The Radiant Warrior

Chapter Twelve

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ

Cilicia was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life, movie stars and the National Ballet included. In the twentieth century, a woman who could dance that way would be in Hollywood if the Bolshoi didn't kidnap her first.

Understand that the Polish girls around were mostly pretty, but then those that were available were all about fourteen years old, and at that age, they're all pretty. It's nature's way of getting them married off. But the two truly outstanding women I'd met here were both foreigners, and I have a theory about that.

In a civilized country, people pick their mates for fairly impractical reasons. Is he witty? Do her hobbies and interests agree with mine? Does he dance well? And most important, is she pretty? Will my friends envy me because he's so tall and handsome?

In all cultures, some people never marry, and often those who don't meet the local standards of desirability are the ones who stay single. Over many centuries, this results in a selective breeding pressure toward people who are attractive and socially adept, but not necessarily intelligent, resourceful, or tough.

In a primitive culture, people have to be more practical in their choice of lifetime partners. Can he provide me and my children with enough food for us to survive? Can she cook and sew and butcher an animal properly? Is he a good enough fighter to save us from our enemies?

Is she tough enough to defend our hut when I'm gone?

These aren't matters of personal preference or social prestige, this is survival. If you pick wrong, it could hasten your death. It's so important that in many cultures, the people directly involved aren't allowed to choose for themselves. Older and supposedly wiser heads do that for them, and marriages are arranged by the parents.

This results in a selective-breeding pressure quite different from that of more civilized peoples. People might be more tough and self-reliant, but they are not more attractive. In fact, I suspect that you could take a good guess at how cultured a person's ancestors were simply by seeing if he or she is attractive.

In the thirteenth century, Poland was only two centuries away from a primitive, tribal culture. It would take many more centuries to transform them into a more attractive if less tough people.

But France and the Middle East had been civilized much longer, and that's precisely where Lady Francine and Cilicia came from.

I'm not saying that this is Ultimate Truth, but I'd argue it over a beer.

Cilicia's talents in bed were as outstanding as her abilities on the dance floor, and I'm glad that I didn't have to take her as a slave because I certainly wanted to take her.

She was bright, too. In two short weeks, she'd picked up enough Polish to communicate, and her accent wasn't as thick as her father's. I admit that she talked me into letting her people stay, despite all the problems that we both knew would occur.

Her technique was to examine things and tell me the name of the man in her group who could show us how to do it better. She examined the blade of the fancy dagger that Sir Vladimir and his brothers had given me last Christmas and pronounced the steel to be inferior. My sword met with her admiration, and when she asked if we could do such work, I had to admit that we couldn't. But one of her people could.

She talked about pottery and cloth and glass, but I think that it was the papermaker that finally convinced me. To really spread knowledge, you have to have plentiful books. There simply was no possibility of producing enough parchment to do that, even if I could automate the process of producing it. It takes the skin of a whole sheep to make — a single large sheet of parchment, and there is a limit to how many sheep you can grow. But if we had paper, I knew I could build a printing press.

So that night, between bouts of Mil. Spec, lovemaking, we planned how our peoples could work together without killing each other. Essentially, the program was to keep them as separated as possible, with contacts only for professional purposes. I would give them some land and keep my people out of it, except for apprentices, who wouldn't be allowed to spend the night. Except for Zoltan, her people would leave their land only with my permission.

My people would build hers some minimal housing, enough to get them through the winter, and we would provide food for the first year, after which they would be on their own. One half their man-hours would be spent teaching my apprentices and in R&D work. We shook on it, a novel custom for her, and in the morning her father was delighted with the deal.

Cilicia, of course would be staying with me. My father didn't raise anybody that dumb!

So my carpenters and masons stopped what they were doing and started putting up a housing unit. No indoor plumbing, no defensive features, and the kitchens would be detached. It wouldn't be as nice as Three Walls, because we were up against a time limit.

Not only was winter closing in, but I wanted them out of Three Walls before the Great Hunt. I didn't want fifty noble guests, a few of whom had fought Moslems in the Crusades, rubbing shoulders with guests who weren't even Christians! That was asking for trouble.

But after two weeks at Three Walls, I had to make my rounds of the other installations again. I was getting ready to leave when Kotcha, my mount's rubdown girl I, all fifty pounds of excited nine-year-old, ran breathless into my bedroom.

"Anna's had puppies!" she shouted.

This announcement left me momentarily stunned. "Kotcha, horses don't have puppies. They have foals. And Anna's not expecting. You can tell on a horse. The body gets bigger and the breasts fill with milk. This is the wrong time of the year for that, anyway."

Children in the Middle Ages didn't have to be told about the birds and the bees. It was normal for the entire family, parents, children, and various relatives, to live and sleep in a single room. Sex was something normal that had happened around them all their lives. And if that wasn't enough, they were mostly farmers, and watched animals doing it as farm children have always done. Making sex a secret is a modern perversion.

"Anna's not a horse! And they look like puppies!"

"The first part is true enough."

"Maybe you'd better come and look. My lord."

"Maybe I'd better."

A crowd had gathered around Anna's stall, and I pushed my way through it.

What I saw turned my stomach. If ever there was a bunch of prematurely born foals, this was it. They really did look like oversized puppies, with tiny spindly legs they could barely crawl on. Born in November, for God's sake, and there were four of them. No wonder they had aborted. It was incredible that they were still alive. There was only one decent thing to do. Put the poor things out of their misery. I got out my good Buck jackknife.

"You people get the hell out of here!" I shouted at the crowd, which evaporated.

"Kotcha, you'd better go, too. You don't want to see this."

"What are you going to do?"

I crouched down to her level. "I know that this will be hard for you to understand, Kotcha, but sometimes things aren't born right. Sometimes, well, something goes wrong, and when it does, the only nice thing to do is to make them not hurt anymore."

"But what are you going to do?"

"These foals, these 'puppies,' won't be able to grow up right. Look, Anna's breasts haven't even started to swell yet. She won't be able to feed them. They'll starve."

"They eat hay, just like Anna does."

"They're too young to eat hay. Small mammals have to have milk, and Anna doesn't have any."

"I saw them eating hay!"

"Kotcha, I've tried to explain, but I'm just out of explanations. It's something that has to be done. Now please go away."

"You're going to kill them!"

"Yes, Kotcha. I have to."

"NO!" She ran to the back of the stall, grabbed a pitchfork, and stood in front of the colts pointing it at me. Fifty pounds of sheer courage and no brains at all.

"Damn. Anna, would you talk to her. You know that this is necessary, don't you?"

Anna shook her head No, and stood beside Kotcha.

If I had to, I could always disarm Kotcha and lock her in her room. But if Anna was against me, it wasn't so straightforward. She could whip me easily in a fight.

"Anna… damn. There's nothing in our sign language that covers this. Let's go over to the letterboard and talk this over. Kotcha, you can stay right here and watch the babies."

I'd made up the letterboard more than a year ago when I learned that Anna was intelligent. She couldn't talk but she could spell things out by pointing at the letters. If you could call it spelling.

She went over to it and spelled out KEDS OK.

"Kids okay? You're telling me that those are normal?"

She nodded yes.

"They always look like that?"

Yes.

I sat down on the ground. "Oh my God! I nearly murdered them! But what are they going to eat? You don't have any milk."

ET HAY ET GRAN ET ENEDING

"They can eat anything, the same as you do?"

Yes.

"Your species always has them four at a time?"

Yes.

"Who… who was the father?"

NO FADER

"No father? Then how… Anna, some fishes and lizards reproduce asexually, parthenogenetically. Do your people do that?"

Yes.

"Huh. But this isn't a sensible time of the year for a herbivore to reproduce. Anna, what triggers it? Why did you have them now and not some other time?"

SHE ASK

"She? You mean Kotcha?"

Yes.

"And all she had to do was ask? You reproduce voluntarily?"

Yes and yes.

"I'll be damned. How long does it take them to grow up?"

She tapped her hoof four-times.

"Four years, huh? Anna, do you like having children?"

Yes and yes.

"Well, having more people like you around would sure be helpful. You keep on having them until further notice. Is that sufficient?"

Yes.

"Good. I hope you accept my apology for the stupid scene I just made. I guess I'd better talk to Kotcha now. How long before you're ready to travel?"

She gave me the "ready" signal.

"The morning after childbirth? Well, if you say so. We leave in an hour. I'm through trying to second-guess you. From now on I'm going to ask."

Yes.

I apologized to Kotcha, but she stayed mad at me, the way a kid will. It was months before we were friends again.

Actually, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I had reacted emotionally and had almost made a horrible mistake because I hadn't stopped to think. I'd known for years that Anna was a member of a different species than a horse. Just because the adults of her species looked like horses was no reason to think that the juveniles would. And since when do you do mercy killing on people? Because Anna was people, and I had gotten into the bad habit of forgetting it.

I'd had the saddler make a sort of second saddle that attached to the back of Anna's regular saddle. This let a passenger ride sidesaddle behind me and have someplace to brace her feet. I took Cilicia along to show her some more of the country, to give her a chance to show off some of her new western-style outfits, and for sex, of course. There was no point in messing around with strange ladies when I had perfection at home.

It took us two days to get to Copper City. Anna could make it in one during the summer, but winter was closing in and the days were much shorter. The lack of a decent artificial light cut into travel time as much as it did into industrial production.

My experiments in trying to distill a decent lamp fuel from coal tar had met with a pretty dismal failure. The stuff had so much sulfur and ammonia in it that it cleared the room of people when I fit the lamp. It smoked badly, too.

I was toying with the idea of trying to drill for oil so that we could have kerosene lamps, but the only oil fields nearby were at Przemysl, a city that was originally Polish, and would be again, but had been in the hands of the Ukrainian Duchy of Halicz Ruthenia for fifty years. Getting permission to set up an installation there would probably take a major diplomatic effort.

I was stumped.

When I got to Copper City, the duke was just arriving.

He had Lady Francine with him, and two dozen armed men.

"Damn, boy! Do you always run a horse like that? You'll kill her!"

"Not Anna, your grace. She likes a good run."

"People say that whenever they see you on the road, you're always at a dead gallop and never seem to have time to talk."

"It's just that between your projects, Count Lambert's, and my own, there isn't much time, your grace. I hope I haven't been rude."

"No, but it keeps them talking about you."

"I suppose it does keep me in the limelight, your grace," I said as I got out of the saddle and helped Cilicia down. She was short and slender but surprisingly heavy for her build. A dancer's body is all smooth, hidden muscle, and remarkably dense.

She bowed to the duke, who nodded back, but she stayed out of the conversation until invited in, as a good woman should. In the twentieth century, the ladies would have monopolized the conversation for hours, talking about nothing. The thirteenth was less decadent.

"What the hell is a limelight?"

"It's…" Daylight dawned in the swamp. "It's what I've been trying to think of for two years, your grace. It's a very bright artificial light made by burning a gas under lime, and it's what will double the production in our factories."

"Double the production? I don't follow you, boy."

"It might even triple It. As things are, we can only work during the daytime, your grace, and then only during good weather in the wintertime. Our expensive machinery is idle almost two-thirds of the time. With a good artificial light, we can shutter up the windows and run things day and night!"

"How're you going to get that much work out of the peasants? Three days of it and they'd fall over dead!"

"Well, you don't work the same men continuously, your grace. You work them in two shifts, one working days and one working nights. We're already doing that with the smelters and the blast furnaces, where we can't stop at night, but the animal fat lamps we use are expensive to operate and don't give off much light. The accident rate at night is three times that of the day shift, and a lot of that is caused by poor lighting. But limelights are as bright as day!"

"But you'd stiff have to double up on the housing, and that's what most of the buildings around here are, unless you figure to run their beds on two shifts too."

"That would cause more trouble than it would be worth, your grace. Every family needs its own apartment. But the expensive things are not the sleeping rooms. What costs is the bathrooms and the kitchens, and there is no reason why both shifts can't use those same facilities."

"Sounds good, boy. You get it working and I'll want some for Piast Castle."

"I'm not sure that we'd want to put any of them inside a dwelling place, your grace. The gas I'll have to use will contain carbon monoxide, a poison until it's burned. But it should be safe enough in a factory where there's always somebody around to make sure that a lamp doesn't go out."

"Whatever you say, boy. You'll be staying with me at the inn, won't you? I always rent the top floor when I'm here."

"If you wish, your grace, although I have a bed set up in my office."

"No, you come with me. There's plenty of room. I take the whole floor so I don't have to have any strangers around. I have enemies and there's always the chance of a hired assassin. You and your lady join me and Lady Francine for dinner after you've had a chance to clean up."

One didn't argue with the duke. "Thank you, your grace. We are honored."

Cilicia and I got to the dining room before the duke and Lady Francine. I was in a beautifully embroidered outfit that I'd been given last Christmas, and Cilicia wore a lovely woolen gown.

The duke and Lady Francine arrived in a few minutes, She was wearing a sort of miniskirt, mesh stockings and high heels, and that was all. She was topless, as were the waitresses, and she was actually wearing slightly more than they were, but it was unusual and unexpected for a customer to compete with the help.

Introductions were made and the duke noticed me trying not to stare.

"I like it that way," was his only comment.

"A very attractive style, your grace. Count Lambert once told me that when a vassal is on his lord's lands, he should punctiliously conform to his lord's customs. Since you are my lord's lord, it would seem that this obligation is on me doubly. Cilicia, would you please remove your dress to conform with Lady Francine's style?"

Cilicia stared at me for a moment. I suppose that I was being a little rough on her, since she'd grown up among people with a nudity taboo, and while she somehow felt that it was all right to dance naked, she was not used to walking around that way. But having only one of the ladies at the table bare-breasted would have been awkward for all concerned, especially for Lady Francine. Anyway, Cilicia had to learn our customs.

"Yes, master," she said as she stood and unlaced both sides of her dress.

"Master?" the duke said. "After the battle you fought last year to clear Poland of slavery, you own a slave?"

"No, your grace. It's just that she comes from a land east of the Caspian Sea, where slavery is common. Her father 'gave' her to me, mostly to keep her safe. She keeps on calling me 'master,' and I can't seem to break her of it."

"Cilicia, you are not my slave. Please stop calling me,master.'"

"Yes, master." She pulled the dress over her head. folded it and set it on a stool.

"Dammit! Stop calling me that!"

"You say I am free, yes?"

"Yes!"

"Then I may do as I wish, yes?"

"That's what I've been saying, dammit!"

"Then I wish to call you 'master,' yes?"

Frustrating! How the hell do you answer that one? "You see, your grace? What's a man to do?"

"Nothing, boy. When a woman gets an idea into her head, a man just has to live with it. Or he does if he wants to live with her, and this one looks like a keeper."

Cilicia removed her blouse and tucked up her slip so that it was as short as Lady Francine's. Seeing the duke's frankly admiring gaze, she struck a dancer's pose and waited until he'd filled his eyeballs.

Everyone else in the room was trying to act as though it was perfectly normal for a beautiful woman to undress at the table of an inn, for to anger the duke was not wise.

"Boy, you do seem to collect the beauties! You've near outdone me this time, but not quite!" He gave Lady Francine's hand a squeeze.

Lady Francine, who understood why I had done what I had done, quietly said, "Thank you, Sir Conrad. Thank you for everything."

"Yes, it's a style I like," the duke said. "I may not be the rutty buck I once was, but I can still admire good girl flesh. I've half a mind to dress all the serving wenches at Piast Castle this way, just to improve the scenery. In fact, seeing these two ladies side by side, I've got all of a mind to do it!"

"It looks nice on truly beautiful women such as our ladies here, your grace, but it's not a style that would suit every woman."

"So what? If any of my wenches are — ugly or too droopy, I'll just replace them with girls who aren't!"

"Then, too, your grace, they keep the inn here warm because of the waitresses' costumes, or rather their lack of them. Your castle is pretty drafty. Wouldn't it be better to wait until spring?"

"Wait? Boy, I just turned seventy. I don't have time to wait! In fact, I'll do it right now. Sir Frederick! Attend me!"

A knight in full armor set down his bowl of soup and came briskly over. "Your grace?"

"Ladies, stand up. Take a good look at these women, Sir Frederick, then go back to Piast Castle and tell the castellan that I want all the serving wenches at the castle looking the same way when I get back."

"Yes, your grace. I shall leave immediately. But… these two ladies are the most beautiful that I have ever seen in my life! Where below heaven is the castellan going to find two hundred like them?"

"There aren't two hundred like them in the world! I didn't mean that they had to be this pretty, you ninny! I meant that they should dress this way! I want to see their tits!"

"And don't leave now. It's dark out there. Go back to your supper and leave first thing in the morning."

I thought that Count Lambert got away with a lot, but the duke could do anything that didn't offend the majority of his major supporters. If the servants didn't like the change in outfits, tough. Their vote wasn't taken.

"Yes, your grace." The knight beat a speedy retreat.

"Sit down, girls," the duke said. "You see what I have to work with, Sir Conrad?"

"He seemed a most courteous and obedient vassal to me, your grace." This was as close as I dared come to criticizing the duke.

"Yeah, but he's stupid. Men like you are rare."

"Your grace, I think that any difference between Sir Frederick and me has more to do with education than with basic ability."

"That makes it rarer, boy. There aren't any schools here like the ones you went to, but I hear that you're working on it."

"Yes, your grace. We now have nine dozen primary schools operating in Count Lambert's county. There is one in almost every town and village."

"Almost? Why not all?"

"Your grace, you must remember that I am a mere knight. I can only try to persuade a baron to do things my way. If he's against me, what can I do?"

"You're talking about Baron Jaraslav, Sir Stefan's father, aren't you."

"Yes, your grace."

"He's a hard-nosed bastard, but he's served me well on the battlefield. "

"I'm not speaking against the man, but in this case he's wrong. Education is important! It's not as though those schools will cost him anything. I'm putting them in at my own expense, with the help of the peasants."

"Boy, I don't see why you're pushing this reading and writing business so hard. What good is that going to do a peasant?"

"As things stand, very little, your grace. But things aren't going to stay as they are for much longer. Right now, most people are spending most of their time simply doing grunt work, generating power with human muscles. But you saw that steam-powered sawmill of mine. You said it had the power of two hundred women. Well, the women who used to walk back and forth on the walking-beam sawmill aren't doing that anymore. They're all doing other work now, more skilled work."

"That's just a start. Tomorrow, I'll show you the steam engines we're installing to turn the machines in the shop here, and the others to knead the clay for the mold shop and pump the bellows of the smelter."

"Every time one of those machines goes in, we need fewer dumb peasants and more skilled men. What's more, the skills needed are changing too quickly for men to get by simply by learning the trades of their fathers. They'll have to learn them in schools and out of books. They have to be able to read."

"I'll grant you're right when it comes to factories, boy, but most commoners are farmers. It has to be that way if we're all going to eat!"

"True, your grace, but only so long as we stay with current farming methods. I've already started to change things. There was another bumper harvest at Okoitz this year, but this time they got the entire harvest in, despite more rainy days than usual. The difference was as simple a thing as a wheelbarrow. They have a thresher attachment on their windmill, and they were able to store the entire harvest in their existing storage bins threshed. Had it still been in the shucks, as is usual, half of it would be on the ground. In the next few years I'll be introducing new plows, reapers, and other harvesting machines. The era of the dumb peasant is over!"

"Interesting. But how far can this go?"

"Quite a ways, your grace. I once spent four years in a country called America. That nation was the greatest seller of agricultural products in the world, and its people are among the best fed, Yet only one man in fifty was a farmer! Most of the rest worked at trades that are unknown in this country. There aren't even words for them."

"Yet somehow all this troubles me, Sir Conrad. I keep asking myself if it's all really worth it."

"They seemed to think so, your grace, Tell me, would you like to live in a home that was warm in the coldest weather, that was as cool as you wanted it on the hottest day? Would you like to have fresh fruits and vegetables available at any time, no matter what the season? Would you like to have an instrument called a telephone that would let you speak to any of your vassals, though they were a hundred miles away? To any duke or king in Christendom? Would you like to have doctors so skilled that they could keep you healthy for many years to come? Would you like to be able to walk on board a great silver ship that could fly you to China in an afternoon, while a pretty waitress brings you drinks as you look down on the clouds below? And would you like to have these things not only for yourself, but for the least of your subjects?"

"Tell me, your grace, are these things worth it?"

"Maybe, boy. Maybe. But your priest has told me of the terrible wars your people have, of weapons so mighty that one man, pushing a button, could destroy whole cities. Of hatreds, and of famines when there was no need for famines. What do you say to that?"

"I say that I'm an engineer, your grace. I can build machines that can heat your home, harvest your crops, and flush your shit. It's not fair to expect me to make you love your fellow man as well. That's not my job!"