CONRAD'S QUEST FOR RUBBER

thighs had become. I felt my chest, and could feel every rib under my fingers.

I stood, shaking, and slowly made my way to the kitchen, expecting to see the remains of bodies scattered around. It was not as bad as I feared. Most of the beds in the common room were gone. There were four beds left, and they showed signs of use.

The kitchen was untidy, the breakfast dishes unwashed, but the scraps on them were no more than a few hours old. There was cold food left in a pot. I found a spoon, sat down, and ate. I drank a canteen filled with water, and then stumbled to the door to relieve myself in the latrine at the stern. The forest came right up to the doorway. There was no sign of the lake that we steamed in on. The Magnificent Maude was sitting on the forest floor, her formerly straight lines all bent and slumped, and she was in the process of rotting away. Ants swarmed over the hull.

I fought my way through the thick bushes to the latrine, only to find vegetation growing up through the toilet seat. I ripped the leaves away and sat down.

None of this made any sense at all.

My ears hummed with bird sounds, insect sounds, and what might be the distant scream of a monkey. Then, in the far background, I heard what had to be the regular thumping of an axe. It was a man, swinging an axe. Some of my crew were still alive, they were out there somewhere, doing something important.

Exhausted, but greatly relieved, I went slowly back to my bed and fell asleep.

I awoke to find Tomaz standing above me. He was dirty, bearded, and except for a silver cross hanging around his neck, he was completely naked. He had lost a third of his body weight since I had seen him last, but despite everything, I could see that he was healthy, or at least getting that way.

'Are you feeling better, sir?'

I said that I thought so, and asked how long I had been away.

'We are not sure, sir. For a while there, there was no one mobile and sane enough to keep up the log. Several months, at least.'

I asked how many of us were still alive.

He sat down on the edge of my bed.

'There are five of us left, sir. You, me, Jane, Gregor, and Antoni. The other eleven are dead. They weren't even buried properly. The two priests were the first to die, so none of them were given extreme unction. Jane was alone through the worst of it, and there wasn't anything she could do but throw the bodies overboard. That was before the water went away.'

Seeing the quizzical expression on my face, he continued.

'We weren't sailing across a lake, sir. We were going over a flooded forest. In a few months, once the rains stopped, the water all drained away and the forest became dry land again. It was just as well, because by then the boat was sinking, just rotting away. Something in this land doesn't like our northern lumber. Even the handles on our knives and axes have had to be replaced. Some of the local timber is pretty good, though. Jane has been a big help, there, since the trees around here are a lot like those around her home.'

I asked about the chopping I'd heard earlier.

'There is a fair-sized river about a mile from here. Jane is showing us how to make a dugout canoe, a boat of the sort her people use. You probably heard us working on that. We have been trying to spend half our time on it. The rest is needed to find food. Most of our stores rotted, of course. All the dried peas and beans, all the grains. Only the canned and bottled things are left, and not much of them. When she was taking care of us all alone, Jane didn't have much time to go hunting, and in her tribe, it's the men who do the gathering. Luckily, she knew enough about what to look for to show us what to do.'

I said that he made it sound like she was in charge.

'I suppose she is, sir, in a way. She knows this country, and we don't. She hasn't been giving orders, exactly, but when she makes a suggestion, we usually follow it.'

I said that despite all that, she was still an outsider, and we were regular army. I supposed that I would have to do something about our command structure.

'Sir, you are not going to do anything about anything, not for a week at least. That's how long it took each of the rest of us to get to the point of doing useful work. That's all you have to do for now. Get well. Once you are up on your feet, I will relinquish my command to you, but not until then.'

I asked him if he had taken command.

'To the extent that five naked, starving people constitute a command, yes. I had to. I am senior lance leader, after all, and the only knight you have left. Until recently, you have been out of your head, when you weren't comatose. Just relax, sir. In a week, you'll likely be up and around.'

Five days later I was able to hobble all the way down to the site where they were building the new boat. Jane had selected a huge tree as being suitable, and it had been chopped down. Although her methods called for burning it down, the men did it their way, but on later reflection they weren't sure which would have been faster. Certainly, burning would have been less work. The bark was removed, and with fire and axe they made the outside look like a double-ended boat.

Fires were started on the top of the log, while the outside of the boat was kept wet. By judicious burning and scraping, the thing was being hollowed out. Jane estimated that in two weeks they would be ready to leave.

It seemed to me they had built on a grander scale than necessary to carry five people. They said they planned to take all of the remaining trade goods with them, to trade with the other tribes along the way. Also, there had been six of us when they started the boat. Yashoo had died a week before I regained consciousness.

Moving the completed boat on rollers proved to be impossible without a block and tackle, and those aboard the Maude had all either rotted or been eaten by the ants. Again, the native way worked. We dug trenches under the boat and slid logs under it, which supported the thing as we dug a pit under the whole boat. Then we extended the pit into a canal all the way to the river. Water filled the canal, we dug out the supporting logs, and floated the boat out.

I found it remarkable that the native people had worked out whole technologies to get around their lack of a good cutting edge.

As we were loading the canoe with everything we would be taking with us, we came across the only item made of northern wood that had not rotted to uselessness. The whiskey barrel. It was completely sound, as were its contents. This was a pleasant surprise, for Lord Conrad had mentioned that a small amount of whiskey would purify water without the need to boil it. We toasted the old Maude, as well as our lost comrades, and then rolled the half-empty barrel down to the canoe.

We pushed off at dawn.

The dragons had always avoided us when we traveled in the Maude. I suppose that we frightened them. But they had seen a lot of native canoes, and they weren't afraid of smaller boats. We had to shoot dozens of them when they came too close, but dragons have a slow learning curve, and we had to thin them out everywhere we went. Their tails were good eating.

We made good progress downstream for the first few days, but there hadn't been any rain for some time, and the level of the water was dropping alarmingly. What had been a deep river became a sluggish creek. We often had to get out of the canoe and pull it through the shallow, muddy water. This was required more and more often as the long days wore on.

Eventually, we were reduced to unloading the boat in order to drag it farther. It soon became obvious that we would either have to stop our journey, until such time as the water level rose, or to abandon most of our weapons and supplies and try to make it back on foot with only what we could carry on our none too strong backs.

In this jungle, without our supplies, I did not think we could have survived a week.

On the other hand, finding enough food was no longer a problem. What little water was left in the river bottom was filled with fishes. Our food stocks were never very good, and while the fish were available, we set out to smoke as many of them as possible, for future use.

The water eventually got so low and the fish got so thick that you could just wade into the mud and grab