The High-Tech Knight

by Leo Frankowski

  “An interesting thought. I’ll think on it. But how the devil do I contact them to make my offer?”

  “I’m not sure, my lord, but my experience has been that people of a certain type usually all know one another. If you wish, I'll have my bailiff see what can be done. He'll never admit to anything, but I'd bet that he can get your message across.”

  “Good, though one wager a day is sufficient. Have him come with us tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, my lord?”

  “Yes. There is a certain ceremony that we have not yet done. The beating of your bounds. We must ride the boundaries of your lands so that all may know where they are and there will be no future disagreements. Sir Miesko and Baron Jaraslav will meet us at their borders at the proper times tomorrow. But for now, I am sated. Krystyana makes a good meal. Did you have any entertainment planned, Sir Conrad?”

  “A dance, my lord. With any luck, you might find a lady that you find suitable for the evening.”

  “Excellent, but you really must get into the habit of telling the peasants what to do, rather than just asking them.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The lumbermen had gotten to playing a rough game. The topmen would start to climb a tree to cut the top off, and two of the tree fellers would immediately start to cut down that same tree. The idea of the game was to see if the topmen could finish before the fellers cut the tree down under them. I told them not to do that, but they didn’t pay much attention to me. I probably wasn't assertive enough. The topmen were getting pretty insufferable, strutting around, wearing their spikes everywhere. Maybe, deep down inside, really I wanted to see them lose.

  Count Lambert was impressed with the game, as well as the speed with which my people could bring down a huge tree. Part of his philosophy, or perhaps character, was that if anybody else did anything that looked dangerous, he had to do it, too.

  “You’ve done this, haven't you, Sir Conrad?”

  “Yes, my lord, I had to show them how to do it.”

  “Good! Then you can show me as well. You peasants, strip off that equipment and lend it to us.”

  The topmen weren’t happy about being called peasants, and they liked lending out “their” equipment even less. There had been a rash of jokes going around about topmen taking baths with their spikes on, as well as making love with the same gear that they climbed trees with.

  But there wasn’t much they could do but comply, which they did.

  The count always picked up everything quickly, and we were soon at the top sawing through the tree. He worked so fast that keeping up with him, I didn’t have time to get scared.

  When the top came down and we were whipping back and forth fifteen stories up, Count Lambert looked down and said, “What? No one is cutting the tree off below us!”

  “My lord, would you dare cut a tree when the duke was up it?”

  “I see your point, but dog’s blood' I think we would have won!”

  We soon left to beat the bounds. Count Lambert had decreed that it should be a festive occasion, so besides all the knights present, Krystyana and her ladies came along, as well as the girls Lambert and his knights had slept with the night before, in borrowed finery, and some of them on pack mules since we had a limited supply of palfreys.

  My bailiff was with us, at Lambert’s request'. and Piotr Kulczynski came along, since he had nothing better to do and it gave him further opportunity to gaze at Krystyana from afar. The idea was to have as many witnesses as possible, and preferably young people, who would be around longer to remember things.

  Sir Miesko and Lady Richeza met us at their lands and the party went its way along our mutual border, with Count Lambert pointing out the landmarks to all and sundry. In the days before accurate surveying, this was the accepted way to record boundaries.

  Baron Jaraslav and Sit Stefan did not meet us at the appointed time and place. We stopped and unpacked lunch while we waited for them, but even after a leisurely dinner, we were still waiting. Count Lambert was getting angry. “Sir Daniel! You did go to them yesterday, didn’t you? You told them to meet us here and now?”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  “Well, damn them!”

  “There have been hard feelings between them and me, my lord,” I said.

  “They can hate you all they want, but they can’t disobey their liege! Mount up! We'll go without them! Sir Miesko, stay with us as a witness.”

  So we finished my borders without Sir Stefan being along. In later days, I sometimes wondered if Lambert didn’t assign me some of the baron's lands just to spite him. One day that border would cause me a good deal of grief.

  On the trip back to Three Walls, we fanned out in hunting array and with luck took a wild boar and a bison. This was good because I had no meat in my larder with which to feed my guests, and the nearest supermarket was seven hundred years away.

  It was dusk when we got back, and Yashoo had the apartment building half up. After all, it was a simple matter of assembling precut pieces, like putting together a huge tinker-toy set. I had checked every piece myself, so of course they fit right together.

  Count Lambert was awestruck. “They did this much without your being here? I might as well concede our bet right now. I’ll ship your twenty loads of cloth as soon as I return to Okoitz.”

  “I’ll take it in medium-grade linen, my lord.”

  That gave us curtains and a spare set of sheets.

  In the summer, everyone including me went barefoot, but with cold weather coming on, the workers started making shoes for their families. The usual peasant footwear was made of birch bark. You wrapped your feet in rags and laced on soles of bark with leather thongs. The soles lasted a week or two and then you needed new ones.

  At first, I was saddened that this was all they had, but then I did some time studies on what was required to tan leather and what was required to cut new soles out of birch bark. A man could cut a set of bark shoes for his entire family in less than an hour. Tanning a hide with medieval methods took months, and leather soles didn’t last out the season.

  It was over fifty times cheaper to wear birch bark. I suspect that leather shoes became popular only when birch trees became rare. But birch trees were not that common on my lands. I had some birch groves planted, but for a few years we were buying birch bark. I found that it was useful for writing paper as well as shoes, and far cheaper than parchment.

  By the time the first snows were flying, our basic living quarters had been completed. Well, we never stopped building, but the apartment house was up and the plumbing was in. I suppose I should describe it.

  The building was a hundred ninety yards long, reaching from cliff face to cliff face, and was eighteen yards wide. Structurally, it was really five buildings, with firewalls between each.

  The basement, with thick wooden fire doors, eventually to be sheathed in iron, stretched the full length. Because of the slope of the land, it was mostly exposed on the outer side, but it had no windows. From outside the valley, it was a solid masonry first floor. The basement was mostly in dry-food storage, except that the brewery was relocated there from its temporary building. A short tunnel sloped downward from the basement to the icehouse.

  The first floor contained the passageway to the main (and only) gate, and off this passageway was a ramp down to the basement. Incoming food supplies could go directly into storage. Next to the gate was the main bathroom, which had showers, sinks, a hot tub, and a dozen flush toilets.

  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 washing dishes.

  Our only source of wate
r 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 passage and the dining room. It contained the nursery, the schoolrooms, and our library, once we had enough books for it to deserve that title. 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 quantity 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 quantities 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 Annastashia 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 noble 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 clusters 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 scraps 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 shift. 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 massive 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 glass, but for now they had to be boarded over. Even without the glass, 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 massive 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 God didn’t want his church to fall over. It worked.