Incidentally, my horse, Anna, was quite willing to wear a horse collar and drag logs, provided that one was polite to her. Several peasants with whips were bitten and one was seriously kicked before the message got across. Anna developed a friendship with an eight-yearold girl, one of Janina's sisters, and those two made a very productive team. Somewhat later, it was discovered that the count's best stallion was also willing to work, provided that he was allowed to work next to Anna. Such things gave people their first new subjects of conversation since my arrival.
I was watching this strange and amusing trio dragging a huge log down the snowy hill when another log being dragged by a team of oxen broke loose and started rolling.
There were screams and shouts and people scrambling. The oxen were knocked over and probably would have been killed if the rope around the log hadn't come loose. The log bounded downhill, bouncing off some tree stumps and smashing others to splinters.
Mikhail Malinski was downhill of the rolling log. He had been taking his dull axe down to the blacksmith's temporary forge to get the cutting edge sharpened. With the wrought-iron tools, the edge wasn't ground-that was wasteful of iron-it was heated up and the edge was beaten sharp.
Mikhail heard the shouting, looked up the hill, and saw the log coming at him. Dropping his axe, he ran diagonally away. When he saw that he was clear, he stopped to watch, leaning against a large tree stump to catch his breath. The log struck another stump and spun completely around, smashing Mikhail's left ankle against the stump he was leaning on; then it bounced off and continued downhill.
I was the first to get to Mikhail. His ankle was red mush, and his foot was almost off. Blood was spurting from the wound. He was screaming; he knew he was going to die. Without thinking, I stripped off my leather belt, wrapped it around his calf, and twisted it tightly until the squirting stopped.
This was reflexes, this was training, this was what one did until the doctor arrived.
Only, deep inside me, a panicky voice was yelling at me that I was it! There was no impersonal institution to take Mikhail away and tell us later if he lived or died. There was only me, and I was not competent.
But as always, when I am seared and don't know what to do, the actor surfaces. I say the phony words and adopt a phony posture and try to fake it.
"Easy, Mikhail, easy. Don't worry, we'll take care of you." A crowd was gathering. I pointed to a long-legged young man. "You! You run to the castle and tell Krystyana or whoever of the handmaidens is there that I want the kitchen table clean with a fresh cloth on it. I want a big kettle of water boiling, and I want all the clean napkins she's got. Have it ready for us! Now move!" He moved.
"You! Take my cloak off. Spread it on the ground over there." I still had one hand on the tourniquet. "Now, you eight men! Get around us. The rest of you, back! Now, pick him up. Easy, now! Put him on the cloak! That's it. Now, pick up the cloak! No! Face that way, dummy! Now, we carry him back to the castle." I trailed behind him, still holding the tourniquet, trying to remember what to do next. There was nothing in my training to tell me. Except… except, once over a Christmas holiday in the dormitories, I spent two weeks improving my English by devouring Forester's Hornblower novels. There was one very graphic sequence where the excellent Mr. Bush lost a foot in combat and was tended by early nineteenth-century physicians. Oh God, I hoped that Forester knew what he was talking about and was not as great a phony as I was!
We got Mikhail on the kitchen table. "Okay. Now, lift him up and off my cloak; the cloak isn't clean enough. The first rule of tending a wound is to make it clean." started lecturing, acting as if this were a classroom demonstration, partly to reassure Mikhail, partly to rehearse to myself what I was to do, but mostly to shut out the reality of the bleeding man in front of me.
I had the count hold the tourniquet, and I cut away Mikhail's clothes with my jackknife. I washed my hands and the smashed foot, talking all the while about the importance of cleanliness. The foot felt like a bag of broken rocks. We got a few liters of wine into Mikhail, and I took a drink myself.
"One break or two could heal," I said. "This foot is going to have to come off." A stir went through the crowd. "That's not so bad. We can make him a new one later, out of wood." I washed my jackknife in wine and then in boiling water. I got a pair of scissors and cleaned them up. And a needle and thread, I remembered. I found the arteries by having Lambert loosen the tourniquet and seeing what squirted. I had to cut away flesh to find the things. Tying them off, I left long threads, as Forester mentioned. I trimmed the skin and pulled it up to the calf. It was "usual" to saw the bone, but not a saw in the town was up to it. I cleaned my sword and chopped the bone with a single hack. Then I sewed the wound almost shut. I left the strings from the arteries hanging out, as well as a twist of boiled linen. Forester had stressed the importance of draining.
Mikhail stood up to it fairly well, considering that the amputation and all was done with no other anesthetic than wine. Most of the time he didn't have to be held down. You see, he wanted to believe my acting job. He needed to believe in the firm words I mouthed, and so he did.
We put Mikhail in one of the spare rooms in the castle, and the crowd dispersed.
I met Sir Stefan as he went to do his nightly guard duty, heavily bundled against the wintery night. The long, lonely hours were telling on him. He looked tired and older than he had been a month before.
"Sir Conrad, what's this I hear about you chopping off a peasant's foot on the kitchen table? What did the man do to deserve that?"
I was blood-splattered and tired. "Deserve? He didn't deserve it at all. He was hurt, and I had to amputate to heal him."
"So your witchcraft includes blood rites?"
"Witchcraft? Damn it, I-"
"Oh, I'm sorry." He held his hand up. "I spoke out of turn. You must know how tired I am, standing guard from dusk to dawn every night without relief while you are bedded safe with a young wench."
"Yeah. I know you've got a rough job. But it's only for a couple more months."
"Two more months of this without a wench of nights, just so you can play peasant carpenter during the day?"
"Look, Sir Stefan. If I hadn't been out there today, Mikhail would have lost more than his foot. He would have lost his life."
"Well, what of it? What damn use is a crippled peasant?"
"You're disgusting."
"I'm disgusting? You've just drenched the kitchen table with human blood! I have to eat off that table while you sleep soundly!" He stomped out.
Mikhail was a model patient. The wound was never seriously inflamed and seemed to be healing well. I visited him several times a day. His wife was tending him, sleeping beside him. The children, including the kid I had brought in from the storm, had been farmed out except during Ignacy's feeding time.
We talked about his future. He was thinking about becoming a trader. Traders were mostly on horseback, weren't they? I promised to advance him money and introduce him to Boris Novacek.
Within a month, I carefully pulled out the long strings, removed the rotted ends of the arteries, and then closed the wound. All seemed well. In a few weeks, we were talking about moving him back to his home.
Then one night he got a fever and was dead in the morning.
I don't know why.
Two weeks after the funeral, Lambert decided that it would be good if Ilya the blacksmith married the widow; a month later there was an Easter wedding.
Lambert had eleven barons subordinate to him. These men held lands from the count. Each had his own fort or manor, and all of them but one had subordinate knights, often with manors of their own. The number of their knights varied from zero to twenty-six. In addition, fifteen knights, including myself, reported directly to the count.
The great majority of the noblemen held their positions on a hereditary basis, but it was still possible for an outstanding commoner to be elevated.
And, of course, the count ran things at Okoitz. A number of specialists-
the smith, the carpenter, the baker, and so on-had specific areas of responsibility and worked directly under the count. The castle itself was run by a constantly changing group of adolescent handmaidens, but on closer observation I found that the cook exerted a strong, steadying influence on them.
The farmers worked through a half dozen foremen, who in turn took directions from Piotr Korzeniewski. These leaders were neither elected nor appointed but attained their positions and got things done by a system of consensus that I never fully understood. People just talked things over for a while and then, somehow, things were accomplished.
Piotr had no official standing or title. In theory, all the farmers worked directly for Lambert. I was at Okoitz for months before I realized that Piotr was really the chief executive of the whole town.
Knowledge of Okoitz's ghost structure was to prove very useful to me over the years. Most of the nobility were interested only in fighting, hunting, and playing status games with each other. When I wanted something of a manor- sanitation measures or workers for my factories-the quickest way to do things was to have one of my subordinates talk things over with the informal executive.
But I get ahead of myself.
Chapter Sixteen
My third endeavor was the loom. The count insisted that we set up the loom as a permanent fixture in his hall. The situation in the cloth industry annoyed him, and he wanted the loom as a showpiece for his summer guests. The concept of keeping a profitable trade secret was entirely foreign to him. I never saw him really concerned about money at all. What he wanted was the prestige of being the man who cracked the strangling cloth monopoly.
Understand that the hall was a large room. It could handle a hundredpeople at a sit-down dinner. It took up most of the ground floor of the castle, and the ceiling was fully four meters high.
In order to use as little floor space as possible, my loom design was more vertical than horizontal. A loom, in essence, is a simple device. It has a framework to support a few thousand spools of thread that go lengthwise through the cloth produced. Whether this was the warp or woof, I didn't know. I wasn't a weaver, and in fact I made up my own terminology as I went along. We didn't have a warp or a woof. We had long threads and short threads.
There are some frames that loop around the long threads to spread them apart in the proper order so that the short threads can be passed through. The simplest number of these spreaders would be two, but I wanted the loom to be able to produce more complicated weaves, like tweeds, so I built it with six spreaders, each of which connected with one-sixth of the long threads. There is a shuttle that holds the short thread as it gets tossed back and forth, and there is a thing that beats the short threads tightly together. Finally, there is a roll for the finished cloth.
I was sure that on modem looms there is a friction device that holds the long threads tight, yet lets them advance as cloth was made. However, I couldn't think up a simple way of doing it. It would have to be very simple, since we needed a thousand of them.
I solved the problem by bypassing it. The carpenter drilled an array of holes, thirty-six wide by forty-eight high, directly into the wooden wall of the count's hall. Into these he pounded 1,728 pegs to hold the long spools of thread. This was a convenient number, since it was twelve cubed-a thousand in our new base-twelve arithmetic.
From there, the threads were to loop up over a pole near the ceiling, down under a suspended pole that could be raised as the threads were consumed, and then up to the four-meter ceiling again and down through the spreaders, the beater, and the cloth bolt.
This arrangement let you make eight meters of cloth before you had to loosen each of the thousand spools and lower the suspended pole again.
A working solution if not a perfect one.
The finished loom took up about four square meters of floor space, eight if you counted the area for the two operators. It produced a band of cloth two meters wide.
Sir Stefan waddled in one sunset as I was talking to Vitold about the spreaders. Sir Stefan was in full armor and heavily bundled and cloaked against the cold. "Another piece of witchcraft, Sir Conrad?" His voice was weary.
Vitold crossed himself but remained silent.
"A loom for making cloth," I said. "I wish you would knock off this nonsense about witchcraft."
"Nonsense, is it? Then how do you explain that witch's familiar of a mare you own?"
"I bought Anna in Cracow not two months ago. She's nothing but a good, well-trained horse."
"Indeed? Do you know what I saw last night? I saw your familiar leave the stables, go to the latrines, and relieve herself there! I followed her back to her stall and saw her putting the bar back in place. That's no natural horse!" He was glaring at me.
"Yeah, the stable boy told me she didn't soil her stall, but so what? If a dog can be housebroken, why not a horse? I told you she was well trained."
"Well trained? She's some manner of demon! Conrad, know that my father is Baron Jaroslav, the greatest of Lambert's vassals and well known to Duke Henryk. I swear that they will hear of your warlock's tricks!" he shouted as he stomped out into the snow.
Vitold crossed himself again.
"Damn it, Vitold, don't you start believing that horseshit! You've been building this thing. You know there is nothing magic in it!"
"I can only do as my betters bid me." He returned to work, but you could tell that his heart wasn't in it.
We were a month getting the loom built, and then I asked for 1,728 spools of thread, each perhaps 500 meters long, to string it with.
I was looked on with horror. That amount of thread simply did not exist.
I said that I had to have it or I couldn't thread the loom. At least that much more would be needed for the short threads.
So the girls dug out their distaffs and went to work.
It was my turn to be horrified. The distaff was nothing more than a small wooden cross. You stretched some wool between the cross and your left hand, and then your right hand gave the cross a spin. This twisted the thread. Then you wrapped the half meter of thread around the cross, stretched some more wool, etc.
The truly labor-intensive part of clothmaking wasn't in the weaving at all. It was in the spinning. I had taken off on a project without first knowing what a the parameters were. You might expect this of a beginner but not of a seasoned engineer.
I told the girls to put away their distaffs and went to work on a spinning wheel.
We were five weeks getting a spinning wheel working, partially because I had to come up with a wood lathe first. Also, we lost a week because I didn't realize that you have to have two loops of string from the wheel to the spindle, one to turn the spool and one to turn the twister a little faster.
Our first spinning wheel looked a lot like what you would see in a modem museum, because that's what I modeled it on. There were a lot of design flaws that were cleared up on subsequent models. The bench seat was uncomfortable, and one couldn't wear a long dress while using it. Our ladies wore a floor-length dress or nothing. Calf-length dresses were for field workers. The foot pedal gave the operator leg cramps, and it was discovered that if one tied a string from one's big toe to the crank of the wheel, it worked a lot easier.
I had learned a long time ago that if the operators don't approve of your engineering, your machines don't work. If they wanted a string on their big toe, they got a string on their big toe.
It was a lot easier to work if the spindle faced the operator at about an arm's length rather than being placed horizontally under her breasts.
Our third model had places for six operators, who sat facing each other in a circle. The job was boring, and they liked to talk.
It took six spinsters to keep up with the loom. Lambert solved this problem by putting on a few more ladies-in-waiting.
Also, it took two men-one holding the chisel, one turning the crank-six weeks on our new wood lathe to make enough spools to put the thread on.
I subsequently found out that s
pinning and weaving are two of the seven production steps necessary in making the crudest of homespun cloth. To produce the best commercial cloth required some thirty production steps. It was going to take a while.
"Look, Sir Conrad, you'll be able to get this going by Easter, won't you?" the count asked.
"Well, the spinning and weaving at least, my lord. I don't think that we have enough washed and carded wool to keep us going for long."
"I'm ahead of you there. I've already sent word to my knights to send me all of their wool, and all of it washed and carded. Also, they are to send me two-thirds of the wool from this spring's shearing, and the acreage in flax is to be doubled."
"Excellent, my lord. You realize that weaving linen takes a slightly different loom, don't you? It takes more threads, closer together, and only two spreaders."
"What of it? Vitold can build more now that you've shown him the way. We'll have a dozen looms going by next year! You just put your mind to the problems of washing and carding."
"The washing is simple enough, but I'm still not sure of the carding."
"You will solve it." I wasn't sure if he was expressing confidence in my abilities or giving me an order. Sheep's wool is much finer than human hair and a sheep goes all year without combing it. As a result, it is incredibly tangled, and untangling it is what carding is all about.
"Sir Conrad, thus far you have seen us only as a small agrarian community. You must realize that Okoitz is the capital of a fairsized province. After Easter, all sorts of people will be coming through, my uncle and liege lord, Duke Henryk the Bearded, among them. It is essential that we make a good impression."
"Yes, my lord. You say that Henryk is your uncle?"
"Well, of sorts. Henryk's father was Boleslaw the Tall; my grandfather, Miesko the Stumbling, was Boleslaw's brother, both sired by Wladyslaw the Exile."
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