Part 15 (2/2)
”That's enough!” Count Lambert shouted, running up to us. ”You two are supposed to be knights, not kitchen dogs fighting over garbage! We will speak of this in private! Come with me, both of you.”
”Yes, my lord,” I said, following him to the castle, trying to control my emotions.
”It's not over, Conrad!” Stefan shouted, but I didn't turn. Something heavy hit me square in the back, knocking me flat on my stomach in the dirty snow. I looked up to see the bear's head bouncing down the path toward the castle. Rage enveloped me as I got up.
As I turned toward him, Stefan hit me square in the face, almost knocking me down again.
I was too angry to fight efficiently, but Stefan didn't know anything about unarmed combat in the first place. For a few seconds we swung at each other wildly, and I gave a lot more than I got.
Suddenly, a naked sword divided the s.p.a.ce between, us. Lambert's. ”I swear, the next one of you who strikes will get this in his guts,” Lambert hissed. ”My own sworn knights fighting in the dirt, in front of the peasants no less! Now, to my chambers, and this time both of you walk in front Of me.” In his chambers, Lambert ordered us to sit on opposite sides of the room but was so angry that he couldn't sit down himself.
”Dogs blood! My own knights! Men who are supposed to enforce the peace, fighting each other like squalid beggars! You shame me, the both of you!” ”First you, Sir Conrad! I saw you deliberately destroy the property and sport of a brother knight. I fine you two hundred pence for that and order you to pay Sir Stefan another fifty in damages.”
”Yes, my lord.”
”Is that all you have to say? Just why did you do such a despicable thing?” ”My lord, he was going to torture that animal, chain it to that post, and turn the dogs on it.”
”So? Bears kill our people and our cattle. We have the right to vengeance! You don't like our sports? I know you don't like our holidays. Very well! You can sleep through them, doing night guard duty before every one of them from now till Easter.”
I groaned. Lately one day in three had been a holiday of one sort or another.
Stefan smiled.
”Wipe that d.a.m.n smirk off your face, Sir Stefan,” Lambert said. ”Your sins are worse than his!
On slight provocation, you struck a brother knight with a dishonorable weapon-a b.l.o.o.d.y bear's head without proper challenge and in the back! You did it when I had specifically ordered you to follow me immediately! Some lords would have you hung for that, and were it not for your father I'd be sorely tempted. Instead, I'll be lenient. I fine you, three months' additional guard duty, from Easter to midsummer, on the night s.h.i.+ft.” ”Now I want no more bad blood between you two.
Knights of the same lord should be like brothers! Stand up and give each other the kiss of brotherhood, then get out of my sight!”
As I kissed the smelly b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he whispered, ”It's not over!” Standing guard duty for fourteen hours in the dark gives you a lot of time to think. My engineering work was seriously hampered for lack of a decent system of weights and measures. In the cities, the guilds used a hodgepodge of gills and pennyweights and yards, mostly unrelated except that a pint of milk was supposed to weigh a pound. n.o.body cared if the specific gravity of milk varied by five percent, with richer milk being lighter.
Here in the country, things were even worse. The blacksmith and the baker did things until they felt about right. The saddler just cut and trimmed until it fit. The carpenter did a bit of measuring-in cubits and spans and finger widths-but he used his cubit, from his elbow to his fingertips. We didn't even have a meter stick.
Of course, I could invent my own system of weights and measures easily enough, and it would at least have the advantage of consistency. But I would lose a lot doing it. Every person, and certainly every engineer, knows hundreds of numbers. I knew the speed of light and the diameter of the earth and the distance from the earth to the sun. I knew the tensile strength of wrought iron and what could be expected of concrete and, well, all sorts of things.
But I knew all these values in terms of the metric system. Without a meter stick, I was stuck with guesswork. With one, I could derive all of the weights and measures and from there translate the data I remembered into any other system at all.
But none of my equipment contained a single reliable measurement. I had nothing that I knew was a definite length or weight.
At gray dawn, the answer hit me. I had my own body! My weight might not be reliable-I had put on muscle and lost some fat since arriving-but surely my height hadn't changed. I was precisely 190 centimeters tall. I had only to measure myself in stocking feet, divide by nineteen, multiply by ten, and I had my meter stick. With that, a cube of cold water ten centimeters to the side has a volume of a liter and a ma.s.s of a kilogram.
From there it was simple arithmetic to translate it into the base twelve system that these people could use.
Dead tired, I got Krystyana out of bed and had her standing on a chest, marking my height on the wall with a piece of charcoal.
”Sir Conrad,” Lambert said as he saw us. ”Just what are you doing now?” I tried to explain how I was developing a standard meter and about engineering constants. Some things I had to repeat three times, perhaps because I hadn't slept in twenty-four hours and Lambert was just out of bed and bleary-eyed. ”So by measuring yourself, you will somehow know the distance from earth to moon? My dear Sir Conrad G.o.d may have spanned the universe to his own measure: but it is rank blasphemy and profound hubris for a mere mortal to do so. In all events, the standard of measure here is the Silesian yard, not this foreign meter thing. I won't have you changing it.”
”Yes, my lord.” After yesterday the last thing I wanted was to irritate Lambert.
”Uh, how long is a Silesian yard?”
”I'll show you.” Taking Krystyana's charcoal, he marked it on the wall. With his head turned left, it was the distance from his nose to his right fingertip. ”Thank you, my lord,” I said, and he left.
Forever after, I used yards instead of meters rather than offend my liege lord.
I soon knew the ratio of yards to meters and that was enough to save my data.
My fourth endeavor was engineering the mills.
Understand that I had no reference books, no instruments, and no measuring devices. I had no drawing equipment and darned little parchment. These last two wouldn't have done me much good anyway, because I didn't have anyone who could read a blueprint.
For the comparatively small items I'd had to build thus far, it was possible to give instructions like ”We need a piece of wood that's this long, and it's got to have holes in it so it can fit into this thing and that thing.” This technique was not suitable for building a mill, and we needed two of them; I built one-twelfth scale working models, because the people had to see how things moved in order to understand them.
Okoitz didn't have a stream suitable for damming, so that left wind power. The problem with wind power is that it works only when the wind is blowing. This is not a great complication on something like a flour mill, because only one operator is required and he can work strange hours if the situation requires it. But a lot of processes- beating flax and sawing wood-are both energy- and labor-intensive. If a crew is working and the wind stops, twenty people are left standing around, which is blatantly inefficient. An intermediate energy shortage device is needed, and we had water.
The first windmill was a water pump and some storage tanks. Actually, it was two sets of water pumps. One set of four pumps pumped water from a new well to a tank near the top of the mill. We needed a new well anyway because the old well was entirely too close to the latrines. The top tank provided fresh water to the community and supplied the lower, working tanks. I used four small pumps because I did not know how much power the mill would produce. If we only had enough torque to operate two pumps, the other two could be disconnected and used as spares. Also, if one pump malfunctioned, it could be repaired while the others continued in operation.
This is called contingency planning, or in the colorful language of my American friends, ”keeping your a.s.s covered.”
Four larger pumps operated between the lowest tank and the middle tank. These provided water power to several machines in a circular shed that ringed the base of the windmill.
The sawmill, for example, had a straight saw blade operating vertically between two ropes.
These ropes were connected by a pulley system to two short, fat barrels mounted at the ends of long pivot arms. A barrel, reaching the top of its stroke, pushed open a weighted door that allowed water from the middle tank to fill it. Filled, it descended, pulling the saw blade and raising the other barrel. Reaching the bottom, a fixed peg pushed up another weighted door on the bottom of the barrel, which drained the water into the lowest tank. At the same time, the second barrel was filling and the process reversed itself. This ”wet mill” was a fairly big thing. The body of it was a truncated cone twenty-four yards across at the bottom and twelve at the turret. The walls were vertical logs flattened on two sides. The cone shape resulted from the natural taper of the logs. I was learning.
The foundations went a full story into the ground, and from the ground to the top of the highest blade the thing was as tall as a nine story building. A windmill must be kept facing the wind, so the turret has to rotate. Ours did this on ninety-six wooden ball bearings, each as big as a man's head.
One of my college professors had shown us a device to accomplish this automatically. A second, much smaller windmill was built on the back of the large turret, with the blades at right angles to the main blades. This was geared down to rotate the turret if the small windmill wasn't parallel to the wind. He claimed it was the world's first negative feedback device.
I could have made the turret manually rotatable, but I wanted the mill to operate unattended at night.
One of the engineering problems I faced was that the weight of the water tanks, besides pus.h.i.+ng downward, also pushed outward. Some crude calculations indicated that a wrought-iron band strong enough to hold the middle tank together would have weighed eight tons. I wasn't sure that there was that much iron available on the market, and in any event the cost would have been fabulous. My solution was exactly the same as that used by my contemporaries, the Gothic cathedral builders. These cathedrals have purely decorative internal stone arches that produce an outward thrust. I say purely decorative because the cathedrals were topped by wooden truss roofs that kept the rain out and didn't touch the arches. They actually built the outer walls and wooden roof first and then built those magnificent arches later, working indoors out of the rain. I used the circular work shed as a flying b.u.t.tress, leaning into the tower and squeezing it together.
Between the high-water level of the lowest tank and the bottom of the middle tank was a s.p.a.ce of four yards. This was at ground level, but the area would be dark and wet, and I could think of no good use for it. I didn't bother putting a floor there.
This resulted in the lowest tank being used, over my protestations, as a swimming pool.
By the time I got the model of the wet mill done, the weather had broken. The bitter cold of winter was over, the snow had melted, and the first warm breezes kissed the land.
A mood of wondrous relief and joviality filled the community. It was so glorious that I had to rip my s.h.i.+rt off and stand in the warm suns.h.i.+ne, soaking up the vitamin D. I wasn't alone in doing this; Krystyana and Natalia were suddenly standing naked next to me.
This mood lasted for about a day, and then it was time for spring plowing and planting, an all- out effort for those people, who got up before dawn and performed fifteen or sixteen hours of grueling labor before collapsing exhausted, only to repeat the process the next, day.
The count kept equal hours supervising, and the carpenter and the smith were kept busy repairing tools. There were only three or four weeks to complete the task, and if the planting didn't get done, next winter we would starve. I seemed to be the only one at loose ends-as a knight, I was not allowed to work- so I wandered about observing things, seeing what improvements could be made. What they needed most was a good steel plow, and I saw no way of providing one.
Lambert owned more than half the land surrounding Okoitz. Well, actually, he owned two hundred times as much besides, but much of it was farmed out to his knights, most of whom ran manors similar to, but smaller than, his. Peasants were expected to work three days a week on his land and had the balance of their time ”free” to work their own. Special workers-the bakers, carpenters, etc.had their own separate and often quite complicated arrangements, but in general it amounted to a fifty percent taxation, with the count being the entire government.
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