Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/238

214 armor; everywhere men were testing with great care lances, swords, axes, spears, helmets, mail, straps for breastplates, horse trappings. Smiths were beating night and day on iron plates with their hammers, forging rude heavy armor which elegant knights of the West could hardly move, but which the sturdy "heirs" of Great and Little Poland carried easily. Old men drew forth from caskets in their closets faded bags with coin in them, to procure military outfits for their sons. Once Zbyshko passed the night with a rich noble, Bartosh of Belav, who having twenty-two stalwart sons mortgaged broad lands to the cloister in Lovich so as to buy twenty-two suits of armor, as many helmets, and other arms for the conflict. So Zbyshko, though he had not heard of this in Bogdanets, thought, also, that he would have to go to Prussia directly, and thanked God that he was equipped for the expedition so splendidly.

Indeed his armor roused admiration everywhere. People esteemed him the son of a voevoda, but when he said that he was only the son of a simple noble, and that such armor might be bought among the Germans if one would pay with an axe properly, hearts gained warlike desire. But more than one man unable to stifle greed at sight of this armor caught up with Zbyshko on the road, and asked, "Well, wilt thou fight for it?" But being in a hurry he would not fight; besides, the Cheh drew his crossbow. Zbyshko ceased even to hang out the board with the challenge at inns, for he noticed that the farther he advanced from the boundary the less people understood it, and the more they considered him foolish.

In Mazovia men spoke less of the war. They believed even there that it was coming, but they knew not the time. In Warsaw there was peace, the more since the court was at Tsehanov, which Prince Yanush had built over after the old attack of the Lithuanians, or rather he had built it entirely new, for of the earlier place there remained only the castle. In the town of Warsaw Yasko Soha, the starosta of the castle, son of the voevoda Abraham, who fell at the Vorskla, received Zbyshko. Yasko knew the young knight, for he had been with Princess Anna in Cracow; hence he was glad to entertain him. But before sitting down to food and drink Zbyshko inquired about Danusia. "Had she not been given in marriage at the same time with other damsels?"

Yasko could not answer that question. The prince and princess had lived in the castle of Tsehanov since early