Overnight, the steam launches had been repaired, and with them a half mile to either side of us, we spent days sweeping back and forth across the river, and eventually out into the ocean. Lezek and I had set seven barges adrift, and in the end we recovered only four of them, with twenty-nine men aboard. Another eleven people were found alive in the warm river water.
Zbigniew and Taurus were still among the missing.
After a week of searching the river, the sea, and the sur-rounding shores for our missing comrades, we regretfully called off the search. The barges each contained a small emergency kit, but with even a few men on board, by this time the supplies would be long exhausted.
We had recovered a total of twenty-two floating corpses. The last dead man we pulled aboard was Taurus.
Baron Tados called an officers' meeting, to sum up what had happened.
This was the first maritime disaster suffered by the Christian Army, and we were all painfully aware of our ignorance and our inexperience. Careful notes were written up by everyone on board, to be delivered to the Maritime Design Board at Gdansk. Hopefully, some of our stupider mistakes would not be repeated the next time disaster struck. We all knew that someday, somewhere, it would happen again.
The baron thought that the disaster might have been caused by a tidal bore. The Baltic Sea doesn't have tides, any more than the Mediterranean Sea does, so we Poles were fairly ignorant of such things. Baron Tados had heard of only one other river in the world that had such a wave, the Severn River, in England, although he had never been there. It was said that they were caused by the mouth of a river having a funnel shape, and a big, incoming tide getting somehow focused, and made larger, as it rushed up the river.
I understood very little of it. I had heard Lord Conrad's lecture on the causes of tides, but I had never actually seen one, until that disastrous time on the Amazon River.
I didn't want to see any more of them.
Fritz had an interesting report. He said, "I think that I now know why our fuel consumption has been so high. I was in the water when the big wave lifted the ship up, and I got a good look at our bottom. We have an underwater forest growing down there! Some of the weeds looked to be two yards long!"
"There has been some growth below the waterline before, in the northern seas, but nothing that bad," the baron said. "It must be all this warm water we've been steaming through. Does anybody have any ideas on how to get rid of it without a dry dock? No? Then we'll just have to live with it for now."
Only one of the ship's crew was still missing, mostly because the crew wore bright red work clothing and so were easier to find in the water. The dark green explorer uniforms did us a great disservice that week.
Zbigniew had not been found.
As the meeting was about to break up, Captain Odon announced that he was having a barrel of whiskey broken out and set up in the mess. He said it was time to mourn our dead.
In a few minutes I found myself at a table with what was left of our old lance. Captain Odon. Fritz. Lezek. Kiejstut. Me. The captain poured us each a big glass from the pitcher, and we held up our glasses, as if in a toast. Only nobody could think of anything appropriate to say, and we just drank in silence.
"I never expected Taurus to die an old man in bed," Kiejstut said. "He was just too crazy, underneath, for that. But I always imagined him going out swinging his axe at his enemies, the way he did during that fight against the Mongols, on the bank of the river. He must have killed dozens of them, running and screaming like a madman."
"I think that he truly was a madman then, so soon after his family had all been killed," Fritz said. "He even took a swipe at me before Sir Odon took his axe away from him."
I reminded them that a few of his people were still alive, although after his last leave, he hadn't liked them very much.
"I suppose they'll think better of him now," Lezek said. "By their standards, Taurus died rich, what with his gold, his savings, and his shares in the iron mine. They'll inherit all that, won't they?"
"I suppose so, unless he left a will, and I never heard of one," Captain Odon said. "I think that after this, I will go and have one written up for myself. The rest of you might want to do the same. The ship's purser knows something about the law."
"Inside, somehow, I was beginning to think that we were all immortal," Kiejstut said. "We were always so lucky. I mean, we all lived through the Battle for the Vistula. Only about one man in three did that, out of the more than nine thousand men who fought in it, and every one of us came through it alive and healthy. What were the odds against that happening?"
"Who knows?" the captain said. "Who knows what the odds are of Zbigniew still being alive? Or if he is, will we ever see him again? We all knew that we were engaged in a dangerous occupation, but whoever thought we would lose men this way? Those were two of the finest fighting men I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Who would have expected them dying, not in combat, but in what was, in the end, just an accident brought on by our own ignorance? Well, we still have our duties to the younger men. I'll talk to Taurus's platoon, and Zbigniew's as well. Gentlemen, men have died in every one of your platoons. You should go and comfort the living. Maybe later tonight we'll meet back here."
We left to talk to our knights and squires, but much later we were all sitting around the same table again, quietly drinking.
In the morning we said a special Mass for the Dead, recited our Army Oath, and then we went back to our duties.
We steamed back up the mighty river, and by luck one of the lookouts spotted the life ring that Kiejstut had attached to the anchor cable. An hour's hard labor got us back our anchor.
We anchored upstream of a wooded, uninhabited island, on the theory that if another tidal bore happened, the island would break its force. We started assembling riverboats again, while others went to the island and began chopping firewood, which was needed both to ensure that the ship got home and as fuel for our four remaining riverboats.
The disaster had cost us, in dead, missing, and seriously injured, almost two complete platoons of explorers, including two platoon leaders. Since we were also missing two boats, well, with some reshuffling of personnel, it worked out.
The baron was shorthanded by twenty-one men, and asked if we could help out, but Captain Odon said there were still thirty-four men on the sick list, and many of them would be capable of doing at least some work within a few days.
I could see that the baron wanted to say that taking care of the injured took up a lot of badly needed manpower, but I think he was still a little afraid of our captain, and kept silent.
A tall, straight tree on the west end of the island had been stripped of its branches. The base had been girdled so they couldn't grow back, and a big flag was nailed at the top, as a marker. It was agreed that the ship and the riverboats would meet back at this place in exactly three hundred sixty-five days.
It was decided that the captain would go with Father John and a platoon of men, and try to get to the headwaters of the Amazon, where there was supposed to be a gold-rich civilization.
I was to take my boat and search out the north side of the river, and Lezek was to take the south. Kiejstut and Fritz were to accompany the captain farther west and would be assigned to search and map some tributary.
We were to be friendly to the natives, to show them our products and see what they might have that would be of interest to us, but mostly we were to search for a rubber tree. This was described as having a white, sticky sap that, when dried, was stretchy, like raw pigskin.
Those men who had been logging on the island were apprehensive about finding a single kind of tree in that strange forest.