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1Chapter Eleven
2
3With the Count’s leave, I left him gazing out across his lands. I wanted to check on some things, and anyway, dinner was being skipped to leave an appetite for the feast.
4My horse, Anna, was happy to see me. She was in a good stall in a big, clean stable, and she had been carefully groomed. “Are they treating you okay, Anna?”
5She nodded yes.
6“Anything you need?”
7She shook her head no.
8“Right.” I didn’t want to believe this.
9Uneaten oats lay in the trough in front of her. I patted her neck and went in search of the kid I’d brought in.
10Everyone in the bailey seemed to be hurrying about, getting last things done before the feast. Many were still in the plain gray wool that was everyday wear for most people, but some were already in their Sunday best, dyed in bright colors, with a great deal of embroidery.
11Everyone seemed to know who I was. Passersby greeted me with smiles and nods. I had always thought of peasants as being brutally downtrodden, forced to grovel before their masters. I’m sure that that must have happened somewhere, but I saw none of it at Okoitz.
12I was passing the mill when a man stopped me. He had a basket of food in one hand and a pail of beer in the other. “Sir Conrad? Could it be that you are looking for the child you saved?”
13“In fact, I am.”
14“Then I shall take you there. I am Mikhail Malinski, and the child is with my wife.”
15“Then I am in your debt, Mikhail.”
16“No, Sir Conrad. It is I who am in your debt. Understand that two nights ago our third child died at birth. My wife grieved horribly for a day and a half. I thought it would be the death of her. But she’s happy now. You understand?”
17“I understand. We are in each other’s debt. Let's see them.”
18“In a moment, sir. I have but a quick errand.” He went inside the millhouse, and I followed. I was shocked by what I found. Four men were chained to a heavy “hourglass” mill, grinding grain to flour. It was the first brutal thing I’d seen in Okoitz.
19“What’s all this?”
20“Why, the mill, Sir Conrad. Oh! You mean the men. These two were caught last week drunk, disorderly, and annoying some married women. They’ll be here until the end of Christmas.”
21“This one’s my brother. I always warned him about his poaching. He got six months for it.”
22“I wasn’t poaching! I shot that deer on my land and tracked him to where they found us!”
23“Save your lies for someone who’ll believe them, brother! They found you four miles from your land, and that deer had an arrow through its heart. It couldn't have gone four yards!”
24“What about this last one?”
25“Oh, he’s a bad one, he is. They caught him stealing from a merchant. He's worked off maybe half of the five years he got.” Mikhail put down the food. “Your Christmas feast, brother. Share it if you want.”
26As we left, I said, “Five years for theft seemed severe.”
27“Had he robbed another peasant, it would have been only six months. But merchants have to be protected, you know. If they aren’t, they might stop coming, and who would we sell our grain and hides to?”
28“I see. What if someone stole from a knight?”
29“Why, I can’t remember such a thing ever happening, Sir Conrad. I suppose, if the knight let him live, that it would be far more than five years.”
30I ceased to worry about the location of my gold.
31“What do you do when there aren’t any criminals?”
32“Well, the grain has to be ground to flour, doesn’t it? There's usually a spot or two open on the mill, and the rest of us men have to take turns at it. But we keep an eye out for lawbreakers.”
33“I can see where you would. You keep saying ’men.' What do you do about female criminals?”
34“Well, that’s rare, Sir Conrad. Women are more lawabiding. But there was a time, two years ago, when a girl-only twelve, she was-stole a silver-handled dagger from the count himself.”
35“What did the count do?”
36“Got his dagger back and told the girl’s father. He beat his daughter to within a thumb's width of her life! Then the count gave the father a month at the stone for not bringing up his daughter right! As I said, it doesn't happen too often.”
37“What if she’d been married?”
38“At twelve? You shouldn’t marry a girl off until she's at least budding!”
39“No, no, Mikhail. I mean, what about an older woman?”
40“Why, that’d be up to her husband, of course!” Mikhail walked up to his house.
41In the twentieth century, it would have been called a shed. It was three meters wide and five deep, and it was one of a long row of similar log dwellings that stretched along the outer log wall. Next to the wall and above the sheds was a two-meterwide wooden walkway, apparently a place for defenders to stand. The rest of the roof was straw.
42“All this was by the count’s own plans, it was. Houses next to each other keep each other warm and take less walls to build. The neighbors make noise, but that's not the count's fault.” The door had no hinges but was picked up and moved aside. Mikhail went in without knocking, and I followed.
43Apparently, the lack of a nudity taboo applied to married women as well. Judging by the flush of her skin, Mrs. Malinski was just back from the sauna. I guessed her to be around thirty but later found out that she was only nineteen. She was doing up her long hair and didn’t bother getting up or even covering herself.
44“Sir Conrad! I am sorry that I did not speak to you last night, but the baby… you know…”
45“I quite understand, Mrs. Malinski.” A campfire burned smokily at the center of the single room. Their few spare clothes were hung from pegs in the log walls, next to bags of food, bunches of garlic, and a single cooking pot. Bags of straw on the floor served as beds. Two small children were playing on the dirt floor. Yet Mikhail was obviously proud of his home! What had he been born in?
46“We have real wooden floors going in next year, the count says,” Mikhail told me.
47“He is a good lord, isn’t he?”
48“The best! Why, he could get a dozen men for every man here if there was room for them.”
49I was pensive as I walked back past the latrines and the grainery. These were good people, and there was so much that I could help them with. But I would have to leave as soon as the roads were clear.
50One thing remained yet to do. There was a church, so there had to be a priest. I had killed-or at least caused the deaths offive people. And there were two very young women that I had… had. Damn it! They were not rapes! I needed confession.
51The church was full of commotion when I got there. The altar had been removed, along with the candlesticks, the relic-a lock of hair from Saint Adalbert, I found out later-and all of the appurtenances. The church was furnished with movable chairs instead of bolted-down pews; I half suspect that the use of pews was the result of a clerical rebellion to secular use of the church. The chairs were being rearranged, and long, collapsible trestle tables were being set up. The fact is that the church was the only room in Okoitz large enough to hold everybody.
52Asking about, I learned that the priest, a Father John, and his wife (!) were in their chambers to the left of the altar.
53I entered and discovered that the nudity taboo did apply to a priest’s wife, at least to this priest's wife. From her accented shriek, I gathered that she was French. She was an attractive woman, better looking than any of the count's handmaidens. I turned to leave but was stopped by the priest.
54“Please forgive her, Sir Conrad. She is new to Poland and not used to the local customs.” His wife was still arranging a blanket around herself.
55“Of course, Father. But still, I should leave.”
56“You may if you wish. But as a personal favor, I would prefer that you did not. You are from the west. Know that I met Francine when I was a student in Paris. She is the granddaughter of a bishop and was legitimate before the second Lateran Council forbade such marriages in the west. But these decrees were never ratified here in my native Poland, so here we are now, under God, man and We.”
57He turned to his wife. “Francine, we cannot bring the word of God to these people unless we adhere to the local customs! There is no prohibition against nudity in the commandments, nor in the words of Christ. Remember the parable of the lilies of the field and care not about your raiment. Now, disrobe. Please.”
58She was embarrassed, probably as much as I was. The whole situation was awkward. There wasn’t anything that I could say, but I tried to give her a confident smile and nod. She bit her lower lip, looked at me, and stood up. Then she slowly dropped her blanket. I think she did it slowly in order to pull it up if I disapproved rather than from a desire to entice.
59She really was a beautiful woman, as fine as any you would see in modem Cracow. Her hair was black, the first black hair I had seen in the thirteenth century. Her waist was tiny, her hips were full, and her breasts were voluptuous orbs topped by tiny, coal-dark nipples.
60“Thank you, love. Now, Christ also talked of the virtues of cleanliness, and the sauna grows cold,” the priest said.
61“Yes. Sir Conrad.” She nodded to me and ran through the doorway.
62“Thank you, Sir Conrad. I’ve been trying to get her to do that all day. She objected to their nudity, and they objected to her smell.” The priest paused, and we heard a roar of applause from the crowd in the church. “Damn, but I wish they hadn't done that!”
63This was afar stranger priest than Father Ignacy!
64His next sermon was on the importance of being kind to people who were trying to fit in. Still, he seemed, for some unreasonable reason, to be a holy man.
65“I took my sauna earlier, hoping that she would join me, but no such luck. But, Sir Conrad, you came here for a reason of your own. Can I help you?”
66“Well, Father, I came here for a confession.”
67“Of course, my son, if you need it. The church is crowded now, but we are private enough here. Would this be adequate?”
68I agreed, confessed, and told him about the people I had killed, the underaged girls I had copulated with, and lastly about coveting his wife!
69He passed off the first two as not being sins at all but merely the things any sensible man would do. As for the last:
70“You must learn to fight the results of your training. Had you seen her fully clothed, you might have thought her beautiful, but you would not have had these sensual thoughts. She was wearing what God gave her. The sin was in your eyes, Sir Conrad.”
71I thought about it, and he was right. I eventually got to know Francine as the unique and creative human being she really was. I learned that my initial impressions of her had been entirely wrong. She was not a shy and modest housewife. There was something of the whore in her and much of the bitch. But I get ahead of myself.
72I went away with a penance of a single Pater Noster and three Ave Marias. I was somewhat surprised by that as I left the priest’s chambers, but my surprise was increased when I saw Francine walking back, nude, through the crowded church. She smiled at me with her back straight. She strutted!
73Her actions had much in common, I think, with the religious conversion of the goliard poet.
74Half an hour later, we were seated behind a trestle table on the dais, near where the altar stood. There were five of us: Count Lambert, Sir Miesko, myself, Father John, and Francine. There were also six empty chairs that I found were for Krystyana’s gang. They wouldn't actually be using them, since they were in charge of the banquet, but they had the right to sit at the head table even if they didn't have time for it.
75Try to imagine six modem fourteen-year-olds being in charge of a sitdown banquet for two hundred people. Yet they did a fine job!
76All the adult commoners were seated at long, narrow tables, sitting at only one side. A space was left between each pair of tables for the “servants” to walk. Actually, the servants were the peasant women. An elaborate schedule had been worked out such that each woman helped serve a certain course but most of the time played guest.
77Everyone was there. The gate to Okoitz was not only left unguarded, it was left open! Had a known outlaw walked in, he would have been served along with the rest, until the festival was over. Afterward they might have hanged him.
78The children were seated through the door in the count’s hall. Part of the serving orchestration kept them fed, too. The babies were farther back, in the hallways and in some of the unused guest rooms. A stream of mothers flowed back and forth, but our six bright harem girls kept it all going and the food coming besides. Even the cooks took their turn at playing guest. The girls never did, the first night. But after, for the next two weeks, they were administrators, grand ladies!
79Boris was down among the crowd with acceptable ladies seated on either side. He waved. I waved back, and the crowd applauded.
80I had a normal place setting before me. There was a long tablecloth that doubled, I discovered, as a napkin. Ihad a spoon, a cup, a bowl, a large pitcher of wine-beer for the commons-and a salt shaker made of a hard wheat roll with a finger hole punched in the top.
81We at the head table each had these to ourselves because of the six empty places. Among the commoners, each pair shared a setting, almost invariably a man and a woman. Not that there was a scarcity of place settings, it was just one of those things one did at a banquet. You shared a spoon, shared a cup, shared with your sister or your wife.
82Musicians took turns playing—a recorder, a shawm, a pipe and tabor, a krummhorn, a bagpipe. Not the Scottish war pipes, of course, but the higher-pitched, more friendly Polish version. They had obviously practiced long for the occasion. Only when the banquet was over did they play in concert.
83Father John said an elaborate grace.
84The first course was a stew. Somebody’s grandmother ladled it out to most of the people, but we at the head table were graced with Krystyana's service. I winked at her, and she winked back.
85Stew was followed by broiled steaks. Janina placed before me a thick slab of bread directly on the tablecloth, and a girl named Yawalda, to whom I had not yet been introduced, put a juicy slice of meat on it. I found out much later that it was from the horse we had lost in last night’s snowstorm. It wasn't bad.
86Course followed course, usually a meat thing followed by a grain thing. There were no fresh vegetables at all.
87On the final course, the count himself got up. He took a huge tray from Natalia and Janina and personally handed a small piece of cake to each person in the room, laughing and joking continuously. He got halfway through the church and then went into his “hall,” where he personally gave a piece to each child. He went up and down the hallways, putting a small piece in each baby’s hand, or at least on his bedclothes. Then he came back into the church and passed out cake to every commoner he had missed before.
88He returned to the head table, where he placed a piece in front of each chair, including the vacant seats of the ladies-in-waiting. He stared as if aghast at the pieces left on the tray and then went up the table again, doubling the “nobles”’ portions, to the applause of the crowd. Reaching the end, he put the five remaining cakes in his hand and pretended to count the crowd. Then he stuffed them into his own pouch, and the commons roared their approval.
89I was so intent on this performance that I had not tasted the cakes. When Count Lambert sat down next to metwo empty chairs were between us-he said, “Well, eat up, Sir Conrad.”
90So I bowed and smiled and bit into one of them. It was good enough, but it was really only ordinary honey and nut cake. Nothing like the glories they make in modern, Torun. I waved Krystyana over.
91“This is excellent, my lord, but I too have something to contribute to the feast.” When Krystyana got there, I said, “Now, quick like a bunny! I have a piece of brown stuff wrapped in silver and some brown paper. The last I saw of it, it was on my bed. Bring it here quickly!” She was off like an arrow.
92“This is some cake of your own?” the count asked.
93“Something like that. Chocolate.”
94As Krystyana came back, the other five girls were handing out bread rolls to the commons, without any helpers.
95Seven pieces of chocolate were left. It was obvious that I couldn’t share it with two hundred commoners and an equal number of children. There were five at the head table, plus six more who belonged there.
96I broke each piece in two, got up, and started to put half a piece at each place.
97The count stood up. “It’s some foreign delicacy,” he shouted. “It's only this big.” He gesticulated. “So there's only enough for the head table, plus some for the king and queen!” This also met with shouted approval. Had there been elections just then, I think Genghis Khan could have been voted in.
98So I went on, passing them out, not missing myself. When I sat down, three pieces were left.
99“What is this business about a king and queen, my lord?”
100He was tasting his chocolate and staring wide-eyed. “Why, we are about to select one of each, for the holidays at least. A king and a queen of misrule. See those small loaves they’re handing out-wheat for the men and rye for the women? Well, in one of each sort of loaves there is a bean, and the two who get the beans shall be our king and queen for the festival. Further, you and I and the good Sir Miesko and Father John and wife shall become commoners!”
101“You mean that the king would have the right to Francine?” I asked.
102“She’s married. Still, he might try; try and get away with it, perhaps, until the holiday was over. Then I'd cut the bastard's balls off! If I have no right to her, I'll be damned if any peasant can take her!”
103“Uh. Yes. There are these three pieces left…”
104“Well. One for the king and one for the queen. As to the last, well, rank hath its privileges.” He started to put it in his pouch, and then he stopped. He waved Natalia over. “Give this to Pyotr Morocek’s redheaded daughter.” As she darted away, he looked at me and said, “It looks as though you are going to be robbing me of some of my ladies, Sir Conrad. I had better start restocking now!”
105It evolved that Mrs. Malinski got the woman’s bean and became queen. The blacksmith became king and ordered us “common swine” away from the head table. A side table had been prepared for us.
106His first act was to order up his own six “ladies-in-waiting,” namely, the six fattest women in the church. Mrs. Malinski demanded her right to some “boys-in-waiting,” and called up three septuagenarians, who snuggled up to her. All this was greeted with great ribaldry from the crowd.
107The king demanded that the count show more respect for blacksmiths and should henceforth act like one.
108A leather apron was brought forth, and a hammer Lambert put them on and went through a parody that I would have appreciated more had I known the blacksmith better.
109Sir Miesko was charged with abandoning his wife, and another was named in her place. This huge matron was given a feather pillow, and he permitted her to beat him around the room, to the commons’ delight. A great deal of beer was circulating.
110My turn came up. The “king” said that since I was so adept at saving babies, I must be one of their breed. This had to be a setup, because all too soon three large women I had never met ran forward and pinned a huge diaper over my embroidered tunic and hose. I’d thought that the safety pin was a modem invention.
111I was then forcibly presented with six large breasts to suck on, four of which were lactating. I survived. A television situation comedy would have contained higher, and considerably less coarse, humor.
112Francine was then summoned. The “king” claimed that she had shown her wonders to but a few and that this was unfair. He commanded her to strip naked and walk among the crowd to show them what beauty was.
113I tensed myself for a fight. I was quite willing to put up with the buffoonery with regard to the count, Sir Miesko, and myself. I would not permit them to humiliate a priest’s wife, even though the whole concept of a priest having a wife confused me.
114I never had a chance to draw my sword.
115Francine stood up from her seat at the side and pulled herself out of her garments. The crowd cheered. I was awestruck. She strutted and wiggled her way up and down the tables of the commons, pinching a chin here, kissing a hairy peasant’s lips there. The cheering rose to deafening levels, and she gloried in it! At last, she came to our side table. She gave Sir Miesko a peck on the cheek, which he accepted. The count demanded more and stroked her from armpit to knee.
116At my turn, I wanted much more. I sat her on my knee and kissed her. She wiggled her body close.
117“But this is all for the Church,” she said with mock innocence. “One must mingle with the barbarians and follow their customs.”
118I didn’t know if I wanted to beat her or rape her, so I handed her down to her husband. She stayed there the rest of the night, eventually permitting a cloak to be draped around her shoulders. The situation struck me as being more than slightly sick.
119The priest and our six ladies were notably exempted from the hazing, as the king and queen turned on the commoners. All the musicians were playing in the hopes that they wouldn’t be called out.
120The various performances that the king and queen required of the commons were, if anything, even more crude than those required of the nobles. Most of them involved incomprehensible in-jokes that soon became boring. Boring to me, at least. Everyone else was having a marvelous time.
121Eventually our royalty of misrule ran out of ideas and called for the dancing to start. Tables were moved out, chairs were moved back, and two barrels of beer were rolled in. The tops were removed from the barrels, and the beer was just dipped out.
122Lambert, Sir Miesko, and I were required to join in the first dance. I was unsure of just what steps to try, but Krystyana dragged me out on the floor.
123I’m not convinced that you could call it dancing. Okoitz had never heard of a polka or a mazurka, let alone a waltz, but people contented themselves with enthusiastically jumping up and down. They were not quite as bad as the modem punkers, but they came close.
124That ordeal completed, I found myself standing at the sidelines next to the count. He tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to follow. He went to his chambers. A look of relief crossed his face as he closed the door. “I’m glad that we only have to do this once a year I Custom requires that I put on a party and play the clown, but I have as little liking for it as you do.”
125“It was a bit… raucous, my lord.”
126“Yes. I hope that you haven’t gotten a bad opinion of us. Had you seen these people during harvest, your impression would have been different. We'll have to put in an appearance later, but for now, do you play chess? Oh, and do take off that stupid diaper.”
127I’m not a great player, but I'm competent. The game he played was identical to modem chess, except the pawns couldn't capture en passant. The count's game was good but extremely conservative; the strategy of play had evolved vastly in seven hundred years. That evening I won four games out of four.
128“Sir Conrad, that brown cake you served-is there any more about?”
129“I’m afraid not, nor is there any way of making more. I was surprised at that cake of yours.”
130“Good, yes?”
131“Oh, yes. Delicious. But when all of that food and drink was flowing so generously, you were somewhat sparing with it.”
132“Of course. It had honey in it. I could have sold that honey for more than what the rest of the feast cost.”
133“Honey is that rare here? I’m surprised. It should be a natural product, easy to get.”
134“Easy enough to get, Sir Conrad, once you find a honey tree. A full-time honey hunter finds one, maybe two trees a year.”
135“Remarkable. What do you do then?”
136“Why, you smoke the bees out and chop open the tree, of course.”
137“I begin to see your problem. You know, my lord, bees can’t hollow out a tree themselves. They have to find a suitable place to build a hive. If you chop up every hollow tree, there isn't any place for them to live. No wonder honey is rare.”
138“I see. You’re suggesting that we hollow out trees?”
139“It doesn’t have to be a whole tree. A simple wooden box will do. You know, bees are very remarkable creatures. I've read a few articles on them. Did you know that they have a language?”
140“What! Insects talking?”
141“Not exactly talking, but when a bee finds a field of flowers, she goes back to her hive and does a dance that tells the others where to go.”
142“Remarkable! You say ’she.' What of the male bees?”
143So I prattled on for an hour about bees. Friends have accused me of having a garbage pit mind. Things fall in there and sort of stay around, fermenting. The upshot was that I agreed to instruct Lambert’s carpenter on making beehives, a gross of them.
144There would be nothing much to it, of course. Just a simple rectangular wooden box of about forty liters’ capacity would do. You drilled a hole of four square centimeters near the bottom, facing south, and mounted them on a pole at least three meters in the air.
145“It’s been a pleasant and educational evening, Sir Conrad. Doubly so since you wouldn't wager any money on your chess playing. But now we must rejoin the buffoonery below.”
146The end point of the evening was the gift giving. Gift wrapping was unknown, but it wasn’t missed. The only awkward moment occurred when the priest and his wife gave me a wooden crucifix and a carved rosary-the priest's own work-and I hadn't realized that they were on my Christmas list. The best return gift that I could think of on short notice was some rose seeds.
147I also got a new sword belt from Sir Miesko. The harem didn’t give; they just got. Well, maybe they did give. That night I was visited by Yawalda and Mary. They liked to work as a team.
148Chapter Twelve
149
150It was a relaxed afternoon.
151I was giving Lambert and Sir Miesko fencing lessons. Over their strenuous objections and at my firm insistence, we were using wooden sticks instead of real swords. Boris Novacek soon joined us, praising my previous battles.
152For men who lived by the sword, they had some odd attitudes. It was as if they didn’t believe that a sword had a point! Their fencing was strictly hack and chop. They didn't see where the lunge had any use at all.
153Finally, Boris said, “My lords, I have seen him use this thing! I saw him put that little sword entirely through a man’s neck, and he killed the German knight with a single blow through the eye slit of his helmet.”
154“Well, I haven’t seen him kill anything, Novacek,” the count said. “Let's do some killing and prove this thing properly. Bring your sword, Sir Conrad.”
155I followed Lambert apprehensively out of the building, along with the rest of the crowd. He led us to a pen containing six pigs destined to be the next day’s supper.
156“Now then, Sir Conrad. You have allowed that the edge is useful on horseback but said that the point is stronger afoot. We shall see. I shall kill that boar with the edge of my sword, and you will take that sow with your point.” Without further discussion, the count vaulted, sword in hand, into the pigpen.
157The test was somewhat unfair in that the boar was mean. Lambert’s first two-handed swing caught the pig a little in back of the “belt” line. This broke the boar's back without seriously cutting it. The boar was annoyed. Its hind legs were not functional, but it charged the count, dragging itself along on its front legs.
158The pig is a very powerful animal, and its jaws can rip a man’s leg off. All that meat is muscle.
159Lambert was back-stepping furiously, and his second blow-to the shoulder-didn’t slow down the boar at all. I was about to leap in when the count's sword crashed into the animal's skull and all motion stopped.
160“You saw the power in that blow?” Lambert was actually proud of his performance. “Your turn, Sir Conrad.”
161I hated jumping into a pigsty with my embroidered tunic and leather stockings, but there was nothing else I could do. “That sow over there, my lord?”
162The remaining pigs were all studying Lambert intently. I was trying to remember just how a pig’s ribs went. I couldn't remember whether they angled back like a man's or not. I was obviously going to have to put all the power into my lunge that I could. Also, pigs being built the way they are, I was going to have to lunge downward.
163This I did. Body upright, arm straight, blade out with the edge down.
164The results surprised me. I had never actually stuck an animal before. My sword went entirely through the first pig and halfway through the one behind it. They both dropped dead without a squeal.
165I got out of the pen and cleaned my sword in the snow. Then I started working on the pig shit on my boots, with Krystyana’s help.
166Sir Miesko said, “That was a great blow, Sir Conrad! But how real was the test? What if they were in armor?”
167“An excellent idea!” the count said. “Krystyana, Boris brought in four sets of armor. Take Mary and bring us some hauberks. Pick two that match.”
168As the girls ran off, Sir Miesko shouted, “And the gambesons! Bring two equal gambesons!”
169Boris’s objections that we were about to chop up his armor were squelched by Count Lambert: “Fear not, our smith will repair it.”
170The pigs were not minded to volunteer for this experiment, but a large number of commoners had gathered and manpower was available. At my suggestion, we did it outside the pigsty.
171Under great protest by the pigs, two of them were dressed in armor and strung upright between horizontal poles, forelegs up and hind legs down.
172The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have been horrified, but we were going to eat the animals anyway, and I fail to see where my sword was any worse than a butcher’s knife.
173Actually, the count’s sword was a good deal worse. The rule being that all blows had to strike armor, it took him five hacks before the pig quit screaming. It died of internal concussions. The armor was never cut.
174My watered steel blade cut the wrought-iron rings easily, and again I found the heart.
175I could see Lambert’s emotions in conflict. On the one hand, here was a valuable new technique. On the other, I was refuting the experience of his lifetime. I began to worry. Had I offended my host?
176“Your blade, Sir Conrad. May I see it?”
177“Of course, my lord.”
178He grasped the cheap brass grip and swung it a few times. Then he jumped into the pen with its one remaining live pig. With a single, mighty one-handed swing, he took the pig’s head entirely off. Then he smiled.
179“Your techniques have merit, Sir Conrad, but your sword! Your sword is magic!”
180“Hardly that. But it is good steel.”
181“Could you teach my smith the way of this?”
182“I could tell him how it’s done, but the actual doing of it is an art form that he'd have to work out for himself. I wouldn't expect results for a year or two.”
183“Sir Conrad, we must talk.” But he seemed uncertain.
184As we went back inside, Krystyana seemed glum.
185“What’s the matter, pretty girl?” I asked. “I'm sorry if all that killing bothered you.”
186“No, it’s not that. The second course of tomorrow's supper was to be blood pudding, and you men have just splattered the blood all over the courtyard!”
187It’s hard to keep everybody happy.
188Before supper, the count and I were playing chess atone end of the hall, and the girls had set up a loom at the other.
189It wasn’t much of a loom. There was a pole on top with a few thousand woolen strings wrapped around it. A pole at the bottom was used to roll up the cloth they made. In between, two girls were laboriously moving a shuttle back and forth between the vertical threads and then tightening the horizontal thread down with something like a pocket comb. They hadn't made a centimeter of cloth in an hour.
190“Is that something they do as a hobby?” I asked.
191“Hobby? There’s always need of cloth, and my ladies are instructed to keep busy.”
192“Then why don’t you use a proper loom?”
193“You know something of looms?” The game was forgotten.
194“Well, I’m not a weaver, but I know the process—”
195“I know, Sir Conrad. ’But not in the few weeks I'll be here!' Have you no idea of our economic situation with regard to cloth? Don't you know that the French and Italians are making vast profits in the trade? Why, at the Troyes Hot Fair alone, millions of pence change hands, much of it Polish silver going for French cloth.”
196“But why not bring some weavers here?”
197“My liege lord, Henryk the Bearded, did that very thing. At huge cost, he imported three dozen Walloon weavers and set them up, at his expense, in Wroclaw. Yet to this day not one Pole-save Henrykhas ever been in their building! And the price of cloth has not dropped a penny! Why, the cloth in that very tunic you’re wearing was woven in Flanders and dyed in Florence.”
198“I don’t know anything about dyeing, but I'm sure that I could build a loom,” I said.
199“Then that cuts it! Sir Conrad, I must have you. I want you to stay here and instruct my workmen-and women in the arts you’ve mentioned. In a scant two days, you've talked of honey and steel and cloth. You've shown me better swordsmanship, better dancing, and better chess playing than I would have thought possible. I say I want you. Now, what's your price?”
200“My price? Well, I’m not sure that I need any money. I have half the booty I took, and-”
201“Another thing-you have more than you think. This business of your splitting evenly with Novacek is nonsense! Despite the fact that he was your employer, you are a knight and he is a commoner; those spoils were taken entirely as the result of your sword arm. Oh, you might make him a gift of a twelfth of it, but any more than that would be absurd.”
202“There is the matter of booty being taken on my lands. By custom, I have the right to a tenth. But that is about the same amount as I gave you for killing that foul German, so we’ll call it even.”
203“Be that as it may, Count Lambert, I still have an obligation to Boris. I agreed to accompany him, to keep his accounts, and to defend him, my lord.”
204“Novacek is traveling from here to Hungary for wine and then back. It happens that I must send a knight to Hungary. That letter you gave me was from my wife. She and our daughter stay with her relatives in Pest. She complains, as usual, about her need for money, so I must send it to her. Otherwise she will come back here to get it. If I must send a knight-who else could be trusted?then that knight might as well accompany Boris and be paid by him.”
205“As to this accounting business, well, that’s hardly a proper occupation for a belted knight.”
206“Uh… my lord, that hits on one more problem. You see, I’m not exactly a belted knight.”
207“What! You mean to say that you have been crossing swords with me, beating me at chess, and enjoying my ladies and that you are not a true belted knight? Sir Miesko! I need a witness! Attend me!”
208“Coming, my lord!”
209“But, Count Lambert, you see… in my country, we don’t have knighthood exactly, but I was an officer-no! Am an officer, and the priest said that—”
210“Silence! Kneel, Conrad Stargard!” He drew his sword.
211Visions of the boar’s crushed skull flashed through my mind, but still I knelt. “You see—-”
212“Quiet!” The flat of his sword came down hard on my bruised right shoulder. This was followed by an equally rough blow above my wounded left arm. Apparently, I was being knighted, and the count did not go along with those effeminate taps on the shoulders so common in the movies.
213“I dub thee knight!” The last blow came against the side of my head, and I saw a strange, web-shaped visual display. I almost fell over but managed to stay on my knees.
214“Rise, Sir Conrad.”
215The girls at the looms were looking, whispering, and giggling.
216“You two!” the count said. “This was purely a formality to remove any doubts from Sir Conrad’s mind. They use a different ceremony in his country. All the same, be silent on this matter. You as well, Sir Miesko.”
217I managed to get to my feet.
218“Well, that’s settled. Now then, Sir Conrad, do you see any other problems?”
219“Problems? Well, no, my lord. But what exactly is it that you expect of me?”
220“I expect you to build such mechanisms as you feel would be beneficial here, and I would expect you to swear your allegiance to me.”
221Hmm. Actually, it didn’t sound that bad. Comfortable surroundings, friendly people who really needed me, and plenty of sex. Compared to my previous position-well, Boris Novacek had been decent enough. But in two days on the road with him, I had been involved in two murderous fights. While two is not a statistically significant number, it certainly is an indication! Luck alone had kept me from being a naked corpse in a snowy wood.
222“Very well, my lord. I will expect you to settle with Boris Novacek, to his satisfaction. I would swear allegiance, but not forever. Say, perhaps for nine years.” I was leaving myself a cowardly way out. At the Battle of a, which was not far from here, thirty thousand Christians fought a much greater number of Mongols. The Mongols did not leave a single survivor. Not one single Polish witness to the battle lived to tell of it. I wanted the option not to be there.
223“Done, Sir Conrad. And your remuneration? If not money, then lands perhaps? People of your own?”
224“Uh, let’s leave that undefined for a while. Perhaps at some later date we may agree on something. For now, I will be satisfied with my maintenance in your castle.”
225“You understand that I agree to defend you and the people on your land if attacked, but I will not be responsible for other military duties.”
226“Agreed. Boris told me of your ambivalent feelings with regard to killing, and I saw your face when you stuck those pigs. You are a strange man, Sir Conrad Stargard.”
227Chapter Thirteen
228
229That night’s feast was a more civilized affair than that of Christmas day. It was a sit-down dinner followed by dancing.
230It seems that I was responsible for introducing the polka into Poland. My brief dancing with Krystyana had apparently impressed everyone, and that evening the count insisted on my demonstrating it again. I spent a few minutes with the musicians, humming the tune and slapping my thigh for rhythm, and they picked it up quickly. Having no written music, they all played by ear.
231I shall make no attempt at describing the sound of three krummhorns, four recorders, a shawm, two drums, and a bagpipe playing the “Beer Barrel Polka.”
232The scheduling was less hectic, too. The common women were divided into six groups that took turns playing servant for a day; each of the groups of adults was directed by an adolescent handmaiden. Somehow, it worked.
233The count seemed to feel that it was necessary and proper for a knight to have at least two young women within reach at all times. I think they were called “handmaidens” because they were always on hand. The term “maiden” was a euphemism, of course. When they got pregnant, he married them off and replaced them. I later discovered that this was not an ordinary state of affairs. Most of his knights, as well as his liege lord, envied his ability to get away with it.
234I was playing chess in my room with Sir Miesko when Krystyana darted in. She waved at me to follow her in an urgent, secretive way. I excused myself and followed. We went to an empty room next to the count’s chambers. She put her ear next to the wall and motioned for me to do likewise. Confused, I did this.
235I was shocked! Lambert and Novacek were discussing me! I pulled my head away and started back to my room, horrified that I should invade someone’s privacy in this way.
236Krystyana was still listening as I entered the hallway and the count stepped out beside me.
237“Ali, Sir Conrad. I wanted to speak to you.”
238“Yes, my lord. Do you realize that your servants eavesdrop on you?”
239“What? Of course! My dear Sir Conrad, either you are very naive or the servants in your own land are of a different breed of humanity. Servants eavesdrop! You might as well say that fishes swim. You can have servants or you can have privacy. You can’t have both!”
240“But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Come into my chamber. I want to finalize our arrangements with Boris Novacek. Was I correct in assuming that you wished to gift Boris with a twelfth part of your captured booty?”
241“Well, yes, at least-”
242“Excellent, because that is precisely the amount that he decided to give me as my Christmas present.”
243Boris was turning purple. “My dear Count Lambert, surely-”
244“No, not another word. You have already been too generous. Now, Sir Conrad, you recently purchased armor. I have decided to buy the armor that you captured. What did you pay for your armor?”
245“Seven hundred and eighteen pence, my lord.”
246“So, then my price of one thousand pence per set is generous.”
247“But Count Lambert,” Boris protested, “I could obtain far more than that in Hungary! And besides the armor, there were weapons, saddles, bridles—”
248“Yes, but I have decided to pay four thousand pence for the lot.”
249“But my lord-”
250“But I have decided! So, that’s settled. There was a dead horse that you brought in, which I accept as your contribution to the feast. The other captured horse-well, you lost a horse on my lands, so take it as my gift, a replacement.”
251“Sir Conrad, I have an errand for you. Go to the strong room; Krystyana will show you the way-Krystyana! I know you’re listening! Get in here! Good. Now, go to the strong room. You will find, in addition to my own valuables, Boris Novacek's saddlebags, Sir Conrad's and the creditor's pouches, and a chest that they took from the German's camp. Pour both pouches into the chest. Then take four thousand pence from my own coffer and add it to the lot. Take three thousand pence out and put it in Boris's saddlebags, to pay for Sir Conrad's equipment. Then take one twelfth of the contents of the chest and put it in my coffers. The chest will be Sir Conrad's, and I believe we'll be square.”
252All of this verbal, without a scrap of documentation. I doubt if the count knew how much he had in his coffers. I could see that one of my-services was going to be setting up a double-entry bookkeeping system for him.
253“Oh, yes,” he continued. “Krystyana, have all of my newly purchased equipment sent to the proper workmen. I want it all repaired and properly stored as soon as the holiday is over. The arms to the blacksmith, the horse trappings to the saddler, the clothes… Oh, I forgot the clothes. Well, I’ll pay six hundred pence for them. Make that four thousand, six hundred pence that you throw in from my coffers.”
254“Well, it’s good that all is settled.”
255“But my lord —-”
256“What is your problem, Novacek? You entered my lands with a knight and a loaded mule. You will leave with the same possessions, since Sir Miesko has graciously agreed to accompany you to Hungary and back at the same pay that you would have paid Sir Conrad. You win have enjoyed a holiday at no expense to yourself. As to the rest, you have had some adventures to talk of in the taverns. Where is your complaint?”
257Boris bowed to the inevitable. It was obvious that one did not try to bargain with Count Lambert. “Well, there was the Arabic arithmetic that he was to teach me.”
258“Hmm. Sir Conrad, would you object to instructing Mr. Novacek while he is here, at your convenience?”
259“Not at all, my lord.”
260“Then that’s settled. Well, Krystyana, Sir Conrad? You have your orders. Go, but come back while the sun is still high. There is the matter of your oath of fealty.”
261Krystyana and I went down to the basement strong room. An army would have had trouble getting in there if it was defended, but a thief could have walked in if it was not. Most of the time, it was not. I would have to do something about locks.
262We followed the count’s instructions, and I began counting money. Krystyana looked at me strangely. She got out a balance scale and weighed the money. It seems that the coinage was not all consistent.
263When we were through, I found that I was the owner of 112,200 pence. Krystyana told me that this was enough to hire every commoner in the fort for over five years!
264It was absurd that a single person should have such wealth, especially a good socialist! I was dazed as we went back up to the sunlight.
265At that time, throughout most of Europe an oath of fealty was taken with the vassal on his knees. His hands were placed together as if in prayer, with his lord’s hands around them. The lord was seated.
266That was not how it was done in thirteenth-century Poland. Here, you walked outside on a sunny day, with the biggest possible crowd of witnesses. You raised your right hand to the sun and made your oath in a loud voice. This was doubtless a thing held over from pagan days, but I still think it a more fitting ceremony.
267My oath was, “l, Sir Conrad Stargard, promise to come to the aid of my liege lord, Count Lambert Piast, if ever he or the people on his land are oppressed. I shall obey him for nine years. This I swear.”
268The count returned: “I, Count Lambert Piast, promise to defend my vassal, Sir Conrad Stargard, to the best of my ability. I shall see to his maintenance and will do such other things as are, from time to time, agreed. This I swear. ”
269People applauded, and that was it. No forms in quadruplicate, no committees to be consulted. I was beginning to like the thirteenth century.
270Chapter Fourteen
271
272The holidays drifted by pleasantly. I often slept in sometimes almost missing 10 A.m. dinner. The sauna was fired up daily during the Christmas season as opposed to the usual twice weekly. Commoners and nobility used it indiscriminately.
273Afternoons I played instructor, teaching fencing, first aid, accounting, and arithmetic. I taught base-twelve arithmetic rather than the usual base-ten, in part because Boris Novacek insisted on it, in part because the people thought in terms of dozens and grosses rather than tens and hundreds, but mostly because they had convinced me that twelve is a more useful number than ten. Twelve has four factors; ten has only two. A circle can easily be divided into twelve parts, but it is almost impossible to divide it into ten without a protractor. Base-twelve is more condensed; you can state larger numbers with fewer digits.
274In fact, the only advantage to the base-ten system is the unimportant biological fact that human beings happen to have ten fingers. I have heard that the American Maya Indians always went barefoot and so developed a basetwenty numbering system, counting on their toes as well as their fingers.
275It was a simple matter to set up a base-twelve system. Zero and the numbers one through nine remained the same. Ten and eleven required new symbols; I picked the Greek letters delta and phi.
276Counting went one, two three… nine, ten, eleven, twelve, oneteen, twoteen, thirteen… nineteen, tenteen, eleventeen, twenty, twentyone… twenty-nine, twentyten, twenty-eleven, thirty, and so on. Eleventy-ten was the equivalent of decimal one hundred forty-two. Obvious, right? Then it was a matter of constructing multiplication tables and so on; again, straightforward.
277I was astounded at how quickly some people picked up all this. Twentieth-century schools take eight years to teach children arithmetic, yet I had some students learn it in two weeks! It was as if their minds were dry sponges, eager to suck things in.
278Class size varied between four and fifty. It was agreed that after the holidays, classes would be continued on Sunday afternoons.
279The learning procedure was entirely by lecture, backed up with chanting for memorization. I had part of one wall of the hall plastered and painted black for use as a blackboard. There were no books, no paper, no pencils, no tests beyond verbal questions.
280Despite those handicaps, learning proceeded well. By the end of his stay, Boris had a parchment ledger book that he understood better than I, since I was never able to learn to think in base-twelve arithmetic. I could do it but not think in it.
281Boris complained that carrying and using slow-drying ink would be awkward on the road, so I suggested using a sharpened piece of hard lead. That worked fairly well, and a few years later we were producing and selling lead pencils, made with real lead instead of the modem graphite and clay mixture.
282On the feast of the twelfth night, I was expected to give gifts to the commoners, and by then I knew precisely what to give them. The people were obviously suffering from a number of vitamin deficiencies. The seeds I had with me could make a valuable contribution to their diet if handled properly. I sorted carefully through the seed packages, dividing them into six piles.
283The first pile consisted of those which could be eaten and the seeds saved: the pumpkins, the squashes, the melons, the luffas, the tomatoes, etc. Those, I could give to the peasants and be sure that there would be seeds for future crops. There were ninety-two packets of those, enough to give one to each farmer.
284The second pile contained those plants of which one ate the seeds themselves. Those were the really important crops: the grains, the maize, the potatoes, the peas, and the beans. It would be best if those were planted and harvested strictly for seed, at least the first year, since my understanding was that the modern varieties were more productive than the ancient ones. Those were best grown on the count’s own lands since a peasant might get hungry and eat the seeds next winter. After some thought, I put the biennials, where I knew how they reproducedthe onions and garlic-in with this group.
285The third pile consisted of the long-term plants: fruit trees, berry bushes, sugar maples, asparagus, grapevines, and so on. Those too were for Lambert’s lands, since he could afford a long-term investment and a peasant probably could not.
286The fourth pile contained plants that were decorative but had no economic use: decorative trees, flowers, and so -on. Roses were nice, but I wasn’t going to worry if we lost a strain. Those I would give to the women of the fort.
287It turned out that I was completely wrong about the usefulness of some of these. Goldenrods were an excellent insect repellent, and people ate some of the flowers. And roses were their major source of vitamin C. The Japanese roses grew into a huge, tangled mass that became an excellent military defense, vastly superior to barbed wire! They also kept cattle out of the crops.
288Then, there were plants that wouldn’t grow in Poland at all. I had two packages of rice, six kinds of citrus fruits, and a package of cotton seeds. I didn't know why that redheaded bitch had sold them to me, but she had, and they were useless in Okoitz.
289But Boris was going into the warmer lands of Hungary; I knew that rice and oranges would grow there, and who knows?-maybe cotton would, too. I felt guilty about Lambert’s settlement with Novacek, and the gift of seeds was a way I could help make it up to him. If he played his cards rightand Boris was no fool-those plants could make him rich.
290The cotton was especially important. Cotton is better than linen, and it takes much less labor to make it into thread. In this clothing-conscious age, cotton could make Boris the vast fortune he so much desired.
291Now if there had only been some tobacco seeds…
292The last pile was of plants about which I had no idea how they reproduced. These were mainly root crops: carrots, turnips, radishes, and beets, along with the cabbage and its sisters cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. The last six are all really the same species and can be interbred. The best I could do with that pile was to turn it over to the count, and we’d try our luck. I was troubled because the sugar beets were in the last pile. With the incredible prices paid for sweets, sugar beets could be a very valuable cash crop for the count, but I didn't know how to make them reproduce.
293The party went off fairly well. The people were all willing to try something new, and the count was willing to invest a few hectacres for seed production. The next spring, Father John and 1, the only literate people in the fort, were kept busy reading and rereading seed packages for people.
294It is annoying and time-consuming to be surrounded by illiterates. You can’t leave a note for someone. You must find a messenger and trust his memory. You can't give written instructions. And somehow there's something wrong about illiteracy.
295I found Father John working on a wood carving, a statue of a saint.
296“Father, I think that we should start a school.”
297“Indeed? And teach what?”
298“Why, reading and writing, of course.”
299“Now, what possible good would that do for my parish?”
300“What possible good? These people are all illiterate! They can’t write their own names, let alone read.”
301“And if I taught them to read, Sir Conrad, what then? What would they read?”
302“Why, books, of course.”
303“The only books in Okoitz are a not particularly legible Bible and my own copy of Aristotle. These I can recite from memory. As for writing their names, where would they have need to sign them? On latrine walls?”
304“But surely literacy is more important than a carving!”
305“Indeed? Consider that the peasants tithe, but they give me only a tenth of what they sell to merchants, which is perhaps only a tenth of what they grow; they eat the rest. The count provides me with food and shelter but little else. I have a wife with… expectations. I can sell my carvings, and I cannot sell learning.”
306“Okay. I get your message, Father. How much do you earn by carving?”
307“Five, six pence a week, sometimes.”
308“Very well. I will pay you-or, rather, donate to the Church-a penny a day for your teaching. Teach a dozen students, the bright ones, five days a week, from dinner until sundown during the winter. I especially want the Kulczynski boy, Piotr, taught. He has learned arithmetic in two weeks, and a mind like that must not be wasted.”
309“There will be expenses. Parchment, ink, wax tablets.”
310“Buy them. I’ll give you a fund to pay for them. If you need other things, Father Ignacy of the Franciscan monastery in Cracow can provide them. He knows me.”
311“And I can still carve in the mornings?”
312“Yes, damn it!”
313“Then we are in agreement.”
314As I left Father John, I saw Count Lambert talking to a newly arrived knight. The fellow was very splendidly dressed in purple and gold. His armor was gold-washed and of very small links, the kind you see in museums. His embroidered velvet surcoat matched the velvet barding worn by his fine white charger, and the trim on his helmet and weapons looked to be solid gold.
315I was just in blue jeans and sweater, but I went over to introduce myself.
316“Ah, Sir Conrad,” Lambert said. “I introduce you to Sir Stefan. Sir Conrad is my newest vassal; Sir Stefan is the son of my greatest vassal, Baron Jaroslav. The two of you will be serving together until Easter.”
317“I am honored, Sir Conrad,” Sir Stefan said, somewhat taken aback by my size and strange clothing. “I had thought that I would be serving with Sir Miesko. Still, anyone who can do guard duty for the other half of a long winter’s night is warmly welcome.”
318“Well, uh…” I stammered.
319“Sir Miesko is on a mission for me in Hungary,” Lambert said. “As for the rest, you touch upon a problem, Sir Stefan. You see, my arrangement with Sir Conrad is that he will have no military duties save in an actual emergency. I regret that this means that you will have to take the night guard by yourself.”
320“Dusk till dawn, seven nights a week in the winter, my lord? Surely that is excessive!”
321I had to agree that he had a point. At Okoitz’s latitude, there could be seventeen hours of darkness in the winter. Three months straight of night duty under those circumstances could make a man crazy and old before his time. I felt sorry for the young knight, but not enough to volunteer my time. It wasn't my job. I had my own work to do.
322“Count Lambert,” I said. “Can’t you get another man to help him out?”
323Lambert shook his head.
324“For another knight to come, he would have to make arrangements with yet another warrior to look after his own estates; then that man would have to make similar arrangements, all of which would take time. It probably couldn’t be done within three months, by which time it would no longer be needed. No. The lots were drawn last Michaelmas, and I won't upset the schedules for anything less than death or the threat of war.”
325“I resign myself,” Stefan said. “But Sir Conrad, couldn’t you occasionally help out?”
326“Well, I’m sorry, but there are a lot of other projects I have to work on.”
327“Sir Conrad will have his own duties which only he can perform,” Lambert said. “I am afraid that you are left with an arduous task, Sir Stefan.”
328“But alone, my lord?”
329“Damn, man! I’ve explained it to you. Who else is there? The place must be guarded! I can't leave guard duty to a peasant. They'd start thinking that they were our equals. And surely you don't expect me to do it. It is more than sufficient that I must be awake during the day. I am your father's liege lord! Enough of this! It is settled!” I think Lambert felt as guilty as I did.
330Sir Stefan glared at me as though it were all my fault and stalked off to the castle.
331My first task was to get a gross of beehives built. There was really no hurry since bees don’t swarm until June, but I wanted to establish a good working relationship with the carpenter before we started building a loom.
332It was soon obvious that I was going to have difficulty with the man. Vitold had to be competent; he had supervised the construction of the entire fort. Yet when it came to sawing up some boards and building some simple boxes, he had a great deal of difficulty understanding what I wanted. I drew pictures on the snow, but three-view drawings were incomprehensible to him. He asked innumerable questions about bees and what it was that we were trying to accomplish. That went on for hours, and I was losing my temper by suppertime. We agreed to discuss it the next day. Admittedly, we were talking about a gross of the things and it would probably take a month or two to get them nailed together, but a box ought to be a simple thing.
333The next morning, he caught me on my way to the blacksmith. If I couldn’t get a box made, what was I going to do about the twentyodd complicated steps involved in making watered steel?
334“Sir Conrad?” Vitold asked. “Would it be all right with you if I just went ahead and built what I think you want? If you don’t like them, we can always use 'em for firewood.”
335“That would be fine, Vitold.” I figured that it would keep him out of my hair for a while, and once we had a sample, I could show him what he was doing wrong.
336The blacksmith, Ilya, was the man who had been chosen king during the holidays. He had put me in diapers, and I did not have a favorable impression of his character.
337“Ilya, the count wants me to tell you about steel.”
338“Well, since the count wants it, I’ll listen. But I already know about steel.”
339He was working at his forge and didn’t look up when he talked to me. This forge was a primitive affair about the size of an outdoor barbecue. It was a table-high rock pit with the back wall raised as a windscreen. A crude leather bellows forced air into one side. A roof without walls covered it and his anvil, his other major piece of equipment. A few pliers, punches, and hammers completed the smithy's small collection of tools. Charcoal in the forge burned yellow-hot.
340“You know something about wrought iron. You know nothing about steel,” I said.
341“Huh.” He still didn’t look up. He was a short man, but he looked to be immensely strong. Even though we were outside in the snow, his sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms twice as thick as mine. He was repairing the armor that the pig had worn when I killed it a few weeks before. “Damned lucky work, here. You must have hit a couple of weak links.”
342“I did nothing of the sort! I killed that pig because my sword is good steel and that armor is cheap wrought iron!”
343“ Nothing wrong with this armor.” He still didn’t look up. He was beating an iron ring into the mail shirt draped over the anvil, working over the tip of the point.
344“Damn it, look at me when I’m talking to you!”
345He glanced up. “I see you.” Then he went back to his work.
346“Well, if you won’t look at me, look at my sword!” I drew it to show him what watered steel looked like.
347“Skinny little thing.”
348Obviously, I was going to have to get his attention. It occurred to me that chopping a hole through the mail he was working on might do the trick.
349“Damn you, Ilya! You stand back or you’re going to lose a hand!” I swung at the armor draped over the anvil and he got out of the way in time.
350The results were surprising. Fortunately, Ilya was too busy staring at the anvil with his mouth open to notice my expression. I had cut three centimeters off the end of the anvil, and the armor was almost in two pieces, hanging by a shred. My sword was undamaged.
351My experience as an officer had taught me to recover quickly. “Now fix that, Ilya,” I growled. “Then you come to me after supper tonight and we’ll talk.” I walked off as though I knew what I was doing.
352The carpenter was selecting logs from the firewood pile, about a meter long and half that thick, splitting them in half and laying the halves side by side on the snow.
353I didn’t want to ask.
354I went back to the castle, thinking about a mug of beer. Maybe the count would want a game of chess. A noble wasn’t allowed to play with commoners because he might lose.
355Janina got my beer, and the girls pounced on me.
356“Sir Conrad, you promised to show us how to make that wonderful knot work.” Krystyana wasn’t very good at playing the coquette. I think she was trying to imitate Francine, the priest's wife.
357“Hmm. I don’t remember promising anything, but I'll think on it.” Thinking did me surprisingly little good. Understand that my mother knitted constantly. Unless she was cooking or sleeping, her needles and yarn were always out. My grandmother had done the same while she was alive.
358And, you know? I had never really looked at what they were doing. I knew that there was a needle in each hand, with little loops of yam that connected them to the fabric below. She did something complicated with them in the middle. I spent more than an hour trying to visualize what it was, and the girls drifted away, embarrassed.
359Then a partial solution occurred to me. I didn’t know what knitting was, but when I was seven, my grandmother had shown me how to crochet. I got some heavy slivers of wood from the carpenter, who was still splitting logs and laying them out.
360Other groups were working. One bunch of men had piles of flax lying on the ground, and they were beating on them with large wooden mallets. Some women were shredding it into fiber. A few others were braiding a sort of rope. Some repair work was in progress on a straw roof. No one seemed to be in charge, but things were getting done.
361I took my sticks back to my room, and in an hour I had whittled three usable crochet hooks. The lack of sandpaper was a nuisance, but if you take your time you can get things fairly smooth with just a knife. I borrowed a candle from the count’s room and waxed them. I borrowed some yam and shortly produced a pot holder that was as good as anything I had done when I was seven.
362The girls were thrilled and picked it up without difficulty. Within a week I had two usable linen undershirts and Lambert was equally well equipped. The ladies were soon experimenting with variations, some of which were quite nice, and the peasant women were following their lead.
363One surprising thing about technology is that very often the simplest processes and devices take the longest to develop, or perhaps I should say that it’s surprising until you've been a designer. It is much easier, conceptually, to design a complicated thing than a refined simple mechanism. Those intricate machines that came out of twentiethcentury Germany are really the results of lazy thinking.
364Consider the evolution of the musket. The expensive and tricky wheel lock was produced for a hundred years before some nameless craftsman came up with the simple and dependable flintlock.
365Or look at this crocheting business. It’s hard to imagine a simpler tool than a crochet hook. It produces a useful cloth fairly quickly, yet I do not know of a single primitive tribe that uses it. Even nomads, who must carry all their belongings with them, haul along a simple loom to make cloth.
366A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.
367After supper, Mary escorted Ilya the blacksmith into my room. He was considerably less surly than he had been in the afternoon.
368“Sir Conrad, please understand that when I have the forge going, I have to work! It takes me two or three days to make enough charcoal to feed the fire for a single afternoon.”
369“Okay, Ilya. I’ll count that as an apology if you'll excuse my temper. Now, about steel.”
370The door was open, and Lambert walked in. “Yes, Sir Conrad, about steel! I want to listen in on this.”
371“You’ve had a productive day! All my ladies are busily tying balls of yam into remarkable knots, and I hear that you have invented a new technique for obtaining Ilya's attention. ”
372In a place so small, everybody seemed to know what everyone else was doing. “I’m sorry about losing my temper, my lord. I imagine that anvils are expensive.”
373“Yes, but Ilya fixed it and the mail as well.” His eyes twinkled. “I’ve occasionally considered using a similar technique on his head, but I feared for my sword. Now, tell us about steel.”
374“Well, the first step is to convert the wrought iron into blister steel. Wrought iron is almost pure iron; steel is iron with a little bit of carbon in it. Charcoal is mostly carbon, so the trick is to mix them.”
375“You start by beating the iron until it’s fairly thin, thinner than your little finger. Then you get a clay pot with a good clay lid. You put the iron in the pot and pack it all around tight with charcoal, crushed fine. You put the lid on and seal it with good clay. It's important that no air gets into the pot.”
376“Then you build a fire around it, slowly heat it up to a dull red, and keep the fire going for a week.”
377“What? A whole week?” Ilya interrupted.
378“Yes. A wood fire is hot enough, though. Now, if you’ve done this right and the pot hasn't cracked and no air has gotten in, the iron will have little pimples on it, and it will now be steel. Not a good grade of steel but good for some things. What I've just described is called the cementation process.”
379“You don’t know anything about heat-treating, do you? No, I guess you wouldn't. Wrought iron stays soft no matter what you do with it. Well, steel can be hardened. You heat it until it's bright red, almost yellow, and dunk it in water. This will make it hard, so it can keep a good edge. The trouble is, it breaks easily.”
380“Then there is tempering, which makes it tougher. After hardening, you heat it to almost red, then let it cool slowly.”
381“That’s what there is to it?” Ilya asked.
382“That’s what there is to making a decent kitchen knife or an axe blade, but it won't be springy enough for a sword. It might break unless you made it as heavy as the count's.”
383“So let’s have the rest of it.”
384“Hey, this is going to be a lot harder than it sounds,” I said. “Just learning how to cook a pot that long without breaking it is going to take a lot of tries, and tempering is an art form.”
385“Well, I want to hear it anyway.”
386“Yes, Sir Conrad, tell us the whole process,” Lambert said.
387“Okay. I’ll tell you how they do it in Damascus.” Actually, I didn't know how they did it in Damascus, but I'd seen Jacob Bronowski's magnificent television series, and he had showed how they did it in Japan, which was probably similar. “You weld a piece of this cemented steel to a similar piece of good wrought iron. You know how to weld, don't you?”
388“Does the Pope know how to pray?”
389“I’ll take that as an affirmative. You weld them together and beat it out until it's twice as long as it was. Then you bend it over and weld it again. Then you heat it up again, beat it out long again, bend it over again, and weld it again. You repeat this at least twelve and preferably fifteen times. This gives you a layered structure thousands of layers thick.”
390“That sounds impossible.”
391“No, but it is difficult. Look carefully at my sword. See those little lines? Those tiny waves? Those are layers of iron and steel. It’s called watering, and it's the mark of the best blades.”
392“That’s it, then?”
393“Almost. Then you beat it until it looks like a sword. Once you start playing with hardening, you’ll learn that the faster the steel cools, the harder it gets. You want the edge very hard but the shank springy. You coat the sword with clay, thin near the edge and thick at the shank. You heat it, clay and all, until it's the 'color of the rising sun' and quench it in water the same temperature as your hand. Then you temper it and polish it. Soaking it in vinegar will bring out the watering.”
394“That’s a long-winded process,” Ilya said.
395“But worth it, I’ll wager,” the count said. “Ilya, you work on it-in addition to your other duties, of course. Good night, Ilya. A game of chess, Sir Conrad?”
396Lambert won one of our games that night. By spring he was beating me two games out of three.
397Chapter Fifteen
398
399I awoke to find that the carpenter was burning all the logs he had split and laid out the day before. Not one big bonfire, you understand, but hundreds of little fires, one in each split log. Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were tending the fires under his supervision.
400I knew that I didn’t want to get involved.
401I scrounged up some splinters of about knitting-needle size and retired to my room.
402You see, it often happens with me that a problem that I have in the day gets solved in the middle of the night. I’d woken up in the dark with the answer, sitting bolt upright and startling Natalia.
403It was obvious. I had a product sample, a sweater that my mother had knitted. All I had to do was figure out how to stick the knitting needles into it and then perform the operation backward! Taking it apart, I could tell how to put it together.
404I had the needles ready by dinnertime, and I eagerly went at it as soon as the meal was over. It was not as easy as I had thought. I was not aided by the fact that my sweater was very fancy, with lots of embossing and special twists. Also, I did not know which end was up. It was a long, frustrating afternoon. I learned little and lost a third of my only sweater.
405Ladies wandered in and out, but I really didn’t have time to be friendly.
406The carpenter was still out there, burning his logs, with a new crew of helpers.
407After supper, I was at it by the smoky light of an off lamp when Count Lambert took the stuff out of my hands, handed it to Krystyana, and sat me down at the chess board.
408“Time for recreation, Sir Conrad.”
409By the end of the third game, Krystyana had my sweater partially reassembled.
410“You see, Sir Conrad,” the count said, beaming. “Another eldritch art that you have taught my people.”
411“Uh… yes, my lord.”
412“By the way, do you have any idea as to just what Vitold is doing out there with all those fires?”
413“In truth, my lord, he has been confusing me for the past two days.”
414“Now that is refreshing to hear. I hate to be the only one who doesn’t know what is going on. Sometimes I think they play a game called confuse the count.”
415“Bedtime. Coming, Krystyana? Or is it someone else’s turn?”
416At noon the next day Vitold showed me the first sample beehive; by dusk he had completed the entire gross. In three days he had finished a job that I had assumed would take months.
417It seems that boards were hard to make. They had to be sawed by hand out of tree trunks, using a poor saw. Nails were even harder. They had to be hammered one at a time out of very expensive iron.
418But though a modem carpenter thinks in terms of boards and fasteners, Vitold thought in terms of taking trees and making things out of them.
419As the firewood was already cut, splitting was a fairly simple job. He then burned out a hollow in each half log, carefully leaving about five centimeters untouched all the way around. An entrance hole was chopped in with an axe, and the two troughs were tied back together again with a sturdy, though crude, linen rope. To harvest, you untied the rope, removed the combs, and retied it.
420Vitold’s method was one of those brilliantly simple things that I was talking about earlier. There was a lot I had to teach the people of the thirteenth century. There was also a great deal that I had to learn.
421I haven’t talked much about children in this confession, perhaps because the subject is so painful. In modem Poland, children are cherished, as they are in all civilized countries. In the thirteenth century, this was not always true. Perhaps because so many of them died so young, you did not dare love them too much.
422From puberty to menopause, if they lived that long, the women of Okoitz were almost continually pregnant. Most of them averaged twelve to fifteen births. There was no concept of birth control, no feeling that one should abstain from sex. In that small community of perhaps a hundred families, there were typically two births a week. There was also more than a weekly funeral, usually a tiny clothwrapped bundle without even a wooden coffin.
423The adults, too, died young. Forty was considered old. The medical arts that can keep a sick person alive did not exist. You were healthy or you were dead!
424And there was nothing I could do about it. I was completely ignorant of most medicine. Oh, I had taken all the standard first-aid courses. I could give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could treat frostbite and heat stroke and shock. I could splint a fracture and tend a wound. But all that I had learned was learned for the purpose of knowing what to do until the doctor arrives.
425I got into this sad subject because Krystyana’s baby sister was dead. Her father had rolled on the baby while sleeping and smothered it. Because of the harsh winters and unheated houses, babies slept with their parents. It was the only way to keep them from freezing. And the father just-rolled over.
426The look on the man’s face-he couldn't have been much older than I was, but his face was lined and weathered, his hands were wrinkled, calloused claws, and his back was bent as if he were still carrying a grain sackthe look on that man's face was such that I couldn't stay through the all-too-brief church ceremony. I had to leave and I had to cry.
427Everyone already knew that I was strange, and they left me alone.
428I am not a doctor. I am an engineer. I did not know what most of those people were dying of. Hell, nobody here had cancer! People just got a bellyache and died! But I did know that a better diet, better sanitation, better clothing, better housing, and-damn it-a little heat would do wonders for them.
429A sawmill for wooden floors and beds that got them off the floor. An icehouse to help preserve food. Looms for more and better cloth. A better stove for heating and cooking. Some kind of laundry-these people couldn’t wash their clothes all winter!—a sewage system, and a water system.
430These were things that I could do; these were things that I would do!
431That and get ready to fight the Mongols.
432It was just after Christmas that I started working on my master plan, or at least the first few glimpses of it started to come to me.
433If we were going to accomplish anything with regard to the Mongols, we would need arms and armor on a scale unprecedented in thirteenthcentury Poland. We would need iron, steel, and-if possible-gunpowder by the hundreds of tons.
434That meant heavy industry, and heavy industry is equipmentintensive. A blast furnace can’t be shut down for Sundays or holidays. It can't stop working for the planting or the harvest. Its workers have to be skilled specialists.
435A steel works at Okoitz, or anywhere else in Poland’s agricultural system, was simply an impossibility, yet the work could not be done in the existing cities, either. Not when dozens of powerful, traditionminded guilds guarded their special privileges and were ready to fight anything new. Obviously, to have a free hand to introduce innovations, I would need my own land and my own people. Well, Lambert had said that was possible.
436I would need to be able to feed my workers, and the local agricultural techniques produced very little surplus. Here the seeds I had packed in should help. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and better farm machinery were a ways off, but work on animal husbandry should be started immediately.
437I’d already promised to get some light industry going—clothmaking and so on-which would improve my status with the powers that be as well as getting people more decent clothing.
438Windmills. We could definitely use some windmills, and I hadn’t seen one in this century.
439I talked with Lambert about my plans for Okoitz, and while I don’t think he grasped a third of what I had in mind, he gave me his blessings. “Yes, of course, Sir Conrad. These innovations are precisely what I wanted you to do. You are welcome to all the timber you can get cut and all the work you can get out of the peasants.”
440“Thank you, my lord.”
441“Just don’t do anything silly like interfering with the planting or harvest.”
442“Of course not. Uh, you mentioned once that I could have lands of my own.”
443“Yes, I did, didn’t 1. But there's a slight difficulty there. You see, you are a foreigner-”
444“I am not, my lord. I was born in Poland.”
445“Well, you talk funny, so it comes to the same thing. The law is that I can’t assign you lands without my liege lord's permission. It's just a formality, really. I'm sure he'll grant it when next I see him, probably in the next year or two.”
446“The next year or two? That’s quite a delay!”
447“Oh, likely he’ll be by in the spring or summer. What is your hurry? You have just outlined projects here at Okoitz that will take years to complete.”
448I talked for a while about Mongols, heavy industry, and blast furnaces.
449“Oh, if you say so, Sir Conrad. If I must, I’ll send a rider with a letter to find the duke, taking your word on faith.”
450“I must say that belief in a fire that is so intense that one dares not let it die-well, it stretches the mind more that transubstantiation!”
451“But you’ll send the letter?”
452“After Easter, if necessary. You couldn’t build anything on your land until the snow melts, anyway.”
453For the next few months, my time was divided, unevenly, four ways. One was animal husbandry. The people of Okoitz knew the basic principles of animal breeding. They produced outstanding war-horses, but somehow the techniques had not filtered down to the more mundane world of farm animals.
454A modem hen produces more than an egg a day. The hens of Okoitz produced perhaps an egg a week. The sheep were small and scrawny; I doubted if there was a kilo of wool on any one of them. The milk cows looked likely to produce only a few liters a day, and then only in the spring and summer. Grown pigs were only a quarter of the size of the modern animal.
455Much of the reason for this was economic. A farmer with a cow, two pigs, and six chickens was in no position to get involved with scientific breeding. Another part of the problem was that they tended to use farm animals as scavengers. Kept grossly underfed, pigs and chickens were allowed to run free and were expected to find much of their own food. That resulted in indiscriminate breeding and constant arguments about someone’s pigs eating someone else's crops. It also spread shit over everything.
456But the count had his own herds, and if we could improve the quality of those, the results would spread. For the most part, my program was a matter of dividing each species into a small A herd and a larger B herd. The A herd contained the best animals, most of them females. They got better food and the best available herdsman, who was expected to get to know them as individuals.
457They were kept strictly apart from the B herd, except when inferior animals were demoted. The B herd was for eating. There were two A herds for cattle, one for beef and one for dairy products, but it took some time to convince Lambert that it was useful to breed separately for two desired sets of qualities.
458The same was done for chickens: one A flock for eggs and one for fast growth. I concentrated on chickens because they have a shorter life cycle, and selective breeding would give faster results.
459Breeding for egg production requires accounting. You have to know which chicken is producing how many eggs. This involves an “egg factory,” with each hen imprisoned in a tiny cell. It was labor-intensive in that food and water had to be brought to them. I had a small rack built by ’each cell. When the breeders took out an egg, they put a stone in the rack. Big egg, big stone; little egg, little stone.
460Once a month, the hens were evaluated. The best hens got a rooster, and the worst were demoted to the shortlived B flock. The mediocre got to keep their jobs. I got a couple of the older women interested in the project, and egg production doubled in the first year.
461As time went on, most of our best animal breeders were women. They seemed to understand the concepts better.
462A half dozen holidays came and went. These annoyed me because they cut down on the man-hours I had available. The holidays came to a height in a weeklong carnival, a Polish Mardi Gras, from Lenten Thursday to Ash Wednesday. “Carnival” is Latin for “good-bye, meat.” Lent was not so much the religious abstinence from meat eating as the formal acknowledgment that the village was actually out of animal products and that those animals left had to be kept for spring and summer breeding.
463The second of my time-consuming jobs was lumbering. Understand that the people of Okoitz had felled a lot of trees. Okoitz was built almost completely of logs, and in the last four years a huge effort had gone into it.
464But those logs were actually the by-product of land clearance. If you want to clear land for farming, you not only have to remove the tree, you have to remove the stump. The sensible way is not to chop the tree down; you dig around the tree, cut out the roots, and then pull the tree down. Since you can’t dig in frozen ground, tree removal was a summer job.
465Lumber cut in the winter is superior to that cut in the summer. It is drier. There was some nearby hilly ground that was not suitable for farming but could do well as orchards. Leaving the stumps in would delay erosion until the orchard was established.
466Projects I had in mind for the next summer were going to require a lot of wood, and that all added up to winter lumbering.
467The difficulty was that the peasants were not used to working hard in the winter. Except for spreading manure on the snow and basic housekeeping tasks, winter was when you went to bed early and slept late and spent the time in between enjoying yourself. It took a lot of persuasion to get things done.
468Incidentally, my horse, Anna, was quite willing to wear a horse collar and drag logs, provided that one was polite to her. Several peasants with whips were bitten and one was seriously kicked before the message got across. Anna developed a friendship with an eight-yearold girl, one of Janina’s sisters, and those two made a very productive team. Somewhat later, it was discovered that the count's best stallion was also willing to work, provided that he was allowed to work next to Anna. Such things gave people their first new subjects of conversation since my arrival.
469I was watching this strange and amusing trio dragging a huge log down the snowy hill when another log being dragged by a team of oxen broke loose and started rolling.
470There were screams and shouts and people scrambling. The oxen were knocked over and probably would have been killed if the rope around the log hadn’t come loose. The log bounded downhill, bouncing off some tree stumps and smashing others to splinters.
471Mikhail Malinski was downhill of the rolling log. He had been taking his dull axe down to the blacksmith’s temporary forge to get the cutting edge sharpened. With the wrought-iron tools, the edge wasn't ground-that was wasteful of iron-it was heated up and the edge was beaten sharp.
472Mikhail heard the shouting, looked up the hill, and saw the log coming at him. Dropping his axe, he ran diagonally away. When he saw that he was clear, he stopped to watch, leaning against a large tree stump to catch his breath. The log struck another stump and spun completely around, smashing Mikhail’s left ankle against the stump he was leaning on; then it bounced off and continued downhill.
473I was the first to get to Mikhail. His ankle was red mush, and his foot was almost off. Blood was spurting from the wound. He was screaming; he knew he was going to die. Without thinking, I stripped off my leather belt, wrapped it around his calf, and twisted it tightly until the squirting stopped.
474This was reflexes, this was training, this was what one did until the doctor arrived.
475Only, deep inside me, a panicky voice was yelling at me that I was it! There was no impersonal institution to take Mikhail away and tell us later if he lived or died. There was only me, and I was not competent.
476But as always, when I am seared and don’t know what to do, the actor surfaces. I say the phony words and adopt a phony posture and try to fake it.
477“Easy, Mikhail, easy. Don’t worry, we'll take care of you.” A crowd was gathering. I pointed to a long-legged young man. “You! You run to the castle and tell Krystyana or whoever of the handmaidens is there that I want the kitchen table clean with a fresh cloth on it. I want a big kettle of water boiling, and I want all the clean napkins she's got. Have it ready for us! Now move!” He moved.
478“You! Take my cloak off. Spread it on the ground over there.” I still had one hand on the tourniquet. “Now, you eight men! Get around us. The rest of you, back! Now, pick him up. Easy, now! Put him on the cloak! That’s it. Now, pick up the cloak! No! Face that way, dummy! Now, we carry him back to the castle.” I trailed behind him, still holding the tourniquet, trying to remember what to do next. There was nothing in my training to tell me. Except… except, once over a Christmas holiday in the dormitories, I spent two weeks improving my English by devouring Forester's Hornblower novels. There was one very graphic sequence where the excellent Mr. Bush lost a foot in combat and was tended by early nineteenth-century physicians. Oh God, I hoped that Forester knew what he was talking about and was not as great a phony as I was!
479We got Mikhail on the kitchen table. “Okay. Now, lift him up and off my cloak; the cloak isn’t clean enough. The first rule of tending a wound is to make it clean.” started lecturing, acting as if this were a classroom demonstration, partly to reassure Mikhail, partly to rehearse to myself what I was to do, but mostly to shut out the reality of the bleeding man in front of me.
480I had the count hold the tourniquet, and I cut away Mikhail’s clothes with my jackknife. I washed my hands and the smashed foot, talking all the while about the importance of cleanliness. The foot felt like a bag of broken rocks. We got a few liters of wine into Mikhail, and I took a drink myself.
481“One break or two could heal,” I said. “This foot is going to have to come off.” A stir went through the crowd. “That’s not so bad. We can make him a new one later, out of wood.” I washed my jackknife in wine and then in boiling water. I got a pair of scissors and cleaned them up. And a needle and thread, I remembered. I found the arteries by having Lambert loosen the tourniquet and seeing what squirted. I had to cut away flesh to find the things. Tying them off, I left long threads, as Forester mentioned. I trimmed the skin and pulled it up to the calf. It was “usual” to saw the bone, but not a saw in the town was up to it. I cleaned my sword and chopped the bone with a single hack. Then I sewed the wound almost shut. I left the strings from the arteries hanging out, as well as a twist of boiled linen. Forester had stressed the importance of draining.
482Mikhail stood up to it fairly well, considering that the amputation and all was done with no other anesthetic than wine. Most of the time he didn’t have to be held down. You see, he wanted to believe my acting job. He needed to believe in the firm words I mouthed, and so he did.
483We put Mikhail in one of the spare rooms in the castle, and the crowd dispersed.
484I met Sir Stefan as he went to do his nightly guard duty, heavily bundled against the wintery night. The long, lonely hours were telling on him. He looked tired and older than he had been a month before.
485“Sir Conrad, what’s this I hear about you chopping off a peasant's foot on the kitchen table? What did the man do to deserve that?”
486I was blood-splattered and tired. “Deserve? He didn’t deserve it at all. He was hurt, and I had to amputate to heal him.”
487“So your witchcraft includes blood rites?”
488“Witchcraft? Damn it, I-”
489“Oh, I’m sorry.” He held his hand up. “I spoke out of turn. You must know how tired I am, standing guard from dusk to dawn every night without relief while you are bedded safe with a young wench.”
490“Yeah. I know you’ve got a rough job. But it's only for a couple more months.”
491“Two more months of this without a wench of nights, just so you can play peasant carpenter during the day?”
492“Look, Sir Stefan. If I hadn’t been out there today, Mikhail would have lost more than his foot. He would have lost his life.”
493“Well, what of it? What damn use is a crippled peasant?”
494“You’re disgusting.”
495“I’m disgusting? You've just drenched the kitchen table with human blood! I have to eat off that table while you sleep soundly!” He stomped out.
496Mikhail was a model patient. The wound was never seriously inflamed and seemed to be healing well. I visited him several times a day. His wife was tending him, sleeping beside him. The children, including the kid I had brought in from the storm, had been farmed out except during Ignacy’s feeding time.
497We talked about his future. He was thinking about becoming a trader. Traders were mostly on horseback, weren’t they? I promised to advance him money and introduce him to Boris Novacek.
498Within a month, I carefully pulled out the long strings, removed the rotted ends of the arteries, and then closed the wound. All seemed well. In a few weeks, we were talking about moving him back to his home.
499Then one night he got a fever and was dead in the morning.
500I don’t know why.
501Two weeks after the funeral, Lambert decided that it would be good if Ilya the blacksmith married the widow; a month later there was an Easter wedding.
502Lambert had eleven barons subordinate to him. These men held lands from the count. Each had his own fort or manor, and all of them but one had subordinate knights, often with manors of their own. The number of their knights varied from zero to twenty-six. In addition, fifteen knights, including myself, reported directly to the count.
503The great majority of the noblemen held their positions on a hereditary basis, but it was still possible for an outstanding commoner to be elevated.
504And, of course, the count ran things at Okoitz. A number of specialists-the smith, the carpenter, the baker, and so on-had specific areas of responsibility and worked directly under the count. The castle itself was run by a constantly changing group of adolescent handmaidens, but on closer observation I found that the cook exerted a strong, steadying influence on them.
505The farmers worked through a half dozen foremen, who in turn took directions from Piotr Korzeniewski. These leaders were neither elected nor appointed but attained their positions and got things done by a system of consensus that I never fully understood. People just talked things over for a while and then, somehow, things were accomplished.
506Piotr had no official standing or title. In theory, all the farmers worked directly for Lambert. I was at Okoitz for months before I realized that Piotr was really the chief executive of the whole town.
507Knowledge of Okoitz’s ghost structure was to prove very useful to me over the years. Most of the nobility were interested only in fighting, hunting, and playing status games with each other. When I wanted something of a manor- sanitation measures or workers for my factories—the quickest way to do things was to have one of my subordinates talk things over with the informal executive.
508But I get ahead of myself.
509Chapter Sixteen
510
511My third endeavor was the loom. The count insisted that we set up the loom as a permanent fixture in his hall. The situation in the cloth industry annoyed him, and he wanted the loom as a showpiece for his summer guests. The concept of keeping a profitable trade secret was entirely foreign to him. I never saw him really concerned about money at all. What he wanted was the prestige of being the man who cracked the strangling cloth monopoly.
512Understand that the hall was a large room. It could handle a hundredpeople at a sit-down dinner. It took up most of the ground floor of the castle, and the ceiling was fully four meters high.
513In order to use as little floor space as possible, my loom design was more vertical than horizontal. A loom, in essence, is a simple device. It has a framework to support a few thousand spools of thread that go lengthwise through the cloth produced. Whether this was the warp or woof, I didn’t know. I wasn't a weaver, and in fact I made up my own terminology as I went along. We didn't have a warp or a woof. We had long threads and short threads.
514There are some frames that loop around the long threads to spread them apart in the proper order so that the short threads can be passed through. The simplest number of these spreaders would be two, but I wanted the loom to be able to produce more complicated weaves, like tweeds, so I built it with six spreaders, each of which connected with one-sixth of the long threads. There is a shuttle that holds the short thread as it gets tossed back and forth, and there is a thing that beats the short threads tightly together. Finally, there is a roll for the finished cloth.
515I was sure that on modem looms there is a friction device that holds the long threads tight, yet lets them advance as cloth was made. However, I couldn’t think up a simple way of doing it. It would have to be very simple, since we needed a thousand of them.
516I solved the problem by bypassing it. The carpenter drilled an array of holes, thirty-six wide by forty-eight high, directly into the wooden wall of the count’s hall. Into these he pounded 1,728 pegs to hold the long spools of thread. This was a convenient number, since it was twelve cubed-a thousand in our new base-twelve arithmetic.
517From there, the threads were to loop up over a pole near the ceiling, down under a suspended pole that could be raised as the threads were consumed, and then up to the four-meter ceiling again and down through the spreaders, the beater, and the cloth bolt.
518This arrangement let you make eight meters of cloth before you had to loosen each of the thousand spools and lower the suspended pole again.
519A working solution if not a perfect one.
520The finished loom took up about four square meters of floor space, eight if you counted the area for the two operators. It produced a band of cloth two meters wide.
521Sir Stefan waddled in one sunset as I was talking to Vitold about the spreaders. Sir Stefan was in full armor and heavily bundled and cloaked against the cold. “Another piece of witchcraft, Sir Conrad?” His voice was weary.
522Vitold crossed himself but remained silent.
523“A loom for making cloth,” I said. “I wish you would knock off this nonsense about witchcraft.”
524“Nonsense, is it? Then how do you explain that witch’s familiar of a mare you own?”
525“I bought Anna in Cracow not two months ago. She’s nothing but a good, well-trained horse.”
526“Indeed? Do you know what I saw last night? I saw your familiar leave the stables, go to the latrines, and relieve herself there! I followed her back to her stall and saw her putting the bar back in place. That’s no natural horse!” He was glaring at me.
527“Yeah, the stable boy told me she didn’t soil her stall, but so what? If a dog can be housebroken, why not a horse? I told you she was well trained.”
528“Well trained? She’s some manner of demon! Conrad, know that my father is Baron Jaroslav, the greatest of Lambert's vassals and well known to Duke Henryk. I swear that they will hear of your warlock's tricks!” he shouted as he stomped out into the snow.
529Vitold crossed himself again.
530“Damn it, Vitold, don’t you start believing that horseshit! You've been building this thing. You know there is nothing magic in it!”
531“I can only do as my betters bid me.” He returned to work, but you could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.
532We were a month getting the loom built, and then I asked for 1,728 spools of thread, each perhaps 500 meters long, to string it with.
533I was looked on with horror. That amount of thread simply did not exist.
534I said that I had to have it or I couldn’t thread the loom. At least that much more would be needed for the short threads.
535So the girls dug out their distaffs and went to work.
536It was my turn to be horrified. The distaff was nothing more than a small wooden cross. You stretched some wool between the cross and your left hand, and then your right hand gave the cross a spin. This twisted the thread. Then you wrapped the half meter of thread around the cross, stretched some more wool, etc.
537The truly labor-intensive part of clothmaking wasn’t in the weaving at all. It was in the spinning. I had taken off on a project without first knowing what a the parameters were. You might expect this of a beginner but not of a seasoned engineer.
538I told the girls to put away their distaffs and went to work on a spinning wheel.
539We were five weeks getting a spinning wheel working, partially because I had to come up with a wood lathe first. Also, we lost a week because I didn’t realize that you have to have two loops of string from the wheel to the spindle, one to turn the spool and one to turn the twister a little faster.
540Our first spinning wheel looked a lot like what you would see in a modem museum, because that’s what I modeled it on. There were a lot of design flaws that were cleared up on subsequent models. The bench seat was uncomfortable, and one couldn't wear a long dress while using it. Our ladies wore a floor-length dress or nothing. Calf-length dresses were for field workers. The foot pedal gave the operator leg cramps, and it was discovered that if one tied a string from one's big toe to the crank of the wheel, it worked a lot easier.
541I had learned a long time ago that if the operators don’t approve of your engineering, your machines don't work. If they wanted a string on their big toe, they got a string on their big toe.
542It was a lot easier to work if the spindle faced the operator at about an arm’s length rather than being placed horizontally under her breasts.
543Our third model had places for six operators, who sat facing each other in a circle. The job was boring, and they liked to talk.
544It took six spinsters to keep up with the loom. Lambert solved this problem by putting on a few more ladies-in-waiting.
545Also, it took two men-one holding the chisel, one turning the crank-six weeks on our new wood lathe to make enough spools to put the thread on.
546I subsequently found out that spinning and weaving are two of the seven production steps necessary in making the crudest of homespun cloth. To produce the best commercial cloth required some thirty production steps. It was going to take a while.
547“Look, Sir Conrad, you’ll be able to get this going by Easter, won't you?” the count asked.
548“Well, the spinning and weaving at least, my lord. I don’t think that we have enough washed and carded wool to keep us going for long.”
549“I’m ahead of you there. I've already sent word to my knights to send me all of their wool, and all of it washed and carded. Also, they are to send me two-thirds of the wool from this spring's shearing, and the acreage in flax is to be doubled.”
550“Excellent, my lord. You realize that weaving linen takes a slightly different loom, don’t you? It takes more threads, closer together, and only two spreaders.”
551“What of it? Vitold can build more now that you’ve shown him the way. We'll have a dozen looms going by next year! You just put your mind to the problems of washing and carding.”
552“The washing is simple enough, but I’m still not sure of the carding.”
553“You will solve it.” I wasn’t sure if he was expressing confidence in my abilities or giving me an order. Sheep's wool is much finer than human hair and a sheep goes all year without combing it. As a result, it is incredibly tangled, and untangling it is what carding is all about.
554“Sir Conrad, thus far you have seen us only as a small agrarian community. You must realize that Okoitz is the capital of a fairsized province. After Easter, all sorts of people will be coming through, my uncle and liege lord, Duke Henryk the Bearded, among them. It is essential that we make a good impression.”
555“Yes, my lord. You say that Henryk is your uncle?”
556“Well, of sorts. Henryk’s father was Boleslaw the Tall; my grandfather, Miesko the Stumbling, was Boleslaw's brother, both sired by Wladyslaw the Exile.”
557Western countries give their rulers numbers. We Poles prefer nicknames. It’s friendlier.
558“In addition, after our father’s untimely death, Henryk raised my brother Herman and me until we came of age. Being the eldest, he got the established city of Cieszyn and its environs. I got the Vistula-Odra Road and perforce have had to build my own town.”
559Another difference between eastern and western Europe was that in the west, inheritance was by primogeniture. The oldest son inherited everything, and the rest were out of luck. They might get a good job with the Church or in the army, but they were commoners.
560In Poland, the rule was to divide things fairly evenly between the sons, with a very substantial dowry for the daughters. This was a nicer system, but it had the disadvantage of shattering the country and weakening-often destroying-central authority. A hundred years before, Boleslaw the Wrymouth, the last king of Poland, had divided the country up among his five sons, giving only nominal authority to the eldest. That is all very well unless you are about to get invaded.
561“Certainly an ambitious project, my lord.”
562“So it is. But we are midway on the road, and Okoitz has to grow. Now that you’ve had time to look it over, what do you think of it, Sir Conrad?”
563The place to build cities is at the end of a road, where pack mules change cargoes with riverboats, but I thought it wise not to mention this. And as a military defense, wooden walls only four meters high were a sick joke. The Mongols could take it in hours. But for now, there was nothing I could do about it, and I saw no reason to irritate my liege lord. “In many ways excellent, my lord. This business of building cottages side by side, sharing a wall and built against the outer wall, saves materials and heat. But I worry about fire. A single fire could bum down all of Okoitz. I have seen places where they build every other dividing wall out of brick to serve as a fire-stop.”
564“I can see that you haven’t priced bricks and mortar, Sir Conrad.”
565“No, my lord, I haven’t. But the new mill should give some protection. It will have a water tank higher than the church. I plan on having a fire hose long enough to reach any part of Okoitz.”
566“Then see to it.”
567Dismissed, I went out to the bailey just as a strange procession was coming through the main gate. Sir Stefan was riding proudly in the lead, followed by a dozen peasants holding on to strong chains. Between the peasants, snarling, tugging, trying hard to get away, was a fair-sized brown bear chained around the neck.
568“What on earth-” I said to Stefan.
569“A bit of sport, Sir Conrad,” he -said, getting down from his horse. “We were a month trapping him and most of the day getting him chained and out of the pit. But he’s a beauty, hey?”
570“But what would you want with a live bear?”
571“Why, to bait him, of course! Look you, Sir Conrad, what would you say to a gentlemanly wager? I’ll bet you a thousand pence that that bear can kill six dogs before it's brought down. What say you?”
572I heard someone behind me whisper, “That’s a sucker bet. That bear is good for a dozen, easy.” But I ignored it.
573“What do you mean, bait him?” I asked.
574“You don’t know the sport? Well, we'll chain him to that post and turn the dogs on him. A good bear like this one can go for hours before he's ripped apart.”
575“That’s horrible!” I said, meaning it. “What a disgusting, brutal, ugly thing to do.”
576“Well, damn! If you don’t like it, don't look!”
577“But you can’t do this! There are children here!”
578“What of it? They’ve seen bear baiting before. Anyway, how do you dare tell me what I can or cannot do with my property?”
579“Then I’ll buy it from you! What is a bear worth?” I poured some silver out of my pouch and into my hand. “Is a hundred pence enough?”
580He swatted my hand aside, spraying my money onto the snow. None of the peasants dared touch it.
581“It’s not for sale, damn you! Anyway, what would you do with a bear? Make another warlock's familiar out of it?”
582Actually, discounting the stupidity about familiar creatures, Stefan had posed a good question. What could I do with a bear? I couldn’t possibly keep it-it might break loose and kill somebody. I couldn't let it go-as angry as it was, it would surely kill somebody.
583By this time, the bear had been fastened to the post, and a large crowd had gathered in a wide circle around the animal. It was on its hind legs, straining at the chains trying desperately for vengeance.
584I walked into the circle. “Blood sports are cruel and wicked!” I shouted. I looked to the priest for support, but he just looked away. “If you won’t think about the bear, think about the brutality to your dogs!”
585“What else are the dogs for?” Stefan smirked. “Sir Conrad, you look as funny as the bear.”
586The peasants had sense enough to keep quiet, to not get involved. But they didn’t want to miss the action, either.
587“Laugh if you want to, but I won’t let you do this.”
588“Just how do you plan to stop it?” Stefan had an ugly laugh.
589Another good question. Once the bear was chained to the post, he couldn’t be unchained without getting past him, and that bear was irate. The only thing I could do for the animal was to give it a clean death.
590“Like this,” I said. I drew my sword and stepped close to the beast. On his hind legs, he was taller than I and must have weighed three times as much, swatting at me with his massive paws.
591I timed his swipes and swung at him when both his paws were down, catching him horizontally at the neck a centimeter above the chain.
592The head flew clear in a spray of blood, and the suddenly freed body lunged at me, almost falling on top of me. As I leaped aside, it brushed my leg.
593“All right!” I shouted, trying not to show the pity that was welling up in me. “I want that carcass skinned and the hide tanned. And I want the meat served up for tomorrow’s supper.”
594As I turned to leave, sheathing my sword, Stefan shouted, “You bloody bastard! You filthy scum. You blow by of an incestuous-”
595“That’s enough!” Count Lambert shouted, running up to us. “You two are supposed to be knights, not kitchen dogs fighting over garbage! We will speak of this in private! Come with me, both of you.”
596“Yes, my lord,” I said, following him to the castle, trying to control my emotions.
597“It’s not over, Conrad!” Stefan shouted, but I didn't turn.
598Something heavy hit me square in the back, knocking me flat on my stomach in the dirty snow. I looked up to see the bear’s head bouncing down the path toward the castle. Rage enveloped me as I got up.
599As I turned toward him, Stefan hit me square in the face, almost knocking me down again.
600I was too angry to fight efficiently, but Stefan didn’t know anything about unarmed combat in the first place. For a few seconds we swung at each other wildly, and I gave a lot more than I got.
601Suddenly, a naked sword divided the space between, us. Lambert’s.
602“I swear, the next one of you who strikes will get this in his guts,” Lambert hissed. “My own sworn knights fighting in the dirt, in front of the peasants no less! Now, to my chambers, and this time both of you walk in front Of me.”
603In his chambers, Lambert ordered us to sit on opposite sides of the room but was so angry that he couldn’t sit down himself.
604“Dogs blood! My own knights! Men who are supposed to enforce the peace, fighting each other like squalid beggars! You shame me, the both of you!”
605“First you, Sir Conrad! I saw you deliberately destroy the property and sport of a brother knight. I fine you two hundred pence for that and order you to pay Sir Stefan another fifty in damages.”
606“Yes, my lord.”
607“Is that all you have to say? Just why did you do such a despicable thing?”
608“My lord, he was going to torture that animal, chain it to that post, and turn the dogs on it.”
609“So? Bears kill our people and our cattle. We have the right to vengeance! You don’t like our sports? I know you don't like our holidays. Very well! You can sleep through them, doing night guard duty before every one of them from now till Easter.”
610I groaned. Lately one day in three had been a holiday of one sort or another. Stefan smiled.
611“Wipe that damn smirk off your face, Sir Stefan,” Lambert said. “Your sins are worse than his! On slight provocation, you struck a brother knight with a dishonorable weapon-a bloody bear’s headwithout proper challenge and in the back! You did it when I had specifically ordered you to follow me immediately! Some lords would have you hung for that, and were it not for your father I'd be sorely tempted. Instead, I'll be lenient. I fine you, three months' additional guard duty, from Easter to midsummer, on the night shift.”
612“Now I want no more bad blood between you two. Knights of the same lord should be like brothers! Stand up and give each other the kiss of brotherhood, then get out of my sight!”
613As I kissed the smelly bastard, he whispered, “It’s not over!”
614Standing guard duty for fourteen hours in the dark gives you a lot of time to think. My engineering work was seriously hampered for lack of a decent system of weights and measures. In the cities, the guilds used a hodgepodge of gills and pennyweights and yards, mostly unrelated except that a pint of milk was supposed to weigh a pound. Nobody cared if the specific gravity of milk varied by five percent, with richer milk being lighter.
615Here in the country, things were even worse. The blacksmith and the baker did things until they felt about right. The saddler just cut and trimmed until it fit. The carpenter did a bit of measuring-in cubits and spans and finger widths-but he used his cubit, from his elbow to his fingertips.
616We didn’t even have a meter stick.
617Of course, I could invent my own system of weights and measures easily enough, and it would at least have the advantage of consistency.
618But I would lose a lot doing it. Every person, and certainly every engineer, knows hundreds of numbers. I knew the speed of light and the diameter of the earth and the distance from the earth to the sun. I knew the tensile strength of wrought iron and what could be expected of concrete and, well, all sorts of things.
619But I knew all these values in terms of the metric system. Without a meter stick, I was stuck with guesswork. With one, I could derive all of the weights and measures and from there translate the data I remembered into any other system at all.
620But none of my equipment contained a single reliable measurement. I had nothing that I knew was a definite length or weight.
621At gray dawn, the answer hit me. I had my own body! My weight might not be reliable-I had put on muscle and lost some fat since arriving-but surely my height hadn’t changed. I was precisely 190 centimeters tall. I had only to measure myself in stocking feet, divide by nineteen, multiply by ten, and I had my meter stick. With that, a cube of cold water ten centimeters to the side has a volume of a liter and a mass of a kilogram.
622From there it was simple arithmetic to translate it into the basetwelve system that these people could use.
623Dead tired, I got Krystyana out of bed and had her standing on a chest, marking my height on the wall with a piece of charcoal.
624“Sir Conrad,” Lambert said as he saw us. “Just what are you doing now?”
625I tried to explain how I was developing a standard meter and about engineering constants. Some things I had to repeat three times, perhaps because I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and Lambert was just out of bed and bleary-eyed.
626“So by measuring yourself, you will somehow know the distance from earth to moon? My dear Sir Conrad God may have spanned the universe to his own measure: but it is rank blasphemy and profound hubris for a mere mortal to do so. In all events, the standard of measure here is the Silesian yard, not this foreign meter thing. I won’t have you changing it.”
627“Yes, my lord.” After yesterday the last thing I wanted was to irritate Lambert. “Uh, how long is a Silesian yard?”
628“I’ll show you.” Taking Krystyana's charcoal, he marked it on the wall. With his head turned left, it was the distance from his nose to his right fingertip.
629“Thank you, my lord,” I said, and he left.
630Forever after, I used yards instead of meters rather than offend my liege lord. I soon knew the ratio of yards to meters and that was enough to save my data.
631My fourth endeavor was engineering the mills.
632Understand that I had no reference books, no instruments, and no measuring devices. I had no drawing equipment and darned little parchment. These last two wouldn’t have done me much good anyway, because I didn't have anyone who could read a blueprint.
633For the comparatively small items I’d had to build thus far, it was possible to give instructions like “We need a piece of wood that's this long, and it's got to have holes in it so it can fit into this thing and that thing.”
634This technique was not suitable for building a mill, and we needed two of them; I built one-twelfth scale working models, because the people had to see how things moved in order to understand them.
635Okoitz didn’t have a stream suitable for damming, so that left wind power. The problem with wind power is that it works only when the wind is blowing. This is not a great complication on something like a flour mill, because only one operator is required and he can work strange hours if the situation requires it. But a lot of processesbeating flax and sawing wood-are both energy- and laborintensive. If a crew is working and the wind stops, twenty people are left standing around, which is blatantly inefficient. An intermediate energy shortage device is needed, and we had water.
636The first windmill was a water pump and some storage tanks. Actually, it was two sets of water pumps. One set of four pumps pumped water from a new well to a tank near the top of the mill. We needed a new well anyway because the old well was entirely too close to the latrines. The top tank provided fresh water to the community and supplied the lower, working tanks. I used four small pumps because I did not know how much power the mill would produce. If we only had enough torque to operate two pumps, the other two could be disconnected and used as spares. Also, if one pump malfunctioned, it could be repaired while the others continued in operation.
637This is called contingency planning, or in the colorful language of my American friends, “keeping your ass covered.”
638Four larger pumps operated between the lowest tank and the middle tank. These provided water power to several machines in a circular shed that ringed the base of the windmill.
639The sawmill, for example, had a straight saw blade operating vertically between two ropes. These ropes were connected by a pulley system to two short, fat barrels mounted at the ends of long pivot arms. A barrel, reaching the top of its stroke, pushed open a weighted door that allowed water from the middle tank to fill it. Filled, it descended, pulling the saw blade and raising the other barrel. Reaching the bottom, a fixed peg pushed up another weighted door on the bottom of the barrel, which drained the water into the lowest tank. At the same time, the second barrel was filling and the process reversed itself.
640This “wet mill” was a fairly big thing. The body of it was a truncated cone twenty-four yards across at the bottom and twelve at the turret. The walls were vertical logs flattened on two sides. The cone shape resulted from the natural taper of the logs. I was learning.
641The foundations went a full story into the ground, and from the ground to the top of the highest blade the thing was as tall as a ninestory building.
642A windmill must be kept facing the wind, so the turret has to rotate. Ours did this on ninety-six wooden ball bearings, each as big as a man’s head. One of my college professors had shown us a device to accomplish this automatically. A second, much smaller windmill was built on the back of the large turret, with the blades at right angles to the main blades. This was geared down to rotate the turret if the small windmill wasn't parallel to the wind. He claimed it was the world's first negative feedback device.
643I could have made the turret manually rotatable, but I wanted the mill to operate unattended at night.
644One of the engineering problems I faced was that the weight of the water tanks, besides pushing downward, also pushed outward. Some crude calculations indicated that a wrought-iron band strong enough to hold the middle tank together would have weighed eight tons. I wasn’t sure that there was that much iron available on the market, and in any event the cost would have been fabulous.
645My solution was exactly the same as that used by my contemporaries, the Gothic cathedral builders. These cathedrals have purely decorative internal stone arches that produce an outward thrust. I say purely decorative because the cathedrals were topped by wooden truss roofs that kept the rain out and didn’t touch the arches. They actually built the outer walls and wooden roof first and then built those magnificent arches later, working indoors out of the rain.
646I used the circular work shed as a flying buttress, leaning into the tower and squeezing it together.
647Between the high-water level of the lowest tank and the bottom of the middle tank was a space of four yards. This was at ground level, but the area would be dark and wet, and I could think of no good use for it. I didn’t bother putting a floor there.
648This resulted in the lowest tank being used, over my protestations, as a swimming pool.
649By the time I got the model of the wet mill done, the weather had broken. The bitter cold of winter was over, the snow had melted, and the first warm breezes kissed the land.
650A mood of wondrous relief and joviality filled the community. It was so glorious that I had to rip my shirt off and stand in the warm sunshine, soaking up the vitamin D. I wasn’t alone in doing this; Krystyana and Natalia were suddenly standing naked next to me.
651This mood lasted for about a day, and then it was time for spring plowing and planting, an all-out effort for those people, who got up before dawn and performed fifteen or sixteen hours of grueling labor before collapsing exhausted, only to repeat the process the next, day.
652The count kept equal hours supervising, and the carpenter and the smith were kept busy repairing tools. There were only three or four weeks to complete the task, and if the planting didn’t get done, next winter we would starve.
653I seemed to be the only one at loose ends-as a knight, I was not allowed to work- so I wandered about observing things, seeing what improvements could be made. What they needed most was a good steel plow, and I saw no way of providing one.
654Lambert owned more than half the land surrounding Okoitz. Well, actually, he owned two hundred times as much besides, but much of it was farmed out to his knights, most of whom ran manors similar to, but smaller than, his.
655Peasants were expected to work three days a week on his land and had the balance of their time “free” to work their own. Special workers-the bakers, carpenters, etc.had their own separate and often quite complicated arrangements, but in general it amounted to a fifty percent taxation, with the count being the entire government.
656In return, the people got what amounted to police and military protection, much of their clothing, and a fixed number of feasts per year. In addition to the Christmas season, there were twenty-two days of feasting. I estimated that twenty-five percent of the food consumed by the commons was eaten at these feasts.
657Also, and very important, the count made arrangements for the sick and needy. Since Lambert was an intelligent and decent person, it really wasn’t a bad system. Under a stupid or greedy lord, you could see where it could be pure hell.
658Chapter Seventeen
659
660I wasn’t accomplishing anything at Okoitz. No feast days fell during the planting season, church and state being practical about such matters. By the terms of my punishment, I didn't have to stand guard duty. I was told that right after planting and Easter there would be plenty of manpower available to start work on the mill.
661There were some parts of the mill that we could not produce locally. I wanted the main rotor bearings to have brass or bronze collars riding on lead bushings. The lead we could cast in place, but the heavy collars troubled me until the count mentioned some bell casters at his brother’s city of Cieszyn some thirty “miles” away to the south.
662I was soon riding along the road to Cieszyn on a fine spring day. My equipment was much the same as that I had purchased in Cracow last fall, only now I wore conventional padded leather under my chain mail. I had a new scabbard for my sword, and its garish brass hilt had been replaced, a wrought-iron basket guard added. The shield and spear were as before. Anna had a new saddle and bridle of modem design, and she was happy to be traveling.
663Riding a palfrey beside me, Krystyana was even happier. Three hours of her begging and pleading had persuaded Lambert to let her go along to “take care of me.” He didn’t mind her going, but he hated losing another horse during spring plowing.
664She was wearing her best dress, covered with a large traveling cape, and had four others-borrowed-in her saddlebags. She was taking her first trip away from Okoitz since she had moved there with her family when she was ten years old.
665Krystyana was a competent person and actually handled most of the day-to-day management of the castle. But she was trying to remain on top of an unfamiliar sidesaddle-I don’t think I could have stayed on one of the silly things -while trying to play the part of a knight's lady.
666She was ludicrous at it; I decided that much of her problem was that the only “ladies” she had ever seen were seen from a distance, when she was a peasant girl. What she needed was a good role model.
667I carried letters from Lambert to his brother. These he had dictated to Father John because, for all his good qualities, the count was illiterate.
668I also had instructions to see if Sir Miesko’s wife and lands were well since his manor was on our route. It was six hours to Sir Miesko's manor, all of it at a walk, because Krystyana could never have stayed on at a gallop. As it was, the poor kid had leg cramps all night.
669I was not looking forward to meeting Lady Richeza, Sir Miesko’s wife. From the events at the Christmas party, where Sir Miesko had declined the favors of Count Lambert's ladies because he feared repercussions from his wife-permitting the king of fools to brand him as henpecked-I had formed an impression of a violent, shrewish woman. I was absolutely mistaken. After meeting Lady Richeza, I decided that Sir Miesko had declined all others simply because he loved his wife. Implying that he was henpecked was simply a ruse to avoid exposing his true feelings.
670In her thirties, she was not a pretty woman. She was tall as the Poles of the thirteenth century went, and overly broad in the hip. Her hair was dark, curly, and shoulder length, and her face long and rectangular, with remarkably bushy eyebrows. She had dark blue eyes, and her features were otherwise unremarkable. Even in her first bloom, I doubt any man, on seeing her from a distance for the first time, could have honestly called her pretty.
671Yet after meeting her and talking with her for a few hours, it dawned on me that I was being honored by the presence of one of the world’s truly beautiful women.
672But I get ahead of myself.
673Sir Miesko’s manor was not a fort. It was a comfortablelooking sixbedroom log house located a few hundred yards from a town of perhaps forty small cottages. A few barns and outbuildings were scattered about nearby, but they were located for convenience, not defense. What fences and walls there were had been built with animals, not enemies, in mind.
674At first the place seemed too peaceful for such a brutal age, but then I noticed that all the peasants in the fields were armed. Some carried spears, others had axes, and a few possessed swords in addition to the ubiquitous belt knives. Half the women had bows. Sir Miesko apparently had his own theories on defense.
675As We approached the manor, two boys who had been working at a kitchen garden laid down their hoes and came to greet us. “Welcome gentles,” the older of the two said. I guessed his age at twelve. Despite the hard work they’d been doing, the boys had a fresh-scrubbed took. “Stash, got tell Mother we have company. I'll take care of the horses.”
676“We thank you for your courtesy.” I dismounted and helped Krystyana down from her sidesaddle. The poor thing could barely stand. I kept an arm around her waist for more reasons than affection.
677The boy looked up at me. “Sir, can it be that I am addressing the hero, Sir Conrad Stargard?”
678I couldn’t help smiling. “I don't think that I qualify as a hero, but I'm Conrad Stargard. This is my friend Krystyana.”
679“You are a hero here, Sir Conrad. Sir Rheinburg killed my best friends’s father and four other men from the village. He stole half my father's cattle. You are the knight who defeated him.”
680I don’t think the boy was intentionally snubbing Krystyana. He was just at an age where heroes are far more important than girls. He'd learn.
681A woman came out to the porch. “We’ll talk later, son. I must greet your mother.”
682“Welcome.” The smiling woman looked at me calmly while drying her hands on a towel.
683“I take it that you are Lady Richeza. I am Sir Conrad Stargard, and this is Krystyana.”
684“Welcome, Sir Conrad.” She took both my hands and squeezed them. I knew she wanted a hug, so I gave her one., Understand that I did not and never have felt any sexual attraction for the woman. She was simply the warm sort of person who automatically steps into the role of a favorite aunt or cousin.
685“And a very warm welcome to you, Krystyana.” As she gave my girl a hug and a kiss, I saw Krystyana. tighten up. She wasn’t used to this sort of thing. Lady Richeza pretended not to notice but took her by the hand and led her inside. I followed.
686The furnishings were sparse by modem standards but very comfortable by those of the Middle Ages. Large chests along the walls served as chairs, and each had a comfortable cushion, a thing lacking at Okoitz. The floor had a carpet of braided rags, the first rug I had seen in the thirteenth century. Most places made do with rushes scattered on the floor. But mostly, everything-including the two small children playing on the rug-was incredibly clean. My own mother’s house was no cleaner, and she vacuumed daily.
687One of Lady Richeza’s daughters brought in some beer and bread. “Is beer acceptable? It seemed too warm a day for wine.”
688“A beer would be wonderful, Lady.” I downed the mug. It was flat, of course; no pressure containers in the Middle Ages. One got used to it.
689I had a very pleasant evening. The food was good, the surroundings pleasant, the conversation wonderful. I felt at home. The children-eight of them, five boys and three girlswere exactly what children are supposed to be but never are: inquisitive, bubbling with energy, yet clean and well mannered.
690All of them over six could read and write. Sir Miesko had a library of twenty-two hand-lettered books, most of them copied by himself. That was another side of his personality that I hadn’t seen at Okoitz. He had taught his wife, and she in turn had educated not only her own children but all those in the village as well.
691After the kids were in bed, Lady Richeza and I spent a few hours talking over a school system, one that would spread to every village in Lambert’s county. She had the potential teachers, and I could imagine nothing better to do with my money.
692Throughout the evening Krystyana was unusually stiff and quiet despite our tries at getting her into the conversation. I put it down to feminine moods, augmented by the pain of the sidesaddle.
693When we were in bed in the guest room, I said to Krystyana, “Our hostess is a truly fine lady. If you grew up to be like her, you’d make some very lucky man very happy.”
694“You ogled her all evening long.”
695“Ogled? Nonsense! I was just being polite to a very gracious lady.”
696“She isn’t even a real lady.”
697“Krystyana, you are talking stupid.”
698“She isn’t a lady, and Sir Miesko isn't really a knight. They were both born peasants. Miesko was twenty-five when the duke knighted him on the battlefield. He was a clerk before that.”
699“Remind me tomorrow to give you a spanking. You are saying horrible things. If Sir Miesko raised himself by his own efforts, he’s a better man than if he was just born to the nobility. And Lady Richeza would be a great lady whether the duke said so or not!”
700“It’s not the same.”
701“No. It’s better.”
702“But-”
703“Shut up and go to sleep.” We stayed celibate for the night, and Krystyana had leg cramps until dawn.
704We got to Cieszyn that afternoon. It was a nice little town if you could ignore the lack of a sewage system. It had perhaps four thousand people, a great city by Krystyana’s standards. At the city gate, a guard saluted us and waved us through. Apparently, a knight and his lady didn't have to bother with tolls. The outer walls were of brick, as were several charming little round brick chapels, two hundred years old.
705The castle was brick as well and was exactly like what the movies told you to expect. Count Lambert had walked away from quite a bit.
706Count Herman was in Cracow, along with most of his household knights, attending his liege lord, Henryk. Somehow, word of my “military” exploits had reached Cieszyn, and the ladies of the court gave me a warm welcome.
707They were noticeably less cordial to Krystyana. Count Lambert’s… uh… chosen life-style was not appreciated by those fine women, and Krystyana was available to take it out on. Conversation was somewhat strained that afternoon. -I kept trying to get Krystyana into the discussion, and they kept cutting her off.
708The situation became worse when we were called to supper. I was to be seated between two spreading middle-aged women, and no chair had been provided for Krystyana.
709“But surely you understand,” my hostess said.
710“Oh, yes. I understand.” I was doing a very good job of containing my temper, but I understood entirely too well. “Mistakes happen all the time, even in the best regulated of households. Page! Someone forgot a chair for Krystyana. Bring one and set it next to mine.”
711“But my lord… ” The rumors that the page had heard spoke of my killing twelve men in a single fight, each with a single blow. Angry with a blacksmith, I supposedly had chopped an anvil entirely in half. He had also heard an exaggerated version of the way Lambert and I had slaughtered pigs.
712“Another chair. Right here.” I pointed. I’m sure that my mouth was smiling, but I don't think my eyes were. A chair rapidly appeared, and after some shuffling, Krystyana sat down.
713My actions caused more problems than I had intended. At Okoitz, the “share the spoon, share the cup” thing was reserved for holidays. In the castle at Cieszyn, apparently, it was for every meal. Adding one more person meant that everyone downstream of us suddenly had to change partners and that the woman at the end was all alone.
714Oh, well. To hell with them! If they could be rude, so could 1. It was all very well to give people fancy titles, but that’s no excuse for snubbing a perfectly decent fourteen-year-old girl, especially one who happened to be my date.
715“Sir Conrad,” my hostess eventually said, trying to smooth things over, “please tell us of your adventures.”
716“Adventures? Well, I’d be happy to tell you about what I've been working on lately.” I launched into a discourse on the finer points of animal breeding. I must have rattled on for ten minutes and was stressing the importance of counting eggs when I felt my hostess's hand on my arm.
717“That’s most educational, Sir Conrad. Was it really you who defeated the renegade Black Eagle, Sir Rheinburg?”
718“I killed the lunatic if that’s what you mean.”
719“Was he really insane?”
720“I suppose so. People who go around attacking armed men in public generally aren’t too sensible.”
721“And you felled him with a single blow, cutting his head in two, though he wore a helmet?”
722“Look, there wasn’t much time. I gather you like gory stories. I'll tell you how Mikhail Malinski lost his foot.” And I told them, every bloody bit of it. Slewing and slaying on a battlefield were great fun to them, but tying off an artery was entirely too graphic. More than one person excused herself before I was done.
723My hostess was a little green below the ears. “And he died in a bed in Count Lambert’s castle?”
724“It was easier to take care of him there. Krystyana and her friends are great nurses. Oh, did I tell you about our looms and spinning wheels? Krystyana and seven of her friends can take wool and turn it into twenty of your yards of cloth in a single day.”
725“Seven of her friends. Oh, dear.”
726The only upshot of this was that one of the guest rooms at Okoitz became “the bed where the peasant died,” with something stupid and supernatural attached to it. In a way, it was -beneficial because when higher-ranking guests arrived, none of them were eager to take that room. I wasn’t bumped to the blockhouses as otherwise would have happened. Anyway, if Mikhail Malinski ever had a ghost, it would have been a good ghost.
727Much later, our hostess suggested that Krystyana would be much more comfortable in the servants’ quarters. The bitch still hadn't learned, and I was out of teaching techniques.
728“Madame, that is hardly necessary. I have delivered my liege lord’s letters, and we have enjoyed an excellent Lenten supper. Regretfully, duty calls and we must be Off.”
729“But I had hoped-”
730“As I said, it’s regrettable, but I have my duty.” I led Krystyana off to the stables.
731“Page, I want our horses saddled and our personal effects gathered. Now.”
732The page made quick finger motions, and four men scurried off. In minutes we were riding to the postern gate, led by the page with a torch.
733“But Sir Conrad, it’s so dark out now,” he said.
734“Then I shall need the loan of your torch.” I took it.
735“There are thieves out there! It’s dangerous.”
736“You’re right, kid. Go tell the thieves to be careful.”
737Krystyana had been holding her feelings in all afternoon and evening. Once outside the gate, she bawled like the schoolgirl she should have been. There wasn’t much I could do but squeeze her hand and mumble about things getting better.
738I asked at a few taverns and was eventually directed to a decent inn, the Battle Axe. The room was big and clean, and ten pence a day for food, lodging, and care of the horses didn’t seem all that bad. The innkeeper was overjoyed. I had forgotten to haggle.
739“You understand that I will expect excellent service, food, and drink. See that our horses are well taken care of and send a large pot of good wine to our room.”
740“Yes, my lord. Of course, my lord.” I later discovered that we were his only guests. Business was not booming in Cieszyn, and many who were willing could not find work. That people in Okoitz should be working sixteen hours a day and people in Cieszyn should be idleand ill fed-offended my socialist morality. This place needed organization.
741As soon as we were alone in our room, Krystyana threw her arms around my neck and started crying again. “Sir Conrad, I love you!”
742“I hope not, pretty girl. I’m not the marrying kind.”
743“No, I mean, you don’t have to but, I mean, leaving all those countesses and baronesses and ladies because of me.”
744“Hold it. I didn’t leave because of you. I left because I was offended by their rudeness. Also, I had no intention of bedding any one of those overaged, overweight, and profoundly married women. And certainly not when there is somebody as sexy as you around. Now have some wine and settle down.”
745Sometime later, she said, “I love you anyway, Sir Conrad.”
746The next morning I sent Krystyana out shopping with one of the innkeeper’s servants to keep her safe and see that she didn't get gypped. I tipped the woman a penny a day, and she was overjoyed. I gave Krystyana a hundred pence and told her to buy presents for her family and friends. Also a wedding gift from me to Mrs. Malinski and something for the carpenter and the count.
747“But what could Count Lambert possibly want?”
748“Dye. Dye for cloth. And if you can find a good dyer out of work, the count would like that, too.”
749I was pleased to discover that the bell casters I had come to Cieszyn to see lived directly across from the inn.
750The bell foundry was owned and operated by the three Krakowski brothers-Thom, Mikhail, and Wladyslaw. It had been their father’s business and had been a thriving concern until a year before, when the bishop's nephew, a German, had opened up a bell foundry in Cracow. New orders to the Krakowski brothers had stopped, and their melting furnace had been cold for six months. But the information came out slowly, and I got some of it from the innkeeper. The brothers were trying to keep up appearances.
751The Krakowski brothers and I spent the morning talking. I talked about the huge bushings I would need-the bore was to be a full yard, and the outside flange diameter of the blade-end bushing was to be two yards. They were each to be a yard long. Modem roller bearings would have been a tenth that size, but I had no illusions about the quality the Krakowskis could give me. In working with inferior materials, you must make things big.
752They talked to me about bell casting. They used the lost wax method. This is not an ancient “lost” technology, even though I once met a twentieth-century museum tour guide who seemed to think so; it’s still being used when intricate, one-of-a-kind castings are needed. To make a bell, the brothers Krakowski first dug a pit. In the pit, they fashioned by hand, from clay, a male form shaped like the inside of the bell. They then took beeswax and made a wax bell over the form, carving in wax all the exterior decorations and, being somewhat literate, the lettering. Clay was carefully molded over the wax, and the whole was left to dry for a week. Then they built a fire in the pit, small at first but growing.
753In a few days the wax melted, ran out of prepared holes, and burned. A few days later, the mold was hot enough for the pour. Having carefully measured the amount of wax used, the casters knew exactly how much brass to melt. After the pour, they broke off the clay and spent a few months “tuning” the bell by chipping brass out of the inside to get it to sound right.
754“That’s the trick, Sir Conrad,” the youngest brother said. “The mold has got to be as hot as the brass or she'll crack, or the bell will crack.”
755The other brothers looked at him as if he were divulging guild secrets, and maybe he was.
756“I’m familiar with the process,” I lied. It was now past noon, and they had not offered me dinner. I thought about that-they looked more underfed than Lent alone would account for. “This is interesting,” I said. “But I grow hungry. I would like to invite you and your families to dinner. I'm staying at the Battle Axe. Could you send someone to tell the innkeeper how many are coming? Have him let us know when it's ready.”
757They eagerly accepted my offer, and soon we were at a sitdown dinner for fourteen. There were no babies; all three had died in the winter.
758As it was Lent, the meal was meatless: bread and oatmeal, pease porridge, and small beer. Even the children drank beer. Water was unhealthy, and cows would not start producing milk for another month. My guests ate a great deal under the watchful gaze of the innkeeper, who was hovering at the back of the room to make sure everything went right. We were his biggest sale in months.
759These men had skills that I needed, and they certainly needed me. They needed socialism, and I was going to socialize themwithin the framework of their own society, of course. I’m not the banner-waving, gun-wielding revolutionary sort.
760“Excuse me, sir knight,” the oldest Krakowski brother finally said. “But are you the Sir Conrad Stargard? The man who killed Sir Rheinburg?”
761That business again? “Yes.”
762“Then we owe you gratitude. That German murdered our cousin Yashu. Killed him on the road when he was weaponless and penniless.”
763“I’m sorry about your cousin. The German was a madman, but he's dead now.”
764“Still, we owe you.”
765“You don’t owe me anything. All I did was to stop myself from joining your cousin.”
766The innkeeper intruded. “Excuse me, Sir Conrad, you realize that serving fourteen is more than we agreed on.”
767“Of course. Put the difference on my bill.”
768“Yes, sir. That would be twelve pence.”
769Small talk at the table stopped. A penny for each meatless meal!
770“Innkeeper, that seems excessive. I do not like to haggle, but if I decide that you are cheating me, you will lose my business.” .I said this quietly and calmly but without smiling.
771“Yes, Sir Conrad.” Beads of sweat suddenly dotted the man’s forehead. When I eventually settled the bill, four pence accounted for that meal.
772Later that day, I got their price for my bushings. It came to thirty-one hundred pence. Each.
773“That seems excessive,” I said. “Let’s go over your expenses, and mind you, I intend to check these prices myself in the market.”
774The copper would cost eight hundred pence, and calamine, a compound of zinc, was three hundred and fifty pence. We had agreed, from samples that they had on hand, on a hard brass of about thirty percent zinc. The clay they dug up themselves, and they chopped their own wood by arrangement with a landowner. With transportation costs, those two items came to a hundred and fifty pence. The eye opener was the wax. It was a rare commodity, like the honey that came with it. The wax would cost eleven hundred pence, almost as much as the metal. The remaining five hundred pence for their labor and equipment did not seem excessive. Still…
775Still, there was no reason why the molds themselves could not be cast off wooden forms. Both bushings could be made the same so that only one set of forms would be needed. Also, I would need four bushings for the upcoming “dry mill” that would grind grain.
776In addition, I had hoped that more mills would be wanted by other landowners. We might need a lot of bushings. A lot of parts that I had planned to make of wood could be made better-much better-in brass: some of the gearing and the pump cylinders and pulleys. I wanted some fire-heated tubs for a laundry and Parts for a threshing machine, and, well, all sorts of things.
777“Gentlemen.” They looked up in surprise at my use of the term. “Your prices seem fair for what you propose to do, but it happens that I know some less-expensive techniques. Not for bells, you understand, but for the kind of things I have in mind.” As it turned out, in two years they were selling bells again. You had to choose from three standard sizes and had no choice of inscriptions, but they were half the cost of the Cracow bells.
778“Now, then,” I continued. “It is obvious that you are suffering under a burden of debt. It is also obvious that you have no security at all and that your families are hungry. I propose to purchase your establishment and pay you all a decent salary. I also intend to pay for a number of improvements around here. What do you think?”
779“Well, that sounds fine, but there are guild rules…” said Thom, the eldest.
780“What? I thought you were the only bell casters in Cieszyn.”
781“Well, we are.”
782“Then who is the guild master?”
783“I am, actually.”
784“And these are your guild members?”
785“Uh… yes.”
786“Then to hell with your damned guild! You are three brothers, and I am talking about hiring you.”
787“Can’t the guild vote to disband?” the youngest, Wladyslaw, asked.
788“But there’s nothing in the rules-”
789“And to hell with your rules! 1, Sir Conrad Stargard, by the power granted to me by my sword, do hereby proclaim your guild null and void. Questions?”
790Thom checked with his brothers. “No, I guess not.”
791“So. I’m not sure of local property values, but for your house and furnace and lands, does two thousand pence sound fair?”
792I got enthusiastic nods from the younger two. The eldest said, “We also have certain rights and privileges to clay and wood, and two thousand pence would not quite cover our debts.”
793“Let’s make it twenty-five hundred, then,” I said. “I would not want my vassals to be suffering from debt.”
794“Vassals? You would take an oath?”
795“Of course, and I would expect you to, also. All of you and your wives, besides.”
796“Our wives?”
797“An oath of honesty and fair work. Your wives help you, don’t they?”
798“Yes, but—”
799“I do not touch other men’s wives. Now, what would you say to six hundred pence per year each, with two hundred pence to each of your wives? When your children are old enough to help, we'll discuss it. Agreed?”
800The eldest looked about. “I suppose so.”
801“Good. I will pay half of your first year’s salary in advance, since it appears that you need some things around here. You need some clothes, but don't buy a lot. The price of common cloth is about to drop.”
802“How can you know?”
803“Let’s say that I can smell it. In addition, since I want you to apply yourselves diligently to this enterprise, once all expenses, improvements, materials, taxes, salaries, and so forth are paid, you will divide among yourselves one-twelfth of the surplus.”
804“Profit” is not a nice word for a socialist.
805Their mute agreement had turned to enthusiasm.
806“Good. Now go discuss the matter with your wives. Come to me while the sun is still high, for I want your oaths. I shall be at the inn.”
807I was only halfway through my first beer when the six of them showed up, smiling.
808“Innkeeper, I want your whole staff in the courtyard. There are oaths to be taken!”
809So we had a deal, and it was in this manner that 1-1 can’t say nationalized, since I'm not a nation, but, socialized the Bros. Krakowski Brass Works. In doing so, I was acting again, playing the role of the shrewd merchant and dirtying my good socialist soul in the process. The thing needed doing, and much of being a man is doing the things that must be done no matter how unnatural or painful they are. Surely this was a small evil compared with the naked corpses I had left in a snowy wood.
810I bought the beer, called for an honest scale, and weighed out the money I owed. When I had left Okoitz, Count Lambert had been distracted with the planting and hadn’t mentioned money, so I had brought along twenty thousand pence of my own. I wasn't worried; the count was honest. You see, you must either trust a person or not trust him. It is stupid to rely on oaths or marks on a piece of parchment because a thief will rob you no matter what is written down, and an honest man stays honestwithin reason.
811I weighed out thirty-seven hundred pence in goldthe exchange rate of silver to gold being 54 to 1—which I gave to Thom. Then I weighed out another four thousand and told him that I wanted him to buy copper and calamine at the best possible prices. We needed a woodcarver, and I told him to find one. The other two brothers were ordered to go out and bring in vast amounts of firewood and clay and start making charcoal.
812There was some consternation, and then it was agreed that the innkeeper would safeguard the gold until morning, since he kept an armed guard at night.
813Chapter Eighteen
814
815The party was breaking up as Krystyana returned. She was excited about her day’s shopping in the big city. As supper was served, she prattled on and on about pins and churches and ribbons and merchants and the outlandish price of dinner. I was in a good mood and said little. I heard every detail of every bargain, and sometimes feminine babble makes a pleasant background noise to relax in. Eventually she wound down.
816“That’s wonderful, pretty girl. Did you buy anything for yourself ?”
817“Well, no. I mean, you said…”
818“Then here’s fifty pence to spend tomorrow on things that you want.” This was greeted by squeals. “Did you have any luck with dyes or a dyer?”
819“I looked at them, but dyes are so complicated, Sir Conrad. A pound of this one can do something, but an ounce of that one can do more and-”
820Pounds? Ounces? I’d forgotten the metric conversions. “I understand. Any word about a dyer?”
821“I heard of one, but they called him a ’walker' because he walks on the cloth being dyed. People said that they had heard of him, but nobody knew him.”
822“Well, then you know what to do tomorrow. Keep the serving woman with you from now on. I want you to look into the price of raw woolen cloth, the kind that you make on the loom. See if you can’t find a merchant willing to buy, say, a thousand yards at slightly less than the present wholesale price, for delivery next spring.” If I had to play the merchant, I thought that I might as well make some gain from it. My hands were already dirty.
823“I’ll try, Sir Conrad.”
824“And I know that you’ll do a wonderful job. It grows late. What do you say? One more cup of wine and then to bed?”
825The next few days were busy. Thom had located a copper merchant who wanted to sell out his entire -stock and move to a better-more profitable-place. We could buy copper at half price, along with some calamine, lead, and tin, if we bought his entire stock. I looked it over and paid an additional 3,250 pence. They found an out-of-work wood-carver. I looked at his work in a few churches and swore him in at five hundred pence a year. I told him that he was now a pattern maker.
826Clay and wood were coming in slowly, so I told the brothers that they should hire twelve men temporarily and keep the best four on a permanent basis.
827Krystyana found her walker, a Florentine who had come north to seek his fortune and had picked up a fair amount of Polish while starving in Cieszyn. He claimed to be a journeyman dyer, but on questioning him I discovered that he had never completed his apprenticeship. He had also been apprenticed as a wool sorter, a comber, a carder, and a warper. He had some experience with linen that he preferred not to discuss.
828He was thirty years old and a perpetual misfit. Or maybe a diamond in the rough. I had mixed feelings about the man. “Okay, Angelo Muskarini. It is good that you have finally told me the truth. As my liege lord is about to enter the clothmaking business, it is possible that we can use you. Perhaps you know something that will help him. Look long and hard before you criticize my loom or spinning wheels! Aside from that, if you can improve the quality or quantity of his cloth, you will be very well rewarded. If you do not produce results, we shall trans port you back to your garret here at Cieszyn. Understood?” It was.
829I swore him in for two years at one hundred pence per year, plus food and lodging. Then I put him up at my expense at the back of the inn for two pence per day. I advanced him three months’ pay for beer and such just to see how he'd do. As it turned out, he saved most of it, barring a little he spent for clothes. Sometimes when a man has spent enough time between the hammer and the anvil, he turns into good steel.
830Besides explaining to the Krakowski brothers about building patterns for molds, I had to explain about grinding wheels and lathes. It is not enough to cast a bushing. It has to be perfectly round, and that is not possible with casting alone.
831The wood-carver, Ivor Korenkov, found himself instructing his new employers, and the days wound on.
832Krystyana made the right commercial connection. She found a cloth merchant eager to deal. It was already arranged that he would buy some two thousand square yards-Cieszyn measure-of raw wool cloth for seveneighths of the current price, twenty-three pence per square yard. We swore the agreement before a notary, who produced three copies: one for each of us and one for himself. We left one thousand pence each with a Templar as surety, and the deal was closed.
833Days later, I was still busy at the foundry, but Krystyana had nothing else to do. The story of her rebuffs at the castle had already spread, and she was embarrassed by it.
834“Pretty girl, I have one more job for you. Take Angelo and the servant woman-whatever her name is-”
835“Zelda.”
836“Zelda, then. The three of you should go and buy one thousand pence worth of dye or whatever Angelo needs. Then I want you and Angelo to go back toward Okoitz.”
837“But just he and I alone?”
838“I’ll be with you as far as Sir Miesko's manor, and that's as far as you're going. We can send Angelo alone to Okoitz.”
839“Why send him alone, Sir Conrad?”
840“Because I’m not sure if I trust him. If I've hired a thief, I'd rather find out sooner than later.”
841“Why trust him at all? I mean, why take a chance with thousands of pence worth of dye and mules?”
842“I have to be able to trust him because he knows things that I don’t. He could pull the wool over my eyes, and I wouldn't know it.”
843“Pull the wool…” She couldn’t sort that one out. “Then why are we going to Sir Miesko's?”
844“Because I want you to stay with Richeza for a few weeks. Remember what I said about her being a truly fine woman? Remember her grace and charm and the way everyone feels comfortable around her? Now, compare her with those ’ladies' at Cieszyn Castle and ask yourself what you want to be like when you grow up.” She thought a bit and was suddenly in tears. Her arms went around my neck. “It's okay, pretty girl.”
845Two days later, we set out at dawn. I was fully armed and on Anna, of course. Krystyana. was sidesaddle on her palfrey. Angelo followed on a mule, leading a second mule loaded with roots, bark, herbs, and sea shells.
846We arrived at noon. Richeza was charming as always, and if she was offended by my intention to leave in a few hours, she didn’t show it. Gossip about our adventures at Cieszyn Castle had already reached her, and she had the insight to invite Krystyana to stay with her before I had a chance to broach the subject.
847Still, courtesy forbade my immediate departure, and it was midafternoon before I was on the road again for Cieszyn. “Well, Anna, do you think we can make it before dark?”
848Anna nodded her head. She’d always had the disconcerting habit of nodding or shaking her head to questions, as if she actually understood what was said. She probably picked up some clue from my body language, like the famous Clever Hans, but it was still interesting to talk to her.
849“Then let’s see how fast you can go, but don't strain yourself.”
850She took off at a full gallop and kept it up for the better part of an hour. Finally, I starting worrying; a good horse will run itself to death if you ask it. I reined her back to a walk. “Easy, girt! You’ll hurt yourself.”
851She shook her head no, took the bit in her teeth, and galloped the rest of the way back to Cieszyn. I dismounted at the city gates to check Anna over. She wasn’t even sweating! An amazing horse.
852A week later, I got word that Angelo Muskarini had arrived safely at Okoitz: with his charge. I was vindicated.
853More remained to be done at the brass foundry than I had thought. This business of working in a pit and baking the molds with an open fire was obviously inefficient and wasteful of fuel. We built an oven of clay bricks for drying and baking the clay molds. Eventually we were to build five more.
854The lathe had to be huge, and it needed bearings that had to be built before the bushings could be turned. We had to build a small lathe in order to build a big one. The big lathe was too large to be handpowered, so we built a big barrel cage at the headstock. A man got in this cage and climbed continuously uphill, turning the cage and the part on the lathe.
855I was enjoying myself, but it was five weeks before I felt confident enough of the Krakowski brothers to return .to Okoitz.
856During that time, though I had done the right thing by sending Krystyana to Richeza’s “finishing school,” I began to suffer for it. When one has had a continuous supply of sex, abstention becomes difficult. I soon discovered that my knightly right to the use of young women did not apply within city limits, and one more visit to Cieszyn Castle convinced me that I wanted nothing there.
857Look. I was quite willing to tolerate honest ignorance. Most of the people I had met in the thirteenth century had been brutally poor; they’d had no chance to improve themselves. But those women of the castle had absolutely nothing to do and expended an incredible amount of effort in doing it. They were wrapped up in stupid mind games, courts of love, and “he said that she said that they said…” nonsense. They placed an absurdly high value on the virginity of unmarried women and none at all on the chastity of those who were married.
858In short, they offended my moral code and were. not worth the bother.
859There were prostitutes in town, and I tried one. She spend the first half of the evening wheedling me for more money and the second half on the streets after I threw her out.
860Mostly, in the evenings I drank a lot. The innkeeper, Tadeusz Wrolawski, became my regular drinking partner. The Krakowski brothers were fine people, you understand, but it is not a good idea to socialize too much with one’s subordinates. The role change from drinking buddy to willing worker becomes difficult if one must do it too often. Also, they had their wives to keep content.
861“Socialism, Tadeusz!” I explained drunkenly. “This country and this century are in horrible shape because of the lack of socialism!”
862“You are absolutely right, Sir Conrad! What is socialism?”
863“I am glad that you agree with me, my good friend Tadeusz. All of this business of no work in Cieszyn and too much work in Okoitz and not enough to eat and no sewers and little babies dying can all be cured with a little technology and some organization.”
864“This sounds marvelous! What is a sewer?”
865“All we have to do is to get things organized and apply a little appropriate technology. We have everything else. We have the manpower, and we have the materials. Give us nine years and we’ll have things running right and beat the Mongols, besides. Have her bring us some more wine.”
866“Outstanding! What is a Mongol?”
867“Eh? Mongols are little greasy yellow bastards that are going to ride in out of the east and try to kill everybody. They won’t do it, though, if we get organized. Blow hell out of them with cannons. Brass cannons, maybe.”
868“These Mongols are like Tartars?”
869“Same bastards. Change their name a lot.”
870“I have heard some horrible tales from traders from the east. They speak of whole cities put to the sword! Every man, every child, every animal! Not even the women spared for ravishing!”
871“Yeah. Those are the bastards. But it’s not going to happen here. We'll stop them. It's just a matter of organization. Caring about people. Technology. Socialism.”
872“You say ’technology.' What is this technology?”
873“Why, technology is what I have going at the brass works across the street. New lathes, new ovens, better production processes.”
874“They certainly are prosperous, Sir Conrad! A month ago they were nothing but three starving men and their families with nothing to do. Now they work from dawn to dusk. Their wives have bought pigs and chickens and new clothes. They have hired a dozen new men!”
875“See? Technology triumphant and socialism in action! Another mug of wine?”
876“And this technology, it can be applied anywhere? Say, to an inn?”
877“Well, of a sort. Technology is mostly sensible thinking about the problems you face. Now, your inn here. You’ve got a good building. Your rooms are clean. Your food is good, and you make good beer. All you seem to lack are the customers.”
878“What you say, at least the last part, is true.”
879“Okay. We agree that the physical plant is adequate. Now, what is the purpose of an inn?”
880“Why, to provide food and drink and-”
881“Wrong. Your customers could buy wine from a wine seller much cheaper than you sell it. You must buy from the same wine seller and pay your overhead besides. The same goes for food. The markets must be cheaper.”
882“But for travelers-”
883“Transient business is fine, but you are not on a main street. Local business is more important. You must serve the people. There are what? A thousand men of drinking age in town. Maybe another thousand in nearby villages. If you could get a tenth of them to come here regularly, your success would be assured. Once the town’s people came here regularly, the travelers would come, too.”
884“Yes, yes! But how do we do that?”
885“Let me think.” I didn’t know much about managing taverns, but I had been in a great number of them in Poland and America. Some were bad and empty. Some were good and empty. Some were crowded whether they were good or bad. The biggest single factor seemed to be that people went to a given place because people were already there. Getting the first ones there was a matter of advertisingwhich was impossible in a world without newspapers or radios-and providing something interesting. Something different. I thought of the two or three best places I had found in Massachusetts. A combination of those.
886A controls designer lives in a four-dimensional world. When things finally come to me, they come as a working, moving, solid whole. Only later do I string them out in serial fashion.
887A vision crystallized in my sodden mind.
888“Tadeusz, I know how to do it. You know my arrangement with the Krakowski brothers? Would you like to be socialized as well?”
889“That I should be paid thousands of pence and a regular salary besides? Oh, yes my lord!”
890“OK. Same deal, but I think your building is worth more than theirs. Say, 3,000p.?”
891“Agreed, my lord!”
892“Six hundred pence for yourself, yearly, and a twelfth of the surplus, with two hundred pence to your wife?”
893“With honor, my lord!”
894“Good. We’ll swear you in right now.”
895“But the sun is not up.”
896“True… But there is a full moon and that is more appropriate for an innkeeper. Agreed?”
897So, under the moon, with a sleepy chamber maid and the night guard as witnesses, I swore in Tadeusz and his wife. I picked up another pot of wine and we went back to the table. The first order of business was to settle up my present bill, which I did. Then I gave Tadeusz 3,400p.
898“Our first rule is that since I own the place, I shall lodge here free. Keep one room open for my own use.”
899“The second change is the name of the inn. ’The Battle Axe' is entirely too stern. People go to inns because they need to enjoy themselves. We need a light, amusing name. We'll call it the 'Pink Dragon'. I have a wood carver across the street; he'll make a new sign.”
900“Then, this room is too empty and cavernous. People like crowds. I want some curtains to divide the room in half, another set to divide the front half in half, and a third set so that only the front eighth is exposed. You are to open a set of curtains only when the space before it is so crowded that people are bumping into each other. Understood?”
901“Yes, my lord.”
902“All your present people are to be retained. No firing except for dishonesty.”
903“Ali. There is the matter of certain salaries being in arrears.”
904“None of that under socialism. They must be paid. Figure up the amount tomorrow. Oh, yes. We’ll need an accounting system. I'll send somebody to keep the books for here and the foundry. You'll think it's a nuisance, but I insist on it. What else? Your pricing! This business of having to haggle over everything has to go. We'll have to work out a reasonable set of prices for everything. Then we post those prices, and they are the same for everybody. No exceptions.”
905“But what if one is conspicuously wealthy and—”
906“No exceptions, not up or down. Then, entertainment. From supper until late, I want some music in here. A single musician at a time will do, and hire them for only a week at a time. See what people like. And waitresses; we’ll need half a dozen of them. They must be well paid, since we want the best. Say, four pence a week with another eight pence set aside for their dowries. We'll have a turnover problem. We want the six best-looking maidens available. They must be pretty.”
907“What! You would turn my inn into a brothel?”
908“To the contrary. They must all be virgins and stay that way. See to it yourself.”
909“My wife would object.”
910“Then have your wife see to it. Part of her job will be to see to their morality. They must live here at the inn, in some of your back rooms. Customers may look but not touch. See that they are properly barricaded.”
911“Look?”
912“Yes. They’ll need some special costumes.” With a fingertip and wine, I sketched out what I had in mind on the worn wooden table. “We'll have to get the woodcarver and a leather worker to do the highheeled shoes. I can show somebody local how to do the stockings, but later they can come from Okoitz.”
913“You want them dressed as rabbits?”
914“The people will like it. Then there is the matter of advertising. It seems that I have considerable notoriety in Cieszyn, or at least my name does. I’ve been busy at the brass works, and I haven't met very many people here. But in a week or two, once we get this set up, I want you to hire some old women. They are to wander around and tell about how Sir Conrad Stargard, the killer of the Black Eagle, left the ladies of the castle to move into a notorious inn where beautiful women are scantily clothed. That should get some action going.”
915“It will get good Christians at my door with pikes and torches!”
916“Good. Let them in. Sell them some beer. If they are really organized, let the leaders verify the virginity of the waitresses. No problem.”
917“Uh… all this is going to cost money, my lord.”
918“Right. Here is two thousand pence to cover it. Keep a careful reckoning. Well, it grows late. I bid you good night.” I took the half pot of wine to my room. The full moon was halfway to setting. God, it was late.
919The next day I overslept dinner and caught a late, cold breakfast in the kitchen. My head hurt, and I had these horrible thoughts about what I had done.
920People were cold, people were hungry, the Mongols were coming, and I was wasting valuable resources starting a thirteenth-century bunny club. Oh God, my head hurt.
921Thinking drunkenly with my gonads instead of my frontal lobes, I had screwed up again. I tried to leave the inn quietly, hoping to avoid the innkeeper, but no such luck.
922“Sir Conrad! At last you are up; I was growing worried! I have followed your orders; already the word is out that I search for the six most beautiful maidens in Cieszyn! I have explained our need to the wood-carver, and he will be available tomorrow. But he wishes, of course, to discuss the matter with you.”
923“Uh… Yes… I’ll talk with him. You realize that for various reasonsour advertising and my relationship with my liege lord-it would be best if my name is not connected with all of this.”
924“But we must say, in rumors, that you stay here, my lord.” Tadeusz really liked having a lord protector.
925“Of course. But don’t tell anyone that I have any ownership in the place. Swear the witnesses to secrecy.”
926“As you wish, my lord.”
927“Hey, the rumor campaign won’t work if they know that I own the Pink Dragon.”
928“As you wish. I have talked with a seamstress. She will have no difficulties with most of the costumes-think; it will be like a continual carnival!-but she wants help with the stockings.”
929I didn’t accomplish much at the foundry that afternoon, and when I got back for supper, the inn was packed. Word had gotten out that the most beautiful maidens in the city would be there. Fully a hundred young males showed up to see what was happening, along with some thirty young hopefuls. I was embarrassed, and the innkeeper expected me to do the choosing.
930Stalling for time, I said, “Are you sure that all of them are virgins? Have your wife check it.” I ate a meal and drank a pot of wine at the small table that had been reserved for me. I had in mind that his wife should simply ask them, but she felt obligated to actually check for an intact hymen. She passed fourteen of them. How many left because they were embarrassed, I don’t know. Apparently, room and board was good wages for a maid. Twelve pence a week on top of that was fabulous.
931“And now will you choose the six, my lord?”
932Well, one of them was attractive, up to Krystyana’s standards. The rest of them were hopeless ducklings, and I felt sorry for them. “No. Let the crowd choose one of them. You talk to them. Have them choose the best five, then the best two, and then a final vote.” It seemed the fairest way, and it didn't get me involved.
933“But only one?”
934“Just do it all again for five more days. Remember what I said about entertainment? Well, this is entertainment.”
935They took in four hundred pence that night, and afterwards the crowds got bigger.
936A week later, as I ate dinner, I got a visit from a local priest, a Father Thomas. I offered him wine, but he refused and immediately got down to business.
937“I am worried about your actions, my son, and about your soul.”
938“But why, Father?”
939“You have been responsible for the hiring of young women-virtuous, Christian women from good families—and parading them half naked in a brothel.”
940“A brothel? By no means, Father! They are waitresses at a good inn, which is the farthest thing from a brothel. They live most virtuous lives, on threat of dismissal! There is no convent that protects its nuns better than we protect our waitresses.”
941“Aside from the morality of it-and both the innkeeper and I are moral men-aside from it, I say, running a common stews would be bad for business. There are a lot of them in your parish, and they aren’t very profitable.”
942“That others sin is well known. They are not the subject of this conversation.”
943“But why don’t you try to do something about the real fleshpots? Why come to an honest inn?”
944“The fleshpots, as you appropriately call them, are sanctioned by their own guild and to a certain extent by the law, if not by the Church. What you are doing is new and is best nipped in the bud.”
945“Father, we do nothing more than serve food and drink. The waitresses are pretty, but that’s the way God made them, and 1, for one, appreciate His good work. We do offer lodging, but we do not offer bed partners.”
946“You dress them in a manner that encourages lechery.”
947“We dress them in an attractive manner that fully covers their breasts and privy members. Any man wanting to see more may simply go to the public baths, Father.”
948“The baths have their own guilds and sanctions. The Church will close them down in time. You evade my charge Of lechery.”
949“Father, it is normal for men to appreciate the beauty of women. If looking at pretty girls is a sin, then every normal male in Poland is doomed to hell!”
950“Please go and inspect the waitresses’ rooms. Talk to the girls. Prove to yourself that we are moral.”
951“I fully intend to make such an inspection,” he said, and left.
952I was just finishing my meal, washing down my cheese with beer, when the priest returned.
953“Sir Conrad, I admit that the situation is much as you described it. If anything, the girls complain of the restrictions placed on them.”
954“The price of morality, Father.” I made a mental note to see just how serious their complaints were. “While you are here, there is another matter that I would like to discuss. One of our waitresses has become fond of a local boy. I have talked with him. His intentions are honorable and his character good. Since she is employed by the inn, it seems fitting that the inn should pay her wedding expenses. Would it be possible for you to perform the ceremony?”
955“Why, I suppose that this is quite possible. In fact, I would be delighted.”
956“Wonderful! I expect that most of our waitresses will soon be married. Virtuous and attractive young ladies don’t stay single for long. Perhaps we should discuss group rates.” In the next hour, I made an ally of Father Thomas.
957As he left, I said, “Father, how did you know that I owned the inn?”
958“The Church has its own sources of information, my son.”
959It was early afternoon, and only one waitress was on duty. Troubled about the waitresses’ complaints to the priest, I went back to the girls' dorm, what had been “the ducal suite,” even though the duke never slept there. Actually, almost- no one had ever slept there since it was priced beyond the means of the usual guest. It made sense to convert it. If it was more magnificent than necessary, well, young girls like that sort of nonsense.
960I had arranged inexpensive group rates at a local bathhouse-early afternoons only-for the inn’s staff, at the inn's expense. Our people were encouraged to take a daily bath, and the waitresses were required to.
961When I called on the girls, the five of them were in various stages of undress, with a preponderance of full nudity. They let me in without bothering to dress. Perhaps their status as untouchables, along with their recent adolescent discovery that men noticed them and that they liked it, was the cause of this display.
962I didn’t like it. On the one hand, I could hardly break my own rules with regard to their virginity, and, well, a really decent man simply doesn't take a virgin in a casual way. I think that half the world's frigid women are the results of a klutzy male on their first night. Properly done, it takes patience and warmth and a great deal of love. Back in the twentieth century, I'd had two virgins. They'd both left me as wonderful lovers. I was rather proud of my workmanship.
963But just then I was horny as hell. I had been three weeks without, and the last thing I needed was five pairs of budding nipples staring at me.
964“Put some clothes on, damn it! You’d think we were running a brothel here!” I shouted.
965They scurried to cover themselves with towels and blankets. “We were just back from the baths,” one of them said. “We were hot.”
966“Yeah, sure. Fourteen years old and hotter than hell. Now, what are these complaints you’ve been making about your jobs?”
967“Complaints, Sir Conrad? We have no complaints. The pay is wonderful, and the work, I mean, it’s like being at a party,” the short redhead said.
968“Then why were you complaining to the priest who was here today?”
969“Oh, that,” said a well-endowed blonde, managing to drop her blanket below her belly button. “We were just doing what Mrs. Wrolawski told us to do.”
970“Cover your breasts. Now, what exactly did the innkeeper’s wife tell you to do?”
971“She said that if we didn’t act as pure as nuns in a convent, the Church would shut down the inn and we'd each be lacking our twelve silver pence per week.”
972“She also threatened to send us to a nunnery if we weren’t convincing,” the redhead added.
973So Mrs. Wrolawski had eavesdropped on my conversation with the priest and had set things up. Well-a-day. All’s well that ends well.
974“Okay. But put some clothes on, damn it!”
975Most of the waitresses found suitable husbands within six months. The inn paid the wedding expenses, and there was always a “new hiring” the day after. This happened at least once a month and often once a week. For most of our customers, it was their first experience with voting. In my own mind, I could never sort out the morality of it a.
976I had no difficulty with the morality of a situation that occurred much later that evening. The inn had closed for the night, but I was up in my room, drinking and doodling with some ideas about a gear-cutting machine. I do much of my best thinking late at night over a bottle. Oh, in the sober light of dawn I throw out three-quarters of it, but the quarter that is left is often very creative.
977My room was directly above that used by Tadeusz and his wife. The cooks lived out, the waitresses were fourteen-year-old girls, and it happened that at the time there were no overnight guests. The only men in the inn were Tadeusz, the guard, and myself when the innkeeper’s wife screamed. I was shocked sober in an instant.
978“Guard!” Tadeusz shouted.
979“Shout all you want. Your aging guard has been detained,” a sinister, gravelly voice said.
980There were more shouts, accusations, and then screams as I flew for the doorway, down the hall, and down the steps. I was wearing the embroidered outfit given me by Count Lambert, and my glove-leather boots made my approach fairly quiet, at least compared with the commotion coming from the innkeeper’s room.
981A beefy stranger was guarding the doorway. He had a long misericord, and I belatedly realized that I had left my sword belt in my room.
982I am not a master of the martial arts, but I had taken the standard military courses in unarmed combat. The important thing is to hit hard and fast. Hesitation can get you killed.
983The thug came at me with a clumsy overhand swing. I blocked his dagger with my left forearm and kneed him hard in the groin. He bent over, presenting the back of his head to my clenched fists and his face to my knee.
984I took advantage of this opportunity; his nose and teeth gave way with a crunching sound. He fell heavily to the floor, still gripping his knife. I don’t like people who pull knives on me in dark hallways, so I stamped hard on his knife hand. Too hard. The bones smashed, and splinters of knuckle bones were driven through the thin soles of my boot, lacerating my foot. Pain shot up my leg.
985I picked up the misericord and limped into the room, ducking my head to get through the doorway. “What the hell goes on here?” I inquired.
986Two Mafia types were in the room beside the Wrolawskis. The leader of the pair grinned evilly and said, “Just a bit of guild business, stranger. Get out and you’ll live longer.”
987Tadeusz was bleeding from the nose and mouth. His wife’s dress was torn, exposing bruised, aging breasts.
988“They’re from the whoremasters guild!” Tadeusz said, contempt and fear in his voice.
989“If your business was honest, you’d come in the daytime,” I said. “Now I'm telling you! Get out fast and you'll live.”
990The leader signaled to his subordinate, and the man came at me with a wide-bladed dagger. He used the same stupid overhand attack as his associate in the hallway.
991The misericord is a long, narrow, thrusting weapon designed to pierce chain mail. I blocked the thug’s attack as before, but this time at the expense of a slash in the embroidery on my cuff. Gripping him by the shoulder with my left hand, I aimed a gutting thrust at the man's stomach. He pulled his body back, and my knife continued upward, catching him between the chin and neck. The thin blade went entirely through his brain, and a few centimeters of it stuck out from the top of his head.
992Over the man’s shoulder, I saw the leader hauling back to throw a knife at me. With my hands still on the shoulder and the grip of the knife, I yanked the body upward as a shield. The dead man was much lighter than I had expected, or perhaps the fury of combat increased my strength, but in all events I bashed the thug's head into a low roof beam. The misericord stuck in the wood, and the corpse hung there, the leader's knife in its back.
993The leader came at me with his fists, but his sort of hoodlum lives more by fear than by fighting ability. Equally weaponless, I hit him twice, hard, in the stomach.
994“Sir Conrad!” Tadeusz shouted.
995Suddenly the Mafia type froze, rigid. I was too furious to stop; grabbing him by the shoulder, I chopped viciously with the edge of my right hand, once on each side of the neck, breaking both collar bones.
996“Sir Conrad?” the man gasped, his arms hanging unnaturally low.
997“Yeah.” I was breathing hard.
998“The noble knight that killed Sir Rheinburg with a single blow?”
999“Among others.” I was returning to normal.
1000“I knew him, sir.”
1001“You look the type.”
1002“We had heard rumors that you were associated with this inn, but the whoremasters guild felt-”
1003“Well, you felt wrong.” The noise had awakened the waitresses, and they were clustered wide-eyed around the doorway. One had a blanket wrapped around her, but the rest were naked.
1004“Those girls are servants, not whores,” I said. “We have nothing to do with the whoremasters guild.”
1005“Yes, sir. That is obviously true, sir.”
1006“So?” I said.
1007“I may live, sir? I may leave?”
1008I had to think for a minute. “Yeah. You can live. But you damn well owe us for damages.”
1009“Of course, sir. We always pay our just debts.”
1010“Tadeusz,” I said. “What do they owe you for what they’ve done to your property, for the injury caused to you and your wife?”
1011“Who can say, Sir Conrad?” the innkeeper said. “But is this wise?”
1012“Name a number!”
1013“Perhaps five hundred pence?”
1014“Good,” I said. “Okay, whoremaster. You owe us five hundred pence, not to mention the mess you’ve made on the floor and the fact that your thugs cut up and bled all over my best outfit. Get out!”
1015“As you command, Sir Conrad Stargard.” He left with as much dignity as he could muster.
1016“Are you insane, Sir Conrad?” the innkeeper said. “Now they will come back!”
1017“I doubt it. That kind knows when it’s licked.”
1018“But they will! Girls! Quickly! Run to Sir Conrad’s room. Bring back his weapons and armor!”
1019Six naked teenagers scurried off, the one with the blanket having dropped it in the blood pooling under the body that was still stuck to the beam.
1020“At least bring my wine!” I shouted. I dropped heavily into a chair. The action was over, and I was starting to get the shakes.
1021I got my wine, but shortly six pretty, nude girls, at Tadeusz’s insistence, were stripping off my outer clothes and lacing me into padded leather and chain mail.
1022“This is stupid. They won’t be back,” I said, but I was wrong.
1023Once I was fully armed, we searched out and found the inn’s guard. He had a huge knot on the side of his head and was bound, gagged, and furious. He smiled at the corpse stuck to the ceiling, and when the other thug started moaning, he took particular pleasure in tying the man up.
1024“Yes,” the guard said, gripping his sword. “Let them come back.”
1025“Hey,” I said. “If you people are that worried, why not send for the count’s guardsmen?”
1026“Certainly, Sir Conrad,” the innkeeper said. “But who would dare go out into the night?”
1027“Oh, hell. I’ll do it myself,” I said. “And have these girls get some clothes on. They act like this really is a brothel!”
1028“And leave us defenseless?” one of the girls squealed.
1029“Shit.” I sat down and took a long pull of wine. There was nothing for it but to wait until they all calmed down and went back to bed. Anyway, my injured foot was throbbing.
1030The girls were passing out knives from the kitchen, which was absolutely stupid. If you don’t know how to use a weapon, you are much better off without it.
1031In their excitement, they had forgotten my instructions to get dressed. Or perhaps running around naked with knives seemed more adventurous to them. Mrs. Wrolawski, who usually kept them in check, was sitting, stunned, on her bed.
1032She hadn’t even made an effort to cover her bruised breasts. Her husband was sitting in the other chair in a blue funk, blood still dripping from his nose. The guard was looking for an excuse to kill somebody, the girls were working out a set of heroic passwords, the body was still stuck to the ceiling, and my foot hurt.
1033Damn, what a lunatic night! My mother told me I should have gone to the beach.
1034There was a knock at the door.
1035Everyone in the room froze. Even the previously murderous guard was suddenly sweating.
1036“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
1037I limped down the hall to the main door. One more piece of insanity and I was going to scream. I did take the precaution of drawing my sword before opening the door.
1038“Ali. Sir Conrad Stargard, I believe,” said the welldressed gentleman before me. “Please note that we come unarmed and with goodwill. We wish to make amends for certain unpleasantries that occurred earlier this evening.”
1039There were six of them, two men and four women. They presented Tadeusz with a purse containing five hundred pence, removed the dead and wounded men, and, with buckets of warm, soapy water that they had brought with them, cleaned up the blood on the floor.
1040“These, of course, are yours by right of combat,” the gentleman said, presenting me with the newly cleaned misericord, the wide-bladed knife, and the leader’s throwing knife. All three were sheathed. He must have brought the leader's sheath with him.
1041“Certain other amends will be made at the earliest opportunity. In the interim, I wish you a pleasant sleep and our assurances of our continued goodwill.”
1042And they left.
1043“That’s it, gang. Back to bed,” I said, and took a long pull of wine.
1044A week later, a messenger delivered to me four complete outfits, all beautifully embroidered and one almost an exact duplicate of the one that had been damaged. He also brought a red velvet barding for Anna and a matching surcoat for me, both embroidered with gold thread.
1045All of it fit perfectly. I never found out how they got the sizes, but I was never again troubled by the underworld.
1046Chapter Nineteen
1047
1048I needed quite a few brass castings for the wet mills.
1049There was the gearing between the small, compensating windmill and the turret. I had originally envisioned a collection of wooden cog wheels, but a brass worm gear was a lot simpler and more efficient.
1050A worm gear is simply a screw-the worm-with threads that fit into the teeth of a gear. The problem is that for them to mate properly, the shapes of both the worm and the gear get very complicated. They were well beyond our ability to machine; they were probably beyond my ability to describe mathematically.
1051I spent an evening drinking and pondering the problem in my room. The taproom below was always too crowded and noisy to think, and even in my room enough noise seeped up from below to be disturbing. I finally hired a krummhorn player to sit in the corner and play softly. Muzak.
1052The next morning, I had Mikhail Krakowski make up an oversized worm and gear out of clay. This was done crudely, by hand and by eye. The teeth were very deep, and the clay was built up around turned brass mandrels to assure concentric bearings. When dry, we fitted these together in an adjustable wooden frame. The fit was poor at first, but it was possible to turn the gear by turning the worm. We then put a man to cranking the worm gently and adjusting the teeth together as the unbaked clay wore away. In three days, they were much smaller and a perfect fit. We then fired the clay worm and gear, and these became our master patterns for brass castings. This gearing gave us a 48 to I reduction between the small windmill and a shaft that connected to the turret. The shaft turned a lantern gear that worked on pegs set into the fixed tower. As a result, the small windmill turned 1,152 times in the course of rotating the turret once. I hoped it would be enough.
1053One by one, problems were solved. The bushings had been cast, one with sockets to hold the windmill blades. These bushings were being turned laboriously on the big lathe. Two more smaller lathes were under construction. We were confident that all the parts necessary for the wet mill would be ready for delivery to Okoitz in a month.
1054I was getting ready to return to Count Lambert when I heard an awful squealing from the foundry. I rushed over and was stopped by Wladyslaw Krakowski.
1055“My brother! My own brother called me a lazy pig!”
1056“I called you a lazy pig because you are a lazy pig!” Mikhail explained. The squealing was still going on.
1057“All right! But I’m a tired lazy pig, and walking in that barrel on the lathe is no fit job for a man!”
1058They were still arguing when I pushed past them and went to the lathe. Thom was operating it. Inside the barrel an unhappy pig was trotting madly, trying to climb the rotating wall. A brass ring in the animal’s nose was tied to a wooden stick such that if it stopped running, its nose was pulled.
1059I stared at this for a while. Using a pig as motive power was strange, but a pig is a strong animal, and its short legs let it work where no horse could possibly fit. Would our future machines be rated in pigpower the way Americans use horsepower?
1060I suppose it was hard on the pig, but I can think of nothing worse to do to an animal than killing and eating it, and I am not about to become a vegetarian like Adolf Hitler.
1061Thom moved the stick back so that the pig could stop. “The speed control,” he said. “I think we’ll have to switch pigs about three times an hour. It's cheaper than men, though.”
1062I could see that it was time to go back to Okoitz.
1063I was in the saddle when the innkeeper brought me a stirrup cup and a pouch of gold. “Seven thousand pence, my lord. Your profits for the first month of the Pink Dragon,” he said.
1064I thanked him and rode off. Seven thousand pence in a single month! That was twice what I paid for the place, back salaries and all! Well, it would keep the foundry going no matter what else happened. If I couldn’t get land of my own, that foundry might be all that stood between us and the Mongols.
1065Anna seemed inordinately proud of her new red velvet barding. She held her head high with her neck arched and walked with a gait she’d never used before. It was a sort of hopping thing, with her left front and right rear hooves hitting the cobblestones at the same time. I guess it was impressive because a lot of people came out to watch.
1066But it was rough on my lower back, and as soon as we left the city gates, I urged her into a more comfortable gallop.
1067She ran the entire way to Sir Miesko’s manor, again without working up a sweat.
1068Krystyana greeted me, but at first I almost didn’t recognize her. Her actual appearance hadn't changed, except that she wore her hair differently. But something about her bearing, the way she held her shoulders back, the way she glided instead of clumping along like a gawky adolescent… But there was more, much more. Something that I couldn't quite define. Somehow, a pretty duckling had turned into a swan.
1069“Welcome, Sir Conrad. I’ve missed you.” She had the same calm smile that made Lady Richeza so radiant.
1070I was home.
1071I hated to leave, but I was worried about my projects at Okoitz so we set out the next morning. Halfway to Okoitz, we met Sir Miesko on the road.
1072“Sir Miesko! It’s delightful to see you again. We have just come from your manor, and all is well.”
1073“That relieves my mind, Sir Conrad. In truth, I worried about Richeza all winter. For my own part, I have sent Boris Novacek on his way to Cracow with half a dozen mule skinners, seventyfive mules, and a gross of barrels of wine.”
1074“And how are things going at Okoitz?”
1075“Amazing! Your loom and wheels are turning out cloth by the mile, and that huge mill of yours is half up!”
1076“Half up! I’ve stayed too long at Cieszyn.”
1077“All seemed to be going well. But aren’t you being rude, Sir Conrad? You haven't introduced me to your lady.”
1078“But you already know her. Surely you haven’t forgotten Krystyana.”
1079“What? Damn, but you’re right! But her bearing, her poise-”
1080“It’s entirely your wife's doing, Sir Miesko. Krystyana visited her for a month, and you see the results. I didn't think to buy a present for Richeza, but if you want a loom and some spinning wheels, or even the fittings for a mill, you have only to ask.”
1081“I might just take you up on that, for you have gained a prize of great value. But now I am anxious to see my wife again, so I bid you good-bye, Sir Conrad, and you, my Lady Krystyana.”
1082As Sir Miesko rode away, Krystyana looked at me. “He called me a lady!”
1083“You’d rather be a gentleman?”
1084“Of course not! But surely I’m only a peasant girl.”
1085“Well, you’ll always be a pretty wench to me, Krystyana.”
1086“He acted as though I was of the nobility!”
1087“So, noble is as noble acts. Come on, let’s get going.”
1088“But I’m not noble, am I?”
1089“Do you expect to be beaten about the head and shoulders with a sword? I don’t know if there is a ceremony for elevating a common woman, but as far as I'm concerned, you can be whatever you want to be. Let's ride.”
1090The mill was nothing like half done, but good progress was being made under Vitold’s supervision. The “basement” for the lower tank had been dug, and the new well was in. Most of the upright logs had had their sides flattened, and some of them were already in place. All according to plan. The main shaft was finished, ready for the brass collars, but here there was a discrepancy. I had assumed that the cam would be a separate piece, but Vitold had cut the cam and shaft out of a single log more than two yards across! I had allowed an extra yard in diameter to provide room for clamping the cam to the shaft, but single-piece construction let him reduce the cam diameter from three to two yards while still giving a meter's travel on the follower wheel at the end of the A-frame.
1091This in turn permitted raising the top of the clean tank half a yard, increasing its volume by sixty tons of water. Also, the turret could be lowered by half a yard, saving materials and work. It was an excellent improvement. Now if I could only teach Vitold to read blueprints!
1092“You’re doing a good job, Vitold. ”
1093“Thank you, Sir Conrad. We’re way ahead of where I thought we'd be. It's these axes you showed Ilya how to make. The old axes needed sharpening every hour, but since he treated them, they last for days!”
1094“Hmm. Good. Tell Ilya to come to me the next time he’s free.”
1095“I’ll tell him when he gets back, Sir Conrad. He's been gone for a week getting supplies.”
1096The count’s hall was humming with activity. Natalia and a girl I hadn't met were running the loom at a remarkable pace, and six other “handmaidens,” most of them new, were spinning busily. Eleven huge bolts of cloth were proudly stacked in a corner, and the girls all seemed to be having fun.
1097Five of the count’s knights were in attendance, but the count was out with a party making the rounds of his lands and the manors of his knights. The journey was partly social, visiting his subordinates; partly economic, to ensure that things were managed well; partly judicial.
1098The knights and barons had the right of low justice, that is, jurisdiction over offenses punishable by fines, flogging, and up to a year’s forced labor, subject to the count's review. The count reserved for himself the right of high justice, and his word could have a man hanged. For eight months of the year, he was out riding circuit half the time.
1099Except for Sir Stefan, who was still making himself unpleasant on my behalf, the knights were essentially a decent lot, if somewhat extroverted. They tended to spend their afternoons in fighting practice, their evenings in heavy drinking, and their mornings sobering up.
1100I spent some of my afternoons with them, but they were slow to pick up on fencing, and I wasn’t worth much with a lance and shield.
1101Evenings were like being back in the air force again. They were especially pleasant since Sir Stefan had the dusk to midnight guard shift. We sang songs, told stories, and swapped lies with boisterous good humor. Yet I always had to watch what I said so as not to violate my oath to Father Ignacy, and much of their conversation revolved around hunting and hawking, of which I was ignorant. Then, too, they were very heavy drinkers. While I like to drink, too much of it spoils lovemaking, and sex doesn’t give you hangovers.
1102Following local custom, the knights had left their wives at home to manage things. There were now a dozen ladies-inwaiting, six of them new since Mary and Ilona had been pronounced pregnant and married off. This left us with plenty of variety, although Krystyana was still the best-looking of the bunch.
1103The other knights were courteous to Krystyana, but at bedtime they paired off with other girls. After a few nights, I got to sleeping with Krystyana regularly even though there were quite a few I hadn’t sampled. I just didn't want her feelings hurt.
1104I looked up Angelo Muskarini, the Florentine walker.
1105“You have strange things going here, Sir Conrad.”
1106“How so?”
1107“You told me not to criticize your loom and spinning wheels. Your loom looks crude, but it makes more clothand faster-than any that I have ever seen. And your spinning wheels are amazing! They make a hundred times the thread that a distaff can!”
1108“Better than the wheels in Florence?”
1109“There are no spinning wheels in Florence, nor any in Flanders, either. This is a new thing under the sun!”
1110Huh? I’d thought that they had spinning wheels in the thirteenth century. Oh, well. “I'm glad that you approve. So what's so strange about our goings-on?”
1111“Because, Sir Conrad, you are doing everything else entirely wrong! You have the finest methods for spinning and weaving that I have ever seen, but you aren’t even sorting your wool! Your ideas of combing and carding are a joke, and no one here has ever heard of warping, or dyeing, or fulling!”
1112“Well, we’re new at this. Talk to Vitold and Ilya about any special tools you'll need and figure out what you'll need in the way of dyeing vats and so on. The count wants a dozen looms going by winter, which means a dozen of our six-station spinning wheels. We'll need enough of the rest of this stuff to keep them fed. How are you doing for dyes and other chemicals?”
1113“I have plenty for now, but with a dozen looms-”
1114“Figure out what you’ll need for a year and we'll place an order with Boris Novacek. I still owe him a favor.”
1115I spent some of my time watching the mill go up, although Vitold really didn’t need any help. Mostly I worked on the scale model of the dry mill.
1116The basement of that mill was to be eight yards deep and insulated with two yards of sawdust. It was to serve as an icehouse, a communal refrigerator. Come winter, two-thirds of its volume was to be packed with snow, the rest in storage shelves. According to my crude estimates, the snow should last at least twelve months. We would be able to store some of the vegetables and meat from the next harvest through the winter.
1117In external appearance, the dry mill looked like the wet mill, except the circular work shed was missing. The only attendant building was to house a threshing machine. The dry mill’s construction was lighter, because it didn't have to support twenty-five hundred tons of water.
1118Internally, it was designed quite differently. The ground floor had a huge, three-yard grindstone, which was turned by a shaft connected to a ten-yard solid wheel just below the turret. Four circles of carefully placed vertical pegs rose from the wheel, and on the shaft above it were eight matching rows of radial pegs. The shaft was offset by a yard from the center line of the mill. Between these sets of pegs was a movable lantern gear with sliding concave brass rollers to mate with both sets of pegs. By moving the lantern gear, the miller could get four different speeds, both forward and reverse.
1119The space between the gears and the stone was mostly taken up by twelve grain hoppers. Each had a chute at the bottom to direct grain to the hole in the top of the stone. Outside, a system of pulleys and dump buckets filled the hoppers.
1120One of the knights, Sir Vladimir, seemed to have some mechanical ability. He got interested in the model and started helping me with it. After we had worked together for a few hours, I asked, “What’s wrong between you guys and Krystyana?”
1121“Why, nothing. Everyone has been most polite to her.”
1122“You’ve been polite, but you haven't taken her to bed. 130 you think that I have some exclusive right to her?”
1123“No, it isn’t that. It's just-oh, I don't know.”
1124“But she’s the prettiest one there.”
1125“I know, but-well, it just wouldn’t seem right. She doesn't act like a peasant girl. You don't just grab a lady and drag her to your room-”
1126“I’ve never seen a wench here who needed dragging. Anyway, you know she isn't noble. Her father is a peasant right here in Okoitz.”
1127“I know, I know. But you’ve asked me and I've answered you, so let's let the matter drop,” he said. “Now, explain again why it is necessary for the rollers on the lantern gear to be able to slip sideways.”
1128After about a week of monogamy on my part, Krystyana sort of withdrew. I put this down to feminine moodiness and continued my sampling for a week.
1129Ilya the blacksmith returned with five men and fourteen pack mules loaded with hematite, a red iron oxide. A small placer mine some thirty miles away made a limited amount of bog ore available. Ilya had spent much of the winter preparing to make charcoal from the branches of the trees we had cut, but somehow I had never realized that he actually made his own iron out of ore and fuel.
1130To make charcoal, Ilya and his helpers cut and split wood, which he piled in a single huge stack. As soon as the weather broke and the ground thawed enough for digging, the stack was covered with a full yard of dirt. Only a small hole was left at the top and an even smaller one at the bottom. Then he lit the stack. Over the next few days, he dug sampling holes to see how the burning was progressing. When the wood was completely charred, he filled in all the holes, let the fire smother, and went off for iron ore.
1131“Got a hundred pairs of hinges that I promised people, Sir Conrad, plus I figure you’ll need some iron for that thing.” He gestured toward the half-completed mill.
1132“You’re right, Ilya. Later on we'll talk about a saw blade. I saw those axes you made. Nice work. I'm amazed that you made so many of them in only five weeks.”
1133“Five weeks? That didn’t take me five days! Those are the same axe heads we used last winter, only I cemented them. Cementation didn't change the shape of the iron bars I made into steel, and the old axe heads already looked like axe heads. I took the handles off and put them in the count's last pickling crock with plenty of charcoal and heated it up. Didn't go a whole week, though. A kid I had keeping the fire going fell asleep the third night, and the crock was cold in the morning. I still haven't found the bastard; he's been hiding from me. But those axe heads hardened up all right, so I guess it's okay.”
1134“Congratulations, Ilya. You have just invented case hardening. What you have is steel on the outside and iron on the inside. Not a bad thing for an axe.”
1135“Heh. Thought it might be something like that. This saw you want, does it have to be steel?”
1136“It sure does.”
1137“Then you better find me some more clay pots. There is not one left in Okoitz, and the cooks are not happy. Neither will be the count if he gets a taste for sauerkraut.”
1138“I know just the place. There’s a brass foundry in Cieszyn where they use a lot of fire clay. Some of the workers should be coming here in a few weeks to deliver fittings for the mill. I would have sent an accountant to them by now, but I think I need the count's permission to swear the kid in. Maybe you know him, Piotr Kulczynski.”
1139“Know him I That’s the bastard that let my fire go out. You're going to be shy one accountant if I find him!”
1140“Not a chance, Ilya. You hurt that kid and I’ll hurt you. Like I said, I need him. Anyway, he taught you something about steel, so call it even.”
1141“Well, seeing as how it’s you asking, I'll let the kid off. I'll be busy making iron for a month, but after that I'll need those crocks.”
1142Ilya actually made wrought iron in the same crude forge that he used for everything else. He layered charcoal on the bottom of his forge higher than the nozzle of his bellows. Then he carefully put lump ore on the side away from the bellows and more charcoal on the near side until the forge was heaped high.
1143He started a fire and worked the bellows gently for two hours, adding a mixture of fine ore and charcoal as the mass in the forge was consumed. Then he called for assistants, who worked the bellows hard. After three hours of this, constantly adding ore and charcoal, he dug into the burning mass with large pincers and pulled out a glowing spongy mass.
1144This was immediately placed on the anvil, and three burly men beat on it vigorously with sledgehammers. Ilya kept turning the mass so that it was shaped into a crude rod.
1145When the rod cooled, it was put back into the fire; another spongy lump was fished out, and then the process was repeated. Two men were still working the bellows and adding ore and charcoal.
1146Each rod was pulled and beaten and reheated four times before being set aside to cool. By the end of the day, six men working twelve hours had consumed forty kilos of ore and two hundred kilos of charcoal. But they had made less than ten kilos of wrought-iron bars.
1147“You know, Ilya, once we get the wet mill built, we’ll have machines to work the bellows and a trip-hammer to beat your iron. We'll build you a bigger forge, and you'll be able to make ten times the iron working alone.”
1148“Bellows that work themselves? Hammers that swing on their own accord? You might as well tell me that fishes can fly!”
1149“I know of one that does.”
1150“Sir Conrad, if you hadn’t been right about steel, I'd call you the greatest liar in Christendom. As it is, well, you tell me what you want and I'll make it. But I'll believe those hammers and bellows when I see them!”
1151Krystyana was still acting standoffish, so finally I asked her about it.
1152“Sir Conrad, it’s not that I'm putting you off, it's just… oh, you'd call it a superstition.”
1153“Try me, pretty girl.”
1154“Well, it’s something that Lady Richeza told me about.”
1155“Yes?”
1156“Well, she said that if you count the days after your… your time and sleep alone from the end of the first week to the middle of the third, you won’t get pregnant. I know it's silly, I know it's superstitious, but I don't want to get pregnant and I don't want to marry a peasant and I don't want to be old at twenty and dead at forty and-” She was in my arms, crying uncontrollably.
1157Once I got her calmed down, I said, “Don’t worry, pretty girl. You don't have to be anything that you don't want to be. As to this abstention during certain times of the month, well, in my country it's called the rhythm method, and the Pope has approved it. It works most of the time.”
1158She cried some more, and after that I settled down to a program of fifteen days a month with Krystyana and the rest of the time spreading myself around.
1159I had a model of the cloth factory built by the first of May. We were running out of room in the bailey, so I made it a threestory building, as high as the church.
1160The top floor, with a high, peaked roof, was filled with a dozen looms. The middle floor held the spinning wheels and the combing and carding equipment. The ground floor was for washing and dyeing, with additional space for storage. I added a treadmill-powered lift to carry materials up and down.
1161I wished that I could have done something about windows, but glass was hideously expensive. Even a few small glass windows would have cost more than the rest of the building put together. The lack of glass or decent artificial light was serious. It cut our available man-hours by a factor of three at least. Poland is at a high latitude. In the summer, it can be light for eighteen hours a day. But in the summer, except for two months after planting, most people had to spend most of their time in the fields.
1162In the winter, nothing could be done in the fields. There was often less than six hours of daylight, and that was useful only to those who worked outside or next to an open window. Oil lamps burning animal fat were hard to work by, smelly and expensive. The animals of the thirteenth century were skinny, and fat was scarce. In Cieszyn, a kilo of fat sold for twice the price of a kilo of lean meat.
1163Farming occupied six months out of the year. Two months in the late spring were available for other work, but without a good source of light the four winter months were largely useless.
1164Although electric lights were out of the question, kerosene lamps were possible. The world’s first oil wells were drilled in Poland by Ignacy Lukasiewicz, who built the first petrochemical plant and invented the kerosene lamp. But I saw no possibility of getting our technology to that level in the next five years.
1165Beeswax candles? It would take thirty candles to light the factory poorly. I estimated that it would take six hundred beehives to produce enough wax to keep them burning all winter.
1166In short, I was designing a factory that could be operational only two months out of the year.
1167When I explained the problem to the count, he solved it in moments in his own typical way. He simply told each of his 140 knights to send him a peasant girl or two from just after Easter to just before Christmas. The girls were paid in cloth, and everybody was happy. But I get ahead of myself.
1168Chapter Twenty
1169
1170Count Lambert returned on the morning of May 1, which was yet another holiday. With him were about thirty knights and a number of dignitaries, one of whom was Sir Stefan’s father. I thought it best to leave Lambert with his guests until I was summoned.
1171In the early afternoon I was watching an archery competition; the peasants were shooting at targets about fifty yards away with a skill that was about equal to that of modern archers.
1172Suddenly, Count Lambert was standing beside me. “Well, Sir Conrad, are you going to teach us the proper way to shoot arrows?”
1173“Not I, my lord. But I know a man who could.”
1174“Indeed? And who is this man?”
1175I told him the story of how Tadaos the boatman had shot the deer.
1176“A single arrow into a deer’s head at two hundred yards from a moving boat? You saw this yourself?”
1177“Yes, my lord, and helped him eat the venison.”
1178“Hmm. I could use such an archer to train others. Could you get him here?”
1179“I could write Father Ignacy and ask him to tell the boatman of your needs. Perhaps he will come.”
1180“Do so. I will affix my seal to the letter. Now then, I have talked to this Florentine cloth worker you sent me. Does he really know his trade?”
1181“I think so, my lord, but we won’t know until we see his cloth.”
1182“Hmm. You swore him to yourself. Would you transfer his allegiance to me?”
1183“Gladly, my lord. I engaged him for you. But could I ask a favor in return?”
1184“Name it.”
1185“There’s a boy here, Piotr Kulczynski. I would like him to swear to me.”
1186“Certainly, Sir Conrad, if the boy and his father are willing. In fact, as long as someone is not sworn to me, you really don’t need my permission. Even sworn, a man always has a right of departure, provided his debts are paid. What do you want with him?”
1187“He’s a bright kid, my lord, and has picked up accounting very quickly. I want him to keep an eye on some commercial interests I have in Cieszyn.”
1188“Do these commercial interests include ownership of the Pink Dragon Inn?”
1189“Yes, my lord. Do you object?”
1190“Not in the least. It’s just that some remarkable rumors have been circulating about your adventures in Cieszyn. Did you really seat one of my peasant girls at the head table in my brother's castle?”
1191“Yes, my lord. I’m sorry if I've offended you, but-”
1192“Sir Conrad, my only objection is that I wasn’t able to see the expression on his wife's face.” He laughed. “That bitch has always hated me.”
1193“Well, come along. I want to introduce you to my liege lord, and I want you to explain your mills and the new cloth factory.”
1194As we entered the castle, Sir Stefan was talking heatedly with his father. I couldn’t hear them, but twice he pointed at me. As my American friends would have put it, the shit was about to hit the fan.
1195Duke Henryk the Bearded was one of the most remarkable men I had ever met. He was almost seventy years old, and his face was cracked and wrinkled like old timber, yet his back was straight and strong. His thick white hair brushed his shoulders, and his thick white beard was huge. It was wider than his chest and extended below his sword belt.
1196But more important than his appearance was his-I don’t want to say aura, because that implies something mystical, and this was an immensely practical man-but a feeling of power was almost tangible about him, as if, had he decided to walk through a wall, the wall would have apologized and scrambled out of his way.
1197Even more impressive, though in a totally different way, was his son, who would eventually be called Henryk the Pious. Young Henryk was just over forty and approaching the height of his powers. He could read and write and did a lot of both-rare among the nobility. Whereas the father was a tough politician, the son was a prince, every centimeter of him. His bearing and his look and his tone of voice were a chant that said, “Duty, justice, order, and restraint; honor, vigor, and discipline.”
1198We looked each other in the eye, and I knew that this was a man I would follow into hell, fully confident that he could lead me out again. I had found Poland’s king and my own.
1199Henryk the Bearded looked at me and said, “So, you are Sir Conrad the Giant. I have heard much about you.”
1200“I hope nothing too bad, my lord.”
1201“Mixed. But all of it is impossible, so most of it is lies. Your loom works faster than anything the Walloons own. They brought nothing like your spinning wheels. Now, tell me about these mills you’re building.”
1202The mill tower was now up, the tank floors were in, and the circular shed was completed. Work was under way on the turret. With the five-story-tall structure and my two-meter models, I was able to explain what I was doing, yet their questions kept me hopping. Our two visitors might be statesmen and warriors by profession, but they were not stupid when it came to technical matters. They went over things point by point. almost as thoroughly as Vitold did.
1203After the mills, we started on the cloth factory. The looms and spinning wheels were already understood, and I referred them to Angelo the Florentine when they asked about the dyeing vats and the combing and carding equipment. They jumped on me when it came to the washing fine. After all, everybody understood washing.
1204“Why twelve tubs? Why not one big one?”
1205“A single big tub would have to be brass, with a fire under it. Using a dozen small tubs, only two tubs need to be heated. The rest can be of wood. Also, wool needs not only to be washed but to be rinsed several times. With a single tub, we would not only have to heat three tubs of water for each batch of wool, we would have to throw away a lot of cleanser with the rinse water.”
1206“Explain that.”
1207“We call this the reverse-flow system. The wool moves from north to south along the line of tubs. The water moves from south to north, overflowing from one tub to the next. The water comes in cold and clean and goes out cold and dirty. The wool comes in cold and dirty and goes out cold and clean.”
1208I could see that I wasn’t getting through.
1209“Let’s follow some wool as it goes through the tubs. Dirty wool is dumped into the first wooden tub, and a worker stirs it with a wooden fork. The water is only warm, and it's dirty. Most of the cleanser has been consumed, but some dirt is easily removed. Excess water goes out this drain, and fresher water flows in through this pipe from the second tank.”
1210“The wool is scooped up and into the second tub, and more raw wool is dumped into the first. In the second tub, the water is hotter and cleaner.”
1211“This goes on until the sixth tub, which is made of brass. It is set in stone, and there is a fire beneath it. The water is very hot. Cleanser is added here.”
1212“The seventh is the first rinse tub. The water is warm, and cleanser that is washed off the wool flows with the water into the sixth tub.”
1213“Tubs eight, nine, and ten are additional, progressively hotter rinse tubs. The eleventh tub is also of brass and is heated boiling hot.”
1214“The twelfth tub contains fresh, cold water. Its purpose is to cool the wool while warming the water before it flows into the boiling rinse tank.”
1215“The washing line is followed by these draining and drying racks.”
1216“Hmm. So the same water is used many times, and fuel is saved. Interesting.”
1217The reverse flow is one of those beautifully simple things that were invented remarkably late. It was first applied to heat exchangers in the 1930s and was Albert Einstein’s major contribution to engineering. Since then, it has been applied to hundreds of industrial processes.
1218“Sir Conrad, you keep saying cleanser. Aren’t you using soap or wood ashes?”
1219“Soap is a boiled mixture of ashes and grease. The wool already has grease on it. It is what we are trying to remove. Raw ashes have a lot of solid particles that would make the wool dirty.”
1220“Instead, we leach the ashes first. We put them in a barrel with a cloth bottom and run hot water through them. The water that drips out contains sodium hydroxide, lye, which is a stronger cleanser.”
1221“So there is a worker at each tub?”
1222“Probably not, my lord. Working all day over the two boiling tubs would be arduous. We plan to have each worker follow a given batch of wool up the line.”
1223This grilling went on for hours before Duke Henryk called for beer and I could slake my very dry throat. We were seated in the count’s hall.
1224“Sir Conrad, as you have described the washing line, it seems to me that it can wash more wool than your wheels can spin.”
1225“True, my lord. It will be free much of the time for other things. Washing clothes, for example.”
1226“You have explained what you -are doing but not why you are doing it.”
1227“Why make cloth, my lord? So that people can wear it!”
1228“No. I mean, you are a foreigner among us. What do you want? Is it money?”
1229“I have plenty of money, my lord. More than I want for myself. And I am not a foreigner. I know that my accent is strange to you. I grew up in… another place. But all of my ancestors were Poles, and I am a Pole, and this is my country.”
1230“Indeed. I am told that you may not discuss your place of birth, and I will not press you. But why are you doing what you are doing?”
1231“Because Poland is divided and backward and weak! Because our people are cold and hungry and illiterate! They die like snowflakes touching a river.”
1232“And because the Mongols-the Tartars-are coming! They want to kill all our people and turn our fields into grazing lands for their war-horses!”
1233“Calm yourself, Sir Conrad. It is good that you are concerned with the lot of our people. These mills, these looms of yours, they are good things. I will see that their use is encouraged. But as to the Tartars, why, Genghis Khan died five years ago, so why worry about them?”
1234“Genghis had sons, and his sons have sons. They will come.”
1235“When?”
1236“In nine years. A little less than that.”
1237“Hmm. You know their plans so far in advance?”
1238“They will come, my lord.”
1239“If you believe that, then why are you wasting your time on these peaceful pursuits? Why are you not building weapons of war?”
1240“I will build weapons, my lord. But who will use them? In Poland now it takes a hundred peasants and workers to support a single fighting man, a knight. When the Mongols come, they will come with every man in their tribes under arms. By numbers alone they will overwhelm us. My machines will give all the people the time and the weapons to train for war. Poland can survive only with a citizen army!”
1241“You would arm commoners? That would upset the social stability.”
1242“You are right, my lord. But there is nothing as stable as a dead man. He just lies there and doesn’t move at all.”
1243“You are a strange man, Sir Conrad the Giant.”
1244And so I was dismissed. As I walked away, I knew that I had blown it. I had gotten so wrapped up in technical details that I had forgotten what it was that I should have been trying to accomplish. I was like the engineer who became so involved in fighting alligators that he forgot that his job was to drain the swamp.
1245It didn’t matter what the duke thought of my mills and factory. They were already being built, and he would not be likely to stop them, no matter what he thought.
1246The important thing I needed was his approval on a grant of land. Without my own land, everything I had done so far would be trivial.
1247And I had come across like a lunatic prophet of doom’ I couldn't have done worse if I'd been carrying a sign proclaiming the end of the world.
1248I was in a black mood when I learned that the Krakowski brothers had arrived with a packtrain loaded with my brass mill fittings. City folk didn’t pay much attention to most of the country holidays. When there was work to be had, they worked. The collars were so big that they had to be slung between two mules each, like sedan chairs.
1249I called Vitold, Ilya, and Angelo away from a sort of soccer game and introduced them to the Krakowski brothers. We discussed our mutual needs: the fittings for the dry mill, tubs for washing and dyeing, axles and bushings for wheelbarrows.
1250Fortunately, the Krakowski brothers understood my technical drawings, and I had a thick stack of parchment for them to take back.
1251It took Vitold a long time to grasp what a wheelbarrow was all about, but he agreed to make a gross as soon as the sawmill was done. They would help in getting in the harvest.
1252Then there were the clay crocks for Ilya’s steelmaking. The brothers agreed to make them but insisted on understanding the cementation process. They already had the clay and the charcoal and the ovens. They were impressed by Ilya's axes and wanted to get into the cementation business themselves. I gave them my blessing.
1253They had the idea of casting brass into molded clay forms and a hint from me about stacking up small clay forms and casting many objects at once. They were already selling belt buckles and door hinges by the gross.
1254I called over Piotr Kulczynski and swore him to fealty before the group. It took a while to make the brothers understand that Piotr was not their boss-they could run their business as they saw fitbut they were expected to keep him informed on all financial transactions, and he would be reporting to me.
1255It was understood that Piotr was to live in my room at the inn and keep the inn’s books as well. I gave him a letter to the innkeeper confirming this.
1256Finally, Thom Krakowski brought up a delicate subject. Despite the fact that they were working for me, I had agreed that they should get one-twelfth of the profits of their work. He therefore felt that I should buy the present fittings and the order I had just placed, just to get it on the books so that they could figure up their bonus. I would get much of this back as my profits for ownership.
1257I had to agree that this was fair but stipulated that they would be paid from the surplus from the inn. This was agreed on.
1258Their bill came to 19,500 pence.
1259It was growing dark, so I invited all present to a quick meal in the count’s kitchen. We were halfway through the meal when Lambert came in.
1260“Sir Conrad! Where the devil have you been? There was a high place for you at supper that stood empty!”
1261“I’m sorry, my lord. I didn't know that I was invited. The brass mill fittings came in, and there was much to discuss.”
1262“I saw the brass. I’ve never seen so much brass in one place in my life! You paid for all this?”
1263“Well, yes, my lord. When I left for Cieszyn, you were distracted with the planting, so I thought it best to take my own money along.”
1264“But you agree that the mills are mine?”
1265“Of course, my lord.”
1266“Then I owe you your expenses. What were they?”
1267“The present fittings, plus those for the dry mill, the tubs for the factory and the dye, the mules, and the Florentine came to… uh… about twenty-three thousand pence.”
1268“Twenty-three… Come talk with me in my chambers, Sir Conrad.”
1269When we got there, he said, “Twenty-three thousand pence is a huge amount of money, Sir Conrad.”
1270“Yes, my lord.”
1271“Hmm. You wouldn’t wager on your chess playing. Would you wager on your mill? I would bet you that your wet mill doesn't work. Double or nothing. Do you agree?”
1272“If you wish, my lord. But I’m stealing your money. The mill will work.”
1273“We shall see. For now, come to the hall. People want to meet you. I should mention that throughout supper Sir Stefan and his father, Baron Jaraslav, have been damning you to all and sundry for a warlock and a witch! I believe they’ve called you everything but a Christian.”
1274“Sir Stefan? But why isn’t he on guard duty?”
1275“One of his father’s other knights is doing his stint so he can be there to blacken your name. I don't like my vassals acting this way. I know it's not your fault, except had you been there they wouldn't have been so blatant about it. What the duke thinks is anybody's guess.”
1276As we entered, Lambert whispered, “Here we go. Keep your temper!”
1277As we walked into the hall, conversation was suddenly muted. People had been drinking and socializing after a feast. Now half of them were staring at me, and the rest were obviously trying not to.
1278Bluff it through! I thought, shouting to myself. You can do it, you can do it-I think I can, I think I can, I think I can… Head high, smiling, I swaggered in at Lambert’s side, almost convincing myself that I wasn't. scared.
1279Sir Vladimir saved me. Cutting through the crowd, he said, “Sir Conrad, what’s this I hear about your attacking six thugs from the whoremasters guild and killing the lot of them?”
1280“Just lies, Sir Vladimir. There were only three of them, and I believe two lived.”
1281A knight I hadn’t met said, “You were completely unarmed when you attacked?”
1282“Well, yes. You see, there wasn’t much time. A friend was in trouble, and had I gone back for my sword, well, who could tell what would have happened?”
1283“A friend of the whoremasters guild? Was she pretty?” a third knight said.
1284“Hardly. It was a he. The innkeeper of the Pink Dragon, although his wife was also being abused.”
1285“But how was it possible for one unarmed man to defeat three with knives?” the second knight persisted. An interested crowd was gathering. Except for Lambert’s ladies, this was an all-male group. They were all professional fighters, so by their standards anybody talking about bloodshed and mayhem had to be all right. I was winning!
1286“It wasn’t three at once,” I said. “I was able to get them one at a time.”
1287“But even one man is hard to believe.”
1288“Okay. Hang up your cloak and I’ll show you.” As I've mentioned, I'm no black belt, but I did learn a few simple throws in the service. With the sheath on his knife, we went through a few judo throws in slow motion.
1289I didn’t actually reenact my fight in the hall of the Pink Dragon. I wasn't sure how these knights would react to kneeing someone in the groin, and I wanted to play the good guy. The first time you find yourself lifted into the air in judo is a memorable event, and it looks impressive. Three or four of them lined up to try me. The others were watching and drinking. I was becoming socially acceptable.
1290“You see,” I said to a fellow in blue who was lying at my feet. “Had I thrown you down hard, you would be momentarily stunned. I could do all sorts of things to you. I could stamp on your chest, for example.”
1291“Try me,” a voice said from behind me.
1292I turned to find myself facing Duke Henryk the. Bearded.
1293“My lord it… it doesn’t seem fitting,” I stammered. Good God. He was my boss's boss, and he looked to be seventy years old. Not your usual judo partner!
1294“Try me,” he repeated, holding his knife high with his right hand.
1295“Yes, my lord.” Taking it slow and watching carefully to see that I didn’t hurt him, I started through the same throw that I'd shown the others.
1296“Hold!” he said. I froze.
1297I felt a sharp prick at my ribs. Looking down, I saw that the duke held a dagger in his left hand. Where it had come from, I didn’t know.
1298“What do you think now, Sir Conrad?”
1299“My lord, I think that had I met you in that dark hallway, I would be a dead man.”
1300The room exploded in laughter, but it was laughter of a friendly sort. It was no dishonor to be bested by one’s superior.
1301Contented, the duke sheathed his knives-one in his boot-and walked away.
1302The evening went well, I thought. Sir Stefan stayed to one corner of the room with his father and a half dozen knights. Sir Vladimir told me that they were the baron’s liegemen. No hope of support there! I avoided them and circulated.
1303Conversation that evening centered mostly on hunting and hawking, so I didn’t have much to contribute. Krystyana was a perfect hostess, and a lot of her newfound poise was rubbing off on the other girls, especially Janina, Natalia, Annastashia, and Yawalda. They were treated cordially, but they got a lot of side glances.
1304Later I found myself standing with Lambert and the duke.
1305“It’s an interesting thought you've brought up, Sir Conrad,” the duke said. “That it is possible for an unarmed man to defeat one who is armed.”
1306“My lord, please understand that I am not a master of unarmed combat. I’m hardly an apprentice. I certainly believe that in a fight one is much better off armed. It is just that a warrior should remain a warrior even if he's naked.”
1307“Interesting. You say you believe the obvious. Is there anyone who doesn’t?”
1308“I’ve met one, my lord. He insisted that weaponry was unimportant compared to mental attitude and training. He was a master of the martial arts, a black belt from Japan.”
1309“Ali, yes. It is said that you have traveled widely.”
1310“Yes, my lord. Perhaps more widely than you can imagine. But I made a vow—”
1311“I know, son, and I won’t push you. Still, a man must think. You, Lambert. Where do you think our Sir Conrad has come from?”
1312“My lord, I had not intended to speak on this, but since you ask, I must answer. Know that I have been watching this man carefully since Christmas. I have pondered long as to his origins, and I am confident that my guess is the right one.”
1313“Then what is it?” the duke asked.
1314“I think that he is an emissary from Prester John, the Christian king of that most distant and fabulous empire.”
1315Naturally, I was astounded by this. I’m not sure that I kept my jaw from sagging. Prester John!
1316“Remarkable,” the duke said.
1317“Think about it, my lord. We have here a deadly knight who is distressed by the sight of blood. A master of the technic arts who didn’t know how a smith makes iron. A man who treats warriors and children just the same. Where else could he have come from but the most civilized empire in the world?”
1318“Sir Stefan would say that he came from the Devil,” the duke noted.
1319“There has been bad blood between them, my lord. I have explained”
1320“So you have. But why would Prester John send a man to us?”
1321“Perhaps because of the Mongols,” Lambert said. “It is said that they have conquered half the world. Perhaps they press him and he is in need of aid.”
1322“Then why didn’t he send an emissary instead of an engineer?”
1323“Perhaps he did, my lord. Whatever Conrad’s instructions were, well, I've explained the gist of his oath.”
1324“So you have. Well, Sir Conrad. It grows late. We are hunting tomorrow. Will you join us?”
1325“I would be honored, my lord.” I don’t like blood sports, but hunting at least has the virtue of putting meat on the table. Anyway, when your boss's boss invites you, you go.
1326The duke and Lambert drifted away.
1327We were to hunt for wild boar and bison, the misnamed buffalo of my American friends. There were, of course, wild bison in thirteenth century Poland. They still exist in modern times on carefully tended game preserves.
1328I sent word to the Krakowski brothers to go home and take Piotr Kulczynski with them.
1329The next morning at dawn, I was on horseback with armor and spear, along with two dozen other knights. The duke sent me back to get my shield, since this was also part of the paraphernalia required.
1330As we rode out, young Henryk dropped back from the front column and rode at my side. “A remarkable coat of arms, Sir Conrad.”
1331“Indeed, my lord?”
1332“A white eagle on a red field. That is very similar to the insignia of the dukes of Poland.”
1333“Consider it a symbol of Poland, my lord.”
1334“And the eagle wears a crown. Do you claim to be a king?”
1335“No, my lord. I’m saying that Poland needs a king.”
1336“Hmm, ’Poland is not yet dead.”' He read my motto. “Are you saying that Poland is dying?”
1337“It’s lying in a dozen pieces, my lord. That's a fair start. ”
1338“You know that my father and I are working to unite those pieces.”
1339“I know, my lord. When you weld them back together, I will change my motto.”
1340He laughed. “Done, Sir Conrad! In ten years I’ll watch you paint out that motto yourself.”
1341“Gladly, my lord. But do it in nine.”
1342We stopped for an early dinner and then spread out at twohundred-yard intervals to sweep through the forest, driving the animals toward the mountains. Lambert was on the far right, and my station was next to him, with Sir Vladimir to my left. They had deliberately put me between two experienced hunters, which was fine by me.
1343After a few hours I found myself facing a large bull bison a hundred yards away. Anna immediately broke into a gallop. Anna was trained to pass to the right of a charging knight so that one’s spear went over the horse's neck at the knight to the left, but it was easier to use a spear on the right if one had to strike downward. I signaled her to pass on the left. The bison charged at us, not to slightly miss, as a knight would, but directly at us, to ram!
1344I was bracing for a crash when Anna abruptly sidestepped at the last instant. Surprised, I managed to get a slashing cut into the animal’s shoulder. It was bleeding, but it was not mortally wounded.
1345The bison had had enough and took off at a dead run, angling in front of Lambert. Anna, of course, raced behind it.
1346“After it, Sir Conrad!” Lambert shouted, and blew a signal on his horn, which I didn’t understand. I'd been given a hunting horn, but I didn't know how to use it.
1347Anna was faster than the wounded bison, but he was built lower to the ground than we were, and he knew it; he charged through the thickets and under low branches. We lost sight of him.
1348I found tracks along a game trail and followed them for half an hour. By now we were into mountainous country and the trail seemed to lead between two cliffs, about two hundred yards apart, into a valley beyond. The valley contained about a square kilometer of flat land and was devoid of bison, wounded or otherwise. We worked our way up the sloping walls toward the bald mountains above, but it was soon obvious that I had lost the animal.
1349I was tired, and Anna probably needed rest, although she didn’t show it. I dismounted, took a long drink of water from my canteen, and gave the rest to her. I sat down and fell another yard into a hole.
1350It was not actually a hole but a cave, and the floor sloped downward at a forty-five-degree angle. I was sliding on my back, headfirst into the darkness. My shoulder hit an obstruction. I yelled and flipped over and skidded on my armored belly, feet first, for about twenty yards and then hit water. Ile cave was narrow, only about a yard across, and had I still been going headfirst, I might have ended my story right here, by drowning.
1351As it was, I was able to wedge myself between the walls and work myself out before I ran out of air. Climbing up in slippery armor was a miserable job, but I managed it. I looked around. It was not a natural cave at all but an abandoned mine’
1352When I finally got out to greet my anxious horse, I threw myself on the ground, exhausted.
1353Shortly, I heard a horn blowing from the entrance of the valley. I got up, managed to get a squeak out of the horn slung on Anna’s saddle, and then sat down again, carefully avoiding the hole.
1354Count Lambert rode up. “Sir Conrad, what are you doing up here?”
1355“Trying my hand at drowning, my lord.”
1356“Drowning on a mountainside with no water in sight? By God, you are all wet! Another of your arcane arts?”
1357“No, my lord. I simply fell down a mine shaft.”
1358“Ali, yes! I remember that shaft. It was dug in my grandfather’s time. They used to dig coal out of it and burned limestone from that outcropping to make mortar.”
1359“The coal seam ran out?”
1360“No, there’s plenty of coal down there. But when you have two men mining and thirty more passing water buckets, there's not much profit in it. That mine is full of water.”
1361“I noticed, my lord.”
1362“Well, we got your bison two miles to the east. You followed a day-old trail up here. I gather that you don’t know much about hunting.”
1363“No, my lord. I’ve never hunted before in my life.”
1364“There are a lot of things that you don’t know much about. Since we're alone, it's time we discussed them. I'm talking about Krystyana.”
1365“What about her?”
1366“Understand that playing a joke on my sister-in-law is one thing. Encouraging a peasant girl to take on the airs of the nobility is quite another. Aside from the offense this gives my other vassals-yes, and my liege lord! Do you realize that Henryk asked me why I had a noblewoman working like a servant?-aside from that, have you thought about what’s to become of her? Is she going to be content to settle down as a peasant's wife?”
1367“No, my lord. She wouldn’t be.”
1368“Do you plan to marry her yourself?”
1369“No, my lord.”
1370“Then why have you encouraged her to rise so far above her station?”
1371“Well, she’s a good girl, an intelligent girl who wanted to better herself, and I didn't think-”
1372“That’s just it! You didn't think! What's more, it's spreading. Three or four of the others are starting to imitate her. You started this, Sir Conrad. What do you plan to do about it?”
1373“I don’t know, my lord.” He was right, of course. I'd set the poor kid up for a nasty fall. I'm good with technical stuff, but I am not a wizard when it comes to people problems. Best to change the subject. “You know, if there is still coal in this mine, I could build pumps to empty the water. We could make mortar here again.”
1374“Ah! I see where you are leading. That would take you out of Okoitz, and you could take the girls with you. Well, why not? You’ve given my workmen projects that will take a year or two to complete, and it's time you had your own lands, anyway. What if I gave you this valley and the land for a mile around it?”
1375“A mile, my lord?” God! He was giving me some eighteen square kilometers of land!
1376“You are right, of course. This soil is rocky and poor. You’ll need more. The top of that mountain is the boundary of my brother's land. We'll make that your southern boundary. We'll extend you to Sir Miesko's land on the east and to Baron Jaraslav's on the north and west. That will give you lands about six miles across. You should be able to eke out a decent living on it, in sheep if nothing else. In return, let's see. I'll want you to come to Okoitz for two days a month to oversee your improvements there. And if you get this mine working, I'll want a hundred mule loads of mortar a year. Agreed?”
1377“Yes, my lord. You are most generous!”
1378“Good, then it’s settled. Leave tomorrow and take the girls with you. Now let's return to the hunting party.”
1379“Will the duke approve your grant?”
1380“That is a very good question., I don’t know.”
1381I had taken first blood on the expedition, which was apparently some sort of honor even though Sir Vladimir had actually killed the bison. All told, the knights took four bison and six wild pigs.
1382The meal that night was braised pork-sort of a shish kebob-and bison stew.
1383Because of the first-blood thing, I was seated at the high table between Lambert and the duke. I was the only mere knight up there. All the rest were at least barons. Baron Jaraslav sat to the duke’s left.
1384The high table was just that. It was a third of a yard higher than the rest of the collapsible trestle tables in the hall. We had a correspondingly higher bench to sit on.
1385Krystyana and company did the serving. Once the meal was well under way, Lambert announced that he was minded to grant me a fief but that it required the duke’s consent to be binding. While Lambert spoke, Sir Stefan was in the crowd, talking angrily to the knights at either side. Apparently, he had again found a substitute for guard duty. Then Baron Jaraslav began muttering in the duke's ear.
1386Lambert outlined the proposed boundaries of the fief. As he finished, Stefan struck his stein on the table so hard that it shattered, spraying beer over a dozen knights.
1387“You’d grant that black warlock lands adjoining ours? Damn you!” he shouted.
1388The room was suddenly totally quiet.
1389Lambert turned and struck Stefan with an icy stare. I’d seen many facets to Lambert's personality, but never before that of a cold, deadly killer. “You would raise your voice to your father's liege lord?” Lambert asked in the silence. There were swords in his voice.
1390“I—I spoke rashly, my lord.”
1391“Yes, you did.”
1392“I… apologize, my lord.” Stefan knew he was in trouble. He came from his bench and walked stiffly to the front of Lambert’s table. He went to his knees and made a full Slavic bow, with forehead touching the rushes on the floor. “I regret my words and beg forgiveness, my lord.”
1393“Sir Stefan, this is the second time your temper has offended me. A true knight knows his place and his duty at all times. He does not give way to fits of temper. You need some cooling down. Perhaps some additional meditation in the evening air will help. I extend your tour of guard duty by an additional three months, from now until Michaelmas. On the night shift!”
1394“Go now and stand your post.”
1395Sir Stefan rose stiffly. “Yes, my lord.” He left without a word. The room was silent after he left.
1396“Well,” the duke said after a bit. “Returning to the matter of my consent of this grant, I must think on it. The thing is perhaps being pushed too quickly, but you will have my answer before morning. For now, Lambert, can you provide music?”
1397The peasant band had been waiting in the kitchen and was soon performing. The music didn’t help me a bit. I've never been much good at waiting.
1398I couldn’t help overhearing Baron Jaraslav's advice and comments to the duke.
1399“To allow evil into our own ranks… foreigners taking the lands of our fathers… worse than the Duke of Mazovia inviting in the Knights of the Cross…” The duke’s replies were inaudible, but my stomach tightened and I wasn't able to eat much. I drank more than I should have, but I stayed on beer so as not to get too drunk,
1400When the meal ended and the tables were being taken down, Baron Jaraslav and the duke went to the duke’s chambers.
1401“I think it doesn’t look good,” Lambert said to me. “Perchance I erred in punishing Sir Stefan, but, damn, a lord has to maintain discipline.”
1402“I appreciate your aid, my lord. If this doesn’t work out, perhaps we'll think of something else.”
1403“I’ve thought on simply having you develop that mine on my own lands, just as you are building the mills. We could work out some informal arrangement. But it would border on my deliberately circumventing the wishes of my liege lord.”
1404The knights who had been on guard duty at Okoitz had learned the waltz and polka and were demonstrating them, with the ladies’ help, to our guests. They called me to join them, but I was too tight. It almost hurt to smile. During a lull in the music a page summoned me to the duke's chambers.
1405With a profoundly acid stomach and no Alka-Seltzer due for seven hundred years, I followed him up the steps.
1406On entering, I bowed low.
1407“Sit down, boy. I have things to ask you. First, I want to know more about this guise. Whom did you make this vow to and where can I find him?”
1408“He is Father Ignacy Sierpinski, at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow, my lord.”
1409“I will talk to this Father Ignacy. My second question is, Why do you want this land? From what I’ve heard, you know as little of farming as you do of hunting.”
1410“I want the land so I can build an industrial base.”
1411“A what?”
1412“Hear me out, my lord. You have asked me why I wasn’t building weapons. I intend to build them. I can make armor that no arrow can possibly penetrate. I can make swords as good as the one I carry. Have you seen what it can do?”
1413“I’ve heard stories. Go on.”
1414“I can build weapons that roar like thunder, strike like lightning, and kill your enemies half a mile away.”
1415“And I intend to make these arms and armor by the thousands. By the hundreds of thousands if I can.”
1416“A hundred thousand suits of armor? Why, I doubt if there are fifty thousand knights in all of Poland.”
1417“Not the knights, my lord, the peasants.”
1418“And just how do you suppose that a peasant could afford armor?”
1419“Obviously they can’t, my lord. The arms will have to be supplied to them.”
1420“Do you expect me to pay for this?”
1421“Of course not, my lord. I will have to do that myself.”
1422“I know that you are wealthy, Sir Conrad. But even your wealth could not equip a hundred men, much less a hundred thousand.”
1423“I said I would make the weapons, not buy them. The money I have will get me started. After that, I will have to come up with salable products to meet expenses. Mortar and bricks, certainly. Perhaps pottery. Cookware, pots and pans. Maybe even glass. At this point I am not sure of specifics, but I know it can be done.”
1424“Very well. If we assume that you really can build such arms and that the peasants will wear them, it is still useless. A mob of peasants, no matter how armed, is still a mob. Fighting men could cut them up regardless of weapons. Believe me. I’ve seen it too many times.”
1425“Training is necessary, of course. But techniques exist that can turn a bunch of farmers into a fighting unit in four months’ time. I've been through it myself, my lord.”
1426“Indeed. What does all this have to do with my original question? Why do you want that land?”
1427“I need to have someplace to do these things. I can’t do it in the cities. The guilds would never permit me the innovations that I will have to introduce.”
1428“You did well enough with the guilds of Cieszyn. You abolished one and have another louting to you.”
1429“My lord, that business with the whoremasters guild was simply stupidity on their part. I never wanted anything to do with them. As to the bell casters, they were only three brothers who were starving to death. I wouldn’t have that kind of luck in Cracow.”
1430“Why not?”
1431“I can’t do it here. These people are primarily farmers. I need fulltime craftsmen.”
1432“I see. You are dismissed, Sir Conrad.”
1433Shaking slightly, I went back down to the party and drained two mugs of beer.
1434Shortly, I saw Lambert being escorted to the duke’s chambers. A thorough man, the duke.
1435The party was breaking up. It must have been approaching midnight, because I saw Sir Vladimir stumble out to relieve Sir Stefan. He hadn’t been at the feast, and from the looks of him he had slept in his armor.
1436The duke came down and looked at me. “There is more to gain than to lose. I’ll be watching you, boy, but you can have it.”
1437I came close to fainting.
1438Privately and somewhat curtly, the count informed five adolescent girls that they were leaving with me, the ones he thought were acting above their station in life. That night Krystyana was happy and excited about the coming adventure. She didn’t realize that she was being thrown out.
1439I didn’t regret my actions. I intended to raise a million bright kids “above their stations,” and damn these Dark Age rules!
1440Yet personally, I was somewhat sad. I had been happy at Okoitz, but my job there was done. Good things must end, and perhaps the future would not be so bad.
1441For a penniless immigrant who had arrived only six months before, I had done fairly well. We now had the start of a decent school system, the beginnings of a textile industry, and the glimmerings of an industrial base.
1442If the seeds I’d brought worked out, we had the makings of an agricultural revolution.
1443We had steel, a fairly efficient brass works, and a profitable if embarrassing inn.
1444And now I had a hundred square kilometers of land to work with, land that would someday be the industrial heart of Poland.
1445It was a magnificent challenge, but still, leaving is a sad thing.
1446Interlude Three
1447
1448Tom pressed the HOLD button.
1449“Enough for today. They’re waiting the banquet on us, but I'd hate to make them hold the ballet.”
1450“Okay,” I said. “But first tell me what went wrong.”
1451“Wrong with what?”
1452“With Conrad’s plans. He seems to be an intelligent, competent engineer. He had the backing of the authorities. He had raw materials and a good work force. Where did he fail?”
1453“What makes you think he failed?”
1454“Well, he had to fail! He’s trying to start the industrial revolution five centuries too early, which obviously didn't happen.”
1455“Ah, the catch is in that word ’obviously.' Son, I've been showing you this record for a reason. You know that subjectively I'm over eight hundred years old. There are limits to what even our medics can accomplish. You are ninety now, and I think you're mature enough to get involved with the firm's decision-making processes.”
1456“But decisions shouldn’t be made without complete information, and for us there's never a reason for anything to be rushed. Time, after all, is our stock in trade. Let's go eat.”
1457“But-”
1458“But nothing! You want to keep the dancers waiting?”
1459As we left for the banquet hall, Tom put his hand on my shoulder and said, “What tickles me is the way Conrad keeps on talking about building socialism while at the same time taking all of the actions a nineteenth-century capitalist would approve of. Buying businesses, making them profitable, reinvesting the money…”