I told him the arrow had missed the eyeball, so it was likely he would see with it again, but the arrow had stuck in the bone to the right of it, and there would probably be a scar. Still, he had been lucky.
'I would have been a damn sight luckier if the arrow had missed!'
I had to agree to the truth of that statement.
'Well, open that surgeon's kit! Get the arrowhead out, clean the wound, and sew it up! Didn't they teach you anything in medic's school?'
I tried to explain that I wasn't qualified, that I had never sewn up an eye before, that in fact I had never sewn up anything but some small dead animals in training, but it seemed he was adamant about me doing the job, and doing it immediately! I looked desperately around for help, but both of the surgeons were working on men who were far more seriously wounded than Lord Conrad. High rank has its privileges in most places, but not in an army surgery.
'Well, boy, now's your chance to learn! First, wash your hands in white lightning, and then wash around the wound as best you can.'
What could I do? I had been given a direct order by a very superior officer! I had no choice but to obey.
When I finished with the washing, he said, 'You got that done? Then get the pliers out of your kit and pull the arrowhead out. Better get somebody to hold my head. It will hurt, and I might flinch.'
I could not believe that the greatest hero in all of Poland would ever flinch and tried to say so, but he shouted me down.
'I said get somebody to hold my head and stop acting like I'm God! That's an order!'
Shocked, I agreed that he was not God and called Lezek over to hold his head still.
'Now the pliers,' he said.
The pain must have been horrible, for while he did not cry out, he did pass out for a few moments. When he came to, I told him it was out, and showed him the bloody arrowhead.
'Good. Throw it away. That kind of souvenir I don't need. Now get a pair of tweezers and feel around in the wound for any bits of broken bone or any foreign matter.'
I thought of keeping that Mongol arrowhead myself, as a conversation piece, but orders were orders, and I gave it a toss. I found the tweezers and went to work. This time he cried out, although he did not pass out. I felt around in there as gently as I could, and found a few small bits of broken bone, which I removed. Then I told him I was done.
'Thank God! Now clean it all out again with white lightning. Pour it right in.'
I still felt awkward about all of this, but what could I do but follow orders?
'Okay. Now get your sterile needle and thread and sew it up. Use nice neat little stitches, because if my wife doesn't like the job you do, she will make your life not worth living. Believe me. I know the woman.'
I had heard tales of Lord Conrad's lady, and I had no desire to be her enemy. I carefully made nine neat little stitches, and when I was done, you could hardly see where the cut was. Then I bandaged him up, wrapping the clean gauze around his head and then under his jaw to keep it in place.
He sat up and said, 'Well. Good job, I hope. Thank you, but now you better get around to the other men who were wounded.'
I looked around and told him that it wasn't necessary, the surgeons had already taken care of everybody.
'The surgeons!' he yelled. 'Then what the hell are you?'
I told him I was in the fifth lance, an assistant corpsman.
'Then what the hell were you doing operating on my head?'
I tried to explain that he had ordered me to do all that I had done. That I had been given a direct order by my commanding officer. What else could I have done but obey him?
'Then what were you doing with that surgeon's kit?'
So I explained how they had had these extra kits at the warehouse, and how they handed them out to some of the fifth lancers, just in case we needed them.
'They just handed it to you?'
I said yes, and thanked him for showing me what one should do with many of the things in the kit. It had reminded me of my boyhood at Okoitz, when Sir Conrad always seemed to have time to explain things to us.
But he just turned away from me with a look of exasperation on his face. I thought about the way Sir Conrad had always had a lot less patience with adults than he had with children, and I supposed that I was finally growing up.
Nonetheless, 1 beat a hasty retreat down to the lower deck.
Lezek followed me, giggling.
Chapter Five
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 21, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 26, 1241
WE GOT back to East Gate every second or third day, to load up on more coal, food, and ammunition, and to put ashore our dead and our seriously wounded.
The fighting was getting grim. The Mongols were becoming a lot less stupid than they had been, and we were starting to take serious losses.
The Mongols killed their first riverboat by luring it close to shore, and then felling a tall pine tree on it. They swarmed over the tree and eventually killed everyone in the crew. They were learning how to use the guns when Lord Conrad had another boat set the captured boat on fire with its flamethrower.
Their engineers all seemed to have black hair, yellowish skin, and funny-looking eyes. Lord Conrad said they were Chinese, from a place called China on the other side of the world.
They started setting up a sort of Mongol catapult. The things had a long arm with a big rock at one end and maybe two gross of their men pulling ropes on the other. They worked a lot better than you'd think, throwing rocks weighing over a ton for hundreds of yards.
One day when I was resting down on the cargo deck, a rock came through the fighting top, through two bunk beds in the officers' quarters, through the second floor, through our war cart not a yard from where I was lying down on top of it, through the cargo deck floor, and down through the bottom of the boat a yard below that!
I'd made the mistake of removing my armor before lying down to rest, so I got sprayed with about two dozen big splinters. I was never in danger of dying, but it took the surgeons over an hour to patch me up. And it hurt.
Lord Conrad got the bottom fixed before we sank, but just when he was done, another rock came all the way down through the boat not three yards from where the first one hit!
I tell you, warfare was starting to get dangerous!
We managed to keep our boat afloat, but had we caught a rock in the boilers, or on the paddle wheel the way some boats did, we would have been wrecked just like so many of the others.
Usually, the boatmaster could get his boat on the west bank before the thing sank, or sometimes another boat was near enough to be able to help out, so most of the men were saved. Most, but by no means all.
Sir Odon said it was possible to swim in armor, and he had done it himself, but he didn't think that a man could last long in the freezing water of February. It didn't make much difference to me one way or the other, since I had never learned to swim.
We got to avoiding those catapults, except where they started building a bridge in front of a bunch of them. As long as we could keep the Mongols on the east side of the Vistula, we knew eventually we would beat them. We didn't dare let them across, so we didn't dare let them get a bridge built.
Then the Mongols came up with their best idea yet, only maybe I should call it their worst one. They got whole cowhides, sewed them back together, and filled them with oil and lard. They lit them on fire and threw them at us with their catapults. When they hit a boat, it usually burned to the waterline. We lost more than half of all our boats to those firebombs, and all too often their crews were burned up with them.
In front of Sandomierz, where the enemy tried again and again to build a bridge, I saw six riverboats get hit
