Of course, the other half of the day was spent doing physical things, and it was as demanding as it had been before.
But even here, there were differences. For one thing, they finally issued us swords, and we spent at least an hour a day working out with them. The sword the army used was not the horseman's saber, but the long, straight infantryman's épée. It had very little in the way of a cutting edge and was primarily a thrusting weapon, but once you knew how to use it, you could even defeat a man in full armor. Once you were fast enough, and accurate enough, you could hit the cracks in his armor, his eyeslit, the places where one plate moved over another.
It was worn, not at the belt, but over the left shoulder. A leather tube was fastened to the epaulet to protect the forte section of the blade, and a long, thin knife sheath at the right buttock covered the tip. It came out quickly enough, although it took a bit of squirming (or a friend) to resheathe it.
Much time was spent studying unarmed combat, on the theory that a warrior was always a warrior, even if he was naked.
That, and they finally taught me how to swim.
Since there were many fewer people in Hell than there had been last winter, we ran the great obstacle course at least once a day. Last winter we were only able to get to it about once a week.
Lastly, there was much more emphasis on religion than before. If you didn't have a thorough grounding in Christianity before you went to Hell, you certainly got it there. This produced several problems for the men of my lance.
For reasons that I don't understand, throughout our first training session and the war that followed it, we had never talked much about religion among ourselves. Lezek, Fritz, Zbigniew, and I were all Roman Catholics, we had always lived where everybody was a Roman Catholic, and none of us had a clear idea about how anybody else could possibly be anything different.
We were surprised to discover that Taurus was a Greek Orthodox Christian. He'd been going to church with the rest of us because there wasn't one of his faith available, and he figured that it wouldn't do any harm.
Kiejstut was the quiet Lithuanian who spoke so little that it was easy to forget that he was there. It turned out that he wasn't a Christian at all!
He was some sort of pagan, and had been going to church with the rest of us because he was afraid of what we would do to him if we found out the truth! Once the truth came out, it took us, and the priest who was teaching the class, a long time to relieve him of his anxieties. It was only when I told him to relax, that we weren't going to eat him, that he finally did calm down.
Secretly, I believe he really was worried about being eaten! That either his tribe or some of those around his people actually did eat human beings. Or maybe his tribal shaman, or whatever they had, had told him Christians ate people, I don't know.
But when the priest asked him if he would like to take some extra study, and then be baptized a true Christian, he jumped at the chance.
Long before the school was over, we all went to his christening.
We learned one very sad piece of news in the fall of 1241. Captain Targ was missing and presumed dead.
His parents had a farm west of Sacz, near the Dunajec River, and with Lord Conrad's blessings he and his brother, a platoon leader from another company, had borrowed a pair of conventional army horses and ridden east to visit them and see to their safety.
And that was all we knew.
They were never seen again. A lance sent out to look for them found nothing except the farm, which had been burned out by the Mongols, apparently in the early spring. There was no sign of Captain Targ's family, either.
With both our captain and our platoon leader dead, my lance felt that it was orphaned.
When most of the course was over, we all underwent an ordeal and a blessing. Sir Odon was included with us, since he had not yet performed this ceremony. After a day of prayer and fasting, with our souls in a State of Grace, we walked barefoot across a big bed of glowing coals. We were not harmed, being protected by God.
The others were perhaps more impressed by this miracle than I was, but then they had not seen golden arrows come out of the sky to kill four Crossmen who would have harmed Lord Conrad.
Then we did a night's vigil, praying on a hilltop outside the Warrior's School, and in the morning we looked down on the fog in the valley below. Each of us saw a halo, great rays, or horns of light, around the shadow of his own head, but not around the heads of the others. We had been individually blessed by God and were all knighted, and made Knights of the Order of the Radiant Warriors!
The next day, we were issued the army's new full-dress red and white uniform. We were amazed at the amount of gold that one wore on it.
There was a big, heavy medallion on the front of the peaked hat, and a band of solid gold below it. On the jacket there were golden tabs on the collar, huge gold epaulets on the shoulders, and solid gold buttons. Over it, one wore a belt with a solid gold buckle from which hung a fancy dress saber with a solid gold hilt and handle, and a matching dress dagger with matching gold trim..
Pinned to the jacket there was a huge and glorious gold medal, as big as your hand, announcing that we were members of the Order of the Radiant Warriors, and two smaller gold medals, one for the Battle of the Vistula and one for the Battle of Sandomierz.
Personally, I thought we should have been given a medal for the really tough job that we did, cleaning up the bodies east of the Vistula, but that didn't happen.
We even had golden spurs, like the French knights are said to wear, although ours had a rowel at the back, rather than the cruel spike they used. Not that any of us had been on a horse even once during our entire time in the army.
All told, we were to walk around with over eight pounds of gold hanging about our persons! I was relieved to discover that it was customary to wear this finery only at very special ceremonies and to otherwise leave our decorations locked up in the company vault.
Of course, we all planned to wear it home, at least once, and on any occasion when it was desirable to impress the ladies.
Once, I had told myself that the gold we got from the Mongols would only mean we would wear more jewelry, but somehow in the course of things, I had forgotten my own prediction!
There was one major sour point in all of this, however. Despite the fact that we had been knighted as part of our induction into the Order of the Radiant Warriors, and despite the fact that we had golden spurs, as only knights wore in France, and despite the fact that we had completed a course of study that resulted in the knighting of everyone else who had taken it before us, despite all of this, we were still not officially knighted, not as far as the army was concerned.
Sir Odon was still just a knight, not a knight-banner, as he had assumed he would be, and each of the rest of us was only a squire, at four pence a day, rather than a knight at eight.
"They hang eight pounds of solid gold on each one of us and then they are too cheap to pay us another four pence a day?" Zbigniew said.
We complained, but we didn't get very far, since everybody else was complaining about the same thing.
"It's the new policy," the baron's executive officer said to an angry crowd of us. "The graduates before you were promoted to knight because they would be immediately each given a lance of men of their own to train. Back then the army had to expand very rapidly to be able to meet the Mongol threat. But until we finish the training of everybody who took the short course just before the war, we will not be adding very many new members to the army. It only stands to reason that promotion will be slower."