Poland: A Novel Part 3

So on the morning of 11 January 1241, a date recorded with awe in the chronicles, the six thousand mounted troops of the Tatar leader Vuldai eased themselves quietly into the eastern limits of the Forest of Szczek and started cautiously infiltrating toward the western edge, where the little settlement waited.

One unauthorized person witnessed this pa.s.sage of the Tatars through the forest. From the village a boy of twelve named Jan was working in the woods gathering fallen branches for his father, also named Jan, but with the additional designation The Woodsman, and he had wandered far to a place which had always enchanted him: a gra.s.sy glade hidden among the tall trees which his father tended for the knight who owned them. The area was surprisingly large, a pleasing gap in the forest where birds came and deer and sometimes one of the bears who lived nearby.

Young Jan liked to visit here and rest from his labors, lying on the gra.s.s and staring at the open sky, and on this day he was in this position when he heard a clinking sound to the east, and it occurred to him that once again the devil was rattling his chains in the forest to which he had given a name. But when the sound grew closer, appearing to be not devilish but human, he prudently slipped away from the glade and hid himself among the trees.

What he saw astounded him, for out of the trees to the east came two men on horseback, and they were certainly not Poles, for they were dressed in costumes he had not seen before, and their skins were dark, their mustaches long and their eyes c.o.c.ked curiously. That they were some kind of military men seemed evident from the swords and daggers in their belts, but they rode easily, letting the reins hang slack, and they spoke in low voices as they pa.s.sed, using words he could not understand.

One thing was clear: they were men ready to strike at anything that surprised them, and when they were gone Jan moved farther back into the shadows lest others follow.

Now solitary hors.e.m.e.n entered the area, always from the east, and they were fascinating to see: small, heavily clothed, darting eyes, each man looking as if he were an inseparable part of his mount. The lone rider would pause, encourage his horse to browse on the good gra.s.s, then pa.s.s quietly on, leaving the area silent.

But then four or five of the strangers would arrive in unison, and they, too, would graze their horses and talk quietly, then vanish mysteriously into the farther trees.

Now eleven of the little men came through on a determined trot and they did not stop, but six or seven others who filtered through actually dismounted, and Jan saw that they had captured a Polish woodsman who sometimes worked with his father. They threw him to the ground and shouted strange words at him, as if asking questions, and when the woodsman could not reply, they pierced him many times with their daggers, remounted and rode on.

It was then that Jan, staring at the inert body and hearing echoes of the unfamiliar words, realized that these intruders must be the dreaded strangers from the steppes: Mongols! They've come to destroy us all!

He wanted to run westward to his village, but before he could move, large groups of the hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.sed through the glade, each man reacting in his special way; one dismounted and walked directly toward where Jan was hiding, but at the edge of the glade he stopped to inspect the strange trees whose like he had not seen before. Then he urinated and returned to his horse. But no rider bothered with the dead man in the middle of the glade, for they were accustomed to the death of strangers.

By nightfall more than a thousand warriors had pa.s.sed close to Jan, and when the stars came out he knew that it was his duty to go quickly and alert his village, but it seemed that all around him the Mongols were camping, and he could move only with extreme caution lest they hear him. Avoiding the trails he customarily followed, he took a long detour, checking with the stars whenever they twinkled through the treetops, and as the night deepened he heard, no matter where he crept, the sound of clinking, warning him that on this night the devil was truly in the forest.

The little settlement which the Tatars were proposing to destroy and which the boy Jan was trying to save was dominated by three Polish families. In Castle Gorka, a shabby stone affair guarding the Vistula, lived a red-haired knight of medium means whose name, Krzysztof, would in western nations have been Christopher, and with the same exalted meaning: Christo-phoros, the Christ-bearer, a man of good will dedicated to the service of Our Savior. The ancestors of the present Krzysztof had been placed in this particular castle by the duke himself to serve as frontier guards protecting the eastern advances to the ducal city of Krakow, and through the decades the various knights had served well. Illiterate, and married to the daughters of illiterates, they had occupied their meager castle with only the barest amenities: no forks to eat with, one plate for all things cooked, gla.s.s in only a few windows, thin draperies supposed to kill the dampness of the walls, only a few smoking oil lamps to brighten the long nights, heavy old-style armor and not the light new chain, swords of only moderate length and strength, and worst of all, four horses only and not the minimum of thirty which marked an important knight.

But Krzysztof and his ancestors did have three attributes that clothed them in virtue: they loved Jesus and sought to bring his realm into being in Poland; they were brave; and they were loyal to the duke whose preference had lifted their family from the ordinary dregs into knighthood. When Christianity first edged its way tenuously into Poland before the years were counted in thousands, Krzysztof's family had been one of the first to comprehend what the flowing vision of a new world meant, and in subsequent years they had volunteered to fight on behalf of bishops, they had helped build churches and monasteries, and they had supported all the good works of the church. They were Christian in the great good sense of this word and were prepared to live, or fight, or die for their faith.

Their castle, a rough affair built in the year 1060, bespoke no power, for the owners did not control vast lands; they owned some five thousand acres, mostly wooded, and seven rather small villages, but that was all. The fields and the villages had been given to the family in reward for services to the duke, and it was a.s.sumed that if the present Krzysztof of Gorka behaved with any distinction, these domains could be enlarged.

The castle stood on a piece of high land that had always borne the name Gorka, and by tradition it was referred to as Castle Gorka, which meant that the owner was known widely as Krzysztof of Gorka, and in the heat of battle, simply as Gorka or Red Head. In the entire settlement, including knights, gentry and peasants, no one carried a last name and no one felt the need of any.

The smaller castle to the north was much older than the one in which the knight lived; records show that it had been in existence as early as A.D. 914, a stubby, tough little affair intended to provide a hiding place for defenders of the river in which they could resist alien sieges until help came from Krakow, and it had served this purpose well. True, it had been burned and nearly destroyed some six or seven times, but it had been a deterrent, so that even if its occupants did perish, they died knowing that they had held up the invaders for precious weeks or even months until defensive forces could gather on the far side of the river. It was a small castle with a giant reputation.

It was now occupied by a family that stood in the same relations.h.i.+p to Krzysztof in the big castle as he did to the duke in Krakow. Zygmunt was a liege of the knight's, by no means a servant but, rather, a man of historic lineage who happened to own almost nothing: he had no land, no villages, no peasants, and worst of all, he had only one horse. He was obliged to report for military duty whenever the knight summoned him, but he was recognized throughout the region as a full-fledged member of the gentry, a man of some distinction whose ancestors had boasted of the same restricted honor.

What he lacked in goods he compensated for with a quality which he exemplified: he was proud, proud of his family, proud of his courage in battle, proud of his piety, proud of his willingness to defend Jesus Christ. A rather stupid man, he walked through the world as if he were a porcupine ready to throw his barbed quills at anyone who even smiled askance; indeed, he was known mockingly to his a.s.sociates as Jezyk, the hedgehog, the porcupine. Having little but his sense of honor, he wore it like a suit of armor.

The village to which his castle was attached had been known for as long as men could remember as Bukowo, the place of the beech trees, so his official t.i.tle was Zygmunt of Bukowo, and with his one poor horse he did function as a kind of knight, but a most impoverished one, landless and with little prospect of advancement.

In the village itself, which he and his castle were supposed to protect, three hundred and forty peasants lived in little hovels with earthen floors, no windows, no chimneys and no furniture other than a platform for a bed, a table and a couple of three-legged stools. A few mean pots, some rude equipment to work the fields and never an extra piece of clothing-such was the wealth of the family. Months could pa.s.s or sometimes even years without the cooking of a piece of real meat that a man could chew. Over the long grind of life they ate turnips and cracked wheat and thin soup and huge amounts of cabbage in varied forms.

The peasants worked for three masters: Zygmunt in the little castle, Krzysztof in the big castle, and the duke in Krakow, and in some years they would spend three hundred and twenty days working for these masters, forty-two days working for themselves, and three days in idleness at the festive season. They rarely saw money; they tended to die before they reached forty-four; and the only solace they had was poaching a rabbit now and then from the knight's forest and attending comforting services in their little church when some itinerant priest happened by. They spun thread and wove cloth; they threshed grain; they minded numerous geese belonging to the knight; they sang a lot; they fell into bed at sundown and rose an hour before sunup; and they died without ever having moved ten miles from where they were born, unless some marauding enemy captured them as slaves and later set them loose, in which case they invariably returned to Bukowo, for it was known as the finest village along the river, the one with two castles.

Among the villagers there was one stubborn family that had survived every vicissitude, century after century. Its eldest sons were always known as Jan, and because they worked as foresters, sometimes as Jan of the Forest. They were a taciturn lot, clever in the lore of the woods, obedient to the rule of their masters, but occasionally they produced a lad of fiery temperament, gifted in playing pranks and daring in his challenges to authority, and these Jans were always given the affectionate nickname Janko. There had been seven or eight Jankos in village memory and some had been redoubtable. When Ruthenian marauders had penetrated almost to the Vistula, one Janko led a band of village men who drove them back with heavy losses, and from a dead body this Janko had stolen an odd-shaped medal bearing a non-Christian symbol, which the priest wanted to destroy because it was pagan, but which the various Jankos kept hidden beneath one of the walls of their cottage. On the occasions when it was produced, the villagers were convinced that it honored a heathen G.o.ddess.

In this generation there was no Janko, nor anything distinctive about the miserably poor family that occupied the cottage. There was Jan the Woodsman; Danuta, his wife, toothless although only twenty-nine; the boy Jan, who loved the forest and was now running through it to spread an alarm; and the girl Moniczka, a lively, pretty la.s.s. Among the four they had only two extra pieces of clothing: a man's jacket, which either of the two Jans could wear to festivals, and a woman's dress, which could be let out or tucked up depending upon whether Danuta or her daughter was to wear it.

It was now an hour before dawn, and when Danuta awakened to make the morning broth she discovered that her son was not sleeping in his accustomed place on the floor and she nudged Moniczka with her foot. The girl jumped up instantly, supposing that she was being summoned to work, but her mother merely asked: 'Where's Jan?'

'I thought he was here,' the girl said.

'Well, he isn't.' Then, with instinctive fear of the unknown, Danuta asked: 'Was he here at all?'

Before the girl could answer, there came from the edge of the forest her brother's agonized voice uttering the terrible cry that would awaken the whole village: 'Mongols!'

Fifty years had pa.s.sed since the last intrusion of this dreadful horde, but legends of what it meant were so much a part of daily life that a few fortunate people reacted almost instantaneously and thus saved themselves. Others, terrified by what might happen in the next moments, hesitated or became confused, forgetting promises they had made themselves as to how they would act 'when the Mongols came,' and these would perish.

Mother Danuta grabbed her shawl with one hand, her daughter with the other, and without even waiting for her son to reach the cottage or for a chance to say goodbye to her husband, who had responsibilities of his own, she dashed for a secret path that led into the heart of the forest and by accident chose the very one that her son was using to leave it. 'Save yourself!' she shouted as they pa.s.sed.

Her husband, reacting to inherited fears, bolted like a frightened deer to the little castle, shouting as he approached 'Mongols! Mongols!' and when his panic-filled voice penetrated to the dark halls, Zygmunt knew instantly what he must do. Springing from bed, grabbing what little armor he possessed, he shouted at his wife 'Save yourself!' and sped to where his priceless horse was tethered. Leaping to its back, he galloped to the river's edge and goaded the beast to plunge in. As soon as the water was deep enough he slipped out of his saddle, grabbed the horse's tail, and swam with it to the far side, where, as planned, he would meet up with other lesser knights.

Jan, satisfied that he had done all he could to warn the little castle, now dashed along small footpaths to the bigger one, shouting as he drew near 'Mongols! Mongols!' whereupon Krzysztof, who was always awake before dawn, appeared at the castle gate urging Jan to hurry inside. As soon as the peasant ran gasping in, the heavy door was clanged shut, to reopen periodically as a group of terrified peasants and two lesser knights from the castle environs clamored for refuge.

Now red-headed Krzysztof demonstrated why his neighbors considered him a man of character. Pacifying everyone and demanding silence, he coldly calculated his position: 'Only three fighting knights. Where's Zygmunt?'

'He escaped across the river,' Jan reported.

'With his horse?'

'Of course.'

'Excellent. We have fifty-five peasants here. Far too many, but what can we do?'

He studied each face as if judging the owner's capacity for heroism, then continued: 'We have little water. d.a.m.ned little food. So we can't survive a long siege.' No one groaned, but he did see some jaws drop in fear and he knew that what he said now would be critical. 'We have one chance, and it's a good one. We don't know if they're Mongols ... with machines to knock down castles. Suppose they're really Tatars on an expedition ... horses only. They'll come raging here, hoping to overwhelm us, but if we kill off the first half dozen, they'll wheel their horses about and gallop off.' When some faces brightened, he cried: To us they must be Tatars. And we must drive them back.'

With swift precision he placed his best archers at slits in the wall, directing them not to release their arrows until the Tatars were almost at the gates, and then to shoot three arrows as rapidly as possible: 'Don't even aim the last two. Just fire.'

'And if the Mongols keep coming?' a farmer asked.

'They are not Mongols!' Krzysztof shouted. 'Surely G.o.d, seeing our desperate plight, will send us Tatars.'

He did his best work on the battlements, where he led most of the male peasants to man the huge piles of boulders he had collected there, year after year. These were to be thrown down with as much force as possible onto the heads of the Tatars: 'I trust in G.o.d that these great stones will turn them back.'

A woman lookout shouted from her topmost position in the tower: 'The village is burning.' And after only a few minutes she called: 'The other castle is burning.' And then the fearful report: 'Here they come!'

Krzysztof stared at the opening in the forest through which they would appear, and those about him could see that he was praying, and then he saw the first little hors.e.m.e.n with their flowing mustaches and conical fur hats and he knew that he and his defenders had a fighting chance. Falling to his knees before the first arrow sped out from his castle or the first boulder was hurled, he cried for all around him to hear: 'Thank you, blessed Lord Jesus, for sending us Tatars without machines,' and he began the defense of his fortress.

When Vuldai led his Tatars out from the Forest of Szczek he perceived in one glance that the miserable village of Bukowo was not going to provide much booty, so with a brief flash of his right hand he cried: 'Destroy it.'

Like an explosion of lava from a volcano, the hors.e.m.e.n swept over the settlement, setting fire to every cottage, slaying every human being they encountered, even killing cattle too old to be herded easily to that night's campsite, wherever it was going to be. Of those Bukowo peasants trapped inside the village, all were slain, even though not one of them had taken arms against the Tatars or tried in any way to oppose them.

When Vuldai found the little castle practically undefended, his men simply broke their way in, slaughtered everyone they caught inside, including the wife and children Zygmunt had abandoned when he swam his horse across the Vistula. Disappointed at the poverty of the goods they uncovered inside the castle, the Tatars took revenge by setting it afire, watching with glee as all things consumable fed the roaring blaze, even the corpses. When the fire subsided, the vigorous little men tore down what walls were left, then urinated on the embers.

The invaders now rode to attack Castle Gorka, but here they encountered a much different situation, for when the first line of hors.e.m.e.n galloped up to the walls they were met by a withering hailstorm of arrows, which killed four men and wounded six others. As these latter lay on the ground, wrestling with arrows that had pierced them, great boulders descended from the battlements, crus.h.i.+ng three of the men horribly. And when other riders dashed in to rescue survivors, they, too, were met by arrows and cras.h.i.+ng boulders.

When Vuldai approached the castle walls, in the third line of attack, he again perceived the situation quickly, and with another wave of his right hand, cried: 'Leave it. We cross the river.' And he wheeled his own horse tightly, headed for the steep banks of the Vistula, and scrambled his mount down the shaley slope and into the dark water.

By nightfall his six thousand, somewhat diminished, had reached the western sh.o.r.e, and scouts were already scurrying northward to make contact with the larger army to determine where the two branches should meet to concert their attack on Golden Krakow.

When Krzysztof of Gorka surveyed the pitiful condition of his domain he could have been forgiven had he allowed himself to be submerged in despair, for only his castle remained. His other six villages had been destroyed as completely as Bukowo; his peasants had been slain; the homes of his lesser knights had been devastated and their women killed; and there seemed to be no reasonable strategy by which the terrible scourge of Tatars could be either punished or turned back. Inevitably, Golden Krakow must fall to their torches, but Krzysztof was unwilling to concede this inevitability, and in the perilous days ahead he became the soul and animating spirit of Poland.

He was forty-eight years old, almost an ancient in that time of early death, with no substantial resources of his own except his conviction that knights defended their dukes regardless of circ.u.mstances: 'We will march to Krakow and save that city from the wild hors.e.m.e.n.'

When he studied his position coldly he found little to rea.s.sure him: 'Nine horses only in my entire territory. Fourteen men who know how to use arms. No food surplus. No help arriving from any quarter. Good! We know we must depend upon ourselves.' Running his fingers through his red hair, he laughed, spat on the ground, and renewed his pledge: 'We march to Krakow, for the duke will need us.'

From the forest he conscripted every man who had escaped slaughter, and found among them the boy Jan whose running shouts had enabled Castle Gorka to prepare its defenses: 'You march with me to tend the horses.' And when he learned that this lad was the son of that adult Jan who had joined in the boulder-hurling, he cried: 'Jan and Jan, that's a good omen. For in the Bible there are many Jans, and they are all men of good report.'

With the same enthusiasm he would have shown had he commanded a battalion of well-equipped cavalry, he a.s.sembled his fragile troop, then dispatched the older Jan to the far side of the Vistula to locate Zygmunt and any other gentry who had escaped with their horses. His orders were: 'You are to come back across the river and a.s.semble at Castle Gorka.'

There the expeditionary force was organized, a pitiful rabble of men whose wives and children had been slain, of cavaliers with wretched horses or none, of lancers with no weapons. They comprised about ninety men, if one counted the foot-servants who tagged along and the boy Jan. They set forth immediately for Krakow, hoping to arrive before the Tatars could mount their attack, and when young Jan saw the golden city for the first time, with its splendid towers and walls, and formidable castle and shops with incredible riches, he told his father: 'They can never capture such a city,' but the woodsman whose eyes were trained to note differences saw quickly that the supposed defenses were more show than reality. He would not allow such walls to be built in the village of Bukowo.

The boy, like his elders, was perplexed by the young duke to whom all present owed allegiance, for although he was sovereign in this part of Poland, he seemed never to know what exactly to do and he alternated between surges of heroic optimism and torments of despair, so that on this day he was prepared to defend the city with his life and on the next he was seeking counsel as to the best way to surrender the town before the Tatars started to burn it. When Jan asked a local soldier about such contradictions, because Krzysztof of Gorka certainly displayed great constancy, the Krakow man explained: 'You must excuse the duke. He doesn't know whether Krakow belongs to him or not, or even whether he belongs to Krakow.'

This sounded silly, so Jan asked what the man was saying, and the latter replied: 'Poor fellow. His friends have put him on our throne five times, but his enemies have kicked him off four times.'

'Do they want someone else?' Jan asked.

'No. The people of Krakow don't want to be ruled by anyone.'

Jan pondered this during most of one night when he was helping pile logs across the main entrance to the city, and he thought it strange that a big city like Krakow could not govern itself intelligently when a little village like Bukowo could: Our knight tells us what to do and we do it. When the priest comes he tells us how to remain friends with Jesus and we do what he says. Here they have a duke and an archbishop, but n.o.body obeys.

Next day at noon, when the Tatars were reported on the outskirts to the north, Jan became totally confused, for word flashed through the defenders that the duke, terrified by the prospect of what might happen in the next days, had fled the city completely, taking along two women he liked, with the intention of crossing the mountains into Hungary, where there was peace and where the Tatars never came. In its moment of maximum peril, Krakow was abandoned by its legitimate ruler.

It was curious that no one in the remaining leaders.h.i.+p considered even for one moment marching north to engage the Tatars in preventive battle: 'They're so swift they'd overwhelm us. The horses of our cavalry are too slow. With Tatars there's nothing to do but hide until they go away.'

Krzysztof alone wanted to sally forth, and he believed he had tactics which would neutralize Tatar mobility, but he was forbidden to try. Polish strategy, with the young duke gone, consisted of selecting the largest churches with the stoutest walls and hiding therein as many citizens as possible, then praying that the walls would stand until the Tatars ran out of food or patience.

Four times Krzysztof addressed the knights, pleading with them to take decisive action, but they had no concept of union or strong leaders.h.i.+p or concerted movement toward a common goal; they were men of insolent freedom, and the abuse they had showered upon their reasonably capable young duke they also showered upon any one of their own members who threatened to stick his head above the generality. Poles hated strong leaders.h.i.+p, and when Krzysztof of Gorka showed signs of exerting it they cut him down.

'You have been given St. Andrew's church with the big cloister,' the commanders told him. 'Allow as many citizens inside as it will hold, and pray.'

On 21 March 1241 red-headed Krzysztof, aware of the disgraceful act he was performing, led his Bukowo men into the nave of the fine old church with the stoutest walls in Krakow, and there they accepted seven hundred residents of the city, including a group of priests who started prayers that the church might be spared. There they remained for three awful days and nights, s.h.i.+vering in terror as they heard the Tatars galloping into the city, where fires began to rage and women scream. They could hear the destruction moving methodically from street to street, until it reached the area of the church itself, cras.h.i.+ng at last against the powerful walls. They cringed as they heard great oaken beams come thundering at the gates, and they watched with terror as the gates swayed inward, but at this point Krzysztof and his strongest men rushed forward to support the doors, and they held. When the Tatars tried to set the gates afire, men from aloft poured down precious water, and again the doors were saved, but the screams and the galloping of horses continued throughout the three days.

On the fourth morning, at about the ninth hour, one of Krzysztof's watchmen on the tower shouted: 'They're moving off!' and when excited aides rushed up to verify the report, they saw that the Tatars were indeed quitting the city, but they also saw that Golden Krakow of the beautiful towers, this center of light and commerce and religion, had been put to the torch, and when the gates of St. Andrew's were swung open, at noon on 24 March, the survivors walked out in a stupor to see only the charred remains of what had been one of the world's ill.u.s.trious cities.

Krzysztof of Gorka did not waste time in lamentation; he more than most could appreciate the terrible loss which had occurred here, but he also knew that only a relentless pursuit of the Tatars, an incessant hara.s.sment of their flanks, would ever turn them back from their devastating sweep through Christian Europe, and he was grimly determined to provide that hara.s.sment.

Collecting all the remnants he could, and turning the governance of the city over to the aides of the absconded duke-for his enemies knew nothing of government except how to overturn it-he marched westward, hoping to encounter other remnants who would coalesce to oppose the Tatars on some battlefield more favorable to the Polish cause.

The spring of 1241 was one of the darkest periods in Polish history, for the rampaging Tatars had ripped the fledgling nation into shreds. Krakow lay in ruins. The Vistula was closed to river traffic. Fields were left barren and centers of production were burned out. There seemed to be no cohesion anywhere, and deep shadows covered the land.

Krzysztof was faring as poorly as his land. His two best horses had been killed and the ones that remained were not strong, but he did have this fellow Zygmunt of Bukowo, who was proving to be a man of some stability; if you told him to hold a difficult position, he held it. He was not intelligent and could not follow a complex argument, but when his neck muscles tightened and his shoulders squared he could be formidable. There were a few others like him, so with undiminished conviction that the Poles would triumph in the end, Krzysztof led his remnants westward to intermediary battles he knew they could not win.

He mustered a half-hearted stand at Raciborz, where the Poles were almost annihilated by the brilliant horsemans.h.i.+p of General Pajdar and his united forces. Undaunted, he regrouped and retreated stubbornly to the town of Opole, where he fell in with an enormously fat duke named Mieszko Otyly, Mieszko the Obese, who displayed some skill in generals.h.i.+p. With Krzysztof's daring help, the fat one laid a trap for the Tatars as they attempted to cross the Oder River, and the Polish forces might have won their first real victory except that at the height of the battle Mieszko the Obese grew frightened at the magnitude of what was happening and ordered a full retreat. He might have been overly cautious; he might have been downright cowardly; or he might have shown real brilliance in damaging the Tatars and moving off before they could annihilate him. Regardless of what impelled his move, he allowed the Tatars free access to the riverbanks, but he did save his troops for a disorganized retreat to the formidable city of Wroclaw, called Breslau by the Germans, where at last Krzysztof heard some rea.s.suring news.

Wroclaw could be defended, for it, too, stood on the Oder River; it had steep flanks; it already contained a large number of troops; and best of all, it was governed by a remarkable pair: Hedwig, a strong-minded German princess who had come here decades ago to marry a das.h.i.+ng Polish count, now dead; and her able son Henryk Pobozny, Henry the Pious, a sagacious, just and heroic man whose ambition it was to unite the many shattered dukedoms like Krakow's into one powerful nation. To achieve this, he realized that he must demonstrate his leaders.h.i.+p by being the only Polish commander to defeat the Tatars.

When Krzysztof first met Henry the Pious he liked him and saw a chance that here at last was a leader capable of establis.h.i.+ng order among the Polish forces and common sense among their captains. Hope began to germinate, but when Krzysztof met Hedwig, whom the years would consecrate as a saint, he was trebly encouraged. She was a rare woman; after she and her husband had produced seven children, she cried 'Enough!' and retired to a monastery, from which she continued to give counsel and even rule when her powerful husband was incapacitated.

She was especially likable when she appeared with her son, for his strength and piety were reinforced by her German sagacity, and no part of Poland was better governed than the lands adjacent to Wroclaw. Krzysztof sensed this immediately as he talked with Hedwig and her son, but he was even more impressed by a much different group of Germans who rode in from the Baltic coast.

He saw them first as they approached the north gate of Wroclaw, a company of some four hundred knights, all big, all strong, all blond, all dressed in black, with capacious white surplices covering their armor and proudly displaying the mark of their order: a huge black cross standing out boldly against the white ground. These were the Teutonic Knights, a holy order blessed by the Pope himself and commissioned by him to carry Christianity to the heathen lands facing the Baltic. Each item of their appearance, from their supple chain armor to the arbalests some carried to the grim set of their mouths, announced that here were men ready for battle, and Krzysztof joined the other watchers in cheering their arrival.

They were led by a handsome man in his fifties, Wolfram von Eschl, who, when he approached Hedwig and her son, threw himself before them, grasped the hem of Hedwig's gown, and cried: 'We have come to serve Christ in your behalf.'

'Rise,' she said quietly. 'We have great need of you.'

In the council directing the defense of Wroclaw, Krzysztof was struck by how similar his own a.s.sessments were to those of Von Eschl. Both men believed that Polish troops must meet Tatar mobility by great free movements of their own. Both felt that the place to strike the Tatars was when they attempted to cross the Oder again. And most significant of all, both were convinced that the Poles could win if they kept hacking away remorselessly at the Tatar flanks.

Von Eschl also endeared himself to Krzysztof by saying bluntly: 'We must watch this Fat Mieszko. I don't like him, and I fear that if the battle grows fierce ...' He shrugged his shoulders.

'At Opole he ran away, so don't count on him in your plans,' Krzysztof said, but he was concerned with deeper matters. 'I'm sure the Tatars know they must subdue Wroclaw or their pa.s.sage west will be prohibited. They can't afford to bypa.s.s us. And they can't sustain a siege. So what we must prepare for is a frontal a.s.sault.'

To inhibit this, Henry the Pious decided to meet the Tatars a goodly distance east of the city, and there he positioned a major part of his army, with Krzysztof and the Germans on his right flank, and when the two had studied the terrain, Von Eschl said with sober calculation: 'I'm not sure we can hold them here. Quite possibly we'll have to fall back into the city.'

'But certainly we'll do what damage we can,' Krzysztof protested.

'That we will!' the German agreed. 'It's like our constant battles with the Lithuanians. Hack away at them whenever you can. Punish them as sorely as you can. But when they outnumber you with better hors.e.m.e.n and more spearmen, let them go past and wait for a better day. But even as they go, cut at their horses, wear them down.'

Von Eschl's antic.i.p.ation of this preliminary battle proved amazingly accurate. The Tatars knew that this time they could not afford to bypa.s.s this linchpin in Europe's defenses and they supposed that the best way to take it was by overwhelming the Poles in the first skirmish, and this they did. At their first flight of arrows, which came humming like a flight of deadly birds, Fat Mieszko turned and took his needed brigades with him, leaving a vast empty s.p.a.ce into which the Tatars galloped and from which they spread destruction on all sides.

Within less than an hour the battle was over, a total rout, but even so, when Krzysztof and Von Eschl studied the results, they saw cause for hope, glimmering though it was at a far distance. 'In this battle,' the Teutonic Knight said, 'they've tasted real opposition. The fat one fled, true, but you and I made them pay viciously for every horse they stole. You're wondering tonight, Red Head. And I'm wondering. But be d.a.m.ned, the Tatars are beginning to wonder most of all. The next battle, that's when we'll get them.'

'Always you say "the next one," ' Krzysztof said, and Von Eschl, whose ancestors had fought in the Holy Land and Hungary and Prussia and Lithuania, replied: 'A soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.' When the stars came out, he pointed to the defenses of Wroclaw: 'Imagine what we'll do to them when they try to attack the city!'

To the surprise of these two tested warriors, the a.s.sault on Wroclaw never came, for early next morning Henry the Pious announced that all troops would be withdrawn forty miles to the west, where they would engage the Tatars in a culminating battle around his secondary castle at Legnica. So without firing an arrow, the Tatars took their third ducal city, and as they burned and raped, shouted that now all lay supine before them.

This was not the case. Dowager Hedwig had summoned from all neighboring nations allies to unite in one great effort to repel the invaders, and now the army would comprise not only her son's tested Silesians but also South Germans and Bohemians and a scattering of Frenchmen, and particularly, the huge Teutonic Knights with their blazing white tunics and black crosses. But on 8 April 1241, Krzysztof and Von Eschl were walking through the castle grounds, swearing to one another how each would deport himself the next day, when a ma.s.sive stone dislodged itself from a cornice and fell only a few feet ahead of the duke.

'It's an omen!' his men shouted, and news spread through the allied camp that G.o.d had warned Henry the Pious not to start the battle on the morrow, and that night, when Dowager Hedwig added her pleas that everything wait till a contingent of Hungarian mercenaries arrived from the south, Krzysztof had an opportunity to witness behavior which justified Henry's name of Pious, for the duke said with prayerlike gravity: 'Beloved Mother, I cannot wait even one day longer, because great is the misery of my people as they die under the Tatar lash. Therefore I must fight tomorrow, and risk my life, and await death itself if I am fated to die in defense of our Christian faith.'

He prayed most of that night, and in the morning he moved as if an aureole placed by G.o.d Himself hovered above his head. Inspiring his men as never before, he led them into battle, ten thousand Poles against twenty thousand Tatars, and he came very close to winning an inspired victory, for aides like Krzysztof of Gorka and Wolfram von Eschl ripped at the Tatar flanks, causing terrible disruption, but in the end the miracles which the Poles hoped for favored not them but the Tatars.

It was when the battle hung in the balance that a company of six Tatars rode toward the Polish lines with the wind strongly at their back, carrying aloft a monstrous red banner with an X painted across it. On top of one of the shafts supporting the banner stood the carving of an ugly black head, its chin buried in black hairs, its eyes glaring defiance. When the Tatars reached a point only a hundred paces away, the men began to shake the giant banner with all their might, and immediately this huge black head started to puff out large clouds of smoke which stank so awfully that it nearly knocked the Polish cavalry off their horses, and caused them to choke and even to vomit. And there was confusion everywhere.

At this moment a man rushed from the Tatar lines as if he were a prisoner escaping, and he dashed into the middle of the Polish troops, shouting in good Polish: 'Run! Run! All is lost!' And by ill luck this spy ran directly into the section captained by Mieszko the Obese, who became so terrified by the biting smoke and the wild shouts that again he fled the battlefield with all his troops.

With shock and sorrow Krzysztof saw chaos overtake the Polish lines, where a score of leaders were cut down, but there was still a chance to restore reason, so he galloped to where Von Eschl in his white tunic was inflicting real damage on the invaders. But as they fought side by side Krzysztof happened to look across the fray, and saw the Tatars surround the duke, and isolate him, and stab at him many times, and finally sever his head from his body.

In great rage he led his Poles and Von Eschl's Germans in pursuit of the Tatars who carried away the head, but he was frustrated by thousands of fresh Tatar cavalry who now entered the battle, and as day waned, all hope of a Polish victory vanished. But remembering Von Eschl's doctrine that one hacked and chewed at an enemy as long as possible, he did just that, but in time his third horse was killed under him, and he had to pursue his vengeance on foot, for he could not locate young Jan, who was tending the fourth horse.

As he slashed about with his long sword, keeping the Tatars at bay, Zygmunt of Bukowo saw his lord's predicament, dashed through the battle lines, leaped down from his own horse, and shouted: 'Sir Knight! You are the one to ride!' Without even pausing to acknowledge the gift, for this was what a liege was expected to do in such circ.u.mstances, Krzysztof mounted the new horse and galloped off to join Von Eschl's Teutonic Knights, who were slaughtering Tatars as they attempted to withdraw with booty gathered from Polish corpses.

At dusk the humiliated Poles lifted the headless body of their duke, and a rumor started that the corpse was not the duke's and that he still lived on another part of the battlefield, but Hedwig recognized a scarf she had given him and said: 'This is my son,' and she directed the men holding the body: 'Pull off his left boot,' and when this was done everyone saw that the foot had six toes.

Thus died Henryk Pobozny, a man of superpiety who believed that dukes should not run away in moments of danger but should stand and fight for their castles, their people and their G.o.d.