Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  I had the pews, altar, and communion rail permanently installed, as opposed to the usual medieval practice of making them movable. Nobody was going to use my church for a beer bust, as happened elsewhere.

  * * *

  A month after Lambert's visit, the Mongol hunt went off very well, I thought. Over forty knights accepted my invitation, including the Banki brothers, which Janina, Yawalda, and Natalia appreciated. And Friar Roman had come from Okoitz to observe.

  With all of my people and Sir Miesko's, with men, women, and older children going at it, we had over seven hundred people beating the bushes, backed up by the knights in case of trouble.

  Starting out almost a hundred yards apart in the morning, they were shoulder to shoulder at sunset, and the valley was full of animals. Bison and wolves and bears. There were so many that during the night I had to give orders that no one was allowed out of the building. Not that anybody much cared. They were all too busy playing in the bathroom.

  The showers were the biggest hit of all, with people standing under them back to back and belly to belly and using up hot water by the ton. The kitchen stoves were going full blast and nonstop, but they were still hard-pressed to keep the water warm.

  I suppose it's harder to get enthused about a flush toilet, but they caused considerable wonderment. One knight complained that he washed his small clothes in one of the low sinks, pressed the little lever and they disappeared!

  Natalia had counted the animals as they ran over the drawbridge and through the gate, and toward the end she had a different person counting each species.

  We had over four thousand deer, eleven hundred wild boar, four hundred bison, six hundred wolves, two hundred elk (or moose, as the Americans call them), one hundred forty bears, plus lynx, wildcats, wood grouse, heathcocks, rabbits and other small game. And eight of the biggest cows Natalia had ever seen.

  People couldn't believe her when she read the list, but after all, these were all the animals living on forty square miles of rich land.

  They believed her in the morning when the killing began. The knights rampaged for two days, exhausting themselves physically before their bloodlust was sated. The commoners had to scurry to drag in all the bodies, and gut and skin them.

  Tadaos the bowman begged permission to join in the slaughter, and I told him that he could bag a few, but I didn't want to spoil the nobles' fun. He strung his bow in an instant and fired off four arrows in as many seconds. Each came to rest in the head of an animal: three bucks and a wild boar. Every one of them was more than two hundred yards away. His shooting was still as good as it had been last fall. Then he unstrung his bow, and with a look of contentment on his face, recovered his arrows before he went back to help out with the skinning and gutting.

  I had reserved all of the hides for myself, since we needed leather for a lot of things, and we exhausted all of my salt just salting down the skins. I had to buy three more tons out of Cieszyn before it was all over.

  Five of our huge beer barrels were pressed into service holding salted meat. For a few weeks, we were back to having only water to drink, until more barrels were made.

  The sauna/smokehouse was a nine-yard stone dome, and was packed almost solid.

  The beehive coke oven had just been completed, and hadn't yet been used for coal. It was the same size as the sauna, since they had used the same centering on both. It too was used as a smokehouse, and the woodcutters were hard-pressed to find enough hickory to keep both fires smoldering.

  In the Middle Ages, the most highly prized meat was not the muscle tissue but the internal organs. Everyone gorged themselves on liver and hearts and kidneys.

  The kitchens turned out headcheese by the ton and I resolved that next year we'd have some sausage-making machinery. This year, there just wasn't time.

  But to me, the most interesting things were the aurochs. There were eight of them, a bull, four cows, and three calves. These were huge wild cattle that are extinct in the twentieth century. The last of the species was killed in Poland in the sixteenth.

  They were black with a white stripe down the back, from head to tail, and they were huge. While I was sitting on Anna, who was bigger than the average war-horse, the bull could raise his head and his eyes were higher than my own.

  "He's mine!" Sir Vladimir shouted, lowered his lance and would have charged if I hadn't stopped him.

  "Remember the rules," I told him. "At least one-sixth of the males must be kept for breeding, and he's the only one. Anyway, I'm going to domesticate him. Think of the meat on that animal! There must be three tons of it!"

  "You'll never domesticate that beast, Sir Conrad."

  "I can try."

  With a lot of work and one serious injury, we managed to herd the aurochs into another valley, then cut down a few strategically placed trees at the entrance to barricade them in. Eventually, we had a good-sized herd of them, but I get ahead of myself.

  Six dozen bucks were saved to provide fresh meat for us through the winter and there were no complaints when I had the female half of our catch released along with the young and a sixth of the males. We had more fresh meat than anybody had ever seen before.

  Friar Roman had come from Okoitz, where he had been studying clothmaking, at the behest of his abbot.

  At supper, he presented me with a beautifully illuminated manuscript of the deed to my property. It was as colorful as a church altar and radiant with gold foil.

  "It's wonderful!" I said. "But where did you get all the paints and gold leaf?"

  "Oh, I have quite a painting box now. It was given to me by a wealthy widow as a pious act for the Church. Actually, my vow of poverty has made me much better off than I was. Soon, my vow of obedience is going to give me command of a cloth factory at Cracow. I think perhaps I shouldn't discuss my vow of chastity, but Okoitz is a marvelous place."

  It was agreed by all that we would do the hunt again next year, and people were courteous enough not to remind me that I wasn't going to be here next year.

  Sir Miesko said that next time we should sweep his lands as well, and Count Lambert was seriously thinking of staging a Mongol hunt covering his entire territory.

  "Think of it," he said. "We might rid all my lands of wolves and bears! Do you realize how many of my people they kill every year? It must be dozens! And the food we'd gather!"

  Someone pointed out that the beaters would have to be in the field for weeks. How would they be fed and housed? How could they keep the wolves from sneaking out of the ring in the dark?

  No one knew, but everyone agreed to think on it.

  When it came to the division of the spoils, there was so much that we didn't bother trying to set up a fair system. I simply told everyone to take as much as they could carry. When I noticed some of my yeomen coming back for thirds, I put a stop to it.

  We had skinned and gutted the wolves, cats, and other normally inedible animals and hung them up outside the gate. I said that if anybody kept dogs, they were welcome to come back and pick up the dog meat.

  But when a few knights came back with pack animals, the carcasses were gone. Some peasants must have taken them for eating.

  Until the time of the big hunt, the people at Three Walls had been eating a largely vegetarian diet, and that mostly grains, with only a small amount of meat and fresh greens in it. But from then on, we became meat-eaters, and over half of our caloric intake was in animal products. The children grew taller.

  * * *

  Later that fall we finally struck coal, and we found that we could make coke. This involved cleaning the coal of any obvious incursions of clay and stone, then baking the impurities out of it.

  The beehive oven was a nine-yard dome that had a hole in the top through which the coal was loaded.

  The rest of the oven was covered with dirt as an insulator, except for a doorway for extracting the coke. The coal was leveled with long rakes through the doorway to the depth of a yard and a half. Then a fire was started on top of the coal and t
he supply of air was restricted.

  Soon the whole bed of coal was smoldering, and the dome of the oven reflected the heat downward. This eventually melted the coal, and volatile material—sulfur, ammonia, hydrocarbons—was vaporized to rise to the surface and be burned. It stank abominably.

  The operator peeked through the small hole at the top of the doorway. When he saw that the volatiles had been burned off, the coal was again a solid, and the top of the bed was glowing, he inserted a brass spraying-apparatus through the top hole and fed enough water through it to quench the fire without unduly cooling the oven.

  The coke, which was by then almost pure carbon, was shoveled out with very long-handled shovels. The doorway was bricked over again and new coal was loaded from the top.

  If the process was done properly, the oven was hot enough to restart the new batch of coal by itself, saving a good deal of fuel. Once we got the oven working properly, we ran about one batch a day through. By spring, we had eight ovens going.

  The masons could build the new ones through the coldest weather, since each was built next to a functioning oven, which kept the ground thawed, and the domes were built of dry laid sandstone. Mortar would never have stood the heat.

  Chapter Nineteen

  But now it was a week before Christmas, and my stay of execution was over. I had to go and fight and kill or maybe be killed to see if a hundred forty-two children had the right to live normal lives.

  My orders were to bring the children to Okoitz, and there wasn't any way around it. But I wasn't going to bring them in chained neck to neck as I'd found them. I was going to bring them as what they had become. The Christian children of Polish Christian people.

  If the kids had to go to Okoitz, then their adoptive parents would go with them. That meant just about everybody at Three Walls, so we pretty much shut down the whole town, except for a skeleton crew who kept the chickens fed, the fires going, and the pipes from freezing.

  But it meant that if I lost the fight, the Crossmen would have to take Christian children from Christian families, and I didn't think that even they could get away with that. Or maybe they could. But it was worth a try.

  It meant a long, two-day walk for eight hundred people, but we were well fed and in good shape. It was cold, but we were well clothed and had plenty of blankets.

  We had a long string of pack mules for our baggage and Sir Miesko was expecting us.

  My new armor was done, and I'd made Ilya polish it like a mirror. If I had to go out and defend truth, justice, and the purity of childhood, I was damn well going to go as a knight in shining armor.

  I had him polish my old helmet as well and was wearing it instead of the new one, which was hard to take off. My new chest and back piece had a circular hole on top for my head. At this hole the metal collar flanged up and then out. The new helmet was a clamshell affair that hinged on top, and it had a ring around the bottom that fit into the collar flange on the suit below. Two hand-filed bolts held the sides of the helmet together.

  Once the new helmet was on, I could turn my head from side to side, but I couldn't tilt it. More importantly, it couldn't be tilted. With my old helmet, a heavy sword blow could break my neck. With the new one, a blow to the head was transmitted through the flange to my upper body.

  But the damned thing was a nuisance to put on and take off. You needed a wrench and a helper.

  Anna wore some armor as well. A face plate and a lobstertail guard for the top of her neck were all she would accept, and I only got her to wear that by telling her it was pretty.

  The hooks to hold the lance for her were built into both sides of her face plate, in the hopes that their use wouldn't be obvious on something strange to people. We had them on both sides in case they threw a lefty at us.

  Having a hook on the saddle was fine when we only had to hit the hole on a quintain. Hitting a knight required something sturdier.

  I had a notch cut into the saddlebow of my warkak. I could set my lance in it with the handguard, or vamplate, ahead of the notch. That put the force of the blow on the saddle and thus on Anna, without my smaller muscles having to get involved. We had continued practicing every day and I figured that we were as ready as we would ever be.

  Besides the armor, which covered me from crown to fingertip to toe, the only other thing I wore was a huge wolfskin cloak. Anna and I must have looked pretty awesome. We got a lot of stares, anyway.

  Sir Miesko was ready for us, and had a barn set up for the workers to sleep in. The booty taken from the Crossmen was already at Okoitz, cooking facilities and supplies of food were arranged. Good neighbors are wonderful.

  Sir Vladimir, Sir Miesko, and myself, along with all our ladies, were sitting at supper.

  But Sir Miesko and his wife were still convinced that I was soon to die, fancy armor or not. When everybody who knows anything is of the same opinion, you can't help but start to believe them. For five months, everybody I met was certain that I was going to get killed. It was getting to me, and it was hard to stay cheerful. "Okay," I said. "I admit that there is some danger. I could die in a few days. So what do we do about it?"

  "Have you given thought to your projects and your plans?" Sir Miesko asked.

  "Well, everything goes back to Count Lambert, doesn't it?"

  "It does if you make no other provisions for it."

  "You're suggesting that I make out a will?"

  "A will may or may not be honored. Tell me, is Count Lambert the man you would want to run your estate at Three Walls?" Sir Miesko asked.

  "He might do a better job than most. Actually, I think that Sir Vladimir here would be about the best person for it. Can I make him my heir?"

  Sir Vladimir looked shocked. "Me? But I'm no master of the technical arts!"

  "No, you're not. But you have brains enough to listen to those who know more than you. You're a natural leader, and you care about people. Furthermore, you're an unimpeachable member of the old nobility. I couldn't leave it to Yashoo, for example. The nobles would never stand for it. No, Sir Vladimir, I think you're stuck with it."

  Sir Vladimir started to say something, but Sir Miesko cut him off. "Now that that's agreed upon, the question is how best to accomplish it. I've mentioned that a will may or may not stand up. It depends on the duke's mood, which is, in truth, a fickle thing. Still, we should try it, for it costs us only a sheet of parchment.

  "But I think that neither the duke nor any other of the nobility would dare to interfere with, say, your daughter's inheritance. After all, their own wealth and position depend on this point of law."

  "But I don't have a daughter!" I said.

  "But you could. It's obvious that Sir Vladimir and Annastashia have been in love for quite a long time. Even an old man like me can see that. They want to get married but they can't, because Baron Jan would never stand for one of his sons marrying a peasant. His wife is worse."

  Vladimir rose in indignation, but Sir Miesko shut him down. "Sit down, Sir Vladimir. I've known your folks for twenty years. They wouldn't even come to my wedding, despite the fact that I'd been knighted only weeks before, because my lady was still a commoner."

  "Sir Miesko, you are talking about my father and my liege lord!" Sir Vladimir said.

  "I'm talking about an old acquaintance, and every word of it is true. You want to marry the girl, don't you?"

  "Yes! Of course."

  "And you, Annastashia. You want to marry this impetuous young knight, don't you?"

  "Oh, yes!"

  "Then keep him shut up while we work out how that can be accomplished."

  "But she's not my daughter!" I said.

  "She can be. Her parents are both dead. You can adopt her. Once she's your daughter and heir, even Baron Jan isn't going to stop his son from marrying the wealthiest heiress in the duchy.

  "Oh, I know that your funds are low now, but I've seen what you've accomplished in a few months at Three Walls. In a year, you would have been the richest man in Poland. Even without
you, what you've started there will get fabulous wealth. Any man with brains can see it.

  "So Annastashia gets the man she wants, Sir Vladimir gets a wife of his choice and more wealth than he's ever dreamed of, and you, Sir Conrad, get an heir who can carry out your plans."

  There was no arguing with his reasoning, so Sir Miesko got out parchment, pen and ink, and drafted both a letter of adoption for Annastashia, and a will for me, in which I specifically gave my blessing on the marriage of my daughter to Sir Vladimir.

  "You really should get yourself a seal," Sir Miesko said. "A bit late now, though."

  Everybody present signed everything, and Sir Miesko affixed his own seal and promised to get the duke's seal on both instruments the next day.

  As the party was breaking up, I announced that I had some presents to distribute. I gave Sir Miesko and Sir Vladimir wolfskin capes like my own. "I've had a dozen of these made up," I said. "I'll be giving them to the highest-ranking people who show up at the fight. It takes six wolves to make one of these. I figure that if I can make wearing wolfskin popular, it will give people more incentive to exterminate the wolves.

  "Actually, wolfskin is a very sturdy and warm material. It has two different kinds of hair in it. There are the long, stiff hairs you see on the outside and there are shorter, finer hairs, much like wool, next to the skin. A wolf really does have sheep's clothing, underneath.

  "Lady Richeza, I couldn't bring your present with me. Indeed, you won't get it until spring. But I've left the design of a complete home water-and-septic system at Three Walls, along with written orders to build one for you.

  "You'll have hot, running water in your kitchen as well as a new stove, a complete bathroom, and a small, windmill-operated water tower." She was speechless. Actually, I'd owed her something nice for a long while. That, and I needed somewhere to set up a showplace for our plumbing products, and nobody missed stopping at her house when they were in the area. I was a socialist becoming a miserable capitalist.