Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  "Well, a bride usually comes with a dowry," Sir Wojciech said, before Sir Gregor hushed him up.

  "We have talked these very things over with our ladies, Sir Conrad, and the truth is that while they are eager for marriage with us, they do not want to leave their positions at Three Walls. Your adopted daughter, Annastashia, has stayed here after her marriage with Sir Vladimir. He gets no pay other than his maintenance and the dowry you gave him. Why can't we do the same? Surely the presence of three good fighting men would be useful to you, what with all the caravans you have going in and out of here. Don't they need guards?"

  "First off, I can hardly adopt the girls in the same way that I adopted Annastashia. Quite frankly, I've slept often with all three of them, and it would feel like incest if they became my daughters! And the 'dowry' that I gave Sir Vladimir was in fact half the booty that we took together in that fight with the Crossmen last year. The duke awarded it all to me, and making part of it a dowry was just a way of giving Sir Vladimir his share without insulting the duke. Count Lambert never pays more than five hundred pence to marry off one of his ladies-in-waiting, and then only when they're pregnant, generally by him."

  "But these girls are hardly peasants anymore, and we would not require anything like the amount that you gave to our cousin Sir Vladimir. Say, three thousand pence each. In return, we will swear fealty to you and serve you daily for four years, asking only our maintenance."

  I did some quick mental calculating. Eight pence a day and maintenance was fairly standard pay for a knight and his horse. That came to just less than three thousand pence a year. The brothers were offering me quite a deal, about seventy-five percent off. They must have wanted my ladies pretty bad. Anyway, I hadn't slept with any of them since I'd met Cilicia, and it was a shame to let them go to waste.

  "Okay, I think we have a deal, providing that the girls continue on as my managers, and providing that you get their parents' permission, post proper banns at the church, and so on. If you're to swear to me, well, you're sworn through Count Lambert's brother, Count Herman, aren't you? I think we need the permission of both counts before I can swear you in. All that will probably take three or four months, so I suppose we'll have the wedding around Easter."

  The brothers were delighted and went off to tell their prospective brides, who were waiting out in the hallway, probably with their ears pressed to the door, if I knew that crew, and I did.

  When the slaughter was over, and the female deer, elk and bison were driven out of the valley, along with the young and a sixth of the males, and all the catch was carefully divided according to schedule, we held a last feast and a dance. The morning after, our guests departed happy and heavily laden.

  The icehouse and storerooms and smokehouses at Three Walls were filled, we had a gross of deer to provide fresh meat during the winter, and there were huge piles of salted down deer and wolf skins. It was time we set up a tannery.

  I couldn't properly announce the engagements to all the hunters present, since the parents had not yet given their permission, but the day after the crowds left, we threw a party in celebration anyway, just a small one for my household.

  Anna had stayed in the barn during the time that Baron Stefan was visiting us, since I didn't want to give him anything to start ranting about. But with him gone, she just naturally came up to join the party. The Banki brothers had heard a lot of stories about Anna, of course, but I don't think that they really believed any of them until she came up to the living room and sat down. I introduced them and explained about her speech difficulty, and they were most surprised to find themselves in a conversation with a being who looked like a horse!

  I was a little surprised when Piotr came uninvited to the party, which was for my household only, but Sir Vladimir explained that as my squire, Piotr was most certainly a member of the household. I guess I just hadn't thought it out properly. But there was nothing for it but to invite him out of the bachelors' quarters and give him one of the spare rooms in my apartment.

  Piotr was delighted with this move upward, but Krystyana was scowling about it. In fact she had been doing a great deal of scowling lately, and I began to think that having a talk with her was in order. It hurts to be hated.

  I thought about her as the evening went on, and some of her troubles were obvious. Since I'd met Cilicia, I hadn't had very many other women. Krystyana had always been willing to share me with the others, but now she was having to give me up all together. Then too, she had left Okoitz in the company of four other girls almost two years ago. Now one was married to Sir Vladimir and the other three were engaged, or nearly so, to the Banki brothers. She had always been the leader of that group, and now she was the one left behind. Only Natasha remained unattached besides her, and Natasha was a relative newcomer.

  I was looking at Krystyana when I was thinking this out, and I noticed a slight bulge in her tummy. I wasn't sure, but I thought I might have hit on Krystyana's big problem.

  As soon as I could, I called Natasha aside and asked her about it.

  "Of course, my lord. You didn't know? Krystyana is heavy with your child."

  "My child? You're sure of that?"

  "She has touched no other man but you since first leaving Okoitz, my lord. Whose else can it be?"

  Now that's as big a fist in the stomach as a man can get! I dismissed Natasha and sat back to ponder it all. I was going to be a father! Cute, bouncing little Krystyana was going to be a mother! It was only when I asked myself if the kid's father and mother were going to be married that I suddenly got cold chills.

  In the first place, I'm just not the marrying kind. Maybe it was because my parents' marriage hadn't been all that happy, or maybe it was something in my genes, but that's just the way I am.

  In the second place, Krystyana and I didn't have anything in common but a certain sexual attraction, the sort of thing any normal man feels for a healthy fourteen-year-old, and even that was already fading, at least my half of it.

  And in the third place, the whole idea of marriage scares me shitless!

  I procrastinated for a few days, hoping that some solution would come to me. The only obvious one, a marriage between Piotr and Krystyana, was shot down because of her obvious hatred for the boy. He was willing to take her in any shape or condition.

  I finally decided that my procrastination was sheer cowardice, and called Krystyana into my office. I simply laid it on the line to her. I said that I liked her like a sister, but I wasn't going to marry her. If she wanted to stay single, that was okay by me. I would always see to it that she and her child were well taken care of and I hoped that whatever happened, she would want to stay on as the kitchen manager, since she was doing such a good job there. But I strongly recommended that she marry, if not Piotr, who loved her, then someone else. I would be happy to provide a suitable dowry.

  She didn't answer. She just left, crying.

  Some days you just can't win.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The duke was impressed by the stories he heard about Count Lambert's Great Hunt, and decided that we should do it on all of the lands subject to him, about half the land that would one day make up modern Poland. I was appointed his Master of the Hunt, and delegated all the work to Sir Miesko. He was delighted to do it, since the hunt on Lambert's lands alone had made him a wealthy man. He spent almost six months on the road getting the thing organized, and I didn't much get involved. That suited me just fine, since I wanted to work on the limelights.

  Getting the limelights going was another job of bucket chemistry. I had some iron grids cast that would fit in the bottom of one of our beehive coke ovens, to raise the coal off the bottom so we could run water underneath. While that was being done, work was started on the gas tower, a circular water tank in which floated a vast close-fitting, copper-lined, straight-sided barrel. Not that a straight-sided barrel was unusual. They were the only kind in use until I introduced the potbellied variety and proved that they leaked less.

  Pi
pes went under the tank and up to just above the waterline. When gas was produced, the barrel rose, to settle again as the gas was consumed.

  How big a gas tower did we need? How much gas was needed to keep a limelight going? Was one coke oven enough? Too much? I hadn't the slightest idea. I just made things big and hoped for the best.

  Then, too, I'd never even seen a limelight, I'd only heard about them. As I understood it, it was a hydrogen flame under a lump of lime. I didn't know what sort of a burner was used, so I used a bunsen burner.

  Six weeks and eighteen thousand man-hours later, seventy-five tons of coal was loaded into the converted beehive coke oven and lit on fire. It was necessary to have the grid completely covered with coal so that the steam would be forced through the coals rather than around them.

  The system worked to the extent of generating a flammable gas, and filling the gas tower, but the faint blue flame produced was hot enough to heat the lime only to a dull red. Not a very efficient light, which was the purpose of the exercise.

  I could think of only two ways to get a hotter flame. One was to use pure oxygen instead of air, since the nitrogen in the air cools a fire considerably. The trouble with that was that I didn't have a good source of oxygen, and we weren't quite up to building an air liquefaction plant.

  Oh, I could have heated mercury, a remarkably cheap substance in the Middle Ages. It was an industrial waste product from the manufacture of sulfur. At moderate temperatures, mercury absorbs oxygen and at higher temperatures, gives it off. But having that much mercury vapor around was scary. At least with carbon monoxide you know when you're being poisoned. I'd save the mercury scheme for a last resort, if then.

  The other way was to preheat the air and gas before they were burned. I spent a few frustrating weeks getting a burner of this sort going. The trick turned out to be to mix clay with slaked lime and mold the heat exchangers into the lamp itself, then run it through the brick kiln to harden it. A few months later it was discovered that a fire clay lamp painted with slaked lime was stronger and brighter. One problem with this scheme was that it required pressurized air, and thus a second set of pipes running to each lamp. But at least it didn't need a second fancy locked valve at each installation.

  But by the time the new lamps were ready, the weather had closed in and the water under the gas tower froze. In normal operation, this wouldn't happen because the gases themselves would be hot enough to keep the water liquid in the worst weather, but we had shut the system down while I worked on the lamp. We drained the water, covered the tower with straw and circulated hot coke oven gas through it until the crust of ice was melted. Then we started over.

  This time the lamp got to a fairly bright orange after an hour or so, and I declared that to be good enough.

  Other things were going on while I was playing with lights. Zoltan's people started doing us some good. Their pottery man came up with five colors of glazes made from local materials, and we went into production making tableware, at first for ourselves, but then for sale as well.

  Their papermaker was in limited production turning our old linens into very nice rag paper.

  And their sword-maker was screaming at the top of his lungs at Ilya, who was naturally screaming back at him, both men being of the opinion that sufficient volume could make up for their lack of a mutual vocabulary. The workers had a betting pool going on which one would kill the other first, and at what time of the day this happy event would take place.

  The two smiths went on screaming for over a month with nothing accomplished, so I had to step in and demand that the sword-maker demonstrate to us his methods. They surprised me, being nothing like the Japanese method I'd told Ilya about two years before.

  He collected up a pile of wrought iron and beat and cut it into small pieces, about the size of a ten zloty piece, or an American quarter. He put a measured amount of this iron into each of a dozen round bottom clay flasks and packed them full with raw wool. Then he sealed the flasks and took them up into the hills where it was quiet. He built a fire around the flasks and after a day of burning he started gently shaking the flasks and listening carefully. When the metal inside "sounded wet," he let the fire go out. On breaking open the flasks, there was a fused blob of steel inside he called "wootz." This he worked at relatively low temperatures—never red hot—until it was shaped like a sword or knife. Then he hardened and tempered it in the usual manner. The result was watered steel that looked just like the steel in my sword, and kept a fine edge.

  It wasn't quite as good as my sword, however. I pared the edge off one of his knives with my blade, which had the swordsmith staring goggle-eyed. None the less, it was better than anything Ilya had done using the method I'd told him about, so we went into production using the wootz method.

  The glassmaker started to make glass out of sand, lime, and wood ashes. After having him make a very fancy drinking glass as a Christmas present for Count Lambert, I had him make a chimney for the gas lamp, to conduct the fumes away. The chimney made a great improvement in light output, and it took me a while to figure out that the glass was transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared, which was reflected back to the lime, making it hotter.

  All of which shows that it isn't necessary to know what you're doing in order to be able to accomplish something. It's only necessary to be sufficiently persistent. Sort of like the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of word processors who wrote everything in existence.

  Anyway, we now had good light source, and I gave orders to plumb the factories and furnace areas, and had two gross of the lamps made. By spring, we had light as long as we wanted it, by which time there were eighteen hours a day of sunlight, and we didn't much need the lights.

  But next winter . . .

  * * *

  The shops weren't idle either. We made a rolling mill to make sheet brass, and some small punch presses to use the sheetmetal. I designed some simple door locks and padlocks, and they looked to be a profitable line.

  Our reinvestment rate was over ninety percent. That is to say, most of the things we made were for use in our factory system. But we still needed to buy a fair amount of stuff from the outside, and additional cash was always welcome.

  Transportation costs were very high in the Middle Ages, especially for land transport. The best mules can only carry a quarter of a ton, can only go thirty miles a day, and must be loaded and unloaded by hand twice a day. Expensive.

  This meant that the most profitable products would be small, light, and valuable. Locks, glassware, pottery, cast-iron kitchen products, plumbing parts, and clocks were all being made by spring, as well as our older brass works' lines of church bells, windmill parts, hinges, and other hardware. I wanted to add paper, printed books, and cigarette lighters in the near future.

  We expanded the paperworks from a two-man outfit to one where a dozen men worked, and added power machinery to cut and mash the linen rags to pulp. Within the year we added a papermaking machine, which was a major undertaking but not a major headache. I'd at least seen a papermaking machine.

  For a printing press, I decided to bypass the evolutionary step of the flatbed press and go directly to a simple rotary press, and to cast the type in a solid line, rather than bothering with movable type. I drew up what I thought were some very simple designs, but they took a team of our best machinists along with the Moslem goldsmith over a year to make them work.

  And the cigarette lighter took the longest damn time. We actually spent three times as many man-hours developing it than we did on our first steam engine. It had seemed so easy in the beginning.

  We had flint, steel, and white lightning for fuel. I drew up a simple Zippo-type lighter, except that I made it cylindrical instead of flat to simplify the machining, and with a pull-off cap because we didn't have a decent steel spring to hold the usual flip-top in place. It was bulkier than the modern equivalent, but these people used pouches instead of pockets, so that wasn't a problem.

  The pro
blem was in generating a spark. Flint was harder than any steel we could make. The spark wheel wore away before the flint was touched, and all without a spark. I even sacrificed the disposable butane lighter I'd had with me from the twentieth century. We took it apart but didn't learn much, since the flint was about gone.

  But flint gouged up the modern spark wheel as well, which told us that the flint in a lighter wasn't like the flint we were using. This got us to collecting flint from every source we could find, but all of it seemed to be the same.

  I finally dropped back and punted. Some of the more expensive modern lighters used a quartz crystal that was struck by a tiny hammer to generate a spark electrically.

  I found some quartz crystals in a shop in Wroclaw, and had our jeweler cut several pieces at different angles of the crystal. Within a week, we had a working lighter! After that, it was just a matter of tooling up for a very profitable line.

  It can take a half hour to start a fire with flint and steel, but it only took moments with one of our lighters. You just took off the cap, raised the little weight on its slider, let it drop and presto! Fire! We sold them by the thousands! It also gave us a nice market for lighter fluid, which was wood alcohol, after a while.

  By then, spring was on us and it was time to get back into the construction business. Transporting coke by pack mule from Three Walls to the boat landing on the Odra River was extremely expensive. After that, transport costs by riverboat weren't nearly so bad, about one-twelfth the cost per ton mile.

  Many of Count Lambert's knights had followed his lead in digging coal mines for fuel, now that potbellied stoves were available. Questioning them and going down most of the shafts, I was able to map out the coalfield fairly well.

  All indications were that I could dig for coal right on the riverbank. All through the winter, I'd had six men digging a pilot shaft there on some of Count Lambert's land, and they'd struck coal five dozen yards down.

  It made all kinds of sense to build a mining-and-coking operation there, so I made a deal with Count Lambert for half a square mile of land and as soon as the weather broke, I got ready to head there with a construction crew.