Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  "Fine by me, my lord, if both men are willing."

  "They are. It was them that brought the matter up to me. They also both wanted to leave Ilya's wife here, but I don't see how we can allow that. The Church would not be pleased, and it's never been too happy with me."

  "The Church is not pleased because you are separated from your wife, my lord. Why can't you grant the same privilege to Ilya?"

  "Why? Because I'm a nobleman and he's a commoner, that's why! The commons don't have the brains or the ability to regulate their own lives properly. That's why they serve us, and why we serve them. I may not be the pillar of marital fidelity, but my wife has not taken another husband and I have not taken another wife. What these smiths are proposing is nothing less than that the one should step into the bed of the other! That is clearly against the laws of the Church. Without the influence of the Church and Christian morality, we'd have nothing but chaos on our hands! The Church must be maintained and its laws enforced!"

  "I suppose you're right, my lord. Well, what's a few more mouths to feed?" I lost my last knight and my position was terrible. I knocked over my king. I had lost two out of two. Damn. When we first started playing, a year ago, I'd won the first two dozen games.

  "Good. Then shall we go make an appearance at the festivities?"

  They started the gift-giving when we returned. The gambling pot I'd won in the course of surviving my Trial by Combat had a fair amount of jewelry in it, which made gift-giving pretty simple. I started with those nobles least important to me, Sir Vladimir's sister and her husband who had come down from Gneizno. I'd never met them before and would likely never see them again, so a small gift was appropriate. I took out a sack of my least valuable jewelry, poured it on a tray and asked each to choose what he or she wanted. They were delighted.

  As I went up my guest list, I periodically noted when the pile was growing small and added another sack of jewels, a step up from the first batch, but nobody knew that but me. My own ladies were near the end, and after Annastashia took her choice, I added to it the purse of silver I had denied her a few days before.

  "I hear you've been acting properly, daughter!" I said, and the crowd cheered. The rumor was out that she had thrown Sir Vladimir out of her bed once I'd adopted her and she was no longer a peasant wench.

  I'd saved Count Lambert's priest, Father John, and his magnificent French wife until the end. Lady Francine was easily the most beautiful woman I had seen in this century. She chose a heavy gold pendant and chain with some sort of green stone in it. It might have been an emerald, but who could tell? It was polished smooth and glassy, since the cutting of facets hadn't been invented yet.

  "Father John, last year I was ignorant of local customs and didn't realize that I owed you a gift, so the best I could do at the time was a poor one. This year, I notice that your altar furnishings could use some improvement. Would this be acceptable?"

  I held up one of the stranger things I'd found in my booty from the Crossmen, a large and ornate glass goblet. The crowd's reaction surprised me. Gold and silver jewelry they had taken in their stride, but a piece of glass got a chorus of "oohs" and "aahs."

  Father John stood up. "Last year I gave you some of my carvings. This Christmas I hadn't expected to see you alive! The truth is that I have nothing to give you in return!" The crowd laughed.

  "Well, you won't get off that light!" I said. "We've just built a big church at Three Walls that is bare of all carving. I'll take it out in trade!" The crowd was in a good mood.

  The other nobles distributed their gifts. I collected quite a lot of nicely embroidered garments, and Sir Vladimir and his brothers had clubbed up to buy me a magnificent gold-handled dagger, with all sorts of stone and inlay work.

  Count Lambert's gift to me was to publicly appoint me his Master of the Hunt, a job that I didn't want. I tried to take it with good grace.

  After most of the gift-giving was over, I stood up again. "I'm going back to Three Walls after the wedding. I won't be here for Twelfth Night, when one gifts the members of the opposite class, so I have to give my gifts to the residents of Okoitz early. Bring it in!" Four men rolled in two heavy barrels.

  "Last year, Ilya promised to make each of you a set of door hinges. Then I kept him busy all year long working on my projects, and now I'm stealing him from you!" Ilya looked surprised. This was the first he'd heard of my approval of his permanent move to Three Walls. "In those barrels is a set of brass hinges and a brass door latch for every commoner's door in Okoitz—no longer will you close your doors by lifting them into place!" That brought down the house!

  When the noise stopped, I said, "What's more, I'm going to be rude enough to hint at what I want for my present! You remember all those seeds I gave you last Christmas? Well, I want them back!

  "If you can't do that, then give me about a quarter of your new seeds! And I'd like you to loan me the packages they came in, so I'll know what's what!" They all laughed and cheered again, so I expected that we'd have watermelon next year.

  As things were winding down and I was leaving, Count Lambert half jokingly said, "You gave the priest that magnificent goblet and I only got this gold chain?"

  I was dumbstruck. That chain weighed half a kilo! It was probably worth eight thousand American dollars!

  "I didn't realize that you wanted the goblet, my lord. But I'll make you a promise. In four years, I'll gift you with a hundred glass goblets, and enough glassware so that every man below you, commoners and all, can toast you with it!"

  It was his turn to be dumbstruck.

  Chapter Two

  The next day we had a beautiful wedding. Everything went off nicely, the church was packed and I gave the bride to a beaming Sir Vladimir.

  As father of the bride, I paid for the wedding feast, which also was held in the cloth factory for lack of anything else large enough. Lambert gave me a good price on the food and drink, since if it wasn't for the wedding, he would have had to put on a feast that day anyway. It was the Christmas season.

  The honeymoon trip wasn't then a local custom, so the next morning we went back toward Three Walls, Sir Vladimir and his new wife included. We got as far as Sir Miesko's, where they were ready for us.

  After the workers were settled into the copious hay of Sir Miesko's biggest barn, we sat down to dinner in the manor. At his suggestion, since seven more places were available once Sir Miesko's family and my party were seated, I invited in my bailiff, my two foremen and their wives, and my accountant, Piotr.

  These people were awestruck at the honor done them, and scarcely said a word as supper started, although Piotr kept glancing at Krystyana, who was sitting across from him. The poor kid was still smitten.

  I told Sir Miesko about Count Lambert's plan for the Great Hunt. I also told him that I really didn't want to get much involved with it, but that Count Lambert had insisted. "What I'm building up to is that I would like you to do the job for me. Would you like to be my deputy? Count Lambert said that we could take as our portion pretty much whatever we wanted. Do you think you might be interested?"

  "I might. Even a small share of the take from all of Count Lambert's lands would be vast! Consider what was harvested from your lands alone! But there are details to be considered . . ."

  We were soon into a deep conversation, with Lady Richeza and Krystyana sitting between us. These two fine and understanding women looked at each other, got up, and sat back down once Sir Miesko and I had scooted close together. The conversation never broke and not a word was said about the new table arrangement.

  The deal we made was that Sir Miesko would take complete charge of the project in all but name. He would divide the county into eight or nine hunting districts, and appoint a district master for each. The district masters would be responsible for building an enclosure if something suitable wasn't already available, seeing that everything was properly arranged and feeding the people participating. In return for this they would get all the deer skins taken in their district
.

  Peasants participating would divide one-quarter of the meat between them, and the nobles there would get another quarter. The landowners would get half the meat, proportioned according to their areas. Sir Miesko would get all the furs taken, except for the wolf skins, which were to be mine. I also got any aurochs captured, to be delivered live to me. They were an endangered species and I meant to domesticate them.

  "Sir Conrad, you're taking the short end of the stick!" Sir Miesko said. It's interesting that he used an expression that has lasted to modern times. The local custom among these largely illiterate people was to account for debts by cutting notches into a stick. If I lent you three pigs, we would cut three notches into a stick of wood. Then we would split the stick about in half, down the middle of the notches, so we each had a record. When the sticks were put back together again, it would be obvious if either of us had done further whittling! Wood never splits evenly, and as the lender, the creditor, I got the larger stick of wood and became the stockholder. You, as the borrower, got the short end of the stick.

  "I'm satisfied with the deal as it stands."

  "Be that as it may, Sir Conrad, wolf skins aren't worth much. Half the time they're burned along with the rest of the animal! The other furs will be worth a thousand times as much."

  "Fine. You'll be doing all the work and bearing all the expenses. I'm happy just to get the whole project off my shoulders. Just remember to stress that all the females and young of useful species, along with one-sixth of the males, are to be spared."

  "That much is obvious, once you've explained it. But you've been given a gift and I've taken it from you."

  "I said I was happy. Just try not to get me in trouble, okay?"

  "Rest assured of that. But I don't think my trouble or expenses will be large. I need only write a few dozen letters. It will cost me nothing to send them since every landowner in the county, or at least their men, comes by here monthly to deliver food for your city at Three Walls."

  "What? I thought that you were providing our food."

  "I am. You asked me to keep you supplied and we agreed on prices. Surely you don't think that the hundred farmers I have here could feed the almost thousand folk you have in your valley! I mentioned your needs and your prices to my fellow noblemen, and they have delivered their surplus grains here, for pickup by your people.

  "I have paid the others precisely what I have charged you, so I have made no immoral profit. I have charged them reasonable rates for fodder for their pack animals and storage in my barns, but surely you can't complain about that."

  I was surprised, but I didn't have a legitimate bitch. I was getting what I had agreed on.

  "No, no, Sir Miesko, I have no complaint. I simply had never thought it out. I owe you thanks for supplying my needs without bothering me with details. I hope this will be a precedent for the Great Hunt."

  While we were talking, the party went on around us. Sir Miesko's wife, Lady Richeza, is the most gracious woman imaginable. Warm and caring, she was working my awkward subordinates into the conversation. By the time I was back into it, they were all talking boisterously about recent events. Soon she summoned her musicians and we were all dancing.

  I noticed that little Piotr Kulczynski asked Krystyana to dance a waltz, and she turned him down. He soon went outside, and Lady Richeza followed. As things were breaking up, she came to me. "That poor boy truly loves Krystyana."

  "I know. It hurts me to see his pain. But she won't even look at him! That little kid is brilliant! With a proper education he'd be a Nobel prize winner."

  "And what is that?"

  "Where I come from, there is a yearly set of prizes given to those who are judged to have made the greatest contributions to an understanding of the world around us, and the greatest contributions to literature, medicine, and peace. To win one of these is a greater honor than to, say, be the chief administrator of the United Nations. It also pays well. With training, I think Piotr could win the prize in mathematics."

  "Yours must be a wondrous land."

  "There is much good about it, but also much bad. This land has much to be said for it."

  "Yet you came here."

  "It wasn't exactly voluntary. Still, I can't say that I regret it. I think I've found a home here."

  "A home with Krystyana?"

  "No. Please understand that I like Krystyana. She's a fine girl, an intelligent girl and competent at whatever she sets her mind to. And—I hope you aren't offended by my saying this—she's a wonderful bed partner. But, dammit, she's fifteen and I'm thirty-one! I've had seventeen years of formal schooling and she's had about three months! There's too big a gap between us to consider marriage. Marriage should be a thing between equals. Krystyana and Piotr and I would all be better off if they would get together."

  "Do they know your feelings about this?"

  "I think so. I've tried to be obvious about it."

  "But you haven't actually talked with them about it," she said.

  "No, I guess I haven't. Sometimes it's hard . . ."

  "Would you object if I talked to them?"

  "Object? I'd be forever grateful!"

  "Then I will see what I can do."

  She tried, but nothing came of it.

  * * *

  The next day we were back in Three Walls, and the day after was a normal working day. The country folk knocked off work for two weeks around Christmas, but the people at Three Walls had mostly been recruited from a city. City folk worked whenever work was available, and there was plenty for us to do.

  Winter is the best time of the year for logging, the wood is drier and the logs are easier to move around on the snow. Also, the tops of the fir trees were about the only fodder the outdoor animals were going to get. Besides the six dozen bucks left over from the fall's hunt, we had a thousand sheep in the valley. All of them ewes.

  I got a lot of ribbing about that, the gist of which was that I didn't know that rams were needed to make little sheep, but I didn't care. I happened to remember that sheep have a five-month gestation period. Any ewe you buy in December is pregnant if she's going to be. And sheep are sexually mature in six months. Next year we'd have plenty of rams. I think.

  Well, I had one ram in another, much smaller herd. If he fell over dead from exhaustion next breeding season, I'd have to buy some more in a hurry.

  We kept the sawmill going all winter, with sixty women walking back and forth on that huge teeter-totter. The main wooden buildings were up, but we needed lumber for furnishings, shipping containers, barrels, and so on.

  Some construction went on as well. The coke ovens were dry-laid sandstone, so there wasn't any worry about mortar freezing. But putting in foundations was difficult.

  The big problem was the lack of decent artificial light. By Christmas, we were down to about six hours of daylight. Most Americans don't realize just how far north Europe is. Southern Poland is farther north than Lake Superior, and our seacoast is farther north than the shores of Hudson Bay. A high latitude means a large yearly variation in the length of the day.

  Mining went on continuously, of course: it was always dark down there. It was also fairly warm in the mine, and coal mining came to be the job everybody was trying to get. I hoped that Count Lambert wouldn't hear about it.

  But even when the weather was good, which wasn't all that often, we were lucky to spend seven hours a day working.

  Well, if you can't spend, invest!

  I set up a school for the adults. A school for the children was already being taught by two of Lady Richeza's women, so once the children's school was out, the adults took over. Most of my people couldn't read, write, or do simple arithmetic.

  By spring they could. That's not quite the accomplishment that it sounds, because Polish is an easier language to learn than English. Polish is absolutely phonetic in its spelling, rather than nearly random as English is. Every letter has a distinct sound, and there are no silent letters. You spell it exactly as you speak it. Learning
to spell in English gave me nightmares.

  Many Americans who write use spellchecking programs in their personal computers, since the English-speaking peoples can rarely spell their own language. When I got back to Poland after my college days, none of my Polish friends would believe me when I told them this. They thought that I was telling an ethnic joke!

  But we had enough people around who could teach arithmetic and reading. Aside from monitoring things, teaching a course in first aid, and tutoring Piotr in math, I had a fair amount of time to myself, which was wonderful.

  I could close the door of my new office, sit down on my new armchair, put my feet up on my nice new desk and do some serious thinking. Mostly about standards. The weights and measures of the Middle Ages were a vast agglomeration of random events. Length was measured in feet, yards, cubits, spans, hands, fingers, miles, and days. Not only was there no agreed-on relationship between those units, but the size of the unit varied from place to place. A Cieszyn yard was not equal to a Cracow yard which was not equal to a Wroclaw yard.

  It even varied from commodity to commodity. Fine velvets, for example, were sold by the Troy yard, which was shorter than all of the above. And these weren't minor differences of a few percent. The Wroclaw yard was half again longer than the Cracow yard.

  Weights were in even worse shape. Cheese, wheat, and oats were all sold by the quarter, for example. A quarter of what, you ask? Why a quarter of cheese, wheat, or oats! There was no "whole" or "half." But a quarter of wheat was more than five times larger than a quarter of cheese, which was maybe a hundred kilos. And a quarter of oats was bigger than both of the others put together. And of course a quarter in one city was not equal to a quarter anyplace else.

  Well, a pint of milk weighed a pound, but milk is the stupidest standard possible. The specific gravity of milk varies by at least five percent, with the richest milk being the lightest. It spoils quickly, so there is no possibility of having a standard jar of milk somewhere. Yet this didn't seem to bother anybody but me. Of course, if a merchant sold short weight, he might get hung, but you never got any complaints out of him after that.