Part 14 (1/2)

Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were tending the fires under his supervision. I knew that I didn't want to get involved.

I scrounged up some splinters of about knitting-needle size and retired to my room.

You see, it often happens with me that a problem that I have in the day gets solved in the middle of the night. I'd woken up in the dark with the answer, sitting bolt upright and startling Natalia.

It was obvious. I had a product sample, a sweater that my mother had knitted. All I had to do was figure out how to stick the knitting needles into it and then perform the operation backward!

Taking it apart, I could tell how to put it together.

I had the needles ready by dinnertime, and I eagerly went at it as soon as the meal was over. It was not as easy as I had thought. I was not aided by the fact that my sweater was very fancy, with lots of embossing and special twists. Also, I did not know which end was up. It was a long, frustrating afternoon. I learned little and lost a third of my only sweater.

Ladies wandered in and out, but I really didn't have time to be friendly.

The carpenter was still out there, burning his logs, with a new crew of helpers. After supper, I was at it by the smoky light of an off lamp when Count Lambert took the stuff out of my hands, handed it to Krystyana, and sat me down at the chess board.

”Time for recreation, Sir Conrad.”

By the end of the third game, Krystyana had my sweater partially rea.s.sembled. ”You see, Sir Conrad,” the count said, beaming. ”Another eldritch art that you have taught my people.”

”Uh ... yes, my lord.”

”By the way, do you have any idea as to just what Vitold is doing out there with all those fires?”

”In truth, my lord, he has been confusing me for the past two days.” ”Now that is refres.h.i.+ng to hear. I hate to be the only one who doesn't know what is going on. Sometimes I think they play a game called confuse the count.” ”Bedtime. Coming, Krystyana? Or is it someone else's turn?” At noon the next day Vitold showed me the first sample beehive; by dusk he had completed the entire gross. In three days he had finished a job that I had a.s.sumed would take months.

It seems that boards were hard to make. They had to be sawed by hand out of tree trunks, using a poor saw. Nails were even harder. They had to be hammered one at a time out of very expensive iron.

But though a modem carpenter thinks in terms of boards and fasteners, Vitold thought in terms of taking trees and making things out of them. As the firewood was already cut, splitting was a fairly simple job. He then burned out a hollow in each half log, carefully leaving about five centimeters untouched all the way around. An entrance hole was chopped in with an axe, and the two troughs were tied back together again with a st.u.r.dy, though crude, linen rope. To harvest, you untied the rope, removed the combs, and retied it. Vitold's method was one of those brilliantly simple things that I was talking about earlier. There was a lot I had to teach the people of the thirteenth century. There was also a great deal that I had to learn. I haven't talked much about children in this confession, perhaps because the subject is so painful. In modem Poland, children are cherished, as they are in all civilized countries. In the thirteenth century, this was not always true. Perhaps because so many of them died so young, you did not dare love them too much.

From p.u.b.erty to menopause, if they lived that long, the women of Okoitz were almost continually pregnant. Most of them averaged twelve to fifteen births. There was no concept of birth control, no feeling that one should abstain from s.e.x. In that small community of perhaps a hundred families, there were typically two births a week. There was also more than a weekly funeral, usually a tiny cloth wrapped bundle without even a wooden coffin. The adults, too, died young. Forty was considered old. The medical arts that can keep a sick person alive did not exist.

You were healthy or you were dead! And there was nothing I could do about it. I was completely ignorant of most medicine. Oh, I had taken all the standard first-aid courses. I could give mouth-to- mouth resuscitation. I could treat frostbite and heat stroke and shock. I could splint a fracture and tend a wound. But all that I had learned was learned for the purpose of knowing what to do until the doctor arrives. I got into this sad subject because Krystyana's baby sister was dead. Her father had rolled on the baby while sleeping and smothered it. Because of the harsh winters and unheated houses, babies slept with their parents. It was the only way to keep them from freezing. And the father just-rolled over. The look on the man's face-he couldn't have been much older than I was, but his face was lined and weathered, his hands were wrinkled, calloused claws, and his back was bent as if he were still carrying a grain sack. The look on that man's face was such that I couldn't stay through the all-too-brief church ceremony. I had to leave and I had to cry.

Everyone already knew that I was strange, and they left me alone. I am not a doctor. I am an engineer. I did not know what most of those people were dying of. h.e.l.l, n.o.body here had cancer!

People just got a bellyache and died! But I did know that a better diet, better sanitation, better clothing, better housing, and-d.a.m.n it-a little heat would do wonders for them. A sawmill for wooden floors and beds that got them off the floor. An icehouse to help preserve food. Looms for more and better cloth. A better stove for heating and cooking. Some kind of laundry-these people couldn't wash their clothes all winter!--a sewage system, and a water system.

These were things that I could do; these were things that I would do!

That and get ready to fight the Mongols.

It was just after Christmas that I started working on my master plan, or at least the first few glimpses of it started to come to me. If we were going to accomplish anything with regard to the Mongols, we would need arms and armor on a scale unprecedented in thirteenth century Poland.

We would need iron, steel, and-if possible-gunpowder by the hundreds of tons. That meant heavy industry, and heavy industry is equipment intensive. A blast furnace can't be shut down for Sundays or holidays. It can't stop working for the planting or the harvest. Its workers have to be skilled specialists. A steel works at Okoitz, or anywhere else in Poland's agricultural system, was simply an impossibility, yet the work could not be done in the existing cities, either. Not when dozens of powerful, tradition minded guilds guarded their special privileges and were ready to fight anything new. Obviously, to have a free hand to introduce innovations, I would need my own land and my own people. Well, Lambert had said that was possible.

I would need to be able to feed my workers, and the local agricultural techniques produced very little surplus. Here the seeds I had packed in should help. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and better farm machinery were a ways off, but work on animal husbandry should be started immediately. I'd already promised to get some light industry going--cloth making and so on-which would improve my status with the powers that be as well as getting people more decent clothing.

Windmills. We could definitely use some windmills, and I hadn't seen one in this century.

I talked with Lambert about my plans for Okoitz, and while I don't think he grasped a third of what I had in mind, he gave me his blessings. ”Yes, of course, Sir Conrad. These innovations are precisely what I wanted you to do. You are welcome to all the timber you can get cut and all the work you can get out of the peasants.”

”Thank you, my lord.”

”Just don't do anything silly like interfering with the planting or harvest.”

”Of course not. Uh, you mentioned once that I could have lands of my own.” ”Yes, I did, didn't 1. But there's a slight difficulty there. You see, you are a foreigner-” ”I am not, my lord. I was born in Poland.”

”Well, you talk funny, so it comes to the same thing. The law is that I can't a.s.sign you lands without my liege lord's permission. It's just a formality, really. I'm sure he'll grant it when next I see him, probably in the next year or two.”

”The next year or two? That's quite a delay!”

”Oh, likely he'll be by in the spring or summer. What is your hurry? You have just outlined projects here at Okoitz that will take years to complete.” I talked for a while about Mongols, heavy industry, and blast furnaces. ”Oh, if you say so, Sir Conrad. If I must, I'll send a rider with a letter to find the duke, taking your word on faith.”

”I must say that belief in a fire that is so intense that one dares not let it die-well, it stretches the mind more that transubstantiation!” ”But you'll send the letter?”

”After Easter, if necessary. You couldn't build anything on your land until the snow melts, anyway.”

For the next few months, my time was divided, unevenly, four ways. One was animal husbandry. The people of Okoitz knew the basic principles of animal breeding. They produced outstanding war-horses, but somehow the techniques had not filtered down to the more mundane world of farm animals. A modem hen produces more than an egg a day. The hens of Okoitz produced perhaps an egg a week. The sheep were small and scrawny; I doubted if there was a kilo of wool on any one of them. The milk cows looked likely to produce only a few liters a day, and then only in the spring and summer. Grown pigs were only a quarter of the size of the modern animal.

Much of the reason for this was economic. A farmer with a cow, two pigs, and six chickens was in no position to get involved with scientific breeding. Another part of the problem was that they tended to use farm animals as scavengers. Kept grossly underfed, pigs and chickens were allowed to run free and were expected to find much of their own food. That resulted in indiscriminate breeding and constant arguments about someone's pigs eating someone else's crops. It also spread s.h.i.+t over everything.

But the count had his own herds, and if we could improve the quality of those, the results would spread. For the most part, my program was a matter of dividing each species into a small A herd and a larger B herd. The A herd contained the best animals, most of them females. They got better food and the best available herdsman, who was expected to get to know them as individuals. They were kept strictly apart from the B herd, except when inferior animals were demoted. The B herd was for eating. There were two A herds for cattle, one for beef and one for dairy products, but it took some time to convince Lambert that it was useful to breed separately for two desired sets of qualities. The same was done for chickens: one A flock for eggs and one for fast growth. I concentrated on chickens because they have a shorter life cycle, and selective breeding would give faster results.

Breeding for egg production requires accounting. You have to know which chicken is producing how many eggs. This involves an ”egg factory,” with each hen imprisoned in a tiny cell. It was labor-intensive in that food and water had to be brought to them. I had a small rack built by 'each cell. When the breeders took out an egg, they put a stone in the rack. Big egg, big stone; little egg, little stone.

Once a month, the hens were evaluated. The best hens got a rooster, and the worst were demoted to the short-lived B flock. The mediocre got to keep their jobs. I got a couple of the older women interested in the project, and egg production doubled in the first year.

As time went on, most of our best animal breeders were women. They seemed to understand the concepts better.

A half dozen holidays came and went. These annoyed me because they cut down on the man- hours I had available. The holidays came to a height in a weeklong carnival, a Polish Mardi Gras, from Lenten Thursday to Ash Wednesday. ”Carnival” is Latin for ”good-bye, meat.” Lent was not so much the religious abstinence from meat eating as the formal acknowledgment that the village was actually out of animal products and that those animals left had to be kept for spring and summer breeding.

The second of my time-consuming jobs was lumbering. Understand that the people of Okoitz had felled a lot of trees. Okoitz was built almost completely of logs, and in the last four years a huge effort had gone into it. But those logs were actually the by-product of land clearance. If you want to clear land for farming, you not only have to remove the tree, you have to remove the stump.

The sensible way is not to chop the tree down; you dig around the tree, cut out the roots, and then pull the tree down. Since you can't dig in frozen ground, tree removal was a summer job.

Lumber cut in the winter is superior to that cut in the summer. It is drier. There was some nearby hilly ground that was not suitable for farming but could do well as orchards. Leaving the stumps in would delay erosion until the orchard was established.

Projects I had in mind for the next summer were going to require a lot of wood, and that all added up to winter lumbering.

The difficulty was that the peasants were not used to working hard in the winter. Except for spreading manure on the snow and basic housekeeping tasks, winter was when you went to bed early and slept late and spent the time in between enjoying yourself. It took a lot of persuasion to get things done. Incidentally, my horse, Anna, was quite willing to wear a horse collar and drag logs, provided that one was polite to her. Several peasants with whips were bitten and one was seriously kicked before the message got across. Anna developed a friends.h.i.+p with an eight-year old girl, one of Janina's sisters, and those two made a very productive team. Somewhat later, it was discovered that the count's best stallion was also willing to work, provided that he was allowed to work next to Anna. Such things gave people their first new subjects of conversation since my arrival.

I was watching this strange and amusing trio dragging a huge log down the snowy hill when another log being dragged by a team of oxen broke loose and started rolling.

There were screams and shouts and people scrambling. The oxen were knocked over and probably would have been killed if the rope around the log hadn't come loose. The log bounded downhill, bouncing off some tree stumps and smas.h.i.+ng others to splinters.

Mikhail Malinski was downhill of the rolling log. He had been taking his dull axe down to the blacksmith's temporary forge to get the cutting edge sharpened. With the wrought-iron tools, the edge wasn't ground-that was wasteful of iron-it was heated up and the edge was beaten sharp.