Conrad Starguard-The Radiant Warrior

by Leo Frankowski

  My lance was lying shattered on the ground, and I reconstructed what happened. I had bought my lance a year ago, figuring it was a useless piece of paraphernalia. I bought the lightest one possible. Sir Vladimir favored a light spear, so he didn't mention anything. But Sir Vladimir goes for targets like the eyeslit, and Anna had trouble reaching that high.

  There was a gouge on his shield that must have been made by my lance. Anna had hit her target dead on, but on impact my spear shattered and his didn't. I never had a chance to swing my sword; it was knocked out of my hand when I went flying. I wouldn't have thought it possible to be knocked over the top of the waist-high cantle of a warkak, but that's the way I went.

  I went and decapitated his horse, which was still screaming.

  The Polish crowd was cheering wildly, including, I suppose, even those who had bet against me. The Crossmen were shouting hoarsely in German, but I couldn't understand them, except for more shouts of "foul" and "witchcraft."

  All I knew was that it was over and that I had won.

  Then the German crowd opened up and four armed and armored horsemen wearing black crosses on their white surcoats charged me with their lances lowered.

  * * *

  FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI

  On the day of the trial, my fellow conspirators and I were all at our assigned positions. Tadaos was lying hidden on the roof of the windmill. Friar Roman was among the clergy, ready to cry out "An Act of God" and "A miracle" and such like. I was among the nobles ready to do the same.

  Ilya was set to run out on the field and try to recover the gold-covered arrows, for we were sure that they could not stand close inspection. Surely God would use something better than gold leaf!

  When the fight was on, Sir Conrad's lance shattered at the first impact. I cursed myself for never making him get a new and stronger one!

  He was unhorsed, and the Crossman started to come around to finish him off, but still Tadaos did not fire!

  Talking to the bowman later, he said that he did, but he never saw where the arrow fell, as he had hid himself immediately after loosing his shaft. When he looked up, he was surprised that the Crossman was still alive, but Sir Conrad and his opponent were locked in such tight combat that he was afraid to shoot again for fear of hitting Sir Conrad.

  My friend looked sure to lose, but then to the wonderment of all, he discarded his shield! A roar went up from the crowd, for we all knew then that Sir Conrad was merely toying with the Crossman, that he was so sure of victory that he could afford a jest!

  In the end, he even left his sword stuck contemptuously in the Crossman's shield and destroyed the man with his bare hands! And then gave the man the mercy blow with his opponent's own sword!

  The crowd was wild! No one had expected such prowess of Sir Conrad, although he had said all along that he was going to win. Shortly after Sir Conrad's victory, he gave mercy to the Crossman's horse, for that animal had been injured by Sir Conrad's amazing mount.

  We thought that all was over when four more Crossmen, fully armed and armored, charged onto the field and at Sir Conrad.

  Cries of "Foul!" went up, for this was a foul beyond all imagining! But the marshals had already ordered the crossbowmen to uncock their weapons, for fear of accidental discharge. They ordered the crossbowmen to shoot the transgressors, but it takes some time to wind up those ungainly weapons. Time that Sir Conrad did not have!

  Far away on the roof of the windmill, Tadaos was more prepared. He loosed four shafts at the evil-doers, watched the arrows go through the low clouds and then come down exactly on target!

  Every one of his golden shafts hit its man square in the heart! They crumbled as a group and their riderless horses ran on both sides of Sir Conrad, while he stood there unmoving.

  "It is an Act of God!!" Friar Roman shouted, falling to his knees. "We have seen a miracle to the glory of God!"

  I too was shouting, "A miracle! A miracle!" Soon everybody was doing it as Tadaos quickly descended from the windmill and hid his bow and remaining arrows.

  As planned, Ilya was first on the field. But when he grasped an arrow to pull it from the dead man's chest, it bent in his hand! The arrows were truly made of soft, pure gold!

  Ilya fell to his knees and prayed.

  Interlude Four

  I hit the STOP button again.

  "I don't believe that shooting, and I'm too much of an agnostic to believe that you have a truly documented miracle here. Your fingerprints are all over this, Tom! What gives?"

  "Well, of course I did it. I couldn't trust Conrad's life to one medieval bowman, no matter how good he was. You don't think I could let those German bastards murder my own cousin, do you?

  "For a long time, I've had a section of engineers working on advanced weaponry, just in case we ever needed such a thing. We've never had to use it, which is good, but rather frustrating for the engineers. They were delighted when I gave them this assignment.

  "The golden arrows were the easy part. Just some thrusters on the arrowheads and some microelectronics to guide them, then a temporal circuit to get rid of the high-tech stuff afterward.

  "Getting rid of Tadaos's arrows was the hard part. They had to do some weather-control work to get the low cloud ceiling to hide our ship, then detect and take out some small, uncooperative targets. After that, well, would you believe thirty-caliber cruise missiles?"

  "I thought that you were so sure that Conrad would be alive eight years later," I said.

  "There are so many unknowns floating around this mess that I just couldn't take the chance. Maybe he could be both killed and stay alive. Is that any stranger than both saving and abandoning that child?"

  "So you faked a miracle. It's hard to believe that even from you!"

  "Look, kid. One man's miracle is another man's technology."

  He hit the START button.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ

  I had gone into the fight knowing that my cause was just, and with the feeling that God was on my side. I had been scared, but somehow, I had won.

  Then suddenly I was looking sure death in the face.

  And then, just as suddenly it was over, and my mind couldn't handle it all at once. Like that farmer in the High Tatras, I was just stunned by all that had happened. Miracles are something that happen to someone else, far away, and a long time ago. They don't happen here and now to one's self.

  Long afterward, there were nagging doubts in my mind about what really happened. I knew what an advanced technology should be capable of. If someone could make a thing like Anna, faking a miracle would be easy for him. But I never really knew.

  Father Ignacy said that perhaps it was both faked and real. That God works in His own ways, and sometimes He chooses to work through men. And if so, why not through men of a different time and place?

  Most of the people of the thirteenth century had no such doubts. They knew that God was talking to them. From the sidelines, there was much praying and wailing, but I just stood there on the snow, my mind strangely blank.

  The bishops came out and claimed the gold arrows for the Church. After some little debate as to whether the four dead Crossmen should be treated as holy, for they had been the object of an Act of God, it was decided that they had been cursed by God, and were hauled off to be buried on unhallowed ground without Extreme Unction, though their arms and armor were claimed by the Church.

  The duke went before the crowd of Crossmen and told them that their order had been cursed by God. He ordered them to disband and to disperse, for they were banished forever from Poland. Fully a third ripped off their uniform surcoats on the spot and rode off west, back to Germany. I heard one say that he'd wanted a bath, anyway. The balance, crasser and more worldly, packed up their gear and returned to their headquarters in Turon, Mazovia.

  All told, the Crossmen lost about a quarter of their total force of men to desertion when this affair became well known. It was the
more honorable and religious of them that left, of course; the worst bastards knew when they had a good thing going, and weren't about to change.

  Then the duke addressed the Polish crowd, and said that from that day forth, slavery was forever banned in Poland, that Poland was now the land of the free, and that any slave need only set foot on our soil to be free. The duke was a rough old SOB, but you had to love him.

  Before they pulled out, a Crossman, the commander in his fancier surcoat, came and talked to me.

  "Your witchcraft and trickery won't stop us! Duke Henryk has nothing to say about what goes on in Mazovia and the Pruthenian forests. If we can't send our slaves through Silesia, we'll find another route!"

  I stared at him for a moment, then said, "Then I'll have to plug that route, too."

  "Do that and we'll just stop taking prisoners!" Then he went away.

  Across the field, I saw Sir Vladimir and his father. They were in each other's arms, crying on each other's shoulders. Uncle Felix was standing nearby. A few hours later Baron Jan came to me and formally asked for the hand of my daughter for his son. Of course, I gave my blessings. No mention was made of a dowry, though I asked what he thought of Sir Vladimir swearing fealty to me.

  Baron Jan said that if Vladimir wished it, and Count Lambert did not object, he would be willing to transfer the allegiance. Just before the wedding, it was done.

  I checked on the wager I had made on myself, and discovered that the odds against me had gone back up to fourteen to one. I was two hundred thirty-eight thousand pence richer. It is not comfortable to be the only person in the world who believes something to be true, but it can be very profitable.

  As they were weighing out my money, the herald of the Bishop of Wroclaw announced that the posting of bans for the marriage of Sir Vladimir and Annastashia had been shortened from six weeks to three days.

  The duke awarded all of the booty won from the Crossmen to me, without even reserving the share normally due to Count Lambert. I gave Sir Vladimir half of it as a dowry.

  We stayed on at Okoitz, and the day after Christmas there was a wedding. The bride I gave away was radiant.

  The Radiant Warrior

  Prologue

  She unloaded the temporal canister, glanced quickly at her new subordinate, loaded it with her last superior, and sent it two and a half million years uptime. One contact every fifty years and that for only a few seconds. Life this far back was a bitch.

  The new arrival was biosculpted into a male version of herself, a type twenty-seven protohuman. He was barely four feet tall, skinny and with dark brown skin. He was also naked, since clothing wouldn't be invented for millions of years.

  She switched off his stasis field.

  He looked up at the stalactites hanging above him from the cave roof. Confused, he looked over at her.

  "Surprise! You son of a bitch!" she shouted. "Welcome to two and a half million b.c.! Welcome to a hundred years of dodging leopards and eating grubs and shivering up in a tree all night, you bastard, because it's all your fault!"

  "What? Where am I?"

  "The where is eastern Africa, you lucky boy, but the fun part is the when! You're in the Anthropological Corps now and you get to do the exciting work of tracking protohuman migration patterns!"

  "This must be some sort of a joke! And you are the rudest and the ugliest woman I've ever seen!"

  "Watch your language, buster! I'm your boss and will be for the next fifty years. And if you think I'm ugly, just wait until you see yourself in a mirror, not that we have one."

  "What is going on here? None of this makes sense! I was in twentieth-century Poland, doing my paperwork, when the monitors came in and I woke up here. And I look like you?"

  "Yeah, minus the floppy tits, ugly."

  "But . . . why?"

  "Your file says it's a punishment detail for gross incompetence. You completely failed to brief a new subordinate on security procedures! She left the wrong door open. And the Owner's own cousin, who had never heard of time travel, got transported back to Poland's thirteenth century, ten years before the Mongol invasions. Then the Owner himself found his cousin in the battle lines during the invasion. The man had been there for ten years before he was discovered! There was nothing they could do about it without violating causality. When you screw up, you don't fart around!"

  "But . . . without notification, without trial?"

  "You mess with the Owner's family, you're in deep shit, boy!"

  "Well . . . what are you doing here, then?"

  "You don't recognize me? I suppose I should be crushed, you bastard, but I'm not. I'm the woman that you failed to brief, you shithead! I've been in this lousy pest hole for fifty years because of you, and now I've got fifty more to get you back for it!"

  "Surely, madam, there's no reason to be vindictive about it. After all, if we're both in the same boat—"

  "A boat wouldn't be this bad, bastard! We are in the middle of a bloody wilderness with nothing to eat but carrion and grubs! There's nothing to do but wander around after a tribe with less brains than a bunch of morons, and nobody to talk to that has a vocabulary of over forty words except each other.

  "Hell yes, I'm vindictive! And I'm going to stay that way for the next fifty years!"

  He rolled over and groaned.

  She looked at him. "Well, in fifty years, my replacement will be the dolt at the thirteenth-century portal who should have caught your screw-up. Then you get to be his boss. It gives you something to look forward to."

  He groaned again.

  Chapter One

  FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI

  My name is Piotr Kulczynski. I am an accountant. I was taught my craft by the lord I serve, Sir Conrad Stargard.

  He is a good lord, and well loved by his people, for he is a giant in mind, body, and soul.

  His learning is renowned above that of all other men, and scarce half a day passes when he does not create some useful device or demonstrate some new technique or sing some new song. He has built great mills and efficient factories for his lord Count Lambert and on his own lands, gifted to him by that count, he has thrown up huge buildings in but a few months. Our Church of Christ the Carpenter at Three Walls is reputed to be the biggest in Poland. Sir Conrad says that soon we will be making iron and steel in vast quantities, as well as a sort of mortar called cement.

  He is vastly tall, and must bend his head to pass through any normal doorway. For his buildings at Three Walls, he decreed that the doors be tall enough to let him pass with his helmet on. He claims that the next generation of children will be, some of them, as tall as he, because they will be eating properly. The carpenters built as he required, but they laughed that any children of his size must be of his get.

  His prowess in battle is above that of all others, and but three days agone he defeated one of the greatest champions in Poland, the Crossman Sir Adolf, in Trial by Combat. He not only destroyed that Knight of the Cross easily, he actually played with the man while he did it, first throwing away his shield and then his sword, winning the fight with his bare hands to show that God was truly on his side.

  And he is a saintly man, kind to those in need and always ready to help the poor, the aged, the oppressed. The very Trial I mentioned was caused when, out of pity for a gross of Pruthenian slaves, he beat seven Crossmen in fair combat, killing five and wounding a sixth almost to the death, then saving that man's life with his surgical skill. He met that caravan of slaves when he was traveling a great distance to ransom a casual acquaintance with a vast sum, to keep that man from being hung.

  And he has been blessed by God. At the Trial, after he had defeated his opponent so easily, he was foully attacked by four other Crossmen. With my own eyes, I saw four golden arrows fall from the sky, killing the men who would have harmed the Lord's Anointed.

  Yet he is my enemy.

  Never would I do harm to my lord, nor even think evil of him, for evil is far from all his words and deeds. But since I w
as a small child I have loved Krystyana.

  Before I dared profess my love to her, she was chosen by Count Lambert to be one of his ladies-in-waiting. I could do nothing while she warmed Count Lambert's bed, and those of his knights, for she went to this task willingly. Yet I was consoled, for it is the custom of that lord, once one of his ladies was with child, to marry her to one of the commoners of his village. My father promised to talk to Count Lambert and to Krystyana's parents when the time was right, and I thought that one day within the year I would have my love by my side.

  But then Sir Conrad came to Okoitz. He came from someplace to the east, though from exactly where is a mystery, for a priest laid a geas on him that he may not speak of his origins.

  I was among those to whom he taught mathematics, and he paid the priest to teach us our letters. He gave me a responsible position, keeping the books of his inn, his brass works, and now the city he was building at Three Walls. This made me a man of some substance, which bolstered my claim to Krystyana's hand.

  Then Count Lambert sent my love, along with four others, with Sir Conrad to the vast lands awarded him.

  Sir Conrad gave all five ladies positions of considerable importance, and it is his custom that no woman may be forced into marriage, nor even strongly encouraged, but that each may marry the man of her own choosing, or even not marry at all.

  My love Krystyana has never looked kindly on me. Even when our positions force us to work together—for she manages the kitchens that feed Sir Conrad's nine hundred people, and I must account for every penny spent—she treats me coldly.

  Long have I been convinced that could she but lay by my side for a single night, her love would come to me. Yet I see no way that this could happen.

  Today at Count Lambert's town of Okoitz, Annastashia—one of Sir Conrad's five ladies—was married to that fine young knight Sir Vladimir. It was a beautiful ceremony, with Sir Conrad giving the bride away and all the ladies crying. But Krystyana's thoughts were plain on her face, and I knew that she would not be content to marry anyone less than a true belted knight, and that knight, Sir Conrad.