Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  The operator slid these sticks until the line he wanted was under the casting apparatus. A second operator slid a mold on top of the line of sticks and poured a molten lead alloy into the mold and over the row of stamped letters.

  A third operator trimmed the wedge-shaped bars of type and fit them into a drum that went to the printer, once the drum had been turned on a lathe to make sure that all the characters were of exactly the same height.

  The printing press was also a simple affair. There was a cast-iron pressure roll on the bottom, then the type roll, and finally some leather-covered inking rolls on the top. There was no paper feed required since we worked only from large continuous rolls of paper, and always the same kind of paper.

  Printing the other side of the paper required a good deal of skill on the part of the printer, keeping the paper tension proper, so that the back of the sheet matched up with the front. Paper stretches with moisture, and sometimes print runs were delayed because it was necessary to print the second side on a day with the same relative humidity as when the first side was printed. But it couldn't be the same day because our ink took a day to dry.

  But despite the above, a twelve-man crew could print and bind six thousand copies of a fair-sized book in less than a week, whereas hand-copying a single book could take a month, or six months in the case of a bible.

  What took a year of development time were all the details. Getting the ink right and finding the right lead alloy that would cast properly and always shrink in exactly the same way, and so on.

  The leather ink rollers were a problem because the crack where the leather was sewn together showed up on the printed page, no matter how carefully it was made. They solved this one by using a tubular piece of leather, made from the covering of a bull's penis! Privately, they called the rollers "Lamberts," but I don't think he ever heard about it.

  * * *

  Making concrete required far less finesse and a lot more brute force. Mortar is made from calcium hydroxide. It hardens by absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air and turning itself back into calcium carbonate, the limestone it was made of. Concrete is made of a mixture of things, but mostly calcium silicates. It hardens by polymerization. With concrete, you have real chemical bonds holding things together, which is what makes it so strong.

  To make it, you heat a finely ground mixture of coal, limestone, clay, sand, and blast furnace slag in a rotary kiln until it melts together into clinkers. Then you grind it up again. The machinery to accomplish these small tasks took over fourteen thousand tons of cast iron, because we were only making a small one.

  The limestone went through a pair of crushing wheels as wide as a man is tall, and three times that diameter. Then the chips went through three sets of progressively finer ball mills. If you can imagine a huge cement mixer filled with cannon balls and limestone, you understand a ball mill.

  The rotary kiln was a cast-iron tube two yards across and three dozen yards long, lined with sandstone bricks and turning once a minute.

  I loved it, but then engineers love to make big things. It gives you a godlike feeling of power! Mere money doesn't come close!

  * * *

  Once you have the materials, making plate glass is pretty easy if you know the trick, and I did. You just pour the glass onto a pool of molten tin and slowly draw off window glass. This won't work with glass made of wood ashes and sand because the melting temperature of that mixture is too high—you vaporize the tin, I found out the hard way. But with our soda glass, it worked just fine. Our rig was fairly narrow, since none of our outside windows was more than a quarter yard wide.

  Within three months, we made enough glass to glaze every window in every building we'd put up in four years, except for the churches. Learning how to make stained glass took a few months longer, and then only because I was able to hire a French glassmaker to show us how it was done.

  He knew two methods of doing it. One involved adding dyes to the molten glass and then piecing bits of this together in a lead frame, but it was the second method that we used, for then we could use standard rectangular cast-iron frames.

  This involved little more than painting the colors and designs wanted on the glass, then baking it until the glass softened enough to absorb the colors. Easy enough once you know how to make the paints, and this guy did.

  But while he was a good enough craftsman, he wasn't much of an artist. He did one window for the church at Coaltown, and I didn't like it. It was trite, and I wanted something glorious.

  So I got the services of an artist friend of mine, Friar Roman, from Abbot Ignacy by giving him a thousand prayer books and offering him his very own printing press. Actually, I'd wanted to give the printing outfit to him anyway, since I didn't want to get into the publishing business.

  The deal we made had my people training his, and we sold them paper and ink at cost. They could print anything over my requirements that they wanted, sell it as they saw fit and keep the money, but they had to acknowledge that money as my donation to the Church. My work, mostly schoolbooks, was to be done at the cost of materials.

  Actually, much of their other work turned out to be my work as well, since we made it a practice to buy a copy of every single book published for every single one of the schools, to build the libraries. We got those at cost, too.

  And there were two other strings attached. The first was that everything printed must be in Polish. I wanted to establish the Polish language and Polish culture as a leader in Europe, and having the only printing presses in existence gave us a big edge. In the twentieth century, a Polish boy has to learn English or Russian if he wants to stay at the forefront of engineering and most sciences and German besides if he wants to keep up with chemistry.

  That wasn't going to happen in the world I was building. I'd make everybody else learn our language! That can be done by making yourself culturally and technically ahead of everyone else. What's more, once you're ahead, you tend to stay ahead, because while your kids are studying science, their kids are studying your language.

  Not one person in a hundred in America speaks a foreign language. They don't have to! But everybody else has to speak English just to keep up with them.

  Anyway, the Polish alphabet is slightly different from that used in the rest of western Europe, so it wouldn't have been easy to do foreign stuff in the first place.

  The second string was that I wanted him to turn out a monthly magazine, a general purpose family-oriented thing that would have sections on current events, household hints, agriculture, medicine, and construction. There would be a sermon written by Abbot Ignacy and there would be something each month for the children. In addition, we would be accepting commercial announcements, for a price.

  The abbot was astounded at the idea of writing a book every month, and even more so at my suggestion that an initial print run of six thousand copies would be appropriate. But once we discussed how each of a dozen people would be writing only a few pages a month each, he came around, although I think that it was the thought that six thousand families would be reading his sermons that made him take on the task.

  As it turned out, I had to write half of the first few issues myself, until we got enough regular contributors to fill it out. I had to write a manual of style, to keep things consistent, and I had to talk Abbot Ignacy into assigning four friars to the task of writing a dictionary.

  The first three issues had only ads from my own companies, but in time I was able to largely disengage myself from the project, except for the occasional article.

  The long-term effect of the magazine was astounding. Up until then, the only source of news anybody had was hearsay and gossip. Now they had a source of information about what the duke said in Wroclaw, and how the Palatine of Cracow answered him.

  Within two years, we had correspondents in most of the major cities of Europe, and were the first news service. And the magazine was a great way to tell my story on sanitation, housing, and food supplies.

  So it was
a profitable trip, but I'd ridden to Cracow to get an artist.

  Friar Roman had never made a church window, but that didn't matter. We had craftsmen who could do the actual construction. What I wanted was the artwork.

  An engineer is probably not the person to choose as an art critic, but I was also the boss and I had definite ideas about what I wanted. I wanted to make a religious statement, and I didn't dare do it in words.

  The Church in the Middle Ages depended far too much on fear to get its message across. When I go to pray, I don't want to be surrounded with representations of tortured human bodies.

  To me, Christ's message was a message of love. Love for God and love for one another. I read nothing in the Sermon on the Mount about mutilating people for the glory of God!

  For the Church of Christ the Carpenter, our church at Three Walls, I wanted a simple naturalistic scene of a young Christ helping Saint Joseph in his carpentry shop. On another wall, I wanted Christ with the little children. The third was to have Christ with the lilies of the fields and the last was to be Christ with the money-changers in the temple, because Christ wasn't a wimp.

  So I put Roman on the payroll and set him up with a nice room at Coaltown, where the glass works was located. It had big windows on the north side, a drawing board, and a big stack of paper. I told him what I wanted and let him alone for a few weeks. Then I told him what I didn't like about what he'd done, and had him try it again.

  It was four months before he started doing what I wanted, and I had to teach him about perspective drawing in the process. But eight months after I'd shanghaied him, we had the glass hung at Three Walls. Then I got him going on my other four churches.

  It was not only important to save Poland from the Mongols, it was also important that I help make it worth saving!

  * * *

  There was a bad harvest in 1235. The fall rains had come much earlier than usual, and much heavier. Yet we barely felt the effects of it.

  For years, Count Lambert had been selling the new varieties of grains as seed and by the pound at high prices. The result was that most of the farmers in Silesia and Little Poland were growing at least some of it.

  The modern grains were shorter and had thicker stems than the older varieties, so they stood up to a heavy rain better. Most towns had at least one McCormick-style reaper, and they were able to get in most of the crop on the few dry days that we had.

  Many farmers were able to sell their grains to harder hit areas, and made great profits doing it. At least, the sale of single-family plumbing packages skyrocketed, which is some sort of indicator.

  My factories didn't buy any grain at all that year, since we had stockpiled enough the year before.

  * * *

  Anna's children were all healthy, and she had another batch of four every six months. The oldest bunch looked like horses now, but they grew slower than regular horses, and Anna said that they took four years to become adults. We had twenty of them, but it would be a few more years before the first bunch would be ready to join the team.

  Anna spent very little time with them, only looking in on them every day or three to see that they didn't need anything. It wasn't that she was a bad mother, it was just that she was supremely confident that if they had enough to eat, they would grow up okay.

  They were good little survivors. When they got cold, they burrowed into the hay, and if that wasn't enough, they burrowed into the ground below the hay. And they would eat anything. If they ran out of hay and grain, they would start eating the stall they were in, so you had to watch them. In fact, I think half of Anna's looking out for them was to protect the world from them, and not vice versa.

  Krystyana was productive as well. After the birth of her second child, I promised myself that enough was enough. I wasn't doing anybody any good by producing illegitimate children. I stuck with that vow, except for once when she was crying and making love seemed the best thing to do.

  Once was enough. By late fall, it was obvious that she was pregnant again.

  * * *

  The previous fall, I'd put Zoltan on the problem of making gunpowder, or rather the problem of making saltpeter—potassium nitrate—since once we had that, I knew the formula for gunpowder. It's seventy-five percent saltpeter, fifteen percent charcoal, and ten percent sulfur.

  But all I knew about saltpeter was that it was made out of manure, or sometimes old mortar, and that it was a white crystal. Oh, I could give you the molecular weight and even sketch up a molecule of it, but that wasn't going to help Zoltan any.

  He'd gamely gone at it, and had gone through seven frustrating months smelling like shit, as did his young Polish apprentices. The boys were all having trouble with their love lives until I ordered them to bathe after work and had them issued extra clothing to wear when not on the job.

  Then one day Zoltan came in with his clothes in tatters, his hair gone, and his beard burned off. His face was covered with blisters but through them shown a great happy smile.

  "I think we have done it, my lord!"

  So I gave him the small brass cannon I'd had made up along with a supply of cannon balls. I told him about wetting the mixture down, drying it, and grinding it to turn serpentine powder, which was what he had, into black powder, which was what I wanted.

  I explained how to load and fire a cannon and told him that I wanted him to play with slightly different mixtures to see which one could make the ball go farthest, always using the same small amount of powder.

  I also made him, his apprentices and everyone around them swear to keep the process for making the powder a secret. I didn't want anybody to know how to make it but a few of his people and his apprentices. They realized the seriousness of having somebody else shooting cannons at them, and the promise was kept until well after the Mongol invasion.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By Christmas of 1235 I could see that it was all going to come together. There was an awful lot left to do, but I think the seeds of an industrial base sufficient to supply a reasonably modern army were there and well planted.

  Getting the army was another matter. I had four knights sworn to me and that's where I had to start.

  Actually, it was sort of strange for one knight to be sworn to another, but there was nothing in the rules against it. I had more knights than some of Count Lambert's barons, but all the lack of a baronage meant was that I sat farther down the table at a formal banquet and I wasn't permitted to knight anybody. But I avoided formal banquets whenever possible and hadn't wanted to knight anybody anyway.

  The truth is that I am of a naturally egalitarian disposition. I didn't like this separation of people into hereditary cases, this silly business of noble and commoner. If I had my way, I'd scrap the whole unhappy system! But I didn't have my way and giving up my own knighthood would drastically reduce my own efficiency, as well as wrecking my lovelife. But someday I'd have the power to do something about it.

  I called my knights together after dinner one day, along with their wives.

  "Gentlemen, we are starting to get it together," I said. "We now have most of the raw materials that we need. We now have the beginning of a factory system that can take those raw materials and turn them into useful products. We now have workmen trained to use those factories and the tools in them.

  "We also have the biggest, best trained and best-led army in the world coming at us in five years.

  "What we don't have is an army of our own! At present, we have no way to save our country from absolute destruction. You've all heard Cilicia's story about the obliteration of her native city. That could happen here!

  "It will happen here, unless we do something about it!

  "Our factories can easily be converted from making civilian products to war production. They were designed with that thought in mind. We can turn out arms and armor at a rate that will astound you. Better armor than the world has ever seen, and weapons of awesome power will be ours when we need them.

  "But the weapons are worthle
ss without the men who will use them! I can promise you that we will be better equipped than the Mongols, but if we are to win, we must be better trained and better led as well. That's not going to be easy!

  "The Mongols have been diligently practicing the art of mass murder and total destruction for over fifty years, and so far they have never been defeated!

  "But they are going to be beaten here and we are going to train and lead the army that will do it! You four gentlemen are going to do most of it, since I'll have to spend half my time on production.

  "It won't be the kind of training that you have been used to, because this won't be the kind of war that you have been used to. You have become accustomed to treat war like a game, where polite, Christian gentlemen settle their disputes according to well-defined rules.

  "Well, the only rules the Mongols know are 'obey orders' and 'win the war.' They are not Christian nor are they gentlemen. They are greasy, smelly little bastards who can fight like all the demons of hell! They are hard and tough and cruel. The only way that we are going to beat them is by being harder and tougher and crueler than they are!

  "You are used to a kind of warfare where only the nobility fights. That too must come to an end. The Mongols will come to us with every single man of theirs under arms. To meet them, we must do the same. Our factories will be able to equip every adult male in Silesia and Little Poland. We must be able to train that number of men. It will be difficult, but not impossible. I can show you techniques that can turn a farmer into a fighting man in six months. Training leaders will take longer, and training the men to train them will take longer yet.

  "In the spring, we will be building a training base in the northwest corner of my lands. We have already fenced off a dozen square miles of land there, using Krystyana's roses, so we'll have plenty of privacy. I've asked Count Lambert to send me a gross of volunteers right after the spring planting. Those peanuts will be our first class.