The harvest was again good that year, and the new crops were starting to be plentiful enough to make a serious contribution to the food supply. I had new grain towers built at all our installations, each with a windmill to circulate the grain and keep it in good shape. If grain is just left to sit there, it soon becomes infested with insects, fungi, and rats. But if you regularly pump it to the top with an Archimedes' screw on dry days, any bugs and rats are killed and the grain stays dry enough to retard fungus, This is still the method used in the twentieth century.
We had tons and tons of sugar beets at Okoitz, and I had to figure out how to convert them into sugar. Sugar is a major industry in modem Poland, and entire sugar refineries are regularly sold to other countries. But the more important an industry is, the more specialized it becomes. There are engineers who spend their entire lives working on nothing but sugar refineries, with the result that a generalist like myself simply didn't get involved. I didn't even know the basic process!
Zoltan came to my rescue. He'd never heard of a sugar beet, but he had heard about the process for refining sugar cane, which grew on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This was wonderful, because by myself, I don't think that I ever would have thought of adding lime, the caustic stuff that mortar is made out of, to the beet juice to make it crystallize. But between Zoltan's chemistry and my machinery, we got a working plant installed at Okoitz before Christmas. It made a nice "winter industry" for the peasants, something to keep them busy between the harvest and spring planting.
Free popcorn became a regular feature of the Pink Dragon Inns. We had twenty-two of them now.
Every few months, I visited Father Ignacy at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow. He was my confessor, my confidant, the one person in this world that I could be honest and comfortable with.
This time, I found that the old abbot had died, and that Father Ignacy had been elected to take his place.
"Congratulations on your promotion, Abbot Ignacy," I said.
"Thank you, my son, although it was probably more your doing than my own."
"Mine? What do you mean?"
"It was mostly those looms and spinning wheels of your design that did it. I encouraged my brothers that we should do our own weaving, and the project has been a huge success. Somehow, I received most of the credit for it."
"But I thought that Friar Roman did most of the work there. "
"He did, but there is very little justice in the world. However, I'm sure that you would rather talk about the inquisition that the Church is conducting on you. At least you always ask about it," Abbot Ignacy said.
"I take it that there is news?"
The Church was holding that inquisition to determine whether I was an instrument of God, to be eventually sainted, I suppose, or if I was an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. Yes, I was most interested in what they decided!
"There is. You will recall that I wrote up my report promptly within months of your arrival in this century. My abbot acted briskly, and within a few months sent the report, with annotations, to the bishop here in Cracow, but his excellency felt that perhaps this sort of report should go through the regular branch of the Church, rather than the secular one. That is to say, through the home monastery rather than through his office, so that summer the report was sent to the home monastery in Italy. But the home monastery felt that no, this was a proper matter for the secular branch to handle, and sent it back here."
"The report was therefore sent, with further annotations, to the Bishop of Cracow again. However, by this time you had established yourself in the Diocese of Wroclaw, so the Bishop of Cracow found a traveler going to Wroclaw and sent the report to the bishop there."
"Wait a minute, father. I was there when that report came in. It was at my Trial by Combat, and both bishops were in attendance. So were you, for that matter. Why didn't the Bishop of Cracow just hand your report to the Bishop of Wroclaw?"
"How should I know that, my son? Perhaps he hadn't had the opportunity to annotate it properly."
"In any event, the report was sent to the Archbishop of Gniezno, in northern Poland, who in turn sent it on to Rome."
"The report has now returned, through the proper channels, with a request that the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery at Cracow investigate the matter thoroughly, and report back. It happens that I am now that personage, so I have written a complete report and am currently looking for someone who is going to Wroclaw. Actually, writing it was an easy matter for me, since I had all the facts at my fingertips, having written the original report myself."
"So, you can see that the matter is proceeding smoothly, and as fast as can be expected."
All I could see was that after three years all that had happened was that Father Ignacy had written a letter in reply to his own letter! I became convinced that the bureaucracy of the medieval Church was as screwed up as that of the stupid Russians!
"Father, we now have a postal service that covers every major city in Poland. Why don't you just mail the report to the archbishop?"
"And bypass his excellency the Bishop of Wroclaw? Heaven forbid! You wouldn't happen to be going to Wroclaw, would you?"
"Not directly. Just mail it to him. It only costs a penny, and it will be there in less than a week."
"An interesting suggestion, Conrad. I'll have to mention it to my superiors."
"Through channels, of course."
"Of course!"
The Great Hunt went off very well, and our new killing ground was ready in time for it, so we didn't have thousands of wild animals running through what had become a substantial city. There were many fewer wild boars and wolves than before, at least locally, and many more deer, elk, and bison. But since I was now getting a rake-off from all the lands owing allegiance to the duke ' the total number of wolf skins delivered to me was huge.
I had a problem storing and curing all of them. But the price stayed up and it was vastly profitable. My aurochs herd was up to eight dozen animals, and we started culling some of the bulls for eating.
The wilderness was being pushed back, the land converted to farming and pasture, and large stockpiles of lumber were building up. On Lambert's lands, the rule was that any tree that gave an edible fruit or nut should be left standing, and except for certain areas preserved as forests-about thirty percent of the total-all else should be cut for more pasture area.
And so 1234 wound around.
Chapter Seventeen
The next year saw our first printed books, our first poured concrete, and our first mass production of glass. It also saw our first cannon.
There are some big advantages to doing something the first time. You can set your own standards.
When it came to printing, there were a lot of simplifications I could introduce, for no other reason than because no one had ever seen anything different. All the characters were the same width, as on an old-style typewriter. The use of lowercase letters was not common in the Middle Ages, so we didn't have any.
The width of a column was standardized at twenty-four characters, and our rule was that any word could be hyphenated anyplace, so all lines were the same width and no space was wasted. AH books were printed on paper that was a third of a yard high and a quarter yard wide, since that was the width that our papermaking machine made. And there were three columns on each page. Always.
Once you were used to it, it was easy enough to read, and almost everybody was used to it because all the schoolbooks were printed that way. It was the way you learned in the first place. For those who learned by reading handwritten manuscripts, there was no difficulty in learning something new. Up until then, every book had been in a different format.
This made for great simplifications in our type-casting machine. It was a carefully machined iron trough with two dozen long iron sticks in it, set up so the sticks could be slid back and forth. The top of the sticks were square cut to look like a castle wall, and on top of each merlon was stamped a letter, number
or punctuation mark.
The operator slid these sticks until the line he wanted was under the casting apparatus. A second operator slid a mold on top of the line of sticks and poured a molten lead alloy into the mold and over the row of stamped letters.
A third operator trimmed the wedge-shaped bars of type and fit them into a drum that went to the printer, once the drum had been turned on a lathe to make sure that all the characters were of exactly the same height.
The printing press was also a simple affair. There was a cast-iron pressure roll on the bottom, then the type roll, and finally some leather-covered inking rolls on the top. There was no paper feed required since we worked only from large continuous rolls of paper, and always the same kind of paper.
Printing the other side of the paper required a good deal of skill on the part of the printer, keeping the paper tension proper, so that the back of the sheet matched up with the front. Paper stretches with moisture, and sometimes print runs were delayed because it was necessary to print the second side on a day with the same relative humidity as when the first side was printed. But it couldn't be the same day because our ink took a day to dry.
But despite the above, a twelve-man crew could print and bind six thousand copies of a fair-sized book in less than a week, whereas hand-copying a single book could take a month, or six months in the case of a bible.
What took a year of development time were all the details. Getting the ink right and finding the right lead alloy that would cast properly and always shrink in exactly the same way, and so on.
The leather ink rollers were a problem because the crack where the leather was sewn together showed up on the printed page, no matter how carefully it was made. They solved this one by using a tubular piece of leather, made from the covering of a bull's penis! Privately, they called the rollers "Lamberts," but I don't think he ever heard about it.
Making concrete required far less finesse and a lot more brute force. Mortar is made from calcium hydroxide. It hardens by absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air and turning itself back into calcium carbonate, the limestone it was made of. Concrete is made of a mixture of things, but mostly calcium silicates. It hardens by polymerization. With concrete, you have real chemical bonds holding things together, which is what makes it so strong.
To make it, you heat a finely ground mixture of coal, limestone, clay, sand, and blast furnace slag in a rotary kiln until it melts together into clinkers. Then you grind it up again. The machinery to accomplish these small tasks took over fourteen thousand tons of cast iron, because we were only making a small one.
The limestone went through a pair of crushing wheels as wide as a man is tall, and three times that diameter. Then the chips went through three sets of progressively finer ball mills. If you can imagine a huge cement mixer filled with cannon balls and limestone, you understand a ball mill.
The rotary kiln was a cast-iron tube two yards across and three dozen yards long, lined with sandstone bricks and turning once a minute.
I loved it, but then engineers love to make big things. It gives you a godlike feeling of power! Mere money doesn't come close!
Once you have the materials, making plate glass is pretty easy if you know the trick, and I did. You just pour the glass onto a pool of molten tin and slowly draw off window glass. This won't work with glass made of wood ashes and sand because the melting temperature of that mixture is too high-you vaporize the tin, I found out the hard way. But with our soda glass, it worked just fine. Our rig was fairly narrow, since none of our outside windows was more than a quarter yard wide.
Within three months, we made enough glass to. glaze every window in every building we'd put up in four years, except for the churches. Learning how to make stained glass took a few months longer, and then only because I was able to hire a French glassmaker to show us how it was done.
He knew two methods of doing it. One involved adding dyes to the molten glass and then piecing bits of this together in a lead frame, but it was the second method that we used, for then we could use standard rectangular cast-iron frames.
This involved little more than painting the colors and designs wanted on the glass, then baking it until the glass softened enough to absorb the colors. Easy enough once you know how to make the paints, and this guy did.
But while he was a good enough craftsman, he wasn't much of an artist. He did one window for the church at Coaltown, and I didn't like it. It was trite, and I wanted something glorious.
So I got the services of an artist friend of mine, Friar Roman, from Abbot Ignacy by giving him a thousand prayer books and offering him his very own printing press. Actually, I'd wanted to give the printing outfit to him anyway, since I didn't want to get into the publishing business.
The deal we made had my people training his, and we sold them paper and ink at cost. They could print anything over my requirements that they wanted, sell it as they saw fit and keep the money, but they had to acknowledge that money as my donation to the Church. My work, mostly schoolbooks, was to be done at the cost of materials.
Actually, much of their other work turned out to be my work as well, since we made it a practice to buy a copy of every single book published for every single one of the schools, to build the libraries. We got those at cost, too.
And there were two other strings attached. The first was that everything printed must be in Polish. I wanted to establish the Polish language and Polish culture as a leader in Europe, and having the only printing presses in existence gave us a big edge. In the twentieth century, a Polish boy has to learn English or Russian if he wants to stay at the forefront of engineering and most sciences and German besides if he wants to keep up with chemistry.
That wasn't going to happen in the world I was building. I'd make everybody else learn our language! That can be done by making yourself culturally and technically ahead of everyone else. What's more, once you're ahead, you tend to stay ahead, because while your kids are studying science, their kids are studying your language.
Not one person in a hundred in America speaks a foreign language. They don't have to! But everybody else has to speak English just to keep up with them.
Anyway, the Polish alphabet is slightly different from that used in the rest of western Europe, so it wouldn't have been easy to do foreign stuff in the first place.
The second string was that I wanted him to turn out a monthly magazine, a general purpose family-oriented thing that would have sections on current events, household hints, agriculture, medicine, and construction. There would be a sermon written by Abbot Ignacy and there would be something each month for the children. In addition., we would be accepting commercial announcements, for a price.
The abbot was astounded at the idea of writing a book every month, and even more so at my suggestion that an initial print run of six thousand copies would be appropriate. But once we discussed how each of a dozen people would be writing only a few pages a month each, he came around, although I think that it was the thought that six thousand families would be reading his sermons that made him take on the task.
As it turned out, I had to write half of the first few issues myself, until we got enough regular contributors to fill it out. I had to write a manual of style, to keep things consistent, and I had to talk Abbot Ignacy into assigning four friars to the task of writing a dictionary.
The first three issues had only ads from my own companies, but in time I was able to largely disengage myself from the project, except for the occasional article.
The long-term effect of the magazine was astounding. Up until then, the only source of news anybody had was hearsay and gossip. Now they had a source of information about what the duke said in Wroclaw, and how the Palatine of Cracow answered him.
Within two years, we had correspondents in most of the major cities of Europe, and were the first news service. And the magazine was a great way to tell my story on sanitation, housing, and food supplies.
So it was a profitable trip, but I'd rid
den to Cracow to get an artist.
Friar Roman had never made a church window, but that didn't matter. We had craftsmen who could do the actual construction. What I wanted was the artwork.
An engineer is probably not the person to choose as an art critic, but I was also the boss and I had definite ideas about what I wanted. I wanted to make a religious statement, and I didn't dare do it in words.
The Church in the Middle Ages depended far too much on fear to get its message across. When I go to pray, I don't want to be surrounded with representations of tortured human bodies.
To me, Christ's message was a message of love. Love for God and love for one another. I read nothing in the Sermon on the Mount about mutilating people for the glory of God!
For the Church of Christ the Carpenter, our church at Three Walls, I wanted a simple naturalistic scene of a young Christ helping Saint Joseph in his carpentry shop. On another wall, I wanted Christ with the little children. The third was to have Christ with the lilies of the fields and the last was to be Christ with the money-changers in the temple, because Christ wasn't a wimp.
So I put Roman on the payroll and set him up with a nice room at Coaltown, where the glass works was located. It had big windows on the north side, a drawing board, and a big stack of paper. I told him what I wanted and let him alone for a few weeks. Then I told him what I didn't like about what he'd done, and had him try it again.
It was four months before he started doing what I wanted, and I had to teach him about perspective drawing in the process. But eight months after I'd shanghaied him, we had the glass hung at Three Walls. Then I got him going on my other four churches.
It was not only important to save Poland from the Mongols, it was also important that I help make it worth saving!
There was a bad harvest in 1235. The fall rains had come much earlier than usual, and much heavier. Yet we barely felt the effects of it.
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