Лео Франковски - Lord Conrad's Crusade

But now, in deference to the visiting cardinal, they were all wearing fashions that would be approved by the old duke’s son, King Henryk the Pious, which involved a complete cover up. It ruined the scenery.

The children had their own dining hall, and had food and entertainment there more to their liking. Mostly there were too many sweets and clowns to amuse them. Once they became pubescent, they went through the Catholic sacrament of confirmation, and were treated as adults thereafter, except that most of them still went to school, or joined the army, which was much the same thing. That usually happened around the time they were fourteen or fifteen, years later than in the Twentieth Century.

I sat between my wives, as always, but lately it had started to feel constraining.

The chair next to Francine was taken by the papal ambassador, who was a cardinal and the courier who had delivered the pope’s letter to me. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to the guy.

He had come up from Rome using the railroad line we had finally built over – or more often, through – the Alps. Individual cars were pulled by a Big Person, and managed to average fifty miles an hour, although our hour was twice as long as the one used in the modern world.

The Big People were another gift from my uncle. They had much in common with my bodyguards, except they looked like the finest horses and they couldn’t speak. They could understand Polish, however. They were intelligent, had outstanding senses, and could run all day, as fast as a modern race horse could for a quarter mile, with an armored man on their backs.

The ambassador and his retinue had rented a whole car from us for the journey.

Why the church couldn’t use our fast, inexpensive post office was beyond me. I’d even given them permission to use the mails free of charge, but no, they had to do things the hard way. The mails were faster than taking the railroads, since the mail was carried on the backs of the Big People. Lightly loaded, they averaged seventy miles in a double length hour.

Father Thomas Aquinas said grace. We all said, “Amen,” and we started eating. Father Thomas was doing a good job at running our school system, but he didn’t have anything like the brilliance he’d shown in my old time line. It was disappointing. Was it somehow my fault?

“I trust your grace will accede to His Holiness’ request to start a new crusade and conquer the Holy Lands for the glory of God,” the ambassador-courier asked loudly, so the whole room heard.

“I’m afraid not. We have too much to do here,” I said quietly.

“But what could possibly be more important than taking back the very land that Christ Himself walked on?” Again, he said it loudly, playing to the crowd.

“In the first place, we can hardly ‘take back’ something that we never owned at any time in history. In the second, there’s a little matter of a few million young Mongols growing up far to the east. The Christian Army’s job is to keep them out of Christendom. The Arabs have never threatened us. To attack them would be immoral.”

The courier was about to make a vehement response when Francine put her hand on his arm and spoke quietly to him. Fine, let her take up the load. She had always considered herself to be the diplomat in the family. Let her prove it. Again.

I sat back and wondered, again, if I was living in a castle or in a palace. Such nonsense thoughts had occurred more often recently.

The place had tall, crenellated outer walls four yards thick, plenty of guns on those walls, and a deep moat around the whole thing, so it was certainly a defensive structure, even though the moat also served as a swimming pool in the summer. That made it a castle. On the other hand, my real defenses, thousands of strong concrete forts, were hundreds of miles away in every direction. Our thick walls here mostly gave us a lot of thermal mass, keeping the place cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

No enemy was likely to get close enough to us to actually attack us.

The windows were all double glazed, usually with stained glass on the inside. Most of the plastered walls were covered with tapestries. The rest were hand-painted, mostly with heroic battle scenes. Stands of captured arms and armor helped to brighten up the place as well. Dozens of captured battle standards hung from the ceiling.

The floors were beautifully parquet, where they weren’t tiled, and then often covered with vastly expensive carpets. The furniture was all of museum quality. The place certainly looked like a palace.

A small band was playing quietly.

Four of Celicia’s well trained dancers were undulating in unison in front of me. Fully clothed.

I had two beautiful wives, and all the lovely young ladies around, the pick of the sweet young things of Poland, were eager for one-nighters with your humble servant. I had hundreds of charming servants. I had thousands of good and loyal friends. I had nearly a million men in my army who would willingly go to their deaths if I commanded it.

I was certainly living the good life!

So why wasn’t I happy?

As the meal finished, and the tables were moved back to allow space for dancing, people – mostly senior military officers – felt free to come over and talk to me.

“Hetman Conrad! What’s all this about a crusade and can I go? A good war is just what my men need! Guarding construction workers who don’t need guarding is making them all bored and stale,” said Kolomel Wladyclaw, commander of the Wolves. The Wolves were a cavalry unit made up of the scions of the old nobility and were the first unit to be entirely mounted on Big People.

“We are not going on crusade, kolomel. We have too much to do around here. I certainly sympathize with that business of being bored and going stale! There is a lot of it going around,” I said.

“Then let’s cure it, sir! The Wolves alone could take back the Holy Lands in a single summer! Then, we could have the construction corps build a few dozen snowflake forts to hold it. All of Christendom would praise you and your army!”

“No. First, a new generation of Mongols will get here sooner or later. With all the slave girls they captured, the word is an average Mongol has at least four wives. At six children per wife – and half of them being boys – that means when they return, there may be a dozen times as many as there were the last time! Your Wolves will be needed to stop them. Second, a crusade would not be a just war! The Arabs have done nothing to harm us! It would not be moral to attack them without reason!” The kid may be Sir Meisko’s son, one of my oldest friends in this century, but he was beginning to piss me off!

“Nothing, my lord? They have made slaves out of thousands, maybe millions of Christians! Surely, that constitutes harm!”

“There is no way of verifying your statement, and I suspect that the real numbers are far fewer than that!”

“If only one Christian was enslaved by the heathens, I would say that our cause was just!”

“Well, I wouldn’t, Sir Wladyclaw. Killing thousands of people, many of them our own, to revenge one crime simply isn’t justified. No! We will not go on crusade! This conversation is ended!”

I walked away, hoping that that was the end of it, but of course it wasn’t. Fully a dozen more of my senior military personnel buttonholed me with plans for how their particular organizations could go out alone and conquer the entire Arab world, with little or no risk or expense to anyone. Ridiculous!

The papal ambassador was circulating among the crowd, talking up the glories of a new crusade. I did not love him for it.

In an hour, I was definitely getting hot under the collar.

Finally, I stood up on top of the high table and shouted, “Listen up, people! We are not going on crusade! We have many other obligations and responsibilities to perform here, and they don’t include attacking anybody who hasn’t tried to hurt us! This discussion is over!”