Conrad Starguard - Flying Warlord Part 6

Then I tried buying things I didn't really need, mostly land. I started buying up land along the rivers because I had some vague ideas of one day building a series of forts along them. But not that much land was for sale, and buying land was not as easy as it would be in the twentieth century. There were all sorts of enc.u.mbrances involved, oaths of fealty, requirements of military service, the rights of the peasants living there, strange taxes, and what not. I managed to get out of most of these-but not peasants'

rights-with one-time cash payments, yet it did not cure the major problem that I was trying to solve.

When I bought land from some n.o.bleman, he usually spent the money to buy the things that my factories were making! He wanted arms and armor, gla.s.s windows, and indoor plumbing. The money came right back to me and the deflation continued!

Furthermore, I couldn't resist making the land I'd bought productive and profitable.

Surely, this was a problem that no capitalist ever had to cope with!

Charity work was another matter. With the a.s.sistance of Abbot Ignacy and his monks, I worked hard at helping the poor. We set up soup kitchens in the major cities and a large leper colony on an isolated estate that I'd bought. But the engineer in me hates waste, and the waste of human potential is the worst sort.

Many of the poor were that way simply because they could not find honest work, so I gave it to them. I set up non-army construction groups to build railroads and bridges. They were supervised by army personnel, of course, since there weren't many trained, technically competent people outside it. We were running tracks as fast as the blast furnaces could cast them, and most of our lines were double-tracked, so we didn't have to worry much about scheduling. With a single-tracked line, you have to make sure that a train isn't coming north before you take yours south. Double tracks can be treated just like a highway.

Some of the poor were children, orphans. We set up an adoption service, and many of these kids were adopted by army families. Some of the poor were old or feeble. In the cities we set up factories that turned out knitted goods, much of which were bought by the army. We always needed socks and underwear.

Undoubtedly, all of this did a great deal of good for the people. I think it made me something of a people's hero. At least they insisted on cheering whenever I was around, though in fact I would have preferred some peace and quiet. And what do you do when children and old women insist on kissing your boot, for G.o.d's sake! It was embarra.s.sing. I got to giving a standard speech, thanking them, but saying that I didn't like people yelling at me, and if they wanted to do anything for me, they could pray in church for my soul, which needed it. It didn't help much. Most people would rather yell than pray.

Yet the prices kept on dropping and my coffers stayed full. Even feeding the indigent, we had to buy from the farmers, and the farmers made enough money to buy our plumbing supplies and gla.s.s windows.

Raising my prices didn't help either. They just bought less, but spent the same amount of money, so I put prices back where they had been.

I In the middle of this charity work, Abbot Ignacy became His Excellency Ignacy, Bishop of Cracow, and he stepped lightly from the regular clergy to the secular branch of the Church. How much I had to do with this promotion, I don't know.

Despite his elevation, Bishop Ignacy remained my confessor, and I made a point of seeing him at least once a month. He had traded in his humble monk's robe for the glorious raiment of his new office, but he wore his embroidered silks and velvets with the casualness with which he had treated his old brown smock when we had camped along the river, so many years ago. His new office, in his palace near Wawel Cathedral, was as ornate as a church altar, with brightly painted carved wood encrusting the walls and ceiling, but he had moved one of our standard wooden desks into it, the sort that our cabinet shop turned out by the gross.

"Ah, Conrad! Have you come to confess again? Have I told you how much I like these desks you've designed? What with all the drawers, I can keep everything at hand. I've recommended them to all my priests."

"Uh, yes, no, and thank you, your excellency." I made a mental note to have a special desk made that would match his office, rather than looking like a computer in a church.

"Oh, 'Father' is sufficient when we are alone, Conrad. Did I tell you that there is word on the inquisition the Church is conducting in your regard?"

Ever since arriving in this century, an inquisition had been hanging over my head. The Church was trying to decide if I was an instrument of G.o.d, perhaps to be canonized, or an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. I couldn't help being a little anxious about it.

"What has happened, Father?"

"Well, you recall that when first you came to this century, I wrote up all the particulars quite diligently and presented them to my abbot. He, in turn, quickly annotated my report and within the month sent it to this very office. The bishop of that time felt that the matter would best go through the regular branch of the Church, rather than the secular, so he sent it back to my abbot with that recommendation. My abbot then sent it to the home monastery as soon as someone could be found who was going in that direction, and the speed and diligence of all concerned was such that the home monastery in Italy was able to reply back to us within the year."

"Yes, Father, but--"

"But the home monastery was sure that this was a matter for the secular branch, so my abbot sent the report, with notations, back to the Bishop of Cracow. But by this time, you had established yourself in Silesia, which of course is in the Diocese of Wroclaw. The Bishop of Cracow therefore sent the report to the Bishop of Wroclaw, who forwarded it to the Archbishop at Gniezno. From there, it was sent to Rome, with further notations. Rome then replied with a request that the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery here confirm the report. By this time, however, I was that very personage, and having all the facts at my fingertips, as it were, I was quickly able to comply, and provided an update on all your doings."

How could I forget that? After three years, all that had happened was that Father Ignacy had written a letter to himself, and then he had replied to it!

"Yes, Father, but-"

"Now, since all this had transpired within a few years, you can see that the matter was being pushed forward as quickly as possible. But then several years went by in which I heard nothing, so I took it on myself to write a letter of inquiry to Rome. As it turned out, my reply to the report had somehow gone astray somewhere between Gniezno and Rome, no one has any idea what happened to it, and the merchant who carried it was never seen again. Fortunately, the Archbishop of Gniezno had caused to be made a true copy of the entire annotated report for his files. A copy of this was made and again it was sent to Rome. Rome's reply returned through proper channels only a week ago, and it orders that a full inquiry be made by the Bishop of Cracow, who at this time again happens to be me. Of course, I complied immediately, and a full report is again on the way to Rome, through channels, of course."

So Father Ignacy had for a second time answered his own report! And nothing of significance had transpired in seven years! It made me want to scream and pull out my hair! But, with work, I kept my cool.

"So Rome still doesn't know much about me, Father?"

"How can you say that, Conrad? They've seen my reports, haven't they? They also subscribe to the magazine you started and get a copy of it every month! People are learning Polish just to be able to read it! Your books and plumbing supplies are all the rage in Rome, and everyone there has one of your lighters! Of course they know about you!"

I sighed. After Confession, I mentioned that I was going over to the monastery to talk to the artist, Friar Roman.

"Then I've saved you a trip, Conrad. I brought Roman over with me, I think mostly to keep an eye on him. He had been using the wealth he gained from designing church windows to hire young ladies as models, and was posing them most immodestly!"

"In most cultures, your excellency, that would be considered an artist's prerogative."

"Not in my church, it isn't! What did you want to see him about?"

"Lithography. It's another printing process, well suited to art work. We have accurate maps of much of Poland now, and I need many copies made of each. I have a new machine almost ready at Three Walls, and I want to teach him how to use it, since it takes an artist:"

"Three Walls would be just fine, Conrad. Take him for as long as you need him. But you keep that boy away from Okoitz! If it was in my diocese, there'd be some changes made there, I a.s.sure you!"

"Yes, Father."

Friar Roman was delighted to get out from under Bishop Ignacy's thumb, and caught the next boat to Three Walls.

The deflation was still troubling me, and I finally realized that to inflate the economy back to its previous levels, I was going to have to add new money to the system. With the duke's permission, I started making my own coins, with his likeness on one side and a Polish eagle on the other. For some years, we had been refining zinc and calling it "Polish Silver." No one had paid much mind, but the fact was that we were the only people in the world that had this technology. I made it a secret technology.

The only problem was that to use zinc for coinage, I had to drastically raise its price. I could sneak it into the bra.s.s, since very few people realized that bra.s.s was an alloy of copper and zinc. They acted like it was a separate metal. But the price of pure zinc items had to go up and the price of galvanized iron skyrocketed to the point that sales went way down.

I wrote a series of articles for our magazine, explaining the cause of the deflation and what I intended to do about it. My alchemist, Zoltan Varanian, made an a.n.a.lysis of the silver content of each of the six dozen supposedly identical coins that were in circulation, and I published it. The silver content of those coins varied from forty percent down to as little as three percent!

The result was economic chaos for a half year. But at the same time, I came out with a series of zinc coins in various denominations. I rated zinc at one-sixth the value of pure silver, but the whole concept for different denominations was new, and it took some people a while to get used to it. But in our money system, with a few large coins you could buy a horse, and with the smallest, a kid could buy a piece of candy, something that was not possible before.

In one of my magazine articles, I made a serious oath that the content and weight of my coins would be absolutely constant, that we would trade any worn (but not clipped!) coin for a new one, and that we would trade our coins for standard silver coins on demand. "Polish Silver" caught on.

Then we started buying everything in sight! We bought land, we bought furs, we bought amber. We bought land in the Bledowska Desert, built huge granaries there, and set up a constant pricing system for purchases and sales, buying grain by the hundreds of tons! We even bought silver and gold. But mostly we bought land. In a few years, we owned most of the land within five miles of the Vistula, the Odra, and many of their tributaries. Once we had the time, I was going to ring Poland with a line of concrete forts!

But all this land aggravated some of my other problems. Besides being the owner, I had to be the police force and the judge as well. The police force wasn't a big problem, since I had set one up years ago.

Whenever one of my bailiffs had a problem he couldn't handle, he called in a detective. And now that these men were partnered with Anna's progeny, their arrest rate was near perfect. The Big People could smell out a thief or a murderer every time.

Most of the other Big People were working carrying the mails, and the speed of mail transport was doubled. After the first few months, we started using them without riders, and except for some astounded travelers, there wasn't a hitch.

But what I needed now was some judges and lawyers, and the man I knew who was most knowledgeable of the law was Sir Miesko. He had been my next door neighbor for years. Well, his manor was six miles away from mine, but that's the way these things went. He was my a.s.sistant Master of the Hunt, and in fact ran the thing on all the duke's lands. He got all the furs taken each fall, and this had made him rich. He had once been my biggest vendor. providing food for Three Walls, but now was one of my best customers. He'd built a truly fine castle using my building supplies, and many of the features of my own defensive works, like the combination granary and watchtower, were invented by him.

He'd been a legal clerk, the closest local equivalent to a lawyer, before he was knighted for valor, so I asked him to head up my legal department.

"I'd like to, Baron Conrad, but I just can't. The Great Hunt takes up a lot of my time, and running my manor takes up more. You know that all of my boys have joined your army instead of helping me out around here, and, well, I'm just not as young as I used to be."

"d.a.m.n. I can see your point, though. Okay, if not you, then who? Do you know a truly honest man who knows the law?" I said.

"That's a hard one, Baron. Somehow, the more a man knows about the law, the less he seems inclined to obey it! But yes, one man comes to mind. He's only a few years younger than I am, but he doesn't have my responsibilities. We worked together in my youth, and we've kept in touch. Adam Pulaski, he's your man."

So I got in touch with this Pulaski. I set him up with three younger men, one to act as prosecutor, one to be defender, and one to be court recorder. I sent them out to take over my case load. I had to approve all their actions, of course, and any capital offenses had to be taken to my liege lord, Count Lambert, but they were the start of the army court system.

Before the Mongol invasion, prices were back up to Where they had been before I had arrived. After that, we just watched the prices of a dozen common commodities, and if the average price got too low, we brought it back up by making more coins and buying things we didn't need.

Chapter Ten.

By the spring of 1240, 1 knew we'd be ready. The Warrior's School was completed, even though everybody was calling it "h.e.l.l" now. The main building was a mile square and six stories tall, surrounding a collection of mess halls, parade grounds, churches, huge warehouses filled to the rafters with military goods, an induction center, and even a synagogue.

I was surprised to find how many Jews I had working for me. The Jews were a new element in thirteenth-century Poland, most of them coming in with the Germans in their peaceful "invasion." There were no racial tensions at the time, mostly because the Christians were rarely aware of the Jews. In fact, most people didn't even know of their existence as a separate religious group, lumping them in with other foreigners.

But most work crews were eager to get them when they could. Jews were perfectly willing to work on Sunday, providing they could get Sat.u.r.day off, or Friday night in the case of night-shift workers. The vast majority of my people were Catholics, and the more Jews in your crew, the better your chances were of getting Sunday off.

A delegation of rabbis had once come to me, asking if they could set up a ghetto at Three Walls, the way they were being set up in the increasingly German-dominated cities. I wouldn't do it.

I would like to make it clear that these ghettos were not slums where the unfortunate were stuffed to get them out of the way. The ghetto was a portion of the city where Jewish Law, rather than Christian Law, was practiced. In the ghetto, the Jews had their own council, their own schools, their own courts, and what amounted to their own police force. Furthermore, there were special courts to handle problems between Jews and Catholics, and an attempt was made to keep these fair. The ghetto was a privilege that the Jews sought and paid cash for.

In the world I grew up in, and I am becoming convinced that it was a different world than that which I am now living in, the Jews came to Poland at about the same time, and settled in the cities.

There is a natural animosity between city dwellers and rural people. Before the days- of movies and television, they lived in such totally different environments that neither comprehended the lifestyle of the other.

Yet each needed the products of the other. The cities needed food and the countrymen needed the manufactured goods of the cities. They traded, but each soon felt that the other was out to cheat him, and so retaliation seemed the sensible thing to do. Once this started to happen, the myth had become truth, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When this difference in lifestyles was added to differences in language, differences in customs, and differences in religion, these animosities naturally were accentuated. There were even differences in political allegiances, for many cities within the political boundaries of Poland became members of the Hanseatic League, and no longer swore allegiance to the Polish Crown.

And in Silesia, the countrymen were Polish, the n.o.bles were sworn to the German Holy Roman Empire and mostly spoke German, and the cities were allied with the Nordic Hans! And part of each city was yet another separate political ent.i.ty, the Jewish ghetto! A crazy system, yet it survived for centuries!

The truth is that the Jews in Poland maintained their separate culture for seven hundred years! They did not learn Polish, the language of the people around them, but continued speaking German, although in time their language drifted so far from standard German as to become a separate dialect, Yiddish.

The Jews called the people surrounding them goyim, cattle, and were sure that these farmers were out to poison them. And indeed, there were unscrupulous farmers who tried to make a quick profit. Not many, but some. The Jews overreacted with a ridiculously strict adherence to the biblical dietary codes, having a religious leader inspect all food eaten, and cheated a dumb farmer whenever possible.

In the early thirteenth-century Poland, Jewish dietary rules were not nearly as evolved as they became later.

The countrymen became convinced that the Jews stole Christian babies for sacrifice at their religious services. This was of course not true, but a few Jews did engage in kidnapping Christians and selling them as slaves to the Moslems, a thing that Christians generally could not do since the Moslems usually refused to trade with Christians.

Without a basis of mutual understanding, the actions of a few criminals became "what everybody knows."

Having said all this, I must point out that Poland was the best place in Europe for a Jew to be, at least up until World War Two. Everywhere else, it was worse. The Jews were thrown out of England, France, Spain, and many other countries. All their property was confiscated, and many of their people were killed. This never happened in Poland, at least not until Poland itself was conquered by foreign powers.

There has always been an official policy of toleration, no matter what most people actually felt.

Separate peoples, hating each other and misunderstanding each other, they lived together because they needed each other.

I wasn't going to let this happen again, at least not on my lands. The Jews were welcome as individuals, as was anybody else. Well, I wouldn't want an Atheist around, but in fact I never ran into anyone who would admit to being one. But if I let the Jews segregate themselves, they would keep to their own German language and their own customs. They never would become part of us, and racial tensions would inevitably develop. I let them have the use of some of the common rooms for their own religious services and religious instruction. Where the rabbis were sufficiently educated, we hired them into the school system, and the Jews could always wrangle it so they got Sat.u.r.day off. But separate housing, separate schools, separate laws, and separate dining facilities were out!

Well, I did have the kitchen staff put up a little sign when something was grossly nonkosher, since many traditional Polish foods were based on blood and others on pork. A Jew would sometimes get violently ill if he found out that he had just eaten kishka. Anyway, you only get a little bowl of blood from a duck, and there is no point in wasting tchanina on somebody who doesn't appreciate it!

Now, I know that I was at the very same time keeping the Moslems sworn to me segregated from the rest of the country. But it was not my intent that this should be a permanent situation. One day, we would defeat the Mongols and drive them back to where they came from, at which time I meant to help Zoltan Varanian's people resettle their original homeland. And if we didn't beat the Mongols, we'd all be dead anyway, so the problem would solve itself.

Count Lambert's new castle was completed, and he was vastly proud of it. It really was a functional military defensive structure, with thick masonry walls six stories tall, crenelations, machinations, turret towers, and all the rest. It was completely fireproof, with even the floors being made of masonry, rather than the usual wood. It had room for all of his peasants as well as the four-gross young ladies that worked at his cloth factory. Further, he could play host to half the n.o.bility in the duchy and have beds for everybody.

And it had gla.s.s windows, indoor plumbing, and steam heat. There were even gaslights in the public areas. There was a church, a granary, huge storerooms, a sauna, and an indoor swimming pool. There was even a system of conduits going to every room, so that when we got electric lights and telephones, these things could be easily installed. The kitchens and dining rooms were such that everybody ate there, and private cooking was frowned on.

I think I was as proud of that building as the count was.

The fort at East Gate was up as well, and it had gone up much quicker, since at Okoitz I had used vaulted construction throughout, but at East Gate I used prefabricated reinforced concrete for the floors and ceilings. Not as pretty, but it sure was cheaper.

I was sure that this fort was impregnable. The outer walls were seven stories tall and made of thick, reinforced concrete. It was surrounded by six tall towers, which were really storage silos for hay, grain, and coal but each had a fighting platform on top, and a dunce-cap roof to protect the fighters. These towers were connected to the main fort by underground tunnels. An enemy attacking any point would be in a crossfire from at least two and usually four directions. A two-story wall (that doubled as a long barn for the mules that pulled the railroad carts) surrounded the entire complex, connecting the towers. It wasn't high enough to stop men with ladders, but it would stop horses and siege equipment.

The ground plan was a symmetrical hexagon, and what with the six surrounding towers and walls, it resembled a snowflake. We ended up calling the design just that, and I got to toying with the idea of someday building hundreds of them.

Let the Mongols try and take this one!

I think that we bragged about it too much, and that this contributed to a major tragedy. But I get ahead of myself.

Three Walls really had three walls now, and the outer one was of st.u.r.dy concrete. There were towers above the surrounding cliffs, and all sorts of dirty tricks were built in as defensive measures.

And all my other installations at Coaltown, Silver City, and Copper City were similarly fortified. This was necessary because when we men went off to war, we needed someplace safe for the women, children, and old folks. And it was not only our own dependents that we had to protect, but those of everyone else in Silesia and Little Poland. I calculated that by stacking people in like cordwood, we'd have enough room to save them all. And while they might eat a lot of kasha, there would be food enough to feed them all as well.

Except for adding wall guns, I'd left the castle I'd inherited from Baron Stefan alone, and in fact rarely used it. It was well enough designed as a defensive structure, but the moat made it difficult to add a sewage system. The peasants in the immediate area used the castle for weddings and what not and, come the invasion, would retreat to it for safety, but aside from that, I really didn't see much use for it. Maybe someday I'd fill in the moat and put in a septic system.

Eagle Nest, on the other hand, got only a single, separate concrete tower, which doubled as a control tower for the airport. If attacked, the boys could go there and be safe enough, since the thing was nine stories tall. There simply weren't enough people there to defend a wall long enough to surround the entire airport, and there weren't enough peasants nearby to help them. I was sorry to do it, but we had to treat the whole wooden complex as expendable.

The old cities weren't in very good shape either. The watts around Cracow were only three stories tall, and a wall that low can be scaled. Wawel Hill was well enough fortified, but the city below it looked likely to fall if it was seriously attacked. But try to get those d.a.m.n merchants to spend a penny they didn't have to! I offered to sell them guns and to train their people as gunners, all at cost. They bought only a dozen swivel guns for the whole city and considered this to be sufficient!

Wroclaw was in similar shape, and Legnica! Legnica still had wooden walls!

We didn't have room enough inside our fortifications for the farm animals, so doctrine was for the animals to be released to try their luck in the woods. At least the wolves were pretty much eradicated now, what with the Great Hunts and all. A program of branding was underway, so that the animals could be returned to their owners after the invasion.

We had a similar program going to identify people. My own troops had dog tags, of course, but we enlarged the program to include the conventional knights as well. The service was free, and most of them took us up on it. If they fell in battle, we could at least mark their graves.

The radios were working, although they weren't all that dependable. They weighed two-gross pounds each and had a range of only thirty miles and that only in good weather. A lightning storm within fifty miles could drown them out, and they required endless fiddling by the operator. Nonetheless, we'd gone into production, and produced them by the thousands. There was one on every steamboat and one at each depot. Every Pink Dragon Inn had its radio, and there were four at each of our major installations. In addition, one war cart in six had a radio, so each company could keep in touch. Getting enough trained operators was a huge problem, but people were being trained as fast as sets were being built. Most of them were still pretty slow, but we kept them in practice.

With only nine months to go before the Mongol invasion, Zoltan came to me with a new device. Our swivel guns used bra.s.s cartridges. They were breech-loading and clip-fed. But after years of fruitless effort, the alchemists had been unable to come up with a dependable primer to detonate the black powder in the sh.e.l.l. What we were using was a firecracker wick on the back of each sh.e.l.l that was lit by an alcohol burner near the breech. It was a clumsy alternative, but it was the best we could do.

Zoltan presented me with a new cartridge and a new gun to fire it. Each cartridge had what amounted to a spark plug in the base, and the bolt of the gun contained a piezoelectric crystal to provide the spark.

This was the same system that we had been using for years on our lighters, and the same system that the boys at Eagle Nest used on their aircraft engines, and the same system we used on the spark-gap radios.

And for years, it hadn't occurred to me or anyone else until now to use it to ignite gunpowder!

In truth, I had to take the blame for this one myself. I had made gunpowder a secret thing, something you weren't supposed to think about. I had kept Zoltan working on chemical projects and generally away from the Christians working on almost everything else. Secrecy is h.e.l.l on innovations, and it was 0 my fault.

To make things worse, there was no time to convert the tens of thousands of swivel guns we had already made. We would have to meet the Mongols with obsolete equipment.

I designed a simple, single-shot pistol to use the new cartridges, and a few hundred of them were made in time, for use by officers. It had a breaking action like a shotgun, and had the general appearance of an old-style dueling pistol. I also designed a submachine gun along the lines of the Sten gun, but only prototypes were made. There just wasn't time!