"Leo Frankowski - Stargard 6 - Conrad's Quest for Rubber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

them.
Simply put, they were good parents, and we were good children. I think this made us unusual.
At the time, our cheerful obedience seemed quite ordinary to my brother and sisters and me, and I
occasionally questioned other friends of mine as to why they wanted to get into the various sorts of
mischief they always seemed to be involved with. They could never satisfactorily explain their
motivations to me, nor, in truth, could I explain mine to them. To anger my father seemed as silly to
me as eating dirt. I simply had no desire to do such a thing.
Strange to say, one of the boys in the town, Iwo, actually did just that, once. He went into the
bailey, sat down on the ground, and proceeded to eat dirt for no obvious or conceivable reason. His
father was angry and spanked him. On this occasion, Anna was tardy in going over to stare. She was
as mystified as the rest of us.
But my story is not about Iwo, and he came to a bad end, anyway. A few years later he ran away,
and somebody eventually said that he was hung in Gniezno, although they didn't know why.
Sir Conrad left in the spring with Anna and some girls. (A boy of seven generally has little interest in
girls, except, perhaps, for occasional target practice.) He went to build the city of Three Walls on the
land that Count Lambert had given him, and we were all sad to see both of them leave. They returned
for a few days almost every month, and over the years, Anna saved many a boy from the beatings that
most of them undoubtedly deserved.
A different kind of beating happened during the first Christmas after Sir Conrad left us. I remember
it clearly with all of my childish impressions still attached.
The story circulated that Sir Conrad found a caravan bound for Constantinople that was owned
and guarded by the Teutonic Knights of the Cross. He found a gross of pagan children that the
Crossmen were planning to sell to Jews and Moslems, who must have been terrible people, we
imagined, although we had never met one. We children understood that something bad would then
happen to the young slaves, but no one would tell us exactly what that bad thing was.
Conrad beat up the Crossmen guarding the caravan and saved the children, because he was a hero.
Then he took them back to his city, gave them to good families, taught them how to speak, and made
them into good Christians, people said.
The Crossmen didn't like him doing all this, so they came to Okoitz, a thousand of them, and Sir
Conrad came here, too, for a trial by combat. It seemed to me that everybody else in the world came as
well, and all of them needed bread to eat, so we bakers hardly had time to sleep at all. Whenever I
looked outside the bakery, which wasn't very often, all I could see was that everything was packed
solid with people. My whole family had to sleep in the bakery, since Count Lambert had lent our
house out to a bunch of other people we didn't even know.
There was a kind of festival going on then at Okoitz, not that I got to see much of it. But when the
trial by combat between Sir Conrad and the bad guy happened, well, my father made sure we closed
the bakery in time for all of us to go and see it.
Sir Conrad and Anna beat up the bad guy and chopped his head off. They chopped his horse's head
off, too, because it was crippled.
Then a bunch of the other Crossmen went out to kill Sir Conrad, when that wasn't allowed, and
God made a miracle happen! Golden arrows came down from the sky and killed every one of them in
the heart! I was there and I saw it myself, and so did two bishops and the duke and everybody else.
They say that after that, nobody ever tried to bother Sir Conrad again. No Christians, anyway.
 The town of Okoitz was constantly changing, all through my childhood. From the time we first
got there, when our town was nothing at all except a clearing at the side of the road that went from
the Vistula to the Odra, something was always being constructed.
My father's bakery was almost the first thing built, since people need to eat before anything else can
happen. Then the outer wall was built, with the houses and stables each side by side against it, and the
blockhouses at the four corners. Then the church and Lambert's castle went up, and most people seemed
to be happy with the thought that the job was finally done.