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-setting 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.
The harvest was again good that year, and the new crops were starting to be plentiful enough to make a serious contribution to the food supply. I had new grain towers built at all our installations, each with a windmill to circulate the grain and keep it in good shape. If grain is just left to sit there, it soon becomes infested with insects, fungi, and rats. But if you regularly pump it to the top with an Archimedes’ screw on dry days, any bugs and rats are killed and the grain stays dry enough to retard fungus, This is still the method used in the twentieth century.
We had tons and tons of sugar beets at Okoitz, and I had to figure out how to convert them into sugar. Sugar is a major industry in modem Poland, and entire sugar refineries are regularly sold to other countries. But the more important an industry is, the more specialized it becomes. There are engineers who spend their entire lives working on nothing but sugar refineries, with the result that a generalist like myself simply didn’t get involved. I didn't even know the basic process!
Zoltan came to my rescue. He’d never heard of a sugar beet, but he had heard about the process for refining sugar cane, which grew on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This was wonderful, because by myself, I don't think that I ever would have thought of adding lime, the caustic stuff that mortar is made out of, to the beet juice to make it crystallize. But between Zoltan's chemistry and my machinery, we got a working plant installed at Okoitz before Christmas. It made a nice “winter industry” for the peasants, something to keep them busy between the harvest and spring planting.
Free popcorn became a regular feature of the Pink Dragon Inns. We had twenty-two of them now.
Every few months, I visited Father Ignacy at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow. He was my confessor, my confidant, the one person in this world that I could be honest and comfortable with.
This time, I found that the old abbot had died, and that Father Ignacy had been elected to take his place.
“Congratulations on your promotion, Abbot Ignacy,” I said.
“Thank you, my son, although it was probably more your doing than my own.”
“Mine? What do you mean?”
“It was mostly those looms and spinning wheels of your design that did it. I encouraged my brothers that we should do our own weaving, and the project has been a huge success. Somehow, I received most of the credit for it.”
“But I thought that Friar Roman did most of the work there. ”
“He did, but there is very little justice in the world. However, I’m sure that you would rather talk about the inquisition that the Church is conducting on you. At least you always ask about it,” Abbot Ignacy said.
“I take it that there is news?”
The Church was holding that inquisition to determine whether I was an instrument of God, to be eventually sainted, I suppose, or if I was an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. Yes, I was most interested in what they decided!
“There is. You will recall that I wrote up my report promptly within months of your arrival in this century. My abbot acted briskly, and within a few months sent the report, with annotations, to the bishop here in Cracow, but his excellency felt that perhaps this sort of report should go th
rough the regular branch of the Church, rather than the secular one. That is to say, through the home monastery rather than through his office, so that summer the report was sent to the home monastery in Italy. But the home monastery felt that no, this was a proper matter for the secular branch to handle, and sent it back here.”
“The report was therefore sent, with further annotations, to the Bishop of Cracow again. However, by this time you had established yourself in the Diocese of Wroclaw, so the Bishop of Cracow found a traveler going to Wroclaw and sent the report to the bishop there.”
“Wait a minute, father. I was there when that report came in. It was at my Trial by Combat, and both bishops were in attendance. So were you, for that matter. Why didn’t the Bishop of Cracow just hand your report to the Bishop of Wroclaw?”
“How should I know that, my son? Perhaps he hadn’t had the opportunity to annotate it properly.”
“In any event, the report was sent to the Archbishop of Gniezno, in northern Poland, who in turn sent it on to Rome.”
“The report has now returned, through the proper channels, with a request that the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery at Cracow investigate the matter thoroughly, and report back. It happens that I am now that personage, so I have written a complete report and am currently looking for someone who is going to Wroclaw. Actually, writing it was an easy matter for me, since I had all the facts at my fingertips, having written the original report myself.”
“So, you can see that the matter is proceeding smoothly, and as fast as can be expected.”
All I could see was that after three years all that had happened was that Father Ignacy had written a letter in reply to his own letter! I became convinced that the bureaucracy of the medieval Church was as screwed up as that of the stupid Russians!
“Father, we now have a postal service that covers every major city in Poland. Why don’t you just mail the report to the archbishop?”
“And bypass his excellency the Bishop of Wroclaw? Heaven forbid! You wouldn’t happen to be going to Wroclaw, would you?”
“Not directly. Just mail it to him. It only costs a penny, and it will be there in less than a week.”
“An interesting suggestion, Conrad. I’ll have to mention it to my superiors.”
“Through channels, of course.”
“Of course!”
The Great Hunt went off very well, and our new killing ground was ready in time for it, so we didn’t have thousands of wild animals running through what had become a substantial city. There were many fewer wild boars and wolves than before, at least locally, and many more deer, elk, and bison. But since I was now getting a rake-off from all the lands owing allegiance to the duke, the total number of wolf skins delivered to me was huge.
I had a problem storing and curing all of them. But the price stayed up and it was vastly profitable. My aurochs herd was up to eight dozen animals, and we started culling some of the bulls for eating.
The wilderness was being pushed back, the land converted to farming and pasture, and large stockpiles of lumber were building up. On Lambert’s lands, the rule was that any tree that gave an edible fruit or nut should be left standing, and except for certain areas preserved as forests-about thirty percent of the total-all else should be cut for more pasture area.
And so 1234 wound around.
Chapter Seventeen
The next year saw our first printed books, our first poured concrete, and our first mass production of glass. It also saw our first cannon.
There are some big advantages to doing something the first time. You can set your own standards.
When it came to printing, there were a lot of simplifications I could introduce, for no other reason than because no one had ever seen anything different. All the characters were the same width, as on an old-style typewriter. The use of lowercase letters was not common in the Middle Ages, so we didn’t have any.
The width of a column was standardized at twenty-four characters, and our rule was that any word could be hyphenated anyplace, so all lines were the same width and no space was wasted. AH books were printed on paper that was a third of a yard high and a quarter yard wide, since that was the width that our papermaking machine made. And there were three columns on each page. Always.
Once you were used to it, it was easy enough to read, and almost everybody was used to it because all the schoolbooks were printed that way. It was the way you learned in the first place. For those who learned by reading handwritten manuscripts, there was no difficulty in learning something new. Up until then, every book had been in a different format.
This made for great simplifications in our type-casting machine. It was a carefully machined iron trough with two dozen long iron sticks in it, set up so the sticks could be slid back and forth. The top of the sticks were square cut to look like a castle wall, and on top of each merlon was stamped a letter, number or punctuation mark.
The operator slid these sticks until the line he wanted was under the casting apparatus. A second operator slid a mold on top of the line of sticks and poured a molten lead alloy into the mold and over the row of stamped letters.
A third operator trimmed the wedge-shaped bars of type and fit them into a drum that went to the printer, once the drum had been turned on a lathe to make sure that all the characters were of exactly the same height.
The printing press was also a simple affair. There was a cast-iron pressure roll on the bottom, then the type roll, and finally some leather-covered inking rolls on the top. There was no paper feed required since we worked only from large continuous rolls of paper, and always the same kind of paper.
Printing the other side of the paper required a good deal of skill on the part of the printer, keeping the paper tension proper, so that the back of the sheet matched up with the front. Paper stretches with moisture, and sometimes print runs were delayed because it was necessary to print the second side on a day with the same relative humidity as when the first side was printed. But it couldn’t be the same day because our ink took a day to dry.
But despite the above, a twelve-man crew could print and bind six thousand copies of a fair-sized book in less than a week, whereas hand-copying a single book could take a month, or six months in the case of a bible.
What took a year of development time were all the details. Getting the ink right and finding the right lead alloy that would cast properly and always shrink in exactly the same way, and so on.
The leather ink rollers were a problem because the crack where the leather was sewn together showed up on the printed page, no matter how carefully it was made. They solved this one by using a tubular piece of leather, made from the covering of a bull’s penis! Privately, they called the rollers “Lamberts,” but I don't think he ever heard about it.
Making concrete required far less finesse and a lot more brute force. Mortar is made from calcium hydroxide. It hardens by absorbing carbon dioxide out of the air and turning itself back into calcium carbonate, the limestone it was made of. Concrete is made of a mixture of things, but mostly calcium silicates. It hardens by polymerization. With concrete, you have real chemical bonds holding things together, which is what makes it so strong.
To make it, you heat a finely ground mixture of coal, limestone, clay, sand, and blast furnace slag in a rotary kiln until it melts together into clinkers. Then you grind it up again. The machinery to accomplish these small tasks took over fourteen thousand tons of cast iron, because we were only making a small one.
The limestone went through a pair of crushing wheels as wide as a man is tall, and three times that diameter. Then the chips went through three sets of progressively finer ball mills. If you can imagine a huge cement mixer filled with cannon balls and limestone, you understand a ball mill.
The rotary kiln was a cast-iron tube two yards across and three dozen yards long, lined with sandstone bricks and turning once a minute.
I loved it, but then engineers love to make big things. It gives you a godlike feeling of po
wer! Mere money doesn’t come close!
Once you have the materials, making plate glass is pretty easy if you know the trick, and I did. You just pour the glass onto a pool of molten tin and slowly draw off window glass. This won’t work with glass made of wood ashes and sand because the melting temperature of that mixture is too high-you vaporize the tin, I found out the hard way. But with our soda glass, it worked just fine. Our rig was fairly narrow, since none of our outside windows was more than a quarter yard wide.
Within three months, we made enough glass to. glaze every window in every building we’d put up in four years, except for the churches. Learning how to make stained glass took a few months longer, and then only because I was able to hire a French glassmaker to show us how it was done.
He knew two methods of doing it. One involved adding dyes to the molten glass and then piecing bits of this together in a lead frame, but it was the second method that we used, for then we could use standard rectangular cast-iron frames.
This involved little more than painting the colors and designs wanted on the glass, then baking it until the glass softened enough to absorb the colors. Easy enough once you know how to make the paints, and this guy did.
But while he was a good enough craftsman, he wasn’t much of an artist. He did one window for the church at Coaltown, and I didn't like it. It was trite, and I wanted something glorious.
So I got the services of an artist friend of mine, Friar Roman, from Abbot Ignacy by giving him a thousand prayer books and offering him his very own printing press. Actually, I’d wanted to give the printing outfit to him anyway, since I didn't want to get into the publishing business.
The deal we made had my people training his, and we sold them paper and ink at cost. They could print anything over my requirements that they wanted, sell it as they saw fit and keep the money, but they had to acknowledge that money as my donation to the Church. My work, mostly schoolbooks, was to be done at the cost of materials.
The Radiant Warrior Page 19