He had the tops of boots—the soles were almost completely gone—and a cap with a bent swan feather. He was as short as my other companions, but while they were thick, solid men, he was as skinny as a schoolgirl. He would have been an amusing sight if he had not been freezing to death.

  "Well, maybe I can loan you something." I dug out my spare underwear and socks. Shirt and trousers. Tennis shoes and poncho.

  "You'll probably swim in these, but they'll help keep you warm."

  "I thank you, Sir Conrad. But don't talk of swimming, as I have done enough of that this year."

  My clothes were a dozen sizes too big for him. He was awestruck by the elastic and zippers, and the buttonholes confused him.

  I was boggled. His jackets had buttons all over, but he had never seen a buttonhole. How could you have buttons with no buttonholes? Was I really in the thirteenth century, or was I living a wacky dream?

  My tennis shoes fit him perfectly. Did everybody back here have big feet?

  When I had him dressed, he didn't look like a clown anymore. He looked like a war orphan.

  We went back to our oars, and Tadaos said quietly to me, "Sir Conrad, you are too good for this world."

  "Oh, he's just a kid."

  "A kid who will rob you, given the chance."

  "We'll see. How long is my watch?"

  "Six hours; four hours to go. You have a full moon and a quiet river, so nothing much should happen; wake me if it does. Otherwise, wake me when the moon is high."

  Food and warmth had cheered the kid up, and soon he launched into a monologue about himself and life. His name was Roman Makowski. He was fairly well educated for the times and had attended the University of Paris.

  It seems that a student had been knifed and killed in a Paris alleyway and that the town council wouldn't do anything about it. The students, blaming the merchants, had rioted in protest and had apparently concentrated their attention on the wineshops and taverns. The town militia was called out, and the drinking and fighting spread. In the end, the king's guard had to enforce the peace. Two hundred students, including Roman, were jailed, and the university was shut down for a year.

  Roman's father, who had been scrimping hard to pay for his son's education, was not amused. He paid Roman's way out of jail and then disinherited and threw him out of the house.

  Roman was madly in love with three different girls without ever having touched one. He was wandering the world in search of Truth, and he hurt inside like a bag of broken glass. In short, he was a typical adolescent.

  Eventually, the boatman told him to shut up.

  Tadaos kept his bow and arrows in a rack near the stern oar. The bow was a huge thing, taller than the boatman and as big around as a golf ball. It took me a while to figure out what was odd about it.

  Tadaos was right-handed, and the arrow rest was on the right side rather than the normal left. The arrows were well made and over a meter long. I was more than a head taller than he was, and I could only pull an 82-centimeter arrow.

>   The next morning I saw him use the bow while I was on watch again, waiting for dinner. Two meals a day seemed to be standard for the thirteenth century, and I was used to eating a heavy breakfast. The boatman had a fishing line over the side, and I hoped we weren't waiting for that.

  "Quiet," Tadaos said in a stage whisper. He crept back to his bow while slipping a leather guard over his right thumb. He had the bow strung in an instant and fitted an arrow to the string.

  But instead of drawing the bowstring in the normal way, with the first three fingers of the right hand, he used his thumb. This gave him a remarkably long draw. He elevated the bow to fully thirty degrees and let fly.

  I had been so interested in his manner of shooting that it was a few seconds before I wondered what he was shooting at. We could be under attack! I looked out and saw nothing within reasonable range. Then suddenly a violent thrashing began in the bushes fully two hundred meters downstream by the water's edge.

  Tadaos motioned to us, and we pulled for the bank.

  "That's a remarkable bow," I said. "What kind is it?"

  "Strange question coming from an Englishman," Tadaos said. "It's an English longbow. I bought it from a wool merchant."

  After a little searching we found a ten-point buck with an arrow squarely in its skull. Incredible. I couldn't have made that shot with a rifle and telescopic sights!

  "Well, gentlemen," the boatman said, "I can now offer better fare than oatmeal. Let's get it aboard! Quickly, now!"

  Once we had manhandled the deer on board, I turned to Tadaos. "That was the finest shot that I have ever seen!"

  "Thank you, Sir Conrad, but there was a lot of luck in it. Now, with a little more luck, we'll be in fine shape."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Oh, the baron hereabouts is partial to his hunting. He hangs poachers when he can catch them."

  "Does he hang accessories to the crime as well?"

  "That depends on his mood." Tadaos's eyes were twinkling.

  The kid fainted.

  * * *

  I think that these people's shortness must have had a lot to do with vitamin deficiencies. They all craved that deer's internal organs. In the next three days, they ate everything in the animal but the eyeballs and the contents of the large intestine. When I asked for a steak rather than broiled lung, they thought I was crazy, but took me up on it. I also passed up the brain for some cutlets.