Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  As an afterthought, he let me add a wing for the peasants as well.

  I made the place look like a proper castle, with machinations, crenelated walls, and dunce caps on the towers. There was even a drawbridge over a moat that doubled as a swimming pool in warm weather.

  His old castle became an addition to the cloth factory and the peasants' housing was turned into stables.

  To build it, he contracted with me to take all the surplus bricks and mortar we could produce for three years, and gave us all the surplus cloth his factory could make for the next five. Essentially, we became his sales force.

  I'd long felt sorry about the poor living conditions at Okoitz, even though they were no different than those throughout most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was just that when I first came to medieval Poland, these people took me in and made me feel at home. This was the first chance that I had to do something really nice for them, and I spent a lot of time on the designs of that building. It was going to be nice!

  As to the financial arrangements, well, as long as I could meet my payroll and keep food on the tables, I really didn't much care who owned what. I was doing my job, I was having fun, and I wasn't missing any meals. Why should any rational man want anything else?

  * * *

  I'd appointed Natasha to take care of Boris Novacek, since without hands he wasn't capable of doing anything for himself, and she had the patience to wait on him literally hand and foot. They hit it off pretty well together and he recovered fairly quickly under her care.

  Yet even after he'd reconciled himself to the loss of his hands, he was still in the dumps. His fortune was gone and he saw no way of supporting himself.

  So I offered him a job, salary plus commission, as my sales manager. We had not only the products of my factories to unload, but the duke's copper works and Count Lambert's cloth works as well.

  At first, he seemed to lack confidence in himself, but within a month he was in the full swing of it and enjoying himself. He was a past master at dealing with other merchants, and I think he used his disfigurement to his own advantage. Gesticulating at his opponents with his hand-less arms seemed to intimidate them. In half a year, we were not only selling everything that we wanted to sell, we were getting thirty percent more for it.

  The money was important because it permitted us to expand faster. I no longer had to worry about whether I could feed a man's family when I hired him. If he looked to be the sort we wanted, I swore him in and found a place for him later.

  But I think that Boris's greatest triumph was when he invented the Tupperware party. You see, one of my major expenses was maintaining over a hundred schools in Lambert's county. Our kitchenware line wasn't selling very well, largely because women didn't know how to use them. We made very good cast-iron frying pans, for example, but frying was an unusual way to prepare food in the Middle Ages, probably due to the lack of a decent frying pan!

  So that summer, Boris invited two dozen of the schoolteachers to Three Walls for a week, and saw to it that they learned how to use every utensil we made. I even found myself showing them how to make pancakes!

  Then he set up a system whereby the schools bought things from Three Walls at below wholesale prices, and the teachers demonstrated and sold the utensils to the other women in their towns at normal retail prices. Everybody knew that half the money spent went to the local school, and that the teachers were making a commission on the sales in addition to their salaries. By fall, we were in danger of making a profit on the schools, which was a bit much. So we used the surplus money to put up school buildings.

  Up till then, school had been taught in the church, somebody's house, or even in a barn. Now there were schoolhouses, and each one of them had a store attached. We expanded the product line available to the schools to include everything we made, and the smallest town now had a general store. If they didn't stock it, they could get it.

  Every school had a post office, too. This was usually just a drawer in the store, but you could send and receive mail.

  Most of the towns were small farming communities, with only a few dozen families, so most of the schools had to be small, one- or two-room affairs. But they all had hot running water, in part to demonstrate our plumbing products.

  If most of our teachers only had a year or two of schooling themselves, well, it was the best we could do and the quality of teacher education went up in time.

  I refused to allow any money to be made off the schools, so there was nothing to do but expand the system. In three years, we covered the entire duchy, and in six, all of Poland.

  Just in time for the Mongols.

  By late fall, Boris knew that he had found a new niche in life, and he and Natasha came to me during one of my regular biweekly court sessions. They wanted to be married, and had already gotten her parents' written permission to do so. I gave them my blessings, and told him that he was a very lucky man, which he was. A fine lady!

  * * *

  Construction never stopped at Three Walls. That summer we added a second housing unit, made of brick, outside of our existing building. It tripled the living space available to the workers. Yet because everyone was on different shifts, our existing kitchen, dining room, recreation facilities and church were still adequate, not to mention the factories. A considerable savings.

  We also finished the sawmill and carpentry shop that had been stopped last fall in order to build housing for the Moslems. Besides cutting logs into rough lumber, there was a drying kiln, and power-operated planers, joiners, and routers.

  Surprisingly, medieval carpenters didn't know much about cabinet-making. Despite the lack of inexpensive fasteners, they had never heard of a dado or a rabbet or a dovetail joint. Their methods of fastening were limited to butting two boards against each other and doweling them together. If more strength was needed, they had iron straps made up. I had to teach myself cabinet-making just so I could teach it to my own carpenters.

  Then there was the whole problem of getting mass production going. They were used to making things one at a time. If somebody needed a chair, a carpenter made one. If somebody wanted three, he made one and one and one. This was an emotionally satisfying way to work, but it wasn't very productive. Equipping one of our dining rooms took a thousand chairs, and mass production was in order.

  We needed barrels, chests, and other shipping containers by the tens of thousands. Standardization was necessary, unless we wanted to haggle over the price of every barrel of lime shipped. It took a lot of work and a few temper tantrums, but I made believers out of them.

  * * *

  By midsummer, I had over two thousand men sworn to me and on my payroll, and that's not counting their families.

  The place was crawling with kids! Almost every woman continued having a baby a year, but now, with better nutrition, sanitation, and housing, they weren't dying off as fast as they were born. Our infant mortality rate was fast approaching modern levels.

  Modern doctors and other medical-types like to take all the credit for the vast improvements in public health, but the fact is that it is the lowly sewer inspector and the despised customs inspector and the humble sanitation engineer who really keep people healthy!

  So we had a population explosion on our hands, but it didn't bother me. At least these kids were going to grow up clean, well fed, and well educated! We could afford to feed all the extra mouths, and the population of the country wasn't a twelfth of that of modern Poland, which isn't all that crowded.

  In the long run? Well, historically, a high standard of living inevitably results in a lowered birth rate. And if that wasn't good enough, there was a whole empty world out there to repopulate.

  Everywhere the Mongols had gone.

  * * *

  I was spending more time than I was actually required to at Eagle Nest, mostly because I liked working with the kids. They were the most eager, enthusiastic, friendly, and earnest bunch of people I'd ever met. They were so absolutely convinced that they were goi
ng to conquer the skies that they damn near had me believing it.

  In the course of the winter, they'd each built several model gliders, and many of them were as good as those done by modern boys, despite their lack of balsa wood, silk paper, and quick-setting glues. In the spring, they were back at kites again, and getting innovative about it. The winner of one combat contest was really a section of aircraft wing, with three strings controlling it.

  But toward summer, I could see that they were getting a little bored, so I told them about hang gliders, and they built a dozen of them.

  A hang glider is controlled by the pilot moving his body to shift the center of gravity of the craft, rather than by the more conventional use of control surfaces. What can make them deadly is that in a downdraft, the plane and pilot can experience zero G. At this point, the pilot has absolutely no control over his plane. Shifting the center of gravity has no effect when there is no gravity! Coming out of the downdraft, the glider can be in any orientation, even upside down or backward, and a fatal crash is likely.

  Downdrafts can't happen close to the ground, and for this reason I forbade them to go more than a dozen yards in the air, under penalty of being grounded for a month. By late fall, most of the boys had been grounded at least once. I even caught Count Lambert flying too high, but I couldn't do much except admonish him for it. The joy of flying was too much for him.

  We had our first fatality that year. One of the boys broke a dozen regulations by taking a glider to the top of the big conical hill alone during a windstorm. A shepherd tried to stop him, but the kid was airborne by the time the old fellow got there. They say he was high out of sight before he got into trouble.

  His body was sent back to his parents and three other boys were pulled from the school.

  But two weeks after that, the new class arrived, twice as large as the first one, and things went on, twelve-dozen boys strong.

  * * *

  Krystyana had a fine healthy boy that summer, and pretended that she didn't notice what anybody said about her lack of a husband. I got to sleeping with her occasionally, mostly because I felt sorry for her, and by Christmas she was pregnant again.

  * * *

  The harvest was again good that year, and the new crops were starting to be plentiful enough to make a serious contribution to the food supply. I had new grain towers built at all our installations, each with a windmill to circulate the grain and keep it in good shape. If grain is just left to sit there, it soon becomes infested with insects, fungi, and rats. But if you regularly pump it to the top with an Archimedes' screw on dry days, any bugs and rats are killed and the grain stays dry enough to retard fungus. This is still the method used in the twentieth century.

  We had tons and tons of sugar beets at Okoitz, and I had to figure out how to convert them into sugar. Sugar is a major industry in modern Poland, and entire sugar refineries are regularly sold to other countries. But the more important an industry is, the more specialized it becomes. There are engineers who spend their entire lives working on nothing but sugar refineries, with the result that a generalist like myself simply didn't get involved. I didn't even know the basic process!

  Zoltan came to my rescue. He'd never heard of a sugar beet, but he had heard about the process for refining sugar cane, which grew on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This was wonderful, because by myself, I don't think that I ever would have thought of adding lime, the caustic stuff that mortar is made out of, to the beet juice to make it crystallize. But between Zoltan's chemistry and my machinery, we got a working plant installed at Okoitz before Christmas. It made a nice "winter industry" for the peasants, something to keep them busy between the harvest and spring planting.

  Free popcorn became a regular feature of the Pink Dragon Inns. We had twenty-two of them now.

  * * *

  Every few months, I visited Father Ignacy at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow. He was my confessor, my confidant, the one person in this world that I could be honest and comfortable with.

  This time, I found that the old abbot had died, and that Father Ignacy had been elected to take his place.

  "Congratulations on your promotion, Abbot Ignacy," I said.

  "Thank you, my son, although it was probably more your doing than my own."

  "Mine? What do you mean?"

  "It was mostly those looms and spinning wheels of your design that did it. I encouraged my brothers that we should do our own weaving, and the project has been a huge success. Somehow, I received most of the credit for it."

  "But I thought that Friar Roman did most of the work there."

  "He did, but there is very little justice in the world. However, I'm sure that you would rather talk about the inquisition that the Church is conducting on you. At least you always ask about it," Abbot Ignacy said.

  "I take it that there is news?"

  The Church was holding that inquisition to determine whether I was an instrument of God, to be eventually sainted, I suppose, or if I was an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. Yes, I was most interested in what they decided!

  "There is. You will recall that I wrote up my report promptly within months of your arrival in this century. My abbot acted briskly, and within a few months sent the report, with annotations, to the bishop here in Cracow, but his excellency felt that perhaps this sort of report should go through the regular branch of the Church, rather than the secular one. That is to say, through the home monastery rather than through his office, so that summer the report was sent to the home monastery in Italy. But the home monastery felt that no, this was a proper matter for the secular branch to handle, and sent it back here.

  "The report was therefore sent, with further annotations, to the Bishop of Cracow again. However, by this time you had established yourself in the Diocese of Wroclaw, so the Bishop of Cracow found a traveler going to Wroclaw and sent the report to the bishop there."

  "Wait a minute, father. I was there when that report came in. It was at my Trial by Combat, and both bishops were in attendance. So were you, for that matter. Why didn't the Bishop of Cracow just hand your report to the Bishop of Wroclaw?"

  "How should I know that, my son? Perhaps he hadn't had the opportunity to annotate it properly.

  "In any event, the report was sent to the Archbishop of Gniezno, in northern Poland, who in turn sent it on to Rome.

  "The report has now returned, through the proper channels, with a request that the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery at Cracow investigate the matter thoroughly, and report back. It happens that I am now that personage, so I have written a complete report and am currently looking for someone who is going to Wroclaw. Actually, writing it was an easy matter for me, since I had all the facts at my fingertips, having written the original report myself.

  "So, you can see that the matter is proceeding smoothly, and as fast as can be expected."

  All I could see was that after three years all that had happened was that Father Ignacy had written a letter in reply to his own letter! I became convinced that the bureaucracy of the medieval Church was as screwed up as that of the stupid Russians!

  "Father, we now have a postal service that covers every major city in Poland. Why don't you just mail the report to the archbishop?"

  "And bypass his excellency the Bishop of Wroclaw? Heaven forbid! You wouldn't happen to be going to Wroclaw, would you?"

  "Not directly. Just mail it to him. It only costs a penny, and it will be there in less than a week."

  "An interesting suggestion, Conrad. I'll have to mention it to my superiors."

  "Through channels, of course."

  "Of course!"

  * * *

  The Great Hunt went off very well, and our new killing ground was ready in time for it, so we didn't have thousands of wild animals running through what had become a substantial city. There were many fewer wild boars and wolves than before, at least locally, and many more deer, elk, and bison. But since I was now getting a rake-off from all t
he lands owing allegiance to the duke, the total number of wolf skins delivered to me was huge. I had a problem storing and curing all of them. But the price stayed up and it was vastly profitable. My aurochs herd was up to eight dozen animals, and we started culling some of the bulls for eating.

  The wilderness was being pushed back, the land converted to farming and pasture, and large stockpiles of lumber were building up. On Lambert's lands, the rule was that any tree that gave an edible fruit or nut should be left standing, and except for certain areas preserved as forests—about thirty percent of the total—all else should be cut for more pasture area.

  And so 1234 wound around.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next year saw our first printed books, our first poured concrete, and our first mass production of glass. It also saw our first cannon.

  There are some big advantages to doing something the first time. You can set your own standards.

  When it came to printing, there were a lot of simplifications I could introduce, for no other reason than because no one had ever seen anything different. All the characters were the same width, as on an old-style typewriter. The use of lowercase letters was not common in the Middle Ages, so we didn't have any.

  The width of a column was standardized at twenty-four characters, and our rule was that any word could be hyphenated anyplace, so all lines were the same width and no space was wasted. All books were printed on paper that was a third of a yard high and a quarter yard wide, since that was the width that our papermaking machine made. And there were three columns on each page. Always.

  Once you were used to it, it was easy enough to read, and almost everybody was used to it because all the schoolbooks were printed that way. It was the way you learned in the first place. For those who learned by reading handwritten manuscripts, there was no difficulty in learning something new. Up until then, every book had been in a different format.

  This made for great simplifications in our type-casting machine. It was a carefully machined iron trough with two dozen long iron sticks in it, set up so the sticks could be slid back and forth. The top of the sticks were square cut to look like a castle wall, and on top of each merlon was stamped a letter, number or punctuation mark.