Conrad Starguard - Lord Conrad's Lady Part 6

We ate a remarkably spare meal, even for Lent. There was only oatmeal porridge and new beer, for the inn's huge cellars had been completely cleared to provide a quick lunch for a twelfth of my husband's army. Even rare wines that had been aging in the bottle for three entire years had been given away, for Count Conrad had said "Empty out your entire cellar," and the innkeeper had taken him exactly at his word. A sad loss.

We then went to the monastery, arriving as the monks were chanting Prime. Soon the new abbot was with me, for the old one had died in the fighting. This new man, Father Stanislaw, had been in charge of the print shop, and he, too, fell completely in with my plan. There was much anger in Cracow at Duke Henryk, for that n.o.bleman had once sworn to defend the city but now had failed to do so, or even to come when the city was under siege.

To be fair to Henryk, the n.o.bles of Cracow had so disagreed with his battle plan that they had left him as a group and gone to fight the Mongols under the leaders.h.i.+p of Duke Boleslaw of Mazovia. But the n.o.bles who had done so were now almost all dead, and the commoners have a short memory about such things. The abbot said that to a man, the people of Cracow wanted Conrad for their duke.

The abbot had supplies on hand for a "print run" of twelve thousand copies and set aside all other work to get it done.

Together we talked of an entire issue that treated nothing but the recent war with the Mongols, as opposed to the usual format, where there were a dozen short articles on everything from current events to cooking recipes. We would have a dozen or so witnesses of the various battles each tell their story, stressing how it was that Count Conrad had saved all of Christendom. Near the end there would be an article stressing the danger that eastern Poland was in without a properly confirmed duke to defend it.

Then there would be an appeal, hopefully by Bishop Ignacy, for all the freemen and n.o.bles of the duchies of Little Poland, Sandomierz, and Mazovia to meet and elect Conrad duke. Or maybe even king.

The story of the battles had yet to be written, and several monks were put with Sir Wladyclaw and his men to get some of it down on paper. I left to secure Bishop Ignacy to our cause, but as I boarded my carriage, word came that a riverboat had come to port. I had Anna take me there immediately for fear that the boat might leave before I had a chance to talk to the captain. The magazine would have to be delivered, after all.

The boat proved to be the Enterprise, with Baron Tadaos himself commanding. This was a stroke of luck, for he commanded all the boats on the river and knew more of the river battle than did any other man.

The baron gave me a warm greeting, and he, too, liked my plan of making Conrad Duke of eastern Poland. He promised all a.s.sistance in delivering the news but would not take the time to write the story of the river battle. His duty, he said, was to patrol the rivers and search for his several missing boats.

However, he lent me Baron Piotr for the task of writing the history of the Battle for the Vistula, as he called it, and I had to agree that this intelligent young man was certainly up to the task.

As I drove Baron Piotr to the monastery, I said, "You realize that it is important that as much credit as possible must go to Count Conrad himself. You know that if Conrad himself were writing the tale, he would praise everyone but himself, but we must see to it that the truth is told."

"My lady, the only way that Conrad could have done more than he did would have been for him to have killed every single Mongol with his own sword! I shall praise him to the stars, not because you have asked but because he deserves it," the baron said.

Leaving Piotr in the care of the monks, I went to Wawel Cathedral in search of Bishop Ignacy. He was important to my plan because he was so well known and loved. He wrote a sermon every month for the magazine and thus had great influence in the country, indeed in the world, for many copies of the magazine found their way to all the countries of Europe! He was very patriotic and had long worked for the unity of Poland.

Thus, I was very taken aback when, having explained my plan, I found that the bishop was less than totally enthused by it.

"My lady, I have my doubts as to the wisdom of all of this."

"But your excellency! Eastern Poland lies defenseless! Only Conrad has the power capable of defending it."

"I quite agree with you, my daughter, but Conrad would defend it in any event, whether he were duke or commoner."

"But the people want him for their duke!"

"I don't doubt it. Furthermore, they're right. He'd make a fine duke!"

"Then, your excellency, why do you oppose this plan?"

"I am not opposing it. I simply have grave doubts. You seem to forget that I am Conrad's confessor. I know the man very well, perhaps even better than you do. I have no doubt that he would be very good for the country. Indeed, since Duke Henryk controls most of western Poland, were Conrad to control the east, Poland would once again be a united country, could they but agree. And I think that they would.

I tell you that Conrad could be made the first King of Poland for a hundred years!"

"Then why do you doubt him?"

"I don't doubt him! Conrad would make a great king, but would being the king make a great Conrad?

Do you think that he would be happy with such a position? I don't! Do you know, when once I suggested the throne to him, he said that it looked very stiff and uncomfortable and that he had a fine, soft leather chair in his office that tilted back and suited him. When I suggested the crown, he said that a crown was nothing but a hat that let the rain in. You may want Conrad's enlargement, and the people of Poland may want it, too. But does Conrad want it? I doubt it! He wants to be free to work on his technical devices, and he considers them to be far more important than the fleeting glories of temporal power."

"Your excellency, I cannot believe that any man in his secret heart would turn down absolute power."

"Conrad has very little of this 'secret heart,' as you call it. Indeed, he truly wears his heart on his sleeve, most of the time, to his considerable pain. True, he likes power, but power to him is a very different thing than it is to you. The power he glories in is the power of a white-hot spray of liquid steel pouring from one of his furnaces or the thundering power of one of his huge engines turning at great speed. He cares nothing for the brutal power that permits a king to put some offender to death. He doesn't dream of crowds chanting his name. He avoids crowds as much as he can! He does not want the honor of sitting at the high table of a banquet. He makes excuses and tells lies to avoid banquets altogether! He has dreams, yes, but his dreams are of great cities gleaming white in the suns.h.i.+ne with not a bit of trash in them, of steel tracks that crisscross all of Europe, connecting every hamlet, of mighty s.h.i.+ps traveling swiftly to far lands with neither sails nor oars, That's what power means to your man! Not sitting on a gilded chair wearing a golden hat."

I was much taken aback by all the bishop had said, for there was more than a grain of truth in it. Yet I was not about to let half a country slip through my fingers.

"You speak the truth, Father. I realize now that when the seym, the local parliaments, meet and they choose Conrad as duke, he will refuse them. After all, they can't force him to become a duke. But think of what this will mean, your excellency! Without Conrad, they must then choose someone else. If they are all met together and have already decided to choose a single man, Poland is united! The eastern half, anyway, or all of it if they then choose Duke Henryk, who is Conrad's only real compet.i.tion. Father, you have changed my reasons for what I'm doing, but you have not changed my intention to do it! Doesn't Poland need to be united? Won't you help me with this plan?"

"Hmm. On that basis, where we would only be using Count Conrad's current popularity as a device to get the people together, yes. To that I would lend my support."

"We need more than your support, your excellency. We need your active help and leaders.h.i.+p! With so many 'of the n.o.blemen dead, I think that you alone would have the prestige to call together all the seym here to Cracow and have them come. Or do you think that Sandomierz would be more centrally located?"

"Sandomierz is not only more central, my daughter, it is also intact! Surely you have noticed that lower Cracow is a smoldering ruin. No, I'm afraid that we must definitely choose Sandomierz."

I left the good bishop working on his proclamation and his sermon and had Anna drive me back to the inn. And then I went to sleep.

Chapter Twelve.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD.

I woke to see that it was broad daylight outside. The second thing I noticed was that I had an attractive young lady in my arms and that she wasn't one of my wives. I thought about it a bit and decided that they had probably provided me with this subst.i.tute since they were both in advanced pregnancy, and that it would not be gallant to look a gift lady in the mouth. Of course, if she were not here with my wives'

permission, there could be fireworks, but what the h.e.l.l. I had been two weeks and more without, and that's an absurd amount of time!

So I found out that her name was Mary and that she was one of Cilicia's new maids. I had never known Cilicia to have a maid before. She was picking up Francine's bad habits already. I told Mary that all this was wonderful and topped her for the better part of an hour. About fifteen years old, she was an enthusiastic and healthy girl, if not particularly skillful. At least she wasn't a virgin.

Then I began wondering what the army was doing.

Promising the girl that I'd see her later, I threw a cloak over my bare shoulders and walked over the catwalk to the second wall. The few people I met gave me a smile and a nod, but left me to my mood.

The three walls, which doubled as apartment buildings, were connected with narrow, lightweight wooden bridges at each floor that let you go from one apartment building to another without having to go all the way down and then up again. They were built such that if the first wall was taken by an enemy, the catwalks could be easily knocked down and the fight could be continued from the second or even the first wall. Fortunately, this had not proved necessary against the Mongols, but every little bit of safety helps.

I got to the fighting top of the outer wall and saw that the cleanup job was well under way. A start was being made at repairing the septic tank. Dead Mongols were being stripped and decapitated, with the bodies being hauled away for burial somewhere out of sight. In the distance, heads were being stuck on poles lined up on both sides of the railroad tracks. Different from what we had done before but just as effective. Maybe even more so, to someone traveling down the track. I wondered if anyone had calculated just how long a double line of a quarter of a million heads was. I did the arithmetic in my head and came up with six dozen miles! Perhaps Baron Gregor was in for a surprise.

The dead Mongol horses were being skinned, and a fair number of the young and healthy ones were being butchered. Many of them were being salted down. Krystyana always was a tightfisted little manager, Things were being done, they didn't need my help, and I found this to be good. I went down to the showers, which were empty at this hour, and then to the dining room. I was surprised to find that lunch was already over, but I wanted a breakfast, anyway. I hadn't had an egg in two weeks, and I not only ordered six of them, over easy, I had the cook go out to the chicken coop herself and get some that were absolutely fresh. I had them make me some fresh biscuits too. Rank hath its privileges, and for a day or two I intended to wallow in them!

Yet still I missed a cup of coffee, and no amount of wealth or power could get me one. Most modem Poles prefer tea, but I had developed a taste for good coffee during my college days in Ma.s.sachusetts and had kept with it after going home. An expensive habit, but worth it.

After eating, I went to the church, feeling guilty for not having gone there yesterday as soon as we had won the battle. Even with most of the people working on the cleanup, there was still quite a crowd in the church, most of them. silently praying, giving thanks. There was a long line of people waiting for a chance at the confessionals, one of the things I had introduced to this century. They were standard in my own time, and the priests here had accepted them almost without question as a convenience. My own soul was blackened almost beyond redemption, and I knew that soon I would have to go to Cracow to see my own confessor, Bishop Ignacy. I prayed for an hour and it helped.

My next stop was to the Big People's barn. All of them were gone except for the new white one. Out on patrol, I supposed. I needed to talk to the white person, anyway. I took her over to the big letter board so she could spell out words and answer my questions. The Polish alphabet isn't quite the same as the one used in English, but they are similar enough to get by. Like Anna, she knew that she was a bioengineered product of a civilization in the distant past. Like Anna, she hadn't the slightest idea how a time machine worked. She knew her former rider only as Tom. If he had a last name, she hadn't heard it.

In fact, she had absolutely no new information for me at all, except for her name. It was Silver. I should have guessed.

I told her that she was on the payroll. now and that she was welcome to swear allegiance to me. She didn't know what that was, so I put it off until later. Somewhat disappointed, I went back to my apartment.

I never developed as close a relations.h.i.+p with Silver as I had with Anna. She didn't like to come up to the apartment and listen in to the conversations, since she couldn't understand them. She couldn't develop friends.h.i.+ps with the local children the way Anna did, for the same reason. And I was now a far busier man than I had been ten years earlier. I just didn't have as much time to spend with her as she deserved. I hired two young boys to stay with her and try to teach her Polish, but she proved absolutely incapable of learning the language. A bad situation, but I didn't know what to do about it.

Back in my apartment, I pa.s.sed Cilicia in a hallway. She smiled and gave me a quick kiss, but she knew enough about my moods to know that I needed to be alone.

I went to my office and told Natalia, my secretary and Baron Gregor's first wife, that I didn't want to be disturbed by anything less than Duke Henryk or a new Mongol army. I closed the door, and if I had had a telephone I would have unplugged it from the wall. I had some thinking to do.

For the last nine and a half years I had been busy building the seeds of an industrial revolution and building an army to defend Poland from the Mongols. The second objective was now accomplished, for we had given the greasy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds the soundest beating that they had ever gotten. They'd be a generation sucking their wounds before they dared try us again. By that time, we'd be invincible. We'd likely be attacking them!

As for the first objective, well, there were a lot of improvements still to be made in our technology.

Indeed, many had been made in the last few years and had been shelved because we were so involved in war production that we didn't have time to mess with them. The idea that war encourages technology is a myth. War encourages war production and very little else.

The alchemists had come up with an improvement on our method of making sodium bicarbonate, an important chemical in the production of gla.s.s, medicines, and the biscuits I had just eaten. The old method mixed salt water (sodium chloride) with carbon dioxide from heated limestone (calcium carbonate), and ammonia from our c.o.ke ovens. This yielded sodium bicarbonate and ammonium chloride. The problem was that we couldn't find much of a use for the ammonium chloride and didn't get all that much ammonia from the c.o.ke ovens. This greatly limited the amount of the stuff we could produce.

Zoltan's improvement was a way to take quicklime, calcium oxide, and combine it with the ammonium chloride to get all the ammonia back, which we could then recycle. We were still throwing away the calcium chloride. Well, it melted snow, and eventually we came up with the idea of using it as a dehumidifier as part of an airconditioning system. But mainly, now there was no limit to the amount of gla.s.s we could make! Within a year, gla.s.s would be cheap enough to use for making canning jars.

Some experimental work had been done on electricity, too. We now had a varnish that was a fair insulator, provided that the voltage was low and you didn't expect much flexing. We had plenty of copper, and all the new towns I had built were very compact, so they could be easily defended. If we put a generator within each city, we wouldn't have to send the electricity very far, so using a low voltage made sense. It eliminated the need for ugly power towers that couldn't be defended, and for half the year we could use the waste heat from the generators to heat our buildings. The usual modem method of doing things wastes about two-thirds of the energy in the fuel in generation and transmission losses. With my system, much of this waste was eliminated, at the price of having a power station next door.

Electric lights would be nice, and although I didn't know where we could get tungsten for the filaments, Tom Edison made a decent light bulb using a carbon filament, simply a baked thread. It's easier to make a low-voltage light bulb than a high-voltage one, since the filament gets shorter and thicker. And once you have a light bulb, you have solved most of the problems in making an electronic tube.

Well, we'd have to work on it.

Nonetheless, the big job ahead of us was simply to do more of what we had been doing.

The simple fact is that ma.s.s production is necessary to produce goods and services in sufficient quant.i.ty to maintain a decent standard of living. Ma.s.s production cannot exist without ma.s.s distribution. The larger the market you are serving, the more specialized and efficient you can make your productive machines and processes.

It was critically important that we build more railroad tracks so that industrial and agricultural products could get from place to place more easily.

The failure to emphasize the importance of transportation is one of the Russians' greatest failings. Karl Marx, in his nineteenth-century evaluation of the world economy, lived much of the time in a British industrial area. He not only was never a railroad man or a seaman, he seemed to think that these things were unimportant. All his thoughts were on the making and consuming of things. As a result, orthodox communistic thinking stresses production and treats transportation as a necessary evil.

This philosophical bias has resulted in an inadequate transportation network in Russia, and this in turn is one of the causes of that country's incredible inefficiency.

The railroads were a top priority, but the more I got to thinking about it, the less important a railroad engine seemed to be. Pulling carts with mules, as we were doing now for civilian transport, was a hundred times more efficient than using pack mules in caravans, which was the only compet.i.tion. It takes almost as much manpower to tend one of our primitive steam engines as it takes to tend a string of mules.

More important, in twenty years we'd have so many Big People that we could use them to pull the carts.

Then we wouldn't have to expend any manpower at all! The motive power would also be the driver. A Big Person can pull a ten-ton cart six hundred miles in a day. That ought to be fast enough for anybody.

Pulling one cart at a time, we wouldn't have to bother with railroad hump yards and all that sort of time-consuming nonsense. And Big People don't consume nonrenewable resources or pollute the environment the way mechanized transport does. Best to leave mechanically powered transportation to the rivers and oceans.

Then there was the problem that in the last half year we had multiplied the size of the army by a factor of six, to 150,000 men. This was accomplished by giving them an abbreviated course at the Warrior's School. They had learned to handle weapons and take orders, but they hadn't been taught to read, write, or do arithmetic.

This necessary expansion was a tremendously big bite for us to take, and I rather wished that it was possible for us to chew it up. At present, though, we had housing and permanent jobs for only about twenty-five thousand families. More housing and more factories and more farms were obviously needed.

But the only thing I could see to do for now was to at least temporarily discharge everybody below the rank of knight who hadn't worked for us before. Then, in time, those who wanted to come back in could finish up the Warrior's School course, and if they pa.s.sed, they could come back into the army.

No! Stop! Dumb idea. We might need those men again at any time, especially if I had judged the Mongols wrong. Rather than discharging them, I had to form them into active reserves. That would mean regular pay, regular practice sessions, a reserve command structure, and a dozen other headaches. And doing all this while they were scattered all over the country! I'd have to delegate the authority on this one, since I certainly didn't want to bother leading it myself. I wondered if Baron Vladimir would want the job.

The reserve force would have to be a temporary thing, designed to phase itself out as the men came on as full-time workers or retired after ten years or so.

Construction was going to be the big game on campus for quite a while. I had long dreamed of building a line of company-size forts along the Vistula and the Bug as a defense against Mongols, and a similar line along the Odra and the Nysa against the Germans. Oh, except for the German Teutonic Order, the Germans hadn't given us much trouble lately, since they were mostly involved in conflicts in Italy and with the Pope, but from a historical standpoint they repeatedly invaded us, and it was just smart to be ready for it.

We had already built a good working model of a standalone fort, the one at East Gate. It had been taken by a combination of trickery and stupidity, but there had been nothing wrong with the design that I could see. It was easily defensible and looked like a castle, but actually it was mostly an apartment building for two gross families. It was really a small town, with factories, a school, a library, a store, an inn, and everything that such a community needs. Two gross families is about the fight size for a town, too. At that size, you have enough neighbors to have somebody interesting to talk to and there are enough of you to support a full set of community services, but you are not so big that people get lost in the crowd. Three Walls, for example, was already too big. Despite the fact that everybody was well taken care of, we were getting a crime problem. I don't mean relatives getting into fistfights, either. That sort of thing will always be with us. No, I mean real organized crime, like that fairsized theft ring we broke up a year ago.

In a town of under three hundred households, things like that aren't likely to happen. Everybody knows what's going on!

Each fort would be situated on twenty or thirty square miles of land, and that land would be farmed by the troops. In the off-seasons there would be light industrial work available to keep them busy. They would spend one day a week in military exercises, but mostly they would be a working community.

I had long been toying with the idea of a factory that would build large precast concrete sections that could be s.h.i.+pped by railroad or boat and a.s.sembled on site into a fort. They'd have to go up fast, since I wanted to get the army back up to its present size in a hurry. To house an additional hundred thousand men and their families in four years, I'd have to throw forts up at the rate of two a week!

And there wasn't only the concrete to think of. There was plumbing, wiring, power plants, heating systems, weapons, school-books, and beer steins. I got to sketching out what was required, and it was very dark before I quit.

We were going to have to build a factory that built factories that made the components of the forts, which were themselves partly factories! I wrote a note to Natalia to have all drafting and engineering personnel relieved of all military duties and back at their desks immediately. I needed help!

I woke up in the suns.h.i.+ne again, with the same girl in bed with me. I had missed the sunrise service two days in a row! There was some cheering going on outside, and I went to the balcony to see what it was all about. The women and children from East Gate were back! Not the n.o.bles who were murdered there by the Mongols, but our own people who had left the fort two or three days before that. The women and children had wandered around in the hills for a week before they had found their way back here.

I got some proper clothes on in a hurry and went down to the mob scene below. Understandably, the men whose families had been missing were delighted to find that they were safe and sound. They were hugging and kissing and laughing and crying, sometimes the same person doing all four at the same time.

What annoyed me was the fact that the captainette who had brought the dependents in was being carried around on some of the men's shoulders as though she were a hero.

I got over to them and wrenched her down. "You stupid b.i.t.c.h!" I shouted. "You're under arrest!"

"But what for, sir?" one of the men asked.

"What for? For dereliction of duty, for abandoning her post, for treason, and for contributing to the murder of twenty thousand women and children!" I shouted.

Then suddenly everybody was quiet.

Chapter Thirteen.

THREE WALLS still didn't have a jail, so I had a blacksmith put leg shackles on her and followed the two knights who took our prisoner to the storeroom we used as a lockup when necessary. The room was already in use for the handless Mongol ex-amba.s.sador, but I had her thrown in with him. He stank the way all Mongols do, but I didn't owe her any favors. I was on my way back up when I realized that I was going to have to judge the case.

You see, "count" is a judicial t.i.tle, like "judge" or "justice." A man holding it had the right of high justice within his realms. That is to say, he could hold a trial for a major crime and punish the offender as he saw fit. His word could have a man hanged. I had held the t.i.tle of count since the Christmas before, but that meant that I was count of Francine's tiny county of Strzegom, where there never was much crime. Here, at Three Walls, I had remained Count Lambert's baron despite my right to use the t.i.tle of count. Up until a week ago, that is. When Count Lambert had been killed by a Mongol spear and I had inherited his lands in Poland, I had also inherited his responsibilities. I couldn't fob off my serious criminals on him anymore. I was it!

I went back up to my office to ponder this latest problem.

For years I had been ducking my legal duties by having somebody else do them. On Sir Miesko's recommendation, I'd appointed Baron Pulaski to be my judge. The baron had four subordinates, a court recorder, a bailiff, and two prosecutor-defenders. These last two took turns. They went around my extensive and scattered estates, hearing cases and writing up their recommendations to me. I almost invariably went along with them or, in the case of serious offenses, handed their recommendations up to my liege lord, Count Lambert. In time he got to following their recommendations as well.

But they really didn't have any official sanction for their existence. Since they normally tried trivial matters and only conducted hearings on serious ones, n.o.body had seriously complained about it. But Captainette Lubinska's crimes were hardly trivial. Whether I tried her or had Baron Pulaski do it, I would be setting a precedent.

After some hours of agonizing over it, I decided that the baron was more competent a judge than I was, and he was certainly more unbiased. Furthermore, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life being a trial judge. I had better things to do than sit on a gilded chair deciding if some poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d deserved to die. If my liege lord, Duke Henryk didn't like it, he could start by telling me so.