Thus I had an arrow nocked and ready in my left hand when Anna suddenly left the trail and charged through the brush.
Sir Conrad was in his plate armor and seemed not to notice the branches whipping by, and Sir Vladimir, in chain mail, would hold it dishonorable not to be able to follow where his liege lord led. Myself, I was in but ordinary clothes and while they had broken off the larger branches in my path, I was still sore pressed to stay with them, and must needs protect my face with my arms and clutch tightly to my bow test I lose it.
Nonetheless, I got first blood in the fight, for as we went through a meadow at break-neck speed, I saw a sentry in a tree stare at us and nock an arrow.
I let fly and saw that my shot was true. He dropped his bow half pulled, clutched his chest and fell.
Sir Vladimir saw this and lowered his lance.
“For God and Poland!” he shouted.
Sir Conrad’s sword had been out since we had left the trail.
The bandit camp was in a clearing, and I think that they must have had such confidence in their numbers that they had not moved it after committing yesterday’s crime, even though their prisoner had escaped. Immediately and without hesitation, Sir Conrad charged into their midst, covering himself completely with glory. I saw heads and arms fly as he cleared a swath through them. Sir Vladimir was right behind, and I saw two men fall to his lance on his first pass.
Being unarmored, I dared not follow, but stopped at the edge of the clearing. The brigands were slow to act, stunned by the fury of the attack. I let fly at those at the edges and killed three while they stood there. Then suddenly all were in motion, and I killed but one more with my last eight arrows, though I wounded two besides.
The surviving bandits put all their efforts at Sir Conrad and Sir Vladimir, and I think that they scarce noticed me if they saw me at all. I prayed thanks to God in heaven for this favor, but when my arrows were exhausted, I felt obligated to sheath my bow, draw my sword, and join the others.
I had no chance to bloody it, for it was suddenly over. Bodies and pieces of bodies were scattered about the meadow, many sporting the bright red feathers for which I had paid extra to fletch my arrows.
Not a man among them was left alive. Sir Conrad was looking at them.
“I think we got carried away, Sir Vladimir. We should have taken a few of them alive.”
“To what purpose, Sir Conrad? To hang them later? What good would that do? To show people that they shouldn’t be brigands? They already know that!”
“We haven’t even proven that these were the men who attacked Boris. We have only Anna's word for it.”
“Well, there’s proof for you. Look there. That's Sir Kazimierz's stallion. I'd recognize it anywhere. And I'll wager we'll find his armor when we sort the booty.”
“What of the sentry?” I said. “He might still be alive.”
“Sentry?” Sir Conrad said. “Piotr, what are you doing here?”
I was astounded. “Why, I am your squire and you told me to come, my lord!”
“I told you? I certainly did not!”
“Wait, Sir Conrad,” Sir Vladimir said. “He was standing just behind me when you ordered me to follow you. 1, too, thought you meant him to come with us.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“A bit late to say that now, my lord. Look about you. Those arrows are his. He killed at least as many of the enemy as did you or 1. If this were my grandfather’s time, and any knight could knight another, I'd dub him right now, for he saved my liege lord-you! You didn't even see the sentry he skewered from a treetop. That man was aiming at you when he did it.”
All this was not precisely true. That sentry hadn’t had time to aim at anybody. But I blessed Sir Vladimir for saying it.
“Oh,” Sir Conrad said. “Piotr, I guess I owe you an apology, as well as my thanks. Let’s see if that sentry is still alive.”
He wasn’t. Not only had my arrow pierced his heart, but he had broken his neck in the fall.
“It looks like you wasted an arrow, Piotr!” Sir Vladimir laughed. “The fall alone was fatal!”
It was an old joke, but we all laughed at it. These noble knights were treating me as an equal!
We looked through the camp. There were horses and mules belonging to Novacek, and armor belonging to him and to Sir Kazimierz was found and identified. There was also a third suit of chain mail, doubtless the property of some earlier victim. It was small and made for a person of slender stature.
“There’s really not much here in the way of booty,” Sir Vladimir said. “Novacek's property must be returned to him, and Sir Kazimierz had a younger brother who would appreciate having his horse and armor. They aren't wealthy, and I would feel best if they were given to him.”
“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, crenelated 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.
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