"Agreed," Sir Conrad said. "I'll see that it gets to the kid."
"That leaves this last set of mail. It's of Piotr's size and I'm minded that he should have it. Traveling as much as he does, he needs it, and he truly earned it this day."
Sir Conrad looked at me and smiled. "Agreed. Piotr, you are now the proud possessor of a set of armor, with helmet and gambezon. Wear it in good health!"
"The rest of these tools and weapons are mostly junk. We'll give anything that looks decent to Count Lambert as his share, throw the rest into Ilya's scrap bin, and that settles the problem of the distribution of the spoils, except for one major item."
"Boris was half delirious, but he distinctly said that he had all his wealth with him when he was attacked. As well as he's been doing these past few years, that was probably several hundred thousand pence. Where is it?"
We spent much of the morning looking for the treasure, but without luck. Finally, we loaded the animals for the trip back to Three Walls, and I took a few moments to try on my new armor. It was a remarkably good fit, and even the open-faced helmet sat well, so I made a brave appearance reentering the city.
Naturally, we were the center of attention, and everyone was looking at us. I caught Krystyana's eye, but she quickly glanced away.
Sir Conrad announced that the journey to the Odra River would be delayed a few days, and said that in the afternoon, right after lunch, every available person in Three Walls would go to the bandits' campsite to search for Novacek's treasure.
At dinner, bold in my new armor, I came and sat by my love's side in the dining room. I tried to make polite conversation, but she stopped and stared directly at me.
"It takes more than armor to make a knight, Squire Piotr!"
Then she left, her food uneaten.
That afternoon and the whole of the following day, almost a thousand people searched for the treasure. Sir Conrad had Anna try to smell out where they hid it, but all she found was their latrine. There was shit there, and Novacek's left hand, but no treasure. We threw the bandits' bodies on top of their own filth and piled dirt over them.
Sir Conrad lined the people up fingertip to fingertip and marched them for miles from north to south and then from east to west. Every square yard of land for miles around was searched again and again. We found Sir Kazimierz's body, and Novacek's other hand, but no treasure.
One yeoman's cottage was taken apart and the ground under it dug up, for no other reason than he lived a mile from the camp. Then a crew rebuilt it for him.
Countless trees were climbed and no few hollow ones were chopped down, but to no avail.
Novacek affirmed that he had lost just under four hundred thousand pence, and not a penny of it was ever found. The reward on the treasure was never claimed.
Eventually, it became a normal pastime, a thing to do on one's day off, to head into the woods with a shovel, and many young couples claimed that this was what they were doing in the woods as well. It became a standing joke to ask how you dug a hole with a blanket.
Yet it was a game my love would not play.
Interlude Three
I hit the STOP button.
"So what happened to the treasure?" I asked.
"It was right where Anna said it was. The outlaws hid it under their latrine, or rather they used the hole as a latrine after they buried the treasure, figuring that nobody would look through somebody else's shit. They were right, and the effect was doubled once there were sixteen dead bodies over it."
"Oh," I said. "Another thing, why didn't flint work in Conrad's lighter?"
"Lighter 'flints' aren't flint, kid. They're made of misch metal, an alloy of rare earth elements. Anything else troubling you?"
He hit the START button.
Chapter Sixteen
It was another summer spent running around on Anna, usually with Cilicia riding behind me. I had originally intended to put her on the payroll like everybody else, but at first I didn't get around to it. Then she started teaching dancing to the women at Three Walls, charging a penny for six lessons a week. All winter long she had more than sixty women in two classes, and was making more than twice what anyone else at Three Walls was making, so there was no point in paying her on top of that.
I was even considering charging her rent on my living room, where the classes were held, but then found out that she was giving most of the money to her father. My deal with Zoltan hadn't included giving him any cash. I could see where land, clothes, and food weren't quite enough, so I let it ride. It was years later that I discovered that she was charging him fifty percent a year on his loans.
Had a Polish girl done that, I would have spanked her ass, but these were a different people, with different morals.
Different strokes for different folks.
Cilicia wasn't really eager to spend half her time traveling with me, but she wasn't happy about letting me out of her sight, either. She came, despite the money she was losing by not teaching school. But she made up for it by dancing for the men at each of my installations, and then teaching dancing to the women when she was there. After six months, she had enough girls well trained to act as instructors, and she built an organization that paralleled my own, teaching dancing for all the traffic would bear. About the same time, dancers became standard fare at the Pink Dragon Inns. Oh God, how the money rolled in.
Cilicia's people were survivors. They had to be, after all they'd been through.
Zoltan worked out a sideline of his own, making and selling perfumes and cosmetics. I wasn't all that happy with it, since it seemed a waste of resources, and a girl who can blush doesn't need makeup. But he found a ready market for his products, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, so I didn't try.
Visiting the duke's castle at Wroclaw, we found that not only were the serving girls topless, but most of the other women were doing it, too. The serving wenches were dutifully clad in miniskirts and mesh stockings, and were clumping around inexpertly in high heels. The noblewomen were wearing clothes reminiscent of something worn by snake goddesses in ancient Crete. But not all of them.
There were two factions. The largest felt that if the duke wanted it, he should get it. But a substantial minority noticed that the duke's son, Prince Henryk, was a lot more straightlaced than his father, and that the prince's wife wasn't going along with the new fad. Figuring that the prince was the wave of the future, these ladies were dressing like Queen Victoria.
The first thing we built at Coaltown, the installation on the Odra, was a brickworks. It was cheaper to manufacture bricks on-site than to haul them in on mules from Three Walls, and we needed an awful lot of bricks.
The previous fall, I'd put Zoltan to work seeing what he could do with coal tar. He'd come up with ammonia and a wood preservative. Further, he knew of a process of combining salt, ammonia, and carbon dioxide to make sodium bicarbonate and ammonium chloride. We tried the ammonium chloride out as a fertilizer. Sodium bicarbonate has lots of uses, but the big one is to melt it down with sand and lime, both of which are plentiful, to make a good quality glass. I wanted plentiful glass more than I wanted steady sex!
Of course, I might not have said that a few years ago.
A beehive coke oven isn't very efficient at producing byproducts, so the ovens at Coaltown had to be of the complicated modem design, with brick heat regenerators, chemical separators, and tall brick chimneys.
Okoitz started to get a major face-lifting that summer. During the winter, Count Lambert had repeatedly enlarged my plans for the workers' dormitories until they were bigger than the rest of the town! He not only had room for three gross of young ladies, but moved his own quarters there as well. There were six dozen guest rooms, a huge dining hall, a big new church, and an indoor swimming pool. And plumbing, sewage disposal, limelights in the public rooms, and steam heat.
As an afterthought, he let me add a wing for the peasants as well.
I made the place look like a proper castle, with machinations, cre
nelated walls, and dunce caps on the towers. There was even a drawbridge over a moat that doubled as a swimming pool in warm weather.
His old castle became an addition to the cloth factory and the peasants' housing was turned into stables.
To build it, he contracted with me to take all the surplus bricks and mortar we could produce for three years, and gave us all the surplus cloth his factory could make for the next five. Essentially, we became his sales force.
I'd long felt sorry about the poor living conditions at Okoitz, even though they were no different than these throughout most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was just that when I first came to medieval Poland, these people took me in and made me feel at home. This was the first chance that I had to do something really nice for them, and I spent a lot of time on the designs of that building. It was going to be nice!
As to the financial arrangements, well, as long as I could meet my payroll and keep food on the tables, I really didn't much care who owned what. I was doing my job, I was having fun, and I wasn't missing any meals. Why should any rational man want anything else?
I'd appointed Natasha to take care of Boris Novacek, since without hands he wasn't capable of doing anything for himself, and she had the patience to wait on him literally hand and foot. They hit it off pretty well together and he recovered fairly quickly under her care.
Yet even after he'd reconciled himself to the loss of his hands, he was still in the dumps. His fortune was gone and he saw no way of supporting himself.
So I offered him a job, salary plus commission, as my sales manager. We had not only the products of my factories to unload, but the duke's copper works and Count Lambert's cloth works as well.
At first, he seemed to lack confidence in himself, but within a month he was in the full swing of it and enjoying himself. He was a past master at dealing with other merchants, and I think he used his disfigurement to his own advantage. Gesticulating at his opponents with his handless arms seemed to intimidate them. In half a year, we were not only selling everything that we wanted to sell, we were getting thirty percent more for it.
The money was important because it permitted us to expand faster. I no longer had to worry about whether I could feed a man's family when I hired him. If he looked to be the sort we wanted, I swore him in and found a place for him later.
But I think that Boris's greatest triumph was when he invented the Tupperware party. You see, one of my major expenses was maintaining over a hundred schools in Lambert's county. Our kitchenware line wasn't selling very well, largely because women didn't know how to use them. We made very good cast-iron frying pans, for example, but frying was an unusual way to prepare food in the Middle Ages, probably due to the lack of a decent frying pan!
So that summer, Boris invited two dozen of the schoolteachers to Three Walls for a week, and saw to it that they learned how to use every utensil we made. I even found myself showing them how to make pancakes!
Then he set up a system whereby the schools bought things from Three Walls at below wholesale prices, and the teachers demonstrated and sold the utensils to the other women in their towns at normal retail prices. Everybody knew that half the money spent went to the local school, and that the teachers were making a commission on the sales in addition to their salaries. By fall, we were in danger of making a profit on the schools, which was a bit much. So we used the surplus money to put up school buildings.
Up till then, school had been taught in the church, somebody's house, or even in a barn. Now there were schoolhouses, and each one of them had a store attached. We expanded the product line available to the schools to include everything we made, and the smallest town now had a general store. If they didn't stock it, they could get it.
Every school had a post office, too. This was usually just a drawer in the store, but you could send and receive mail.
Most of the towns were small farming communities, with only a few dozen families, so most of the schools had to be small, one- or two-room affairs. But they all had hot running water, in part to demonstrate our plumbing products.
If most of our teachers only had a year or two of schooling themselves, well, it was the best we could do and the quality of teacher education went up in time.
I refused to allow any money to be made off the schools, so there was nothing to do but expand the system. In three years, we covered the entire duchy, and in six, all of Poland.
Just in time for the Mongols.
By late fall, Boris knew that he had found a new niche in life, and he and Natasha came to me during one of my regular biweekly court sessions. They wanted to be married, and had already gotten her parents' written permission to do so. I gave them my blessings, and told him that he was a very lucky man, which he was. A fine lady!
Construction never stopped at Three Walls. That summer we added a second housing unit, made of brick, outside of our existing building. It tripled the living space available to the workers. Yet because everyone was on different shifts, our existing kitchen, dining room, recreation facilities and church were still adequate, not to mention the factories. A considerable savings.
We also finished the sawmill and carpentry shop that had been stopped last fall in order to build housing for the Moslems. Besides cutting logs into rough lumber, there was a drying kiln, and power-operated planers, joiners, and routers.
Surprisingly, medieval carpenters didn't know much about cabinet-making. Despite the lack of inexpensive fasteners, they had never heard of a dado or a rabbet or a dovetail joint. Their methods of fastening were limited to butting two boards against each other and doweling them together. If more strength was needed, they had iron straps made up. I had to teach myself cabinet-making just so I could teach it to my own carpenters.
Then there was the whole problem of getting mass production going. They were used to making things one at a time. If somebody needed a chair, a carpenter made one. If somebody wanted three, he made one and one and one. This was an emotionally satisfying way to work, but it wasn't very productive. Equipping one of our dining rooms took a thousand chairs, and mass production was in order.
We needed barrels, chests, and other shipping containers by the tens of thousands. Standardization was necessary, unless we wanted to haggle over the price of every barrel of lime shipped. It took a lot of work and a few temper tantrums, but I made believers out of them.
By midsummer, I had over two thousand men sworn to me and on my payroll, and that's not counting their families.
The place was crawling with kids! Almost every woman continued having a baby a year, but now, with better nutrition, sanitation, and housing, they weren't dying off as fast as they were born. Our infant mortality rate was fast approaching modem levels.
Modern doctors and other medical-types like to take all the credit for the vast improvements in public health, but the fact is that it is the lowly sewer inspector and the despised customs inspector and the humble sanitation engineer who really keep people healthy!
So we had a population explosion on our hands, but it didn't bother me. At least these kids were going to grow up clean, well fed, and well educated! We could afford to feed all the extra mouths, and the population of the country wasn't a twelfth of that of modem Poland, which isn't all that crowded.
In the long run? Well, historically, a high standard of living inevitably results in a lowered birth rate. And if that wasn't good enough, there was a whole empty world out there to repopulate.
Everywhere the Mongols had gone.
I was spending more time than I was actually required to at Eagle Nest, mostly because I liked working with the kids. They were the most eager, enthusiastic, friendly, and earnest bunch of people I'd ever met. They were so absolutely convinced that they were going to conquer the skies that they damn near had me believing it.
In the course of the winter, they'd each built several model gliders, and many of them were as good as those done by modem boys, despite their lack of balsa wood, silk paper, and quick-settin
g glues. In the spring, they were back at kites again, and getting innovative about it. The winner of one combat contest was really a section of aircraft wing, with three strings controlling it.
But toward summer, I could see that they were getting a little bored, so I told them about hang gliders, and they built a dozen of them.
A hang glider is controlled by the pilot's moving his body to shift the center of gravity of the craft, rather than by the more conventional use of control surfaces. What can make them deadly is that in a downdraft, the plane and pilot can experience zero G. At this point, the pilot has absolutely no control over his plane. Shifting the center of gravity has no effect when there is no gravity! Coming out of the downdraft, the glider can be in any orientation, even upside down or backward, and a fatal crash is likely.
Downdrafts can't happen close to the ground, and for this reason I forbade them to go more than a dozen yards in the air, under penalty of being grounded for a month. By late fall, most of the boys had been grounded at least once. I even caught Count Lambert flying too high, but I couldn't do much except admonish him for it. The joy of flying was too much for him.
We had our first fatality that year. One of the boys broke a dozen regulations by taking a glider to the top of the big conical hill alone during a windstorm. A shepherd tried to stop him, but the kid was airborne by the time the old fellow got there. They say he was high out of sight before he got into trouble.
His body was sent back to his parents and three other boys were pulled from the school.
But two weeks after that, the new class arrived., twice as large as the first one, and things went on, twelve dozen boys strong.
Krystyana had a fine healthy boy that summer, and pretended that she didn't notice what anybody said about her lack of a husband. I got to sleeping with her occasionally, mostly because I felt sorry for her, and by Christmas she was pregnant again.
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