The Radiant Warrior

Chapter Fifteen

The duke was impressed by the stories he heard about Count Lambert's Great Hunt, and decided that we should do it on all of the lands subject to him, about half the land that would one day make up modem Poland. I was appointed his Master of the Hunt, and delegated all the work to Sir Miesko. He was delighted to do it, since the hunt on Lambert's lands alone had made him a wealthy man. He spent almost six months on the road getting the thing organized, and I didn't much get involved. That suited me just fine, since I wanted to work on the limelights.

Getting the limelights going was another job of bucket chemistry. I had some iron grids cast that would fit in the bottom of one of our beehive coke ovens, to raise the coal off the bottom so we could run water underneath. While that was being done, work was started on the gas tower, a circular water tank in which floated a vast close-fitting, copper-lined, straight-sided barrel. Not that a straight-sided barrel was unusual. They were the only kind in use until I introduced the potbellied variety and proved that they leaked less.

Pipes went under the tank and up to just above the waterline. When gas was produced, the barrel rose, to settle again as the gas was consumed.

How big a gas tower did we need? How much gas was needed to keep a limelight going? Was one coke oven enough? Too much? I hadn't the slightest idea. I just made things big and hoped for the best.

Then, too, I'd never even seen a limelight, I'd only heard about them. As I understood it, it was a hydrogen flame under a lump of lime. I didn't know what sort of a burner was used, so I used a bunsen burner.

Six weeks and eighteen thousand man-hours later, seventy-five tons of coal was loaded into the converted beehive coke oven and lit on fire. It was necessary to have the grid completely covered with coal so that the steam would be forced through the coals rather than around them.

The system worked to the extent of generating a flammable gas, and filling the gas tower, but the faint blue flame produced was hot enough to heat the lime only to a dull red. Not a very efficient light, which was the purpose of the exercise.

I could think of only two ways to get a hotter flame. One was to use pure oxygen instead of air, since the nitrogen in the air cools a fire considerably. The trouble with that was that I didn't have a good source of oxygen, and we weren't quite up to building an air liquefaction plant.

Oh, I could have heated mercury, a remarkably cheap substance in the Middle Ages. It was an industrial waste product from the manufacture of sulfur. At moderate temperatures, mercury absorbs oxygen and at higher temperatures, gives it off. But having that much mercury vapor around was scary. At least with carbon monoxide you know when you're being poisoned. I'd save the mercury scheme for a last resort, if then.

The other way was to preheat the air and gas before they were burned. I spent a few frustrating weeks getting a burner of this sort going. The trick turned out to be to mix clay with slaked lime and mold the heat exchangers into the lamp itself, then run it through the brick kiln to harden it. A few months later it was discovered that a fire clay lamp painted with slaked lime was stronger and brighter. One problem with this scheme was that it required pressurized air, and thus a second set of pipes running to each lamp. But at least it didn't need a second fancy locked valve at each installation.

But by the time the new lamps were ready, the weather had closed in and the water under the gas tower froze. In normal operation, this wouldn't happen because the gases themselves would be hot enough to keep the water liquid in the worst weather, but we had shut the system down while I worked on the lamp. We drained the water, covered the tower with straw and circulated hot coke oven gas through it until the crust of ice was melted. Then we started over.

This time the lamp got to a fairly bright orange after an hour or so, and I declared that to be good enough.

Other things were going on while I was playing with lights. Zoltan's people started doing us some good. Their pottery man came up with five colors of glazes made from local materials, and we went into production making tableware, at first for ourselves, but then for sale as well.

Their papermaker was in limited production turning our old linens into very nice rag paper.

And their sword-maker was screaming at the top of his lungs at Ilya, who was naturally screaming back at him, both men being of the opinion that sufficient volume could make up for their lack of a mutual vocabulary. The workers had a betting pool going on which one would kill the other first, and at what time of the day this happy event would take place.

The two smiths went on screaming for over a month with nothing accomplished, so I had to step in and demand that the sword-maker demonstrate to us his methods. They surprised me, being nothing like the Japanese method I'd told Ilya about two years before.

He collected up a pile of wrought iron and beat and cut it into small pieces, about the size of a ten zloty piece, or an American quarter. He put a measured amount of this iron into each of a dozen round bottom clay flasks and packed them full with raw wool, Then he sealed the flasks and took them up into the hills where it was quiet. He built a fire around the flasks and after a day of burning he started gently shaking the flasks and listening carefully. When the metal inside "sounded wet," he let the fire go out. On breaking open the flasks, there was a fused blob of steel inside he called "wootz." This he worked at relatively low temperatures — never red hot-until it was shaped like a sword or knife. Then he hardened and tempered it in the usual manner. The result was watered steel that looked just like the steel in my sword, and kept a fine edge.

It wasn't quite as good as my sword, however. I pared the edge off one of his knives with my blade, which had the swordsmith staring goggle-eyed. None the less, it was better than anything Ilya had done using the method I'd told him about, so we went into production using the wootz method.

The glassmaker started to make glass out of sand, lime, and wood ashes. After having him make a very fancy drinking glass as a Christmas present for Count Lambert, I had him make a chimney for the gas lamp, to conduct the fumes away. The chimney made a great improvement in light output, and it took me a while to figure out that the glass was transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared, which was reflected back to the lime, making it hotter.

All of which shows that it isn't necessary to know what you're doing in order to be able to accomplish something. It's only necessary to be sufficiently persistent. Sort of like the infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of word processors who wrote everything in existence.

Anyway, we now had good light source, and I gave orders to plumb the factories and furnace areas, and had two gross of the lamps made. By spring, we had light as long as we wanted it, by which time there were eighteen hours a day of sunlight, and we didn't much need the lights.

But next winter…

The shops weren't idle either. We made a rolling mill to make sheet brass, and some small punch presses to use the sheetmetal. I designed some simple door locks and padlocks, and they looked to be a profitable line.

Our reinvestment rate was over ninety percent. That is to say, most of the things we made were for use in our factory system. But we still needed to buy a fair amount of stuff from the outside, and additional cash was always welcome.

Transportation costs were very high in the Middle Ages, especially for land transport. The best mules can only carry a quarter of a ton, can only go thirty miles a day, and must be loaded and unloaded by hand twice a day. Expensive.

This meant that the most profitable products would be small, light, and valuable. Locks, glassware, pottery, cast-iron kitchen products, plumbing parts, and clocks were all being made by spring, as well as our older brass works' lines of church bells, windmill parts, hinges, and other hardware. I wanted to add paper, printed books, and cigarette lighters in the near future.

We expanded the paperworks from a two-man outfit to one where a dozen men worked, and added power machinery to cut and mash the linen rags to pulp. Within the year we added a papermaking machine, which was a major undertaking but not a major headache. I'd at least seen a papermaking machine.

For a printing press, I decided to bypass the evolutionary step of the flatbed press and go directly to a simple rotary press, and to cast the type in a solid line, rather than bothering with movable type. I drew up what

I thought were some very simple designs, but they took a team of our best machinists along with the Moslem goldsmith over a year to make them work.

And the cigarette lighter took. the longest damn time. We actually spent three times as many man-hours developing it than we did on our first steam engine. It had seemed so easy in the beginning.

We had flint, steel, and white lightning for fuel. I drew up a simple Zippo-type lighter, except that I made it cylindrical instead of flat to simplify the machining, and with a pull-off cap because we didn't have a decent steel spring to hold the usual flip-top in place. It was bulkier than the modem equivalent, but these people used pouches instead of pockets, so that wasn't a problem.

The problem was in generating a spark. Flint was harder than any steel we could make. The spark wheel wore away before the flint was touched, and all without a spark. I even sacrificed the disposable butane lighter I'd had with me from the twentieth century. We took it apart but didn't learn much, since the flint was about gone.

But flint gouged up the modem spark wheel as well, which told us that the flint in a lighter wasn't like the flint we were using. This got us to collecting flint from every source we could find, but all of it seemed to be the same.

I finally dropped back and punted. Some of the more expensive modem lighters used a quartz crystal that was struck by a tiny hammer to generate a spark electrically.

I found some quartz crystals in a shop in Wroclaw, and had our jeweler cut several pieces at different angles of the crystal. Within a week, we had a working lighter! After that, it was just a matter of tooling up for a very profitable line.

It can take a half hour to start a fire with flint and steel, but it only took moments with one of our lighters. You just took off the cap, raised the little weight on its slider, let it drop and presto! Fire! We sold them by the thousands! It also gave us a nice market for lighter fluid, which was wood alcohol, after a while.

By then, spring was on us and it was time to get back into the construction business. Transporting coke by pack mule from Three Walls to the boat landing on the Odra River was extremely expensive. After that, transport costs by riverboat weren't nearly so bad, about one-twelfth the cost per ton mile.

Many of Count Lambert's knights had followed his lead in digging coal mines for fuel, now that potbellied stoves were available. Questioning them and going down most of the shafts, I was able to map out the coalfield fairly well.

All indications were that I could dig for coal right on the riverbank. All through the winter, I'd had six men digging a pilot shaft there on some of Count Lambert's land, and they'd struck coal five dozen yards down.

It made all kinds of sense to build a mining-and-coking operation there, so I made a deal with Count Lambert for half a square mile of land and as soon as the weather broke, I got ready to head there with a construction crew.

FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI

It was early morning, and we were mounted up in caravan fashion to go to the new lands sold to Sir Conrad by Count Lambert near the River Odra. There we would open mines for coal and build coke ovens of a new design.

Sir Conrad rode up the line of loaded mules and three gross men, seeing that all was ready. I was stationed near the front, next to Sir Vladimir. The three Banki brothers were away making final arrangements for their upcoming weddings, which we were all looking forward to.

There was a great commotion at the gate, and I looked to see the merchant Boris Novacek, a friend of my lord Sir Conrad, crawling through the wood gate on his knees and elbows, for he had no hands!

Sir Vladimir shouted for Sir Conrad, and we both rode to Novacek's aid. Yet Sir Conrad passed us and was there first.

"Boris! What happened?" Sir Conrad shouted as he dug out his medical kit.

"What happened?" Boris said, half dazed. "Why, they cut my hands off."

"Who did this?"

"I don't know. We were never properly introduced." Novacek tried to laugh, but tears came out. "Do you have any water?"

Sir Conrad threw his canteen to Sir Vladimir, who sat Novacek up and held that strange metal bottle to his lips.

"You!" Sir Conrad shouted, looking at a young man in the crowd that was gathering, "Run and get Krystyana!"

"You! Run and get a stretcher! You! Have the men stand down. We leave at three!" Sir Conrad ordered while he opened his kit and examined Novacek's stumps.

"What happened to your guard, Sir Kazimierz?" Sir Vladimir asked.

"Sir Kazimierz? He's dead, poor lad. The good Sir Kazimierz is dead. He took an arrow in the eye and I think he did not see it fly at him."

"You were ambushed?" Sir Conrad said.

"Yes, my friend. My lord. Cut down on the road. There's nothing to buy now in Hungary. I sell your cloth and metalwork there, but they have nothing to give for it but silver. Even all the wine they can spare has already been brought here, I carried nothing but silver and gold, all my silver and gold. We had no caravan to protect us, you see, so they chopped my hands off." Novacek spoke as one falling pleasantly to sleep after hard work and many beers.

"He's lost a lot of blood," Sir Conrad said to my love Krystyana, who had just arrived, walking as fast as she could, for she was heavy with child. Of course she would not took on me. He tied off the arteries in the left stump, and left it for Krystyana to sew up, going around the merchant to tend the right one.

"Boris, who put on these tourniquets for you?" Sir Conrad asked.

"The tourniquets? Why, I put on the right one myself, after the fight. The highwaymen put on the other."

"But how could you have tied it without any hands?"

"I still had my left hand then. It was hard, but one can do things when motivated sufficiently." Novacek seemed not to notice the trimming and sewing they were doing to the stumps of his wrists, and I think the tourniquets must have had them completely numb.

"Then how did you loose the left one?"

"They cut off my right hand in the battle, and my sword with it. They cut off my left one that night, in sport. At least they thought it great sport. I wasn't asked." Boris giggled.

I could see a terrible fury building up on Sir Conrad's face.

"So this happened yesterday?"

"Could it have been only yesterday? It seems much longer. But it must have been yesterday afternoon, for I planned to make Three Walls by sunset."

"And where did it happen, Boris? Can you remember where?"

"It was on the trail from Sir Miesko's. A ways down the trail. About half a night's crawl." He giggled again.

"Anna, can you smell out Boris's path back to the outlaws?" Sir Conrad asked his mount, as he finished tying off and cleaning up the right stump. Annastashia was there, washing her hands with white lightning, ready to sew it up.

Anna nodded Yes, a thing I had gotten used to.

Sir Vladimir was standing between Sir Conrad and me, but I was sure that Sir Conrad was looking directly at me.

"Then mount up! There's work to be done!" The look in Sir Conrad's eyes left no room for argument, or even comment. I mounted my horse, checked my sword, bow and arrows, and followed Sir Conrad and Sir Vladimir out the gate at a gallop.

I heard Novacek yell, "Stop! There are sixteen of them!"

Sir Vladimir turned and said, "What of it? We have God on our side!"

But I don't think Sir Conrad heard him.

Anna had her head to the ground as she ran, sniffing like a hound, which slowed her down some. We would never have stayed with her otherwise, and even so Sir Vladimir and I were hard-pressed to meet her pace.

Sir Conrad never turned around to see that we were following. Sir Vladimir turned once, saw me following and smiled. Then he turned again to the trail ahead, for our pace was wild.

I unsheathed my bow and strung it at a full gallop, as I'd often practiced before. Tadaos the bowman had taught me much of shooting, and there is none better than he at a standing-shot. But Tadaos will not shoot from a horse. In fact, I think that it is not possible to pull his mighty bow from any but a standing position. Myself, I can scarcely bend it even then! But I had taught myself horse archery, riding past the butts and letting fly for many a Sunday afternoon. A good thing to do when your love will not look at you.

Thus I had an arrow nocked and ready in my left hand when Anna suddenly left the trail and charged through the brush.

Sir Conrad was in his plate armor and seemed not to notice the branches whipping by, and Sir Vladimir, in chain mail, would hold it dishonorable not to be able to follow where his liege lord led. Myself, I was in but ordinary clothes and while they had broken off the larger branches in my path, I was still sore pressed to stay with them, and must needs protect my face with my arms and clutch tightly to my bow test I lose it.

Nonetheless, I got first blood in the fight, for as we went through a meadow at break-neck speed, I saw a sentry in a tree stare at us and nock an arrow.

I let fly and saw that my shot was true. He dropped his bow half pulled, clutched his chest and fell.

Sir Vladimir saw this and lowered his lance.

"For God and Poland!" he shouted.

Sir Conrad's sword had been out since we had left the trail.

The bandit camp was in a clearing, and I think that they must have had such confidence in their numbers that they had not moved it after committing yesterday's crime, even though their prisoner had escaped. Immediately and without hesitation, Sir Conrad charged into their midst, covering himself completely with glory. I saw heads and arms fly as he cleared a swath through them. Sir Vladimir was right behind, and I saw two men fall to his lance on his first pass.

Being unarmored, I dared not follow, but stopped at the edge of the clearing. The brigands were slow to act, stunned by the fury of the attack. I let fly at those at the edges and killed three while they stood there. Then suddenly all were in motion, and I killed but one more with my last eight arrows, though I wounded two besides.

The surviving bandits put all their efforts at Sir Conrad and Sir Vladimir, and I think that they scarce noticed me if they saw me at all. I prayed thanks to God in heaven for this favor, but when my arrows were exhausted, I felt obligated to sheath my bow, draw my sword, and join the others.

I had no chance to bloody it, for it was suddenly over. Bodies and pieces of bodies were scattered about the meadow, many sporting the bright red feathers for which I had paid extra to fletch my arrows.

Not a man among them was left alive. Sir Conrad was looking at them.

"I think we got carried away, Sir Vladimir. We should have taken a few of them alive."

"To what purpose, Sir Conrad? To hang them later? What good would that do? To show people that they shouldn't be brigands? They already know that!"

"We haven't even proven that these were the men who attacked Boris. We have only Anna's word for it."

"Well, there's proof for you. Look there. That's Sir Kazimierz's stallion. I'd recognize it anywhere. And I'll wager we'll find his armor when we sort the booty."

"What of the sentry?" I said. "He might still be alive."

"Sentry?" Sir Conrad said. "Piotr, what are you doing here?"

I was astounded. "Why, I am your squire and you told me to come, my lord!"

"I told you? I certainly did not!"

"Wait, Sir Conrad," Sir Vladimir said. "He was standing just behind me when you ordered me to follow you. 1, too, thought you meant him to come with us."

"Well, I didn't."

"A bit late to say that now, my lord. Look about you. Those arrows are his. He killed at least as many of the enemy as did you or 1. If this were my grandfather's time, and any knight could knight another, I'd dub him right now, for he saved my liege lord-you! You didn't even see the sentry he skewered from a treetop. That man was aiming at you when he did it."

All this was not precisely true. That sentry hadn't had time to aim at anybody. But I blessed Sir Vladimir for saying it.

"Oh," Sir Conrad said. "Piotr, I guess I owe you an apology, as well as my thanks. Let's see if that sentry is still alive."

He wasn't. Not only had my arrow pierced his heart, but he had broken his neck in the fall.

"It looks like you wasted an arrow, Piotr!" Sir Vladimir laughed. "The fall alone was fatal!"

It was an old joke, but we all laughed at it. These noble knights were treating me as an equal!

We looked through the camp. There were horses and mules belonging to Novacek, and armor belonging to him and to Sir Kazimierz was found and identified. There was also a third suit of chain mail, doubtless the property of some earlier victim. It was small and made for a person of slender stature.

"There's really not much here in the way of booty," Sir Vladimir said. "Novacek's property must be returned to him, and Sir Kazimierz had a younger brother who would appreciate having his horse and armor. They aren't wealthy, and I would feel best if they were given to him."

"Agreed," Sir Conrad said. "I'll see that it gets to the kid."

"That leaves this last set of mail. It's of Piotr's size and I'm minded that he should have it. Traveling as much as he does, he needs it, and he truly earned it this day."

Sir Conrad looked at me and smiled. "Agreed. Piotr, you are now the proud possessor of a set of armor, with helmet and gambezon. Wear it in good health!"

"The rest of these tools and weapons are mostly junk. We'll give anything that looks decent to Count Lambert as his share, throw the rest into Ilya's scrap bin, and that settles the problem of the distribution of the spoils, except for one major item."

"Boris was half delirious, but he distinctly said that he had all his wealth with him when he was attacked. As well as he's been doing these past few years, that was probably several hundred thousand pence. Where is it?"

We spent much of the morning looking for the treasure, but without luck. Finally, we loaded the animals for the trip back to Three Walls, and I took a few moments to try on my new armor. It was a remarkably good fit, and even the open-faced helmet sat well, so I made a brave appearance reentering the city.

Naturally, we were the center of attention, and everyone was looking at us. I caught Krystyana's eye, but she quickly glanced away.

Sir Conrad announced that the journey to the Odra River would be delayed a few days, and said that in the afternoon, right after lunch, every available person in Three Walls would go to the bandits' campsite to search for Novacek's treasure.

At dinner, bold in my new armor, I came and sat by my love's side in the dining room. I tried to make polite conversation, but she stopped and stared directly at me.

"It takes more than armor to make a knight, Squire Piotr!"

Then she left, her food uneaten.

That afternoon and the whole of the following day, almost a thousand people searched for the treasure. Sir Conrad had Anna try to smell out where they hid it, but all she found was their latrine. There was shit there, and Novacek's left hand, but no treasure. We threw the bandits' bodies on top of their own filth and piled dirt over them.

Sir Conrad lined the people up fingertip to fingertip and marched them for miles from north to south and then from east to west. Every square yard of land for miles around was searched again and again. We found Sir Kazimierz's body, and Novacek's other hand, but no treasure.

One yeoman's cottage was taken apart and the ground under it dug up, for no other reason than he lived a mile from the camp. Then a crew rebuilt it for him.

Countless trees were climbed and no few hollow ones were chopped down, but to no avail.

Novacek affirmed that he had lost just under four hundred thousand pence, and not a penny of it was ever found. The reward on the treasure was never claimed.

Eventually, it became a normal pastime, a thing to do on one's day off, to head into the woods with a shovel, and many young couples claimed that this was what they were doing in the woods as well. It became a standing joke to ask how you dug a hole with a blanket.

Yet it was a game my love would not play.