Лео Франковски - The Radiant Warrior

"My lord, this sort of thing is dangerous. You can't control a hot air balloon.

You go wherever the winds blow you, and the winds up there can be pretty fierce!

You could end up in the Baltic Sea!"

"Well, what of it? You're the one who's been taking all the chances lately. Didn't we decide that last month?"

"Count Lambert, your support has meant everything to me and my projects. Without it, I might never get things going well enough to fight the Mongols in eight years."

"That's touching but no longer true. It might have been, a year ago, but now you have the support of Duke Henryk. I suspect that if I died, he just might give all my lands to you, and let my wife go hang in our lands in Hungary. Isn't it enough for me to say that I want this balloon?"

I exhaled. When Count Lambert wanted something, he got it. To try going against him was pissing into the wind. "As you wish, my lord. You want me to design a hot air balloon?"

"Of course! What have I been saying? Just a small one, enough to take me alone high above the hills and trees!"

"Even that will be quite large, my lord."

"What of it? You'll find I've had a drawing board of the sort you favor built and set up in your old room, along with a supply of parchment, pens, lamps, and that sort of thing. I'll send a wench to call you to supper. Pick one to your liking for tonight, but you might want to try out Natasha. She's nicely skilled.

Well? Be off with you!"

I went to my room and got to work. I obviously wouldn't be allowed to leave

Okoitz until I had completed a set of drawings.

I spent a few hours doing arithmetic and decided that if I could heat a sphere of air fourteen yards in diameter to fifty degrees warmer than ambient, I could lift about five hundred pounds. Was it reasonable to expect a warming of fifty degrees Celsius? Would Count Lambert plus an undefined balloon made with unspecified and unweighed materials weigh less than five hundred pounds? I hadn't the foggiest idea. I wasn't even certain about the specific gravity of air.

Nobody had ever asked me to design a balloon before.

All I could do was to make a number of reasonable-sounding engineering approximations, which my colorful American friends called WAGs: Wild Ass Guesses.

I was called to supper by an attractive and cheerful young lady who announced that she was Natasha. Again bowing to the inevitable, I asked her to join me for supper.

Once seated with Count Lambert and another lady, I was told that Kotcha was in the kitchen, and what did I want done with her?

I told Count Lambert that she was joining my household, and it seemed right that she should eat at the same table as I did. He nodded benignly. Perhaps he was glad to be getting out of having to provide for her, which he would have done if

I hadn't wanted to take her, or perhaps he realized that I was quite capable of making an issue of not hurting a girl's feelings.

But in any event the ragged little nine-year-old was soon sitting wide-eyed between me and Count Lambert. He soon had his arm around her. People in the thirteenth century touched a lot more than those in the twentieth. It was a fatherly caress-Count Lambert wasn't interested in a lady sexually until she was filled out.

It was a pleasant meal. Even though there were only five of us at the table, four wenches were serving and three musicians playing. Almost everything in medieval Poland was expensive except for people. You could have as many servants as you could afford to feed. A peasant considered getting a job as a servant to be a wonderful thing. The work was easy and they fed and clothed you well, for almost no nobleman wanted ragged or starving people around.

Count Lambert got his maids by exercising a variant of his droit du seigneuy.

Separated from his wife, he asked the prettiest girls in his town to be handmaidens. This was a euphemism, since they were usually pregnant in six months. He then found each of them an acceptable husband, paid for the wedding expenses and a small dowry, and went to church regularly, with everybody happy with him.

Musicians didn't have the high status they enjoy in the modem world. They were playing quietly in the background, ignored while the conversation went on: Muzak.

I was talking. "You understand that I've never designed a hot air balloon before, my lord? I can't promise that the first one will work. We'll have to build one and see how it goes."

"Reasonable, Sir Conrad. But you've had a chance to think on it. Tell me what the first one will be like."

"It's a cloth bag, made of the same thin material that we made kites from. It's like a ball on the top and a cone on the bottom," I said, gesticulating. "It is the custom of my people to make them brightly colored, but that's up to you. It should be fourteen yards across at the widest and twenty yards high. It must be strongly made, but kept as light as possible."

"To launch it, I think if you found three big trees in your forest that grew in a triangle, and cut the tops off, they could serve to support the balloon until the air inside is warm. It should be launched only in a dead calm, the sort that often happens in the gray dawn."

"That seems easy enough. I'll have it done. You will have drawings of this before you leave, won't you?"

"Yes, my lord. Would it be too much to ask if you tethered the balloon for safety? Tied it to a tree with a long rope?"

"Well at first, of course. After that, we'll see."

"Count Lambert, I say again that there is no controlling these things. You don't know where you'll come down. Do you really want to fall into Frederick the

Second's outhouse?"

"Ha! That would stuper his mundi, wouldn't it!"

I gritted my teeth, but there was nothing else that I could do.

I had Kotcha put up with a couple of Count Lambert's ladies-they were only five years older than her-and intended to get in an hour of drawing before I sacked out. Such things "gang aft agley" at Okoitz. Natasha was all she was cracked up to be. Lord, what an enthusiastic young lady! We went to bed early and I really didn't get much sleep. Good, though.

I started drawing the next morning, but to make an accurate drawing, with dimensions, of a single panel required an awful lot of math. And it all had to be done long hand, without a calculator of tables or anything but my skull and a goose quill pen.

Halfway through, I found that I was doing everything in decimal rather than the duodecimal arithmetic that I had taught everybody else. I have always had the darndest time thinking in duodecimal, and going over this diary, sometimes I'm not sure myself when I was talking in base-twelve and when in base-ten. So far as the balloon was concerned, I completed the calculations in base-ten and then translated the whole thing into base twelve.

And there were all the detail drawings. How to do a tent stitch, how to fasten the ropes to the basket, the importance of carrying sandbags. I wasn't done until noon the next day.

Natasha stayed with me, eager to run errands but happy if ignored. I began to realize that there was a good mind in that pretty little head.

After dinner, I explained my drawings to Count Lambert, because he couldn't read.

"Excellent, Sir Conrad! I think we can make short work of it. You seem to have taken a fancy to my Natasha. Would you believe that not a week ago, she sported a maidenhead?"

"That's hard to believe, my lord. She's remarkably… adept."

"Isn't she though. But I can certify it since I relieved her of that liability myself. She has a pure natural talent. See here. I've kept you half a day past our agreed time. What say I give her to you in compensation?"

"You're going to give her to me?"

"If you wish. As I said, she's only been here a week. There's months and months of use in her yet."