"We need more than your support, your excellency. We need your active help and leadership! With so many 'of the noblemen dead, I think that you alone would have the prestige to call together all the seym here to Cracow and have them come. Or do you think that Sandomierz would be more centrally located?"
"Sandomierz is not only more central, my daughter, it is also intact! Surely you have noticed that lower Cracow is a smoldering ruin. No, I'm afraid that we must definitely choose Sandomierz."
I left the good bishop working on his proclamation and his sermon and had Anna drive me back to the inn. And then I went to sleep.
Chapter Twelve
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
I woke to see that it was broad daylight outside. The second thing I noticed was that I had an attractive young lady in my arms and that she wasn't one of my wives. I thought about it a bit and decided that they had probably provided me with this substitute since they were both in advanced pregnancy, and that it would not be gallant to look a gift lady in the mouth. Of course, if she were not here with my wives' permission, there could be fireworks, but what the hell. I had been two weeks and more without, and that's an absurd amount of time!
So I found out that her name was Mary and that she was one of Cilicia's new maids. I had never known Cilicia to have a maid before. She was picking up Francine's bad habits already. I told Mary that all this was wonderful and topped her for the better part of an hour. About fifteen years old, she was an enthusiastic and healthy girl, if not particularly skillful. At least she wasn't a virgin.
Then I began wondering what the army was doing.
Promising the girl that I'd see her later, I threw a cloak over my bare shoulders and walked over the catwalk to the second wall. The few people I met gave me a smile and a nod, but left me to my mood. The three walls, which doubled as apartment buildings, were connected with narrow, lightweight wooden bridges at each floor that let you go from one apartment building to another without having to go all the way down and then up again. They were built such that if the first wall was taken by an enemy, the catwalks could be easily knocked down and the fight could be continued from the second or even the first wall. Fortunately, this had not proved necessary against the Mongols, but every little bit of safety helps.
I got to the fighting top of the outer wall and saw that the cleanup job was well under way. A start was being made at repairing the septic tank. Dead Mongols were being stripped and decapitated, with the bodies being hauled away for burial somewhere out of sight. In the distance, heads were being stuck on poles lined up on both sides of the railroad tracks. Different from what we had done before but just as effective. Maybe even more so, to someone traveling down the track. I wondered if anyone had calculated just how long a double line of a quarter of a million heads was. I did the arithmetic in my head and came up with six dozen miles! Perhaps Baron Gregor was in for a surprise.
The dead Mongol horses were being skinned, and a fair number of the young and healthy ones were being butchered. Many of them were being salted down. Krystyana always was a tightfisted little manager,
Things were being done, they didn't need my help, and I found this to be good. I went down to the showers, which were empty at this hour, and then to the dining room. I was surprised to find that lunch was already over, but I wanted a breakfast, anyway. I hadn't had an egg in two weeks, and I not only ordered six of them, over easy, I had the cook go out to the chicken coop herself and get some that were absolutely fresh. I had them make me some fresh biscuits too. Rank hath its privileges, and for a day or two I intended to wallow in them!
Yet still I missed a cup of coffee, and no amount of wealth or power could get me one. Most modem Poles prefer tea, but I had developed a taste for good coffee during my college days in Massachusetts and had kept with it after going home. An expensive habit, but worth it.
After eating, I went to the church, feeling guilty for not having gone there yesterday as soon as we had won the battle. Even with most of the people working on the cleanup, there was still quite a crowd in the church, most of them. silently praying, giving thanks. There was a long line of people waiting for a chance at the confessionals, one of the things I had introduced to this century. They were standard in my own time, and the priests here had accepted them almost without question as a convenience. My own soul was blackened almost beyond redemption, and I knew that soon I would have to go to Cracow to see my own confessor, Bishop Ignacy. I prayed for an hour and it helped.
My next stop was to the Big People's barn. All of them were gone except for the new white one. Out on patrol, I supposed. I needed to talk to the white person, anyway. I took her over to the big letter board so she could spell out words and answer my questions. The Polish alphabet isn't quite the same as the one used in English, but they are similar enough to get by. Like Anna, she knew that she was a bioengineered product of a civilization in the distant past. Like Anna, she hadn't the slightest idea how a time machine worked. She knew her former rider only as Tom. If he had a last name, she hadn't heard it. In fact, she had absolutely no new information for me at all, except for her name. It was Silver. I should have guessed.
I told her that she was on the payroll. now and that she was welcome to swear allegiance to me. She didn't know what that was, so I put it off until later. Somewhat disappointed, I went back to my apartment.
I never developed as close a relationship with Silver as I had with Anna. She didn't like to come up to the apartment and listen in to the conversations, since she couldn't understand them. She couldn't develop friendships with the local children the way Anna did, for the same reason. And I was now a far busier man than I had been ten years earlier. I just didn't have as much time to spend with her as she deserved. I hired two young boys to stay with her and try to teach her Polish, but she proved absolutely incapable of learning the language. A bad situation, but I didn't know what to do about it.
Back in my apartment, I passed Cilicia in a hallway. She smiled and gave me a quick kiss, but she knew enough about my moods to know that I needed to be alone.
I went to my office and told Natalia, my secretary and Baron Gregor's first wife, that I didn't want to be disturbed by anything less than Duke Henryk or a new Mongol army. I closed the door, and if I had had a telephone I would have unplugged it from the wall. I had some thinking to do.
For the last nine and a half years I had been busy building the seeds of an industrial revolution and building an army to defend Poland from the Mongols. The second objective was now accomplished, for we had given the greasy bastards the soundest beating that they had ever gotten. They'd be a generation sucking their wounds before they dared try us again. By that time, we'd be invincible. We'd likely be attacking them!
As for the first objective, well, there were a lot of improvements still to be made in our technology. Indeed, many had been made in the last few years and had been shelved because we were so involved in war production that we didn't have time to mess with them. The idea that war encourages technology is a myth. War encourages war production and very little else.
The alchemists had come up with an improvement on our method of making sodium bicarbonate, an important chemical in the production of glass, medicines, and the biscuits I had just eaten. The old method mixed salt water (sodium chloride) with carbon dioxide from heated limestone (calcium carbonate), and ammonia from our coke ovens. This yielded sodium bicarbonate and ammonium chloride. The problem was that we couldn't find much of a use for the ammonium chloride and didn't get all that much ammonia from the coke ovens. This greatly limited the amount of the stuff we could produce.