The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  Vitold, Count Lambert’s carpenter, was in charge there and things were going well. There were probably more men available than could be efficiently administered, but they were mostly logging and digging, which doesn't take much supervision.

  Count Lambert had left the day before, and the setup was his idea, so I didn’t change anything. We left for Okoitz that afternoon and got there in time for supper.

  One of my miners was getting the coal mine dug without problems, and the cloth factory, with its two hundred attractive and available young ladies, was going full blast.

  Count Lambert rather proudly offered me a cold beer. “You were right again, Sir Conrad. A cold beer is a wonderful thing on a hot day! I’m glad you talked me into finishing the icehouse below the grain mill.”

  The next morning, I was at Three Walls and found that Sir Vladimir and Annastashia were the proud parents of a healthy boy.

  Trivial matters delayed me a few days, and then I headed to Copper City again, this time with Yawalda riding Anna’s rump.

  The whole summer went that way, with me constantly racing from Three Walls to Copper City to Eagle Nest to Okoitz and back to Three Walls, the whole circuit taking us a week to run. Since many of my workers were separated from their families, and since they could read and write now, I was playing postman as well as roving supervisor. It was fun and exciting at first, but it got very old after a while.

  By fall, things were settled down to the point that Copper City only needed to be visited once a month, and I tried to keep my traveling down to two weeks a month, staying at Three Walls as much as possible.

  We had another good harvest in 1233, the third in a row. Everyone gorged on sweet corn and watermelon, honeydews and zucchini, pumpkins and muskmelon. The beehives were a great success, and the price of honey and beeswax dropped by a factor of twelve on the open market.

  The grains, potatoes, and legumes I’d brought with me had done well, and I computed that in two years we would be eating them rather than keeping it all for seed as we had been. And glory be to God, we had sugar beet seeds, over a hundred pounds of them! Next fall, I'd have to worry about refining sugar.

  The new plants were almost untouched by insects, which cut heavily into most crops since insecticides weren’t available. Most insects are very specialized in their eating habits, and the local ones couldn't cope with the crops that I'd brought in. They'd catch up with us eventually, but for the time being we were getting a free ride.

  In fact, the only sour point was the squashes. I hadn’t realized that they could interbreed, and they had been planted too close to each other. The bees, or whatever pollinated them, had made a mess of things. We got veggies that were half butternut and half spaghetti squash, and every other combination possible. Lambert and I set up a breeding program at six widely separated manors to try to breed back to the original forms, but that would take time. I moved six varieties of beans to those same six manors just to be on the safe side.

  Most of Lambert’s knights and barons were quickly taking up his new crops and other improvements, running only a year behind him. And everyone was using wheelbarrows now, and the entire harvest was gotten in early, almost without loss.

  Piotr was doing a lot more traveling than I was. He had to make a monthly visit to the inns at Cracow, Cieszyn, and Wroclaw, besides the installations at Three Walls, Copper City, Eagle Nest, where we were taking care of the bookkeeping, paying all expenses and charging Count Lambert in cloth for it, and Okoitz, where we had built a small Pink Dragon Inn at Count Lambert’s request. If the duke had one at Wroclaw, Count Lambert had to have one at Okoitz.

  That summer, I’d formalized the mail service, setting up a post office at every one of our inns. Besides serving our own people, we carried the mail of anybody who asked, and charged for it. It became a profitable sideline.

  We never carried money or valuables, since Piotr had to travel alone and I didn’t want to make him a target for thieves, but I did set up a system of postal money orders.

  By spring, volume had grown to the point that I had to put on a full-time letter carrier, who made the round on about a weekly basis on a fast horse. As more inns were added, the number of letters sent increased as a cube function. In a few years, letters left each inn daily, and a letter could get to any major city in Poland in a week, for a price.

  And like a modem post office, we were absolutely scrupulous about respecting people’s privacy and about getting the mail through.

  By late fall, the smelters at Copper City were in full production and the other facilities were just about complete. I sold the Krakowski Bros. Brass Works at a very healthy profit to Count Lambert’s brother, Count Herman. I did this with the clear written understanding that I was taking the best of my workers with me to Legnica, and that we would be producing products there much like those that were made in Cieszyn.

  I don’t think the guy understood that people are as important as things when it comes to getting something done. It takes both the tools and the man who knows how to use them to accomplish anything, but many would-be industrialists don't realize that. He got all the buildings, machinery, and facilities, as well as two years worth of back orders and my blessings. But deep inside, I didn't think he'd be successful.

  Most of the people from the brass works were moved to Copper City and formally sworn to me. They hadn’t been up to that time, except for the Krakowski brothers themselves and their wives, and I wanted all the workers to be treated the same. I also swore in those workers hired that spring that had received the approval of the foremen, most of them, actually.

  Thom Krakowski was put in charge of the smelting and mining operations, and being the eldest was also overseer of the whole city. His brothers had charge of the casting and machining sections. In fact they were used to working as a committee, and that’s the way I set it up. Oh, they were always arguing like a bunch of kids over a game, and sometimes it got pretty loud. But somehow inside they were a smooth team. It takes all kinds.

  My ladies had each spent months at the city and at Eagle Nest duplicating their own bailiwicks there. Krystyana got the kitchens going well; Yawalda had the barns running efficiently. The stores and offices were set up, and all the girls had chosen to come back to Three Walls. I was flattered, but they explained that if they stayed out in “the woods,” as they described it, they might be stuck there. But things were always happening when I was around, even if I wouldn’t marry them.

  Tadeusz had put his youngest son in charge of running the inn at Copper City. He was worried. He was now out of sons. How could we expand further? So we worked out a training program for innkeepers, with each of his sons training a man, and with promotions to larger inns if a man did well. There was also a bonus system for the trainer.

  Piotr had junior accountants at each of our installations by then so that he only had to check their work rather than doing it all himself. There just wasn’t time.

  The priest from Italy finally arrived, and I nearly fell off my chair when he announced his name. It was Thomas of Aquinas!

  Saint Thomas Aquinas was the greatest theologian and logician of the Middle Ages, perhaps of all time! And here he was, a young man of twenty-two, running my church and school system. I tried to treat him the same as any other priest, but secretly I was in awe of him. I told him what I wanted to accomplish, but generally I let him do as he felt best, offering advice only when asked.

  Interlude Two

  I hit the STOP button.

  “He really had Thomas Aquinas working for him?”

  “Yes and no. The man’s name was Thomas and he really was from the Italian town of Aquinas. But the Thomas Aquinas you're both thinking of was seven years old at the time, and no relation to Conrad's schoolteacher. Conrad's history was about as accurate as yours.”

  “Summa Theologica still got written in Conrad’s branch.”

  He hit the START button.

  Chapter Ten

  We had just finished installing
our first rotary steam engine, our first double expansion device. It turned an overhead shaft that had leather belts driving the lathes, grinders, and other machines we had lined up below it. Wicker baskets covered the belts, a safety feature.

  I was getting ready to go to Eagle Nest to greet the first batch of four dozen boys when there was a commotion at the gate of Three Walls.

  In front of the drawbridge was a ragged mob of some sort of foreigners, and Sir Vladimir was not about to let them in without my permission. There were over a hundred of them.

  They had darker complexions than we did. Their hair was black and their eyes brown, sometimes green. They were of medium stature and had the thin, wiry bodies one associates with Armenians, or even Arabs. Yet they weren’t quite exactly like either of those peoples.

  Their leader, who was about as ragged as the rest, spoke only a smattering of Polish, and the others spoke none at all. It took me several hours to find out what they wanted, and I would have given up on them if I hadn’t caught the words “Novacek” and “alchemist.”

  A year before, I had asked a merchant friend, Boris Novacek, to send me a chemist, if he ever ran across one, since I was weak in practical chemistry. Apparently, this man was the thirteenth-century equivalent of a chemist. He had with him three pottery jars of what smelled like, acids, and intimated with gestures that he had made them.

  Well, I badly needed a chemist. We were throwing away all sorts of things that could be useful if treated properly. Coal tar, for example, is a sticky guck that is a mixture of thousands of chemicals, some of which can be very useful. I knew that it contained aspirin and dyes and wood preservatives, to name but a few. But I hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to go about purifying the stuff. But I needed one chemist, or maybe a few. I didn't need a hundred!

  I tried to get this idea across, but it was slow going.

  The lunch bell rang, and I was getting hungry. Looking at the crowd of refugees, for that’s what they turned out to be, I realized that they hadn't eaten in days, and had had damn little in the months before. We had plenty of food, and there was no reason to be uncharitable. I invited them in for lunch, trying to communicate with gestures that this was a temporary invitation only, and that I was not permanently hiring them.

  Problems started almost at once. Where I come from, when you’re a guest, you eat what's put in front of you, and at least pretend that you're enjoying it. But they wouldn't touch our beer, insisting on drinking only water. Many Poles feel that you can't trust a man who I won't drink with you, and to refuse a man's generosity is an insult.

  The leader questioned me at length about the kind of meat we were serving, and I finally had to draw him a picture of a pig to get the idea across to him. He acted like I was trying to feed him human flesh, and on finding out it was pork he said something to his followers such that they contented themselves with bread and kasha. At least they were cheap to feed, even though they ate three times what my own people did.

  In the course of the afternoon, either his Polish improved or I got better at gesticulating. It seems that his name was Zoltan Varanian, although I wasn’t sure whether “zoltan” was a name or a title. In any event, I got the idea across that he and his people were welcome to stay for two weeks, but after that they would have to leave.

  I also insisted that they take a bath before we put them up for the night, which caused other problems. My people didn’t have a nudity tabu, and his did. Men and women didn't bathe together.

  This caused all sorts of screaming every time one of my workers of the wrong sex walked into the shower room at the wrong time. Their men even screamed when a pretty girl went in to join them. Culture shock all over the floor.

  Their clothes were in shreds and we had cloth coming out of our ears. Lambert had been paying for all the work at Eagle Nest in cloth, and I hadn’t gotten-around to disposing of it profitably yet. I had Janina issue them enough cloth to make a set of clothes for each of them.

  Supper that night featured lamb, and that they’d eat. We put them up in the lowest two floors of the noble guest quarters, since there wasn't room for them anywhere else. They were stacked in like firewood, but even so, if the duke paid an unexpected visit, I didn't know what we'd do. Put them up in the barns, maybe.

  The next morning, I really had to get to Eagle Nest, being a day late already. I assigned Natasha to Zoltan, with the understanding that she was supposed to do what she could about teaching him some Polish. I said that I didn’t expect her to sleep with him. There are limits to hospitality.

  Natasha took the job with the same cheerful acceptance that she did everything else. I never decided whether she was odd for being so compliant, or all the rest of the women in the world were strange for not being exactly like her. Any man who wouldn’t marry the girl was a damn fool, including myself. Of course, I got her without having to get married.

  Four dozen boys were waiting for me at Eagle Nest, bright young kids about ten or twelve years old, the scions of the local nobility.

  Most of them had a servant or two along, and these people expected to have the cushy job of waiting on one small person. I put a stop to that, assigning most of the servants to housekeeping, cooking, and cleaning, which freed up many of my own people for more productive work elsewhere.

  The boys were assigned six to the room, and one responsible servant was put in with them, mostly to keep the kids in line. There was room for eight times the number of people we had, and each of the boys could have had a room to himself, but boys of that age are tribal in their outlook. I wanted to get them to form long-lasting friendships and a sense of teamwork. For the first few days, I let them switch roommates as they liked, but after that room assignments became fairly permanent.

  Count Lambert had picked the headmaster, and I liked the man. He would be teaching two classes of two dozen each, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. He was to teach the standard subjects, reading, writing, and arithmetic. When not in school, the boys were under the supervision of one of my carpenters, a man who was good with kids.

  This system gave us a morning team and an afternoon team, which was intended to create friendly rivalry. A good amount of time was spent on team sports, and competitions were set between the shifts on weekends.

  I started the boys out with kites, and had them build their own. And not just ordinary kites, but controllable kites with two and three strings. By the end of the week, I told them about gluing sand to the strings, so that you could cut another kite’s strings.

  Competition got fierce! And hopefully the boys learned something.

  Returning to Three Walls, I got to thinking that a uniform might help with the feeling of solidarity I was trying to build among the boys. Count Lambert’s factory turned out quite a nice red wool cloth, and Copper City could turn out brass buttons and military doodads by the ton.

  I decided on white trousers and a white turtleneck sweater, with a red open-collar jacket. The trousers and jacket would have pockets in the modem fashion, since carrying everything in belt pouches is a nuisance. Black leather boots, belt, and gloves. Brass buttons, buckles, insignia, and epaulets. And either a red or a white peaked hat, depending on which shift they were on.

  At the end of the year, I’d let the boys design a class dagger, and none but them would carry one of that design. Each class would have its own, just as many schools have a class ring.

  Instructors would wear a similar outfit, except they would have a black hat. Other workers would have the same, but with much less braid on their outfits.

  I debated with myself on whether or not the kids should be required to sew their own uniforms, since skill at sewing was needed to make canvas-covered aircraft. I decided against it because boys of that age grow quickly. If the kid had made it himself, he wouldn’t feel right about handing it down once he'd outgrown it, and the obvious economy of hand-me-downs was standard in this century, even among the highest nobility.

  Natasha and Zoltan made a remarkable am
ount of progress in the week I was gone.. It was actually possible to communicate with the man. Some of this was Natasha’s patience, but mostly it was because Zoltan was a very accomplished linguist with eleven other languages. Oh, he still had the vocabulary of a five-year-old, and .much of our time together was spent discussing the meanings of various words, but he was able to tell his story.

  He and his people were originally from thousands of miles east of Three Walls, east of the Caspian Sea. They had been from the city of Urgench, a part of the Khoresmian Empire, which stretched from the Arabian Ocean to north of the Aral Sea, and from beyond the Hindu Kush to the shores of the Caspian. To hear Zoltan talk of it, it was next door to Eden, with skies that were never cloudy and the waters ever abundant in the great Amu River that washed down from the never-failing snowfields of the Himalayas.

  Ponds and orchards and fields of grain went on forever, a irrigated by the mighty Amu. Dozens of cities rose white and glorious in the sun, each with populations of more than half a million, for the empire was densely populated. Yet such was the abundance of the land that there was plenty for all.

  Then the Mongols had come from out of the mountains to the northeast, and had killed the Shah and taken Samarkand and the capital city of Bokhara. The cities were destroyed, and their entire populations murdered. With their armies completely obliterated, with their Shah dead, or some said hunted beyond the shores of the Caspian Sea, with no hope left at all, the Prince of Urgench submitted to Genghis Khan. In return for a ruinous tribute paid to the conqueror, he bought some measure of peace for a few years.

  But the tribute demanded increased yearly, and to it was added the demand that all the healthy men must enlist in the armies of the Khan, to fight in foreign wars. Already the required tribute in grain and gold and slaves meant starvation stalked the land. Without the aid of the healthy men, the tribute could not be met. The women, children, and aged might be able to support themselves, if poorly, but there would be no surplus. Without the tribute, the Khan’s armies would return, and there would be none to defend against them.