Conrad Starguard - The Radiant Warrior Part 12

But France and the Middle East had been civilized much longer, and that's precisely where Lady Francine and Cilicia came from.

I'm not saying that this is Ultimate Truth, but I'd argue it over a beer.

Cilicia's talents in bed were as outstanding as her abilities on the dance floor, and I'm glad that I didn't have to take her as a slave because I certainly wanted to take her.

She was bright, too. In two short weeks, she'd picked up enough Polish to communicate, and her accent wasn't as thick as her father's. I admit that she talked me into letting her people stay, despite all the problems that we both knew would occur.

Her technique was to examine things and tell me the name of the man in her group who could show us how to do it better. She examined the blade of the fancy dagger that Sir Vladimir and his brothers had given me last Christmas and p.r.o.nounced the steel to be inferior. My sword met with her admiration, and when she asked if we could do such work, I had to admit that we couldn't. But one of her people could.

She talked about pottery and cloth and gla.s.s, but I think that it was the papermaker that finally convinced me. To really spread knowledge, you have to have plentiful books. There simply was no possibility of producing enough parchment to do that, even if I could automate the process of producing it. It takes the skin of a whole sheep to make -a single large sheet of parchment, and there is a limit to how many sheep you can grow. But if we had paper, I knew I could build a printing press.

So that night, between bouts of Mil. Spec, lovemaking, we planned how our peoples could work together without killing each other. Essentially, the program was to keep them as separated as possible, with contacts only for professional purposes. I would give them some land and keep my people out of it, except for apprentices, who wouldn't be allowed to spend the night. Except for Zoltan, her people would leave their land only with my permission.

My people would build hers some minimal housing, enough to get them through the winter, and we would provide food for the first year, after which they would be on their own. One half their man-hours would be spent teaching my apprentices and in R&D work. We shook on it, a novel custom for her, and in the morning her father was delighted with the deal.

Cilicia, of course would be staying with me. My father didn't raise anybody that dumb!

So my carpenters and masons stopped what they were doing and started putting up a housing unit. No indoor plumbing, no defensive features, and the kitchens would be detached. It wouldn't be as nice as Three Walls, because we were up against a time limit.

Not only was winter closing in, but I wanted them out of Three Walls before the Great Hunt. I didn't want fifty n.o.ble guests, a few of whom had fought Moslems in the Crusades, rubbing shoulders with guests who weren't even Christians! That was asking for trouble.

But after two weeks at Three Walls, I had to make my rounds of the other installations again. I was getting ready to leave when Kotcha, my mount's rubdown girl I, all fifty pounds of excited nine-year-old, ran breathless into my bedroom.

"Anna's had puppies!" she shouted.

This announcement left me momentarily stunned. "Kotcha, horses don't have puppies. They have foals.

And Anna's not expecting. You can tell on a horse. The body gets bigger and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s fill with milk. This is the wrong time of the year for that, anyway."

Children in the Middle Ages didn't have to be told about the birds and the bees. It was normal for the entire family, parents, children, and various relatives, to live and sleep in a single room. s.e.x was something normal that had happened around them all their lives. And if that wasn't enough, they were mostly farmers, and watched animals doing it as farm children have always done. Making s.e.x a secret is a modern perversion.

"Anna's not a horse! And they look like puppies!"

"The first part is true enough."

"Maybe you'd better come and look. My lord."

"Maybe I'd better."

A crowd had gathered around Anna's stall, and I pushed my way through it.

What I saw turned my stomach. If ever there was a bunch of prematurely born foals, this was it. They really did look like oversized puppies, with tiny spindly legs they could barely crawl on. Born in November, for G.o.d's sake, and there were four of them. No wonder they had aborted. It was incredible that they were still alive. There was only one decent thing to do. Put the poor things out of their misery. I got out my good Buck jackknife.

"You people get the h.e.l.l out of here!" I shouted at the crowd, which evaporated.

"Kotcha, you'd better go, too. You don't want to see this."

"What are you going to do?"

I crouched down to her level. "I know that this will be hard for you to understand, Kotcha, but sometimes things aren't born right. Sometimes, well, something goes wrong, and when it does, the only nice thing to do is to make them not hurt anymore."

"But what are you going to do?"

"These foals, these 'puppies,' won't be able to grow up right. Look, Anna's b.r.e.a.s.t.s haven't even started to swell yet. She won't be able to feed them. They'll starve."

"They eat hay, just like Anna does."

"They're too young to eat hay. Small mammals have to have milk, and Anna doesn't have any."

"I saw them eating hay!"

"Kotcha, I've tried to explain, but I'm just out of explanations. It's something that has to be done. Now please go away."

"You're going to kill them!"

"Yes, Kotcha. I have to."

"NO!" She ran to the back of the stall, grabbed a pitchfork, and stood in front of the colts pointing it at me.

Fifty pounds of sheer courage and no brains at all.

"d.a.m.n. Anna, would you talk to her. You know that this is necessary, don't you?"

Anna shook her head No, and stood beside Kotcha.

If I had to, I could always disarm Kotcha and lock her in her room. But if Anna was against me, it wasn't so straightforward. She could whip me easily in a fight.

"Anna... d.a.m.n. There's nothing in our sign language that covers this. Let's go over to the letterboard and talk this over. Kotcha, you can stay right here and watch the babies."

I'd made up the letterboard more than a year ago when I learned that Anna was intelligent. She couldn't talk but she could spell things out by pointing at the letters. If you could call it spelling.

She went over to it and spelled out KEDS OK.

"Kids okay? You're telling me that those are normal?"

She nodded yes.

"They always look like that?"

Yes.

I sat down on the ground. "Oh my G.o.d! I nearly murdered them! But what are they going to eat? You don't have any milk."

ET HAY ET GRAN ET ENEDING.

"They can eat anything, the same as you do?"

Yes.

"Your species always has them four at a time?"

Yes.

"Who ... who was the father?"

NO FADER.

"No father? Then how ... Anna, some fishes and lizards reproduce as.e.xually, parthenogenetically. Do your people do that?"

Yes.

"Huh. But this isn't a sensible time of the year for a herbivore to reproduce. Anna, what triggers it? Why did you have them now and not some other time?"

SHE ASK.

"She? You mean Kotcha?"

Yes.

"And all she had to do was ask? You reproduce voluntarily?"

Yes and yes.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned. How long does it take them to grow up?"

She tapped her hoof four-times.

"Four years, huh? Anna, do you like having children?"

Yes and yes.

"Well, having more people like you around would sure be helpful. You keep on having them until further notice. Is that sufficient?"

Yes.

"Good. I hope you accept my apology for the stupid scene I just made. I guess I'd better talk to Kotcha now.

How long before you're ready to travel?"

She gave me the "ready" signal.

"The morning after childbirth? Well, if you say so. We leave in an hour. I'm through trying to second-guess you. From now on I'm going to ask."

Yes.

I apologized to Kotcha, but she stayed mad at me, the way a kid will. It was months before we were friends again.

Actually, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I had reacted emotionally and had almost made a horrible mistake because I hadn't stopped to think. I'd known for years that Anna was a member of a different species than a horse. Just because the adults of her species looked like horses was no reason to think that the juveniles would. And since when do you do mercy killing on people? Because Anna was people, and I had gotten into the bad habit of forgetting it.

I'd had the saddler make a sort of second saddle that attached to the back of Anna's regular saddle. This let a pa.s.senger ride sidesaddle behind me and have someplace to brace her feet. I took Cilicia along to show her some more of the country, to give her a chance to show off some of her new western-style outfits, and for s.e.x, of course. There was no point in messing around with strange ladies when I had perfection at home.

It took us two days to get to Copper City. Anna could make it in one during the summer, but winter was closing in and the days were much shorter. The lack of a decent artificial light cut into travel time as much as it did into industrial production.

My experiments in trying to distill a decent lamp fuel from coal tar had met with a pretty dismal failure.

The stuff had so much sulfur and ammonia in it that it cleared the room of people when I fit the lamp. It smoked badly, too.

I was toying with the idea of trying to drill for oil so that we could have kerosene lamps, but the only oil fields nearby were at Przemysl, a city that was originally Polish, and would be again, but had been in the hands of the Ukrainian Duchy of Halicz Ruthenia for fifty years. Getting permission to set up an installation there would probably take a major diplomatic effort.

I was stumped.

When I got to Copper City, the duke was just arriving.

He had Lady Francine with him, and two dozen armed men.

"d.a.m.n, boy! Do you always run a horse like that? You'll kill her!"

"Not Anna, your grace. She likes a good run."

"People say that whenever they see you on the road, you're always at a dead gallop and never seem to have time to talk."

"It's just that between your projects, Count Lambert's, and my own, there isn't much time, your grace. I hope I haven't been rude."

"No, but it keeps them talking about you."

"I suppose it does keep me in the limelight, your grace," I said as I got out of the saddle and helped Cilicia down. She was short and slender but surprisingly heavy for her build. A dancer's body is all smooth, hidden muscle, and remarkably dense.

She bowed to the duke, who nodded back, but she stayed out of the conversation until invited in, as a good woman should. In the twentieth century, the ladies would have monopolized the conversation for hours, talking about nothing. The thirteenth was less decadent.

"What the h.e.l.l is a limelight?"

"It's..." Daylight dawned in the swamp. "It's what I've been trying to think of for two years, your grace. It's a very bright artificial light made by burning a gas under lime, and it's what will double the production in our factories."

"Double the production? I don't follow you, boy."

"It might even triple It. As things are, we can only work during the daytime, your grace, and then only during good weather in the wintertime. Our expensive machinery is idle almost two-thirds of the time. With a good artificial light, we can shutter up the windows and run things day and night!"

"How're you going to get that much work out of the peasants? Three days of it and they'd fall over dead!"

"Well, you don't work the same men continuously, your grace. You work them in two s.h.i.+fts, one working days and one working nights. We're already doing that with the smelters and the blast furnaces, where we can't stop at night, but the animal fat lamps we use are expensive to operate and don't give off much light.

The accident rate at night is three times that of the day s.h.i.+ft, and a lot of that is caused by poor lighting. But limelights are as bright as day!"

"But you'd stiff have to double up on the housing, and that's what most of the buildings around here are, unless you figure to run their beds on two s.h.i.+fts too."

"That would cause more trouble than it would be worth, your grace. Every family needs its own apartment.

But the expensive things are not the sleeping rooms. What costs is the bathrooms and the kitchens, and there is no reason why both s.h.i.+fts can't use those same facilities."