The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

Which gave me an idea. I had once read an article on fire-walking in The Skeptical Inquirer, An American magazine organized for the purpose of debunking strange cult practices that abound in that country. Americans take their right to personal freedom to extremes, and permit all sorts of flying-saucer worshipers, Scientologists, and other crazies to abound.

  The magazine explained quite carefully how it was possible to walk on a bed of glowing coals, and under what circumstances it was safe to do so.

  If anything could convince an army that they were unbeatable, walking through fire should do it! Perhaps as part of the graduation exercises. Yes…

  So we ran three miles in full armor, and I made sure that I stayed ahead of them even though my lungs were hurting and I could tell that my legs would be sore for a week. The muscles needed for riding on horseback are quite different from those needed for running! This was followed with an hour of calisthenics in the snow, and then some marching. The dinner bell rang, but I ignored it and kept them marching until they could at least stay in step.

  “Your other left, Vladimir!”

  We ate leftovers for lunch and were silent while doing it. Some of the workers noticed, but were smart enough to say nothing.

  After lunch, we met again in my office.

  “You may speak freely now, gentlemen,” I said. “Part of the reason for these afternoon meetings will be to explain and to hash over what we did in the morning.”

  “Very well, my lord, since you invite it,” Sir Gregor said. “I would like to know why you felt it necessary to speak so rudely to us. Had I not been sworn to you, I swear that I would have challenged you to a duel for some of the things you said.”

  “Well, I warned you that I was going to do it, but you didn’t take me seriously enough. Was it necessary to talk to you in the manner that I did? The answer is no, it wasn't. You four have spent most of your lives training for combat. You are eager for it. Your whole system of self-worth depends on you following your liege lord into battle and fighting there honorably.”

  “But it will be necessary for you to know how to deal with people whose previous life aim was simply to get enough food to feed their families and to maybe lay a little money aside in case of bad times. That is to say, the great majority of people in this world. You must impress them with the importance of instant obedience to a direct order, even when the order makes absolutely no sense to them. I’m not sure why, but somehow shouting at people seems to accomplish this.”

  “Tell me, Sir Vladimir, what were your feelings when I shouted at you for defending Piotr this morning?”

  Sir Vladimir thought for a moment. “Anger, at first, my lord. Then shame. Shame for myself for offending my liege and shame for you for so debasing yourself.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Anger and shame. But the anger goes more quickly than the shame. I think it would be very unlikely for you to speak up like that again in the same circumstances. Now you are no longer angry at me, in part because of this discussion and in part because we have known each other for a long time.”

  “The men you will be training will not have the benefit of your previous acquaintance with your drill instructor, nor will they have the benefit of these meetings. They will learn to hate you, and that is a necessary part of the training. Years after it’s over, most of them will' look back and see you with a certain amount of respect, but that is a very hollow sort of reward. In fact, being a drill instructor is one of the roughest jobs I know of.”

  “It might help if you tell yourself that this is a necessary thing to save your country, because it is.”

  They were silent for a bit.

  “This funny kind of walking’ this marching. Does that have some reason for it?” Sir Wojciech said.

  “There are two reasons, one practical and one psychological. Tomorrow, I’ll be showing you a weapon called the pike. It's like a lance, but it's six yards long. With one, if it's used properly, foot soldiers can destroy cavalry. But carrying something that long, you must walk in step or your pike gets tangled up with everybody else's pike.”

  “There are two parts to the psychological side. From the standpoint of the soldier, it gives a strong feeling of group belonging. It gives a feeling of power, a feeling that your unit can’t be stopped. And if enough of the men really believe that, they truly can't be stopped.”

  “From the standpoint of the enemy, it results in fear. Seeing a thousand men coming at you, all wearing the same clothes and all walking in exactly the same way, their feet hitting the ground at exactly the same time, makes you think that you are not fighting mere men who can be killed. You think that you are up against an unstoppable machine.”

  “Once our men and their men both believe that we are unstoppable, the battle is more than half won.”

  The grueling training went on all winter long. Besides the pike, I introduced the rapier, a footman’s sword that has no edge to speak of but only a point.

  At first we wore the rapiers in the normal way, but this got in the way of calisthenics. Sir Vladimir was the first one to wear one over his left shoulder. He had the tip of the blade stuck into a long dagger sheath at his belt and the rest of the sword covered with a thin leather tube attached to a strap that went over his left shoulder. He could get it out in a hurry, although getting it back in was a bother. Still, it was a lot more convenient wearing it his way than getting it tangled around your feet. Wearing the sword high became one of our trademarks. That, and our funny haircuts.

  You see, I believe that every elite military organization known to man has had a funny haircut. The Normans who conquered England wore one that looked as though they put on a beret, cocked it a bit, and then shaved off everything that wasn’t covered. The Cossacks shaved their heads except for a pony tail hanging on the left side. The Mongols shaved a big square on the top of their heads, leaving a curl in the middle of their foreheads, in front of their ears, and a thick fringe around the back.

  I don’t understand the psychology of this brand of nonsense, but obviously, we had to have a funny haircut too. For a while there, I was toying with going to a Mohawk, but then I decided that the modem military crew cut was as weird as any of them, and took a lot less maintenance to keep up.

  We also spent a lot of time on unarmed combat, for a warrior must stay a warrior even if he’s unarmed and naked.

  But after two weeks, I had to leave and go the rounds of the other factories. There were always technical problems where a few words from me could save hundreds of man-hours, and managerial problems that only the boss could resolve.

  I put Sir Vladimir in charge when I was gone, and I gave him a daily schedule of what was to be done. He followed it as best he could. For my own part, I tried to stay with the physical training program even when I was on the road, but it was hard to do.

  I especially didn’t want to stint the boys at Eagle Nest. Those kids were so earnest that I felt a moral commitment to give them all the help I could. It didn't faze them in the least that one of their members had already died in the air. They fully expected to take further casualties and, in typically Polish fashion, were willing to pay the price. It wasn't the ignorant feeling of 'it can't happen to me.' They knew that it could happen to them! They just felt that the prize was worth the price, and they went on. This from twelve- and thirteen-year old boys! If only NASA had such heroes!

  What could I do but love them and help them in every way that I could? For now, I got them into sailplanes, and designed a launching device that would be built on top of the big conical hill near there. There was plenty of coal tar stockpiled at Coaltown, so we scheduled an asphalt runway on the plain below the hill. In time, other runways were added so that they could land no matter which way the wind was blowing, and eventually an entire half square mile was paved over. This not only permitted landing in any wind, but on sunny days it caused a lovely up-draft that went up for miles!

  Wing struts proved to be a problem. The most efficient sailplane wings are very long and thin,
and we had to support them without the benefit of aircraft aluminum. What we came up with was a sort of synthetic bamboo. I had a huge lathe built that could turn an eight-yard-long spruce log. We bored a conical hole down the middle of it, inserted a long iron cone in the hole and turned the outside of the log so that the thickness of the wall was half that of your little finger. Then the iron cone was removed and wooden discs were glued inside every half yard. This assembly had an astounding strength-to-weight ratio. Two of them fastened together end to end at the fuselage ran down the center of the wings. It held.

  Count Lambert was often at Eagle Nest when I was there. He complained that they were making great progress with the aircraft themselves, but that I had once described to him an engine that could power an aircraft, and I was doing nothing about developing one.

  The problem was that there were a lot of things higher on my priority list than a glorified lawnmower engine. There was the tooling to mass produce armor, a rapid-fire breach-loading cannon to develop, and we needed to be able to mass produce shells, bullets, gunpowder, sword blades, boots, and all sorts of things. I didn’t even have a dependable source of lead and zinc yet, let alone sulfur!

  But Count Lambert and the boys teamed up on me and extracted a promise. I would start working on an engine once they could build a two-man glider that could stay up for an hour. Knowing the problems involved, I didn’t think that my promise would seriously upset my schedules.

  There were two major sour points in early 1236, and they both hit me within the same week. I was being sued, twice. One lawsuit was by Count Lambert’s brother Herman. He was no longer pleased with the brass works that I'd sold him. Rather than making him money, it was costing him money, due, I was sure, to his poor management. He felt that it was all my fault, and he was a count whereas I was a mere knight, which proved it to his satisfaction - He wanted his money back.

  The other one was from Baron Stefan. He had decided that I was still on the land that Lambert had wrongly given me, land which had been in his family for more than three hundred years, he said. He wanted the land back and for me to pay damages for the trees I’d cut down and the fences I'd put up.

  They gave me a few months of needless worry until the duke was passing through one snowy day and threw both cases out of court. Or rather, he dismissed both suits because he was the court.

  Count Herman’s suit was dismissed because I had delivered the property agreed upon and had never promised that it would be profitable. He gave the count a fatherly lecture about trusting to the workingman rather than to the man's tools and nobody mentioned the fact that the duke himself owned the factory that had run the count's factory out of business.

  The duke became angry when he found that Baron Stefan had failed to come at Count Lambert’s summons to beat the bounds between our properties. He said that if the baron lost land because of that, he deserved it, and a horse whipping besides for disobeying his liege lord.

  It helps to have friends in high places.

  Also that winter, Anna and I scouted out the Malapolska Hills, north of Cracow, where I knew there were deposits of zinc, lead, iron, and coal. She said that winter was the best time for smelling out this sort of thing, since there were fewer other smells around ’

  We found deposits of zinc and lead fairly close together, or at least there were two different ores and Anna said that they both stank like sulfur and I knew that both ores here were sulfides. Lead and iron had been smelted here for thousands of years, and some archeologists believe that it was here that iron was first made.

  But zinc was unknown as a separate metal. It was used as an alloying element with copper to make brass, but the ores were mixed before smelting to make brass directly, or zinc ore was mixed with copper before casting and copper was actually used to reduce the zinc!

  Late that summer, I found out why.

  The fact is I wouldn’t have gotten zinc at all if I hadn't added some pollution-control equipment to the blast furnace there. There wasn't even a real need to control pollution, since our facilities were tiny by modem standards and didn't seriously effect the environment. But the problem would grow unless we started off doing things right, so I was adding dust collectors where possible.

  When we tried to smelt the zinc ore, after roasting it to convert the sulfide to the oxide, all we got was slag. No metal at all came out. It was only when we cleaned out the dust collector that we found drops of zinc there.

  The zinc had left the furnace as a gas! Small wonder the ancients never found it. They weren’t worried about pollution at all!

  By the next winter, we were producing zinc in quantity, but I get ahead of myself.

  Work started on the training base as soon as the ground thawed. I’d chosen the land because of the varied terrain, with both mountains and plains on it, and because it was the least populated area of my lands. I only had to pay seven yeomen to move their families off it.

  Eventually, the main barracks would be a square castle a mile to the side and six stories tall, but it was modest enough to start out. It had bunk-bed space for sixteen dozen men and a dining hall that doubled as a church, both made of concrete blocks. There was a big concrete parade around and a twelvemile long obstacle course that was rougher than anything that I’d ever heard of.

  On schedule, over a gross of peasants arrived from Count Lambert, or rather one from each of his knights. I had specifically asked for rough, disobedient characters. Peasants who were “too smart for their own good.”

  They certainly looked the part. If ever there were a bunch of men who looked like they should be hung on general principles, this was the gang. With one exception.

  Piotr Kulczynski was with them.

  Chapter Nineteen

  FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI

  I had spent much of the winter in preparation to attend Sir Conrad’s warrior school. I had trained one of my subordinates, Jozef Kulisiewicz, to take over my position for a year, taking him twice on my rounds of Sir Conrad's factories and inns, and saw to it that his replacement was well trained.

  I had artfully observed all the exercises that Sir Conrad and his knights were doing, and diligently practiced them myself. And I had worked on Count Lambert very carefully, and eventually got him to appoint me to the school. This was not easy, for while my father was one of the count’s peasants, I was not, being sworn to Sir Conrad. But I persisted with the count, and came up with many reasons why I should go. At last, I irritated him sufficiently.

  “Dog’s blood! If you were sworn to me, I'd have you whipped! Piotr, you are too damn smart for your own good!”

  “Yes, my lord. But isn’t that precisely what Sir Conrad asked for? Men who were too smart?”

  “By God it was, and I’m going to send you there just to get you out of my mustache! I know what Sir Conrad has planned at that school, and I think you'll be dead in three days if you go!”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  “You can thank me after he kills you! Now get out of here and get out of town, too!”

  My plan accomplished, I left quickly. For I thought it was absolutely necessary that I attend the warrior school. My position as chief accountant gave me an excellent income, pleasant working conditions, and considerable prestige, but it did not give me what I really wanted. It did not give me Krystyana.

  She was intent on marrying a true belted knight, or not marrying at all. Although nothing had been said of it, I was sure that those who survived the warrior school would soon be knighted. What other purpose could the school have?

  So thus it was that I was standing in line with a gross of the grossest peasants I’d ever seen. It seemed that they had been picked for ugliness rather than for any other reason. They were all huge and hairy and smelled bad. I began to think that I had made a big mistake, a serious error in my career development plan.

  “Piotr, what the hell are you doing here?” Sir Conrad shouted.

  “Count Lambert sent me here, my lord. He said that I wa
s rude and insubordinate and that if I were sworn to him, he’d have me whipped.”

  “Count Lambert could have you hung, sworn to him or not! Who is taking over your job?”

  “Jozef Kulisiewicz, my lord. He’s quite competent.”

  “I’ll bet he is! After this stunt, he just might keep your job! You conniving little runt! You planned this, didn't you? Well, you planned wrong! You wanted to come here? Okay! You'll stay here! You're not my squire any more, Piotr. You're just another grunt in this line!”

  I was so shocked that I barely heard the things that he said to the others in the line, though he was loud enough to make a snake listen. My position gone? And I was no longer a squire? What had I done to myself?. Surely no one would knight this bunch of ruffians! I was ruined!

  They gave me little time to bemoan my fate. We were marched off to the showers, for Sir Conrad said that we stank too badly for him to stand before us.

  They had us strip naked and throw our clothes into a pile, to be burned, they said. Burning was probably the right thing to do with the rags that the others were wearing, but I had been spending much of my pay on nice clothing! My red hose and purple tunic were thrown into the pile of rags, along with my blue hat, my green cloak, and my beautiful Cracow shoes with the longest pointed toes in Silesia! I could only thank God that I hadn’t worn my sword and armor, reasoning that none of the others would have such finery.

  We were each given a small bag with our name on it for our valuables. We were told that these would be returned to us if we survived the year out, or sent to our families in the more likely event that we did not.

  Four old women were waiting for us with sheep clippers, another of Sir Conrad’s inventions.

  We were each clipped of all hair, from head to foot and all in between, with the old women laughing at the small sizes of our privy members or occasionally pretending to be astounded at the size of others.

  It was a vastly humiliating experience, and followed by the knights shouting at us to wash our bald heads and denuded bodies with the foulest smelling soap I’ve ever encountered.