"Well, that didn't work," I said to Tadaos. "How much rope do you have aboard? And do you have any grease?"
"I have some cooking lard and maybe a gross of yards of good rope."
"Okay. Give me the lard and tie this rope to the back of the boat."
"The stern."
Yachtsmen are the same everywhere. They've got to have their own idiot language. "The stem. I'll be back soon." I had picked out a rounded vertical rock perhaps fifty meters upstream of the boat. I went over the side and waded toward it. Damn, but the water was cold! Small bits of ice were floating in it! The rock was just what I wanted-rounded on the upstream side and slightly concave. I greased the surface liberally and pulled the rope around it. Then I greased about ten meters of the rope, from the rock toward the boat, keeping the rope taut.
The boatman jumped into the water and shouted, "Okay, here we go, you men!"
"What are you doing?" I yelled. "Get back into the boat!"
"What do you mean? We have to pull ourselves off!"
"Yes, but the place to pull from is inside the boat."
"That's stupid, sir knight! We'll add our weight to the boat and make it harder to pull!"
"True, but our weight is small compared to the weight of the boat and the grain. And if we're inside the boat, we double our leverage. Be reasonable. Do it my way."
"Okay! We try it your way, just to show how dumb you are!"
I handed the rope up to Father Ignacy, and we struggled aboard.
"What do you think we'll do when this doesn't work?" the boatman asked.
"If this fails, we unload the boat one sack at a time and carry it to the shore. Then we try this again, and if it works, we load the boat back up again."
"That would take days! We'd lose half of the grain by dropping it in the water!"
"I know. So we try this first. Line up, you men. Pull!"
The boat moved, a centimeter at first, then two,. then ten. Once off the rocks, it moved easily. After ten meters, the boatman belayed the line around the sternpost and ran up to the bow. "She's not taking in any water!" Soon, the line cast off and hauled in, we were on our way.
I soon noticed that along with the normal oarlocks on the sides, the boat had additional locks on the bow and stem. Their function was explained when Tadaos set an oar in each. He took the stem oar and put Father Ignacy on the bow. They used these to paddle the boat sideways in order to avoid obstructions in the river. Once he was sure that all was well, the boatman motioned me over to him.
"The good father knows his job well, and as for you, sir knight, that was as fine a piece of boatmanship as I have ever seen. I hope you'll accept my apologies for the rudeness I showed to your knightship."
"No problem. We were all under stress. Your apologies are accepted, sir boatman."
"Well, hardly that, Sir Conrad, but I have had my share. Why, there was this girl from Sandomierz, a blonde she was, that ... but that's not what I want to talk about. I want to find out why you think that we pulled twice as hard standing in the boat as we did standing on the bottom."
"I wish I had a pencil and paper."
"Huh?"
"Some way to draw pictures for you. It wasn't that we pulled twice as hard; we didn't. Look at it from the point .of view of the boat. We were pulling the rope, right? So at the same time we were pushing on the boat with our feet. Right?"
"Okay."
"Also, the rope went around the rock and came back and pulled on the boat, right?"
"So, we pushed it and pulled it at the same time. We got twice as much for nothing!"
"No, we didn't. When we pulled that rope for one of your yards, the rope pulled the boat only one half a yard. We got more force but less distance."
"So we broke even."
"Less than that. We lost some power rubbing the rope against the rock. It would have been better if we could have had a wheel on the rock."
"Like a pulley, you mean?"
Now, how in hell can an apparently intelligent man know about rope and pulleys and not about mechanical advantage? "Yes, like a pulley. Would you mind if I got out of these clothes? I'm freezing."
"Do what you will, Sir Conrad." Water was running off his clothes onto the floorboards and freezing there.
I couldn't do anything to help his wet clothes, but it would have been stupid for me to be uncomfortable with no gain for the others. I went to my pack and dug out my tennis shoes, light trousers, spare socks, and underwear. I changed quickly and stretched my wet things out on the grain bags. Actually, most of my things were wet.
I took stock of my gear. A pair of lightweight 7 X 25 mm binoculars. A Swiss army knife. A small hatchet. A good Buck single-bladed jackknife in a leather belt pouch. A canteen. A dented cooking kit. A compass. A few days' food. A sleeping bag. A ripped knapsack. A sewing kit. A first-aid kit. A stub of a candle. A few coins that might be worth something. Some paper money that probably wasn't. A smashed flashlight that I pitched over the side. With these few things, my total worldly possessions, I was to face the brutal thirteenth century.
I laid all of it out to dry.
At the bottom of the pack, I found the idiot seeds. That incredible redhead! It seemed like years ago rather than only forty-eight hours.
The river grew increasingly interesting as the afternoon wore on, and I was glad that we had our experienced men at the helm, fighting our way past rocks and rapids.
I crawled under my still-damp sleeping bag and watched the scenery, which was pretty spectacular. The River Dunajec cuts through the Pieniny Mountains, and it was one gorgeous vista after another, with white marble cliffs thrusting up through the pine forest and sudden meadows with sheep grazing.
A castle clung high up on the slopes of a three-peaked mountain. I fumbled for my binoculars.
"That's Pieniny Castle," the boatman shouted. Pieniny Castle! I had toured its ruins once. Now, "dunce caps" topped the towers and the drawbridge was intact. It was here-will be here?-that King Boleslaw the Bashful took refuge after he lost the Battle of Chmielnik to Batu Khan, and Poland was left open to the Mongol invaders. That was-will be-in the spring of 1241, nine and a half years from now.
"What is that thing you're holding in front of your face?" Tadaos asked.
"Binoculars. They make things look close. Here, take a look."
"Later, Sir Conrad. I've got my hands full."
And he did, steering that overladen boat through rapids and eddies. I was dreading my turn at those oars.
It was dusk when he finally said, "That's the worst of it. It'll be clear sailing until tomorrow afternoon. Good Father, give your oar to the poet. Sir Conrad, come take mine. Just keep her toward the middle and you'll have no problems."
It was dark half an hour later when we slid quietly past the castle town of Sacz. It was lightless, and we saw no people.
I was back into my heavy clothes, dried now to mere dampness but the kid at the bow was still shivering. He had been silent since his dunking, and I felt sorry for him. I supposed that I was just prejudiced. I had never met a goliard poet before, but I knew the type. He was exactly the same as the Lost Generation and the hoboes and the beatniks and the hippies and-what was the currrent group?-punkers, I think. Every decade or so, they all adopt a stranger slang, put on a different uniform, and say that I am a conformist and that they are doing something wondrous and new!