"I have discussed our friends' proposals concerning a trading company with both of you. I think that we should act favorably on it as soon as possible. I think that we are extremely fortunate to have two such outsiders come to us at this time. So much so that I can't help but think that their arrival on our shores was divinely inspired."
The archbishop was getting increasingly fidgety, so as the warlock sat down, the duke gestured for the clergyman to take the floor.
"Divinely inspired? Damn you! I'll tell you what's divinely inspired!"
"I'm sure that God is delighted to hear that," the warlock drawled.
The archbishop was red faced, and sputtering so badly that the duke said, "Phillias, relax a moment and get yourself under control, so that you can calmly explain your views to us concerning our guests."
Long minutes passed before the archbishop again stood up.
"Your Grace, my own views are diametrically opposed to those of the Warlock, who himself started as an outsider. I consider the many serious dangers that the outsiders pose to be far more worrisome than whatever heavenly spying they are doing to us, whatever possible future invasion we are told may be in the offing, or any tragic structural failure or sinking of our islands that may occur if the Warlock's men continue doing or not doing, as the case may be, whatever it is that they are actually doing.
"I am worried about the health of the bodies and souls of every one of your subjects. The danger of diseases is well documented. Small numbers of outsiders have repeatedly started plagues that have killed off one third to one half of our entire population. That is four to six thousand of your people dead! Now, think about what could happen if hundreds, even thousands of outsiders come all within a short period of time. Hundreds or thousands of plagues could be started simultaneously, and every single one of us could die! Even those who are sick but not deathly ill, and who might have recovered, will not, for lack of anyone to tend them!
"The outsiders themselves, who, over the painful centuries, have developed immunities to most of their diseases, worry daily about their own safety. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control would seem to be an organization as large as our whole nation, yet it can not control the diseases it tries to eliminate.
"With our handicaps in size and immunity, we would be helpless, and soon dead. Our religion, so carefully preserved over the ages, would be gone. Our culture, so carefully nurtured by over seventy generations of your ancestors, would be no more, and your heir would be nonexistent. Our people, bred to be brighter, more fit, and more civilized over so many difficult years, would be gone, and all their promise a wasted effort.
"Yet one thing that we have learned from the machines of the outsiders gives me some insight into God's plan for our tiny band of islanders. We hear repeatedly on their news that the outsiders themselves are destroying the world, or at least making it uninhabitable, if not by war, then by pollution. If they do this horrible thing, and if we are still hidden at sea while this tragedy happens, it may be God's will that we are destined to inherit the earth!
"We may be the future of all mankind! Think long and hard on that before you debase us into becoming just one insignificant nation among hundreds of others!"
The duke was silent for several minutes before he said, "Now that is a remarkably heady thought, and one that the Warlock and I will have to ponder long on before we dare make comment. Certainly, I will have nothing more to say today, so I think that we might as well consider this council closed."
* * *
* * *
In the morning, we spent a half hour at the warehouse getting a few details ironed out. Adam's six "bearers" were laboriously chipping the concrete away from the edges of the hole that the mast had made, to insure that the patch would be grounded on sound ferrocrete. Another day should do it, we figured, and that included the damage to the upper deck as well.
There were two SCUBA divers working separately from the snorkel crew now. Their program was to go down to a hundred feet or so and clean up a six-foot-wide swath, working upwards, to the fifteen foot level where the other divers had to leave off. That took them three hours, and exhausted their tanks. They took a two-hour lunch break while their tanks were being refilled, and then repeated the operation in the afternoon.
We calculated that at their current rate, it would be thirty years before they cleaned off the edges of the entire floating rock, but every little bit helped.
Journeyman Judah arrived to take us on his tour, and Adam and I left with him. Again, I'm only going to give you a summation of the high points of the day's activities.
Because of the space required, orchards, forests and vineyards were in the hands of private growers, but the wizards themselves maintained extensive experimental fields of annual, biennial, and nonwoody perennial plants, and we toured these first.
The total number and variety of plants there was surprising, until we found that the majority of them had no known practical use. Some of their lovingly-cared-for plants were known weeds, and I actually spotted a patch of carefully cultivated crabgrass. It was simply their policy, if possible, to never let a species of plant get lost, on the theory that you never knew what would turn up as useful someday.
The chief gardener, Master Maimonides ibn Tibbon, took us through those veggies whose usefulness had been proven. There were a lot of these.
They had more than fifty spices that I had never heard of. We made a note to buy a large variety of dried spices on the open market to take with us to the mainland. We'd have to see if any of them attracted any commercial interest.
There were sixteen plants from which insecticides were prepared. Each of these was quite specific, repelling or killing only a distinct type or class of pest. One of them was a repellent for black flies, and I knew we had a sure winner there. Northern Maine and much of Canada are almost uninhabitable for months during the summer because of these pests, and here we had a defense against the little bastards!
And, of course, we'd be taking samples of all the rest back with us as well.
More than two hundred varieties of plants were used for making dyes and pigments. Since all the possible colors were already available to the outside world from chemical dyes, I said we had little hope of commercial success with these vegetable ones. This hurt Maimonides' feelings a bit, since dyes had always been a special interest of his.
"You're wrong, Treet," Adam said. "Their dyes don't fade with washing, age, or sunlight. Furthermore, they work on the local Super-Hemp, and we don't know how that stuff will react with our chemical dyes."
We promised to take back samples and to try to find a market for them. Even if Adam was wrong, it was good PR.
The extracts of seven plants were known for their preservative qualities. Since we had no way of comparing these with commercial, chemical preservatives, all we could do was to figure on taking samples and instructions to a testing lab, and see what they said.
There were several plant extracts that I suppose you could call cosmetic, but they weren't paints or oils. One was the depilatory we'd noticed the effect of. It was claimed to stay effective for over a year. Another reduced wrinkles, and a third turned all your hair blond, permanently!
Thinking about what women in the United States paid for treatments that only claimed to do such things, temporarily, all I could see were dollar signs floating in front of my eyes!
Almost five hundred varieties of plants supposedly had various medicinal qualities. Most medicines on the island were mixed up as a sort of tea or soup and simply drunk by the patient. None of them was claimed to cure cancer, and nobody here had ever heard of AIDS, but there was one that made a male contraceptive. They said that one dose lasted six months. There was a female contraceptive available as well, and it was good for a year. There were also two drugs that induced permanent sterility, one for men and one for women.
Most of the rest of the medicines were for diseases that either we had never heard of, or that nobody knew the names of in English. L
ike the preservatives, we would have to bring back samples and instructions on all of them, and send them off to a laboratory somewhere. Or better still, a lot of different laboratories everywhere. Rather than inundating one corporation's lab, we'd make out better by sending a little off to every one of them. After all, a pharmaceutical company would want a monopoly on a drug before they invested all the money that it took to prove the drug's usefulness, and then five times that amount to get it by the horseshit shoveled out by the FDA. We knew that it would be many years before any approved drug finally made it on the market, and so there would be no quick bucks made here. But money later is okay too, and maybe we could help cure somebody's affliction.
Curiously, none of the long list of medicines were for use against pain. Since Adam had recently been treated to the delightful pastime of having five bones set without an anesthetic, he just naturally had to ask Master Miamonides about this strange lack.
"We used to have a number of pain removing drugs, but some two hundred years ago, people got to growing them and using them for pleasure," the chief gardener said. "It seems they got drunk on them, or something similar to that. Furthermore, it was a kind of drunkenness where the victim soon cared about little else besides getting drunk again. Men stopped supporting their families and women forgot their proper duties. And it wasn't just a few fools, either, but a fair part of the population that was doing it. Punishing them was to no avail. They were soon back at their old habits, no matter what was done. Nothing seemed to work, save killing them, of course, and that seemed a bit extreme. All sorts of things were tried, but none of them worked. In the end, the duke of the time—I misremember his name—had every single plant that produced a drug of that type destroyed, along with every single seed. A draconian measure, to be sure, but the only one that finally proved effectual."
"We've had that kind of problem back in the outside world," Adam said.
"Indeed? And what did your rulers do about it?"
"They're still at the stage of trying a lot of things that don't work."
"But that means that there is a market here for the pain killers we use in the rest of the world," I said. "If we bring in only refined chemicals, that can't possibly reproduce, and distribute them only through legitimate medical people, it should be safe enough."
"With the duke's permission, of course," Adam said.
"Of course."
Then there were the food plants, and again, there were a lot of them. Even after we were told what they were, I only recognized about two out of five of them. People eat all sorts of things. But there were a few conspicuous plants missing.
"You don't have any rice here," I said.
"True. We have those food sources that were available from Europe, where we started from, and from the Americas, where we explored and traded extensively, but we are sadly lacking in those from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Perhaps your coming will help to rectify these faults in our collection."
"Not to mention your diet," Adam said. "You are also missing coffee, tea, and bananas, and you don't have one single kind of pea or bean."
"I thought that beans were known in medieval Europe," I said.
"We do have bananas, but they are the original South American variety, and aren't very popular. We used to have beans, but there was a blight, some forty years ago, when I was still an apprentice. We worked for years, trying to stop it, but we failed. In the end, we lost every single legume in the world."
"In your world, maybe," Adam said. "We brought a few tons of them with us on The Brick Royal. They were our emergency food supply."
"So I had heard. But after they went through that canning process of yours, well, they would be useless to us here."
"No. They were just dried beans. You could plant them if you wanted to. There's no reason why they shouldn't grow."
"And I could have samples of these?" The old guy was suddenly excited.
"You can take every bag of the things we got. It was probably a dumb idea to bring them along in the first place. Give what you don't need to the farmers here, or eat them yourself, for all I care," Adam said.
"My lord, you are a true Christian!"
"Thank you. Send a crew around first thing in the morning and pick them up. Sorry that we can't help you with the rice, but all we got is milled white rice, and it wouldn't grow."
With a bit of a flourish, we were shown the island's pride and joy, their indestructible high-strength fiber, or rather the hemp plant it came from.
"They tell the story of the discovery of this strain to every new class of gardeners," the chief gardener said. "It was in the fall of 1477, when a poor widow, Mrs. Eileen Tittle, was harvesting her hemp. Like all trained gardeners, she had always been taught to look for anything unusual in the plants she tended, but to the eye, this one was absolutely normal. It looked not a bit different from any of the hundreds of hemp plants growing around it. The hemp fields were much larger then, since with the way everything wore out so quickly, they had to plant many acres of hemp to clothe themselves, and still they could do but a poor job of it. Many of the poor went cold in the winter.
"So nothing was known to be different until she went to harvest her field. It was late in the day, and she was tired, when the strange thing happened. She grabbed the top of the plant with her hand and struck the base of it with her sickle, just as she had done a thousand times that day. But to her great surprise, the sickle bounced right off! What's more, the plant had pulled a bit in her hand, and when it did, it cut her, straight across the palm.
"Now, someone else might have run off and tended her wounded hand. Or another person might have just run off in a fright, with such strange things happening, but Eileen Tittle was made of better stuff than that. She lay right down on the dirt and examined this strange thing. She looked it up and down and all over, but there was nothing to see but a perfectly ordinary hemp plant, although it was now a bit bruised. The only thing the least bit unusual about it was that there was only a single bud left growing on it, and that bud was not yet ripe. She knew that that bud was important, so she went straightaway and brought back sticks with which to build a bit of a basket around the plant, to protect it from the winds and the animals, for in those days there were still small wild animals on the island. That night she sent her only son out to sleep by the plant, to guard it, and the next day she watched it all the day long, while she tended her fields.
"They did this every day and every night for two weeks, until the single bud matured. Then, and only then, did she pull up the plant to find out just why her sickle had bounced off. Oh, it was eleven more years of selective breeding and propagation before the first good crop came in and old Eileen Tittle became the wealthiest woman on the islands, but if she hadn't kept her wits about her in that first moment, the only mutant hemp plant in God's universe would have been lost forever."
"Quite a story," Adam said. "You know, had she been harvesting with the kind of machinery we use in America, the plant would have been lost and the machine wrecked."
"That is probably true, my lord. It goes to show that sometimes the old ways are the best."
We were shown the plant that they made paper out of, with its large, smooth, and veinless leaves, but we saw no commercial use for it. At best, it made only small, single sheets of paper, and modern printing practice demands huge, seamless rolls of the stuff. The same interesting-but-useless label was put on the gourds that were ground up and made into a sort of plaster. It was needed on the islands, but not needed in the outside world.
The plant that made the rubber paint that they put on their floors and the bottom of their shoes was near the top of our need list, however. If a coat of paint would wear on your shoes for a year, and on the floor indefinitely, think of what it could do for rubber tires! Or for the highways they rode on!
It was getting late in the afternoon when we finally left Master Maimonides. He had promised to have his people collect samples of everything that we felt would be commercial
ly interesting, along with instructions, in standard English, on how to use each one. We planned to carry only extracts of each plant back with us, and never a viable plant or seed. We were after trade, after all, not charity.
If any of these plants were to be grown elsewhere, we'd lose a bloody fortune, and so would everyone else on the islands.
TWENTY-NINE
Since Adam and I had a full day planned for repairing the boat, we agreed to having our guide make a quick trip through the animal caves, rather than putting it off for a day.
There were flocks of ducks and geese that lived off the plant life in the waterways around the islands. These were privately owned, though licensed, to keep their numbers from overgrazing. As far as we could see, they were no different from any other aquatic birds, and Judah confirmed this. Breeding them into something better had been difficult because they sometimes mated with wild birds, which upset things considerably.
We were on the largest and most populous of the five islands, and the caves we were led to contained half of all of the beasts raised in the entire duchy. Whereas plants were grown by half the people on the islands, animal husbandry was kept as a monopoly by the wizard's guild. It was one of their major sources of income. We weren't farm boys but, to us, there didn't seem to be enough animals here to feed a thousand people, let alone six thousand.
"In part, my lords, it is because we get much of our protein from the sea," the head keeper, Master Azzo d'Este, told us. "For feed, we have little else but those parts of the plants that people cannot eat, and indeed, our laws forbid the feeding of an animal with anything that a human could use for food, table scraps excepted. That does not permit the vast herds that I have heard your people possess. Also, it is my understanding that our animals are more productive than yours."
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