In a town of under three hundred households, things like that aren’t likely to happen. Everybody knows what’s going on!
Each fort would be situated on twenty or thirty square miles of land, and that land would be farmed by the troops. In the off-seasons there would be light industrial work available to keep them busy. They would spend one day a week in military exercises, but mostly they would be a working community.
I had long been toying with the idea of a factory that would build large precast concrete sections that could be shipped by railroad or boat and assembled on site into a fort. They’d have to go up fast, since I wanted to get the army back up to its present size in a hurry. To house an additional hundred thousand men and their families in four years, I’d have to throw forts up at the rate of two a week!
And there wasn’t only the concrete to think of. There was plumbing, wiring, power plants, heating systems, weapons, school-books, and beer steins. I got to sketching out what was required, and it was very dark before I quit.
We were going to have to build a factory that built factories that made the components of the forts, which were themselves partly factories! I wrote a note to Natalia to have all drafting and engineering personnel relieved of all military duties and back at their desks immediately. I needed help!
I woke up in the sunshine again, with the same girl in bed with me. I had missed the sunrise service two days in a row! There was some cheering going on outside, and I went to the balcony to see what it was all about. The women and children from East Gate were back! Not the nobles who were murdered there by the Mongols, but our own people who had left the fort two or three days before that. The women and children had wandered around in the hills for a week before they had found their way back here.
I got some proper clothes on in a hurry and went down to the mob scene below. Understandably, the men whose families had been missing were delighted to find that they were safe and sound. They were hugging and kissing and laughing and crying, sometimes the same person doing all four at the same time. What annoyed me was the fact that the captainette who had brought the dependents in was being carried around on some of the men’s shoulders as though she were a hero.
I got over to them and wrenched her down. “You stupid bitch!” I shouted. “You’re under arrest!”
“But what for, sir?” one of the men asked.
“What for? For dereliction of duty, for abandoning her post, for treason, and for contributing to the murder of twenty thousand women and children!” I shouted.
Then suddenly everybody was quiet.
Chapter Thirteen
THREE WALLS still didn’t have a jail, so I had a blacksmith put leg shackles on her and followed the two knights who took our prisoner to the storeroom we used as a lockup when necessary. The room was already in use for the handless Mongol ex-ambassador, but I had her thrown in with him. He stank the way all Mongols do, but I didn’t owe her any favors. I was on my way back up when I realized that I was going to have to judge the case.
You see, “count” is a judicial title, like “judge” or “justice.” A man holding it had the right of high justice within his realms. That is to say, he could hold a trial for a major crime and punish the offender as he saw fit. His word could have a man hanged. I had held the title of count since the Christmas before, but that meant that I was count of Francine’s tiny county of Strzegom, where there never was much crime. Here, at Three Walls, I had remained Count Lambert’s baron despite my right to use the title of count. Up until a week ago, that is. When Count Lambert had been killed by a Mongol spear and I had inherited his lands in Poland, I had also inherited his responsibilities. I couldn’t fob off my serious criminals on him anymore. I was it!
I went back up to my office to ponder this latest problem.
For years I had been ducking my legal duties by having somebody else do them. On Sir Miesko’s recommendation, I’d appointed Baron Pulaski to be my judge. The baron had four subordinates, a court recorder, a bailiff, and two prosecutor-defenders. These last two took turns. They went around my extensive and scattered estates, hearing cases and writing up their recommendations to me. I almost invariably went along with them or, in the case of serious offenses, handed their recommendations up to my liege lord, Count Lambert. In time he got to following their recommendations as well.
But they really didn’t have any official sanction for their existence. Since they normally tried trivial matters and only conducted hearings on serious ones, nobody had seriously complained about it. But Captainette Lubinska’s crimes were hardly trivial. Whether I tried her or had Baron Pulaski do it, I would be setting a precedent.
After some hours of agonizing over it, I decided that the baron was more competent a judge than I was, and he was certainly more unbiased. Furthermore, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a trial judge. I had better things to do than sit on a gilded chair deciding if some poor bastard deserved to die. If my liege lord, Duke Henryk didn’t like it, he could start by telling me so.
If, indeed, he still was my liege lord! The last I’d heard from him, he was damning me for failing to go to Legnica and join his forces there. For all I knew, he considered me to be an independent duke now.
The simple truth was that the military forces that obeyed me were vastly superior to his, and I controlled quite a bit more money than he did, although as a good socialist, I had difficulty thinking of all this vast wealth as being my own. Actually, I could probably declare my own independence and make it stick!
Not that I’d want to.
I could see no advantage to independence and quite a few disadvantages. Being part of a greater whole, I could expand my industrial and agricultural revolutions as fast as necessary simply by doing it and paying a fee or buying land if it was required of me. A little persuasion was all that was usually needed. As an independent king, or whatever, I’d have to fight a war every time I tried to open up a new market. Insanity!
I sent a runner to find Baron Pulaski and ask him to come have a talk with me.
My designers and draftspeople had all shown up at dawn and had spent the morning getting their work area cleaned up and ready to go. It had been more than a year since we’d used it, what with the war and all. Most of them were back in civilian clothes and feeling a little unusual about it.
“I’m not going to enforce any dress codes around here,” I told them, “but if you have to go out to the field or even to the shops, I’ll expect you to be in uniform. You’re still in the army, after all. Now then, we have some factories to design, and we’ll need at least the foundation drawings finalized in two weeks so the troops can start on them as soon as they finish cleaning up the mess we made on the Vistula. Now here’s what we need… ”
Once I got them going, I went back to my “manager” office, called for my secretary, and asked if there were any messages. She brought in a stack as thick as my arm, sorted as to what they wanted. An efficient lady.
Baron Gregor wanted to release all his men who had been workers at Three Walls to get the factories going again. He was particularly worried about the ammunition situation. I wrote “granted,” with a note that all men who had served in the Construction Corps should be sent under Baron Yashoo to East Gate to rebuild the Riverboat Assembly Building. Since almost all these workers had at least a half-dozen new subordinates who had gone through only four months of training, these subordinates would be assigned to other knights at no more than a dozen new men each.
There were six dozen letters of congratulations and then a request from a priest that in the future all Mongols should be baptized before they were beheaded. Denied. The bastards didn’t deserve to go to heaven.
There were a lot of requests for discharge, mostly so the men could search for their families. Denied, put your request through channels. There wasn’t much to worry about, since most army personnel had their dependents at army installations that had not been attacked, and nobody had gotten killed at any of them.
Lady Natalia came in after a while and asked me if I wanted my dinner brought up, but I decided that the men should see that I was still alive, and we went down to the cafeteria, not that there was any “cafe” to justify the name.
The chow lines there were absurdly long, worse than what happens when the communists try to sell six refrigerators in Warsaw. I told Natalia that she should put out the word that the cafeterias would have to be restricted to dependents, officers of the grade of captain and higher, and men who had originally worked at Three Walls. All others would have to eat at their war carts, though the cooks could draw on the stores here. Natalia and I, of course, took cuts in front of the line. RHIP.
The next week was spent in meetings and similar boring but important trivia. The aircraft had found no trace of other Mongols, even though we all knew that there had to be a lot of stragglers hiding out there somewhere. Francine was in Cracow playing hostess to some political nonsense, but she seemed to be having fun and staying out of trouble. I supposed that she needed to get away from it all for a while after the tensions of the war, and I let her have her own way. The cleanup at Three Walls had been completed, and the original workers from each of my other installations were sent home to get things productive again. Getting things back to normal seemed to take as much work as getting us on a war footing had.
Then Baron Vladimir arrived.
I gave him a hug when he got to my office. “God, Vladimir, it’s wonderful to see you! What took you so long?”
“What took me so long, my lord? I think that the problem started when I was entirely too efficient in getting across the Vistula. You recall that as we left the battlefield west of Sandomierz, you were to return the booty here to Three Walls, and I was to take the larger group of our men to cross the Vistula and clean and loot the killing fields there. We found no riverboats running, but we found two of those river ferries of the sort you invented so many years ago, during that delightful journey we made with our ladies to the River Dunajec. You know, the sort that uses a long rope to force the river itself to carry one back and forth. Three dozen big river barges were available at Sandomierz, as was a good supply of rope, so we quickly built three dozen more of the things. By dint of efficient organization and hard work, I was able to get my entire command across by midnight.”
“Now I have a question for you, my lord. What ever possessed you to entrust so important a message as the fact that Cracow was burning to an absolutely untrained peasant? The silly fool had never before in his life been more than six miles from the village in which he had been born! He had never been on a Big Person before. He had never even seen one! Is it any wonder that he never thought of telling her who they were trying to find? He had not the slightest concept of geography, and he couldn’t have read a map even if he’d had one! He couldn’t read, period! Is it any wonder that he missed us in the dark and rode all the way to the Crossman city of Turon? He was two days finding us! Why did you do this thing to me? Two-thirds of your men missed out on half of the war!”
All I could do was to bury my face in my hands and say, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
“Baron Vladimir, I’m sorry. At the time he was simply a man on a Big Person, and I didn’t even think about what I was doing. A courier had come in badly wounded with the news about Cracow. One of the officers assigned a man to ride the Big Person and help out our flankers. Then I realized that you must be told as soon as possible, and so I changed the man’s orders. I never stopped to think about how limited, how restricted the average peasant is. I’m sorry. ”
“And I accept your apology, my lord. You made a mistake, but as it turned out, no great harm was done. You had sufficient forces with you to handle the problems that happened to come up. My men could have given you more power, but they could not have given you more speed. Yet it could have turned out otherwise! The Mongols might have caught you strung out on the road with your men half-armed and armored, with your pikes stored for transit, and your guns unmounted. They could have met you with locally superior forces and wiped you and all of your men out! You were lucky. But while I was waiting to see you-”
“They made you wait?”
“The Baroness Natalia is sometimes overly protective, my lord. But while I was waiting, I heard the tale about Captainette Lubinska. She made a mistake as bad or even worse than yours, and she didn’t have your luck! Now you plan to have her hanged for it. Do you realize that she was born a peasant girl on a farm just outside of Cieszyn, where Count Herman’s wife held sway for so many years? For all of Lubinska’s life, the countess was an authority figure whose word was not to be questioned. Then, one day, the countess lied to her, usurped her authority, and ordered her away from her post. Is it any wonder that she obeyed the countess’s orders even if they weren’t exactly legal? What did the captainette know about the law? She was only a peasant, for God’s sake!”
“Again you shame me, Vladimir. Look, I’ve turned the matter over to Baron Pulaski. Why don’t you speak to him, and also speak at her trial?”
“All right, my lord, if you wish it. But remember, the right of high justice is yours now. You may delegate the duties, but not the responsibility!”
“You are entirely too right. For now, though, what happened once you got the word about Cracow?”
“Well, once I got the message out of the peasant-he hadn’t slept in days and was babbling-we had to drop everything and recross the Vistula. The railroad tracks are on the west bank only. I sent troops south in battalions at a walk until the rest could catch up. After that we went to double time. When we got to the company you left behind to guard the booty, we absorbed them in our van, since they were fresh by then, and eventually left our hindmost company on guard. At Cracow I left a battalion to secure the city and relieve the wounded you left behind there. We had just arrived at East Gate when we got the word about your victory here. As per your orders, we cleaned up East Gate and sent men back to the dumped booty to pick it up. Half of my men are now on the way back to clean up the killing grounds on the east bank of the Vistula. Also, I sent a battalion west to the salt mines to dig and bring back all the salt they could. We’ll need it if we’re to save the horsehides we’ve taken. The rest of them are here now with your booty and what we collected at East Gate.”
“What booty at East Gate? We lost there!”
“Many of those women and children had jewels and money secreted about their persons, my lord. Perhaps the Mongols were in too much of a hurry to search them all properly. But for whatever reason, there was quite a lot of it, and policy is that the dead should never be buried with anything of value, not if you want them to rest undisturbed. ”
“You’re right, of course. Is there any chance of returning the money and jewels to their next of kin?”
“No, my lord. Only a few of them could be identified. We never thought to-issue dog tags to noncombatants.”
“Well, we can hardly keep it for ourselves. Looting Mongols is one thing. Robbing the Christian dead is quite another. Perhaps we should donate it to the Church.”
“That was to be my suggestion, my lord.”
“Well, get some rest and see your family. There’s a meeting at one tomorrow that you should attend, and then I guess you’ll be going back to the Vistula.”
“I can delegate the cleanup, my lord. I have a trial to attend first.”
Interlude Two
I hit the STOP button,
leaned back, and stretched. Tom still hadn’t gotten here. I was almost to the point of worrying about him, but not quite.
“It’s getting to be lunchtime, don’t you think?” I said to the nude girl snuggled next to me.
“Yes, sir. ”
“Well, why don’t you get me a couple of salami sandwiches, a side of onion rings, and a cold Budweiser. And get anything you want for yourself.”
“Yes, sir. ”
An untalkative girl, but she was pretty and obedient, and I guess you can’t have everything. Nice outfit, too. She was back almost immediately. She spread my lunch out on the control desk and stood waiting.
“Aren’t you hungry? Why don’t you eat?” I said.
“Yes, sir.” She brought in a bowl of something that looked like custard and spooned it quickly down.
“Is that all you’re eating?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you want anything else?”
“No, sir.”
I shrugged. Well, she was pretty young, and kids that age can survive on nearly anything. I put it down to some sort of fad diet.
I sat back, put my arm around her, and hit the START button.
Lord Conrad’s Lady Page 10
