We would cruise up and down the Vistula, and every five miles or so there would be a depot with a dock. If they had business for us, they ran some flags up their pole or some lanterns at night and, by a system of codes, we would know if they had something that we had room for, which we usually did. We heard about really important passengers and cargoes by radio.
Evenings aboard, we sold beer and wine to passengers in the dining hall, earning a bit more money on the side, and I have always liked listening to travelers' tales, or hearing the songs they sang, or the tunes they played on strange, new instruments. To get into a competition, pitting our skills on the recorder, lute, or krummhorn against theirs, was always a joy.
It was a pleasant enough existence on the whole, because we stopped at all of the big cities along the way and there was always something new to see.
My main claim to fame came when, annoyed at doing the laundry, I put the dirty clothes along with some soap in a leaky barrel that had all four bungs missing. I tied the barrel to the rear railing with a long rope and kicked it over the side.
The barrel filled with water, then tossed and turned as it was pulled along, washing the clothes. Eventually, the soapy water was washed out and replaced with clean river water, and the clothes were rinsed.
Two hours later I pulled the barrel on board, and the clothes were clean! Soon, every boat on the river was doing laundry that way, and they named the barrel after me. Now, whenever anybody on the river washes clothes, they get out their Josip Barrel.
As the summer of 1242 came along, the army was preparing for another war, this time with the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital at Jerusalem, better known as the Knights of the Cross, or just the Crossmen. It was to be a set-piece battle, with both sides agreeing on the time and place.
Naturally, we wanted to get involved, but our pleas and petitions got us nowhere. Apparently, every outfit in the army wanted to go, and there were only ten thousand Crossmen who needed killing. That wasn't much more than a single one of our battalions.
Also, it soon became obvious that Lord Conrad was planning to try out some new weapons on the Germans. It was all kept very secret, but we hauled some monstrous cannons down to Turon, where the Crossmen were holed up, along with some big canisters of something so poisonous that everybody but the fireman was required to stay up on the fighting top when we had it in the hold.
Lord Conrad and his liege lord, King Henryk, had invited "observers" from just about every Christian country in the world, and from a lot of those that weren't Christians, too.
We carried passengers from Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Spain, and Scotland, and that was just on our boat alone. There were three dozen other boats involved in the business, as well.
Mostly, it wasn't a war so much as it was a big political convention followed by an execution.
We weren't there when they shot poison gas into the Crossmen's fort, but they say there wasn't much to see, anyway.
We were by a few days later, after the big cannons had spent a few hours blowing down the brick walls, and again there wasn't anything to see. Where once there stood a fine, strong fortification, there was now only broken bricks and rubble.
Most of our troops in that "battle" never even got to shoot at the enemy, and we boatmen were so busy transporting the visiting dignitaries back to where they'd come from that our soldiers had to walk home, just as they'd had to walk there.
There wasn't any loot to speak of, either, and what there was didn't cover the cost of the war. Most of our knights got a trophy to hang on their walls, and that was about it. After fighting the Mongols, it was something of a comedown.
That winter, which we again spent logging, we looked into the possibility of transferring our lance from the Transportation and Communication Corps over to the Eagles, who built and flew all of the aircraft, but that proved to be impossible.
We were already too old. They accepted only volunteers who had completed the Warrior's School and were fifteen or younger. An opportunity missed.
The next spring, 1243, our lance was given its own boat, of a totally new, special-purpose design — an oil tanker.
Oil wells had been drilled near Przemysl on the San River, and a refinery had been built on the Vistula, north of Sandomierz. Ours was one of three boats designed to transport crude oil to the refinery, and refined oil in bulk wherever it was needed along the Vistula and its tributaries.
Refined oil, in its various grades, was used in the new kerosene lamps, and as a replacement for coal on the steamboats, where it eliminated the need for a fireman, and, mixed with wood alcohol, as a very energetic fuel for the aircraft. Other products, like asphalt roads, were being developed.
The new boat's engines were the same as those we were used to, except they were oil-fired. The kitchen, mess hall, and living quarters were small, and the boat was only a single story high, plus the bridge, since there were only the seven of us on board. The rest of the boat was nothing but a collection of low-lying steel tanks, almost like a long, low barge that we pushed ahead of us.
We joked that our boat was lean, low, stripped down, and topless, and that her name, The Lady of Okoitz, was therefore very appropriate.
We had no mounted weapons at all, since we didn't have enough people to man them, and we were too flammable to put up a serious fight, anyway. Faced with an enemy, our orders were to run away.
At first we were delighted to have our own boat and the responsibilities it entailed, but eventually the job palled.
For one thing, we now made far fewer stops in our travels, and those stops were invariably at industrial sites, which rarely had much going on except for the same work that they had been doing the last time we were there. We met fewer young ladies, and our love lives suffered.
We no longer carried passengers, who had seemed to be a great bother back when we carried them. After they were gone, well, it had been a long while since I heard an entertaining traveler's tale.
Also, a bulk tanker was much more difficult to keep clean that an ordinary riverboat, and we not only had to spend long hours scrubbing it, but found ourselves being dirtier than we ever had been before. This, too, did not help out our love lives.
Even our music was starting to get flat and stale.
But most of all, our increase in responsibility was not matched with an increase in status and pay. We had all been mere squires for several years, and we often heard of the promotions of others with less seniority than we had. This was particularly painful for Sir Odon. We called him our captain, but in fact he was still a mere knight, and he desperately wanted to advance in the army.
Also, there were no longer any opportunities to make additional money on the side. No legal ones, anyway, and none of us were thieves.
Suffice to say, after three and a half years on an oil tanker, we were all heartily sick of it!
Thus, we were all most interested when, in August of 1246, Sir Odon found a new possibility of employment for our lance.
The Construction Corps had been building a series of company-sized forts just like the one at East Gate, throwing them up at the astounding rate of one a week. They were built five miles apart all along the Vistula and now stretched along the west bank from the headwaters to the Baltic Sea. They were all part of an invincible defense against any future attack by the Mongols.
A second group had begun putting forts of the same design along the east bank of the Odra, some said against a possible invasion by the Holy Roman Empire, who were rumored to be very angry at us for eliminating the Crossmen.
The construction project was continuing and expanding, with plans to eventually put forts on both banks of every major river in Eastern Europe, but more important to us was what was being built at the mouth of the Vistula.
Sir Odon said that a major seaport and shipyard was being constructed there, and the plans were to soon begin building oceangoing steamships.
Were we interested in seeing if we could get involved with this new endeavor?
Well, of course we were! Over the last few years, we had been up every tributary of the Vistula, and frankly, one river is much like another.
But to travel the high seas! To explore, to boldly go where no Christian had gone before! We had been reading about how the world was really round, a great ball in the heavens. What would it be like to be on the first ship to steam around it? Glorious!
We all got together in writing our application for transfer, carefully explaining why we were the best possible people to choose for this new endeavor. We wrote about how our lance had been working smoothly together for years without any of the friction that had disrupted so many other groups.
We stressed that we had experience with various kinds of boats and had thus proved we could take on and master new things. We talked about our military prowess, of the battles we had fought under the watchful eyes of Lord Conrad himself.
We wrote about all of the other skills we had, from baking bread, farming, and handling cattle, to living off the land in the trackless wilderness of Lithuania.
We told our varied ethnic backgrounds and how among us we had speakers of Polish, German, Ukrainian, Latin (Fritz had been an altar boy), Pruthenian, and Lithuanian, so we would be able to communicate with the inhabitants of many different areas.
We explained how we were all bachelors who could take long trips away from home without distressing any wives or children. We wrote and rewrote that application so many times that we were sure if they did not transfer us to the High Seas Battalion, they would at least have to give us an award for literature! Finally, we had Zbigniew write up the fair copy, since he had the best handwriting in the group.
Then we faced the problem of just who we should send this application to. Normally, when one wished to transfer, one applied to the personnel department of the battalion or corps involved. But in this case, as far as we knew, the organization we wished to join did not yet exist.
"If it is new, you just know that Lord Conrad will be involved with it," Sir Odon said. "He likes being in on the beginning of things. You know him personally, don't you, Josip?"
I had to admit I did, that I had been a boy at Okoitz when he first arrived in Poland. However, I had to stress that our last meeting had been less than pleasant, and I quite possibly had been responsible for putting Lord Conrad's eye out or at least causing him to lose the use of that eye.
"I read in the news that he regained his sight in that eye years ago," Kiejstut said. "Anyway, Lord Conrad is not the kind of a man who would hold a grudge over a little accident like that."