The Radiant Warrior aocs-3

by Leo Frankowski

  Sir Conrad paused a while. "Put that way, yes. I'll take care of her."

  "Thank you, my lord."

  The zoltan stood and announced to the crowd, "The noble lord accepts my gift!"

  The crowd cheered, but myself, I think that the zoltan didn't want his followers to know the real reason for his generosity.

  As the festivities broke up, I saw Sir Conrad return to his chamber, or bedroom he called it, with the girl under his arm. She was still naked.

  The next morning at breakfast, the extra meal Sir Conrad insisted on serving, the talk was about nothing but the dance Cilicia had done the night before, and those of us who had been there were the center of attraction. The ladies were all envious, and Yawalda said she'd trade next year's pay to have people talk about her as they did the foreigner.

  "Cilicia will be staying with us," I said. "Get her to give you dancing lessons."

  "I tell you in front of God that I will ask her!" she said.

  "Good. I'd like to see all you women doing it. Myself, I think it was some kind of fertility dance, to induce a man to marriage. It's certain that no woman pregnant could do it, or if she was, she wouldn't be for long. Maybe that's the idea behind it, to show that a man's getting unsullied goods."

  "Unsullied!" Natalia shrieked in mock anger, and Yawalda threw a piece of bread at me.

  I picked up the bread and kissed it, as is only proper, but also to reprove Yawalda for throwing it, for bread is in a way sacred. Then I put it back on the table and she, — of course, ate it.

  "Well, the nobles seem to want that sort of thing. A commoner must be content with what he can get."

  I might have gotten more playful abuse, but Sir Conrad came in and signaled that he meant to speak to us all, so the room fell silent.

  "A year ago I asked my merchant friend Boris Novacek to send me an alchemist, for we have need of a man with such skills here at Three Walls."

  "Two weeks ago, Zoltan's people arrived on that invitation. My thought at the time was that while we needed an alchemist, we did not need a hundred of them. Therefore I told them that they were welcome to stay for a while to rest from their journey, but after that they would have to leave."

  "I did not then realize that all of the other men with him were masters at one craft or another. Many of them have skills that we do not. There is a glassblower in the group. If we can get him the proper tools and supplies, we could all soon be drinking our beer out of real glass vessels! We could have real glass in our windows and the church could have stained glass walls!"

  "They have a papermaker. You probably don't know what paper is. It is used as a sort of parchment, but it is a thousand times cheaper to make!"

  "They have a porcelain-maker. Porcelain is like pottery, but much finer, and with many more colors than we now have."

  "There are many other skills besides. I have talked with their leader Zoltan, and he has agreed to stay here with his people. Each of his masters will be taking on at least one young Polish apprentice. A list of the positions available will be posted in a few- days, and young men interested in possibly rapid promotion and pay are encouraged to make application through Natalia."

  "Applicants must be approved by myself, Zoltan, and the master involved, but there will be at least three dozen of them now, and perhaps more later."

  "These people are from a different culture than ours, and they have a different religion. They worship the same God we do, but they do it in a different way. While I pray that someday they will come to Christ's pure light, I have little hope of that happening soon. Until such time that it does, the discussion of religion with them is absolutely forbidden. If you want to be outlawed, all you have to do is get into a theological argument with one of Zoltan's people. I hope I don't have to prove to you how serious I am about this. Converting them is a matter for the clergy, not for you!"

  "Still, both Zoltan and I recognize the differences and frictions existing between our peoples. Because of this, we will be moving them out of Three Walls as soon as possible. Some of you know of the small valley just a half hour's walk east of ours. It has a small stream, and should be suitable for a group of the size of Zoltan's."

  "If the weather holds, we will be able to build them suitable housing there before the ground freezes, and we will be transferring a few hundred sheep to them."

  "Until that time, I shall be very rough on anyone who breaks the peace with them! With luck, we should have them out of here by Christmas. Cilicia will be staying with my household, to see if it is possible to convert one of them to Christianity."

  Ilya choked down a laugh at the mention of Cilicia. Sir Conrad pointed a finger at him. "That snigger just cost you a weeks' pay, Ilya! Natalia, make a note of it."

  "That's about it. Carpentry and masonry managers, from foremen up, will report to my office at zero six to discuss scheduling changes. Thank you."

  Chapter Twelve

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ

  Cilicia was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life, movie stars and the National Ballet included. In the twentieth century, a woman who could dance that way would be in Hollywood if the Bolshoi didn't kidnap her first.

  Understand that the Polish girls around were mostly pretty, but then those that were available were all about fourteen years old, and at that age, they're all pretty. It's nature's way of getting them married off. But the two truly outstanding women I'd met here were both foreigners, and I have a theory about that.

  In a civilized country, people pick their mates for fairly impractical reasons. Is he witty? Do her hobbies and interests agree with mine? Does he dance well? And most important, is she pretty? Will my friends envy me because he's so tall and handsome?

  In all cultures, some people never marry, and often those who don't meet the local standards of desirability are the ones who stay single. Over many centuries, this results in a selective breeding pressure toward people who are attractive and socially adept, but not necessarily intelligent, resourceful, or tough.

  In a primitive culture, people have to be more practical in their choice of lifetime partners. Can he provide me and my children with enough food for us to survive? Can she cook and sew and butcher an animal properly? Is he a good enough fighter to save us from our enemies?

  Is she tough enough to defend our hut when I'm gone?

  These aren't matters of personal preference or social prestige, this is survival. If you pick wrong, it could hasten your death. It's so important that in many cultures, the people directly involved aren't allowed to choose for themselves. Older and supposedly wiser heads do that for them, and marriages are arranged by the parents.

  This results in a selective-breeding pressure quite different from that of more civilized peoples. People might be more tough and self-reliant, but they are not more attractive. In fact, I suspect that you could take a good guess at how cultured a person's ancestors were simply by seeing if he or she is attractive.

  In the thirteenth century, Poland was only two centuries away from a primitive, tribal culture. It would take many more centuries to transform them into a more attractive if less tough people.

  But France and the Middle East had been civilized much longer, and that's precisely where Lady Francine and Cilicia came from.

  I'm not saying that this is Ultimate Truth, but I'd argue it over a beer.

  Cilicia's talents in bed were as outstanding as her abilities on the dance floor, and I'm glad that I didn't have to take her as a slave because I certainly wanted to take her.

  She was bright, too. In two short weeks, she'd picked up enough Polish to communicate, and her accent wasn't as thick as her father's. I admit that she talked me into letting her people stay, despite all the problems that we both knew would occur.

  Her technique was to examine things and tell me the name of the man in her group who could show us how to do it better. She examined the blade of the fancy dagger that Sir Vladimir and his brothers had given me last Christmas and pron
ounced the steel to be inferior. My sword met with her admiration, and when she asked if we could do such work, I had to admit that we couldn't. But one of her people could.

  She talked about pottery and cloth and glass, but I think that it was the papermaker that finally convinced me. To really spread knowledge, you have to have plentiful books. There simply was no possibility of producing enough parchment to do that, even if I could automate the process of producing it. It takes the skin of a whole sheep to make — a single large sheet of parchment, and there is a limit to how many sheep you can grow. But if we had paper, I knew I could build a printing press.

  So that night, between bouts of Mil. Spec, lovemaking, we planned how our peoples could work together without killing each other. Essentially, the program was to keep them as separated as possible, with contacts only for professional purposes. I would give them some land and keep my people out of it, except for apprentices, who wouldn't be allowed to spend the night. Except for Zoltan, her people would leave their land only with my permission.

  My people would build hers some minimal housing, enough to get them through the winter, and we would provide food for the first year, after which they would be on their own. One half their man-hours would be spent teaching my apprentices and in R&D work. We shook on it, a novel custom for her, and in the morning her father was delighted with the deal.

  Cilicia, of course would be staying with me. My father didn't raise anybody that dumb!

  So my carpenters and masons stopped what they were doing and started putting up a housing unit. No indoor plumbing, no defensive features, and the kitchens would be detached. It wouldn't be as nice as Three Walls, because we were up against a time limit.

  Not only was winter closing in, but I wanted them out of Three Walls before the Great Hunt. I didn't want fifty noble guests, a few of whom had fought Moslems in the Crusades, rubbing shoulders with guests who weren't even Christians! That was asking for trouble.

  But after two weeks at Three Walls, I had to make my rounds of the other installations again. I was getting ready to leave when Kotcha, my mount's rubdown girl I, all fifty pounds of excited nine-year-old, ran breathless into my bedroom.

  "Anna's had puppies!" she shouted.

  This announcement left me momentarily stunned. "Kotcha, horses don't have puppies. They have foals. And Anna's not expecting. You can tell on a horse. The body gets bigger and the breasts fill with milk. This is the wrong time of the year for that, anyway."

  Children in the Middle Ages didn't have to be told about the birds and the bees. It was normal for the entire family, parents, children, and various relatives, to live and sleep in a single room. Sex was something normal that had happened around them all their lives. And if that wasn't enough, they were mostly farmers, and watched animals doing it as farm children have always done. Making sex a secret is a modern perversion.

  "Anna's not a horse! And they look like puppies!"

  "The first part is true enough."

  "Maybe you'd better come and look. My lord."

  "Maybe I'd better."

  A crowd had gathered around Anna's stall, and I pushed my way through it.

  What I saw turned my stomach. If ever there was a bunch of prematurely born foals, this was it. They really did look like oversized puppies, with tiny spindly legs they could barely crawl on. Born in November, for God's sake, and there were four of them. No wonder they had aborted. It was incredible that they were still alive. There was only one decent thing to do. Put the poor things out of their misery. I got out my good Buck jackknife.

  "You people get the hell out of here!" I shouted at the crowd, which evaporated.

  "Kotcha, you'd better go, too. You don't want to see this."

  "What are you going to do?"

  I crouched down to her level. "I know that this will be hard for you to understand, Kotcha, but sometimes things aren't born right. Sometimes, well, something goes wrong, and when it does, the only nice thing to do is to make them not hurt anymore."

  "But what are you going to do?"

  "These foals, these 'puppies,' won't be able to grow up right. Look, Anna's breasts haven't even started to swell yet. She won't be able to feed them. They'll starve."

  "They eat hay, just like Anna does."

  "They're too young to eat hay. Small mammals have to have milk, and Anna doesn't have any."

  "I saw them eating hay!"

  "Kotcha, I've tried to explain, but I'm just out of explanations. It's something that has to be done. Now please go away."

  "You're going to kill them!"

  "Yes, Kotcha. I have to."

  "NO!" She ran to the back of the stall, grabbed a pitchfork, and stood in front of the colts pointing it at me. Fifty pounds of sheer courage and no brains at all.

  "Damn. Anna, would you talk to her. You know that this is necessary, don't you?"

  Anna shook her head No, and stood beside Kotcha.

  If I had to, I could always disarm Kotcha and lock her in her room. But if Anna was against me, it wasn't so straightforward. She could whip me easily in a fight.

  "Anna… damn. There's nothing in our sign language that covers this. Let's go over to the letterboard and talk this over. Kotcha, you can stay right here and watch the babies."

  I'd made up the letterboard more than a year ago when I learned that Anna was intelligent. She couldn't talk but she could spell things out by pointing at the letters. If you could call it spelling.

  She went over to it and spelled out KEDS OK.

  "Kids okay? You're telling me that those are normal?"

  She nodded yes.

  "They always look like that?"

  Yes.

  I sat down on the ground. "Oh my God! I nearly murdered them! But what are they going to eat? You don't have any milk."

  ET HAY ET GRAN ET ENEDING

  "They can eat anything, the same as you do?"

  Yes.

  "Your species always has them four at a time?"

  Yes.

  "Who… who was the father?"

  NO FADER

  "No father? Then how… Anna, some fishes and lizards reproduce asexually, parthenogenetically. Do your people do that?"

  Yes.

  "Huh. But this isn't a sensible time of the year for a herbivore to reproduce. Anna, what triggers it? Why did you have them now and not some other time?"

  SHE ASK

  "She? You mean Kotcha?"

  Yes.

  "And all she had to do was ask? You reproduce voluntarily?"

  Yes and yes.

  "I'll be damned. How long does it take them to grow up?"

  She tapped her hoof four-times.

  "Four years, huh? Anna, do you like having children?"

  Yes and yes.

  "Well, having more people like you around would sure be helpful. You keep on having them until further notice. Is that sufficient?"

  Yes.

  "Good. I hope you accept my apology for the stupid scene I just made. I guess I'd better talk to Kotcha now. How long before you're ready to travel?"

  She gave me the "ready" signal.

  "The morning after childbirth? Well, if you say so. We leave in an hour. I'm through trying to second-guess you. From now on I'm going to ask."

  Yes.

  I apologized to Kotcha, but she stayed mad at me, the way a kid will. It was months before we were friends again.

  Actually, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I had reacted emotionally and had almost made a horrible mistake because I hadn't stopped to think. I'd known for years that Anna was a member of a different species than a horse. Just because the adults of her species looked like horses was no reason to think that the juveniles would. And since when do you do mercy killing on people? Because Anna was people, and I had gotten into the bad habit of forgetting it.

  I'd had the saddler make a sort of second saddle that attached to the back of Anna's regular saddle. This let a passenger ride sidesaddle behind me and have someplace to brace her feet. I took
Cilicia along to show her some more of the country, to give her a chance to show off some of her new western-style outfits, and for sex, of course. There was no point in messing around with strange ladies when I had perfection at home.

  It took us two days to get to Copper City. Anna could make it in one during the summer, but winter was closing in and the days were much shorter. The lack of a decent artificial light cut into travel time as much as it did into industrial production.

  My experiments in trying to distill a decent lamp fuel from coal tar had met with a pretty dismal failure. The stuff had so much sulfur and ammonia in it that it cleared the room of people when I fit the lamp. It smoked badly, too.

  I was toying with the idea of trying to drill for oil so that we could have kerosene lamps, but the only oil fields nearby were at Przemysl, a city that was originally Polish, and would be again, but had been in the hands of the Ukrainian Duchy of Halicz Ruthenia for fifty years. Getting permission to set up an installation there would probably take a major diplomatic effort.

  I was stumped.

  When I got to Copper City, the duke was just arriving.

  He had Lady Francine with him, and two dozen armed men.

  "Damn, boy! Do you always run a horse like that? You'll kill her!"

  "Not Anna, your grace. She likes a good run."

  "People say that whenever they see you on the road, you're always at a dead gallop and never seem to have time to talk."

  "It's just that between your projects, Count Lambert's, and my own, there isn't much time, your grace. I hope I haven't been rude."

  "No, but it keeps them talking about you."

  "I suppose it does keep me in the limelight, your grace," I said as I got out of the saddle and helped Cilicia down. She was short and slender but surprisingly heavy for her build. A dancer's body is all smooth, hidden muscle, and remarkably dense.