Conrad's Quest for Rubber Read online

  Chapter Ten

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF JOSIP SOBIESKI

  WRITTEN JANUARY 26, 1249

  CONCERNING FEBRUARY 17, 1242

  THEY HAD a brand-new boat ready for us at East Gate, but the river was frozen over, and the boat wouldn't be going any­where for a while.

  With nothing better to do, we spent a day inspecting the remarkable "snowflake" fort there. The outer walls were of reinforced concrete, seven yards tall and thick enough to stop any siege engine. The inner walls, twenty yards high, were actually part of a huge, hexagonal building that housed an entire company along with all of their dependents, as many as fifteen hundred people. The complex contained a church, a school, an inn, and a machine shop. All this was crowned by a central tower fully four dozen yards tall.

  Properly manned, I did not see how any army could have possibly taken it. It had a reputation for invincibility, and that very reputation had been the cause of its downfall.

  It had fallen during the war, when Count Lambert's sister-in-law had usurped authority over the fort, then used it as a refuge for the noncombatant nobility only. To make room for all of them, she had evicted the female commoners trained to defend the fort, and had then let herself be tricked by the Mongols into opening the gates.

  Most of the men of the old nobility had fallen in battle, but their parents, their wives, and their children had been slaugh­tered here at East Gate. There were twenty thousand tomb­stones in the adjoining graveyard, but few of them bore a name. There was no one left alive to identify the dead children.

  New orders soon reached us, and we spent the next six weeks sawing down trees along the Bug River, preparing the way to put in a railroad.

  The Ruthenians were now allied with Poland, rather than with the Mongols, and the railroad would let our army get there as quickly as possible, to support them if or when the Mongols objected to the new arrangement.

  The work wasn't what we'd hoped for, but it was tempo­rary and somewhat interesting. I'd never done any outdoor work before, and climbing higher than a church steeple to cut the top off a huge pine tree certainly got your blood going! Evenings spent singing or playing our new musical instru­ments glow pleasantly in my memory like the coals of the fires we sat around.

  We worked five days a week and did military exercises on the sixth, which was the usual routine in the peacetime army.

  We came back to civilization rippling with new muscles, and the girls almost fought each other to get at us!

  When the ice broke up, we were back at East Gate, and soon we were back on the water again, riding the Spirit of St. Joseph II.

  Peacetime riverboats had a crew of only twenty-two, and even that many was because most of us were in training. Only two people on board really knew what they were doing, the captain and the engineer. The rest of us were there mostly to learn how to run one of these things. In the course of 1242,1 worked every single job on the boat, from helmsman to fire­man, plus ticket salesman, sanitary engineer, radio operator, waiter, cargo master, mail sorter, painter, repairman, purser, steward, and cook.

  The boat's captain was not the same thing as an army cap­tain. That is to say, the first was a job position and the second was a military rank. Our current captain was in fact a knight-banner, while our boat captain during the war had been Baron Tados.

  Our boat was a standard army riverboat, just like most of those we had seen the year before, although it wasn't a com­mand boat like the Muddling Through. We had two Halman Projectors, four peashooters, and mounts for six dozen swivel guns, although we carried only twelve of them on board.

  But despite our military capabilities, we were operating like a commercial common carrier. We had cargo space for six standard cargo containers, which were the same size as our war carts had been, six yards long, two yards wide, and a yard and a half high.

  The main difference between a cart and a container was that the containers weren't armored, and they were built much closer to the ground, being mounted on railroad trucks, rather than the huge, cross-country wheels we used on the carts.

  A container could snugly hold twenty-seven standard bar­rels. Or it could hold exactly six dozen standard cases, which were each a half yard wide and high and a yard long.

  Those cases were just the right height to make a comfort­able seat for two, or, upended, they were the right height to make a support for a workbench. Over the years, a lot of our cases ended up as furniture in peasant cottages, since the de­posit on them was only a penny each.

  We would take cargo that wasn't packed in our standard containers, cases, or barrels, but we charged a lot more to do it.

  The army was big on standardization. There were only eight diameters of nuts and bolts, for example, so that when something broke, it was easy to replace. Glass jars came in only six sizes, each about twice as big as the next one smaller.

  Each kind of jar was sized so a certain number of them fitted into a standard case, with no wasted space, and when you bought a quart of milk in Sandomierz, it was exactly the same size as a quart in Cracow. This was something new, since up to a few years ago, every city and town had its own sizes for everything.

  It once was necessary for a merchant to personally be on hand whenever he bought or sold anything. Now he could purchase a container of army-grade number-two wheat in Plock, and do it by mail or even by radio, if he was in a hurry. He could have it shipped to a purchaser in Gniezno, while all the time he stayed in Cracow, secure in knowing exactly what he had bought and sold.

  Many fortunes were made by those who were quick to learn the new ways of doing things. Those of us who worked on the rivers often indulged in this sort of trade whenever we noticed that the price of a given commodity in one place was much different than it was someplace else.

  For years we more than doubled our salaries doing this, but eventually some merchants in Poznan set up a service where they systematically queried some two dozen cities on the local prices of three dozen commodities and made this infor­mation available, for a price, to other merchants. After that, only modest profits could be made, since no one but a fool would pay much more than the Poznan price for anything.

  We carried passengers as well, with two dozen cabins on the second deck, for those who could afford them, and seats on the fighting top, for those who couldn't.

  We would cruise up and down the Vistula, and every five miles or so there would be a depot with a dock. If they had business for us, they ran some flags up their pole or some lanterns at night and, by a system of codes, we would know if they had something that we had room for, which we usually did. We heard about really important passengers and cargoes by radio.

  Evenings aboard, we sold beer and wine to passengers in the dining hall, earning a bit more money on the side, and I have always liked listening to travelers' tales, or hearing the songs they sang, or the tunes they played on strange, new in­struments. To get into a competition, pitting our skills on the recorder, lute, or krummhorn against theirs, was always a joy.

  It was a pleasant enough existence on the whole, because we stopped at all of the big cities along the way and there was always something new to see.

  My main claim to fame came when, annoyed at doing the laundry, I put the dirty clothes along with some soap in a leaky barrel that had all four bungs missing. I tied the barrel to the rear railing with a long rope and kicked it over the side.

  The barrel filled with water, then tossed and turned as it was pulled along, washing the clothes. Eventually, the soapy water was washed out and replaced with clean river water, and the clothes were rinsed.

  Two hours later I pulled the barrel on board, and the clothes were clean! Soon, every boat on the river was doing laundry that way, and they named the barrel after me. Now, whenever anybody on the river washes clothes, they get out their Josip Barrel.

  As the summer of 1242 came along, the army was preparing for another war, this time with the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital at Jerusalem, better known as
the Knights of the Cross, or just the Crossmen. It was to be a set-piece battle, with both sides agreeing on the time and place.

  Naturally, we wanted to get involved, but our pleas and petitions got us nowhere. Apparently, every outfit in the army wanted to go, and there were only ten thousand Crossmen who needed killing. That wasn't much more than a single one of our battalions.

  Also, it soon became obvious that Lord Conrad was plan­ning to try out some new weapons on the Germans. It was all kept very secret, but we hauled some monstrous cannons down to Turon, where the Crossmen were holed up, along with some big canisters of something so poisonous that everybody but the fireman was required to stay up on the fighting top when we had it in the hold.

  Lord Conrad and his liege lord, King Henryk, had invited "observers" from just about every Christian country in the world, and from a lot of those that weren't Christians, too.

  We carried passengers from Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Spain, and Scotland, and that was just on our boat alone. There were three dozen other boats involved in the business, as well.

  Mostly, it wasn't a war so much as it was a big political convention followed by an execution.

  We weren't there when they shot poison gas into the Crossmen's fort, but they say there wasn't much to see, anyway.

  We were by a few days later, after the big cannons had spent a few hours blowing down the brick walls, and again there wasn't anything to see. Where once there stood a fine, strong fortification, there was now only broken bricks and rubble.

  Most of our troops in that "battle" never even got to shoot at the enemy, and we boatmen were so busy transporting the visiting dignitaries back to where they'd come from that our soldiers had to walk home, just as they'd had to walk there.

  There wasn't any loot to speak of, either, and what there was didn't cover the cost of the war. Most of our knights got a trophy to hang on their walls, and that was about it. After fighting the Mongols, it was something of a comedown.

  That winter, which we again spent logging, we looked into the possibility of transferring our lance from the Transporta­tion and Communication Corps over to the Eagles, who built and flew all of the aircraft, but that proved to be impossible.

  We were already too old. They accepted only volunteers who had completed the Warrior's School and were fifteen or younger. An opportunity missed.

  The next spring, 1243, our lance was given its own boat, of a totally new, special-purpose design—an oil tanker.

  Oil wells had been drilled near Przemysl on the San River, and a refinery had been built on the Vistula, north of San­domierz. Ours was one of three boats designed to transport crude oil to the refinery, and refined oil in bulk wherever it was needed along the Vistula and its tributaries.

  Refined oil, in its various grades, was used in the new kerosene lamps, and as a replacement for coal on the steam­boats, where it eliminated the need for a fireman, and, mixed with wood alcohol, as a very energetic fuel for the aircraft. Other products, like asphalt roads, were being developed.

  The new boat's engines were the same as those we were used to, except they were oil-fired. The kitchen, mess hall, and living quarters were small, and the boat was only a single story high, plus the bridge, since there were only the seven of us on board. The rest of the boat was nothing but a collection of low-lying steel tanks, almost like a long, low barge that we pushed ahead of us.

  We joked that our boat was lean, low, stripped down, and topless, and that her name, The Lady of Okoitz, was therefore very appropriate.

  We had no mounted weapons at all, since we didn't have enough people to man them, and we were too flammable to put up a serious fight, anyway. Faced with an enemy, our or­ders were to run away.

  At first we were delighted to have our own boat and the re­sponsibilities it entailed, but eventually the job palled.

  For one thing, we now made far fewer stops in our travels, and those stops were invariably at industrial sites, which rarely had much going on except for the same work that they had been doing the last time we were there. We met fewer young ladies, and our love lives suffered.

  We no longer carried passengers, who had seemed to be a great bother back when we carried them. After they were gone, well, it had been a long while since I heard an enter­taining traveler's tale.

  Also, a bulk tanker was much more difficult to keep clean that an ordinary riverboat, and we not only had to spend long hours scrubbing it, but found ourselves being dirtier than we ever had been before. This, too, did not help out our love lives.

  Even our music was starting to get flat and stale.

  But most of all, our increase in responsibility was not matched with an increase in status and pay. We had all been mere squires for several years, and we often heard of the pro­motions of others with less seniority than we had. This was particularly painful for Sir Odon. We called him our captain, but in fact he was still a mere knight, and he desperately wanted to advance in the army.

  Also, there were no longer any opportunities to make addi­tional money on the side. No legal ones, anyway, and none of us were thieves.

  Suffice to say, after three and a half years on an oil tanker, we were all heartily sick of it!

  Thus, we were all most interested when, in August of 1246, Sir Odon found a new possibility of employment for our lance.

  The Construction Corps had been building a series of company-sized forts just like the one at East Gate, throwing them up at the astounding rate of one a week. They were built five miles apart all along the Vistula and now stretched along the west bank from the headwaters to the Baltic Sea. They were all part of an invincible defense against any future at­tack by the Mongols.

  A second group had begun putting forts of the same design along the east bank of the Odra, some said against a possible invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, who were rumored to be very angry at us for eliminating the Crossmen.

  The construction project was continuing and expanding, with plans to eventually put forts on both banks of every major river in Eastern Europe, but more important to us was what was being built at the mouth of the Vistula.

  Sir Odon said that a major seaport and shipyard was being constructed there, and the plans were to soon begin building oceangoing steamships.

  Were we interested in seeing if we could get involved with this new endeavor?

  Well, of course we were! Over the last few years, we had been up every tributary of the Vistula, and frankly, one river is much like another.

  But to travel the high seas! To explore, to boldly go where no Christian had gone before! We had been reading about how the world was really round, a great ball in the heavens. What would it be like to be on the first ship to steam around it? Glorious!

  We all got together in writing our application for transfer, carefully explaining why we were the best possible people to choose for this new endeavor. We wrote about how our lance had been working smoothly together for years without any of the friction that had disrupted so many other groups.

  We stressed that we had experience with various kinds of boats and had thus proved we could take on and master new things. We talked about our military prowess, of the battles we had fought under the watchful eyes of Lord Conrad himself.

  We wrote about all of the other skills we had, from baking bread, farming, and handling cattle, to living off the land in the trackless wilderness of Lithuania.

  We told our varied ethnic backgrounds and how among us we had speakers of Polish, German, Ukrainian, Latin (Fritz had been an altar boy), Pruthenian, and Lithuanian, so we would be able to communicate with the inhabitants of many different areas.

  We explained how we were all bachelors who could take long trips away from home without distressing any wives or children. We wrote and rewrote that application so many times that we were sure if they did not transfer us to the High Seas Battalion, they would at least have to give us an award for literature! Finally, we had Zbigniew write up the fair copy, since he had the best handwriti
ng in the group.

  Then we faced the problem of just who we should send this application to. Normally, when one wished to transfer, one applied to the personnel department of the battalion or corps involved. But in this case, as far as we knew, the organization we wished to join did not yet exist.

  "If it is new, you just know that Lord Conrad will be in­volved with it," Sir Odon said. "He likes being in on the be­ginning of things. You know him personally, don't you, Josip?"

  I had to admit I did, that I had been a boy at Okoitz when he first arrived in Poland. However, I had to stress that our last meeting had been less than pleasant, and I quite possibly had been responsible for putting Lord Conrad's eye out or at least causing him to lose the use of that eye.

  "I read in the news that he regained his sight in that eye years ago," Kiejstut said. "Anyway, Lord Conrad is not the kind of a man who would hold a grudge over a little accident like that."

  I said losing an eye was not a "little accident," and that I was still apprehensive about writing to so high a personage.

  Sir Odon said, "Nonsense, Josip. The worst that, can happen is that if he is still mad at you, he will throw the letter away without reading it, so the thing for us to do is to make up two copies, one to Lord Conrad with your name on the re­turn address, and one to Baron Tados, who I heard was being considered for heading the ocean steamship command, with my name on it instead of yours."

  "I heard that it was to be Baron Piotr, of the Mapmakers," Lezek said.

  "Then we'll send him a copy of our application, too," Sir Odon said.

  In the end, we sent off nine separate copies to nine dif­ferent army leaders.

  And then we waited for a reply.

  And waited.

  Chapter Eleven

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  JANUARY 4, 1246

  ONE OF the better things to happen to me when I was in school was that my father bought me a loose-leaf binder that had a full color map of the world printed around the outside cover, and a map of Poland on the inside front.