II
Maria sang to herself during the two-mile-long walk from her family’s farm to Gród Narew. Sometimes she would sing small snippets of hymns, but right now she was having a more daring moment. The song was one of the bawdier ballads she had heard the knights of the szlachta singing when she served them in the large dining hall at Gród Narew.
She started singing low, but as she walked through the dense woods, she unconsciously raised her voice with every verse. When she reached the lightning-blasted oak that marked the midpoint between her farm and the fortress, she completed the song, singing at full volume of the conquest of the virile knight over the reluctant maiden. When the words of their consummate act echoed back from the woods around her, she paused a moment with burning cheeks and an embarrassed smile.
Her father would definitely not approve. He was very strict and ever wary of the Devil and his attempts to intrude into their lives. Song was one of those avenues he saw as allowing the Devil in. Maria’s hand unconsciously lifted between her breasts to feel the small silver cross she wore under her chemise. It was still there, still protecting her from the Devil.
She glanced up at the sky, gauging the advance of dawn. The sky above shone a light pink through the trees. She couldn’t see the horizon, but a glow around some of the tallest branches showed that the sun had just peeked above the ground. Just as she started thinking that she had taken too long in her trek through the woods, she heard the clanging of the bell at the fortress, marking the first hour of the day.
She sighed. She should be leaving the dense woods crowding Gród Narew, and here she was barely at the halfway point. She had spent too long with her chores at the farm. Now she was going to reach the fortress just as the stable hands would start working the horses. She clutched her cross more tightly and said a short prayer that God would keep her safe not only from the Devil himself, but also from one of the Devil’s more petty minions.
The sun had fully risen by the time she left the woods and walked the path up the conical hillside toward the looming timber walls of Gród Narew. She walked up past wide stonewalled fields where sheep and goats grazed. The best pasture, though, was closest to the fortress walls, and reserved for the horses of the szlachta.
She hurried past the mounts of the nobility, hoping to make the gate before anyone saw her. But she knew that she had failed to escape as soon as the smells of manure and rotten cheese advanced upon her. Her daily nemesis, Lukasz, came from whatever chores he was in the midst of and vaulted the stone fence, landing on the path directly in front of her.
“You wound me, my fair Maria.” He gave her a gap-toothed smile and reached for her with a filth-crusted hand. She backed up so that he pawed air rather than her chemise.
“Wound you? You seem quite hale.” Maria stepped to the side to go around the man. She hated being a target for this brute, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. He was the personal servant to one of Bolesław’s knights, while she was only here to ease the burden of her family’s debts to the lord of Gród Narew. While he supposedly held no more status or rights than she did, as a practical matter he was almost noble himself. He was also the type of man who didn’t let anyone forget it.
Today, Lukasz seemed particularly amorous, and he reached out again, grabbing her arm as she passed. “In my heart, fair maiden. You wound my heart, passing without so much as a glance toward poor lonely Lukasz.”
The sweetness of his words did not reach his eyes. They never did. He would recite them to any maid or widow unfortunate enough to cross his path, and all the time his gaze would traverse his victim, leaving stains worse than those made by his hands, and harder to wash off. She shook her arm free of his grasp and said, “I have work to attend to, as do you.”
“No work so important that it cannot spare our efforts for a time. Wouldn’t you care to share some of your charms?”
She actually tasted bile in the back of her throat, thinking of the petty troll Lukasz playing the role of the knight in her ballad. “Those are for my betrothed,” she snapped at him in a low whisper.
“A lucky man, indeed. You should grant me an introduction.” Lukasz laughed at her, and she felt a sick sense of despair that she was so plain and common at nineteen years that this brute was the only man to show such an interest in her.
In the dark parts of her soul, she thought that her desire for solitude at times led those more discriminating than Lukasz to question her chastity. She didn’t know, but she suspected what the other women in the kitchen chattered about when she left to serve the knights.
She blinked back her tears and started walking away from him, promising herself that she wouldn’t turn around.
“Someday, Maria, I will be a knight. You could be the betrothed of Rycerz Lukasz.”
Maria balled her hands into fists and spun around. “A knight?” she shouted back. “On that day I will be far too old and feeble to hold your interest, and you’ll be too senile to remember any favors I granted you!”
Her outburst was greeted by laughter from the other side of the stone fence. A trio of stable hands, all younger than Lukasz, were standing in the pasture and doing nothing to hide their amusement at Lukasz’s expense. Lukasz’s face lost all trace of the false humor he’d been showing her and his skin rapidly changed color, becoming a blotchy red. “You shall not make light of my service, woman!”
“We both have duties to attend to,” she said. It took a supreme effort of will not to add, “Don’t you have manure to shovel?”
She turned to walk to the gate.
“You will not walk away from me like—”
She tensed, waiting for him to grab for her, but he was interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats. She felt the approaching horses in the packed earth of the path beneath her feet before she saw them. First she looked back the way she had come, but her path just led back into the dark woods that stretched south of the fortress.
“Everyone, the river!” yelled one of the stable hands from the pasture.
North and west of the fortress, the river Narew flowed, separating the fortress from the last wooded frontiers of Masovia. Across the river were dense woodlands, and eventually Prussia—the Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights. Even after the Polish king Casimir had found peace with the Teutonic Order, very little had come from that direction except the occasional messenger headed south, toward Poland. Masovia itself was still an independent duchy. Even under the rule of Casimir’s brother, it had yet to rejoin the Polish union, leaving it an uneasy buffer between Poland and the Order.
The black cross standard of the Teutonic Order fluttered above a score of horsemen as they drove their mounts across a ford in the river. The sight sent a shiver of terror through Maria’s chest. She grabbed her cross through her chemise as she watched the invading knights: men and horses, moving as if the hand of God itself was whipping their backs.
Behind her, the alarm bells tolled within the fortress.
“We’re under attack,” Lukasz said, standing rooted on the path while his fellow stable hands ran off to retrieve the horses from the pasture.
Maria stared at the men as they crossed the river and said, “No, we’re not.” Then she vaulted the stone fence and began running across the pasture toward the river.
What she had realized, after the initial shock of seeing the Teutonic Knights in Masovia, was that their tabards were smeared with gore, half their men were draped across the backs of horses like so many sacks of grain, and even the horses showed wounds leaking blood down their flanks.
The carnage was worse the closer she came. Even the men who rode upright had bloody rips in their armor, arms held limp at their sides, bandages tight against heads and arms and legs. Several of the horses were riderless, splashing through the water next to their mounted fellows.
She ran, thinking little of where these men had come from or whose colors they wore. She had seen the wounded knights and the wounded horses, and she knew that these men needed assistance.
Ahead of her, the German knights had made it across the ford in the Narew and were drawing up into a ragged group on the southeastern shore, in the shadow of the Masovian fortress. The alarm bells still tolled in Gród Narew, and Maria heard the main gates open. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw a hasty party of horsemen erupt from the fortress. Four mounted men, less than a quarter of the strength of the German party, bearing the threefold cross of the clan Bojcza, the emblem for Wojewoda Bolesław, lord of Gród Narew.
Maria noted immediately from the dress and the armor that only the man in the lead was a noble of the szlachta. The trio with him, while armed, were mere footmen. They accompanied their lord as a show of authority, not as a fighting force. As they rode out of the gate, Lukasz and the other stable hands scrambled to bring the grazing horses back from the pasture.
Maria was halfway down the slope of the pasture, heading toward the river, by the time Bolesław’s men passed in front of her, following the broad path from the fortress gate down to the river’s shore. The Germans, seeing the men approach, drew themselves up in such a ragged line as they could. A man bearing the tabard of the Teutonic Order dismounted and took a few steps forward.
He stood tall and removed his helmet, revealing a creased face adorned with a sharp silver beard. The man held his helmet in the crook of his arm and waited for the horsemen to approach. Despite his calm attitude of command, he had not escaped whatever evil had befallen his men. A single trail of blood wept from a wound under his graying hair, which curved across his cheek to stain dark a spot on the left side of his beard.
Maria slowed her approach. While it was obvious that many of these men needed assistance, Maria forced herself to temper that impulse. These men, on both sides, needed to satisfy the will of Masovia and the Teutonic State before mere human needs would be considered.
She came to a stop as Bolesław’s men rode up to face the Germans. The distress of the German knights became stark in the contrast between the two groups. The men from Gród Narew were clean and well-rested, and rode fresh horses. Maria recognized the man in the lead as Rycerz Telek, Lord Bolesław’s oldest nephew—a man as broad as the German leader was tall. When he dismounted, it was with a lightness that belied his girth, and he walked forward with a smile more good-humored than the situation warranted.
The tall German, by contrast, had an expression that never wavered from a stern seriousness. Behind him, his men sat on exhausted mounts that seemed on the verge of collapse. Their horses snorted from foamy lips, and their flanks were drenched with a foul mixture of sweat, gore, and river water.
Telek walked up, smiling, and said, “My uncle, the Wojewoda Bolesław, extends his greetings and wonders if you have perhaps lost your way?”
German muttering broke through the ranks of the Order, until the tall man snapped something that silenced his men.
Telek began to repeat himself, but the tall man said, “I speak your tongue well enough, sir.”
“Then,” Telek responded, “perhaps you might like a guide to assist you finding your way back to your own demesne?”
“On behalf of His Holiness the pope and Hochmeister Ludolf König von Weizau, I humbly request assistance from Wojewoda Bolesław. I have many injured men who would not fare well on any journey.”
“This much I see. And who is it that requests aid from my uncle in the name of the pope and the Teutonic Order?”
“I am Komtur Heinrich von Kerpen, and these men are brothers in my convent and knights serving the Order.”
“And how come you to be within the borders of Masovia?”
“We serve our duty to God and the pope.”
“We all do, Brother Heinrich. What enemy did you face to be so ill-treated?”
“We are not permitted to say.”
Telek paced in front of the line of Heinrich’s men. “These are not your lands, Brother Heinrich, and we aren’t some Prussian serfs subject to your authority. My uncle has the right and the duty, granted by the Duke of Masovia, to dispatch any invading forces as he sees fit. As yet he has no quarrel with you, but blood has been shed here. How? And with whom?”
“I can only say that it was an enemy of God and the Church—”
“You try my uncle’s patience. We’re quite aware that whomever the Order decides to raise a sword against is an enemy of God and the Church. I suggest that you answer my question, lest you find yourself an enemy of Wojewoda Bolesław and the Duchy of Masovia.”
Maria felt the tension even from where she stood on the hillside. The air between Brother Heinrich and Rycerz Telek seemed so charged that she felt as if the sod between their feet were in danger of bursting into flame.
Brother Heinrich lowered his head and said, “I am bound by my vows.”
“As are we.” Rycerz Telek placed a hand on the pommel of his sword, and Maria felt her breath catch in her throat. It had been almost ten years since the end of open war between the Poles and the Order, and she was about to see it start all over again.
“But,” Brother Heinrich said so quietly that Maria barely made out the word.
Telek lowered his hand and repeated, “But?”
“Grant us a bishop for our confessor, and he can give us leave to speak of what we fight.”
“A bishop?” Telek raised an eyebrow. “Not a cardinal? Or the pope himself?”
“Any of those could release our vow not to speak of our mission. However, a bishop will suffice.”
Telek gestured and his men dismounted. Two came forward and walked up to the Germans while Telek said, “Then if you’re to grant us the honor of accepting the hospitality of Gród Narew, I expect you to surrender your arms to us for safekeeping.”