"That would be a delightful thing, my lady, did I not fear the fact that your husband is called the fiercest fighting man in all the world. And in truth, my wife is no simpering lily, either! I think it would be best if we kept our pleasant relationship platonic."
"I quite agree, my lord, with much the same regrets as yours," I said with a sad smile. "Well, then, once our party is out of sight and in some secluded place, you and your men could trade horses and costumes with five of mine. In the armor of a Radiant Warrior, no one would recognize you. Indeed, you could keep your visor down if you wished. In addition, these mounts we ride are very special. They can go like the wind, and no one in Poland would question a man who rode one. We could go there and be back in a week, my lord."
"You seem to have this well planned out, your grace."
"Indeed, I have thought long on it."
But then we had to join the others, for the master huntsman rode up carrying the droppings of a large stag in his hunting horn for the prince to examine.
And so it was that Prince Daniel got the grand tour of the battlefields, saw our aircraft, and rode on a steamboat. He was astounded almost as much by the Big People. I was able to show him some of my husband's factories, with their huge moving machines and white-hot spraying steel. We toured East Gate, and he found that starting the next spring, Conrad would be building a fortress like it every week. Yet what impressed him most was the three million Mongol heads he saw up on pikes.
"These are not all the Tartars we killed, you know," I said. "About half a million more were drowned in the Vistula when they tried to swim across, and they were so weighted down that most of them never did float up. There's still a fortune in booty lying for the taking on the bottom of the river."
"My God!"
So over a week passed before we were again in Ruthenia. Prince Daniel wanted to talk to his nobles and councilors, but I knew that he would throw off the Mongols and swear fealty to Duke Henryk could he but work out a suitable treaty with us.
He invited me back in a month, and of course I would be there. While back in Cracow, I sounded out Henryk, and he approved in principle of what I had done.
More importantly, I got his solemn written word, in his own hand and sealed, that if I was able to arrange a suitable treaty, my son would be given his rightful inheritance, or one even more valuable. Also, Henryk agreed that it would be best if Conrad did not know about my role in these affairs or about our agreement as well.
Again we went to Ruthenia, and again we brought back
Prince Daniel incognito, but this time to meet with Duke Henryk. I introduced the two leaders, and they soon were engaged in animated conversation. I wisely remained silent, for men do not like women to intrude on what they consider man's talk," even when it is we women who make all the arrangements, set the stage, and even determine what is to be said."
A formal treaty was eventually signed by all interested parties, including my husband, and my son had regained his birthright!
In the winter, when all had been finalized and troops had been sent to Ruthenia to aid in its defense, I met again with Duke Henryk, who gave me a privy letter that confirmed our original agreement.
"Francine, that was a fine job you did with Prince Daniel. Because of you, an enemy has been turned into a friend, Poland now has a buffer state between herself and the Tartars, and I have gained a doubling of my territory, if not my income. It is going to take us a few years to absorb all of this, but in a year or two I am minded to send you north to talk to Prince Swientopelk so that you can talk him into giving us his duchies of East and West Pomerania!"
Chapter Thirty
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
My own personal life remained pleasantly tranquil, even though, or perhaps because of the fact that, Francine stayed away. I hadn't even seen my son by her, but I was not about to force her into coming home just so she could make me miserable. She stayed in the east, and I spent most of my time in the south. When I went to Cracow to see my confessor, Bishop Ignacy, she was always elsewhere. Twice I went to Sandomierz and Plock to check on things, but she wasn't there at the time. Even when Duke Henryk and I hit twelve cities, one on each day of the twelve days of Christmas, she managed to be somewhere else. All that I could figure was that she had an efficient spy system.
Cilicia, on the other hand, remained all sweetness and light. She continued teaching dancing, mostly as a hobby, I think, and continued to manage her string of dance studios at a considerable profit, though God knows we didn't need the money. But her real interest was now in our four children and in the other three dozen or so kids in the household.
These weren't all mine, not by any means. At least a dozen of them were orphans left over from the Mongol invasion. There were some where we knew the mother and nobody was exactly sure about the father, but nobody much cared. When in doubt, I was always happy to confess to just about anything at a baptism. I'd never let a kid be hurt over a little thing like pride, even when the mother wasn't up to my usual standards.
Piotr and Krystyana were still in the household with their six kids, and others came and went as the need and the inclination required. When it came to my household, I ran a very loose ship, and I liked it that way. About my only rules were that kids had to stay out of my office and nobody could permanently enter my household without my invitation. Well, there were some kids who sort of temporarily attached themselves to us for years, but what the heck. As a general thing, a pleasantly disorganized chaos reigned, and any time I needed rejuvenation I had only to sit down on one of the couches in the living room, and there were a couple of kids on my lap and generally a pretty girl under each arm. A good life.
During our Christmas tour Henryk mentioned an offer that he'd gotten that he didn't want to refuse. The Russian principalities to our east were Volhynia and Halicz Ruthenia, and they had a combined area that was at least as large as that of Poland, if not larger, although because of the Mongols, they no longer had anything like our population. They were Russian to the extent that the people there were mostly Greek Orthodox Christians, and their political and social ties were more with the east than with the west.
"Russia" in the modem sense, with its huge uncaring bureaucracy and its brutal central control, would probably have been better called the Muscovite Empire. Politically, it is a Johnny-come-lately, not one of the ancient nations of eastern Europe. It simply didn't exist in the thirteenth century. Moscow was now a small backwater village.
To the north, there is a major city-state called the Republic of Novgorod, which is run by an oligarchy of wealthy merchants, about the way that Venice is in Italy.
In the south, there is a Russian people who would one day be called Ukrainians and who consider their capital to be Kiev, even though Kiev had been massacred by the Mongols a few years ago and still was almost absolutely empty. Before that time it had been a fairly ordinary kingdom, with nothing particularly offensive about it.
In addition to these two large states, there were a dozen or so minor duchies and principalities scattered around the east, all of whom, like their big brothers, were either paying tribute to the Mongols or had been depopulated by them, or sometimes both. Certainly there was nothing about the Russias of the thirteenth century that you could hate.
The prince of both of these principalities of Volhynia and Halicz Ruthenia was a man named Daniel, and he had come to Duke Henryk with an interesting proposal. Prince Daniel offered to swear fealty to Henryk, to become a Roman Catholic, and to encourage his people to do so as well. He would even pay what taxes he could, but in return he needed protection from the Mongols. Henryk wanted to know if we could guarantee that protection.