The Crosstime Engineer

by Leo Frankowski

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  “Just don’t do anything silly like interfering with the planting or harvest.”

  “Of course not. Uh, you mentioned once that I could have lands of my own.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t 1. But there's a slight difficulty there. You see, you are a foreigner-”

  “I am not, my lord. I was born in Poland.”

  “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.”

  “The next year or two? That’s quite a delay!”

  “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.”

  I talked for a while about Mongols, heavy industry, and blast furnaces.

  “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.”

  “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!”

  “But you’ll send the letter?”

  “After Easter, if necessary. You couldn’t build anything on your land until the snow melts, anyway.”

  For 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.

  A 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.

  Much 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.

  But 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.

  They 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.

  The 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.

  Breeding 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.

  Once 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.

  As time went on, most of our best animal breeders were women. They seemed to understand the concepts better.

  A 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.

  The 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.

  But 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.

  Lumber 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.

  Projects I had in mind for the next summer were going to require a lot of wood, and that all added up to winter lumbering.

  The 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.

  Incidentally, 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.

  I 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.

  There 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.

  Mikhail 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.

  Mikhail 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.

  I 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.

  This was reflexes, this was training, this was what one did until the doctor arrived.

  Only, 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.

  But 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.

&n
bsp; “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.

  “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!

  We 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.

  I 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.

  “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.

  Mikhail 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.

  We put Mikhail in one of the spare rooms in the castle, and the crowd dispersed.

  I 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.

  “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?”

  I was blood-splattered and tired. “Deserve? He didn’t deserve it at all. He was hurt, and I had to amputate to heal him.”

  “So your witchcraft includes blood rites?”

  “Witchcraft? Damn it, I-”

  “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.”

  “Yeah. I know you’ve got a rough job. But it's only for a couple more months.”

  “Two more months of this without a wench of nights, just so you can play peasant carpenter during the day?”

  “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.”

  “Well, what of it? What damn use is a crippled peasant?”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “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.

  Mikhail 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.

  We 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.

  Within 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.

  Then one night he got a fever and was dead in the morning.

  I don’t know why.

  Two 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.

  Lambert 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.

  The great majority of the noblemen held their positions on a hereditary basis, but it was still possible for an outstanding commoner to be elevated.

  And, 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.

  The 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.

  Piotr 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.

  Knowledge 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.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My 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.

  Understand 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.

  In 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.

  There 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.

  I 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.

  I 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.

  From 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.

  This arrangement let you make eight meters of cloth before you had to loosen each of the thousand spools and lower the suspended pole again.

  A working solution if not a perfect one.

  The 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.

  Sir 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.