Frankowski, Leo - Stargard 4 - The Flying Warlord

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The Flying Warlord
The Flying Warlord
Book 4 of the Adventures of Conrad Starguard
By Leo Frankowski
ISBN: 0-345-32765-9
Prologue
"Whoopee shit!... It's finally happening," she said. "A hundred years of tracking protohuman migration patterns on the African plain and
it's finally over! It feels so good that I almost don't hate your guts anymore!"
"Well, don't get too carried away. You deserved every minute of it for dumping the owner's cousin into the thirteenth century when the
guy didn't even know that time travel existed. And you deserve twice that for getting me messed up in it. Now get your scrawny body in
the box. Time's running short!"
"Eat your heart out! I'll have my old sexy body back, and I'll take bubble baths and while you're eating carrion, I'll gorge for weeks on
lobster thermidor and New York cheesecake and--"
He sealed her into the stasis chamber, then watched the readout over the temporal transport canister count down to zero.
The tone sounded and he opened the canister, pulled out his new subordinate without glancing at him, and started to slide his previous
superior in. It was expensive to hold the canister in 2,548,850 BC, so doctrine was to make the transfer as quickly as possible.
She was almost in when something struck him as being very, very wrong. He took a closer look at the body he had just extracted. He
gagged, retched, and vomited on the floor. Then he switched off his boss's stasis field.
"--Cherries Jubilee! Hey! What the hell is this? What am I still doing here? You're holding up the canister, you ass! Do you realize what
that costs?"
"So the owner has lots of money but you only have the one life. I figured I didn't hate you that goddamn much."
"You're not making any sense; get me out of this time period! I've waited long enough!"
"Anything you say, lady, but take a look at what just came out of the canister and then ask yourself if you really want to get into it."
She stared at him and then at the other stasis chamber.
The body within was shriveled and dried. It was laying on its side, a look of horror on its face. Its fingernails were all ripped off as if the
man had tried to claw his way out before his air was exhausted.
"His stasis field must have failed," he said.
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"But that's impossible! You know that's impossible! The circuitry for the stasis field is always built inside the field itself Time doesn't
exist inside the field, so how could the circuitry possibly have had time to fail?"
"Yeah, I know. But I still say that something is screwed up somewhere. The trip here takes six years subjective, and he had maybe two
hours of air in the can. But that's not the big question. The biggie is whether or not you want to take the trip back. Me, I wouldn't risk it. "
"Well, this chamber that I'm in hasn't failed. Why should it fail just because the other one did?"
"You know better than that, bitch. You're in the same damn chamber he's in. Right after sending you back, I got to send the empty
chamber back to yesterday. It makes for a quicker turnaround that way. But I ran a self-check on it last night and it checked out perfect.
So make up your mind. You're costing the owner a million bucks a second."
"Screw the owner," she said, squirming out of the chamber. "I'm not going anywhere till I see a live body crawl out of this thing!"
"Then help me get this dead one into your chamber. We gotta let the people uptime know what the problem is and we don't have much
time to do it. Getting the body should be explanation enough!"
"Why not just ship him in the one he came in?"
He got the surprisingly light corpse into the other canister. "Lady, your big problem is that you're dumb."
He sent the canister back uptime and waited for a reply.
He waited for a long, long time.
Chapter One
FROM THE DIARY OF TADAOS KOLPINSKI
My people was always boatmen on the Vistula. My father was a boatman and his father before him, and my great-grandfather was one,
too. I still would be, except I lost my boat a few years back. I would have lost my life with it, if it hadn't been for Baron Conrad Stargard.
I was maybe the first man to meet him in Poland, next to the priest, Abbot Ignacy at the Franciscan Monastery in Cracow. I was stuck
on the rocks on the upper Dunajec with no one but a worthless little Goliard poet to help get me off. It was the poet's fault that we were
hung up in the first place, since the twit rowed to port when I yelled starboard, but that's all water down the river. It was late in the
season, and the weather was cold. Another day, and the river would be froze over and I'd lose my boat and cargo, all I owned, and
maybe my life, too.
Then along comes this priest and with him was Sir Conrad. He was a giant of a man, a head and a half taller than I am, and I'm no
shorty. He was pretty smart, and after I'd hired them two, we got the boat free in jig time with a line bent around a rock upriver,
following Sir Conrad's directions. Never saw the like of it.
He told me he was an Englishman, but I never believed it. He didn't talk like no Englishman and he'd never seen an English longbow!
Now me, I'm a master of the English longbow. There's no one no where who can shoot farther or straighter or better than me, and that's
no drunkard's boast. It's a gift, I tell you, and many's the time I've hit a buck square in the head at two hundred yards from a moving
boat. I did it in front of Sir Conrad, and he helped me eat the venison.
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And if you don't believe me, you meet me down at the practice butts some time, and I'll show you what shooting is all about. Only you
better be ready to bet money.
We got that load to Cracow and I paid off my crew, me spending the night aboard to ward off thieves. Good thing, too, because three of
them tried to rob me that night and kill me, besides. I was asleep, but at just the right time Sir Conrad shouts me awake, while he was
holding a candle to me.
I tell you there was three of the bastards on my boat, coming at me with their knives drawn! I killed the first one with a steering oar,
broke it clean over his head and his head broke with it. I threw the broken end at the second one and when he raised his arms to ward the
blow, I caught him in the gut with my own knife, just as slick as you please.
The third one, he tried to get away, but in that kind of business, where you're a stranger in town, you best not leave no witnesses! Any
thief would have a dozen friends swear that he was an honest man and I was the murderer.
So I bent my longbow and caught the bastard in the throat as he ran along the shore. Nailed him square to a tree, I did, and he stuck
there, wiggling some.
Sir Conrad, he had his own funny knife out, that one that bends in the middle, but I wouldn't let him finish the thief. After all, it was me
they was trying to rob and kill, so the honors was mine. Anyway, that was a good arrow, and I didn't want the fletching messed up. I cut
the thief's throat and saved my arrow, and I guess Sir Conrad, he was a little mad because he wouldn't help me slide the three bodies into
the river current to get rid of them. He even threatened to call out the guard!
But I got him calmed down just fine and he went back to the inn where he was staying at. That was the second time he saved me,
because if them thieves had of caught me asleep, I'd be a dead man, and my cargo gone besides.
Well, I got me a good price for my cargo of grain and spent the winter in Cracow with a widow of my acquaintance.
The next summer a friar brought me this letter. He was the same kid what used to be a Goliard poet and worked for me the last fall. He
read it to me, and it was from Sir Conrad and it had Count Lambert's seal on it. They wanted me to come to Okoitz and teach the
peasants there how to shoot the longbow. I was sort of tempted because I'd heard of beautiful things about Okoitz. They said that Count
Lambert had all the peasant girls trained to jump into the bed of any knight that wanted them, and if Sir Conrad could qualify for them
privileges, then why not me as well? At least I could dicker for it, if they really wanted me that bad, and they must have, since they
wrote that letter on real calfskin vellum. Not that I was about to give up my boat and the Vistula, you know, but it might make a fine
way to spend a winter.
But just then I had a contract to deliver a load of iron bars to Turon, and two other ones to buy grain on the upper Dunajec and sell it in
Cracow. I didn't have the time to find someone who could write me a letter to Sir Conrad, so I told the friar, him what brought me the
letter, that I'd reply to Sir Conrad when I got back, in a few weeks, like.
That trip went just fine until I was heading down the Dunajec again. The water was high, so I was working the boat alone, and I saw a
buck at the water's edge in the same place where I'd bagged two other ones before, where a game trail comes down to the water. I was
out of meat, so I shot that buck square in the head and pulled for shore to get it aboard before I got caught poaching.
Only it wasn't a buck I shot! It was a stuffed dummy with a deer skin on it, and the baron's men, they had me surrounded before I knew
what was happening. They stole my boat and cargo, "confiscated" it, they called it, and I never did see it again. They would have hung
me except I had that letter, written on good calfskin vellum it was, with Count Lambert's seal on it.
The baron said he wasn't about to offend a lord as high as Count Lambert, not without finding out what that man would pay for my life.
They was all eating and drinking while I was tied up in front of them, and every round of wine they drank, they'd decide on a higher
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price for my ransom. By the time they was near dead drunk, they had this priest write up a letter to Count Lambert saying that if he
didn't come up with four thou sand pence in six weeks, they'd hang me for poaching, and I knew I was a dead man. I'd never seen that
much money in one spot in my whole life, and the count didn't even know me. Who'd spend a fortune to save a man they'd never even
met?
So they chained me with shackles riveted around my wrists and ankles and threw me into this tiny cell in the basement, with barely
room to lay down. The only food I got was some table scraps every third day or so and they was stingy with the water. They wouldn't
even give me a pot to piss in, and I had to piss and shit on the floor of my cell. But that whole castle stank so bad that they didn't even
notice the stench I added. In a month's time, I was covered with my own shit, and being hung didn't seem like such a bad thing after all.
At least then I could stop smelling myself!
Then along comes Sir Conrad, all decked out in red velvet and gold trim, with good armor under it. There was another knight with him,
Sir Vladimir, and two of the prettiest girls you've ever seen, Annastashia and Krystyana. He paid out four thousand pence in silver coin
and got my bow and arrows back, too, but I had no such luck with my boat and cargo.
A blacksmith knocked the shackles off me and it was strange to stand there in the bright sun with clean air to breathe, trying to make
myself understand that I was going to get to live again.
Sir Conrad said I owed him four thousand pence, and I'd pay it off by working for him at three pence a day, the same pay that I'd given
him the last fall. That was five ' years pay, even if I saved every penny of it, and many's the time I wished I'd paid him the six pence a
day he'd asked for in the first place, instead of dickering him and the priest down to something reasonable.
They all stayed upwind of me until we got to an inn, and the innkeeper wouldn't let me inside until they'd given me a bath in the
courtyard. They burned my clothes and I had to make do with a set of Sir Conrad's with the cuffs rolled up.
So we headed north and west, and when we got to Cracow, the ferryboat there had been changed at Sir Conrad's suggestion. It had a
long rope running upstream to a big tree on the bank, and by adjusting that rope, the ferry master could take the ferry back and forth
without needing any oarsmen!
I'd known Sir Conrad was smart, but this amazed me. I was still staring at it when we was attacked by a band of unemployed oarsmen.
They blamed Sir Conrad for robbing their jobs, and maybe they was fight. Sir Conrad, he got knocked off his horse by a rock that hit
him square in the head, but Sir Vladimir, he went out and started smashing them oarsmen, and darned if Sir Conrad's mare didn't go out
there and help him with the job. That horse is spooky, smarter than a lot of men I've hired. Sir Conrad says she's people, and he even
pays her a wage for her work, swearing her in just like she was a vassal, but she scares me sometimes. It just ain't natural.
I got my bow bent, but I noticed that Sir Vladimir was using the flat of his sword on the oarsmen, so I didn't kill nobody either. I just
nailed a few of their arms to some trees and buildings, me being that good a shot.
Once Sir Conrad got his wits back, he talked to the oarsmen and said that if any of them couldn't find work in Cracow, well, they could
come to his lands at Three Walls and get work there. Most of them took him up on it, too. So did a lot of others that never was oarsmen,
but it wasn't my place to say nothing. Why should I cost a man his job?
Sir Vladimir. he led the party right up to Wawel Castle, and all the pages and grooms scurried around like our party was real important.
I got put up in the servants' quarters, of course, not being quality folk, but it wasn't bad. Them castle servants eat good, and I was still a
month behind on my eating.
Besides filling me up on food, them servants filled me in on what was happening. They said that Sir Conrad got on the right side of
Count Lambert by building all sorts of machines for him, and the count gave Sir Conrad a huge tract of land in the mountains near
Cieszyn. Sir Conrad was building a city there when he heard I was in trouble and he got into a cesspool of trouble hisself on the way to
get me.
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They said he met a band of Teutonic Knights what were taking a gross of young heathen slaves to the markets in Constantinople, and
Sir Conrad wouldn't allow them to do it. He said they was molesting children, so him and Sir Vladimir chopped up them seven guards
and took the children back to Three Walls.
The trouble was that them Teutonic Knights, or Crossmen they're called, are the biggest and orneriest band of fighting men within a
thousand miles, and they wasn't about to let Sir Conrad get away with robbing them. There was going to be a trial by combat, and Sir
Conrad was going to get hisself killed, sure as sin. No body beats a Crossman champion in a fair fight, and mostly they don't fight fair.
I tell you that if you ever want to know something, you just ask a palace servant. They know everything that's happening, which is
probably the reason that Sir Conrad won't have any. Lots of people works for him, you understand, but he gets up and gets his own
meals just like everybody else.
We went to Okoitz, and I could see why Count Lambert was so impressed with Sir Conrad. There was a huge windmill, taller than a
church steeple, and it sawed wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of things, and there was this big cloth factory chock-filled with
the damndest machines you ever saw, making cloth by the mile.
It was also filled with the finest collection of pretty girls in the world, and didn't none of them wear much. They was all crowding
around Count Lambert and Sir Conrad, hoping to get their butts patted or their tits pinched. Not that any of them would pay any
attention to the likes of me. I wasn't a knight and they didn't have time for us common trash.
Then, like there wasn't a gross of pretty girls after his body, and the Crossmen wasn't going to kill him, Sir Conrad invents a flying toy
called a kite, and spends a week building them. He's a very strange man, that one.
Then we went to Three Walls and I got put to work, mostly doing guard duty at night. It wasn't so bad, since Sir Conrad let me hunt all I
wanted, just so that everything I shot went into the pot, which was fine by me. I ate my share of it, and so did Sir Conrad. One of his
rules was everybody ate the same, and there was always plenty of it. I respected him for that, even though a lot of the others just thought
he was crazy.
At first, there wasn't much at Three Walls but a big sawmill and some temporary shacks, but they got some fine buildings up real quick
before the snow flew, and since Sir Conrad planned it all, you just know they was full of odd things The strangest were the bathrooms,
where they had flush toilets and hot showers and more copper pipes than you ever seen in your life. And some damn fine scenery, since
the girls used the same showers we did. Not that any of the young ones would have much to do with me, no, they was all wanting a real
knight and maybe even Sir Conrad.
But I found me another sensible widow and just sort of moved in with her. Nobody said anything about it and in a few weeks somebody
else was using my bunk in the bachelors' quarters, and that was fine, too.
Come time for Sir Conrad's trial by combat, everybody in Three Walls went to Okoitz to watch it. I got to talking with Sir Vladimir and
Friar Roman-him what used to be the Goliard poet-along with Ilya, the blacksmith. We all allowed as how it was a rotten shame that a
fine man like Sir Conrad was going to get hisself killed, and especially by them filthy German Crossmen.
And we came up with a plan to do something about it. The friar had a painting kit with some gold leaf in it. He was going to cover some
of my arrows with gold, and the blacksmith, he had some steel arrowheads that could cut any armor. I was going to be up on top of the
windmill, and if Sir Conrad got into trouble, I planned to shoot me the Crossman champion. Once I did that, and golden arrows came
down out of the sky to punish the evildoers, the others would be in the crowd shouting "An Act of God!", "A miracle!", and such like
nonsense, since who'd took for the perpetrator of a miracle? How could they punish me or Sir Conrad for an Act of God?
When the time came, we was all ready. Sir Conrad got hisself bashed out of the saddle on the first pass, and the Crossman, he came
around to finish him off. I let fly and then hid myself, but somehow I must have missed him clean because when I looked up, him and
Sir Conrad was locked in a close fight. Since I missed once, I was afraid that the weight of the gold leaf was throwing off my aim, and I
didn't shoot for fear of hitting Sir Conrad. Just as well, because Sir Conrad kicked the Crossman's smelly arse! He played with the
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bastard, first throwing away his shield and then killing him with his bare hands!
Then when the fight was over and I was getting ready to climb down, four more Crossmen charged onto the tourney field at Sir Conrad.
I had my bow bent real quick and let four arrows fly as fast as you can blink! This time, I watched them fly through the low clouds and
come out again to hit every one of them Crossmen square in the heart! I tell you I got four out of four, and every one of them straight in
at three hundred yards! I killed every one of them fouling bastards and their empty horses ran past Sir Conrad on either side.
Then, right according to plan, everybody was shouting "A miracle!" and "An Act of God!" The blacksmith ran out on the field, to be the
first one there to recover my arrows, since we figured that nobody would believe God using gold-covered arrows. God would use real
solid gold if He used anything. It was best to get rid of the evidence.
But when Ilya tried to pull out the first arrow, it bent in his hand! It really was real solid pure gold!
I got religion about then, saying my prayers every night like the priest taught me and going to mass every morning. I did that for about a
month and then was my old self again, or pretty near. Only I don't make jokes about the stupid priests anymore and I try to watch my
language, except when the shitheads push me too hard.
So Sir Conrad lived and them kids all grew up proper at Three Walls instead of being slaves to the Mussulmen. And nobody thought to
catch me for killing them Crossmen, if it was me that shot them and not God. It was some damn fine shooting, Whoever did it.
So we all went back to Three Walls, right after Sir Vladimir married Annastashia. I went back to the Widow Bromski and spent most of
the next four or five years hunting and standing guard, except for a few side trips with Sir Conrad. Well, besides that I got me a fine
education at the school Sir Conrad set up, but I guess that shows up in my writing.
They was always building something new at Three Walls, and some of it was pretty exciting, especially the steam engines. In my off-
hours I got to looking at them and talking to anybody what knew much about it. I tried to get Sir Conrad to transfer me to one of the
machining sections, but he wouldn't do it. He said he had plenty of good men who could run a lathe, but only one man who could shoot
like me.
After that, about the only thing that happened that was worth talking about was once when we was all going to a new site that Sir
Conrad got from Duke Henryk to open up a copper mine. We got word that there was a bunch of foreigners in Toszek, just a mile up the
road, that was murdering people and burning women at the stake! Naturally, we went right there, and Sir Conrad and another knight
went in to arrest the bastards-there must have been five dozen of them-while I got up on a shed to back them up with my longbow.
Well, these foreigners, some kind of Spaniards they was, they didn't want to be arrested so naturally a fight got started. All our workers
got into it and I let fly with all the arrows I had, a dozen and a half of them. I only missed but once, when the fletching let loose on an
old arrow, but that one time was when a soldier was coming at Sir Conrad and all I shot was some priest standing behind him. Sir
Conrad's horse killed the bastard, kicked him square in the face and killed him dead, but like I said, that's a spooky horse!
I felt bad about missing, since Sir Conrad had saved my life three times, and up till then I'd only saved his once, but he wasn't mad about
it. Like I said, he was a fine man.
We took prisoner such of them as we didn't kill and we divvied up the booty and I got three months pay out of it, besides a fine sword
and a knife. Ask me and I'll show them to you sometimes.
Then they had a trial where everybody could speak their piece, and the foreigners, they said that they was only killing witches, and after
that we hung the bastards. I never heard of nobody hunting witches from that time on.
So it wasn't so bad, working for Sir Conrad, but I got to yearning for the river. Being a boatman gets into your liver after a while, and
when you been doing it for four or six generations, it sticks heavy in your blood. When I was close to working off my debt, I went to Sir
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Conrad to talk about it, or rather I made an appointment to see him with Natalia, his secretary. He was a busy man. And he wasn't "Sir"
Conrad any more. Count Lambert had bumped him up to "Baron" now.
I was hoping that he'd stake me to a boat and cargo, or maybe let me work a few more years at the same rate so I could buy my own, but
he had other ideas.
He said that he was going to build a fleet of the finest riverboats ever seen, and every one of them powered by one of his steam engines.
They'd each carry a dozen times the cargo of any boat now on the rivers, and they'd go six times faster, upstream or down!
I asked what would happen to the other boatmen on the river and he said that we'd have to hire them, but he needed a good man to be
boss, a man he trusted and a man who could speak the language of the other boatmen. Then he asked me if I was interested in the job.
I near fell off my chair! Hell yes, I was interested! Me running all the boats on the Vistula! Damn right I was interested!
He said good, he wanted me. And it wasn't only the Vistula. There was more cargo to be hauled on the Odra than on the Vistula, what
with his installations at Copper City near Legnica and Coaltown north of Kolzie. On top of that, these boats wouldn't only be just for
cargo. They'd be armored to stop any arrow and armed with weapons he didn't want to talk about just yet. He said the Mongols were
coming in a few years and they would try to kill everybody, but we would stop them, and we would do it with the riverboats if that was
possible. If that failed, he had an army building at the Warrior's School, and that would be the second line of defense. But the men on
the boats would have to be warriors too, so I would be in the first class through, now that they was almost finished training the
instructors.
Now that took me back a peg or five. I'd heard a lot of stories about that school and wasn't none of them good. It was supposed to be a
secret, but everybody knew that three-quarters of the men who started didn't live through it and I told Baron Conrad so.
He said that I'd been listening to a lot of old wives' tales. That while only a quarter of the first class graduated, only one in six had
actually died. Most of the rest had been washed out for injuries, or physical or mental problems, and anyway the next class would not
have it so hard. They were projecting a fifty percent graduation rate. On top of that, everybody who worked for Baron Conrad would
soon have to go through the school, so I might as well get it over with, before I got any older. Younger men had a better survival rate.
I said I didn't like them words "survival rate," but Baron Conrad said he only meant the ratio of men graduating, and nobody wants to
live forever, anyhow.
I said it was my Christian duty to try, but Baron Conrad, he told me that it was still a secret, but that all of that first class was going to be
knighted, and the next one was, too. He told me to think about all them pretty young girls I saw in the shower room every day and to
think about the old widow I was living with. Yeah, I guess he knew about it.
So I thought about them eager young smiles and the Widow Bromski's scowling face, and about them bouncing young tits and her
sagging dugs and that's what done me in.
Chapter Two
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
The weather was so beautiful that Krystyana and Sir Piotr had elected to have their wedding ceremony, complete with church service
and reception, held outside. Since Sir Piotr was the local boy who had made good, the priest and everyone else went along with it.
And of course, since everything had to be done as ceremoniously as possible, the mass went on for over an hour and I had some time to
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get some thinking done. I was working on my next four-year plan.
Yes, I know that socialists are supposed to write five year plans, but in less than four years the Mongols were going to invade, and there
didn't seem to be any sane reason to plan much beyond that. If we could lick the Mongols, we'd have a whole lifetime to plan things. If
not, well what was the point? We'd all be dead.
For the last five years, I had been working mostly at getting our industrial base going. We now had a productive cloth factory and a
sugar refinery here at Okoitz, and a coppermining, smelting, and machining installation at Copper City, that Duke Henryk owned. More
than a dozen of Count Lambert's other barons and knights had various light industries going at their manors, mostly to keep their
peasants busy during the winters. Some of them were my vendors, making boots and uniforms for my future army.
At the Franciscan monastery in Cracow, we had a papermaking plant, a printshop, and a book bindery. And besides books, they were
also producing a monthly magazine.
I had three new towns of my own running. There was Three Walls , where we were making iron, steel, coke, cement, bricks, and other
ceramics, and machinery, plus several hundred different consumer products. It also had a major carpentry shop, set up for mass
production, and valley filled with Moslem refugees that functioned as an R&D center and a gunpowder works. There was Coaltown,
where we were making coke, bricks, glass, and chemicals. And there was Silver City, in the Malapolska Hills, where we mined and
refined lead and zinc.
Silver City got its name when my sales manager, Boris Novacek, refused to let me call zinc by its rightful name. He said that a zinc was
a musical instrument, and that it was stupid to use the same word on a metal. He wanted to call it "silver" and pass it off as the real
thing, but I wouldn't let him do it. We compromised on "Polish Silver," and the name stuck.
In addition to the factories and mines, a major agricultural revolution was taking place, mostly because of the seeds I'd brought back
with me, but also because of the farm machinery I'd introduced.
Understand that none of these installations was really up to twentieth-century standards. At best, some of it was up to nineteenth-century
standards. Everything was primitive and on a small scale. Most of the work was still being done by hand, and the most useful and cost
effective piece of farm machinery I'd introduced was the wheelbarrow. Well, the new steel plows worked well, and the McCormick-
style reapers sold well even if they were too expensive. A whole village had to club up to buy one.
Nonetheless, worker productivity was four times what it had been when I'd arrived, and things were constantly getting better. The infant
mortality rate was way down, too, because of the sanitation measures I'd introduced. Of course, the birth rate hadn't changed to any
noticeable degree, so the place was crawling with rug rats, but what the heck. There was plenty of room for them. There was an
underpopulated world out there.
Eagle Nest was nominally an aircraft development center, but I completely doubted if a bunch of twelve-year-old boys could really
develop practical aviation. I'd helped build it to keep my liege lord happy and because in the long run, it was actually an engineering
school, which we needed.
Lastly, I had the new Warrior's School ready to go, and my corps of instructors trained. My army was to have three branches.
The first branch would be made up of my existing factory workers. They would all have to go through an abbreviated basic-training
period of six months and then train one day a week after that. The problem was that I would have to send the managers through first,
since we couldn't have a situation where the subordinates were knighted and the managers were commoners. Discipline would vanish!
There wasn't time to send the managers out in small bunches, so there was nothing for it but to send them all at once, which involved
running the factories with untrained, temporary managers. It was scary, but I didn't see any way around it. Everybody in the top two
layers was told to pick a man from below and teach him how to do his job in ten weeks. Only thirty-five men were leaving, but they
were my best thirty-five men.
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The Flying Warlord
There were screams and moans from all quarters, but I got my way.
Furthermore, all new hires, women as well as men, had to go through the six-month training period before they could start work. I
required the women to be trained because when we went off to war, I planned to take every able-bodied man with me. The women
would have to "man" the wall guns and other defenses without us. And this meant setting up a training program for the wives of my
managers as well.
Then there were the river defenses. If the weather was right, and the rivers weren't frozen, we just might be able to stop the Mongols at
the Vistula, or even at the Bug. We already had good steam engines and a carpentry shop set up for mass production. Steamboats should
be a fairly straightforward proposition. The troops manning them would be hired from among existing riverboat men and then put
through the full-year basic-training program. Then, after that, they'd have to learn about fighting from a steamboat on the job.
The regular army would be a full-time group based on the training instructors I already had. Besides training everybody else, they had to
multiply their own numbers by at least six each year for the next three years, and then twice more in the last year to get us an army big
enough to do the job. And those were absolute minimums. Anything less than fifty thousand men would just get us all killed. The
production quotas for the factories were set up for a hundred fifty thousand.
From an economic standpoint, land transport was even more important than river transport. All of the roads were so bad that it was
almost impossible to get a cart over them. Almost all goods were transported by caravan mule, and the best of them could only carry a
quarter ton. They could only do thirty miles a day and had to be loaded and unloaded twice a day at that. But on level ground, on a steel
track and steel wheels with good bearings, a mule should be able to tow two dozen times what it could carry on its back.
But more important than economics was the fact that my army was being trained to fight with war carts. Swivel guns mounted in big
carts would fire over the heads of the pikemen towing the cart. I had to get the troops to the battlefields quickly and in reasonably good
shape. It was time to build railroads.
And if I was going to build a transport system, I was going to build it right from the beginning. All the railroad tracks would be wide
gauge and that gauge would be absolutely standardized. And we would containerize right from the start. Our war carts were six yards
long, two yards wide and a yard and a half high. That would be our standard container size. All chests and barrels would be sized to fit
neatly within the container, and anything nonstandard would get charged double rates, at least. The four wheels on a war cart were two
yards high and mounted on casters, and each could be locked either fore and aft or to the side. Fore and aft, the center of the wheels
were two yards apart, so that was the standard track gauge, and future carts would have flanged wheels to keep them on the track. If they
tore up the ground when going cross country, tough.
Then we needed maps, and there weren't any. How a medieval general ever commanded troops without adequate maps was beyond me,
and I didn't intend to learn. I'd had the machine shop make up some crude but usable theodolites (they didn't have a telescope on them,
just iron sights like on a gun) and I had a good mathematician, Sir Piotr, to put in charge of the project. He could train others.
And we needed radios. Integrated circuits, transistors, and even tubes were well beyond us, and would be for years. I'd been able to
muddle my way through a lot of things because I was too ignorant to know what I was getting into. With electronics, I knew what the
problems would be, and they frightened me! Where would I get the rare-earth oxides needed to make a decent cathode? How would I
develop alloys with the same temperature coefficients as our glass to take wires into the tube without shattering it? How could I possibly
get a good enough vacuum?
But working radios were invented long before there were tubes. They used spark-gap transmitters and coherers to pick up the signals,
and with enough work, I thought I could get one going. With radios, I could effectively double our speed, since I wouldn't have to send
a runner to convey every order. Speed was the one area where the Mongols would be our undoubted superiors. Those shaggy ponies
could move!
Radios were an absolute first priority.
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The Flying Warlord
The mass ended and we all walked over to the reception area. I stood in line to kiss the bride, even though I had done it all-too-many
times before. Cilicia kissed the groom full on the mouth and warmly, probably because she too was glad to see Krystyana married off.
As we went to the sideboard to get a couple of glasses of mead, my liege lord came up.
"Ah, Baron Conrad! You seem to be enjoying yourself!" Count Lambert said. Cilicia remained silent around my lord. They didn't get
along.
"I might as well, my lord, seeing as how I'm footing the bill for the wedding feast," I said.
"And the dowry as well, I suppose?"
"Of course, my lord. After all, I've had three children by Krystyana and it seems the least I could do. I'm just glad that the kids will have
a proper father."
"Indeed. I'm surprised that the Church hasn't come down on you for it."
"I'm sure that they are keeping careful notes, my lord. The inquisition concerning me is still up in the air."
"That's not all that's up there! I trust you've looked up sometime in the last hour?"
I hadn't, but I did so now. There was this thirteenth century sailplane circling overhead.
"I guess I must have been thinking about something else, my lord. There must be quite a thermal above the town."
"Quite. It's doubtless helped by the way every fire in the town is burning bright on a warm, calm day. You don't think that's cheating, do
you?"
"I guess not, my lord. We never qualified what it had to do to stay up, only that it had to fly for two hours. It looks like it's climbing.
The wager is yours."
"Good! Then where is my aircraft engine?"
"Still in my head, my lord, but I'll get working on it as soon as I get back to Three Walls. Perhaps I can deliver something to you in a
few months."
"It will take that long? The boys were hoping to get started immediately!"
"It will take at least that long, my lord. Do you realize what you're asking? It's not just designing and building the mechanical parts,
though that's going to be hard enough! I have no idea how we'll go about machining a crankshaft on one of our lathes! There's a
lubrication system to worry about and a carburetion system. And how am I to make a spark coil with nothing but beeswax and paper for
insulators? And spark plugs! Thermal expansion problems alone could kill us right there! And-"
"You will solve it, Baron Conrad. You always have before. Shall we say by the Harvest Festival, then?"
"My lord, I will work on it diligently, but I cannot promise results by any fixed date. There's the problem with fuel. I think we can use
wood alcohol, but--"
"We'll discuss it again on the Feast of Our Lady of the Harvest. Oh, yes. There was another thing I wanted to talk over with you. When
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TheFlyingWarlordTheFlyingWarlordBook4oftheAdventuresofConradStarguardByLeoFrankowskiISBN:0-345-32765-9Prologue"Whoopeeshit!...It'sfinallyhappening,"shesaid."Ahundredyearsof\trackingprotohumanmigrationpatternsontheAfricanplainandit'sfinallyover!ItfeelssogoodthatIalmostdon'thateyourgutsa\nymore!""Well...

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