The cottages were hovels and the people were listless, lackadaisical, uncaring. You had the feeling that they thought that nothing they could do would improve things, that nothing really mattered. Most of them looked underfed.
In Poland, every man, even a sworn peasant, had the Right of Departure. If things got bad, he could sell out or abandon whatever property he owned and move elsewhere. It was a little like the bankruptcy laws of modem times. Well, around Sacz, anyone with any gumption had already left.
I decided that hunting was so important to Baron Przemysl because he was such a poor manager his lands and people would not produce enough to support him; wild game was the only thing that he had to eat, so he was hard on poachers.
Baron Przemysl was a grimy, gouty, disagreeable person. He produced a Tadaos much whiter and thinner than I remembered. Tadaos was speechless while the baron carefully, publicly counted the ransom money. He shook his head, blinked at the sunlight and rubbed the scabs where the shackles had been on his wrists. Having lived in his own filth for almost a month, he stank monumentally. I stayed upwind of him, but the baron didn’t seem to notice the smell.
Once the baron had finished his long, slow count, he turned and limped away without so much as a thank-you or an invitation to supper, and it was late in the day. I decided not to tell him how to cure his gout.
“You came! By God in Heaven, you came!” Tadaos yelled suddenly.
“Yes, I came. Now get on one of the mules and let’s get out of this pig’s sty.”
But once mounted up, he said, “My bow, Sir Conrad, do you think I could get my bow?”
Tadaos’s bow was an English longbow and pretty special. He was a fantastic shot with it, and I didn’t know how much of that was the man and how much was the equipment. The guard at the gate was a graybeard in rusty armor. After some argument, haggling, and suggestions of violence, he produced bow, quiver, and arrows for eight pence. A bargain, except that the equipment was Tadaos’s in the first place.
“And my boat. Sir Conrad, do you suppose that there is any chance of getting back my boat?” On this point the oldster was adamant. – None. The boat had been confiscated along with the cargo, and both had been sold.
“Then I am a boatman without a boat. What is to become of me?”
“I can tell you that,” I said. “You’re coming along with me. I’m not going to charge you for my traveling expenses and I’m not going to hold you responsible for all the trouble I’ve gotten into on this trip. But I just shelled out four thousand pence to save your neck and I’m going to get it back, somehow. You once hired me at three pence a day plus food. That’s what I’ll pay you until you work off your debt.”
“You’re a hard man, Sir Conrad.”
“Huh. That’s the first time anyone’s ever said that. Well, come along, gang. There’s one more stop to be made before we head home.”
I had been transported to the thirteenth century while sleeping in the basement of the Red Gate Inn. I didn’t know how that was accomplished but the answer just might be in that inn. In all events, I meant to go there.
Chapter Thirteen
We were fortunate to find a decent-enough inn that evening. They wouldn’t let Tadaos in until he had taken a bath, which I considered to be a good recommendation for the place.
The innkeeper set up a wooden tub in the courtyard, checking the wind with a wet thumb to be sure that Tadaos stayed downwind of the dining room. It was filled with hot water and Tadaos was tossed a bar of brown soap from beyond flea-jumping range.
He was ordered to strip and get in. A servant picked up his old clothes with a long stick and carried them off, the stick pointing carefully downwind, to be burnt. They changed the water three times before poor Tadaos passed muster and was permitted to rejoin humanity. Even then, he was probably aided by the fact that it was getting dark.
I also got a bill for washing down the mule Tadaos rode in on.
One of my outfits fitted Tadaos fairly well, with the cuffs and sleeves rolled up, but I wouldn’t let him cut it down permanently, not one of my nifty embroidered outfits!
“It’s just as well that Cousin Przemysl didn’t invite us in for supper,” Sir Vladimir said, “His table is terrible.”
I inquired of the innkeeper about the Red Gate Inn and was told that I shouldn’t go there. It had been struck by lightning and was inhabited by devils.
Slighting the competition a little was one thing, but that was ridiculous. When I pressed him further, he assured me that I could get there by staying on the trail we had arrived on. I couldn’t possibly miss the place, if I was fool enough to go there.
I couldn’t tell my friends why the trip was necessary, and Sir Vladimir was not happy with this extension to our vacation. He wanted to go back and play hero some more at Wawel Castle. Krystyana and Annastashia were solidly on his team. It got to be a nagging contest, three against one.
“Okay. Then don’t go to the Red Gate Inn. I’m not sure I wanted you along anyway. Stay right here tomorrow with the girls. I’ll take Anna and run up to the Red Gate Inn in the morning. She’s fast enough to make it there and back in a single day, where the whole party would take two days easy. Anyway, Anna has been acting like she wants a good run, and we can’t do that with you guys along.”
Sir Vladimir and the girls gave their grudging approval to the plan, and we called it a night.
The next morning I was saddling Anna when Sir Vladimir came over. “Sir Conrad, I spoke rashly last night. Let me accompany you today.”
“Thank you. Apology accepted. But if you go, the girls will insist on going and then with those stupid palfreys, we’d have to move at a crawl. Anyway, we can hardly leave them here unprotected. Anna and I won’t have any problems.”
“Still, I’d feel better if I went along. And let’s bring the ladies. There’s no need for undue haste.”
“Maybe I need a little time to myself. Anyway, I’m going alone. Don’t bother following, you know you can’t keep up.”
I’d left the horse barding and fancy clothes behind. This was a factfinding mission and the less attention I attracted, the better.
Anna went like the wind. She could travel as fast with a big armored man on her back as a thoroughbred racehorse can with a little jockey aboard. And she could keep up that speed all day, not for just a single mile.
It was an exhilarating joy to ride her across flat land and on mountainous trails it was stunt-flying and motorcycling and a carnival ride all in one. More than those, because we were closer to the ground than any stunt plane ever flew for long and no motorcycle could have maintained our speed over these trails. And on a carnival fide, deep down inside you really know that you are safe. This was reality!
We went for about an hour without passing anyone on the trail. Then we came to a pleasant brook with a nice bit of pasture and we stopped for a while. The cook at the inn had packed me a lunch. In the Middle Ages, it was customary to get up at dawn but eat your first meal at ten in the morning. Dawn, I could take, since without decent lights there wasn’t much sense to staying up late. But I’ve always eaten a big breakfast, and a year in this barbarous time still hadn’t changed my desire for that.
We ate. Anna was cropping the lush grass and keeping a sharp lookout.
“Anna, would you come over here, please?”
She trotted over.
“Anna, what’s two plus two? Tap it out with your foot.”
She tapped her foot four times.
There was once a famous German showhorse called Clever Hans that had everyone, including his trainer, convinced that he could do simple arithmetic. It wasn’t until many years later that a psychologist proved that Hans was reading the body language of the person asking him the question. He would start tapping his foot and as he started approaching the fight answer, his questioner would involuntarily stiffen up a bit. When he got to the fight answer, the trainer would relax a little and Hans would stop tapping his foot.
I had to know if Anna’s nodding and shaking her head in response to questions was the Clever Hans sort of thing, or if she really was an intelligent being in the guise of a horse.