‘Lubonski!’ he cried as he rose ponderously from his chair, projecting his great bulk forward to accord the old count the deference he merited. ‘I need your help so badly.’
‘I think all patriots stand ready to help, Sire.’
‘In your case I have a special need
‘You may have my army. I shall ride at its head.’
‘I knew that,’ Sobieski said, almost dismissing the offer. ‘What I require from you is difficult and daring.’
‘I am ready,’ the tall, stiff nobleman replied.
‘I remember you as the man who blew up the two big Swedish guns at Czestochowa.’
‘We did indeed destroy them.’
‘And one of the heroes at the siege of Zamosc’
‘We drove them back that time.’
‘Many claim that it was at Zamosc that you broke the back of Charles X Gustavus and sent him reeling homeward.’
‘Someone had to do it.’
‘But most of all, Pan Cyprjan, I think of you as a papal count, a man ordained to defend Christianity.’
Still erect, still refusing to seek the comfort of a waiting chair, the old man said: ‘I would be proud if I were so considered.’
‘And it is in that capacity that I seek your help—your personal help.’
‘I’ve said my army would join you.’
Again the king dismissed the offer: ‘I don’t want your army—Oh, of course I do. I hoped for it and felt sure I’d be allowed to have it. What I really want is you.’
‘You have me. Poland is endangered, and you have me.’
‘I want you to slip into Vienna, to meet with Lubomirski. To find out what the prospects are. And most important, to scout the route to the city. The route we will follow when we march there this summer.’
This was a most dangerous assignment, and both men knew it. Capture would probably mean death, but there was a good chance that Lubonski’s elevated position might induce the Turks to treat him either as a diplomatic envoy or as a subject for extreme ransom. And if the mission did succeed, and if Lubonski could return with the needed information, it could mean a significant difference.
‘I will go,’ he said, and now Sobieski pulled him down to a chair beside him and shouted for beer with which to celebrate this pact.
Before the servants could bring it, the king snatched an Italian book he had been consulting and showed Lubonski a handsomely engraved plate of a snarling lion, the astrological sign under which he, Sobieski, had been born. Jabbing at a paragraph beneath the lion, the king said laughingly: ‘You magnates have a poor opinion of me, and a worse of my French wife. I know you call me avaricious, and stubborn, and poorly advised. But read what the stars say about me.’ And he shoved the almanac at Lubonski, who could see that someone had added to the printed page a notation in ink, but what the words said he was unable to decipher: ‘I can read French and German, Your Majesty, but not Italian.’
Showing no displeasure, Sobieski took back the book and with an impulsive gesture of friendship drew Lubonski close. ‘I added this in my own hand. “Jan Sobieski, born 17 August 1629 under the protection of Leo.” Now here is what I wanted you to read, and when you hear it, you must tell your friends how the stars assess me.’ And with obvious pride and satisfaction he read:
‘The man of important position born under this sign will be good, pious, righteous, honorable, faithful, serene, pleasant, discreet, charitable, peace-loving, kind, sincere in all his friendships, clever, brave, honorable, of cautious audacity, hot-tempered when his honor is impugned, very alert to grasp meanings before others, and with a remarkable memory. Without the regular offices of Venus he falls easily into distemper.’
Hammering at the almanac with his fist, he cried: ‘By God, they got it all right, and that’s worth noting, since they never met me in person.’ Then he nudged Lubonski and said: ‘They were also right about the Venus business. If I do not lie with a lady four nights a week, I grow nervous. How about you?’
‘That seems a long time ago.’
Sobieski roared: ‘When I’m ninety I’ll have three different women a week. But for the present, my French wife—God, Lubonski, she’s adorable. I could not live a day without that dear woman.’
At this moment the servants, three of them, appeared with flagons of beer and a plate of country cookies, which Sobieski wolfed down, three at a time, cramming them into his mouth so roughly that crumbs spread across his capacious lap, from which he brushed them with a huge, darting hand. Lifting his flagon, which held nearly a quart, he cried: ‘To our wives! To the green cord that Kara Mustafa wears about his neck. May he have occasion to draw it tight before this summer is over.’
The impending war with Turkey exerted curious effects upon the three old veterans who lived at Bukowo. Count Lubonski, aged seventy-three, felt it his duty as a papal count to undertake the dangerous mission to Vienna and later to lead his private army into battle. These were extraordinary decisions, and his age alone would have excused him from either, but to avoid his responsibilities never occurred to him. All his life he had volunteered to serve where needed, and if King Jan Sobieski had mentioned two of his major contributions—Czestochowa and Zamosc—he overlooked three others: the defense of the Ukraine against Cossack invaders, the raid into Transylvania to punish Rakoczy, and his service on the western front when German troops tried to take the best grain fields of Poland.
He was not by nature a warrior; he showed no command ability, but the times had required him to be a dogged, brave, willing soldier, and this he had trained himself to be; since eleven wars occurred during his adult years, it would have been difficult to escape soldiering. Like all the nobility, he felt that a man of his position was degraded if he had to move about on foot, so he had always been a cavalryman, and even at the siege of Zamosc when he made a sortie he did so on horseback.
He maintained a stable of forty-eight horses with carriages in proportion, and although he did not at his age qualify to ride with the winged hussars, he did form, wherever he was, a reliable part of the ordinary cavalry that performed so well. So in a spiritual sense as a good Catholic and in a military sense as a fine horseman, he was ready for war.
But in his private life he was not. His second wife, Halka, had brought with her an attractive daughter whom Lubonski adopted eagerly, spending almost two years endeavoring to find her a suitable husband; with Halka’s help he finally settled on one of the young Lubomirskis, nephew of the general who had performed so well during the war, but after the marriage, which united two of the great families, the young couple moved to one of the eleven Lubomirski castles and Cyprjan saw them infrequently, a fact which distressed him.
Belatedly, Halka had given him two sons who showed signs of being true Lubonskis: conservative, patriotic, Austrian in their sympathies as if one could never be merely a Pole; devoutly Catholic; and while not brilliantly intellectual, learned in their alphabet and figuring. They were fine lads, and before long they would reach the age at which their father would go searching the better castles and palaces for brides.
He therefore wished to stay home, at Gorka, surrounded by people he knew, and cared for by servants who had been with him for many decades. He felt no threat of death, for his health was excellent and his mind alert, but he had reached those years when spare time ought to be allocated to the furtherance of his family interests. Halka was a lovely wife, similar in many respects to Zofia Mniszech, but since she came from only a modest family with one castle and sixteen horses, she lacked the bargaining power that Lubonski had. He was needed at home, but he was also needed in Vienna, and the latter obligation superseded.
When he announced that on his mission he would take Lukasz of Bukowo, the old animal-lover was delighted. He was sixty-two years old, still hearty and still adept at finding orphan animals and teaching them to live with others not of their kind. He had a bear now, a male, but he had never been able to replace that wonderful otter slain by the Swedes. In its place he had a
small deer, a female who loved the red fox that completed the coterie of wild animals. He had no storks now, they were most difficult to tame, but in their place he had a splendid egret who stalked about the place like a hetman with a gold baton. And of course he kept two large dogs, who often seemed bewildered by the diversity of wildlife with which they had to share their quarters.
In place of the castle courtyard in which the original animals had lived, this group occupied an area between the manor house, if anything so rude could be called such, and the farm buildings. It was enclosed by a wicker fence which the deer could leap over if it wished, or the fox penetrate or the bear knock down, but they were happy within their voluntary cage and did not stray even if the gate was left open.
The manor house, erected in 1660, was a poor thing when compared to the stately country houses of England, France or Spain, but Lukasz preferred it to the drafty old castle whose ruins grew more picturesque each year. It had two low stories, the lower built of stone and plastered over, the upper of wood and heavily shingled with cuttings from the forest. Windows were small and scarce, walls thick to repel future invaders, and the chimney large so that storks could nest. The house was distinguished at one corner by a small onion-shaped tower in the Russian style, and considered as a unit, it was a heavy, dark, secure and reasonably comfortable residence.
Lukasz was about as happy with his new home and his new set of animals as he had been with the old, and he was certainly as happy with his new wife, the girl Zosienka, whom he had won at the drawing of the beans. Zosienka had produced two excellent children, who played with the Lubonski boys and who showed a real love for the river. One summer when Lukasz put together a tremendous raft of logs carefully chosen from the Forest of Szczek, he had permitted his son to ride it with him all the way down the Vistula past Warsaw and Plock to Gdansk, where they supervised the loading of valuable logs onto a freighter bound for London.
It had been a rewarding journey, with the sun so far north that there was scarcely any night, and as the great raft drifted silently past this town or that, Lukasz told the boy of events associated with the area. At Plock, for example, he told about the famous hero Firczyk who had swung his massive iron ball at the Battle of Grunwald, holding the German knights back until one crept beneath the swinging ball and stabbed him. At Torun he showed where Nicholas Copernicus had studied the stars, and when the raft went past the place at which vast Malbork Castle lay somewhat to the east, he told of the time their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather had been imprisoned there because he had tried to buy an amber necklace.
How marvelous that trip had been! So if he was content with his animals, and his wife, and his children, what inspired him to shout when the count invited him to risk the trip to Vienna: ‘I’d like that!’?
The problem was one which assails many families, in all societies and all nations. Zosienka, lovely as she was and hard-working too, had one grievous fault. She had a brother named Piotr, and despite all the benefits that Lukasz had provided the young man, all the doors he had opened for him, Piotr remained a problem. Four times he had bungled arrangements that Lukasz had made for his marriage to some appropriate girl, and twice he had failed spectacularly in positions Lukasz had found for him, once with Count Lubonski himself, and now it was clear that Lukasz and his wife were burdened with the young man.
He was known as Brat Piotr, Brother Piotr, for he had joined the fraternity of monks who served at Czestochowa, but this did by no means remove him as a burden from his Bukowo relatives. He always needed extra money, or clothes, or recommendations for an advantage of one kind or other. Twice he had been dismissed from the order as unsuitable—he was a tall, ungainly man who would wander off, not on any particular mission, just off—and only special pleas from Lukasz and Count Lubonski enabled him to win reinstatement. During the periods when he was allowed to leave the monastery, he invariably came to Bukowo, where he would appear suddenly at dusk, opening the gate and whistling to the bear and perhaps playing with the animals a good hour before he bothered to inform his sister that he was there. The children loved him, as did the fox and the deer, but Lukasz and his wife were distressed to the point of pain by his irresponsibility and by the fact that at age forty-five he still behaved as if he were eleven, walking in the forest with the children and even climbing trees with them.
Lukasz would be damned content to get away from Brat Piotr for a while.
The case with Jan of the Beech Trees was quite different. His life had been one of incessant labor, inadequate food and repeated wars. If Count Lubonski had served Poland with distinction during these troubled years, leading in battle and counseling with the king, Jan had served with no less distinction. When the castles were torn down, he rebuilt them. When a raft of valuable logs must be assembled for the float downriver to Gdansk, he cut them. When the village of Bukowo was destroyed by Swedes or Cossacks or Transylvanians or Germans, he had always helped the other men rebuild their cottages. And when the fields needed plowing or the crops harvesting, Jan had done the work.
He had started at the age of three, back in 1626, and he had not stopped for fifty-seven years. In his own home he had never known a wooden floor, only earthen; he had never had a window in his cottage; he had never had a chimney to carry away the smoke. He had eaten meat so rarely that he could savor a good bite of chicken for nine months, and he had never had more than two pairs of pants at a time, the good one lasting for twenty or thirty years. Now he was tired. His life, spent so honorably, was drawing to a close, and sometimes he wished that he could just for one season—summer or winter, he didn’t care which—be left alone to rest in the sun.
The population of Poland had increased since the Swedish war and was now about nine million, which meant that there were some three million peasant men like Jan who had spent or would spend their lives in the kind of remorseless labor he had performed, and around them the strength and the greatness of Poland was built.
Obviously, in these days of near-exhaustion Jan occasionally thought of death, and the word held little fear for him. He saw it as a form of release, a final benediction for work well done. He loved his wife, Alusia; she had proved a far better helpmate than he could have expected and he worried now and then about leaving her, but he knew that she was resourceful, and with four older children upon whom she might rely, she was not going to be destitute the way many peasant widows were. But the principal reason why he faced approaching death with equanimity was that his youngest son, whom they called Janko, was such a delight. Blond, good-looking, quick in his movements where Jan himself had been slow, gentle in manner and bright in his ability to understand rapidly, he was a pleasure to have about the cottage, and at fifteen he was as able as any of the men in the village. He was the kind of son who made a father happy, and old Jan was not loath to think that when he did die, young Janko would take over the cottage. That he would be generous with his mother, Jan never doubted.
Indeed, the boy had only one fault. On the occasions when Brat Piotr left the monastery at Czestochowa and appeared at the mansion in Bukowo to visit with his sister and brother-in-law, Janko displayed an immoderate desire to be with the friar, listening to his improbable yarns and strolling with him among the beech trees.
‘You must stay clear of Brat Piotr,’ both his mother and his father warned. ‘That one is no good, no good at all.’ They told their son what Lukasz from the big house had himself said about his wife’s brother: ‘Our red fox is more dependable than Piotr.’ But no amount of harsh counsel dissuaded the boy from showing his affection, and even his regard, for the tall, gangling, grinning friar.
They formed an interesting pair as they headed for the forest or explored along the riverbank—Piotr, in his monk’s garb and his big, flapping shoes, loose-limbed and all out of joint, a grown man who had never matured, and Janko, marvelously average and proper in all things. Walking together, the boy was silent and attentive, the friar animated, waving his hands, bobbing
his angular head, and pointing out the mysteries they encountered on their brief journeys.
‘That’s where some family of rabbits lives, surely,’ Piotr would say, and they would stop to investigate. Or at the river he would notice where birds had walked and they would speculate on where those birds had spent their winter: ‘Not around here, surely. Too cold.’
They were fascinated by the storks, those ungainly creatures that looked so much like Piotr himself, and he proposed the extraordinary theory that because they were so thin, they needed little heat and so spent their winters at the North Pole. Janko thought this unlikely, and when he argued against the theory, Piotr shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘You may be right.’
But on the matter of historic battles which had been fought along the Vistula he admitted no rebuttal. He could see Tatars as they came dashing out of the forest, or Swedes as they burned the castles, or Hungarians when they arrived in strength, and often he told Janko: ‘I was destined by Almighty God to be a great warrior, a hussar I think, with the feathers singing about my ears and me on a white horse dashing through Russian and Turkish and German lines.’ On several occasions, when they were on flat land, he would bestride his imaginary charger, wave his long arms, and set his lance for the Tatars coming out of the woods. And off he would go, flapping his arms and whistling to imitate the feathers. At such times he frightened Janko, who supposed that Piotr would do the same with the enemy—if he ever got himself a horse, and a suit of armor, and a horseshoe of feathers over his head.
The simple fact was that Brat Piotr was fun. His unbounded imagination inspired others, not the leaders of the monastery, to be sure, and certainly not his brother-in-law Lukasz, but all the younger monks and the lads like Janko.