Conrad Starguard - The High-Tech Knight Part 24

Then came the laundry room, mostly more sinks and draining racks. I'd had some wooden scrub boards made, a major improvement over the local practice of beating dirty clothes between two rocks. After all the trouble I'd had wheedling cloth out of Count Lambert, I had no desire to see it beaten to shreds by some ignorant women.

After that was the kitchen, where the stoves also heated the water for the other plumbing facilities. More porcelain sinks were dedicated to the business of was.h.i.+ng dishes.

Our only source of water was the mine. We split small logs, burned them hollow, then tied- them together to form a pipe. A trench was dug following the contour of the land, gently sloping from the mine to the apartment house. The wooden pipes were carefully fitted together in it and packed in clay to slow leakage.

The water seemed pure enough all summer, but I knew that would change once we hit coal. We had plenty of water head, so we built three big filters, each twelve yards high, one of gravel, one of crushed limestone and one of sand. Our water had to flow through all three before it got to us. The filtration system was probably overkill, but I had no way of testing the purity of the water, and an epidemic could wipe us out.

Below the filters was a big stone reservoir, and like everything else in the water system, it was covered with at least a yard of dirt as an insulator. A frozen waterline would have been a major nuisance.

The biggest room in the building was the dining room. It was two stories tall and could seat a thousand people. It stretched across two of the separate structures, right through the firewall and had a huge stone arch in the middle of it. I worried about this breach in our fire defenses, but it seemed important to me that we should all eat together. I salved my conscience by installing two fire hoses near the archway. A balcony ran around the second floor, connecting to the staircases going up.

The second floor went between the two-story gate pa.s.sage and the dining room.

It contained the nursery, the schoolrooms, and our library, once we had enough books for it to deserve that t.i.tle. It also contained the store. There you could buy all of the sundries and small luxuries that most people wanted.

That was a major innovation, since except in the larger cities, you could only buy things when a peddler happened by. Sometimes housewives went for months without being able to buy pins or needles, so they tried to keep a small supply of money for buying such things whenever they were available. They called this fund their "pin money."

Since we bought in quant.i.ty and our markup was only a hundred percent, instead of the usual three hundred, our prices were generally much less than a backpacking peddler could sell for. Yet it was profitable, since one sales girl, Janina, ran the place, and volume was decent.

Prices were marked and that's what things sold for. No haggling allowed.

We treated our vendors the same way. We requested bids, specifically stating the quant.i.ties and qualities desired. We always bought from the lowest bidder, and if it turned out later that the product was substandard, we didn't ask him to bid next time. These business methods were denounced from all quarters, but since it was profitable to do business with us, our suppliers eventually came around.

Before long, where the town guilds let us get away with it, each of the Pink Dragon Inns had a similar store. Where they didn't, we often set up a store just outside the city limits, and ran it on a breakeven basis. We busted more than one guild that way, but in so doing we drastically raised the standard of living.

Above the gate were my own quarters, with a small restroom, two toilets and two sinks.

Sir Vladimir stayed at my apartments, as did Krystyana, her four main ladies and a varying number of other girls.

With Krystyana managing a kitchen that fed eight hundred people, Yawalda taking care of the animals and coordinating all our transport, Janina handling the store and our stores-both buying and selling-Natalia acting as my executive secretary and records keeper, and Annastas.h.i.+a managing my personal household, I could hardly expect the girls to keep the place clean besides.

To do that, we brought in a half-dozen of the workers' daughters. My handmaidens had handmaidens.

But I got the use of them. Krystyana believed that fair was fair.

My apartment was larger and more sumptuous than I had originally planned, but Sir Vladimir convinced me that it was politically necessary to impress n.o.ble guests.

Anna had her own stall in the barn, which she used mostly for eating, since she preferred the usual fare of horses to that of humans. But she usually stayed with us. This meant that the stairways had to be bigger, the floors stronger, and the door handles had to be designed so she could work them, since she liked sitting in on the conversations. Everybody was already convinced that I was insane, so what the heck. Anyway, I was lord, and rank hath its privileges. Anna was good people.

Over the rest of the buildings were apartments, four stories of them. The typical apartment was nine yards long and three yards wide, although they varied somewhat in size, according to the size of a man's family.

Bachelors usually bunked four to a room, as did bachelorettes. As time went on, and the ladies discovered that it was possible to be single and survive without social stigma, more and more of them stayed single longer. Some of them even held out until they were eighteen, but I get ahead of myself.

On each floor, apartments were arranged in cl.u.s.ters of five, around a stairway that zigzagged between floors. On the second of the four floors, the hallway was much smaller and there was a restroom. Two toilets and sinks for twenty families.

By the standards of the twentieth century, it was a crowded, substandard slum dwelling. By the standards of the thirteenth century, it was fabulous luxury, and everybody, including the people who lived there, thought I was crazy to build so lavishly.

The Pink Dragon Inn Number Three was running under the command of Tadeusz's second son, Zygmunt Wrolawski. This was a smaller version of the inn at Cieszyn, and at about the same level of plushness. It had stables for animals and thirty rooms for rent, mostly for merchants.

But the inn was essentially a workingman's bar, for a man needs to get away from his family occasionally, and to fraternize with other men. The costumes of the waitresses encouraged that and eventually the place went topless. One waitress tried it on her own and without any encouragement from me. She made more in tips than all the others put together. In a week, they were all doing it.

Somehow, despite the lack of a nudity taboo, and despite the fact that we only had the one shower room and men and women used it together, and despite the fact that beer was far cheaper in the dining room not two hundred yards away, the men still preferred to have their beer brought to them by a pretty bare- breasted girl.

The topless fad spread to all the other Pink Dragon Inns, and when it did, profits increased remarkably.

The men paid for their pleasures. The inn recaptured over forty percent of what I paid out in salaries, and the store took in another thirty-five. Most of the rest was saved. That is to say, they could leave their salaries uncollected and draw interest on it, although we had to resort to certain subterfuges to get around the Church's silly usury laws. The workers claimed damages against me to the tune of eight percent a year for not paying them on time, which was, of course at their option.

It's not like I ever missed a payroll.

As things turned out, salaries were only a small part of my net outgo. I soon yielded to pressure for better pay for foremen and general foremen. It really didn't cost much at all. I got most of it back through the inn, the store, and the savings bank.

Then there was a barn for our eight horses, thirty-six pack mules, and fourteen milk cows. Yawalda was in charge of the animals and transportation.

I had insisted that all of our animals be well fed, not for any economic reason, but because of basic decency. I refused to allow any animal of mine to be mistreated.

That was contrary to the usual medieval custom of using animals as scavengers, and keeping them underfed so they'd keep at it. So people said that I was crazy; when they noticed that the milk cows continued to give milk all winter long, instead of drying up for lack of food, they claimed it was magic on my part, but they still thought I was crazy.

We also kept two hundred chickens, which lived mostly on table sc.r.a.ps and kitchen waste. Krystyana was a tight-fisted little manager. I am partial to fresh eggs in the morning, and had breakfast served at dawn. More and more people started joining me at it, especially when I moved the dinner hour from ten to noon.

Besides being what I was brought up to be used to, the three-meals-a-day system has certain advantages. Most of the ladies worked half a day. The ten o'clock dinner hour came in the middle of the morning s.h.i.+ft. During the winter, many of the men were working at logging operations too far away to come back for a hot lunch. At least we could give them a hot breakfast.

What's more, I liked it that way and I was lord.

I suppose I went a little overboard on the design of the church, but we had all these huge logs and it seemed a shame not to do something that pushed them to their structural limits.

And though our population was still well under a thousand, it would continue growing. Building more apartment houses was to be expected, but a community ought to have one church. If you have two churches, you have two communities.

So we built a church that sat four thousand.

I thought a long while before I decided on a name for the place. I called it the Church of Christ the Carpenter.

Imagine two big A-frame buildings, each as long and as high as it is wide, crossing in the middle, and you have the shape of it. Four ma.s.sive masonry pillars went down to bedrock, and supported the structure, one at each corner.

The four huge triangular walls, each eighteen stories high, would eventually be in stained gla.s.s, but for now they had to be boarded over. Even without the gla.s.s, it was impressive, as a church should be. No fancy statues or bright paint, just huge rough logs high in the hills.

Without a traveling crane, getting those logs in place was a problem. We deliberately left several big trees standing right within the construction site.

Those trees became the masts to which we attached ropes and pulleys to haul up the biggest structural components.

Once the central pyramid of our four biggest logs and a ma.s.sive wooden central hub was up, and could be used as a support to haul up the rest of the parts, we carefully cut down the original trees. There were some tight moments when they were felled, for if they came down wrong, they could wreck the structure, and we would not be able to set it up again. But I guess that G.o.d didn't want his church to fall over. It worked.

We built the church pretty much from the top down. The roof went up first, then the walls, finally the floor. I don't think that the carpenters ever stopped shaking their heads over that one, even after it went up on schedule.

I had the pews, altar, and communion rail permanently installed, as opposed to the usual medieval practice of making them movable. n.o.body was going to use my church for a beer bust, as happened elsewhere.

A month after Lambert's visit, the Mongol hunt went off very well, I thought.

Over forty knights accepted my invitation, including the Banki brothers, which Janina, Yawalda, and Natalia appreciated. And Friar Roman had come from Okoitz to observe.

With all of my people and Sir Miesko's, with men, women, and older children going at it, we had over seven hundred people beating the bushes, backed up by the knights in case of trouble.

Starting out almost a hundred yards apart in the morning, they were shoulder to shoulder at sunset, and the valley was full of animals. Bison and wolves and bears. There were so many that during the night I had to give orders that no one was allowed out of the building. Not that anybody much cared. They were all too busy playing in the bathroom.

The showers were the biggest hit of all, with people standing under them back to back and belly to belly and using up hot water by the ton. The kitchen stoves were going full blast and nonstop, but they were still hardpressed to keep the water warm.

I suppose it's harder to get enthused about a flush toilet, but they caused considerable wonderment. One knight complained that he washed his small clothes in one of the low sinks, pressed the little lever and they disappeared!

Natalia had counted the animals as they ran over the drawbridge and through the gate, and toward the end she had a different person counting each species.

We had over four thousand deer, eleven hundred wild boar, four hundred bison, six hundred wolves, two hundred elk (or moose, as the Americans call them), one hundred forty bears, plus lynx, wildcats, wood grouse, heathc.o.c.ks, rabbits and other small game. And eight of the biggest cows Natalia had ever seen.

People couldn't believe her when she read the list, but after all, these were all the animals living on forty square miles of rich land. They believed her in the morning when the killing began. The knights rampaged for two days, exhausting themselves physically before their bloodl.u.s.t was sated. The commoners had to scurry to drag in all the bodies, and gut and skin them.

Tadaos the bowman begged permission to join in the slaughter, and I told him that he could bag a few, but I didn't want to spoil the n.o.bles' fun. He strung his bow in an instant and fired off four arrows in as many seconds. Each came to rest in the head of an animal: three bucks and a wild boar. Every one of them was more than two hundred yards away. His shooting was still as good as it had been last fall. Then he unstrung his bow, and with a look of contentment on his face, recovered his arrows before he went back to help out with the skinning and gutting.

I had reserved all of the hides for myself, since we needed leather for a lot of things, and we exhausted all of my salt just salting down the skins. I had to buy three more tons out of Cieszyn before it was all over.

Five of our huge beer barrels were pressed into service holding salted meat. For a few weeks, we were back to having only water to drink, until more barrels were made.

The sauna/smokehouse was a nine-yard stone dome, and was packed almost solid.

The beehive c.o.ke oven had just been completed, and hadn't yet been used for coal. It was the same size as the sauna, since they had used the same centering on both. It too was used as a smokehouse, and the woodcutters were hardpressed to find enough hickory to keep both fires smoldering.

In the Middle Ages, the most highly prized meat was not the muscle tissue but the internal organs. Everyone gorged themselves on liver and hearts and kidneys.

The kitchens turned out head cheese by the ton and I resolved that next year we'd have some sausage-making machinery. This year, there just wasn't time.

But to me, the most interesting things were the aurochs. There were eight of them, a bull, four cows, and three calves. These were huge wild cattle that are extinct in the twentieth century. The last of the species was killed in Poland in the sixteenth.

They were black with a white stripe down the back, from head to tail, and they were huge. While I was sitting on Anna, who was bigger than the average warhorse, the bull could raise his head and his eyes were higher than my own.

"He's mine!" Sir Vladimir shouted, lowered his lance and would have charged if I hadn't stopped him.

"Remember the rules," I told him. "At least one-sixth of the males must be kept for breeding, and he's the only one. Anyway, I'm going to domesticate him. Think of the meat on that animal! There must be three tons of it!"

"You'll never domesticate that beast, Sir Conrad."

"I can try."

With a lot of work and one serious injury, we managed to herd the aurochs into another valley, then cut down a few strategically placed trees at the entrance to barricade them in. Eventually, we had a good-sized herd of them, but I get ahead of myself.

Six dozen bucks were saved to provide fresh meat for us through the winter and there were no complaints when I had the female half of our catch released along with the young and a sixth of the males. We had more fresh meat than anybody had ever seen before.

Friar Roman had come from Okoitz, where he had been studying clothmaking, at the behest of his abbot.

At supper, he presented me with a beautifully illuminated ma.n.u.script of the deed to my property. It was as colorful as a church altar and radiant with gold foil.

"It's wonderful!" I said. "But where did you get all the paints and gold leaf?"

"Oh, I have quite a painting box now. It was given to me by a wealthy widow as a pious act for the Church. Actually, my vow of poverty has made me much better off than I was. Soon, my vow of obedience is going to give me command of a cloth factory at Cracow. I think perhaps I shouldn't discuss my vow of chast.i.ty, but Okoitz is a marvelous place."

It was agreed by all that we would do the hunt again next year, and people were courteous enough not to remind me that I wasn't going to be here next year.

Sir Miesko said that next time we should sweep his lands as well, and Count Lambert was seriously thinking of staging a Mongol hunt covering his entire territory.

"Think of it," he said. "We might rid all my lands of wolves and bears! Do you realize how many of my people they kill every year? It must be dozens! And the food we'd gather!"

Someone pointed out that the beaters would have to be in the field for weeks.

How would they be fed and housed? How could they keep the wolves from sneaking out of the ring in the dark?

No one knew, but everyone agreed to think on it.

When it came to the division of the spoils, there was so much that we didn't bother trying to set up a fair system. I simply told everyone to take as much as they could carry. When I noticed some of my yeomen coming back for thirds, I put a stop to it.

We had skinned and gutted the wolves, cats, and other normally inedible animals and hung them up outside the gate. I said that if anybody kept dogs, they were welcome to come back and pick up the dog meat.

But when a few knights came back with pack animals, the carca.s.ses were gone.

Some peasants must have taken them for eating.

Until the time of the big hunt, the people at Three Walls had been eating a largely vegetarian diet, and that mostly grains, with only a small amount of meat and fresh greens in it. But from then on, we became meateaters, and over half of our caloric intake was in animal products. The children grew taller.

Later that fall we finally struck coal, and we found that we could make c.o.ke. This involved cleaning the coal of any obvious incursions of clay and stone, then baking the impurities out of it.

The beehive oven was a nine-yard dome that had a hole in the top through which the coal was loaded.

The rest of the oven was covered with dirt as an insulator, except for a doorway for extracting the c.o.ke. The coal was leveled with long rakes through the doorway to the depth of a yard and a half. Then a fire was started on top of the coal and the supply of air was restricted.

Soon the whole bed of coal was smoldering, and the dome of the oven reflected the heat downward. This eventually melted the coal, and volatile material -sulfur, ammonia, hydrocarbons -was vaporized to rise to the surface and be burned. It stank abominably.

The operator peeked through the small hole at the top of the doorway. When he saw that the volatiles had been burned off, the coal was again a solid, and the top of the bed was glowing, he inserted a bra.s.s spraying-apparatus through the top hole -and fed enough water through it to quench the fire without unduly cooling the oven.

The c.o.ke, which was by then almost pure carbon, was shoveled out with very long-handed shovels. The doorway was bricked over again and new coal was loaded from the top.

If the process was done properly, the oven was hot enough to restart the new batch of coal by itself, saving a good deal of fuel. Once we got the oven working properly, we ran about one batch a day through. By spring, we had eight ovens going.

The masons could build the new ones through the coldest weather, since each was built next to a functioning oven, which kept the ground thawed, and the domes were built of dry laid sandstone. Mortar would never have stood the heat.

Chapter Nineteen.

But now it was a week before Christmas, and my stay of execution was over. I had to go and fight and kill or maybe be killed to see if a hundred forty-two children had the right to live normal lives.