Лео Франковски - The High-Tech Knight

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.

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. Nobody 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 constitution. And a week after that, he took to spending his mornings hunting with Annastashia. 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, sturdy-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 relationship 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, basements, 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.