Лео Франковски - Lord Conrad's Crusade

The weapons of our enemies were fairly primitive, at least at sea.

That night, we found that Cynthia could see almost as well in the dark as she could on a clear day, and when the helmsman deliberately took us a few degrees off course, she told him about it.

We passed one of our fishing boats the next morning. She was going after herring, judging from the look of her rig. Captain Sliwa ordered a small net put over side, on the theory that if they were catching fish here, so could he. This was not for commercial purposes, but to feed the crew. They soon pulled up a net full, enough to feed the crew and passengers for a week. The fishing was much better in the Thirteenth Century that it had been in the Twentieth.

Soon, we were eating fried herring, poached herring, stewed herring, pickled herring, and baked herring. For some variety, I asked the cook if he had ever tried deep-frying. He’d never heard of it, but he did have a big bottle of cooking oil, and lots of big pots. I showed him how to bread the fish with eggs and bread crumbs, and they became an instant hit. So did the french fries I made with them. The trick to making great fries is to soak the sliced potatoes in sugar-water for a while. We didn’t have anything like ketchup, a Chinese invention in my old time line, but vinegar works almost as good.

I’d been responsible for introducing potatoes, and dozens of other vegetables, to the Thirteenth Century. Quite by accident, of course.

I wrote a lengthy letter to Sir Piotr telling him about the shipments of tobacco, one to me, one to Captain Sliwa, and one to our Muslim chemists, since tobacco could be refined into a very effective insecticide, and how later, this nicotine could be extracted from those parts of the plant that were not good for smoking.

A second letter concerned the importance of breeding superior strains of tobacco, areas of the earth where it prospered, and the importance of experimentation in developing better curing methods. I said that there was a fortune to be made with this product.

I also wrote a treatise on the subject of smoking, talking about cigars, cigarettes, and pipes. I dwelled a while on the finest of smoking pipes, the meerschaum bowled calabash pipe, how the African calabash gourd was placed over a horizontal pole while growing to give it the desired shape, and where to find meerschaum, on the south coast of the Black Sea.

I made several drawings of it as well as some of the less desirable briar pipes. I explained a bit about water pipes as well. I stressed that a good pipe was a big pipe.

I also talked about the way a cigar was used by a man to reward himself, after a good day and a fine meal. A cigarette was used by a nervous man, to calm himself. And how a pipe was used by someone who was already calm, and merely wanted to relax some more.

We got to Tallinn late one afternoon. The captain said that he had a lot of cargo to transfer, and that we wouldn’t be leaving until dawn. Although he wouldn’t have time to join us, he suggested that I take a look at the city, and perhaps enjoy a night on the town.

Naturally, I took Silver and Cynthia along, with the proviso that the girl put some clothes on. She came, wearing a loose silk dress, under protest. On the ship, her nudity had scandalized some of the other passengers, but since it was an army ship, our rules applied on board. A foreign city was another matter entirely.

The town was beautiful, with dozens of fine, limestone castles and many tall, lovely churches, most of them set high on a cliff overlooking the harbor.

We found a good inn that wasn’t one of my own, but was called the Red Gate Inn, the same as the inn I had stayed in the night I went from the Twentieth Century to the Thirteenth. A spooky name, but a nice place.

The decor would have been called quaint in the Twentieth Century, but here it was only ordinary. The walls and ceilings were of painted plaster, supported by heavy, squared off timbers. They were left rough, with the marks of the broad axe still on them. A low fire burned in the fireplace, slowly cooking a small pig, but providing little light. For that, you had to pay extra for a candle at your table, the usual practice in this century.

We had a fine meal, with Cynthia opting for the roast pork with bread, cabbage, and carrots, along with a light garden salad, since the waitress said that that particular meal was on an all-you-can-eat basis. I guess that the pig had been on the fire for quite a while. All of Cynthia’s people were very heavy eaters, having incredibly high metabolisms. She normally ate three or four times what I did, despite the fact that I was two or three times her size. The waitress at the inn gaped at her while she ate, but she kept the food coming.

I had another inexpensive meal, a pair of lobsters. In the Twentieth Century, this would have been the most expensive meal on the menu, but in the Thirteenth, it was not highly regarded, for some reason. I went to the kitchen, and yes, they were doing it properly, with live lobsters swimming in a big tub. I picked out two of them, and they boiled them up for me.

I loved it, once I talked the cooks into serving them with melted butter, something that they had never heard of before. Delicious!

I also enjoyed copious amounts of some of the finest dark beer that I’d ever tasted. I would definitely have to tell Thadeaus, my head innkeeper, about it. It was not usual to import beer in this century, but this stuff was outstanding, and transportation costs were going down. The army did not permit tariffs, or import - export duties. We were adamant about free trade. Any taxes had to be paid by the producers or the retailers.

Language wasn’t a problem at all, despite the fact that I didn’t speak a word of Estonian. Most of the people we met spoke at least some Polish, as it was fast becoming the world language. Having the only magazines, newspapers, and printing presses in the world was doing a lot for us.

It must have been midnight when I decided that it was time to return to the ship. Cynthia sat in front of me on Silver as we went down the “Street of Drunken Warriors,” so named because it was so narrow that a drunk couldn’t fall over sideways in it!

“Well, now. You will do very nicely!” He said in heavily accented Polish.

An armed man had stepped out in front of us, quickly followed by at least a dozen others, both ahead of us and behind. I had seen them before at the inn we’d just eaten at.

“What do you want?” I said.

“But surely that is obvious! You are a wealthy foreigner, with a large bag of gold. You have the finest horse that I’ve ever seen, and a very attractive young lady who will afford us with many hours of enjoyment. Just what do you think we want?”

“If you are looking for a fight, you’ve got one.”

“As you wish. Or, you could simply dismount, leave behind your lady, your property, and your weapons, and keep your life. The choice is yours.”

“So it is.”

I started to reach behind Cynthia to get at my sword, but suddenly she wasn’t there any more! She jumped up over my head and was going down, bouncing off Silver’s rear, to take out the thugs behind us!

Silver exploded into action, kicking two of our opponents at the same time in their faces with her fore hooves while she was charging forward! She stamped, kicked, and squashed the lot of them, and finally bit the back of the neck of the fellow who had done all the talking! Shaking him the way a dog shakes a rat, she bit it clean through!

It all happened so quickly that I didn’t accomplish much more than getting my sword out!

The street was so narrow that Silver had to go to the next intersection before she could turn around to return to Cynthia’s aid. She had no sooner completed the turn, spitting out some bloody vertebrae out in the process, when Cynthia caught up with us.