I awoke to find that the carpenter was burning all the logs he had split and laid out the day before. Not one big bonfire, you understand, but hundreds of little fires, one in each split log. Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were tending the fires under his supervision.
I knew that I didn't want to get involved.
I scrounged up some splinters of about knitting-needle-size and retired to my room.
You see, it often happens with me that a problem that I have in the day gets solved in the middle of the night. I'd woken up in the dark with the answer, sitting bolt upright and startling Natalia.
It was obvious. I had a product sample, a sweater that my mother had knitted. All I had to do was figure out how to stick the knitting needles into it and then perform the operation backward! Taking it apart, I could tell how to put it together.
I had the needles ready by dinnertime, and I eagerly went at it as soon as the meal was over. It was not as easy as I had thought. I was not aided by the fact that my sweater was very fancy, with lots of embossing and special twists. Also, I did not know which end was up.
It was a long, frustrating afternoon. I learned little and lost a third of my only sweater.
Ladies wandered in and out, but I really didn't have time to be friendly.
The carpenter was still out there, burning his logs, with a new crew of helpers.
After supper, I was at it by the smoky light of an oil lamp when Count Lambert took the stuff out of my hands, handed it to Krystyana, and sat me down at the chess board.
"Time for recreation, Sir Conrad."
By the end of the third game, Krystyana had my sweater partially reassembled.
"You see, Sir Conrad," the count said, beaming. "Another eldritch art that you have taught my people."
"Uh . . . yes, my lord."
"By the way, do you have any idea as to just what Vitold is doing out there with all those fires?"
"In truth, my lord, he has been confusing me for the past two days."
"Now that is refreshing to hear. I hate to be the only one who doesn't know what is going on. Sometimes I think they play a game called confuse the count.
"Bedtime. Coming, Krystyana? Or is it someone else's turn?"
At noon the next day Vitold showed me the first sample beehive; by dusk he had completed the entire gross. In three days he had finished a job that I had assumed would take months.
It seems that boards were hard to make. They had to be sawed by hand out of tree trunks, using a poor saw. Nails were even harder. They had to be hammered one at a time out of very expensive iron.
But though a modern carpenter thinks in terms of boards and fasteners, Vitold thought in terms of taking trees and making things out of them.
As the firewood was already cut, splitting was a fairly simple job. He then burned out a hollow in each half log, carefully leaving about five centimeters untouched all the way around. An entrance hole was chopped in with an axe, and the two troughs were tied back together again with a sturdy, though crude, linen rope. To harvest, you untied the rope, removed the combs, and retied it.
Vitold's method was one of those brilliantly simple things that I was talking about earlier. There was a lot I had to teach the people of the thirteenth century. There was also a great deal that I had to learn.
I haven't talked much about children in this confession, perhaps because the subject is so painful. In modern Poland, children are cherished, as they are in all civilized countries. In the thirteenth century, this was not always true. Perhaps because so many of them died so young, you did not dare love them too much.
From puberty to menopause, if they lived that long, the women of Okoitz were almost continually pregnant. Most of them averaged twelve to fifteen births. There was no concept of birth control, no feeling that one should abstain from sex. In that small community of perhaps a hundred families, there were typically two births a week. There was also more than a weekly funeral, usually a tiny cloth-wrapped bundle without even a wooden coffin.
The adults, too, died young. Forty was considered old. The medical arts that can keep a sick person alive did not exist. You were healthy or you were dead!
And there was nothing I could do about it. I was completely ignorant of most medicine. Oh, I had taken all the standard first-aid courses. I could give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could treat frostbite and heat stroke and shock. I could splint a fracture and tend a wound. But all that I had learned was learned for the purpose of knowing what to do until the doctor arrives.
I got into this sad subject because Krystyana's baby sister was dead. Her father had rolled on the baby while sleeping and smothered it. Because of the harsh winters and unheated houses, babies slept with their parents. It was the only way to keep them from freezing. And the father just—rolled over.
The look on the man's face—he couldn't have been much older than I was, but his face was lined and weathered, his hands were wrinkled, calloused claws, and his back was bent as if he were still carrying a grain sack—the look on that man's face was such that I couldn't stay through the all-too-brief church ceremony. I had to leave and I had to cry.
Everyone already knew that I was strange, and they left me alone.
I am not a doctor. I am an engineer. I did not know what most of those people were dying of. Hell, nobody here had cancer! People just got a bellyache and died! But I did know that a better diet, better sanitation, better clothing, better housing, and—damn it—a little heat would do wonders for them.
A sawmill for wooden floors and beds that got them off the floor. An icehouse to help preserve food. Looms for more and better cloth. A better stove for heating and cooking. Some kind of laundry—these people couldn't wash their clothes all winter!—a sewage system, and a water system.
These were things that I could do; these were things that I would do!
That and get ready to fight the Mongols.
It was just after Christmas that I started working on my master plan, or at least the first few glimpses of it started to come to me.
If we were going to accomplish anything with regard to the Mongols, we would need arms and armor on a scale unprecedented in thirteenth-century Poland. We would need iron, steel, and—if possible—gunpowder by the hundreds of tons.
That meant heavy industry, and heavy industry is equipment-intensive. A blast furnace can't be shut down for Sundays or holidays. It can't stop working for the planting or the harvest. Its workers have to be skilled specialists.
A steel works at Okoitz, or anywhere else in Poland's agricultural system, was simply an impossibility, yet the work could not be done in the existing cities, either. Not when dozens of powerful, tradition-minded guilds guarded their special privileges and were ready to fight anything new. Obviously, to have a free hand to introduce innovations, I would need my own land and my own people. Well, Lambert had said that was possible.
I would need to be able to feed my workers, and the local agricultural techniques produced very little surplus. Here the seeds I had packed in should help. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and better farm machinery were a ways off, but work on animal husbandry should be started immediately.
I'd already promised to get some light industry going—clothmaking and so on—which would improve my status with the powers that be as well as getting people more decent clothing.
Windmills. We could definitely use some windmills, and I hadn't seen one in this century.
I talked with Lambert about my plans for Okoitz, and while I don't think he grasped a third of what I had in mind, he gave me his blessings. "Yes, of course, Sir Conrad. These innovations are precisely what I wanted you to do. You are welcome to all the timber you can get cut and all the work you can get out of the peasants."
"Thank you, my lord."
"Just don't do anything silly like interfering with the planting or harvest."
"Of course not. Uh, you mentioned once that I could have lands of my own."
"Yes, I did, didn't I. But there's a slight difficulty there. You see, you are a foreigner—"
"I am not, my lord. I was born in Poland."
"Well, you talk funny, so it comes to the same thing. The law is that I can't assign you lands without my liege lord's permission. It's just a formality, really. I'm sure he'll grant it when next I see him, probably in the next year or two."
"The next year or two? That's quite a delay!"
"Oh, likely he'll be by in the spring or summer. What is your hurry? You have just outlined projects here at Okoitz that will take years to complete."
I talked for a while about Mongols, heavy industry, and blast furnaces.
"Oh, if you say so, Sir Conrad. If I must, I'll send a rider with a letter to find the duke, taking your word on faith.
"I must say that belief in a fire that is so intense that one dares not let it die—well, it stretches the mind more that transubstantiation!"
"But you'll send the letter?"
"After Easter, if necessary. You couldn't build anything on your land until the snow melts, anyway."
For the next few months, my time was divided, unevenly, four ways. One was animal husbandry. The people of Okoitz knew the basic principles of animal breeding. They produced outstanding war-horses, but somehow the techniques had not filtered down to the more mundane world of farm animals.
A modern hen produces more than an egg a day. The hens of Okoitz produced perhaps an egg a week. The sheep were small and scrawny; I doubted if there was a kilo of wool on any one of them. The milk cows looked likely to produce only a few liters a day, and then only in the spring and summer. Grown pigs were only a quarter of the size of the modern animal.
Much of the reason for this was economic. A farmer with a cow, two pigs, and six chickens was in no position to get involved with scientific breeding. Another part of the problem was that they tended to use farm animals as scavengers. Kept grossly underfed, pigs and chickens were allowed to run free and were expected to find much of their own food. That resulted in indiscriminate breeding and constant arguments about someone's pigs eating someone else's crops. It also spread shit over everything.
But the count had his own herds, and if we could improve the quality of those, the results would spread. For the most part, my program was a matter of dividing each species into a small A herd and a larger B herd. The A herd contained the best animals, most of them females. They got better food and the best available herdsman, who was expected to get to know them as individuals. They were kept strictly apart from the B herd, except when inferior animals were demoted. The B herd was for eating. There were two A herds for cattle, one for beef and one for dairy products, but it took some time to convince Lambert that it was useful to breed separately for two desired sets of qualities.
The same was done for chickens: one A flock for eggs and one for fast growth. I concentrated on chickens because they have a shorter life cycle, and selective breeding would give faster results.
Breeding for egg production requires accounting. You have to know which chicken is producing how many eggs. This involves an "egg factory," with each hen imprisoned in a tiny cell. It was labor-intensive in that food and water had to be brought to them. I had a small rack built by each cell. When the breeders took out an egg, they put a stone in the rack. Big egg, big stone; little egg, little stone.
Once a month, the hens were evaluated. The best hens got a rooster, and the worst were demoted to the shortlived B flock. The mediocre got to keep their jobs. I got a couple of the older women interested in the project, and egg production doubled in the first year.
As time went on, most of our best animal breeders were women. They seemed to understand the concepts better.
A half dozen holidays came and went. These annoyed me because they cut down on the man-hours I had available. The holidays came to a height in a weeklong carnival, a Polish Mardi Gras, from Lenten Thursday to Ash Wednesday. "Carnival" is Latin for "good-bye, meat." Lent was not so much the religious abstinence from meat eating as the formal acknowledgment that the village was actually out of animal products and that those animals left had to be kept for spring and summer breeding.
The second of my time-consuming jobs was lumbering. Understand that the people of Okoitz had felled a lot of trees. Okoitz was built almost completely of logs, and in the last four years a huge effort had gone into it.
But those logs were actually the by-product of land clearance. If you want to clear land for farming, you not only have to remove the tree, you have to remove the stump. The sensible way is not to chop the tree down; you dig around the tree, cut out the roots, and then pull the tree down. Since you can't dig in frozen ground, tree removal was a summer job.
Lumber cut in the winter is superior to that cut in the summer. It is drier. There was some nearby hilly ground that was not suitable for farming but could do well as orchards. Leaving the stumps in would delay erosion until the orchard was established.
Projects I had in mind for the next summer were going to require a lot of wood, and that all added up to winter lumbering.
The difficulty was that the peasants were not used to working hard in the winter. Except for spreading manure on the snow and basic housekeeping tasks, winter was when you went to bed early and slept late and spent the time in between enjoying yourself. It took a lot of persuasion to get things done.
Incidentally, my horse, Anna, was quite willing to wear a horse collar and drag logs, provided that one was polite to her. Several peasants with whips were bitten and one was seriously kicked before the message got across. Anna developed a friendship with an eight-year-old girl, one of Janina's sisters, and those two made a very productive team. Somewhat later, it was discovered that the count's best stallion was also willing to work, provided that he was allowed to work next to Anna. Such things gave people their first new subjects of conversation since my arrival.
I was watching this strange and amusing trio dragging a huge log down the snowy hill when another log being dragged by a team of oxen broke loose and started rolling.
There were screams and shouts and people scrambling. The oxen were knocked over and probably would have been killed if the rope around the log hadn't come loose. The log bounded downhill, bouncing off some tree stumps and smashing others to splinters.
Mikhail Malinski was downhill of the rolling log. He had been taking his dull axe down to the blacksmith's temporary forge to get the cutting edge sharpened. With the wrought-iron tools, the edge wasn't ground—that was wasteful of iron—it was heated up and the edge was beaten sharp.
Mikhail heard the shouting, looked up the hill, and saw the log coming at him. Dropping his axe, he ran diagonally away. When he saw that he was clear, he stopped to watch, leaning against a large tree stump to catch his breath. The log struck another stump and spun completely around, smashing Mikhail's left ankle against the stump he was leaning on; then it bounced off and continued downhill.
I was the first to get to Mikhail. His ankle was red mush, and his foot was almost off. Blood was spurting from the wound. He was screaming; he knew he was going to die. Without thinking, I stripped off my leather belt, wrapped it around his calf, and twisted it tightly until the squirting stopped.
This was reflexes, this was training, this was what one did until the doctor arrived.
Only, deep inside me, a panicky voice was yelling at me that I was it! There was no impersonal institution to take Mikhail away and tell us later if he lived or died. There was only me, and I was not competent.
But as always, when I am scared and don't know what to do, the actor surfaces. I say the phony words and adopt a phony posture and try to fake it.
"Easy, Mikhail, easy. Don't worry, we'll take care of you." A crowd was gathering. I pointed to a long-legged young man. "You! You run to the castle and tell Krystyana or whoever of the handmaidens is there that I want the kitchen table clean with a fresh cloth on it. I want a big kettle of water boiling, and I want all the clean napkins she's got. Have it ready for us! Now move!" He moved.
"You! Take my cloak off. Spread it on the ground over there." I still had one hand on the tourniquet. "Now, you eight men! Get around us. The rest of you, back! Now, pick him up. Easy, now! Put him on the cloak! That's it. Now, pick up the cloak! No! Face that way, dummy! Now, we carry him back to the castle."
I trailed behind him, still holding the tourniquet, trying to remember what to do next. There was nothing in my training to tell me. Except . . . except, once over a Christmas holiday in the dormitories, I spent two weeks improving my English by devouring Forester's Hornblower novels. There was one very graphic sequence where the excellent Mr. Bush lost a foot in combat and was tended by early nineteenth-century physicians. Oh God, I hoped that Forester knew what he was talking about and was not as great a phony as I was!
We got Mikhail on the kitchen table. "Okay. Now, lift him up and off my cloak; the cloak isn't clean enough. The first rule of tending a wound is to make it clean."
I started lecturing, acting as if this were a classroom demonstration, partly to reassure Mikhail, partly to rehearse to myself what I was to do, but mostly to shut out the reality of the bleeding man in front of me.
I had the count hold the tourniquet, and I cut away Mikhail's clothes with my jackknife. I washed my hands and the smashed foot, talking all the while about the importance of cleanliness. The foot felt like a bag of broken rocks. We got a few liters of wine into Mikhail, and I took a drink myself.
"One break or two could heal," I said. "This foot is going to have to come off." A stir went through the crowd. "That's not so bad. We can make him a new one later, out of wood." I washed my jackknife in wine and then in boiling water. I got a pair of scissors and cleaned them up. And a needle and thread, I remembered. I found the arteries by having Lambert loosen the tourniquet and seeing what squirted. I had to cut away flesh to find the things. Tying them off, I left long threads, as Forester mentioned. I trimmed the skin and pulled it up to the calf. It was "usual" to saw the bone, but not a saw in the town was up to it. I cleaned my sword and chopped the bone with a single hack. Then I sewed the wound almost shut. I left the strings from the arteries hanging out, as well as a twist of boiled linen. Forester had stressed the importance of draining.
Mikhail stood up to it fairly well, considering that the amputation and all was done with no other anesthetic than wine. Most of the time he didn't have to be held down. You see, he wanted to believe my acting job. He needed to believe in the firm words I mouthed, and so he did.
We put Mikhail in one of the spare rooms in the castle, and the crowd dispersed.
I met Sir Stefan as he went to do his nightly guard duty, heavily bundled against the wintery night. The long, lonely hours were telling on him. He looked tired and older than he had been a month before.
"Sir Conrad, what's this I hear about you chopping off a peasant's foot on the kitchen table? What did the man do to deserve that?"
I was blood-splattered and tired. "Deserve? He didn't deserve it at all. He was hurt, and I had to amputate to heal him."
"So your witchcraft includes blood rites?"
"Witchcraft? Damn it, I—"
"Oh, I'm sorry." He held his hand up. "I spoke out of turn. You must know how tired I am, standing guard from dusk to dawn every night without relief while you are bedded safe with a young wench."
"Yeah. I know you've got a rough job. But it's only for a couple more months."
"Two more months of this without a wench of nights, just so you can play peasant carpenter during the day?"
"Look, Sir Stefan. If I hadn't been out there today, Mikhail would have lost more than his foot. He would have lost his life."
"Well, what of it? What damn use is a crippled peasant?"
"You're disgusting."
"I'm disgusting? You've just drenched the kitchen table with human blood! I have to eat off that table while you sleep soundly!" He stomped out.
Mikhail was a model patient. The wound was never seriously inflamed and seemed to be healing well. I visited him several times a day. His wife was tending him, sleeping beside him. The children, including the kid I had brought in from the storm, had been farmed out except during Ignacy's feeding time.
We talked about his future. He was thinking about becoming a trader. Traders were mostly on horseback, weren't they? I promised to advance him money and introduce him to Boris Novacek.
Within a month, I carefully pulled out the long strings, removed the rotted ends of the arteries, and then closed the wound. All seemed well. In a few weeks, we were talking about moving him back to his home.
Then one night he got a fever and was dead in the morning.
I don't know why.
Two weeks after the funeral, Lambert decided that it would be good if Ilya the blacksmith married the widow; a month later there was an Easter wedding.
Lambert had eleven barons subordinate to him. These men held lands from the count. Each had his own fort or manor, and all of them but one had subordinate knights, often with manors of their own. The number of their knights varied from zero to twenty-six. In addition, fifteen knights, including myself, reported directly to the count.
The great majority of the noblemen held their positions on a hereditary basis, but it was still possible for an outstanding commoner to be elevated.
And, of course, the count ran things at Okoitz. A number of specialists—the smith, the carpenter, the baker, and so on—had specific areas of responsibility and worked directly under the count. The castle itself was run by a constantly changing group of adolescent handmaidens, but on closer observation I found that the cook exerted a strong, steadying influence on them.
The farmers worked through a half dozen foremen, who in turn took directions from Piotr Korzeniewski. These leaders were neither elected nor appointed but attained their positions and got things done by a system of consensus that I never fully understood. People just talked things over for a while and then, somehow, things were accomplished.
Piotr had no official standing or title. In theory, all the farmers worked directly for Lambert. I was at Okoitz for months before I realized that Piotr was really the chief executive of the whole town.
Knowledge of Okoitz's ghost structure was to prove very useful to me over the years. Most of the nobility were interested only in fighting, hunting, and playing status games with each other. When I wanted something of a manor—sanitation measures or workers for my factories—the quickest way to do things was to have one of my subordinates talk things over with the informal executive.
But I get ahead of myself.