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 off 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 modem 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 modem 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 clothwrapped 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 sackthe 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 thirteenthcentury Poland. We would need iron, steel, and-if possible-gunpowder by the hundreds of tons.
That meant heavy industry, and heavy industry is equipmentintensive. 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, traditionminded 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 1. 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.
