Conrad Starguard - The Radiant Warrior Part 10

Most of Lambert's knights and barons were quickly taking up his new crops and other improvements, running only a year behind him. And everyone was using wheelbarrows now, and the entire harvest was gotten in early, almost without loss.

Piotr was doing a lot more traveling than I was. He had to make a monthly visit to the inns at Cracow, Cieszyn, and Wroclaw, besides the installations at Three Walls, Copper City, Eagle Nest, where we were taking care of the bookkeeping, paying all expenses and charging Count Lambert in cloth for it, and Okoitz, where we had built a small Pink Dragon Inn at Count Lambert's request. If the duke had one at Wroclaw, Count Lambert had to have one at Okoitz.

That summer, I'd formalized the mail service, setting up a post office at every one of our inns. Besides serving our own people, we carried the mail of anybody who asked, and charged for it. It became a profitable sideline.

We never carried money or valuables, since Piotr had to travel alone and I didn't want to make him a target for thieves, but I did set up a system of postal money orders.

By spring, volume had grown to the point that I had to put on a full-time letter carrier, who made the round on about a weekly basis on a fast horse. As more inns were added, the number of letters sent increased as a cube function. In a few years, letters left each inn daily, and a letter could get to any major city in Poland in a week, for a price.

And like a modem post office, we were absolutely scrupulous about respecting people's privacy and about getting the mail through.

By late fall, the smelters at Copper City were in full production and the other facilities were just about complete. I sold the Krakowski Bros. Bra.s.s Works at a very healthy profit to Count Lambert's brother, Count Herman. I did this with the clear written understanding that I was taking the best of my workers with me to Legnica, and that we would be producing products there much like those that were made in Cieszyn.

I don't think the guy understood that people are as important as things when it comes to getting something done. It takes both the tools and the man who knows how to use them to accomplish anything, but many would-be industrialists don't realize that. He got all the buildings, machinery, and facilities, as well as two years worth of back orders and my blessings. But deep inside, I didn't think he'd be successful.

Most of the people from the bra.s.s works were moved to Copper City and formally sworn to me. They hadn't been up to that time, except for the Krakowski brothers themselves and their wives, and I wanted all the workers to be treated the same. I also swore in those workers hired that spring that had received the approval of the foremen, most of them, actually.

Thom Krakowski was put in charge of the smelting and mining operations, and being the eldest was also overseer of the whole city. His brothers had charge of the casting and machining sections. In fact they were used to working as a committee, and that's the way I set it up. Oh, they were always arguing like a bunch of kids over a game, and sometimes it got pretty loud. But somehow inside they were a smooth team. It takes all kinds.

My ladies had each spent months at the city and at Eagle Nest duplicating their own bailiwicks there.

Krystyana got the kitchens going well; Yawalda had the barns running efficiently. The stores and offices were set up, and all the girls had chosen to come back to Three Walls. I was flattered, but they explained that if they stayed out in "the woods," as they described it, they might be stuck there. But things were always happening when I was around, even if I wouldn't marry them.

Tadeusz had put his youngest son in charge of running the inn at Copper City. He was worried. He was now out of sons. How could we expand further? So we worked out a training program for innkeepers, with each of his sons training a man, and with promotions to larger inns if a man did well. There was also a bonus system for the trainer.

Piotr had junior accountants at each of our installations by then so that he only had to check their work rather than doing it all himself. There just wasn't time.

The priest from Italy finally arrived, and I nearly fell off my chair when he announced his name. It was Thomas of Aquinas!

Saint Thomas Aquinas was the greatest theologian and logician of the Middle Ages, perhaps of all time!

And here he was, a young man of twenty-two, running my church and school system. I tried to treat him the same as any other priest, but secretly I was in awe of him. I told him what I wanted to accomplish, but generally I let him do as he felt best, offering advice only when asked.

Interlude Two I hit the STOP b.u.t.ton.

"He really had Thomas Aquinas working for him?"

"Yes and no. The man's name was Thomas and he really was from the Italian town of Aquinas. But the Thomas Aquinas you're both thinking of was seven years old at the time, and no relation to Conrad's schoolteacher. Conrad's history was about as accurate as yours."

"Summa Theologica still got written in Conrad's branch."

He hit the START b.u.t.ton.

Chapter Ten.

We had just finished installing our first rotary steam engine, our first double expansion device. It turned an overhead shaft that had leather belts driving the lathes, grinders, and other machines we had lined up below it. Wicker baskets covered the belts, a safety feature.

I was getting ready to go to Eagle Nest to greet the first batch of four dozen boys when there was a commotion at the gate of Three Walls.

In front of the drawbridge was a ragged mob of some sort of foreigners, and Sir Vladimir was not about to let them in without my permission. There were over a hundred of them.

They had darker complexions than we did. Their hair was black and their eyes brown, sometimes green.

They were of medium stature and had the thin, wiry bodies one a.s.sociates with Armenians, or even Arabs.

Yet they weren't quite exactly like either of those peoples.

Their leader, who was about as ragged as the rest, spoke only a smattering of Polish, and the others spoke none at all. It took me several hours to find out what they wanted, and I would have given up on them if I hadn't caught the words "Novacek" and "alchemist."

A year before, I had asked a merchant friend, Boris Novacek, to send me a chemist, if he ever ran across one, since I was weak in practical chemistry. Apparently, this man was the thirteenth-century equivalent of a chemist. He had with him three pottery jars of what smelled like, acids, and intimated with gestures that he had made them.

Well, I badly needed a chemist. We were throwing away all sorts of things that could be useful if treated properly. Coal tar, for example, is a sticky guck that is a mixture of thousands of chemicals, some of which can be very useful. I knew that it contained aspirin and dyes and wood preservatives, to name but a few.

But I hadn't the foggiest idea of how to go about purifying the stuff. But I needed one chemist, or maybe a few. I didn't need a hundred!

I tried to get this idea across, but it was slow going.

The lunch bell rang, and I was getting hungry. Looking at the crowd of refugees, for that's what they turned out to be, I realized that they hadn't eaten in days, and had had d.a.m.n little in the months before. We had plenty of food, and there was no reason to be uncharitable. I invited them in for lunch, trying to communicate with gestures that this was a temporary invitation only, and that I was not permanently hiring them.

Problems started almost at once. Where I come from, when you're a guest, you eat what's put in front of you, and at least pretend that you're enjoying it. But they wouldn't touch our beer, insisting on drinking only water. Many Poles feel that you can't trust a man who I won't drink with you, and to refuse a man's generosity is an insult.

The leader questioned me at length about the kind of meat we were serving, and I finally had to draw him a picture of a pig to get the idea across to him. He acted like I was trying to feed him human flesh, and on finding out it was pork he said something to his followers such that they contented themselves with bread and kasha. At least they were cheap to feed, even though they ate three times what my own people did.

In the course of the afternoon, either his Polish improved or I got better at gesticulating. It seems that his name was Zoltan Varanian, although I wasn't sure whether "zoltan" was a name or a t.i.tle. In any event, I got the idea across that he and his people were welcome to stay for two weeks, but after that they would have to leave.

I also insisted that they take a bath before we put them up for the night, which caused other problems. My people didn't have a nudity tabu, and his did. Men and women didn't bathe together.

This caused all sorts of screaming every time one of my workers of the wrong s.e.x walked into the shower room at the wrong time. Their men even screamed when a pretty girl went in to join them. Culture shock all over the floor.

Their clothes were in shreds and we had cloth coming out of our ears. Lambert had been paying for all the work at Eagle Nest in cloth, and I hadn't gotten-around to disposing of it profitably yet. I had Janina issue them enough cloth to make a set of clothes for each of them.

Supper that night featured lamb, and that they'd eat. We put them up in the lowest two floors of the n.o.ble guest quarters, since there wasn't room for them anywhere else. They were stacked in like firewood, but even so, if the duke paid an unexpected visit, I didn't know what we'd do. Put them up in the barns, maybe.

The next morning, I really had to get to Eagle Nest, being a day late already. I a.s.signed Natasha to Zoltan, with the understanding that she was supposed to do what she could about teaching him some Polish. I said that I didn't expect her to sleep with him. There are limits to hospitality.

Natasha took the job with the same cheerful acceptance that she did everything else. I never decided whether she was odd for being so compliant, or all the rest of the women in the world were strange for not being exactly like her. Any man who wouldn't marry the girl was a d.a.m.n fool, including myself. Of course, I got her without having to get married.

Four dozen boys were waiting for me at Eagle Nest, bright young kids about ten or twelve years old, the scions of the local n.o.bility.

Most of them had a servant or two along, and these people expected to have the cushy job of waiting on one small person. I put a stop to that, a.s.signing most of the servants to housekeeping, cooking, and cleaning, which freed up many of my own people for more productive work elsewhere.

The boys were a.s.signed six to the room, and one responsible servant was put in with them, mostly to keep the kids in line. There was room for eight times the number of people we had, and each of the boys could have had a room to himself, but boys of that age are tribal in their outlook. I wanted to get them to form long-lasting friends.h.i.+ps and a sense of teamwork. For the first few days, I let them switch roommates as they liked, but after that room a.s.signments became fairly permanent.

Count Lambert had picked the headmaster, and I liked the man. He would be teaching two cla.s.ses of two dozen each, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. He was to teach the standard subjects, reading, writing, and arithmetic. When not in school, the boys were under the supervision of one of my carpenters, a man who was good with kids.

This system gave us a morning team and an afternoon team, which was intended to create friendly rivalry.

A good amount of time was spent on team sports, and compet.i.tions were set between the s.h.i.+fts on weekends.

I started the boys out with kites, and had them build their own. And not just ordinary kites, but controllable kites with two and three strings. By the end of the week, I told them about gluing sand to the strings, so that you could cut another kite's strings.

Compet.i.tion got fierce! And hopefully the boys learned something.

Returning to Three Walls, I got to thinking that a uniform might help with the feeling of solidarity I was trying to build among the boys. Count Lambert's factory turned out quite a nice red wool cloth, and Copper City could turn out bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and military doodads by the ton.

I decided on white trousers and a white turtleneck sweater, with a red open-collar jacket. The trousers and jacket would have pockets in the modem fas.h.i.+on, since carrying everything in belt pouches is a nuisance.

Black leather boots, belt, and gloves. Bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, buckles, insignia, and epaulets. And either a red or a white peaked hat, depending on which s.h.i.+ft they were on.

At the end of the year, I'd let the boys design a cla.s.s dagger, and none but them would carry one of that design. Each cla.s.s would have its own, just as many schools have a cla.s.s ring.

Instructors would wear a similar outfit, except they would have a black hat. Other workers would have the same, but with much less braid on their outfits.

I debated with myself on whether or not the kids should be required to sew their own uniforms, since skill at sewing was needed to make canvas-covered aircraft. I decided against it because boys of that age grow quickly. If the kid had made it himself, he wouldn't feel right about handing it down once he'd outgrown it, and the obvious economy of hand-me-downs was standard in this century, even among the highest n.o.bility.

Natasha and Zoltan made a remarkable amount of progress in the week I was gone.. It was actually possible to communicate with the man. Some of this was Natasha's patience, but mostly it was because Zoltan was a very accomplished linguist with eleven other languages. Oh, he still had the vocabulary of a five-year-old, and .much of our time together was spent discussing the meanings of various words, but he was able to tell his story.

He and his people were originally from thousands of miles east of Three Walls, east of the Caspian Sea.

They had been from the city of Urgench, a part of the Kh.o.r.esmian Empire, which stretched from the Arabian Ocean to north of the Aral Sea, and from beyond the Hindu Kush to the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian. To hear Zoltan talk of it, it was next door to Eden, with skies that were never cloudy and the waters ever abundant in the great Amu River that washed down from the never-failing snowfields of the Himalayas.

Ponds and orchards and fields of grain went on forever, a irrigated by the mighty Amu. Dozens of cities rose white and glorious in the sun, each with populations of more than half a million, for the empire was densely populated. Yet such was the abundance of the land that there was plenty for all.

Then the Mongols had come from out of the mountains to the northeast, and had killed the Shah and taken Samarkand and the capital city of Bokhara. The cities were destroyed, and their entire populations murdered. With their armies completely obliterated, with their Shah dead, or some said hunted beyond the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian Sea, with no hope left at all, the Prince of Urgench submitted to Genghis Khan. In return for a ruinous tribute paid to the conqueror, he bought some measure of peace for a few years.

But the tribute demanded increased yearly, and to it was added the demand that all the healthy men must enlist in the armies of the Khan, to fight in foreign wars. Already the required tribute in grain and gold and slaves meant starvation stalked the land. Without the aid of the healthy men, the tribute could not be met.

The women, children, and aged might be able to support themselves, if poorly, but there would be no surplus. Without the tribute, the Khan's armies would return, and there would be none to defend against them.

The Prince of Urgench joined with other princes in rebellion against the Mongols, and Urgench was the last city to be destroyed. The surrounding countryside was desecrated in days, and every town, village, and farmhouse was put to the torch. The orchards and vineyards were chopped down for no other reason than the pleasure of their destruction. Women were raped within sight of the city walls, and then their throats were cut when the rapist was done. Whole families were lined up just beyond bowshot, and slaughtered.

Urgench held out for five months against the Mongol horde, until all the arrows had been exhausted, all the food was gone. and even the rats had all been captured and eaten. Then the Mongols had proposed a truce.

They said that if the prince would surrender himself, they would let all others in the city live, for only the prince had rebelled against his masters, the others were but dupes who had followed him. The Mongols swore this to Allah. and to their own pagan G.o.ds.

The prince took counsel with his n.o.bles, and then voluntarily surrendered himself. As arranged, the prince went out the city gate, and Mongol soldiers took charge of that gate. They beheaded the prince within sight of his subjects, and marched their army within the walls.

Then they said that all must leave the city, for they had sworn to leave the people with their lives, but the city itself was to be destroyed. The people could take what they could carry, but that was all.

As the citizens went through the gate, they were searched, and all weapons were taken from them. They were then sorted into groups, according to their occupations. Each group was separately guarded.

Military officers were the first to be murdered. They were bound hand and foot in sight of their families and then some were strangled and others slashed to death. Their families were soon butchered as well, except for a few hundred attractive young women, who were stripped, chained, and set aside.

Other groups followed, and the systematic killing went on for days. When the people complained to the Mongols that they were not keeping their oath to their G.o.ds, the Khan answered that he had promised not to kill those within the city, but that they were now outside its walls.

When none were left but a hundred of the city's best craftsmen with their families in one group, two thousand young women in another, and eighty thousand healthy men in a third, the killing stopped for a time.

While the butchering had been going on, and all the heads of the murdered stacked in neat pyramids, others of the horde had been systematically looting the city, although in fact most of the portable wealth had been in the baggage of the refugees.

The city was then burned, and the captive men were put to tearing down every wall, every palace, every mosque, and every hovel. When that was done, it still was not enough to satisfy the Khan. The captives were forced to dig a ca.n.a.l and then to dam the mighty Amu so that the river cut a new channel right through where the city had been. This destroyed the irrigation system, and without irrigation, the fields dried up and the very soil was blown away. Nothing was left of once beautiful Urgench that once held half a million people. The eighty thousand workers were then slaughtered and their heads added to the pyramids of skulls.

The Mongols made Hitler look like a piker, and Stalin look like small change.

Zoltan had been master alchemist of the city, and his family had been spared so that the Mongols might have something to threaten him with. This was also the case of the others in his small group.

The young women were taken off separately and never seen again. Zoltan's group was led off in the direction of Karakorum, the Mongol capital, with a guard of twenty men.

The prisoners were forced to cook for the guards, and Zoltan Was as knowledgeable of vegetation as he was of minerals. He concocted a poison from the roots of certain desert plants, and slipping it into their food, used it to kill all the guards.

He then led his people west, and for seven years they had wandered in search of a home, constantly thrown out of Christian lands because they were Moslems, thrown out of Moslem lands because they were considered heretics and deathly afraid of going near the lands of the Khan.

Once there had been over five hundred of them, but four out of five had been lost along the way. A hundred were all that were left from a city of half a million.

It was a pitiful story, and I felt sorry for these people. But dam it, I had problems of my own! I had to make sure that what happened to Urgench didn't happen to Cracow! To do that, I needed the continued support of the Church, of the state, and of my own people. Having this crowd of refugees around wasn't going to help.

They were Moslems, of a sort, but as best as I could tell, they were all members of some heretical sect. Or at least Zoltan said that all the other Moslems were heretics, so I guess it amounted to the same thing. That was the last thing that I needed. Members of small religious sects tend to be fanatics eagerly searching for converts. The Church was already conducting an inquisition concerning me, and if they found out that I was harboring and encouraging Moslems, and heretical Moslems at that, it could go bad for me. And if the refugees started making converts out of good Christians -well, I didn't want to think about it.

I got very firm on the point that his people were not to try to talk my people into joining his Church, or whatever one does to become a heretical Moslem.

He said that this was not a problem, and went into a long theological argument which I could not follow but that apparently proved to his satisfaction that we could never qualify to join his sect, and therefore no attempt would be made to save us.

This ticked me off even more! Where the h.e.l.l did he get off telling me that I wasn't good enough to join his d.a.m.ned sect? I was good enough to join anything, not that I'd wanted to. By that point, it was pretty late, and I felt it best to call it a night. Much longer and I would have decked the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and that's not how you're supposed to treat a guest.

I spent the next morning catching up on things. Come spring, I planned to build a second housing unit (or defensive wall, depending on how you wanted to look at it), a dozen yards outside our first one. The new one would be made of brick, with a tile roof. Also, I planned a sawmill and cabinetry shop to be built outside the town proper, down where a small stream would make it easier to transport logs. Our valley was as logged over as it was going to be, the trees left being kept for decoration. Hauling huge logs uphill to our existing sawmill was silly.

And there were the hundreds of trivial things that have to be done when you play manager.

It was midafternoon before I could get back to Zoltan, but I was resolved to throw him and his people out at the end of the week. I felt sorry for them, but there was to big a cultural difference between us for it to ever work out. We absorbed a group of Pruthenians last year without much difficulty, but those were children whose families had been murdered by the Knights of the Cross. They'd needed new families pretty badly, and were fairly malleable. These Moslems, or whatever they were, were a tightly knit community. Such a group can maintain its culture indefinitely. They had to go.

I know that sounds cruel, but they were cruel times. There was a limit to what I could do, and if I took responsibility for this band of a hundred foreigners, it meant that there were a hundred Poles somewhere who could otherwise have been helped, but weren't. My own people were dying every winter, and I owed more to them than I did to someone from a country I'd never heard of before.

But while they were around, and I was footing the bill, I wanted to pick Zoltan's brain for everything I could concerning practical chemistry. This proved difficult. Part of the problem was the lack of a mutual vocabulary. Zoltan learned the Polish word for "door" when Natasha pointed at the door and said "door." A bit of discussion might be needed to make sure she wasn't talking about the door k.n.o.b or the door frame, but it didn't take much time. But how the h.e.l.l do you get across the concept of pota.s.sium nitrate? I couldn't say that it was the major const.i.tuent of gunpowder. He didn't know what gunpowder was. It's a white crystal? So are table salt, sand, and a million other things!

I tried to start with the simplest atom, hydrogen. After an hour talking about atoms, Zoltan allowed that he had read an old Greek text about atoms, but was sure that the concept was silly. It didn't fit into his system of moist substances as opposed to dry substances, hot versus cold, and the whole earth, air, water, and fire cosmos that he not only believed in, but that he unshakably knew was true. A thousand times he had used the theories he had been taught by his master and had gotten good results. How could anyone doubt it?

It was late when we finally called it a day with little progress made. The next four days were about as bad, although Zoltan's Polish was improving astoundingly.

The truth was that I bad a good background in theoretical chemistry, with little practical knowledge. Oh, I'd had the usual college lab courses, but they all involved taking prepackaged chemicals and mixing them according to a formula. For all the practical knowledge I gained, I might as well have been in a home economics cla.s.s. It was worse than cookbooking. I hadn't the faintest idea of how most chemicals appeared in nature. A housewife at least knows what a chicken looks like!

And Zoltan knew quite a bit about practical chemistry. He had jars of hydrochloric, sulfuric, and nitric acid with him. He proved it by dissolving a bit of gold. He was also convinced that he could trans.m.u.te lead into gold, once he got good enough at it. He just hadn't found the right procedure yet.

We had no common ground between us.