“It shall be as you say, Sir Conrad.” Count Lambert nodded to one of his men, who went off to make arrangements. “There has been a lot of talk about witchcraft lately. Do you think… ?”
“No, my lord, I don’t. Any so-called 'witches' around are just a bunch of crazy old ladies. If they would eat properly, most of them wouldn't be senile.”
“But everyone knows about witches!”
“Tell me, my lord, why is it that every witch you hear about is a poor miserable old hag? If they really had magical powers, wouldn’t they make themselves into beautiful wealthy young women?”
“You have a point there. I’ll keep an eye out for beautiful young grandmothers who are rich.”
“Do that, my lord. Who were these people?”
“You don’t recognize them? That's Janina's family.”
Janina was one of the girls that I took with me to Three Walls from Okoitz. She was running the store there and was a close friend.
“My God. It’ll be rough telling her. Her whole family.”
“Not quite. Her little sister-Kotcha, I think she’s called-had supper and spent the night with one of the other families. The poor child is in a very bad state.”
I remembered the kid now. Last winter she had become a good friend of Anna’s, and together they had hauled logs in the snow. “Perhaps she should come back with me to Three Walls, my lord. She could live with Janina.”
“A good thought. We will ask the child about it after the funeral.”
I never did find out what killed those people.
Interlude One
I hit the STOP button.
“So what killed them, Tom?”
“I don’t know. I can check it out if you wish.”
He turned on a keyboard and began typing.
“With all our technology, why hasn’t somebody developed some decent artificial-intelligence programs? It can't be all that difficult. Then you wouldn't have to use that silly keyboard,” I said.
“Such programs have been developed. I’ve just forbidden their use. Machine intelligence is dehumanizing to the people that use it. I like people and I want to live in a human world.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?”
“I don’t think so. The ballet they put on last night. Did you enjoy it?”
“Sure. It was great. What does that have to do with computers?”
“Everything. That whole show could have been simulated by a computer and displayed in one of our tanks to a degree of accuracy such that you couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Would it have been the same?”
“Hmm… No, somehow I don’t think so, but I'm not sure why.”
“Well I am. What makes ballet or any other art form worthwhile is the fact that it is done by people. When you watched the dancers, you were putting yourself in their place, imagining what they were thinking and feeling. A recording or transmission of that performance would not have been as good, because you would have been farther removed from the people doing it. A mere computer display of the same show would have been absolutely worthless.”
“But if you didn’t know-”
“Maybe you could have been fooled. But you would have been angry when you found out. Back to that dead family. It was an onion mold got them. Toxin 8771 from mold 15395, extinct in 1462. The really deadly ones don’t last very long. Killing your host, or the people who cultivate your host, is bad ecology and not good for your own survival.”
He hit the START button.
Chapter Three
My monthly two-day visits to Okoitz were used to supervise the construction there, but just then there wasn’t much to do. The cloth factory was shut down until spring. Without glass or a decent light, the only way you could work indoors was next to an open window, a little rough in this weather. At that, you could only get in six hours a day in good weather.
I checked out the wet mill that sawed wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of work. There were thousands of tons of water in there, and if it froze, the mill would be wrecked. I checked each of the tanks, but everything was still liquid. The walls of the mill were a half a yard thick at the thinnest, and that much wood is a good insulator even if it is wet. The windmill kept turning even when it wasn’t in use, and my calculations had shown that the energy imparted should keep the water warm enough even in the worst weather. But theoretical calculations are often a long ways from reality! I was relieved.
Work was progressing on the grain mill, but it was simpler than the wet mill we’d built last summer, and Vitold, the carpenter, needed no help from me.
Quite a bit of logging was going on, mostly to clear land for pasturing more sheep. Count Lambert had been buying wool to keep his mill running, and he thought that this was stupid. They were using the steel saws I’d shown the smiths in Cieszyn how to make, but they didn't need my help.
So I took a sauna to make sure that I wasn’t carrying anything communicable, and then looked up Kotcha.
I sort of fell into the position of Janina’s sister's foster parent. Janina was living in my household, and in fact I slept with her some of the time, so I suppose that the relationship was a natural one. Kotcha was silent through the mass and funeral ceremony. The world can be very brutal when you're nine years old. After her family was in the ground, she wanted to talk to Anna.
My mount was not an ordinary horse. She was a bioengineered creation from some advanced civilization somewhere. Or maybe I should say somewhen, because Anna said they were in the distant past and they used time machines, which she didn’t understand. She couldn't talk, of course, but she could spell things out. She was intelligent in an odd sort of way, and she was a full member of my household. She even got paid like everybody else, not that she spends much of it. Most adults wouldn't believe any of this, but a nine-year-old girl has no such difficulty. They were good friends.
“Kotcha, do you think that you would like to come to Three Walls with Anna and me?”
“Where would I live?”
“Why, in my household, with your sister and me and Anna.”
“Anna lives in your house?”
“Some of the time, and it’s more of an apartment than a house. Anna has a stall in the barn, too, but most of the time she sleeps in the living room.”.
“Could I sleep with Anna?”
“if you want to. Or you could sleep with your sister or even have a room of your own, except when we have company over. I bet you’d take good care of Anna. She gets a good grooming in the barn, but I've always felt that she deserves special care.”
Anna nodded her head, Yes. Then she tapped her right forehoof and scratched the ground with her left. We had this code worked out.
“You want something that you want to pay for,” I said to Anna. “You mean you want to hire Kotcha?”
Yes.
“Well, what do you think, Kotcha? Do you want the job?”
“Yes!”
“Good. Does a penny a week sound all right to both of you?”
Yes and “Yes.”
“Then the two of you have a deal, and you might as well start now. Give Anna a good rubdown. If you need anything, I’ll be at the castle. Remember that you're in my household now, Kotcha. You can always come to me with problems.”
Giving her something to do was probably the best thing for the kid. Physical activity is usually the best therapy for someone whose problems have no real solution. Nothing in the world could bring her family back, and the best thing to do was to forget.
At the same time, it was sort of funny. Lord! It was strange enough when my handmaids got handmaids. Now my mount had a private rubdown girl!
Back at the castle, I asked Count Lambert if I could take off early, since there wasn’t much for me to do.
He had other ideas. He handed me a cup of wine and sat me down. “Sir Conrad, last summer you talked of various flying machines, and how most of them were too complicated for us to assay to build. But my mind has been turning over that ’hot air ball
oon' you mentioned. I see no reason why we couldn't make one.”
“I have bolts of good linen cloth, plenty of rope, and most of that barrel of linseed oil left. There is a pile of wicker for the basket you mentioned, and I’ve a big, light brass serving-tray that would do to hold the fire. My wife bought it but I never use it. What say you?”
Lord. Another fad coming up. I could see it. Now that every knight in Poland was flying kites, Count Lambert had to upstage them all with a hot air balloon. But kites at least were safe. There’s no telling where a balloon will come down. A man could drown, if he didn't fall out.
“My lord, this sort of thing is dangerous. You can’t control a hot air balloon. You go wherever the winds blow you, and the winds up there can be pretty fierce! You could end up in the Baltic Sea!”
“Well, what of it? You’re the one who's been taking all the chances lately. Didn't we decide that last month?”
“Count Lambert, your support has meant everything to me and my projects. Without it, I might never get things going well enough to fight the Mongols in eight years.”
“That’s touching but no longer true. It might have been, a year ago, but now you have the support of Duke Henryk. I suspect that if I died, he just might give all my lands to you, and let my wife go hang in our lands in Hungary. Isn't it enough for me to say that I want this balloon?”
I exhaled. When Count Lambert wanted something, he got it. To try going against him was pissing into the wind. “As you wish, my lord. You want me to design a hot air balloon?”
“Of course! What have I been saying? Just a small one, enough to take me alone high above the hills and trees!”
“Even that will be quite large, my lord.”
“What of it? You’ll find I've had a drawing board of the sort you favor built and set up in your old room, along with a supply of parchment, pens, lamps, and that sort of thing. I'll send a wench to call you to supper. Pick one to your liking for tonight, but you might want to try out Natasha. She's nicely skilled. Well? Be off with you!”
I went to my room and got to work. I obviously wouldn’t be allowed to leave Okoitz until I had completed a set of drawings.
I spent a few hours doing arithmetic and decided that if I could heat a sphere of air fourteen yards in diameter to fifty degrees warmer than ambient, I could lift about five hundred pounds. Was it reasonable to expect a warming of fifty degrees Celsius? Would Count Lambert plus an undefined balloon made with unspecified and unweighed materials weigh less than five hundred pounds? I hadn’t the foggiest idea. I wasn't even certain about the specific gravity of air. Nobody had ever asked me to design a balloon before.
All I could do was to make a number of reasonable-sounding engineering approximations, which my colorful American friends called WAGs: Wild Ass Guesses.
I was called to supper by an attractive and cheerful young lady who announced that she was Natasha. Again bowing to the inevitable, I asked her to join me for supper.
Once seated with Count Lambert and another lady, I was told that Kotcha was in the kitchen, and what did I want done with her?
I told Count Lambert that she was joining my household, and it seemed right that she should eat at the same table as I did. He nodded benignly. Perhaps he was glad to be getting out of having to provide for her, which he would have done if I hadn’t wanted to take her, or perhaps he realized that I was quite capable of making an issue of not hurting a girl's feelings.
But in any event the ragged little nine-year-old was soon sitting wide-eyed between me and Count Lambert. He soon had his arm around her. People in the thirteenth century touched a lot more than those in the twentieth. It was a fatherly caress—Count Lambert wasn’t interested in a lady sexually until she was filled out.
It was a pleasant meal. Even though there were only five of us at the table, four wenches were serving and three musicians playing. Almost everything in medieval Poland was expensive except for people. You could have as many servants as you could afford to feed. A peasant considered getting a job as a servant to be a wonderful thing. The work was easy and they fed and clothed you well, for almost no nobleman wanted ragged or starving people around.
Count Lambert got his maids by exercising a variant of his droit du seigneuy. Separated from his wife, he asked the prettiest girls in his town to be handmaidens. This was a euphemism, since they were usually pregnant in six months. He then found each of them an acceptable husband, paid for the wedding expenses and a small dowry, and went to church regularly, with everybody happy with him.
Musicians didn’t have the high status they enjoy in the modem world. They were playing quietly in the background, ignored while the conversation went on: Muzak. I was talking. “You understand that I've never designed a hot air balloon before, my lord? I can't promise that the first one will work. We'll have to build one and see how it goes.”
“Reasonable, Sir Conrad. But you’ve had a chance to think on it. Tell me what the first one will be like.”
“It’s a cloth bag, made of the same thin material that we made kites from. It's like a ball on the top and a cone on the bottom,” I said, gesticulating. “It is the custom of my people to make them brightly colored, but that's up to you. It should be fourteen yards across at the widest and twenty yards high. It must be strongly made, but kept as light as possible.”
“To launch it, I think if you found three big trees in your forest that grew in a triangle, and cut the tops off, they could serve to support the balloon until the air inside is warm. It should be launched only in a dead calm, the sort that often happens in the gray dawn.”
“That seems easy enough. I’ll have it done. You will have drawings of this before you leave, won't you?”
“Yes, my lord. Would it be too much to ask if you tethered the balloon for safety? Tied it to a tree with a long rope?”
“Well at first, of course. After that, we’ll see.”
“Count Lambert, I say again that there is no controlling these things. You don’t know where you'll come down. Do you really want to fall into Frederick the Second's outhouse?”
“Ha! That would stuper his mundi, wouldn’t it!”
I gritted my teeth,. but there was nothing else that I could do.
I had Kotcha put up with a couple of Count Lambert’s ladies-they were only five years older than her-and intended to get in an hour of drawing before I sacked out. Such things “gang aft agley” at Okoitz. Natasha was all she was cracked up to be. Lord, what an enthusiastic young lady! We went to bed early and I really didn't get much sleep. Good, though.
I started drawing the next morning, but to make an accurate drawing, with dimensions, of a single panel required an awful lot of math. And it all had to be done long hand, without a calculator of tables or anything but my skull and a goose quill pen.
Halfway through, I found that I was doing everything in decimal rather than the duodecimal arithmetic that I had taught everybody else. I have always had the darndest time thinking in duodecimal, and going over this diary, sometimes I’m not sure myself when I was talking in base-twelve and when in base-ten. So far as the balloon was concerned, I completed the calculations in base-ten and then translated the whole thing into base twelve.
And there were all the detail drawings. How to do a tent stitch, how to fasten the ropes to the basket, the importance of carrying sandbags. I wasn’t done until noon the next day.
Natasha stayed with me, eager to run errands but happy if ignored. I began to realize that there was a good mind in that pretty little head.
After dinner, I explained my drawings to Count Lambert, because he couldn’t read.
“Excellent, Sir Conrad! I think we can make short work of it. You seem to have taken a fancy to my Natasha. Would you believe that not a week ago, she sported a maidenhead?”
“That’s hard to believe, my lord. She's remarkably… adept.”
“Isn’t she though. But I can certify it since I relieved her of that liability myself. She has a pure natural t
alent. See here. I've kept you half a day past our agreed time. What say I give her to you in compensation?”
“You’re going to give her to me?”
“If you wish. As I said, she’s only been here a week. There's months and months of use in her yet.”
She’d probably be a lot happier and healthier at Three Walls than at Okoitz, anyway. “I'll take her, my lord.”
So I headed back to Three Walls with Kotcha riding in front of me, Natasha riding sidesaddle at my back, and my huge wolf skin cape thrown around all three of us. Anna didn’t even notice the extra weight.
Once home at Three Walls, I had the unpleasant job of telling Janina about the death of her family. That cast a pall over the household for several days. But life continues and these people were used to death. They saw so much of it.
Kotcha took her job as Anna’s servant quite seriously, and sometimes it was hard to get her out of the stables and into school.
Natasha, well, Natasha was remarkable. Natalia was my secretary, but handling our records, the bank, and the payroll took up most of her time. Natasha became my personal assistant, not that I’d realized that I needed any such person.
But she was quite capable of sitting for hours. sewing or knitting, without making a sound or intruding on what was going on. Then if I needed an errand run, which was fairly often in these telephoneless times, she was eager to drop everything and run it. And she always did a competent job. There was nothing stupid about her. Just absolutely… compliant.
It was so easy to take her for granted that sometimes I even forgot she was in the room. I occasionally neglected to dismiss her for the night. In fact, once I was in bed with Yawalda and actually in the middle of the sex act when I realized that there was another person in the room, at which point there was nothing to do but invite her in.
All told, a strange, interesting, and remarkably comfortable young woman.
And a far cry from Krystyana, who was getting increasingly feisty.
The Radiant Warrior Page 4
