He swung open the kitchen door, and the merriment subsided at his appearance, though, by the looks on the three women’s faces, it was likely due to their not wanting to share the cause of the laughter with a mere male.
“Good morning, Yozef,” said Maera, smiling. Anarynd only nodded, her face still lit from the laughter. Mirramel bobbed her head, the only version of a curtsey she could manage while breastfeeding both Aeneas and her own daughter at the same time. The idea of a woman bare from the waist up and feeding two babies didn’t strike the islanders as peculiar.
“I won’t ask what was so funny—you might tell me,” said Yozef, bringing on a burst of giggling.
Only then did he notice Serys Clithrow, who, like Mirramel, had been widowed by the battle of Moreland City. Serys served as cook for the household and was busy frying salted coney meat (aka bacon) and pulling a pan of biscuits out of the woodburning stove.
7th Hour
“All right, Yozef, it’s time for your writing,” announced Maera. “You have a full day planned. It’s seventh hour now, and you may not get time later. Remember, you meet with the glassblowers at eighth hour.”
New child or not, her own activities or not, Maera continued to keep a schedule for Yozef, something she’d started when they married and moved to Abersford. He found it both helpful and annoying.
She knew the precise time by the pendulum timepiece hanging on the kitchen wall. Her parents had given her this expensive present years ago, but it ticked too loudly for Yozef to want it in the bedroom. Made by skilled craftsmen on Landolin, the closest continent to Caedellium, the clock face showed the twenty-four hours of an Anyar day, though the symbols depicted one of the Landolin dialects and not Caedelli.
Maera’s pendulum clock was indicative of the more sophisticated timepieces he’d seen, although these appeared mainly in abbeys, official sites such as registrar offices and the Keelan clan headquarters, some town and village clock towers, and homes of the more well-to-do Keelanders. The rest of the people kept time by listening to abbey bells, if the listener was close enough to hear, and by consulting various versions of water clocks, hourglasses, and even sundials for the daylight hours.
Anyar had an advantage, in that the axial tilt responsible for differences in seasons was much smaller for Anyar than on Earth, leading to less distinct seasons. This resulted in year-round cropping on the farms, though the selection of specific crops varied within the year, and less variation in the length of daylight. A BBC sword-and-sandals series Yozef had watched on TV had mentioned that the Romans used twelve hours each of daylight and night, no matter the season. That led to winter hours of 45 minutes and summer hours of 75 minutes—oddly inefficient for the supposedly practical Romans, Yozef had thought at the time. In contrast, Caedellium had the same relative latitude as Panama, and with the lesser axial tilt, the length of daylight and night hours varied by only a few minutes. The same relative consistency in the sun’s position as it crossed the sky in daylight made sundials more reliable than on Earth.
As for the average Keelander, farmers and ranchers needed little precise timekeeping, because their lives revolved around sunrise to sunset, while people in towns and villages listened to local bells and used the sun’s position in daylight to judge time.
Pocket watches were known but expensively imported from Landolin.
Despite different methods of keeping time in Keelan, variations occurred in a single system, with the abbeys maintaining consistency across the province. Yozef didn’t realize that this was not the norm for other clans, until he began interacting more outside Keelan.
Not only did differences exist in when to start counting the twenty-four hours, there were also differences in the frequency of bell rings, whether hours remained constant or varied with the season, whether a standard applied for the entire province, and whether the clan kept a formal time.
All of which led to Yozef’s insistence on island-wide standards and the topic of his first session outside the Kolsko property on this day.
Yozef’s daily writing schedule had been reduced because of all of his other commitments, but Maera scheduled it for an hour three times a sixday. Today, he picked up where he had left off two days previously, in the middle of a chapter titled “Carbene Complexes” from a textbook on organometallic chemistry, a subject he remembered thinking interesting at the time he took the course, though in writing down what his memory recalled, he couldn’t account for his prior interest. He finished the chapter and had moved on to organometallic reaction mechanisms when Maera rescued him by reminding him he needed to leave for Caernford and a meeting with workers from a glassblowing shop.
8th Hour
Yozef left the house, mounted Seabiscuit, and neared his destination when he heard St. Tomo’s bell ring once. It had taken him six minutes to reach the newly developing Caernford industrial park, a planned expanded version of his shops in Abersford. He couldn’t have been more than four minutes past the bell when he walked into the glassblowing shop. There, he met the three workers scheduled to present their latest results in making standardized hourglasses.
The project resulted from one of a seemingly endless parade of ideas occurring to Yozef, most of which he now turned over to craftsmen and left it to them to figure out how to make the ideas happen. This especially applied in cases where he had a concept in mind, but his enhanced memory lacked details on that particular subject. In the case of hourglasses, the Caedelli needed mechanisms for fighting units to maintain matching times. There simply weren’t enough pocket watches, even the clunkier ones most commonly owned on Caedellium, to outfit more than the leaders of a hundred men or more.
The only solution he could see was to produce small and accurate-enough hourglasses that could be carried by horseback or wagon. He initially worried that time kept by a stationary commander might differ from that of men ordered to ride hard to a destination. Empirical tests proved the differences in times between stationary and moving hourglasses were not significant enough to be a problem.
Yozef had turned over to the workmen the task of producing two types of hourglasses, one for one hour and one for ten minutes. Any need for coordination would have to rely on multiples of those two times. For example, if two units needed to attack at the same time in one hour and twenty minutes, but the units remained out of visual sight and lacked any other coordinating mechanisms, the timing would depend on one flow of a one-hour hourglass and two of a ten-minute hourglass. Until they had access to more mechanical and portable timepieces, the hourglasses would have to do as stopgaps for daylight hours. Today Yozef would witness the results.
“We quickly gave up trying to blow identical chambers,” said the lead worker. “We had no way to control the variation so any two hourglasses would go through a single flow cycle in the same time. We know you said you wanted matching times, which wasn’t possible, no matter what we tried. However, we think we came close enough for your purposes. The solution was obvious once it occurred to us. We wouldn’t make the chambers identical, so we adjusted the amount of the flowing material for a specific chamber and the size of the channel connecting the upper and lower chambers.
“Once this occurred to us, it went quickly. We simply made hourglasses with one end open, adjusted the amount of flow material to match the time it took to empty the upper chamber, compared to a pendulum clock standard, then sealed the top reservoir. We found that among the different flow materials commonly used, ground marble filtered for size gave the best results.”
The worker showed Yozef two sets of six hourglasses, each of the two types about three inches tall, with different diameters. The set of more slender hourglasses was fastened to a board, and the worker turned them all over at the same time, starting when the pendulum clock’s hand moved to a new marking. They stood watching until all of the ground marble had run out of the six upper chambers. The difference in emptying amounted to only a few grains, hardly more than a second, Yozef estimated. As the chambers emptied, he l
ooked at the clock just as the hand moved to a marker ten minutes from the starting point.
“As you can see, Ser Kolsko, the six function almost identically. We also compared them to one another when some are stationary and others move by wagon or horse. We do see a small difference, but only a matter of five or six marble grain differences between moving or being stationary.”
Good enough, Yozef thought to himself.
“We’ve done the same testing with the one-hour hourglasses. It takes longer to get the exact amount of ground marble for each hourglass, but the result is the same. If you have time, we can demonstrate the longer-timed hourglasses.”
“Not now,” said Yozef. “Send these to Denes Vegga and tell him I suggested he have some men test them many times to be certain of the consistency. Assuming Ser Vegga is satisfied, continue production to a hundred each of the two sizes of hourglasses. I can’t emphasize enough that the quality of all one hundred and any more you make later has to be the same as with these twelve. Men’s lives may depend on this accuracy, possibly your own lives or your relatives’, if we have to fight the Narthani again.”
9th Hour
The 9th-hour bell rang while Yozef talked with the glassblowers. After finishing, he walked a hundred yards to the foundry. Although no meeting was scheduled, he always felt better seeing cannon barrel production. The Abersford foundry had concentrated on 6-pounders and left 12-pounders to the Caernford foundry, which also cast 6-pounders.
He had vacillated in producing heavier cannon, but now that they’d begun to set up new foundries in Farkesh and Bultecki, he had told the Caernford foundry staff to try the 25-pounder barrel again. They were scheduled for the first pour today, and he couldn’t resist looking in. However, he was to be disappointed. The intended mold had a defect they’d only just discovered, and they’d put off the casting for at least three days. He and the foundry workers discussed the defect and how to avoid it. Then, for another hour, Yozef inspected barrels already cast and visited the carriage mounting shop next door. Four 12-pounders and limbers were lined up outside and covered with canvas to protect them from the weather. When the workers finished casting a fifth, the five cannon would form a battery and be taken to Orosz City and turned over to the Orosz clan for training men as artillerymen.
11th Hour
When the eleventh-hour bell rang, Yozef hesitated outside the large shop being set up to produce muskets, a new enterprise for Keelan Province. He had visited the shop the previous day and had gotten into an argument with the foreman, who had decided to make production more efficient and bypassed steps intended to ensure that Keelan muskets be compatible with those made elsewhere on Caedellium. When the foreman had refused to back down, Yozef asked him to step into the next room, where they could speak privately. There, Yozef told him he would be fired from his position immediately, if he didn’t swear to abide by directions from then on. Unsatisfied with the foreman’s response, Yozef had fired him and promoted the next senior worker to foreman, with warnings that he could also be replaced.
Now, Yozef decided he’d better check on the new foreman. He went inside and found that the old foreman had been hired by his replacement.
“I know he’s an irritating bastard,” said the new foreman, “but he knows the work and has a family to support.”
After a moment of thought, Yozef replied, “All right. But he’s your responsibility. If he starts causing problems, I expect you to fire him again.”
“Yes, Ser Kolsko, I understand. I don’t think there will be a problem.”
12th Hour
Yozef left the musket factory and glanced up at the sun. Almost noon. He grabbed a satchel tied to Seabiscuit’s saddle. He sat under a tree on the edge of the industrial park, took quills, ink, and a sheaf of papers from the satchel, and outlined concrete production. In the afternoon, he would meet with a group of masons. Brickwork and small-scale masonry work with something like aggregate-poor concrete was known on Caedellium, though not for large-scale works.
Masonry fortifications wouldn’t stop a determined Narthani assault. So far, they had seen only 12-pounder cannon with the Narthani army, but they had to be prepared for more powerful cannon and siege mortars.
They needed reinforced concrete. Although Yozef couldn’t be sure, he estimated two feet of reinforced concrete could be breached by heavy cannon firing point-blank for several sixdays or longer, although three to four feet might be impregnable with current Anyar technology.
He sat on a bench next to a tree and wrote, thought, trawled his imperfect memory, and wrote some more. The sun filtered through the leaves, and he leaned against the trunk, his face tilted up to catch flickering light.
“Hey, Yozef, you asleep?” said a deep voice.
“Huh . . . ” mumbled Yozef. “ . . . What?”
“Asleep! You’re supposed to be building cannon, doing your chemistry magic or whatever it is, to save us all from the Narthani. How can you do that by sleeping all day?”
Yozef sat upright on the bench, as his head cleared. He could only see a large shape next to the sun. He leaned to his right to hide the sun behind the shape that changed into a very large red-headed and bearded man with a scowling face and amused eyes.
“Carnigan,” said Yozef, “I liked you better when you weren’t talking so much and certainly when you didn’t have a sense of humor. I’d tell you to go hide someplace, but there’s no place that big.”
The big man roared, reached down, and grabbed Yozef by his shirt, pulling him to his feet. “Have you eaten anything yet? And where’s Shadow Two?”
Carnigan was referring to the triumvirate of himself, Balwis Preddi, and Wyfor Kales—Yozef’s official bodyguards. One was always supposed to be with him. This morning, the duty had fallen to Balwis. The escaped Preddi shadowed Yozef all morning and had last been seen sitting on the ground, his back against a building where they’d tied the horses. Carnigan was due to replace Balwis for the afternoon shift.
A puffing Balwis rounded a corner and trotted up to his charge and Carnigan, who scowled for real.
“Where were you?” Carnigan growled.
“Relieving myself out of sight behind the trees. I was only gone a few minutes,” said Balwis, his tone defensive and his face flushed.
“Well, piss in your pocket for all I care!” snarled Carnigan. “You’re supposed to never leave Yozef or be out of sight!”
Balwis reddened further and looked at Yozef. “Sorry. It won’t happen again. But now that Carnigan is here, I’ll be going off.” Without another word, Balwis turned to gather his horse.
“He said he was only gone for a moment,” said Yozef.
“That’s what he said,” Carnigan grunted, “but there’s a whorehouse two blocks away, and I’ve seen Balwis coming out a couple of times. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought he could slip away for a quick poke before you woke up and missed him.”
“Well, shit,” said Yozef. He didn’t care whether Balwis availed himself of prostitutes or not. The Caedelli had a relatively blasé attitude about sex, as long as people observed reasonable discretion and took good care of any resulting children. That Balwis might not be trustworthy enough to carry out assignments is what bothered Yozef—in this case, to provide protection. He wondered whether he could trust Balwis to protect Maera, Aeneas, or other members of the Kolsko household.
“That’s not good,” agreed Yozef. “I’ll have to keep a closer eye on him.”
“I will, too,” said Carnigan. “I can’t say I’ve ever completely trusted him. Right now, it’s time for food. The Snarling Graeko is only three blocks away.”
“No beer for me this time of day,” Yozef remarked. “I have too much to do this afternoon.”
“That’s the trouble with you little people, no capacity,” said Carnigan. He laughed and headed off to the pub, expecting Yozef to catch up on Seabiscuit.
13th Hour
Full of barley and beef soup, heavy bread slathered with fresh butter, and a cup
of kava, to Carnigan’s disapproval, Yozef led Seabiscuit two hundred yards to the clan headquarters building on the edge of the central plaza. The largest structure on the western side of the plaza, it faced the Great Hall of the Keelans on the eastern side. St. Tomo’s Abbey and associated buildings occupied the entire northern side and several blocks farther north, while tradesmen’s shops filled in the southern side.
Denes Vegga and Vortig Luwis met him in a meeting room on the second floor. A middle-aged woman Yozef didn’t know accompanied them.
“Yozef, this is Kullyn Lorna,” said Denes. “She owns a seamstress shop here in Caernford, and Pedr Kennrick advised that we might ask her to think about designing the flags, badges, and medals you suggested.”
Yozef remembered some common advice from the military writers he drew on, Clausewitz, Jomini, Sun Tzu, and Napoleon, all four emphasizing the importance of morale. What he knew from his reading and, to be honest, movies and TV, was that men fought harder if they felt they belonged to something bigger, if they felt recognized, and if they were emotionally attached to their units and fellows. When the men fought with their own clansmen, there was no problem, but Yozef pushed for the clans to learn to fight in mixed-clan units. Without clan identification, Yozef worried that they needed symbols, and he wanted flags for each larger unit, battle streamers to signify actions they had taken part in, and badges to sew on clothing or medals to pin on.
For the next hour and a half, Lorna showed them designs for medals, cloth badges for units and ranks, and flags, all based on Yozef’s suggested models. He was especially pleased with the results of the idea he’d given Lorna for the Caedellium flag, something that had never before existed. Each clan had flags and banners but no single symbol for all of the clans combined. Yozef’s proposed flag drew on flags from U.S. history, with stars representing individual clans. Lorna rolled out a green flag with eighteen small stars encircling a larger star. The symbolism was for eighteen free clans making up Caedellium. He didn’t push the concept of eighteen clans as part of a greater political union—that concept was too early for the clans to accept.
Heavier Than a Mountain (Destiny's Crucible Book 3) Page 39
