Maybe it was reasonable to him, but it wasn't so to us. We locked away our new dress uniforms, put on our old class B uniforms, and went out and got roaring drunk.
We had orders to report for duty at East Gate in two weeks. Sir Odon, Zbigniew, and Lezek elected to go home on their leave, but there wasn't time for Taurus, Fritz, and Kiejstut to do so. They had, however, heard wonderful things about the girls of Okoitz, and I suggested they accompany me home.
We rented two rooms at the newly enlarged Pink Dragon Inn for the four of us, and I left them in the taproom staring at the nearly naked waitresses while I visited my family.
It was not a joyous homecoming.
Most of my family was eager enough to see me, but my father would not say a word to me. He came in, stared at me for a moment, then turned around and walked out.
It hurt.
I visited twice more during my leave, but nothing changed. My mother, my sisters, and my brother all promised to try to talk to him, but none of it did any good.
My friends had a marvelous time at Okoitz, and by joining them, I mostly had a good time, too. The ladies of the cloth factory seemed to think that being a Knight of the Order of Radiant Warriors certainly made one a true knight, and that anyway, any man who walked around wearing eight pounds of solid gold had to be worth spending some time with!
We discovered also that music was almost as good an aphrodisiac as wealth, and our new-taught musical skills did us yeoman service in the cause of Eros.
Since it was winter, the cloth workers dressed warmly enough at the factory, and they wore a long, heavy cloak to go between the castle, where they all lived, the factory, where they all worked, and the Pink Dragon Inn, where they all played.
But all of the Pink Dragon Inns were kept very warm because of the outfits their waitresses wore. Or rather, the outfits they pretty much didn't wear, since it consisted of little beyond high-heeled shoes and a loincloth.
As a result of the competition at the inn, the cloth workers usually wore only a very short skirt, with nothing above it. It was a lovely style, and well appreciated by all of us men.
Suffice it to say that for two weeks not one of the four of us ever slept alone, and it looked for a while as if Fritz was going to get married, although that affair soon fell apart. We were all happy when we left for East Gate, and would have been happier still if our heads had not hurt so badly.
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.