Conrad Starguard - Lord Conrad's Lady Part 16

Construction was the big game on campus, as usual. Doubletracked rail lines were laid north to Plock and beyond, and west to a few miles from the Holy Roman Empire. A road east from Sandomierz was sent as far as the Bug River, and another went from the Vistula to the salt mines. I seemed to own those mines now, since none of the former owners could be found, and in such cases, as in modem times, the property goes to the state. Only now I was the state. The old works manager at the mines was gone, too.

A pity. He had been rude to me once, and I was looking forward to firing the man.

The Reinforced Concrete Components Factory was completed, and soon it was providing structural sections for our ambitious building plans. To a certain extent the factory built itself, since at first it was nothing but a vast field with foundations, plumbing, and concrete molds built into the ground. As these molds were completed and pre-stressed concrete members were cast into them, the first use of these pieces was to put up the walls, pillars, and ceilings of the building itself!

Housing for the workers went up at the same time, and within a few weeks the first additional factory was erected, a major cement plant. A continuous casting operation for steel reinforcing rods went in next, and after that it all became routine. Plumbers followed the masons, and window glaziers came next with carpenters on their heels, putting in the doors.

The new R&D machine shop at Okoitz was built of brick to match the existing castle and the inn there, although the roof was of pre-stressed concrete. When I had sketched the shop, I had also sketched out the additional cloth factories to be built eventually, mostly to make sure that everything would fit well and look nice. Because of some snafu, these sketches were detailed and given by mistake to the construction captain sent to build the machine shop. So while he was there, he also put up both new cloth factories.

Not that we had any machinery to put in them. It hadn't even been invented yet, let alone built!

I am personally convinced that much of this happened because the construction workers liked being stationed at Okoitz, living in the n.o.ble guest quarters and being available to all the cloth factory's eager young ladies, and thus they did what they could to prolong their stay. Oh, I couldn't prove it, but nonetheless I gave that company all the dirty jobs for the next two years.

I suppose I shouldn't have let three months go by between visits, but a man can't be everywhere.

We wouldn't be able to start building forts along the Vistula until the next year, but the three battalions in the eastern duchies were busy preparing for it, clearing the sites and putting in foundations, wells, and septic systems. Winters were spent logging, mostly to clear the land for farming. As the saying went, a Mongol can't hide in a potato field.

The first electrical generator worked, and the third one worked very well indeed. At first we couldn't find any graphite for the brushes, but the name told us the way the oldsters had done it. Bra.s.s brushes, and I mean something that looked like what you could clean a floor with, worked just fine. We got it working one week before a merchant came up from Hungary, riding right through a war zone ,without even noticing, with twenty-two mule loads of graphite.

The electric light bulb team was having less luck, and the tubing team was running into problems because the copper they had to work with was too brittle. I knew that this meant that our copper was too impure, for pure copper is very ductile.

This set of circ.u.mstances naturally got us involved with electrolytic refining, where pure copper is plated out of crudely smelted bars in a copper sulfate bath. This pure copper worked well in the new tube-drawing machines, although die wear was a big problem and a lot of work was still needed to improve our lubricants.

On the bottom of the refining tanks an annoying black sludge kept building up, and I wouldn't let them throw it away because of my pollution-control rules. The team took some of the sludge over to the alchemists to see if they could find any use for it. They could. The sludge was nineteen parts per gross silver and seven parts gold. The rest of it seemed to be some metal that the alchemists had never seen before, but they promised to work on it. We didn't have a copper mine at all. We had a gold mine that also produced silver and copper!

Very quickly, we were selling electrolytically refined copper exclusively and quietly buying back our old stuff whenever possible. The silver and gold in it were worth more than the copper! Admittedly, I had a surplus of silver and gold just then, but I wanted it nonetheless.

Ma.s.s producing electrical generators made them inexpensive enough to use them for other things, besides. Putting ,graphite electrodes on either side of a bath of salt water generates sodium hydroxide, which is useful in making good-quality soap and is a basic chemical starting point for thousands of other things. The process also generates hydrogen and chlorine, which can be combined immediately to produce hydrochloric acid, or the hydrogen can be burned as fuel and the chlorine can be used for bleach, in papermaking, for killing bacteria in water, or for killing things in general. The same chlorine that is found in all modem city water supplies makes a very effective war gas.

It occurred to me that I could get rid of the Teutonic Order without having to get any of my own men killed at all. It struck me that there was a certain justice about killing Germans with a gas chamber.

I worked on it and other things for the war.

Our school system now covered all the lands that Henryk and I held and went quite a way beyond them, to include virtually all the Polish-speaking people in the world. In addition, there were a few schools in Germany, Hungary, and the Russias, mostly training bilingual teachers for our next phase of expansion.

The plan was to educate the children of the surrounding countries to be bilingual in Polish rather than to produce schoolbooks in every single different language, a daunting task since there were five thousand different languages in the world and we had grandiose dreams. Most foreign languages weren't all that standardized, anyway.

Teacher education was still a far cry from the standards of the twentieth century, but it had come a long way in the last ten years.

The school system was completely self-supporting, since each school also had a post office and a general store that sold everything that my factories made. The schools outside the range of the railroads and riverboats lost money because of the high cost of transportation, but those within it more than made up for this deficit. In fact, it sometimes proved difficult to keep the schools from showing a profit.

The army system of weights and measures was well on its way to becoming universal, at least within Poland. We never forced anyone to adopt it, but anything bought by the army was bought in our units. If a farmer wanted to sell us food, he had to sell it in terms of our pints and pounds and tons.

Our transportation system handled things in terms of carts that were two of our yards wide, six yards long, and a yard and a half high, the same size as our war carts. They had a weight limitation of twelve of our tons. We had a standard sized case that was a yard wide, a half yard deep, and a half yard high. Six dozen of them fit neatly into a cart and incidentally made a comfortable seat for two. Upended, they were the right height for a workbench, and our cases sometimes did double duty as furniture. If you wanted to ship something that did not fit conveniently into a cart or a case or a standard barrel, shipping charges were much higher, and most of our users soon adopted our standards.

Our gla.s.s containers were rapidly being accepted, and we made them only in certain fixed sizes. Jars were made in sixth-pint, half-pint, pint, two-pint, six-pint, and twelvepint sizes, and that was all, except that the larger sizes also came in a small-necked version. Each had dimensions such that it fit conveniently into our cases, and if you wanted to buy from us or ship something in gla.s.s containers, you had to use our system of weights and measures. This also made it easy for consumers to compare prices.

Our construction materials-bricks, boards, concrete blocks, gla.s.s, and so on-all came only in standard sizes. If you wanted to build a comfortable and inexpensive house, you had to use our system.

There was surprisingly little resistance to this gentle coercion, and one city council after another voted to adopt the army system of weights and measures.

We had a better than average harvest in 1241, and the granary in the Bledowska desert, which had been almost emptied in the spring and summer to provide seed and food, was now half-refilled. At this point virtually all the grains grown in Poland were of the modem sort, descended from the few grains I had brought here in seed packages ten years before.

Potatoes were now a major item in the diet, as were corn, tomatoes, squashes, peppers, and many of the other vegetables that had come originally from the New World. All the old vegetables were still on the menu, of course, and many people were starting to believe me when I said that a healthy diet was a varied diet. The children were growing up bigger and stronger than their parents, and the infant mortality rates were approaching modem levels, outside of the old cities at least. Someday we'd get decent water and sewer systems in them. Someday.

On the downside, tooth decay was on the rise, especially among the children of the wealthy, and I began to regret that I had been instrumental in increasing the amount of honey and refined sugar available. Now I had to sell people on the advantages of brushing regularly and restricting the use of my own products.

Dentistry. I would have to do something about dentistry.

Decent eyegla.s.ses were being made and sold. I got into it when one of Krystyana's kids turned out to be nearsighted and I started to need reading gla.s.ses.

The never-ending work of animal breeding was still going on, and to encourage it Count Lambert had started a system of county fairs, with prizes for the best laying hen, the best milk cow, and so forth. The prizewinning animals were auctioned off, often at fabulous prices. I expanded Lambert's system of both fairs and prize herds and usually bought the best available at each county fair, often at huge prices. My buyers had fairly strict guidelines.

A sore spot was that a wealthy merchant from Gniezno, who always boasted about the quality of his table, was observed to regularly purchase prize animals to slaughter and eat just so he could brag about how good his meat was. This b.a.s.t.a.r.d was even slaughtering prize milk cows for their meat! I wrote him, politely explaining the purpose of the prize herds and the improvements that had been wrought because of them, but he went right on doing what he had been doing. When I had him banned from the auctions, he had his subordinates do the buying for him. So I contacted my accountants and suggested that this was a man deserving of a beating. Even then they had to work him over twice before he stopped his annoying practice.

Another example of the creative use of accounting, I suppose.

My sheep herds were expanding yearly, and for the last seven years all the males in the main herds had been culled from the prize herd. Improvements in both the quality and the quant.i.ty of the wool were manifest, but since my best sheep could produce three times the wool of the average sheep, there was obviously a long way to go.

The same was true of the dairy herds, except that there the best was five times better than the average.

Do you begin to see why I was so annoyed at having prize animals butchered?

Our best chickens were laying five eggs a week, and some breeders were starting to ignore ducks and geese. They simply couldn't compete with the chickens in either egg or meat production. I tried to reverse this trend, but I had also shown them how to compute profits on livestock, and they knew.

Pigs were getting shorter-legged, bigger-bodied, and faster-growing. They were still hairy, though. Not only did they have to live through the winter in unheated barns, there was a big market for pig bristle, a market that is satisfied by plastics in the modem world.

My wild aurochs herd was now up to three hundred animals that had outgrown all three of the valleys that I had them in. We were feeding them a lot of grain to keep them going and culling half the bulls each year, selecting for size and meat production if not for placid temperament. Something would have to be done before too long. I needed someplace to fence in a big area for them. I checked with the Banki brothers, and Wiktor pointed out an area north of where Sieciechow had been that might be suitable. At least there were very few trees there and almost no people at all left. I sent a surveying team out to look at the possibility of walling it in. We had found out the hard way long ago that ordinary fences didn't impress not very domesticated aurochs much. They walked right through them! It took a thick masonry wall, built wavy in the Thomas Jefferson fashion, four yards tall to do the job. Huge animals!

In October another milestone was reached. From that point on our profits from our commercial services--that is to say, transporting pa.s.sengers and goods as a common carrier, the mails, and Baron Novacek's mercantile enterprises-were higher than our profits from selling the output from our entire factory system. Much of the reason for this was that we didn't pay tolls, while the other merchants did when they weren't using our railroads, plus our communication system let our buyers know quickly about prices here and there.

The conventional merchant would buy goods, pay heavily to take them somewhere, and hope to be able to sell them for more than they had cost him. Since this was an inefficient way of doing things, they generally tried to make profits of from one hundred percent to five hundred percent to make up for their occasional losses.

We usually had the goods sold before we bought them, and our transportation costs were very low.

Everywhere our railroads and riverboats went, people got more for what they had to sell and paid less for what they wanted to buy, and we made a whopping profit doing it. Of course, the merchants howled about it, but their shouts of anguish impressed neither Duke Henryk nor me. And we were the law. A lot of merchants gave up and came to work for us.

We moved my household and the R&D teams to Okoitz in the fall, and the researchers were soon finding uses for the large empty buildings that were scheduled to one day be cloth factories. To quote Parkinson's law, "Work naturally expands to fill the time available to do it in," I would like to add one of my own: "Building s.p.a.ce is consumed in direct proportion to its availability, regardless of what, if anything, has to be done there."

There would be h.e.l.l to pay when I threw the researchers out to make way for production machinery. I could see them kicking and screaming for days, trying to protect their precious little territories.

Nine R&D teams were set up to work on the various steps of producing cloth, and some progress was made fairly quickly. Some of the most complicated-sounding things worked fight off, and some of the most trivial seemed to take forever. What worked on linen almost never worked on wool, and vice versa. You never can tell about research.

As time went on, an increasing number of researchers were foreigners, since a lot of bright kids throughout Europe were reading our magazines and wanted to get in on the action. We let them in-once they survived the Warrior's School.

Baron Piotr went to Okoitz with us both as a member of my household and as a floating member of all the R&D teams. Whenever the teams ran into math problems they couldn't handle, they took them to Piotr. He was good as a general idea man, too. He stayed head of the mapmaking group, but now he rarely went out into the field. This got the mapmakers moved to Okoitz as well, with their lithographic machines set up in the new cloth factories.

The ladies at the cloth factory gave the R&D people a warm and friendly welcome and soon got to referring to them as "the Wizards." The guys liked the t.i.tle, and the name stuck.

Chapter Twenty-nine FROM THE JOURNAL OF d.u.c.h.eSS FRANCINE.

Childbirth was not as bad as I had been led to fear it would be, but it was certainly painful enough. The midwife had convinced me that at thirty I was too old to be having a first child, and indeed she had me quite worried, but my son and I came through our ordeal alive and in good health.

I secured a wet nurse for him immediately so that my nipples would not become unlovely. Within a month, by fasting and exercise, I fit well into my old dresses, but more months pa.s.sed before I felt myself shapely enough to keep my bargain with Friar Roman. In all, he did four nude paintings and gave two of them to me. I put them away, to look at in my old age, I suppose. Soon I could ride Anna without pain or danger, and a fast run through the countryside, often in the company of the delightful Sir Wladyclaw, became my greatest pleasure.

Conrad did not ask to come to the christening, and so I did not invite him. Baron Wojciech stood in his stead, and Duke Henryk became my son's G.o.dfather. I arranged it thus so that Henryk might be more inclined to see that my son one day got his patrimony. We named him Conrad to remind my husband of his duty to our child.

Yet in truth I did not want to see my husband. My anger at the way he treated our child was such that years must go by before the hurt was eased. Instead, I put my mind to the problem of a.s.suring my son's future. After much thought, it occurred to me that if I could do some service to Duke Henryk, some service greater in value than the three eastern duchies, he might be prevailed upon to see to it that my son was properly enlarged, as was his birthright.

Conrad and Henryk were preparing for an utterly stupid war with the Knights of the Cross, a war that would surely get them into a further war with the entire Holy Roman Empire if Emperor Frederick 11 ever stopped fighting with the Church long enough to get back to Germany.

War with the Crossmen will put them in the bad graces of the Church as well, for the Teutonic Order is legally a branch of the Roman Catholic Church. Already I am sure that the real reason why the Vatican was delaying granting Henryk the crown of Poland was this planned war against the Church!

Well, the death of Pope Gregory IX and the fact that Celestine IV died after only two weeks in office haven't helped much, either. Rumors from Rome have it that the factions in the College of Cardinals are so bad that they may be years electing another Pope, and until they do, poor Henryk will have nothing to cover his head but a hat! Not that he's earned anything better.

The color change was on the trees before a suitable opportunity presented itself to ingratiate myself with Henryk. Sir Wladyclaw scouted the eastern frontiers with his men, and often they went well beyond the borders in search of our enemies. One day, he told me that Prince Daniel of both Ruthenias, our neighbors to the east, was va.s.sal to the Mongols and not at all pleased by the situation.

It was an audacious thought, but I wondered if I could persuade this Prince Daniel to throw off the Mongol yoke and swear fealty to Duke Henryk. Surely the Mongols had learned to fear my husband, and word of his protection might be enough to keep Prince Daniel safe. If I could manage it, surely Henryk would be deeply in my debt. Perhaps enough for him to feel obligated to do right by my son. At least it was worth a try.

Sir Wladyclaw agreed to help me in this endeavor, for it was his task to protect our frontiers, and what better way to do that than to put a friend across the border in place of an enemy.

I left my baby with his wet nurse and one of my maids at Wawel Castle and rode out in the early dawn. I was accompanied by Sir Wladyclaw and a dozen of his men, three of whom spoke Ruthenian, and we rode secretly to the city of Halicz and the court of Prince Daniel.

It was a journey of two days, even for our Big People, for we dared not ride along the railroad tracks for fear that word of our mission would get back to Conrad. We had to travel by slow and winding forest trails where our mounts could not make their best speed. And once we got into Ruthenia, the trails were even worse than those in Poland.

Indeed, just before we stopped at Przemysl for the night, the trail was covered with a black grease that was at once sticky and slippery. The point man and his mount slipped in it and went down in a dreadful heap, though fortunately they were unhurt save for the grease and dirt. We all wondered at what this strange liquid was and who had dumped it there. It certainly made a mess by splashing on my dress and Anna's barding, and the knights accompanying me were spotted with it as well.

But of course, with their camouflaged armor and barding, a few spots made little difference.

I was delighted to find that there was a Pink Dragon Inn in Przemysl, and the innkeeper there, once he was made acquainted with who I was, was most helpful. He was easily sworn to secrecy, he made us most comfortable, and he was even able to show my maid the way of removing the spots, using lighter fluid. He said that everyone using that trail was afflicted with the greasy mud, for it had always been there.

We reached the court of Prince Daniel the next evening and were given by him a warm welcome. Sir Wladyclaw and I were placed next to the prince at the high table, and I was delighted to find that he spoke excellent Polish, as did many of his subjects.

Prince Daniel was a robust and fascinating man of about my husband's age, full of vigor yet with a sharp wit and a good sense of humor. He told us of many of his hunting experiences and of some of his adventures fighting the Mongols. Sir Wladyclaw was able to equal or even top a number of his tales, and I told of the Mongol attack on Three Walls, of how I manned a swivel gun, and of how Conrad's army slaughtered the Tartar horde at our feet.

"I've heard of these guns of yours, but of course I've never seen one," Prince Daniel said. I knew that he had been forced to send men with the Mongols against Poland but that he had not gone himself. Yet it was not politic for either of us to mention this unfortunate fact.

"Then you must come to Poland, my lord. My husband's factories make them by the thousand," I said.

"Now, that might be difficult, your grace, for you see, I am va.s.sal to the khan and thus unfortunately an enemy to your people, at least in theory."

"How sad. I would much rather have you for a friend," I said, and smiled.

He smiled back and said, "You understand, of course, that things are not always what one would wish. "

He looked about, afraid that he might have said too much in public. "But we must talk more of this later.

For tonight, we must be soon abed, for we wake early tomorrow for a stag hunt. I am very proud of my kennels here. My huntsmen and I would be delighted if you and your fine gentlemen would join us."

"We would be honored, my lord."

That night I cautioned Sir Wladyclaw and his men to not take first honors in the hunt by getting to the kill first, as they could easily do riding on Big People. Some huntsmen are easily offended in this way.

Hunting with dogs is rarely done on my husband's lands, for neither he nor Count Lambert before him liked the sport. A pity, for it is exciting to chase the dogs across the fields, to race to the kill, and then to share the roast venison in the evening. Conrad is such a bore about some things.

One does not hunt deer in armor, as one does with wild boar or bison. Fortunately, Sir Wladyclaw and his men had their dress uniforms with them, and they made a bold show in their new red and white garb, so covered with gold. They were proud to tell how all their decorations had been made from booty taken from their enemies, and many Ruthenians looked on them with envy, for these people had to pay gold to the Mongols, whereas we had gotten it from them!

The hunt was beautiful, and the dogs tore the throats from two stags by dinnertime. After a light lunch brought out by the stewards, I found myself separated from the others and in the company of the prince.

This was not at all by accident, for we had both been trying to arrange it so all morning.

"You ride so beautifully, your grace. Never before has a woman kept so close to me in the hunt. Why, I almost think that you could have beaten me to that last kill if you had really tried."

"I could only follow your example, my lord. But surely you have more interesting things to talk of than my poor horsemanship. "

"Indeed I do, my lady. You spoke truth last night when you said that I should see your country. I would dearly like to do so, but I fear both spies in my court and the fact that I could be arrested in your land as a spy myself. Yet I have heard many wondrous things about what your great husband accomplished this spring on the battlefield and the wondrous machines that he has on the rivers and even in the air. It is true, isn't it? He can really fly?"

"He has men who can pilot machines that can fly, my lord, though he does not do it himself. He says that he's too old, though his last liege lord, Count Lambert, was older than Conrad and flew a great deal."

"I would like to see these things for myself. Can you think of a way that it could be arranged?"

"You must be of a size with one of the knights that accompanied me here, my lord. If you and my party and, say, four of your men were to ride out to one of your other estates, no one would think it strange.

We could even let them think that we would be lovers if you thought that wise. "

"That would be a delightful thing, my lady, did I not fear the fact that your husband is called the fiercest fighting man in all the world. And in truth, my wife is no simpering lily, either! I think it would be best if we kept our pleasant relationship platonic."

"I quite agree, my lord, with much the same regrets as yours," I said with a sad smile. "Well, then, once our party is out of sight and in some secluded place, you and your men could trade horses and costumes with five of mine. In the armor of a Radiant Warrior, no one would recognize you. Indeed, you could keep your visor down if you wished. In addition, these mounts we ride are very special. They can go like the wind, and no one in Poland would question a man who rode one. We could go there and be back in a week, my lord."

"You seem to have this well planned out, your grace."

"Indeed, I have thought long on it."

But then we had to join the others, for the master huntsman rode up carrying the droppings of a large stag in his hunting horn for the prince to examine.

And so it was that Prince Daniel got the grand tour of the battlefields, saw our aircraft, and rode on a steamboat. He was astounded almost as much by the Big People. I was able to show him some of my husband's factories, with their huge moving machines and white-hot spraying steel. We toured East Gate, and he found that starting the next spring, Conrad would be building a fortress like it every week. Yet what impressed him most was the three million Mongol heads he saw up on pikes.

"These are not all the Tartars we killed, you know," I said. "About half a million more were drowned in the Vistula when they tried to swim across, and they were so weighted down that most of them never did float up. There's still a fortune in booty lying for the taking on the bottom of the river."

"My G.o.d!"

So over a week pa.s.sed before we were again in Ruthenia. Prince Daniel wanted to talk to his n.o.bles and councilors, but I knew that he would throw off the Mongols and swear fealty to Duke Henryk could he but work out a suitable treaty with us.

He invited me back in a month, and of course I would be there. While back in Cracow, I sounded out Henryk, and he approved in principle of what I had done.