Лео Франковски - The High-Tech Knight

"Parchment, your grace? You mean the paper money I gave him for a souvenir?"

"No, not the miniature paintings, although that was pretty impressive, too. Any people who would use works of art for their currency instead of silver must be truly cultured! But no, I mean the parchment arsewipes you gave him."

Once, when we were walking north from Zakopane, Father Ignacy had gestured that he was going off to the bushes, presumably to relieve himself. I'd given him some toilet paper and he'd taken it without comment. I hadn't thought of it since. It appears that rather than using it, he'd kept it as a treasure from the future. "The toilet paper?"

"That's what he called it. People who can afford parchment to wipe their butts are richer than anyone in this century!"

"Your priest told me why he swore you to secrecy, and I have to agree with most of his reasons. You can count on me to keep my mouth shut."

"Look, boy, you don't have much life left, so you get along and enjoy yourself. Tell the guard to send in the castellan. I'll have him fix your party up with the best rooms available."

I bowed and the duke waved me out.

Whew! At first I thought the duke himself was going to kill me! And toilet paper is the most impressive artifact of modem civilization?

I returned to the courtyard to find that Sir Vladimir was having problems with the palace grooms. They didn't know how we were to be treated.

"Relax, boys," I said to them, "the duke is giving us the red-carpet treatment."

"Sir? Do you mean red with blood?"

"I mean that he is giving us the best rooms in the palace, and you may assume that he means our mounts to be very well cared for as well."

"Ladies, Sir Vladimir, let's tour a castle."

Sir Vladimir was thrilled that the duke had complimented his prowess and had me recite much of what was said word for word. Then he had me do it again in front of a dozen witnesses.

I played along with it. For a man like Sir Vladimir, peer approval is the most important thing in the world, what money is to Boris Novacek, or the Church is to Father Ignacy. I owed Sir Vladimir my life and a few moments of lip service was a small price to pay.

We were treated with considerable deference by everyone. Even those who outranked us crowded around. Barons and counts seemed eager to make our acquaintance. Word of the duke's approval traveled quickly, and stories about me had been circulating for months. But I think that much of it was the morbid curiosity people have about a condemned man. Finally, one knight simply offered his quite sincere condolences and said that if there was anything he could do for me before the end, or even after it, he would be most happy to oblige.

"Thank you, sir," I said. "But why is everyone so convinced that I'm going to die? We're talking about a trial by combat, not an execution! It's going to be a fair fight in front of witnesses. I've been in three fights in the last year-four, if you count that nonsense with the whoremasters guild in Cieszyn. Most of them were against odds, yet I've hardly been wounded. I'm going to win this trial, I tell you."

The knight looked awkward, but Sir Vladimir said, "Sir Conrad, I'm afraid that you don't seem to understand what you're up against. You'll be fighting a champion! A man who does little else but train for this sort of thing. The Crossmen have two of them, and each has killed more than thirty men in public trials and duels."

"Even so, I'd say you had a chance if the fight were strictly swords. But the rules are 'arm yourself' and he'll come at you with a lance. Sword against lance, you'd have no chance against even a poor lanceman. Lance against lance-Sir Conrad, I've seen your lancework and a plowman could do better. I'm afraid you have no hope at all."

"It's as bad as that?"

"It's worse than that, but I lack the skill to state it more strongly."

Meals were all served formally at Wawel Castle, with every lord seated by his lady in strict order of precedence. This put us pretty far down the line, but not quite at the bottom.

The food was well served and decorative enough, but not at all to my taste, mostly overprepared, overcooked, and overspiced. It was like something done by home economics students who were trying too hard.

But Sir Vladimir and the girls were happy,

At supper, the duke publicly praised Sir Vladimir's battle skills and insisted on hearing a blow-by-blow account from him. Sir Vladimir gave it in a very animated fashion, shouting battle cries, waving his arms, and praising himself in a way that would have been in very poor taste in the twentieth century.

Here it was the proper thing to do, I suppose.

At any rate, Sir Vladimir was the man of the hour and Annastashia gloried in it.

There was a dance after dinner, and I discovered that the steps I'd shown people in Okoitz last winter had reached Cracow before me. Only the dances had become Conrad's polka and Conrad's mazurka and Conrad's waltz.

My rather embarrassing thirteenth century bunny club, bought and set up one night when I was drunk, had become known as Conrad's Inn, and six different men asked me if I wouldn't set one up in Cracow.

The girls' riding outfits had full-length skirts with that sewn-in panel that I had suggested so that they could ride a man's saddle while maintaining feminine decorum. The very next day after the ladies of Wawel Hill saw the things, fully a dozen women were sporting them. How many seamstresses lost a night's sleep over that, I couldn't tell you. The new-style dresses were called "Conrads."

But the serious work I'd done and was rightly proud of? The windmill I'd designed and the looms and spinning wheels I'd designed and the factory I'd designed? Oh, they were Lambert's mill and Lambert's looms and Lambert's wheels. There is very little justice in this world.

The rooms we got were fabulous by medieval standards, suitable for visiting royalty. That is to say, about up to the level of an American Holiday Inn, except that the furniture wasn't as comfortable.

We also got a servant apiece, which was awkward. I'd never had a personal servant before, and I really didn't like it. Krystyana was thrilled, though, so I put up with it until bedtime.

Then I found that the servants expected to sleep in the same room as us. It seems that one of the reasons for the drapes hanging around the bed was to give us what medieval Poles considered to be sufficient privacy, so that the servants could sleep on the trundle bed next to us, in case we wanted anything in the middle of the night.

Now, I'd spent the night before celibate in a monastery and I had no intention of staying that way again. But I could hardly make love to my girl with a couple of strangers not a yard away. I tried to send them out, but they didn't want to go. They said that if they went back to the servants' quarters, everybody would think that we'd found fault with them.

The final compromise was that they would sleep in Sir Vladimir and Annastashia's room next door, but they made us promise to beat on the wall if we needed anything in the middle of the night. Exasperating.

With Sir Vladimir a hero and the girls being treated like human beings (Krystyana had taken a terrible snubbing at Cieszyn Castle last spring), leaving the next morning as I had planned was out of the question. In fact we stayed the next three days, with everybody but me having a marvelous time. There were dances and games and a hunt that I managed to duck out of by asking another knight to take Krystyana.

When the others were out hunting, I stayed alone in my room, and it felt marvelous. It was the first time I'd been alone since I'd stood guard duty last winter. Being alone gave me time to think, to order the strange things that fester up in my garbage-pit mind.