As I left, the baron's secretary passed me a note, saying that my men and the ladies were waiting for me at the mess hall, after which they would be at the inn. I had news for them, but I went to the radio room first.
I composed a message for my mother, and a much longer one for Maude, trying to tell her that I was well, but that I couldn't come home to her. I wrote and rewrote that message, but it never said exactly what I felt. No matter how I worded it, it still wasn't right. Finally, I just gave my first draft to the operator and asked him to get it out when he could.
I was told that the airwaves had been fairly clean for the last few days, and my messages would probably go through sometime tonight to the relay station in Portugal, and from there to Poland.
It was late when I got to the almost empty mess hall, but the cook scrounged me up some food. I barely noticed the entree, but the bread and the beer were so wonderful they almost cheered me up.
I found my party at the inn. I was surprised that the army would build an inn at so remote a site, but Lord Conrad was always concerned about the happiness of his men. It was just like every other Pink Dragon Inn, except the carved sign over the door showed one of the local dragons, painted pink, instead of the classical one.
I found my people scrubbed clean, pleasantly drunk, and comparatively well-dressed. The men at least were in proper uniform, and the ladies had been prevailed upon to wear short cotton skirts, at least.
When I asked, I found that they had heard of the orders forbidding return to Europe, so I wasn't forced to break that news to them. I told the men that the Christian Army was pleased with us, and congratulated them on their promotions, calling them Sir Gregor and Knight Banner Tomaz. After we drank to that, I explained that they could now refer to me as Captain Sobieski, if they did so respectfully, and with suitable bowing and groveling. They laughed, and we drank to that as well.
I told them that Jane was accepted as an army civilian scout, with the status of an army knight. The pay consisted of room, board, and equipment, plus eight pence a day, retroactive for a year. She didn't understand what most of this meant and was soon talking intensely with Knight Banner Tomaz.
Our wives had no clear idea why we were so happy about our promotions. Our increased pay had no meaning for them, since they didn't know what money was. Our increased status also meant little to them, because in the society they grew up in, small differences in status had little meaning. You were either the chief or you weren't. But at the inn, they were delighted with the music, the dancing, and the ambience of the place, and they were happy because everybody else was happy.
Looking at them, I was reminded that they were really very limited creatures, and a life with Booboo would be much different from the one I had long dreamed of with Maude. It seemed rude to even think it, but we three were permanently bonded with creatures that were, at best, pretty, amusing little puppy dogs. And at worst? I couldn't even imagine, but I was sure that it could become very bad indeed.
I knew that life must go on, but I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to go on with it.
Before my thoughts got too morose, Captain Fritz came in, bringing with him the eight men of his platoon who had survived the year. After introductions were made, our ladies were all surrounded by eager admirers. Fritz and I found ourselves at one end of the table, deep in conversation, discussing our year apart. It was almost like being home. Slowly, my mood revived.
I told my story to Fritz, and he nodded and shook his head in all the right places. He understood what I was saying because his life's experiences were so very like my own. As a good friend will, he let me tell the whole story almost without interruptions, before he started in on his own.
Fritz had found the natives on the south bank friendly from the start. They had immediately seen the value of our products, and were familiar with the concept of trade. If they believed in ghosts, they never talked about it. He thought that the huge width of the river must separate two very different nations.
The people he found did some hunting and gathering, but they were primarily agriculturalists. The dozens of plants they cultivated were completely unknown in Europe, and he saw rich possibilities in trade with them.
There was a kind of pea in which the pods grew at first aboveground, but then went underground as they matured, actually planting themselves! Dug up, roasted, and heavily salted, Fritz said they were wonderful with beer.
They had dozens of fruits he had never seen before, and most of them were delicious. One of them, which looked like a big hand grenade growing in a display of swords, was particularly good.
"On the other hand, nobody ever insisted that we participate in a mass orgy. I think I'll always envy you that one!"
Apparently, the native girls were not extremely interested in Fritz and his men. They were generally available, but only after you negotiated the size of the gift that was to be given to them in advance.
"The price was mud cheap, but it still smacked too much of prostitution for me to greatly enjoy it. I scratched the itch once a week or so, but it was mere gratification, and not love."
The only trouble that he encountered in the first few weeks happened when one of his men was urinating over the side of their riverboat.
"Sir Ian started screaming, and clutched his privy member. He bounced around for a bit, and then fell over onto his back, shouting the most blasphemous of oaths! I was the closest thing to a surgeon we had on board, so I had a half-dozen men hold him down while I examined him. I couldn't see a thing out of the ordinary, so I had him released.
"None of our medications had any beneficial effect, and we didn't yet have a native who could speak Pidgin well enough to question what passes for a doctor among them. Ian remained in great pain for three days, during which time he never urinated, and I began to fear that his bladder would burst. After consulting with the others, it seemed that the only thing to do was to cut the member open, to see what was causing the problem.
"We couldn't even get poor Ian drunk, since that would only have generated more urine. With six men holding the screaming knight down, I took a sharp, clean scalpel and sliced along the last half of the length of his penis. Pints of blood and a gallon of urine squirted out, but can you guess what else was in there?"
I shook my head, and Fritz continued.
"There was a tiny fish, stuck in the urine vessel! It had three little barbs, like a catfish, that had stuck into Ian's flesh, and that was what was blocking his pipe!
"All that we can imagine is that as he was relieving himself, the fish must have swum upstream, right up his urine and into his privy member! There seems to be no other way it could have happened. As you can imagine, we all used a bucket after that.
"Well, I sewed the man up, and he managed to live. That is, he lived until he came down with a fever, three months later."
The rest of his sad story was a matter of surviving a fever much as I had and then building a boat and getting back to the rendezvous. Lacking native advice, since those natives who had not died of their own plague had run away, it took him much longer than it did us to build a suitable boat.
"I managed to get more of my men back than you did, but I must admire the ladies you brought to replace some of those you lost. I've often had fantasies of having a girl so small that I could carry her along in my pouch, and your new wife comes close to that. If there are more like her where she comes from, I'm minded to go along with you when you return. But for tonight, what is the story on the warrior woman you brought back? I mean, is she really the sort who prefers other women?"