Лео Франковски - Lord Conrad's Lady

On the lush African plain, at two and a half million years B.C., two small brown individuals were sitting naked on a small hill. To all outward appearances they were a pair of type twenty-seven proto-humans.

"There's blood on your leg," he said.

"I'm menstruating. The antifertility vaccine is wearing off. It's been a hundred and eighty years, and the shot was only supposed to last a century."

"Yeah. My shots are wearing out, too. My eyesight is going bad, and my joints hurt a lot in the mornings. "

"We're getting old," she said. "Just like people used to grow old before technology."

"They'll never find us, you know. If they were looking, they would have been here by now."

"What did we ever do to deserve this?" she said.

"I didn't do anything. You dumped the boss's cousin into the thirteenth century when the guy didn't even know about time travel."

"Shut up! I don't want to talk about it again."

"Well, there's something we ought to talk about. We're getting old. Before too many more years, we won't be able to take care of ourselves anymore. If we stay with the protos, they'll treat us the same way they treat their own parents when they get too old to be useful. They'll just abandon us," he said.

"So?"

"So we have to do something about it! We have to make sure that there's somebody around to take care of us when we get really old. See, my antifertility shots have worn off, too. For the next few years you can still have children, and I'm still fit enough to take care of you and them. If we raise them right, they'll take care of us when it really gets bad."

"You're such an asshole. Do you think I'd have children and raise them to live in this environment? To be savages two million years before any other real people exist? No way. "

"Will you say that when you are starving to death because you have no teeth to chew your food with? By then it'll be too late to do anything about it!"

"You're also a damn coward," she said.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF COUNTESS FRANCINE

Everyone seems to be keeping diaries now, and I suppose I should do so, too, though mine will be written in French so that the maids can't read it. Perhaps writing will help me take my mind off the horror of my situation.

I sit here in my husband Conrad's city of Three Walls on the tenth of March, 1241, looking out from a tower window on the area that he calls his killing field. He named it thus because it was used yearly as a place to slaughter the surplus wild animals on his extensive lands here in southern Poland. It is a part of what he calls his game management program.

The field still earns its name, though in a far more gruesome way, for the beasts now concentrated on the field below are an entire horde of besieging Mongols!

My husband trained all his men into a mighty army and took them to the east to defend the land against the Tartar invaders. In so doing, he left the defense of his cities to the women, and we are less sure of our abilities than we pretend to be. Why he left our strong walls to fight hundreds of miles away is a matter of dispute among us. For mine own part, I think that if he wanted to find Mongols, he could have saved himself the trip.

We wait here, not knowing if our loves are alive and not knowing how long we ourselves may yet live.

My reader, if any there might chance to be, will therefore forgive me if I write on more pleasant times in more civilized places.

My childhood was a pleasant one, for my grandfather was a bishop, and to be a bishop in France means to be wealthy and powerful. This was all the more true because his diocese was centered on the wealthy city of Troyes, and it stands astride the major trade routes between Flanders, where the cloth is made, and Italy, where the world's cloth is dyed and finished. Two great fairs were held there every year, and Grandfather got his share of it.

My mother was his only child, and since my father held the very high post of Grandfather's privy secretary, we lived in the palace as part of Grandfather's household.

Grandfather's palace was a vast and beautiful place, as full of color and statues as the great Cathedral of St.-Pierre, which stood just across from our courtyard. Our palace was much larger and far more sumptuous than the palace of the Count of Troyes, though of course the count had other palaces and castles in the countryside.

Suffice it to say that until I was nine years old, I had four servants, and my mother had twice that number. My days were spent in pleasant amusements and in learning from my tutors the arts of reading and writing and sewing.

We were very happy until two great tragedies struck us within a year. The first was that the Church declared that all members of the clergy must be celibate. They may not marry, and further, they had never been married! This meant that both my mother and I were illegitimate, for my father was also an ordained priest. This ruling was none of my grandfather's doing, and for a time he was able to protect us from this calamity.

Then, within the year, my wonderful old grandfather died of a plague. Since my mother was no longer born in wedlock and my father was but a priest who was living in sin, there was no inheritance for us. The new bishop had no desire to associate himself with the sinful life of his predecessor, so my father was turned out of his job, and we all were turned out of the palace. We had neither friends nor influence, for although my father was a learned man, his family was of no great means or prominence. For a long time we were at great strife to get enough food to eat.

At long last my father secured a position as a professor at the University of Paris, so we made the long, hard journey to that city. Being a mere university professor was of course a position far below his previous one of secretary, and we had to subsist on whatever the students felt like donating after they heard his lectures. Somehow, my mother was able to make a sort of home for us in our single rented room above a tavern and across the street from a brothel. I was able to continue my education by attending free of charge my father's lectures and those of his fellow professors, for they made this arrangement with each other. Thus we lived until my fourteenth year, for my father considered our location to be convenient for him. He taught classes in a room that the university rented above the brothel.

Then my dear father died, and our situation became dire indeed. Many told me that I had become a great beauty, and I was much noticed by the students and the young guildsmen of the city. Yet being poor and without a dowry, I got no offers, or at least no offers that a virtuous young woman could accept. Indeed, the most persistent of my followers was the owner of the brothel, and his proposal was for a position that I did not desire. Such a life is sinful, dirty, and short!

Then I met a young student who had recently taken Holy Orders and would soon be returning to his native land of Poland. He asked my mother for my hand, and at first she turned him down, for a priest could not possibly marry. It was this fact that had caused all our difficulties in the first place! But he persisted and proved to her that the Gregorian reforms that forbade the marriage of the clergy had not yet been ratified in Poland and, further, that they were not likely to be. Thus, my mother blessed our marriage as the best that I could do without any dowry at all. The very day of our small wedding, she left us to join a convent, being tired of this world and its pain.

As the rent was not paid on my mother's old room, I spent my wedding night with my new husband in his bunk in a student dormitory. Nothing took place that night, but I put this down to his shyness, considering that there were other students in the same room. And truthfully, I was not precisely sure at that tender age just what should have taken place, anyway.