The High-Tech Knight

by Leo Frankowski

  They all looked at me aghast.

  “Sir Conrad! Don’t say things like that!” Krystyana said.

  “Yes, Sir Conrad. That’s hardly a thing to joke about!” Sir Vladimir added.

  “I wish I were joking. But there’s nothing we can do about it right now.”

  “I’m sure Sir Vladimir knows the tale, but have you ladies heard the story about King Krak, who killed the dragon and founded this city?”

  “I’d heard it was a monster, but not necessarily a dragon,” Sir Vladimir said.

  “Then tell it your way.”

  “I shall.”

  He launched into a windy telling of the tale that almost got us to the castle gates.

  “And it’s all true?” Krystyana said. “There really was a King Krak?”

  “I could show you his burial mound. They named the city after him. What other proof can you need?” He said with a twinkle in his eye. He gave me a quick wink.,

  There are these two huge prehistoric mounds in the area, but nobody ever found anything buried under them. The best guess is that they were used as defensive structures. Poland and the rest of the north European plain have’ been inhabited, off and on, for at least a hundred eighty thousand years. A lot can happen in that time.

  “And Princess Wanda really drowned herself in the river rather than marry the German prince?” Annastashia asked.

  “I could show you her mound as well.”

  “And the monster’s cave is still under Wawel Hill?” Krystyana asked.

  “It is. But the mouth of it was covered over hundreds of years ago and no one remembers where it’s at.”

  “Do you believe the story, Sir Conrad?” Annastashia asked.

  “The way I heard it, Wanda turned Prince Rytygier down. He then got mad and invaded her country. Her armies defeated his, and in thanksgiving, she sacrificed herself to the gods. But far be it from me to contradict Sir Vladimir.”

  “God wouldn’t want anybody to do that!” Annastashia said.

  “This was hundreds of years ago. We were pagans then. Pagan gods want a lot.”

  “Thank God we’re Christians,” Krystyana said.

  The last time I was in Cracow, they wouldn’t let me on Wawel Hill. This time the guards saluted us as we entered. The uniform gets them every time.

  As we dismounted, a page ran up to me.

  “Sir Conrad? The duke is expecting you. Please come with me.”

  This startled me, but I followed the kid. The castle had little in common with the one I remembered from the twentieth century. A lot would be torn down in the next seven hundred years and a whole lot more built. But every now and then I’d get the deja vu feeling and realize I was seeing a familiar landmark from a formerly impossible angle.

  Duke Henryk’s chambers were straight out of a movie set, and his bearing and beard were as formidable as ever. I bowed low.

  “Oh, stand up, boy! I’m too old to waste time on that nonsense. In private, anyway. They still make me do it in public. Better still, sit down. Now what's this about your chopping up a Crossmen caravan?”

  “They were abusing over a hundred children, your grace.”

  “They were transporting a consignment of Pruthenian slaves to the Greeks so the Greeks could sell them to the Moors. Go on.”

  I was trying not to sweat. “Yes, your grace. I tried to free the kids and the guards attacked me. Sir Vladimir came to my aid and we won.”

  “Two of you kicked shit out of seven of them. I like that! How did Sir Vladimir do?”

  “He killed three and wounded one more to the death, your grace.”

  “Ha! I knew that kid had his father’s blood in him! Four men in a fair fight!”

  “More than fair, your grace. In the end, he was charged twice by two knights at the same time, and he still killed one of them.”

  “What! Two on one? The bastard Crossman never told me about that! Yeah, I’ve talked to him. He came through yesterday, still scared. Ha! You could smell the shit on his britches. He said you'd killed all six of his comrades. What happened to the last one?”

  “He lost his right arm, your grace, but I think I got to him in time. He’ll likely live. He's at Sir Miesko's now.”

  “Ah, Miesko. He used to be my clerk before I knighted him… Well. Damn good fight, boy. But it’s still going to be the death of you.”

  “If the Pruthenians were on my border, I’d make peasants out of them damn quick, but that sluggard the Duke of Mazovia couldn't handle them, so the damn fool invited in those Crossmen. He invited in the wolves to keep down the foxes!”

  “Well, I don’t like them, but I'm not strong enough to beat them. And that's what it would take for me to get you out of this mess you've made. A war. I can't afford it and I couldn't win it. So I've got to stand back and let them kill you. You hear me, boy? You'll get no real help from me! The best I can do is to delay your trial a few months.”

  “I’d appreciate that, your grace. Maybe the horse will sing.”

  “Eh?”

  “One of the Aesop’s fables, your grace. A man condemned to death asked the king not to kill him because he was the only man in the world who could teach a horse to sing. The king was skeptical, but gave the man a horse and a year to teach it. The man's friends asked him why he had done such a foolish thing. Nobody could teach a horse to sing! The man answered, 'True. But a lot can happen in a year. The king may die. I may die. And maybe the horse will sing.”' “I wish I had an education. Damn. A man comes to us from the far future and we go and kill him.”

  I was shocked. No one was supposed to know about that! “You know, your grace?”

  “Yeah. I worked it out of your priest. Don’t be hard on him, though. I can be very persuasive.”

  “I can believe that, your grace.”

  “You’d better. Even so, he had a time convincing me. What finally turned me was when he showed me that parchment you gave him and I realized the wealth of your people.”

  “Parchment, your grace? You mean the paper money I gave him for a souvenir?”

  “No, not the miniature paintings, although that was pretty impressive, too. Any people who would use works of art for their currency instead of silver must be truly cultured! But no, I mean the parchment arsewipes you gave him.”

  Once, when we were walking north from Zakopane, Father Ignacy had gestured that he was going off to the bushes, presumably to relieve himself. I’d given him some toilet paper and he'd taken it without comment. I hadn't thought of it since. It appears that rather than using it, he'd kept it as a treasure from the future. “The toilet paper?”

  “That’s what he called it. People who can afford parchment to wipe their butts are richer than anyone in this century!”

  “Your priest told me why he swore you to secrecy, and I have to agree with most of his reasons. You can count on me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Look, boy, you don’t have much life left, so you get along and enjoy yourself. Tell the guard to send in the castellan. I'll have him fix your party up with the best rooms available.”

  I bowed and the duke waved me out.

  Whew! At first I thought the duke himself was going to kill me! And toilet paper is the most impressive artifact of modem civilization?

  Chapter Eleven

  I returned to the courtyard to find that Sir Vladimir was having problems with the palace grooms. They didn’t know how we were to be treated.

  “Relax, boys,” I said to them, “the duke is giving us the red-carpet treatment.”

  “Sir? Do you mean red with blood?”

  “I mean that he is giving us the best rooms in the palace, and you may assume that he means our mounts to be very well cared for as well.”

  “Ladies, Sir Vladimir, let’s tour a castle.”

  Sir Vladimir was thrilled that the duke had complimented his prowess and had me recite much of what was said word for word. Then he had me do it again in front of a dozen witnesses.

  I played along with it.
For a man like Sir Vladimir, peer approval is the most important thing in the world, what money is to Boris Novacek, or the Church is to Father Ignacy. I owed Sir Vladimir my life and a few moments of lip service was a small price to pay.

  We were treated with considerable deference by everyone. Even those who outranked us crowded around. Barons and counts seemed eager to make our acquaintance. Word of the duke’s approval traveled quickly, and stories about me had been circulating for months. But I think that much of it was the morbid curiosity people have about a condemned man. Finally, one knight simply offered his quite sincere condolences and said that if there was anything he could do for me before the end, or even after it, he would be most happy to oblige.

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “But why is everyone so convinced that I’m going to die? We're talking about a trial by combat, not an execution! It's going to be a fair fight in front of witnesses. I've been in three fights in the last year-four, if you count that nonsense with the whoremasters guild in Cieszyn. Most of them were against odds, yet I've hardly been wounded. I'm going to win this trial, I tell you.”

  The knight looked awkward, but Sir Vladimir said, “Sir Conrad, I’m afraid that you don't seem to understand what you're up against. You'll be fighting a champion! A man who does little else but train for this sort of thing. The Crossmen have two of them, and each has killed more than thirty men in public trials and duels.”

  “Even so, I’d say you had a chance if the fight were strictly swords. But the rules are 'arm yourself' and he'll come at you with a lance. Sword against lance, you'd have no chance against even a poor lanceman. Lance against lance-Sir Conrad, I've seen your lancework and a plowman could do better. I'm afraid you have no hope at all.”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

  “It’s worse than that, but I lack the skill to state it more strongly.”

  Meals were all served formally at Wawel Castle , with every lord seated by his lady in strict order of precedence. This put us pretty far down the line, but not quite at the bottom.

  The food was well served and decorative enough, but not at all to my taste, mostly overprepared, overcooked, and overspiced. It was like something done by home economics students who were trying too hard.

  But Sir Vladimir and the girls were happy,

  At supper, the duke publicly praised Sir Vladimir’s battle skills and insisted on hearing a blow-by-blow account from him. Sir Vladimir gave it in a very animated fashion, shouting battle cries, waving his arms, and praising himself in a way that would have been in very poor taste in the twentieth century.

  Here it was the proper thing to do, I suppose.

  At any rate, Sir Vladimir was the man of the hour and Annastashia gloried in it.

  There was a dance after dinner, and I discovered that the steps I’d shown people in Okoitz last winter had reached Cracow before me. Only the dances had become Conrad's polka and Conrad's mazurka and Conrad's waltz.

  My rather embarrassing thirteenth century bunny club, bought and set up one night when I was drunk, had become known as Conrad’s Inn, and six different men asked me if I wouldn't set one up in Cracow.

  The girls’ riding outfits had full-length skirts with that sewn-in panel that I had suggested so that they could ride a man's saddle while maintaining feminine decorum. The very next day after the ladies of Wawel Hill saw the things, fully a dozen women were sporting them. How many seamstresses lost a night's sleep over that, I couldn't tell you. The new-style dresses were called “Conrads.”

  But the serious work I’d done and was rightly proud of? The windmill I'd designed and the looms and spinning wheels I'd designed and the factory I'd designed? Oh, they were Lambert's mill and Lambert's looms and Lambert's wheels. There is very little justice in this world.

  The rooms we got were fabulous by medieval standards, suitable for visiting royalty. That is to say, about up to the level of an American Holiday Inn, except that the furniture wasn’t as comfortable.

  We also got a servant apiece, which was awkward. I’d never had a personal servant before, and I really didn't like it. Krystyana was thrilled, though, so I put up with it until bedtime.

  Then I found that the servants expected to sleep in the same room as us. It seems that one of the reasons for the drapes hanging around the bed was to give us what medieval Poles considered to be sufficient privacy, so that the servants could sleep on the trundle bed next to us, in case we wanted anything in the middle of the night.

  Now, I’d spent the night before celibate in a monastery and I had no intention of staying that way again. But I could hardly make love to my girl with a couple of strangers not a yard away. I tried to send them out, but they didn't want to go. They said that if they went back to the servants' quarters, everybody would think that we'd found fault with them.

  The final compromise was that they would sleep in Sir Vladimir and Annastashia’s room next door, but they made us promise to beat on the wall if we needed anything in the middle of the night. Exasperating.

  With Sir Vladimir a hero and the girls being treated like human beings (Krystyana had taken a terrible snubbing at Cieszyn Castle last spring), leaving the next morning as I had planned was out of the question. In fact we stayed the next three days, with everybody but me having a marvelous time. There were dances and games and a hunt that I managed to duck out of by asking another knight to take Krystyana.

  When the others were out hunting, I stayed alone in my room, and it felt marvelous. It was the first time I’d been alone since I'd stood guard duty last winter. Being alone gave me time to think, to order the strange things that fester up in my garbage-pit mind.

  When I use the word “socialism,” I mean a political system in which the social rights are held to be more important than, say, property rights or rights of inheritance. I mean a system in which every person is born with the same basic rights.

  The right to live comes first, and included in that is the right to the minimal food, clothing, and shelter ’ without which life is impossible. I don't mean luxury, but I do mean enough to keep body and soul together.

  I mean the right to an education, paid for by the community, to the extent of the individual’s ability.

  I mean the right to start out even with everybody else. I think that inherited wealth is a bad idea and is harmful to both the individual and to society.

  I believe that democracy is the best possible system for a nation with an educated, concerned, and reasonable population.

  It is not that the people are particularly wise. They aren’t. And the larger the number of people involved in a decision, the poorer the decision is likely to be. To find the IQ of a group, take the average IQ of the people involved and divide by the number-of people in the group. Anyone who has ever marched troops can verify that a hundred men have the collective intelligence of a centipede. Worse. A centipede doesn't step on its own feet.

  No. Democracy is a good system because it is an extremely stable system.

  In many parts of South America and Africa, when an individual becomes truly disgruntled, he gets together with six hundred friends, three hundred rifles, and maybe a hundred bullets and starts a revolution. This practice is socially disruptive and results in lost worktime, destroyed property, and dead bodies.

  In America, such an individual does not go off to the hills with a gun. He becomes a political candidate. Of course, he knows that, to be effective, he must start at the bottom-say, sewer commissioner.

  So he runs against six other social misfits for that office.

  If he loses, at least he feels that he has done his best to straighten things out, that if the people don’t appreciate him, they don't deserve him. Anyway, an election is so exhausting, physically, financially, and emotionally, that he is likely to be over his initial anger.

  If he wins, well, he can’t really do much harm. There are engineers to make sure that shit flows downhill. And who knows? Maybe he will turn out to be a good sewer commissioner.

  In
any case, society is the winner. Seven potential troublemakers have been defused, only one of them has to be paid, and they just might get some useful work out of that one.

  The eastern bloc nations do not enjoy this social advantage. A single political party approves all candidates for office, assuring their loyalty, but also screening out the obvious mental defectives, at least on the lower levels. In so doing, they increase the amount of social frustration, which causes a lack of the very stability that the approval process was designed to ensure. Still, it’s a better system than having the sons of kings warring to see who will be the next king.

  Democracy doesn’t work well unless the proper level of education and the proper institutions both exist. Those things won't happen in thirteenth century Poland for at least one generation and possibly three, no matter what I do.

  Capitalism, as practiced in the twentieth century, has some definite advantages. For one thing, companies are allowed to fail and so cease to exist. The physical assets are redistributed, the workers find new jobs, and the poor management which generally caused the problem is put out to pasture.

  In a centrally-controlled economy, it is extremely embarrassing or politically impossible for such powers that be to eliminate inefficient managers.

  In large organizations, it is hard to be noticed, so it is very difficult to do something that is demonstratively right. It therefore becomes critically important to your career that you never do anything that is demonstratively wrong. Fools may not be fired , but they are rarely promoted, either. To downgrade a subordinate manager seems to imply that one didn’t know what one was doing when one promoted him in the first place. Best to leave him alone and hope that nobody notices. It takes something fairly obvious, an exploding atomic power plant for example, to get anything changed. But generally, things just go on as usual.

  This results in the same fools making the same mistakes forever. People become demoralized, especially the best, most energetic workers. Useful work slows or even comes to a halt. I don’t mean that the workers stop working. They are all furiously active, looking busy. They worry all day long and go home tired. But they are not doing anything useful.