"Yes, I suppose you're right. Thank you for your help."
"I did nothing, your grace. You owe your life to your wife, the Duchess Francine, and she isn't around here all that often to protect you," he said.
"True enough. Why don't you make up that list you mentioned and make sure that the guards know everybody on it by sight."
"Yes, your grace. And the bodyguards?"
"Let me think about that."
"Don't think about it too long, your grace."
Chapter Twelve
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 26, 1249, CONCERNING SEPTEMBER 18, 1246
ONE EVENING a month later, Lezek was playing his flute, and the rest of us were drinking beer. Our boat was waiting its turn in line to be filled up with number two kerosene when Sir Odon came into the boat's mess hall with a vast grin on his face while holding up an official-looking letter.
"Ahem! 'To Sir Odon Stepanski, Master of the Tanker Boat The Lady of Okoitz, Vistula Patrol, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth.
" 'You are requested and required to report with your lance of men to the offices of Lord Conrad, Okoitz, at the first hour after sunrise, on Monday, the fifth of October, 1246, to discuss with him your application to the Explorer's Corps, currently being formed.
" 'Please be advised that your services will be required here for at least one week for further consultation and testing. Report with full kit. Leave your boat at East Gate without resigning your present command, since your group's appointment to the new corps has not yet been confirmed.
" 'Yours most truly, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth,' and it's signed by Lord Conrad himself!"
We all stood up and applauded, but then Lezek said, "But what's this about the 'Explorer's Corps'? That doesn't sound like what they'd call a steamship command."
"Whatever it is, it has to be better than hauling oil around the Vistula from one smelly place to another," Sir Odon said, and we all drank to that.
"True," Zbigniew said, "but what did you make of that business about showing up in 'full kit'? Do they mean 'full kit' like they did in basic training?"
"What else could they mean?" Taurus said.
"Then I have some problems. We haven't needed most of that stuff for years, and as for my equipment, what isn't missing is pretty shabby," Zbigniew said.
I told him that he wasn't alone, and the party broke up as we all went back to our rooms to inventory our equipment. When I got back to the mess hall, Sir Odon was sitting in front of a stack of requisition forms, telling Zbigniew what to fill out, and Kiejstut was on the front deck, waving the boats behind us in line to go around. We had no time to bother with number two kerosene. We had other things to do tonight!
We never found out just what Sir Odon said to the supply captain to get such good service, but three days later it took us three trips to the warehouse to pick up all of the new equipment.
Then it took us three and a half days to polish, sharpen, iron, fit, adjust, wax, and otherwise make usable and presentable all of our new stuff.
The armor was the hardest part, since after we put our plates into the new coveralls, we found that we were in much different shape than we had been. Mostly, we were thicker in the waist and narrower in the shoulder.
Three and a half years of working on an oil tanker had put us all in very poor shape. Besides getting generally dirtier as each year dragged by, we couldn't usually stop the boat while we did the prescribed one day a week of military exercises. We had been getting by with sporadically fencing with practice swords and occasionally doing a few jumping jacks on the foredeck.
Furthermore, the last few winters had been unusually warm, and the rivers had never frozen over. Because of this, we had spent them delivering oil rather than chopping down trees, a far more vigorous pastime.
Sir Odon vowed that we would do something about it! He cut our rations in half, took beer off our menu, and led us in four hours of vigorous exercise a day.
Annoying, but it was needed. There had been that line in the letter about a week of "consultation and testing," and none of us thought that Lord Conrad was going to ask us about how he should run the army. We had better be in shape for whatever they threw at us!
We had two weeks before our appointment, and we spent them getting in the best shape that we could. Then, in new, freshly ironed class A uniforms, with brightly polished shoes and hat brims, we were promptly on time for our meeting with Lord Conrad.
He was an hour late, but that is to be expected when dealing with so important an individual. Eventually, he invited us into his office and courteously bade us to be seated.
"Sorry about being late, gentlemen, but there was a problem at Szczecin that had to be taken care of first. Now then," Lord Conrad said as he opened a folder and took out all nine of the applications we had sent in, along with copies of each of our service records. "You seem to be very eager to leave the Vistula Patrol."
"In truth, sir, we are eager to do something a little more adventurous than delivering oil to oil depots," Sir Odon said. "Also, it would be nice to work someplace where promotion happened a bit quicker."
"Well, you can't expect promotions to happen on a yearly basis the way they did when the army was expanding to meet the Mongols," Lord Conrad said. "Still, your records are all good, and if you stayed where you are, I imagine that you would all be getting your own boats before too long."
"Yes, sir. But even that would not be ideal. We are a very good team, sir, and if we stayed in riverboats, the only way we could be promoted would be to break that team up. With a large, oceangoing steamship, on the other hand, it should be possible for us to be promoted and still stay together," Sir Odon said.
"I see. However, the personnel charts for that operation, the steamships themselves, were filled some time ago by Baron Tados. You are presently being considered for something different. The Explorer's Corps. The plan is that when we enter into a new area, a new sea or a new coast, we will put teams of trained men ashore at intervals of about four dozen miles, ideally at the mouth of a river.
"The team will spend a year or so exploring the area, finding out who lives there, learning their language, and teaching the local inhabitants some Polish.
"We need to know what kind of people they are, what sort of products they produce that might be of interest to us, what sorts of things we have that they might want, and so on.
"We will want to know what minerals and other natural resources are available there, what agricultural possibilities exist, and what the military capabilities of the local inhabitants are.
"We want to know as much as possible about their culture, as well. We want to know about the songs they sing and the dances they do. We want to know the stories they tell, and if they are pagans, we want to know as much as possible about their gods.
"And we will want the area to be mapped as thoroughly as possible.
"Each of our ships will be capable of carrying about a company of men in addition to the crew. That is to say, about three dozen seven-man teams. On a given cruise, it will put the teams ashore and then spend much of the year mapping the shoreline, measuring the currents and the tides, surveying the fishing and other resources, and generally being on hand to help out if any of the explorer teams gets into trouble.
"Does this program sound interesting, so far?"