Conrad Starguard - The High-Tech Knight Part 10

"To me? You think they would?" I was fl.u.s.tered.

"They'd be d.a.m.n fools not to. Your other subjects at your inn and your bra.s.s works are all becoming rich and these people know it. That and they know you're a soft hand. Why, you haven't whipped a man since we got here!"

"You think I should swear in everybody here."

"Well, I can't swear to you, of course. I'm already sworn to my father. But everyone else, yes."

"Very well, Sir Vladimir. I'll bring it up with them at tomorrow's dinner."

"You'll do that only if you swear these ladies to secrecy! Without that, every man in the valley will be crowding you at first daylight."

And that's just the way it happened. At dawn, Yashoo came to me and asked if he might swear to me and be my man. Tomas, the masonry foreman, was on his heels with the same request. Within minutes, the whole population was crowding around me. It really touched me and I had trouble keeping the tears back.

One at a time, they raised their arms to the sun as I did by their side. They swore to serve me honestly for the rest of their lives and I swore to protect them for the rest of mine. Once all the men were sworn in, I surprised them by asking their wives if they wanted to swear as well.

Every one of them did. It meant that I would be responsible for them even in the event of their husband's death. Krystyana was staring at me earnestly. "Sir Conrad, do you think- I mean could we-"

"You ladies want to swear as well?"

"Oh, yes!" came all five voices at once. "Then we'll do it." There wasn't a dry eye in the place. Dinner was two hours late, but somehow they got lot more done than on any day before. Now they were on their own land, building their own homes. It showed in the way they worked and in the way they walked.

Chapter Eight.

I made my monthly trip to Okoitz alone. Anna can run like the wind and it took less than an hour, whereas with the girls and their slow, docile palfreys, the trip would take all day.

The count was still being taciturn with me, and still wouldn't mention our wager.

One of the knights told me that he suspected that Count Lambert was having some sort of financial problems with his wife in Hungary. I supposed that could be the reason for both the count's tightness with money and his unusually rude behavior. But I could do nothing but try to live with it.

Vitold the carpenter and Angelo the dyer had everything going smoothly. The factory was almost finished and a hundred wheelbarrows had been built to speed the harvest. Mostly, I spent my two days talking with the farmers about the new plants I'd given them.

Most were growing well enough, but how did you harvest them? Could this sort last through the winter? How do you cook this thing? And most often, what part of it do you eat?

The flowers were doing beautifully, and everybody was astounded at the size and numbers of the blossoms. Particularly popular were the sunflowers, which were three yards tall and had flowers that moved in the course of the day so as to always face the sun.

There was a wedding that day, and the bride proudly carried a single sunflower as her bridal bouquet. I was getting ready to object to this, since that bouquet cost one-twelfth of the world's known supply of sunflower seeds. But I couldn't interrupt the ceremony, so I waited.

When it came time to throw the bouquet to the bride's maids, the bride gave it a healthy toss over her shoulder. The sunflower, which must have weighed three pounds, caught one of the girls in the face, knocking her to the ground and giving her a fat lip.

I walked away. n.o.body was going to waste another sunflower. Not that way, at least.

I left at dusk of the second day, and we made the run home in the night. I swear Anna can see in the dark.

Vladimir was up and around in a week, so tough was his const.i.tution. And a week after that, he took to spending his mornings hunting with Annastas.h.i.+a. She turned out to be a good bowman, nothing like my old friend Tadaos the boatman, but good enough to bag her share.

I was delighted, since it put meat in the pot. Our diet was too heavy on grains and way too light on everything else.

One morning, they came back with a woebegone individual walking in front of them.

"What have we here, Sir Vladimir."

"A squatter on your lands, Sir Conrad. It didn't seem right to kill him out of hand, so I brought him to you."

"I'm glad you didn't kill him. What do you mean, a squatter?"

"He has a hut hidden on your property. He's been farming your land and hunting your forest."

"Nothing to get upset about," I said. "Well, fellow. Would you like to leave peacefully, or would you like to swear to me and stay on your land?"

"I could stay?"

"Certainly. You'd have to give me a share of your produce, of course. Say, one- fourth of what your fields yield and one-half of any game you bag."

"I could even hunt? Oh, yes my lord!"

So I swore him in and had Natalia open up a file on him. After he left, Vladimir was looking grumbly. I asked him why.

"First, that man was probably an outlaw."

"Well, I can't condemn a man on a 'probably.' Anyway, maybe he's ready to rejoin society."

"Then there is the fact that the usual terms would be half his produce and he wouldn't be allowed to hunt."

"I know, but I didn't want to lean on him too hard. As for hunting, well, there's plenty of game out there and there's no point in letting it go to waste. Half of something is better than all of nothing. Look, he won't cost us anything, and if he works out, well, we have a lot of mouths to feed around here."

"The decision is yours, Sir Conrad, but the other fords won't love you for charging less than they do."

The squatter came back two days later with six deer, a wild boar, and a bison. He had with him his wife, three children, and eight of his friends, squatters who also wanted to swear to me.

They were rough, st.u.r.dy-looking fellows and each carried an axe in addition to his belt knife. The axe was a Slavic peasant's universal tool. With it he would build his house, slaughter his pig, and defend his land. It was just the right length to double as a cane, and the singlebladed axe head was shaped to be a convenient handle. They carried them everywhere, even on dress occasions. They even danced with them, at least in some of the men-only dances. It made a formidable weapon.

Once, in a museum, I saw an ancient Egyptian axe of almost exactly the same design. Oh, the Egyptian one was made for a prince, and was covered with gold decoration, but the basic shape was identical. Some things are hard to improve on.

By the end of the month, a total of twenty-six squatters were turned into yeomen.

I never stopped buying food, but they sure helped.

Of course, my relations.h.i.+p with the yeomen wasn't all one way. I invited them regularly to Three Walls for holidays and less formal social events. There weren't any serious problems in the first few years, but if there had been, I would have had to do something about it. The only time-consuming thing I had to do was visit them all once a year. That took an entire week.

Vladimir said that I ought to have a bailiff or foreman for so many men, and thinking about it, he was right. I contacted one of the yeomen and told him to get together with his friends and elect a leader. The yeomen were delighted with my faith in them. Vladimir was scandalized.

By this time the miners and masons enlarging the old mine were down to the water level. The pumps were working around the clock, but the rock around the shaft was porous and completely soaked. We not only had to pump out the mine, we had to pump out the mountain as well. We were gaining on it, but the miners alone could not keep up with our progress.

I put six of the masons to cutting grindstones from a nearby sandstone outcropping. We'd been sending our supply mules back empty, so transportation out was essentially free. There wasn't much profit in grindstones, but there was some.

The rest of the masons went to work cutting limestone blocks for the foundations, bas.e.m.e.nts, and firewalls of our main building. Limestone isn't the best material to use for a firewall. Fire will eventually ruin it. But it will hold for a while and that was all we needed. Anyway, we had a lot of limestone and we were short on sandstone, which would be needed for the blast furnaces.

Things were settling down and starting to run smoothly. Even the brewery was doing well. With little else to drink, people in the Middle Ages drank an awesome amount of beer. Per capita consumption at Three Walls was over a gallon a day, and that's counting women and small children as well as the men. We went through three huge thousand-gallon barrels a week. Oh, it was weak and flat, but the volumes involved were still frightening.

Nothing I could do about it, though. These people wouldn't mind if I whipped them, and giving me free use of their daughters was just the expected thing. But if I had reduced their beer supply, I would have had a revolution on my hands. I'm just glad that I didn't have to pay a liquor tax on what we made.

Next Sunday evening, I announced that we would be throwing a dance on the following Sat.u.r.day night. We'd be inviting the yeomen, and anyone who could play a musical instrument could take an hour off each evening for practice.

I soon had to retract that last offer. Over half of the people there could play some sort of instrument. After a lot of haggling and argument, we eventually settled on a band master. He was to choose twelve people and they could have the hour off, but I couldn't have half the workforce gone every afternoon.

They mostly had to make their own instruments, and I noticed some of my old parchment drawings turn up as drumheads. At first the band was pretty heavy on percussion and woodwinds, but in time they became a fairly professional outfit.

I held my first formal court just before the dance, since the yeomen were there and Sir Vladimir had been after me to do it for some time. He wasn't happy with my usual informal ways of doing things, and I suppose that there is something in the human animal that wants formality since we act that way so often.

We moved a few tables together under the dining pavilion and put a chair on top of them. My throne.

I got into one of my best outfits, asked Natalia to bring her records and take notes, and asked Sir Vladimir to run the show, since he knew the procedure.

He showed up in full armor, and carried a lance in lieu of a halberd, as though he was a royal guard. He shouted in fine theatrical style.

"Oyez! Oyez! The honorable court of your liege lord, Sir Conrad Stargard, Lord of Three Walls, is now in session. Any who have need of his advice or consent should now come forward!"

Two of the yeomen had an argument over a pig, which they brought along as evidence. They both had a pig run away on the same day, and only one pig had been caught, which they both claimed as theirs. I let them both go on for quite a while, since much of the reason for a court of law is to provide a place where social tensions can be drained off.

As they droned on, I noticed that Natalia was sitting at the table below me, which gave me a pleasant shot down the front of her dress. I didn't know why that should be interesting when I'd seen her naked a thousand times, but somehow it was.

It was soon obvious to me and to everyone else that both men thought they were fight, and that one pig looks much like another.

I said that the facts were now clear and that I had reached my decision. I told the first man that the pig was his, and that he could take it home. Then I told the other guy that the pig was his, and he could take it home. Then I charged them each a half a pig as court costs, and said that they should do the butchering away from camp. This way they could each take home half a pig.

One of the men asked how would I get my court costs. I said that both of my halves were running around in the woods some place, and should he see them, he should return them to me. I thought I was telling a joke.

He nodded very seriously and said, "Of course, my lord."

Two weeks later, the yeomen showed up again, each carrying half a pig, which they had found wandering about in the woods, still stuck together. They returned my property to me and both thought that my justice was excellent.

It takes all kinds. My father told me that.

The only other item on the agenda was the formal request of two of my subjects to be married.

As lord, I had the fight to demand that the bride spend a night with me before she went to her husband, or to accept a bribe from the groom to not touch her. I didn't like the custom. Either the girl was in love with her prospective husband, in which case she wouldn't want me, or she was pregnant, in which case I'd worry about harming the child, or both.

I always waived my fights to the bride. Heck, I had trouble enough satisfying the volunteers.

Naturally, I always gave my permission to marry, but they liked me to go through a certain amount of rigmarole. I asked the father of the bride if he gave his blessings on the proposed marriage. He did. Did the father of the groom bless this marriage? He did. Did anyone present see any reason why these two should not be married?

n.o.body said anything. I nodded to Sir Vladimir. , "Know you that the proposed wedding between Maria Sklodowska, daughter of Tomas Sklodowski, and Mikolaj Kopernik, son of...- "

I nearly fell off my chair on the table. Maria Sklodowska was the maiden name of a woman scientist known as Madam Curie, after she married a Frenchman. And Mikolaj Kopernik was better known by his Latinized name, Copernicus. He was responsible for starting the entire modem scientific revolution!

And they were getting married?

It was a moment before my historical sense caught up with me. Copernicus was born in the fifteenth century, Madam Curie was born in the nineteenth century, and I was stuck in the thirteenth century. The names were obviously just a coincidence.

Obviously.

But I had Natalia make a note in the file that I should get yearly progress reports on any kids they had. There might be a genius coming along.

The dance went off pretty well. Krystyana. and I showed them the polka and the mazurka, which instantly became popular. Perhaps it was the fact that here was a way that you could hold a woman who 'Wasn't your wife, and do it in public in a socially acceptable way.

The yeomen did a vigorous, all-male number that involved huge leaps and clas.h.i.+ng their axes together. It was something between a dance, a contest, and a military training exercise. It was vaguely reminiscent of a group of karate students running through a kata. Not as polished as the National Ballet, but impressive for all of that.

During a break in the dancing, I had a wooden framework I'd had made brought out. This had two small upright logs about two yards long set up so that we could adjust the distance between them.

I announced a contest. I would give six silver pennies to the man who could squirm through the smallest crack.

This was an unusual contest, but six pence was a whole week's pay. The compet.i.tion was spirited. Little Piotr Kulczynski won, but Krystyana wasn't impressed.

"Good," I announced, "I was worried about a thief being able to crawl into our new building. Now I know how wide to make the windows!"

It was a successful event, and we agreed to throw a dance every two weeks from then on. Eventually, we even got a wooden dance floor.

I was getting ready to make the trip to Okoitz one more time when there was a commotion on the trail.

Friar Roman Makowski came in riding a mule with his ca.s.sock up almost to his waist. As he dismounted, I could see that the insides of his thighs were worn raw.

Overexcited and limping, he rushed over to Sir Vladimir and me.

"Sir Conrad! Thank G.o.d I've found you!"

"Slow down, kid. What's the problem?"

"It's Tadaos, the boatman! They're going to kill him!"

"You'd better start from the beginning."

"You remember the boatman we rode with on our way to Cracow? Well, this spring you wrote him a letter bearing Count Lambert's seal that was sent through my monastery. Since I knew the man, I delivered it to him. He had to leave for Sacz immediately, but he said that he would reply on his return to Cracow."

"You remember the deer he shot by the River Dunajec last fall? Well, he shot another one in the very same place two weeks ago."

"Except this time it wasn't a real deer, but only a dummy. As he got out of his boat to get his kill, the baron's men arrested him for poaching. They would have hanged him forthwith save that he had the letter from Lambert with him and the baron was loath to offend so great a lord as your liege."

"He threw Tadaos into the donjon and wrote Lambert that unless a fine was paid, Tadaos would be hanged in six weeks! Again the letter came through my monastery and I obtained permission to deliver it directly to Lambert."

"Lambert told me that it was none of his affair, but that you could do as you saw fit. So I came here and had the awfulest time finding you."

"Then there's a month to go before they hang him. We don't have to panic yet," I said. "You have the baron's letter?"