Frankowski, Leo - Stargard 6 - Conrad's Quest for Rubber

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CONRAD'S
QUEST FOR
RUBBER
Book Six of The Adventures of Conrad Stargard
Leo Frankowski
A Del Rey® Book
THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP • NEW YORK
Prologue
From the Diary of Conrad Stargard
FEBRUARY 10, 1246
WE DESTROYED the Teutonic Order four years ago, and since then things have gone remarkably
smoothly, especially when you compare them to the first ten years that I spent in this brutal century.
It wasn't easy to survive after I was accidentally shipped here from the twentieth century. I had to
prepare Poland for an invasion by the Mongol Empire, and then I had to direct the war after we were
invaded.
There were some tight spots, but we managed to win.
Now we are at peace. For the first time in a century, Poland is united, from the Baltic Sea to the
Carpathian Mountains, and from the Odra River to the Pripet Marshes. What's more, it had all been done
peacefully, voluntarily, and even eagerly, once the kings, dukes, and princes saw what my cannons
could do. Furthermore, Poland, Ruthenia, Hungary, and Bulgaria have joined together to form the
Federation of Christianity.
Our school system is being extended throughout Eastern Europe, as is our system of railroads, our
uniform system of measurements, and our uniform coinage.
We've seen interesting times, but thank God they are over. I haven't had to kill anyone in over three
years, and it feels good.
Sitting in my leather chair behind my nicely carved desk, I could see by the numbers before me that
the factories were running at full capacity, the army was expanding at an optimal rate, and our
concrete castle-building program was right on schedule.
Sweet success.
As I sat patting myself on the back, a young woman, one I didn't recognize, walked into my office.
She had huge green eyes, flaming red hair, and a full set of matching freckles. None of my wives,
friends, or current servants had such stunning coloration.
Without saying a word, she stamped the snow from her felt boots, shook the melted drops from her
heavy, fur-lined cloak, and hung it up on a wooden peg near the door.
"Excuse me? Should I know you?" I asked.
"Probably not, your grace, but we have met." She spoke Polish with a Hungarian accent. She took
off her felt overshoes, and then her slippers, and set them all neatly against the wall under her cloak.
"You are not being very helpful."
"Your grace, I hope to be very helpful," she said as she took off her belt. She rolled it up and put it
in one of her boots, then started unlacing the front of her white woolen dress.
"This must be somebody's idea of a joke," I said. "You have to be a prostitute hired by someone
from accounting."
"I am not a prostitute, and nobody hired me," she said as she dropped her dress to the floor. She
stepped naked out of it. She was obviously still in her early teens, but she had little of the baby fat that
so many girls her age are afflicted with. Instead, she was blessed with the firm, trim body of an athletic
woman of about five years older. Not to mention remarkably large, firm breasts. Or the dusting of
freckles all over everything. I tried not to let my normal male reactions show, and was glad of the
desk in front of me.
She hung the dress on another peg before continuing. "In fact, I'm still a virgin, and people have
told me that I am an attractive one."
"Your face and body are more than adequate, but your character is very much in question," I
said as coldly as I could manage. "I am not a teenage boy who becomes irrational at the sight of a
few square yards of female skin. I want to know why you think you can get away with
approaching me so boldly, and I want to know your name."
My hopefully stern admonition had no apparent effect on the girl. She came around my desk
and sat on my lap. She gave me an inexpert kiss, with her lips too hard.
"My lord, I have the right to be bold with you because you are my proper liege lord. You rescued
me at a tender age from death, outlaws, and a winter blizzard. It is only proper that you should
now enjoy the flower of my maidenhood."
The whole situation had me stunned, flabbergasted, and thoroughly confused. Especially that
last statement.
"I still don't understand. What is your name?"
She kissed me again in the same inexperienced fashion. Part of me wanted to explain to her
the proper way of doing things, but most of me didn't want to change the subject.
"My name is the one you gave me when you christened me in a snowy woods. I'm Ignacy. You
really must remember me now."
Ignacy! Now I remembered. While escorting a merchant through the forests east of here—
what, fourteen years ago?—we were attacked by a highwayman with a black eagle on his shield.
Defending ourselves, we killed him and his henchmen, and my mount accidentally trampled a
young woman in the process.
Later, I'd found a baby in the outlaw's camp. I christened it in case it didn't survive the rest of
the wintry trip to shelter and brought it with me to Count Lambert's castle, here at Okoitz.
Only then did I find out that I had christened a girl with a boy's name.
And this was what that tiny bundle had grown into?
"I remember now. I also recall that you were adopted into a peasant family, that your new father soon
died, and that your stepmother then married a blacksmith."
"Yes, your grace. She told me that his name was Ilya, and that Count Lambert had forced them to
marry. They never did like each other, and she eventually ran away to Hungary with another blacksmith
more to her liking."
"Remember that I was there at the time. She was not actually forced to marry Ilya, although
Lambert was generally too persuasive by half," I said. "None of which explains why you are sitting
naked on my lap."
"This is Okoitz, isn't it? And the custom here is for a maiden to be taken first by her lord, isn't
it?" She kissed me yet again and managed to wiggle herself around such that she was straddling me as I
sat upright in my chair. Her body and breasts were pressed tightly against me, and my resolve to treat
this event as an annoyance was weakening.
"It was Lambert's custom to bounce every peasant girl within arm's reach, if that's what you are
referring to. But Lambert has been dead for five years, and you are not a local peasant girl. You were
raised in Hungary, judging from your accent. And thinking about it, I believe that you are legally still
the daughter of Ilya the blacksmith, who has since become Baron Ilya. You and he are thus both
members of the nobility, not the peasantry."
I was wearing an old embroidered velvet outfit rather than one of my usual military uniforms. The
almost annoying young lady was busily undoing the strings on my codpiece.
She said, "You are trying to wiggle out of this on a legal technicality, and I won't have it! Ilya isn't
my father. My father was the highwayman Sir Rheinburg, and you killed him!"
"If Sir Rheinburg was your father, and if he legally married your mother, then you are a member of
the German nobility and not a peasant. However, it is by no means certain that he was your father.
Rheinburg had two men-at-arms with him, and either of them could have been married to the
woman who was killed. Or there may possibly have been a fourth man involved somehow. We don't
know. What we do know is that your mother and probably your biological father were dead, that you
were adopted, albeit informally, into a family, and that later your stepmother legally married Ilya. She
never divorced Ilya, even if she left him for another man. No, there's no way around it. You are stuck
with being a baroness, and you are not acting like one."
It took me a while to say that, since while I was talking, she had continued with her program of
kissing and disrobing me.
"I've been planning for this day for years, and you're not going to talk me out of it!"
The conversation continued for a while longer, but there is a limit as to how long any normal man
can stay firm in his noble intentions. I bowed to the inevitable before I committed the sin of Onan.
Much later, as she was leaving, I said, "Well, Baroness, I still think that you should go and at least
meet your father. He's stationed at Three Walls, a half day's ride south of here."
"I'll think about it, your grace."
And then she left without asking my leave and without saying a good-bye, much less a thank-you.
Baron Piotr was just approaching my office door as the disheveled girl walked away.
"What was that all about, your grace? I'm sure that I've never seen her before."
"I'm not really sure, but I think I was just raped."
He pondered that a bit before answering. "Remarkable. Still, she doesn't seem to have caused
you any permanent damage, sir. What disturbs me is that a total stranger could enter your castle
and make it all the way to your inner sanctum without being stopped or even identified.
"You know, your grace, I think we are getting entirely too lax about security around here. What if
she had had different designs on your body? Putting some extra holes in it, for example. What then? I
notice that you aren't even wearing your sword."
"Hmm. Yes, you're right. I must have left it somewhere."
"I noticed that you weren't wearing it at lunch, either. Your grace, you must remember that you aren't
just a backwoods knight anymore. You have become one of the most important men in the world.
There are people who feel that they have good reason to hate you, and men in your position have been
assassinated for reasons that no one has ever figured out. The death of Duke Henryk the Bearded is a
recent example."
"Okay, okay, I'll make a point of always wearing my sword from now on. Enough said."
"No, not quite enough, your grace. You need a bodyguard, or better yet, a number of bodyguards
such that there are always at least two of them awake and on hand at all times."
"Piotr, that would be a royal pain in the butt, and I am not royal enough to have to put up with it. I
won't do it. Also, I am not at all sure that bodyguards make a man any safer. They make him stand
out when there is safety in anonymity. And bear in mind, the Duke Henryk you mention was mur-
dered by one of his own bodyguards. So was Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great's father."
"You have very little chance at anonymity, your grace, being at least a head taller than anyone else
in the city. As to the rest, I expect that guards have saved a hundred rulers for every one they have
killed."
"Piotr, the only really nice thing about being a 'ruler' is that you get to do what you want. I want no
bodyguards."
"Yes, your grace."
Chapter One
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 15, 1249, CONCERNING MY CHILDHOOD
MY NAME is Josip Sobieski. I find myself sitting in a cave just south of the Arctic Circle, with nothing
to do for the next three months. In hindsight, this will doubtless seem a wonderful adventure,
especially to someone who has never been here. Presently, I find it to be a deadly bore. To while
away the hours, I have resolved to record the events of my life. I expect that future readers, if any, will
find my experiences a fruitful example of what not to do with the only life God has given them.
In 1230, when I was five years old, my father became a baker at Count Lambert's castle town of
Okoitz. Thus, I had the rare privilege of being personally on hand at the beginning of what was to
become the most remarkable story of our age.
Lord Conrad came to our town on Christmas Eve, in 1231, although he was called Sir Conrad then. I
first became aware of him when I saw him sitting at the high table during a feast. It would have been
hard to miss him, since even seated he was a head taller than Count Lambert, who was himself a
very big man.
He was the talk of the town, having fought and defeated the evil Sir Rheinburg and all his men,
killing each with just a single blow. With the other boys, I watched while four suits of chain-mail
armor were taken to the blacksmith's for repair, so we knew that every word of the story was true.
He was a strange man, much different from the other knights and noblemen who made life at
Okoitz interesting. For one thing, he was always making something, either showing the men how to
build the mills and factories that Okoitz soon became famous for, or carving some toy for the boys of
the town, or sometimes even things for the girls. With his own hands he carved me a spinning top
that, once you learned how to do it, would flip over and spin for a time upside down! I still have that
toy and keep it as a treasure, although I've never been able to figure out exactly why it works.
For another, he took little pleasure in the usual knightly enjoyments. Once, when Sir Stefan brought in
a bear, for baiting, Sir Conrad didn't even know what bearbaiting was. Once he found out, he was
furious, calling the sport cruel. Rather than let the bear be torn apart by the castle dogs, he killed it
himself, with a single stroke of his mighty blade, and he cried while he did it. And then he fought Sir
Stefan over the matter, and I think he might have killed that knight had Count Lambert not intervened.
Sir Conrad didn't like cockfighting either, and soon the peasants at Okoitz stopped doing it,
rather than risk offending him. .
While all of the other adults considered small boys to be little more than nuisances, to be ignored at
best and spanked at worst, Sir Conrad seemed to like us, to actually enjoy our company. He almost
always had time to stop and explain things to us, to tell us some of the thousands of stories he knew,
and to teach us our numbers.
Furthermore, he paid our priest, Father Thomas, to teach us to read and write, every weekday
morning during the winter.
The fathers of most of the boys were peasants, farmers who had little to do during the winter, so
having their boys in school was no hardship for them. My father was a baker, and bakers must work
hard almost every day of the year. If they wish to take even Sunday off, they must work twice as hard
on Saturday, or the people of the town would go hungry without bread. Even then, someone was
needed at the bakery to keep the fires going, since most of the people brought their meals in a pot to our
ovens for cooking.
This meant that my help was needed every day in my father's bakery, for children naturally help
their parents at their work. My parents had six children, and my father felt that the boys, at least,
should go to school.
My older brother and I felt guilty about sitting in school while the rest of the family had to work
longer hours. We would have preferred working, but our father's word was law.
Every afternoon, when we all worked together after school, he always questioned us minutely
about everything that was said in class. At the time, we thought that he did this to assure himself that
we were not wasting the time spent there, but much later we realized that this was his method of
absorbing the new learning for himself and for his wife and daughters. Since we boys were
responsible for repeating to him every single word that was spoken in class, we did not dare be
inattentive.
Both Father Thomas and Sir Conrad praised our diligence. They should have praised our father.
As interesting as Sir Conrad was, his horse received even more attention, from us boys, at least.
Anna was a huge animal, even bigger than Count Lambert's favorite charger. But while Whitefoot
was dangerous to be near, ever eager to nip off an ear or to crush a rib cage, Anna was the most
gentle of creatures, provided that you treated her politely.
Well, she kicked Iwo's father when he whipped her to get her back into her stall after Anna left it to
relieve herself outside. Anna was very clean in her habits, and never soiled her stall.
He did not hit her hard, and with most animals of that size you have to hit them just to get their
attention. With Anna, on the other hand, all you had to do was ask her, and she was happy to do just
about anything for you. And to be fair, she didn't kick the man very hard, for he lived and was able to
go back to work in a few days.
Later, when we asked her about the incident, she said that she had objected to being sworn at as
much as being struck, and that in any event, it wasn't polite to interrupt a lady while she was attending
to private matters.
You see, we boys soon discovered that Anna could understand the language perfectly, and although
of course she couldn't speak it, she would nod or shake her head to answer yes or no to any question
asked her. It sometimes required a lot of questions to get the whole story out of her, but that was
generally our fault and not hers.
She was as intelligent as any of us boys, and we considered her to be much smarter than most of the
grown-ups around.
Also, like her owner, Anna seemed to positively like children. I think that much of it was because
grown-ups think they are much too busy to bother taking the time a conversation with Anna
necessarily took, assuming all the while that they were among the minority who believed what we
told them about her. We children were delighted that someone as big as her would take the time to
fully answer us.
And, perhaps, we really did have more spare time than the older people did.
We soon learned that she was a good friend to have. Whenever a grown-up was spanking a child, or
even shouting at one in public, Anna would walk over and stare at the adult doing the spanking or
shouting. She never made a sound or actually did anything. She just stood close by and stared at
them, and that was generally enough. Having this huge animal stare at you was very intimidating,
and any urge to chastise the less fortunate soon evaporated.
We boys speculated that if someone tried to do actual harm to one of the children of the town,
Anna's response would have been more active and indeed deadly. Since no one in memory had ever
been that evil, we were never able to confirm our suspicions.
Still, we were glad she was there.
Some of the peasants complained to Count Lambert about this habit of hers, saying it was unholy,
but Lambert just laughed at them. He said that everything with eyes has to look at something, and
that "something" is usually the last thing that moved. If being looked at troubled the peasants, the
cause of it must be their own guilty consciences. He said that they were well-advised to seek out the
priest and go to confession!
In all events, my parents were never forced to endure Anna's staring, since to my memory they
never had to severely chastise any of their children, and in turn, none of us ever wanted to displease
them.
Simply put, they were good parents, and we were good children. I think this made us unusual.
At the time, our cheerful obedience seemed quite ordinary to my brother and sisters and me, and I
occasionally questioned other friends of mine as to why they wanted to get into the various sorts of
mischief they always seemed to be involved with. They could never satisfactorily explain their
motivations to me, nor, in truth, could I explain mine to them. To anger my father seemed as silly to
me as eating dirt. I simply had no desire to do such a thing.
Strange to say, one of the boys in the town, Iwo, actually did just that, once. He went into the
bailey, sat down on the ground, and proceeded to eat dirt for no obvious or conceivable reason. His
father was angry and spanked him. On this occasion, Anna was tardy in going over to stare. She was
as mystified as the rest of us.
But my story is not about Iwo, and he came to a bad end, anyway. A few years later he ran away,
and somebody eventually said that he was hung in Gniezno, although they didn't know why.
Sir Conrad left in the spring with Anna and some girls. (A boy of seven generally has little interest in
girls, except, perhaps, for occasional target practice.) He went to build the city of Three Walls on the
land that Count Lambert had given him, and we were all sad to see both of them leave. They returned
for a few days almost every month, and over the years, Anna saved many a boy from the beatings that
most of them undoubtedly deserved.
A different kind of beating happened during the first Christmas after Sir Conrad left us. I remember
it clearly with all of my childish impressions still attached.
The story circulated that Sir Conrad found a caravan bound for Constantinople that was owned
and guarded by the Teutonic Knights of the Cross. He found a gross of pagan children that the
Crossmen were planning to sell to Jews and Moslems, who must have been terrible people, we
imagined, although we had never met one. We children understood that something bad would then
happen to the young slaves, but no one would tell us exactly what that bad thing was.
Conrad beat up the Crossmen guarding the caravan and saved the children, because he was a hero.
Then he took them back to his city, gave them to good families, taught them how to speak, and made
them into good Christians, people said.
The Crossmen didn't like him doing all this, so they came to Okoitz, a thousand of them, and Sir
Conrad came here, too, for a trial by combat. It seemed to me that everybody else in the world came as
well, and all of them needed bread to eat, so we bakers hardly had time to sleep at all. Whenever I
looked outside the bakery, which wasn't very often, all I could see was that everything was packed
solid with people. My whole family had to sleep in the bakery, since Count Lambert had lent our
house out to a bunch of other people we didn't even know.
There was a kind of festival going on then at Okoitz, not that I got to see much of it. But when the
trial by combat between Sir Conrad and the bad guy happened, well, my father made sure we closed
the bakery in time for all of us to go and see it.
Sir Conrad and Anna beat up the bad guy and chopped his head off. They chopped his horse's head
off, too, because it was crippled.
Then a bunch of the other Crossmen went out to kill Sir Conrad, when that wasn't allowed, and
God made a miracle happen! Golden arrows came down from the sky and killed every one of them in
the heart! I was there and I saw it myself, and so did two bishops and the duke and everybody else.
They say that after that, nobody ever tried to bother Sir Conrad again. No Christians, anyway.
The town of Okoitz was constantly changing, all through my childhood. From the time we first
got there, when our town was nothing at all except a clearing at the side of the road that went from
the Vistula to the Odra, something was always being constructed.
My father's bakery was almost the first thing built, since people need to eat before anything else can
happen. Then the outer wall was built, with the houses and stables each side by side against it, and the
blockhouses at the four corners. Then the church and Lambert's castle went up, and most people seemed
to be happy with the thought that the job was finally done.
That was when Sir Conrad arrived, and all the men of the town were soon out chopping down trees
with which to build a huge windmill, the likes of which no one but Sir Conrad had ever seen. A big
cloth factory went up, and a lot of girls came to work there, and then they made a second huge
windmill, until everyone said that if they kept on building, there wouldn't be any room left in the
town for the people!
But soon they started on Lambert's new castle, which when completed turned out to be three
times bigger than the whole rest of the town, and much taller, besides, so they had to make it outside
of the walls themselves. It was four years in the making, and long before it was done, my family and
even the bakery was moved inside it.
All of this civic growth was good for my father's business. He was forced to take on apprentices and
even journeymen from outside of our family to satisfy the needs of his growing number of customers.
When a second baker came to town with Count Lambert's permission, my father wasn't worried
about the competition, but instead they immediately formed a guild in the manner of the big city guilds,
to do proper charity work and see to it that there was employment and plenty for all.
With father now a guildmaster, our family prospered. My sisters began to receive substantial
dowries when they were married. My brother and I soon realized that one day there would be a
considerable inheritance for us and a respected place in the community. He liked the thought of all
this, but I was of mixed mind about it.
Oh, I was pleased that my family prospered, but it was obvious that to do well, a baker had to stay in
one place. All of my life, the interesting people I saw and occasionally was able to meet were those
who traveled, who went to strange places and saw strange things. I heard magic, faraway names like
Cracow and Paris and Sandomierz, and I wanted to see these mystical places. I yearned to go with
those far travelers, to join with the caravans of merchants, soldiers, and priests who were always
coming and going from our gates.
I wanted adventure.
And my father, whom I loved and wanted to obey, would not even discuss the matter. We were
bakers, we always had been bakers, and we would always be bakers. Nothing more could be said.
Chapter Two
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 17, 1249, CONCERNING OCTOBER 10, 1240
IN THE fall of 1240, the call went out. It was time to prepare for war. Together with my brother and
my father, and the last fifty-five other sound men from Okoitz, I made the day-long walk to Baron
Conrad's Warrior's School, commonly known as Hell.
I had long wanted to make the trip. All of the other boys of my age from Okoitz had joined the army
the year before, as soon as they turned fourteen. Their letters to me bragged about how they would be
knighted by the time I got there and how I would have to serve under them, do their bidding, and
polish their boots!
I had begged my father's permission to go with them when they were leaving, and my brother had
been begging for two years, but while father had always been so generous with us in so many ways, on
this subject he was absolutely unshakable.
We were a family of bakers, he said, not warriors. We fed people. We did not kill them. In time of
war, if our country and our liege lord needed our help, we would of course go, but only when we were
absolutely needed.
Ironically, my mother and sisters had been issued weapons and armor over two years before, and
they trained for one day of every week to defend Okoitz when we men finally went out to face the
enemy.
To me, it had seemed strange and unfitting that my youngest sister, only two years older than me,
should be war-trained when I was not, or that my mother should wear a sword over her broad left
shoulder when my father had none, but there it was.
My father was a man of peace, and in the family, he ruled. He had kept us at our normal work for as
long as possible, but now Mother ran the bakery with the help of my sisters and a dozen other women,
and we men walked away through the first snow of the year to answer the call.
We men were all in our oldest, shabbiest clothing, for we had been warned that we would be
issued uniform clothes, and that anything we had with us would be thrown away. The women were
dressed in their best to see us off, and the difference in clothing was somehow unsettling.
All of us, the men as well as the women, were soon crying at the shock of this first sundering of our
family. My people had never before been parted for more than a few hours, and now we would be
separated for months even if all went well.
If it didn't, we might never meet again.
Strangeness, the seeing of new things, the hearing of new sounds, the sampling of new smells, does
odd things to one's sense of time. A day spent in the bakery, doing the same things I had done on
countless other days, went by in a seeming moment. A year spent in mixing dough, baking it, and
selling bread seemed to go by even faster.
That first day away from home—walking over a trail I had heard about all of my life but never seen,
except for the few hundred yards of it visible from the gates of Okoitz—took forever.
Even years later I can remember with crystal clarity the shape of bare oak branches, the flecks of
rust on the railroad tracks we walked beside, the squish of wet snow beneath my sodden birchbark
shoes.
I can close my eyes and see the white clouds forming from my breath, smell the tang of fresh-cut
pine trees, and feel the cold breeze against my back. Yet of my father's old bakery, where I had
worked for years, I find I can remember very little.
An odd thing, memory.
A long walk has healing powers, I was convinced of it, even though I had never been out of sight
of my hometown before. Not accustomed to hours of walking, I was sore and tired, yet I felt less
lonely and depressed by the time we arrived at the Warrior's School.
A friendly guard at the gate directed us to the Induction Center, where they gave us a meal,
warned us a bit about what to expect, and found us a place to sleep for the night. In the morning they
had us line up and raise our right hands to the rising sun. They led us through the army oath:
"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the army. I will obey the Warrior's
Code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight.
'The Warrior's Code:
"A Warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent. Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly. Obedient,
Cheerful, and Efficient. Brave, Clean, and Deadly."
We were told that we would be repeating that oath every morning for the rest of our lives. My father
said nothing, yet I could see a bit of doubt in his eyes.
I had heard all sorts of descriptions of the Warrior's School, but none of them prepared me for
the unbelievable number of people we found there, or for the organized confusion that prevailed.
People in apparent authority were constantly shouting incomprehensible things at us, talking so
quickly, in so many strange accents, about such unfamiliar things, that it seemed almost as though
they spoke some foreign language. When they did say something simple, something we could
understand, it was such a rare event that we did not at first react to it, and then the shouting got only
louder and longer.
We spent two days standing in long lines, something none of us had ever done before, interspersed
with numerous embarrassing interruptions as we were washed, shaved, deloused, fed, inspected by a
half-dozen medical people, and, finally, after being naked for an entire day in a huge, cold building,
issued uniform clothing.
We were a vastly changed group when at last we were counted off, assigned to our companies, and
taken to our permanent barracks.
As it happened, my position in the line was such that I was the last man in one company and my
father was the first in the next. My father shouted protests at this separation of his family, but the
captain in charge was too tired and harried to pay any attention to him.
I felt a twinge of both panic and anguish at being thus separated from my father and brother, since in
the course of our induction we had somehow parted company from all of the others who had come
with us from Okoitz. Indeed, it was the first time I had ever been separated from my male relatives.
For the first time in my entire life, I was friendless.
I was dazed and confused as I obeyed the shouting captain, and walked away at the end of the line.
Everything was so strange, so different from anything I had ever seen before.
For all of my life up to that point, for as long as I could remember, I had always been surrounded
by people that I knew. An unfamiliar face had been a rare thing, a person from some distant land
whole miles away from where things had such a comforting familiarity.
Now, as 1 looked around, I could see not one single person I knew. We had walked a long way
through this weird place,with many twists and turns, and I was soon lost. I didn't know where I was. I
didn't even know why I was.
We stopped in front of a building that seemed to stretch out to the horizon in both directions, a mile
long, at least. The captain told us his name was Stashu Targ, and that we were the Third Company of
the Second Komand of the First River-boat Battalion. I promptly forgot everything he had said. He
摘要：

CONRAD'SQUESTFORRUBBERBookSixofTheAdventuresofConradStargardLeoFrankowskiADelRey®BookTHEBALLANTINEPUBLISHINGGROUP•NEWYORKPrologueFromtheDiaryofConradStargardFEBRUARY10,1246WEDESTROYEDtheTeutonicOrderfouryearsago,andsincethenthingshavegoneremarkablysmoothly,especiallywhenyoucomparethemtothefirsttenye...

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