The Knights of the Cross/Volume 2/Chapter 74

by Henryk Sienkiewicz

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Zbyshko and Yagenka lived in Mochydoly while old Matsko was building a castle for them in Bogdanets. He built it with toil, for he wished that the foundations should be of stone laid in lime mortar, and the watchtower of brick, which was difficult to procure in that neighborhood. During the first year he dug the moat, which work was rather easy, for the eminence on which the castle was to stand had been entrenched on a time, perhaps in days which were still pagan; hence he needed only to clear those depressions of trees and hawthorn bushes with which they were overgrown, and then extend and deepen them sufficiently. While digging, the men reached an abundant spring, which in no long time filled the moat, so that Matsko had to provide an exit for the excess of water. Then on the rampart he reared a palisade and began to collect building timber for the walls of the castle,—oak beams, so thick that three men could not embrace one of them, and larch, which rots neither under clay plaster nor under a turf covering. He set about raising those walls only after a year, although he had the assistance of men from Zgorzelitse and Mochydoly. But he set about it all the more earnestly since Yagenka had given birth to twins. Heaven opened before the old knight then, since there was some one for whom he might labor and bustle, and he knew that the race of the Grady would not perish, that "The Dull Horseshoe" would be moistened yet more than once in the blood of the enemy. To the twins were given the names Matsko and Yasko.

"They are boys," said the old man, "to be praised, such boys that in the whole kingdom there are not two to equal them—and it is not evening yet."

He loved them immediately with a great love, and as to Yagenka, she hid the world from him. Whoso praised her before his eyes could get anything from the old man. People really envied Zbyshko for having such a wife, and glorified her not merely for the wealth which she had brought, since she was as brilliant in that region as the most beautiful flower in a field. She had given her husband a great dowry; but she had given more than a dowry, for she had given immense love, and beauty which dazzled the eyes of men, and noble manners, and a vigor of such sort that many a knight could not boast of the like. It was nothing for her some days after childbirth to rise up to house management, and then go to hunt with her husband, or to hurry on horseback from Mochydoly to Bogdanets and return before midday to Yasko and Matsko. So her husband loved her as the sight of his eyes, old Matsko loved her, she was loved by the servants for whom she had a humane heart, and in Kresnia, when she entered the church on Sunday, she was greeted by murmurs of admiration and homage. Her former worshipper, the quarrelsome Stan of Rogov, had married the daughter of a free landtiller. Stan after mass used to visit the inn with old Vilk, and, having drunk somewhat, say to the old man: "Your son and I cut each other up more than once because of her, and we wanted to marry the lady, but that was just like reaching for the moon in heaven." Others declared aloud that one might look for another such woman only at the king's court in Cracow. In addition to her wealth, beauty, and refinement people honored also her incomparable health and vigor, and there was only one opinion on this point: "that she was the first woman who had ever planted a bear with a fork in the forest, and she had no need to crack nuts with her teeth; she put them on the table pressed them in her hand suddenly and cracked them as if they had been crushed with a stone." So she was praised in the parish of Kresnia and in the neighboring villages, and even in Sieradz, the chief town of the province.

But while envying Zbyshko of Bogdanets because he had won her, men did not wonder over much, for he too was illustrious by such military fame as no one else in that region. The younger possessors and nobles related to one another all the stories touching Germans whose souls Zbyshko had "shelled out" of them in battles under Prince Vitold, and on trampled earth in duels. They said that no man had ever escaped him, that in Malborg he had unhorsed twelve knights, among others Ulrich, the Grand Master's brother; finally, that he was able to meet even knights of Cracow, and that the invincible Zavisha Charny himself was a well-wishing friend of his. Some were unwilling to give faith to such uncommon stories; but even those men, when it was a question whom the neighborhood ought to choose, should it come to rivalry between Polish and foreign knights, said: "Of course, Zbyshko!" and only afterward did the hairy Stan of Rogov and other local strong men, who in knightly training were far behind the young heir of Bogdanets, come into consideration.

Great wealth equally with his fame had won for Zbyshko honor from his neighbors; for he had received with Yagenka Mochydoly and the great property of the abbot. That was not his merit, but earlier he had Spyhov together with immense treasures accumulated by Yurand, and besides people whispered to one another that the booty alone won and taken by the knights of Bogdanets in arms, horses, clothing, and jewels, would suffice to buy three or four good villages. Men saw therefore in this a certain special favor of God toward the race of the Grady with the escutcheon "The Dull Horshshoe," which till recent times had been so reduced that besides empty Bogdanets it had nothing—now it had increased beyond all others in that region. "Moreover, there had remained in Bogdanets after the fire only that poor, bent, decayed house," said old people, "and from lack of laboring hands the owners of the property had been forced to mortgage it to their relative—but now they are building a castle!" Astonishment was great, but since it was accompanied by the general instinctive feeling that the whole nation was advancing with irresistible impulse toward some immense acquisition, and since by the will of God such was to be the future order, there was no malicious envy; on the contrary, the region about boasted and was proud of those knights of Bogdanets. They served as a living proof of what a noble might do if he had a strong arm and a manful heart, with knightly eagerness for adventure. More than one man, therefore, at sight of them felt that for him the place was too narrow among his household goods, and within his native limits, and that beyond the boundary there was a hostile power, great wealth and broad lands, which he might win with immense gain to himself and the kingdom. That excess of strength, which was felt by families, extended over the whole nation, so that it was like a seething liquid which must boil over in a caldron. The wise lords at Cracow, and the king, who loved peace, might restrain that strength for a season, and defer war with the hereditary enemy, but no human power could extinguish it, or even restrain that impetus with which the general spirit of the people was advancing toward greatness.