Лео Франковски - Lord Conrad's Crusade

I didn’t want to do it, but you can’t just ignore a letter from the pope, even if he is an old friend.

There was nothing for it but to spend the afternoon writing him a long letter explaining that while I did have a very large and well-trained army, the fact was that most of my men were very busy doing important things.

What I should be spending my time on was a treatise on patent law, something Europe really needed, but what can a man do? His Holiness must be answered!

We were building thousands of miles of railroads, constructing over a gross of large concrete fortresses a year, and bringing vast areas of new lands under cultivation. We were manning and expanding the mail, telegraph, and radio systems. We had steam-powered river boats on nearly all of Europe’s rivers – as well as the Amazon, the Tigris, and the Indus. And we were building ocean-going ships by the dozen.

They were ferrocrete ships, since we still didn’t have the steel rolling capability to build them out of steel. Anyway, ferrocrete is a fine, strong material, and if it took more manpower to build with it, the material costs were much less.

The power, the wealth, and the glory of a culture is largely based on its technical expertise. What we were doing would make Christians the most powerful people in the world. Eventually, every nation in the world would fear to offend us, and wish to join us. Some day, the whole world would become Christian. This thing must be pushed forward as fast as possible.

Why fight a needless, bloody war when total victory was possible through peaceful means?

We defeated the Mongols when they attacked us, but a whole new generation was growing up in Mongolia. We had to protect Christendom from those hooligans. It a few years, we would be in a position to counter attack, to invade Mongolia, and doing so was a military necessity.

On the other hand, the Arabs had done nothing against us except to defend themselves when Europe – mostly the French, English, Germans, and Italians – had attacked them.

If the Arabs ever did anything serious to us, we would give them a very rude shock. But, until such time, a war with them simply wasn’t justified.

The Mongols were our natural enemies. The Arabs weren’t.

I didn’t mention that one of my wives was a member of an Islamic sect and that a colony of her co-religionists was living on my lands in a valley near Three Walls. They were my best craftsmen, scientists, and technologists, and were responsible for setting up dozens of new industries, vastly expanding the wealth of Christendom. No point in rubbing it in.

I gave the rough draft to my secretary to have some fair copies made, hand-lettered on real parchment. We were making paper by the ton, but some things still required the traditional – and very expensive – parchment. They made it out of calfskin, sheepskin, or goatskin.

One of my normally scantily dressed house girls came to invite me to dinner in my private chambers, one whole wing of the palace. Skin was back in style in Poland. It had never been really taboo, here and in Russia, the way it was farther to the west. I confess that I liked it, if the girl was pretty, but I never tried to influence fashions. I’m not abysmally stupid.

Only today, she wasn’t scantily clad. She was wearing a floor length dress. Everything between her neck and wrists was covered. It had to be because of the papal messenger who was visiting us. Damn him. I mean, it was my palace, after all, and where did these idiots think that little priests came from, anyway?

I was wearing my usual around the castle outfits. Soft black boots, royal blue tights, and a heavily embroidered dark red tunic. I left the blue cape hanging on the wall, since it was more bother than it was worth. My old sword hung on my left hip and my new revolver was in an ornate holster on my right.

I was becoming something of a dandy in my old age. Not that I looked or felt all that old, especially since my Uncle Tom had given me some highly sophisticated medical treatments some time ago, but sixty-two was considered old in this century.

I really preferred to just eat in the cafeteria the way most people did. The food was just as good and it saved a lot of time. But both of my wives, Francine and Celicia, had a thing about large formal banquets. They managed to find an excuse to do so about four times a week. There would be a hundred and twenty people there and they would all be ticked off if I didn’t show up. I didn’t seem to have much choice, but it made me feel… imprisoned.

I found I was becoming dissatisfied with my life, but I really didn’t know why. It was not a new feeling. The disquiet had been growing for months. More and more often I found myself reciting to myself the reasons that I was, of course, deliriously happy. I had more power than almost any other man in Christendom, had two beautiful wives, and more pleasurably, an abundance of other available morsels who talked less and nagged far less. Of course, I was happy.

I walked down past three very lifelike statues of beautiful nude young women, and one that wasn’t a statue at all, but one of my bodyguards. They had a habit of standing motionless and the statues were another bit of camouflage. A few attempts had been made on my life, although I never found out why anybody would want to do that. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anybody that I had offended that much and I had made thousands of people better off.

Uncle Tom had decided that I needed a little protection, so he sent me one of his bio-engineered creations that had been designed to be a combination serving wench, child care worker, dancer, and God-Awfully-Deadly body guard. They looked like sweet and innocent adolescent young girls.

They weren’t. They could cut a man’s throat in an instant, and not feel the least bit of guilt about it.

They reproduced by voluntary parthenogenesis, being able to crank out two litters of four every year, if you asked them to. And when the kids matured, at the age of four, they remembered everything that their mother had known, at the time of their conception. We had quite a few of them around by this time.

They had more than a few quirks, the most obvious of which was their distaste for clothing, except for the lightest and loosest of silk gowns, and then only under protest! Uncle Tom said it had to do with the fact that they did not need artificial covering to be comfortable. Thus, like normal humans who lived in the tropics, they preferred to be without the burden of clothing. I suspect that it actually had more to do with Uncle Tom’s preference for skin.

And they were very pretty.

Still, I didn’t like the idea of being guarded.

My dining room was large, with tapestries on the walls, an elaborate parquet floor, and a high, ornate coffered ceiling. The high table, literally a third of a yard higher than the others, had tall chairs, like bar stools, for me, my family, and my honored guests. There was room for two dozen of us on one side of the table, with men alternating with women. There were usually a few male guests who were single, or who had left their ladies home, but the cloth factories around Okoitz had plenty of attractive young women eager to take up the slack.

The other side of the narrow table was for the pretty, young house girls to serve us from.

Four more tables were set up at a right angle to the high table, like the teeth of a comb. They were the same size, and with the same seating arrangement, but at a normal table top height.

The place was packed, mostly with old and trusted friends and strikingly handsome women. The fashions the girls had decided to wear this year were back to those approved by that old pervert, Duke Henryk the Bearded, which had the women’s breasts bare, and the serving wenches wearing nothing but micro-skirts. On most of the ladies, it looked very nice, and I could hardly tell those who were fat, old, or ugly that they shouldn’t dress like the others.