Seldom in the long history of human effort did any nation recover so swiftly from disaster. In 1658, Poland lay prostrate following the terrible destruction visited upon her by the Swedes, the Germans and the Transylvanians, but in January of 1683 representatives of five European governments convened in Warsaw, begging for Polish help to protect Christianity from a dark cloud of terror which threatened from the south.

Germany, France, the Papal States, Hungary and, most of all, Austria pleaded with the Poles for help: 'Without your a.s.sistance, and soon, Europe will be overrun by the most terrible menace that has ever threatened it. Please, please, spring to our a.s.sistance. Lead the great crusade which alone can save us.'

The danger was real, and of quite a new dimension: Turkey was on the march, having already consumed Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania and much of Hungary, and wherever the Sultan's victorious army triumphed, the losers who were lucky enough to survive faced a harsh choice: convert to Islam or suffer vast disabilities. Only rarely did the Muslims ma.s.sacre whole populations for religious reasons; they preferred to keep them alive as slaves, producing Janissaries for the army and trade goods for taxation, but life for a Christian under Muslim rule was harsh.

Europe trembled, for it saw that unless unprecedented action was taken, the key city of Vienna must fall to the Turks before the year was out, and whereas the Germans and the Austrians were willing to resist with what armed force they had, they realized that they would be ineffective without Polish strength and leadership. So the very nations which only a short while before had been endeavoring to destroy Poland now came to her begging for a.s.sistance.

What had ignited this transformation? And more important, how could a nation with almost no army suddenly find itself with one of the best?

Four factors explained the miracle. First, the good-hearted but confused Swede serving as King of Poland, the b.u.mbling Jan Kazimir, had the good sense to quit; finding himself hamstrung by venal magnates and frustrated by the liberum veto, he abdicated. Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly. Third, after another perilous interregnum and a brutal fight between French and Austrian aspirants, much the better man won, and he happened to be from the French camp. Fourth, and most significant of all, the victor, Jan Sobieski, was in the process of proving that he was one of the most active kings Poland would have.

He was an extraordinary man, fifty-four years old and most curiously shaped, with a large head, an enormous belly and small feet. 'He is,' reported a French observer, 'a perfect oval which from a distance looks like a very large egg stood on the small end.' A man of gargantuan appet.i.tes, explosive rages and piercing perceptions, he might have ended poorly had he not had the great good fortune to marry a brilliant Frenchwoman who had one of the most cupidinous natures in history. Rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV's queen, she believed that no married couple ever had enough money and that any king was worth double what the state allowed him. Repeatedly this Marysienka, always calculating possible advantages, warned her husband: 'Look at what happened to the two before you. Jan Kazimir kicked out. The other one persecuted to his grave by the magnates who would give him nothing. Take advantage of things while you have the chance.'

Together Sobieski and his queen sold every office in the land; if a clergyman threatened to give trouble, they arranged to have him made a cardinal, then charged him for the favor. Nothing was granted without cash in advance, and before long these two had estates, palaces and jewels worth fifty million in modern currency, and the queen had her own secret security fund in cash of more than five million.

But they gave good value. With the lithe quickness of a leopard Jan Sobieski sprang from one corner of his nation to another, driving back this attacker or that, and in doing so, had four times faced large Turkish armies, winning thrice. During that time he put together a formidable army, spearheaded by a cavalry unit unlike any that Europe had ever seen before.

To begin with: the hussars were excellent hors.e.m.e.n, and they backed this up by first-cla.s.s work with the long lance, the short sword and, if necessary, the dagger. Pride of unit made them especially fearsome when they charged into a battle line from a distance, for they rode with terrible precision, their lances evenly leveled and inescapable. But what made them unique was that as they charged they wore riveted to the back of their armor a curious lyre-shaped metal-and-leather construction, which seemed to come out of their backs and rise two or three feet higher than their heads. To it was attached in a beautiful fanlike design some three dozen large turkey or eagle feathers whose purpose was mysterious. Wrote one German knight who had faced their charge at a battle near Szczecin, which he referred to as Stettin, its German spelling: Like all my fellows, I had heard of the fierce Polish hussars, and like them I supposed that their quality lay in the discipline of their charge and the uniformity of their work with the long lance, but when I first saw them approaching in battle array, coming at me from the crest of a hill, I was astounded by their appearance. Each man seemed to come with a halo about his head, like a Madonna in some Italian painting. The feathers made a wonderful sight, but I asked as we prepared for battle: 'What are the feathers for?' Because they obviously were real feathers, and feathers cannot serve as armor, not in any way possible.

Then, as they drew near, galloping in the wind, the feathers began to mourn, or to chant like old women at a funeral or like witches at a false Sabbath, and then to shriek as the wind tore through them. I got frightened by the weird sound and the h.e.l.lish echoes, but my horse became terrified. He reared and whinnied and I could not control him, and the effect on the other German horses was the same, so that by the time the Polish hussars reached our battle line, all was in confusion.

I can state without fear or apology: The Polish cavalry did not defeat us in fair battle. They sang us to death with those d.a.m.ned feathers.

It was these hussars that Europe now wanted for its protection against Islam, and no plea was too undignified for the other nations to make: 'Sire, without your aid the Star and Crescent will fly over Paris,' and there was much truth to this, because the Turks already controlled the Danube, occupied Budapest, and were on the march to Vienna, which would surely capitulate long before autumn unless Poland sprang to the rescue.

But Poland's insane way of choosing its kings had created a difficult problem. France spent huge sums to bribe magnates in favor of Sobieski-Germany, Austria and Russia doing the same to support a Habsburg-and the contest had become quite ugly, with hardly a magnate uncontaminated by foreign gold. In the end, Sobieski had won, but he and everyone else knew that he did so as a lackey of the French.

Where did the complications arise? In European politics France always supported Turkey against her mortal enemy Austria, and Germany supported Austria against her mortal enemy the Turks. It was preposterous, in many ways, for these nations now to ask Sobieski to ignore his patron France and ally himself with his enemy Austria, and the pleas would not have succeeded without the presence of a very old cardinal of the Catholic church, dispatched personally by the Pope.

He was Cardinal Pentucci, the papal legate who had watched so closely and with such keen, knowing eye the debacle of 1655, and he had now come back to Warsaw with an urgent request from the Pope himself and with stubborn persuasive powers of his own. In the general meetings he offered merely ritual remarks, which might have been expected, to the effect that the continuance of Christianity itself depended upon what Poland did now, but in private he was crisp and canny and to the point: 'Jan, child of G.o.d, if you do not help us, the church will suffer and perhaps even vanish, but you already know that. I must remind you that Poland also will vanish, and most cruelly. If you think the Turkish occupation of Hungary is brutal, with the ma.s.s slayings and the appropriations, think of what it will be like if Turkey invades Poland.

'They will remember the humiliating defeats you have visited upon them, at Podhajce in 1667 before you were king, at Chocim in 1673, which qualified you to become king, and at Zurawno in 1676 after you were king. Sultan Muhammad IV remembers every one of those defeats, and he will be avenged in strange and terrible ways.

'Jan, child of G.o.d, you are like a hunter deep in the woods who has attacked a bear but not slain him. You may wish to retire from further battle, but the bear will not allow it. You have aroused him and he will fight with you until one of you perishes. You have aroused Turkey and you are not free to stop the battle now. If you do, and if Vienna falls, Krakow will be next, and then Warsaw, and we shall never see Poland again.'

This was sage counsel, for when Vienna fell, say, at the middle of August, the Turks would surely bring their Tatar subsidiaries across the Carpathians and into the flatlands of Poland, where they would be encouraged to desolate the country one final time. If Germany and France were threatened by the vast Turkish sweep, Poland had cause to fear that she would be eliminated permanently.

Sobieski, much sobered by the hard advice of the old cardinal, met with the military men who had accompanied the diplomats to Warsaw, and they told him a doleful story: 'Sultan Muhammad has given his Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa the green cord, and you know what that means. Capture Vienna or strangle yourself. So it will be a siege to the death, ours or his.

'Hungarian spies who have watched the Turks marching through that country report that Kara Mustafa wears the green cord about his neck day and night, so that all subordinates who speak with him will know the gravity of the undertaking.

'He brings with him an army of three hundred thousand, including the best engineers, the best cannoneers, and what is most important, the very best sappers in the world. Vienna is a walled city now, but when those Turkish sappers finish digging tunnels under the walls and into the heart of the city itself, and then explode enormous charges of gunpowder, Vienna will be blown apart.

'Our job is simple, Sobieski. We must rush to Vienna to neutralize Kara Mustafa's three hundred thousand, and we must do it before his engineers break down the walls, or his cannoneers knock down all the buildings, or his sappers blow the whole place to h.e.l.l. And only you can lead us, for our Germans and Austrians have never defeated the Turks, and you have done so, three times.'

When Sobieski asked whether the other forces would accept him as their general, he was a.s.sured that the Duke of Lorraine, who would be in charge of the Austrian forces, was most eager to cooperate, and that Prince Waldeck, who would be leading the German contingents, had told Emperor Leopold of Austria: 'Without Sobieski and his hussars, we have no hope.'

a.s.sured on this delicate point, because fighting a battle as part of a coalition had to be one of the most difficult of all military operations and not to be attempted if even one of the partners was disgruntled, he then asked about the relative strengths of the contending armies, and received a more balanced report: 'It is true that Kara Mustafa did leave Turkey with about three hundred thousand men, but at least half of them were not fighting soldiers. Did you know he brings whole tents filled with houris? Our soldiers could have some pleasure with them if we win.'

'We shall win,' Sobieski said. 'What are our strengths?'

'Austria can provide twenty-three thousand. We Germans will have at least twenty-eight thousand. They tell me you might bring as many as thirty-four thousand.' When Sobieski frowned at the disparity of his troops compared to the Turk's, his informant rea.s.sured him: 'Sire, by the time Kara Mustafa gets his horde to Vienna, it will have diminished to half the size. We have a chance.'

'That leaves an army of a hundred and fifty thousand, roughly twice our size,' Sobieski said. 'But of the real army, two-thirds are forced conscripts from captured lands, and who knows how they will fight when they have to face our hussars and the German pikemen? And twenty thousand will be the Tatars on one of the wings, and not even Kara Mustafa himself can predict what they will do. So it comes down to eighty-five thousand of our proved troops, and about the same number of theirs.' He broke into a robust laugh. 'Gentlemen, I have never faced the Turks when their army was not three times the size of mine.'

'How did you win?' the emissary of the Duke of Lorraine asked, and Sobieski replied: 'Speed. Those blessed hussars of mine, singing across the battlefield. And one thing more. Although the Turks always outnumbered us, I never permitted all their force to congregate at one time. They are a terrible foe, one of the worst ever to be let loose on Europe, but they can be defeated.'

'And you think we can save Vienna?'

'We must save it, and we shall, to preserve Christianity in the world.'

At the end of the meeting he learned one thing which pleased him: 'You know, Sobieski, that you already have a Polish army in Vienna.'

'I did not know.'

'Yes. Lubomirski is inside the walls there with three thousand of the best. And he promises that when you attack from the outside, he will attack from inside and there will be a happy reunion.'

'I would always be proud to cooperate with Lubomirski. His family knows how to fight.'

Those meetings with the papal legate and the Austro-German generals took place in January 1683, and during the next three months, while Kara Mustafa and his Islamic warriors crept closer and closer to Vienna, details of the treaty that would govern the coalition were painfully hammered out. When Gyor in Hungary fell to the Turks, and Petronell in Austria, death rattles could be heard issuing from Vienna, and the allies speeded negotiations.

On the last day of March 1683 a grand defensive alliance was agreed upon by Austria and Poland, with King Jan Sobieski promising to march at the proper time to the rescue of Vienna. On the first day of April, with Cardinal Pentucci blessing the holy occasion, formal papers were signed in Warsaw by which Poland, a devastated land only twenty-five years earlier, volunteered to stand forth as the champion of Christian Europe. It was a resurgence that no one would have dared predict.

When the convocation broke up, with each group of emissaries about to head for its own beleaguered country and with Cardinal Pentucci in tears of grat.i.tude for what had been accomplished, Sobieski told his allies: 'It will take me till mid-August to a.s.semble my army. But I will do it. You, in the meantime, must a.s.sure that Vienna withstands the siege. I will send a messenger to Lubomirski to encourage him with a promise that I shall soon be at his side.'

But even when faced with this dire predicament, with the fate of European civilization in the balance, the Polish Seym was incapable of behaving in a responsible manner. Only two years before, when Poland itself was threatened by a Turkish invasion, one deputy, a man named Przyjemski, who had accepted one thousand pieces of gold from the Hohenzollerns, who wanted to disadvantage the French, stood in the Seym and cried 'I object!' and the entire defense structure had been destroyed. When one of Sobieski's men asked: 'Why didn't someone shoot him?' he was told: 'The magnates insist upon their Golden Freedom, which is far more important to them than what the king wants.'

Now Sobieski encountered more of the same opposition, with the danger that at any moment some magnate in the pay of some foreign government with a special interest in the continued subordination of Poland might rise and cry 'I object!' and there might go the whole alliance against the Turks. So the king moved cautiously, talking privately with first this magnate, then the next, and obtaining from each a promise of troops and tax support for the crusade that was about to set forth.

He encountered major opposition from a source which surprised him. Count Lubonski of Gorka, now a slim, austere patriarch in his seventies, with his protruding belly long gone but his golden sash still in view, was reluctant to follow Sobieski's leadership. Always faithful to Austrian interests, and always dreaming of a Habsburg on the throne of Poland, Lubonski had opposed Sobieski's election move vigorously and in the years 16741683 had worked consistently against the king and his French advisers in support of any move that would strengthen Austria. As one of the richest men in Poland, he never accepted outright money bribes from the Habsburgs, and they never offered them because they knew they didn't need to, but he did accept other favors, like excessive honors at the Habsburg court when he visited Vienna and vague promises that a position of enormous power would be his whenever an Austrian was elected king.

Magnates like Lubonski had already precipitated the abdication of one king, the Swede Jan Kazimir, and had been on the verge of doing the same with his pitiful successor, when the latter died, so it was natural that after a taste of Sobieski they decided to depose him, and in this struggle Lubonski had taken the lead. The movement failed because Poland realized that Sobieski was the only man who could protect the nation, but the animosity between the two men continued.

Now, however, things were changed. Sobieski needed the support of Lubonski and his private army, and Lubonski found himself obligated to help Austria, whose interests he had always defended. It was a strange meeting that occurred in Krakow after Sobieski had sent a personal envoy to Gorka, imploring Lubonski to meet with him. They met as equals, a powerful king who already sensed the great things he might accomplish in building a stronger Poland and a better Europe, and a most powerful magnate who wanted no change except the union of Poland and Austria under a Habsburg king. Enemies the two men were, yet each knew he needed the other, and it was Sobieski's brilliance which solved the dilemma.

'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 n.o.bleman 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 a.s.signment, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sess 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 G.o.d, 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-G.o.d, 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 n.o.bility, 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 a.s.sociated with the area. At Plock, for example, he told about the famous hero Firczyk who had swung his ma.s.sive 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 a.s.sails 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sembled 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 dest.i.tute the way many peasant widows were. But the princ.i.p.al 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 reb.u.t.tal. 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 G.o.d 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.

'I'm always glad,' old Jan told his wife, 'when Piotr leaves. He is not good for the boy,' but Alusia replied: 'All work isn't good for him, either.'

They were engaged in this mild argument one April morning when their lord, Lukasz from the mansion, appeared, bubbling with good news: 'Jan! We're going to Vienna!'

Jan, two years younger than Lukasz by the calendar, fifty years older when the burdens of time were considered, said: 'Vienna's too far.'

'No! The king himself has ordered Count Lubonski to represent him on an important mission. And the count ordered me to help him, and now I'm ordering you to help me. We leave on Thursday.'