Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  "He is Father Ignacy Sierpinski, at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow, my lord."

  "I will talk to this Father Ignacy. My second question is, Why do you want this land? From what I've heard, you know as little of farming as you do of hunting."

  "I want the land so I can build an industrial base."

  "A what?"

  "Hear me out, my lord. You have asked me why I wasn't building weapons. I intend to build them. I can make armor that no arrow can possibly penetrate. I can make swords as good as the one I carry. Have you seen what it can do?"

  "I've heard stories. Go on."

  "I can build weapons that roar like thunder, strike like lightning, and kill your enemies half a mile away.

  "And I intend to make these arms and armor by the thousands. By the hundreds of thousands if I can."

  "A hundred thousand suits of armor? Why, I doubt if there are fifty thousand knights in all of Poland."

  "Not the knights, my lord, the peasants."

  "And just how do you suppose that a peasant could afford armor?"

  "Obviously they can't, my lord. The arms will have to be supplied to them."

  "Do you expect me to pay for this?"

  "Of course not, my lord. I will have to do that myself."

  "I know that you are wealthy, Sir Conrad. But even your wealth could not equip a hundred men, much less a hundred thousand."

  "I said I would make the weapons, not buy them. The money I have will get me started. After that, I will have to come up with salable products to meet expenses. Mortar and bricks, certainly. Perhaps pottery. Cookware, pots and pans. Maybe even glass. At this point I am not sure of specifics, but I know it can be done."

  "Very well. If we assume that you really can build such arms and that the peasants will wear them, it is still useless. A mob of peasants, no matter how armed, is still a mob. Fighting men could cut them up regardless of weapons. Believe me. I've seen it too many times."

  "Training is necessary, of course. But techniques exist that can turn a bunch of farmers into a fighting unit in four months' time. I've been through it myself, my lord."

  "Indeed. What does all this have to do with my original question? Why do you want that land?"

  "I need to have someplace to do these things. I can't do it in the cities. The guilds would never permit me the innovations that I will have to introduce."

  "You did well enough with the guilds of Cieszyn. You abolished one and have another touting to you."

  "My lord, that business with the whoremasters guild was simply stupidity on their part. I never wanted anything to do with them. As to the bell casters, they were only three brothers who were starving to death. I wouldn't have that kind of luck in Cracow.

  "I can't do it here. These people are primarily farmers. I need full-time craftsmen."

  "I see. You are dismissed, Sir Conrad."

  Shaking slightly, I went back down to the party and drained two mugs of beer.

  Shortly, I saw Lambert being escorted to the duke's chambers. A thorough man, the duke.

  The party was breaking up. It must have been approaching midnight, because I saw Sir Vladimir stumble out to relieve Sir Stefan. He hadn't been at the feast, and from the looks of him he had slept in his armor.

  The duke came down and looked at me. "There is more to gain than to lose. I'll be watching you, boy, but you can have it."

  I came close to fainting.

  Privately and somewhat curtly, the count informed five adolescent girls that they were leaving with me, the ones he thought were acting above their station in life. That night Krystyana was happy and excited about the coming adventure. She didn't realize that she was being thrown out.

  I didn't regret my actions. I intended to raise a million bright kids "above their stations," and damn these Dark Age rules!

  Yet personally, I was somewhat sad. I had been happy at Okoitz, but my job there was done. Good things must end, and perhaps the future would not be so bad.

  For a penniless immigrant who had arrived only six months before, I had done fairly well. We now had the start of a decent school system, the beginnings of a textile industry, and the glimmerings of an industrial base.

  If the seeds I'd brought worked out, we had the makings of an agricultural revolution.

  We had steel, a fairly efficient brass works, and a profitable if embarrassing inn.

  And now I had a hundred square kilometers of land to work with, land that would someday be the industrial heart of Poland.

  It was a magnificent challenge, but still, leaving is a sad thing.

  Interlude Three

  Tom pressed the HOLD button.

  "Enough for today. They're waiting the banquet on us, but I'd hate to make them hold the ballet."

  "Okay," I said. "But first tell me what went wrong."

  "Wrong with what?"

  "With Conrad's plans. He seems to be an intelligent, competent engineer. He had the backing of the authorities. He had raw materials and a good work force. Where did he fail?"

  "What makes you think he failed?"

  "Well, he had to fail! He's trying to start the industrial revolution five centuries too early, which obviously didn't happen."

  "Ah, the catch is in that word 'obviously.' Son, I've been showing you this record for a reason. You know that subjectively I'm over eight hundred years old. There are limits to what even our medics can accomplish. You are ninety now, and I think you're mature enough to get involved with the firm's decision-making processes.

  "But decisions shouldn't be made without complete information, and for us there's never a reason for anything to be rushed. Time, after all, is our stock in trade. Let's go eat."

  "But—"

  "But nothing! You want to keep the dancers waiting?"

  As we left for the banquet hall, Tom put his hand on my shoulder and said, "What tickles me is the way Conrad keeps on talking about building socialism while at the same time taking all of the actions a nineteenth-century capitalist would approve of. Buying businesses, making them profitable, reinvesting the money . . ."

  The High-Tech Knight

  Prologue

  He unloaded the temporal canister, glanced quickly at his new subordinate, reloaded it with his previous superior, and hit the retrieve button. That had to be done quickly. Holding the canister in 2,548,950 b.c. was expensive.

  He examined her frozen, nude body. It was just over four feet tall and skinny. The skin was dark brown, the hair black and tightly curled, the breasts small yet pendulous. An excellent imitation of a type twenty-seven protohuman. The biosculptors had done a good job.

  He switched off her stasis field.

  Her eyes opened, she stared shocked at the stalactites on the ceiling of the cave. She noticed the naked brown man bending over her, noticed her own nakedness and yelped, covering her breasts and groin.

  "Yeah, the uniform here is a bit skimpy." He chuckled. "The protos haven't invented clothes yet, so what can we do? Hey. Don't look so shocked. I'm not going to rape you. You're not my adolescent fantasy any more than I'm yours."

  "Damn it! I have five doctorates!"

  "I'm sure your mother is very proud of you. Are any of them in finding carrion or grubbing for grubs? Anything else isn't very useful around here."

  She glanced furtively at the cave's rock walls, at the torch that was its sole illumination.

  "What is this place? When is it? And who are you?" She was still clutching her groin.

  "You weren't briefed? This is anthropological research station fifty-seven. The time is half past two million b.c., and I am your charming host, Robert McDougall. I'd tip my hat, but you see the problem. The tribe here calls me 'Gack,' so you might as well, too. No point in being formal when you're naked. I'll be your boss for the next fifty years."

  "Fifty years . . ."

  "Right. Then I go home, a new chum arrives, and you get to be boss for fifty more."

  The cave was cold and wet. She shivered. "This is all some hor
rible mistake!"

  "How can there be a mistake? You replaced the asshole I used to work for. Not that I really had anything personal against her, but you'll understand that after fifty years with only one person to talk to, you just naturally start to hate each other's guts.

  "Anyway, the computers don't make mistakes, so you're supposed to be here because you've arrived at the proper time and in a body properly tailored for our research."

  "This body!" She bawled, "I used to be beautiful!"

  "All part of the high price of science," he said. But she had pulled herself into a fetal position and was sobbing louder. "Hey, you're serious, aren't you? You actually didn't volunteer for this post?"

  "No! I mean, yes I didn't volunteer. I was in twentieth-century Poland. I spent one day on my new assignment and the monitors came and I woke up here! I'm in the Historical Corps. I don't know anything about anthropology!"

  "Why, those filthy bastards . . ."

  "Yeah," she said, grateful for any sympathy.

  " . . . sending me a totally untrained recruit! My God! That means . . ." He stooped down and found a sliver of bone on the cave floor. He grabbed her right hand.

  "This doesn't hurt. You won't feel it at all." He slipped the bone under her index fingernail and moved it sideways. She stared openmouthed as he repeated the operation on her left hand.

  "What . . ."

  "They were both turned off, thank God. Look. You have some fairly powerful equipment built into that little body. Your right index finger contains a temporal sword. With it, you can cut a tree in half at six paces. Your left contains a fire-starter. They can save your life, but if you don't know how to use them, they can kill you. Or me!"

  "There's more?"

  "Some recorders, communicators, beacons, and so on. But that can wait. I want to find out what you're doing here." He squatted in front of a large flat rock by the cave wall. He pressed four nondescript spots on the rock. Glowing white letters appeared in the air before him.

  READY

  He started tapping the blank rock as though it was a typewriter keyboard.

  INFO REQUEST PERSONNEL RECORD. HISTORICAL CORPS WORKER NO. . . .

  "Hey. What's your number?" She told him, he loaded it and started reading. "Hmmm . . . born in North America, 62,218 b.c. . . . approved for child rearing; eleven children . . . at forty-five, attended Museum University 62,219 b.c. to 62,192 b.c. . . . doctorates in medicine, Slavic languages, psychology, and Greek literature . . . accepted into the Historical Corps . . . assigned to Periclean Athens, forty-one-year tour of duty. Performance unsatisfactory . . ."

  "That wasn't fair!" she said.

  "Fair? What's fair? If you want to talk about 'fair,' go talk to one of our protos after her kid's been eaten by a leopard!" he snapped. " . . . Returned to university and obtained a doctorate in ancient Egyptian languages . . . turned down on four assignment requests, ninth through thirteenth dynasties . . . assigned twentieth-century Poland . . . caused a situation which resulted in unauthorized transport of local citizen to the thirteenth century. Involuntarily assigned to anthropological section as disciplinary action . . .

  "The bastards! Turning my station into a penal colony!"

  "But all I did was leave a door open!"

  "We'll see what you did." He backspaced a few lines and requested an information expansion. "Good Lord! You're her! They used to tell stories about you in school. You're the worst screw-up in our history! You're the one who sent the owner's own cousin back to the Polish Middle Ages, ten years before the Mongol invasions, when the guy didn't even know that time travel existed. They couldn't bring him back because he wasn't discovered there until the invasion was actually on. The owner himself found his own cousin on the battle lines, so they had to leave the guy there for the ten years or violate causality. When you make a mess, lady, you don't kid around!"

  "But all I did was to forget to close a door!"

  "You screw up here and I'll feed you to the leopards." He pulled up four more files and scanned them. "Well, if it's any consolation, your last boss was punished for failing to brief you properly. He'll be here in fifty years as my replacement and you get to break him in."

  "I think I'll just quit and go back to North America."

  "Fine. You'll get your chance to do that in a hundred years, subjective."

  "But—"

  "Lady, this far back we get one canister every fifty years. The last one just left and the next one is taking me out of this flea-bitten pest hole.

  "So cheer up, kid, and make the best of it. Hungry? Come on, I'll show you where there's a good rotten log. Lots of grubs."

  Chapter One

  My name is Sir Vladimir Charnetski. I am a good Polish knight and a true son of the Holy Catholic Church. I was born in 1212, the third son of Baron Jan of Charnel.

  I write because my instructress felt that I could improve my literacy by recording the events of my life, but on reflection I find that there is very little to say. I had an ordinary upbringing. At sports I was better than most, but not the best. I am good at arms, but there are some who can knock me out of the saddle. My chess is solid but uninspired.

  Who would want to read the tale of so ordinary a knight? None but my mother and she already knows it.

  But in my twentieth year, I met a most extraordinary nobleman and I think it fitting to write about him.

  His name is Sir Conrad Stargard and I met him in the following manner. In the fall of 1231, word came from my father's liege lord, Count Lambert, that we should send a knight to Lambert's castle town to attend there on Easter and for the three months thereafter.

  This was a duty that I eagerly sought for myself, for rumor had it that Okoitz was an excellent place for many reasons. Lambert's table was reputed to be one of the best in Silesia and his wine cellar the best stocked in Poland. Also, Lambert took his droit du seigneur in a most unusual and, it seemed to me, a most delightful way.

  The lord of a manor naturally has the right to enjoy his peasant girls on the night before their wedding. My father is a vigorous man in most respects; but encouraged by my mother, he had long since declared himself too old for this duty and delegated the task to his sons.

  My brothers and I diced for the responsibility and occasionally I won. Now, while the worst of copulations can fairly be described as excellent, these bouts were often less excellent than they could have been. While unmarried girls were presumed to be virgin, in fact they rarely were and a considerable number of them were obviously pregnant.

  Then, too, they were often frightened and sometimes actually in love with their future husbands; circumstances which degraded their enthusiasm.

  Oh, one could always encourage a wench to meet one in a secluded wood, but this entailed a certain amount of sneaking around, a thing I am loath to do.

  My Lord Lambert's solution to the problem is as straightforward as he is. He picks the best-looking of his girls just as they are blossoming and persuades them to move into his castle as "ladies-in-waiting." The advantages he offers are such that scant persuasion is needed; indeed little more than a permission to come. He turns the management of his household over to the "ladies," and enjoys them at his leisure until such time as they are with child; he then procures for each an acceptable husband, provides a suitable dowry, and pays the wedding expenses.

  Most importantly, Lambert, with his usual largesse, permits his attending knights full use of this harem, which often numbers a half dozen.

  Lambert's custom is the envy of all the noblemen around and he gets away with it because his wife stays on her family's estates in Hungary. Or perhaps she stays there because of his custom. For my purposes it was inconsequential. I wanted to go.

  As this pleasant obligation must, of necessity, fall to one of us three brothers, they suggested that we dice for it. I refused, saying that three months was a long time and that the matter ought to be discussed carefully over several days. My real reason was that, while I was a bachelor, my brothers were
both married. I was sure that once their wives heard about the matter (and I saw to it), I would be given the task without the risk of the throw.

  And so it was that my father informed me that I would go to Okoitz. My mother was in tears as I left, acting as if I were going off to war, or some less honorable way of finding death. My father and brothers were cordial and polite with the vague certainty that somehow I had cheated them.

  It was an easy day's ride to Okoitz and, since the highwayman, Sir Rheinburg, had been killed, a safe one. It was Holy Saturday and the Truce of God was in effect, yet prudence and courtesy required that I be fully armed, covered head to toe with chain mail and astride my war-horse, Witchfire.

  But there was no need to be grim, so I took the precaution of carrying a three-gallon sack of wine over my saddlebow, and had a plentiful supply of bread and cheese in my bags, this being the last day of Lent.

  It was a pleasant spring morning and I found myself singing old songs. I aided Witchfire by lessening the weight of the burdensome wine sack and came to some assistance with regards to the saddlebags, as well.

  Horses like you to sing to them and soon Witchfire was galloping for the sheer joy of a clear springtime morning. But while crossing a small wooden bridge he threw the shoe from his right rear hoof.

  This was serious, both because of the high cost of steel and because a charger cannot possibly be ridden unshod without injury. I could not walk to Okoitz and get there by the morrow, and to not get there would stain my father's name.

  I searched the bridge, the stream and its banks for hours without finding the lost shoe. At last I went down the road, walking in full armor and leading my horse, searching for a blacksmith.

  I found a small side trail and followed it to a peasant's hut. The peasant's wife assured me that there was a village with a blacksmith two miles up the side trail.

  In full armor, I trudged fully four miles to this village, only to find that the blacksmith was away, visiting his mother for Easter. But the filthy churls informed me that but three miles further on the trail there was another village and here the smith was sure to be home, as he was the brother of the local smith and it was their custom to alternate, year by year, visiting their mother on Easter and Christmas.