And there wasn't only the concrete to think of. There was plumbing, wiring, power plants, heating systems, weapons, school-books, and beer steins. I got to sketching out what was required, and it was very dark before I quit.
We were going to have to build a factory that built factories that made the components of the forts, which were themselves partly factories! I wrote a note to Natalia to have all drafting and engineering personnel relieved of all military duties and back at their desks immediately. I needed help!
I woke up in the sunshine again, with the same girl in bed with me. I had missed the sunrise service two days in a row! There was some cheering going on outside, and I went to the balcony to see what it was all about. The women and children from East Gate were back! Not the nobles who were murdered there by the Mongols, but our own people who had left the fort two or three days before that. The women and children had wandered around in the hills for a week before they had found their way back here.
I got some proper clothes on in a hurry and went down to the mob scene below. Understandably, the men whose families had been missing were delighted to find that they were safe and sound. They were hugging and kissing and laughing and crying, sometimes the same person doing all four at the same time. What annoyed me was the fact that the captainette who had brought the dependents in was being carried around on some of the men's shoulders as though she were a hero.
I got over to them and wrenched her down. "You stupid bitch!" I shouted. "You're under arrest!"
"But what for, sir?" one of the men asked.
"What for? For dereliction of duty, for abandoning her post, for treason, and for contributing to the murder of twenty thousand women and children!" I shouted.
Then suddenly everybody was quiet.
Chapter Thirteen
THREE WALLS still didn't have a jail, so I had a blacksmith put leg shackles on her and followed the two knights who took our prisoner to the storeroom we used as a lockup when necessary. The room was already in use for the handless Mongol ex-ambassador, but I had her thrown in with him. He stank the way all Mongols do, but I didn't owe her any favors. I was on my way back up when I realized that I was going to have to judge the case.
You see, "count" is a judicial title, like "judge" or "justice." A man holding it had the right of high justice within his realms. That is to say, he could hold a trial for a major crime and punish the offender as he saw fit. His word could have a man hanged. I had held the title of count since the Christmas before, but that meant that I was count of Francine's tiny county of Strzegom, where there never was much crime. Here, at Three Walls, I had remained Count Lambert's baron despite my right to use the title of count. Up until a week ago, that is. When Count Lambert had been killed by a Mongol spear and I had inherited his lands in Poland, I had also inherited his responsibilities. I couldn't fob off my serious criminals on him anymore. I was it!
I went back up to my office to ponder this latest problem.
For years I had been ducking my legal duties by having somebody else do them. On Sir Miesko's recommendation, I'd appointed Baron Pulaski to be my judge. The baron had four subordinates, a court recorder, a bailiff, and two prosecutor-defenders. These last two took turns. They went around my extensive and scattered estates, hearing cases and writing up their recommendations to me. I almost invariably went along with them or, in the case of serious offenses, handed their recommendations up to my liege lord, Count Lambert. In time he got to following their recommendations as well.
But they really didn't have any official sanction for their existence. Since they normally tried trivial matters and only conducted hearings on serious ones, nobody had seriously complained about it. But Captainette Lubinska's crimes were hardly trivial. Whether I tried her or had Baron Pulaski do it, I would be setting a precedent.
After some hours of agonizing over it, I decided that the baron was more competent a judge than I was, and he was certainly more unbiased. Furthermore, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life being a trial judge. I had better things to do than sit on a gilded chair deciding if some poor bastard deserved to die. If my liege lord, Duke Henryk didn't like it, he could start by telling me so.
If, indeed, he still was my liege lord! The last I'd heard from him, he was damning me for failing to go to Legnica and join his forces there. For all I knew, he considered me to be an independent duke now.
The simple truth was that the military forces that obeyed me were vastly superior to his, and I controlled quite a bit more money than he did, although as a good socialist, I had difficulty thinking of all this vast wealth as being my own. Actually, I could probably declare my own independence and make it stick!
Not that I'd want to.
I could see no advantage to independence and quite a few disadvantages. Being part of a greater whole, I could expand my industrial and agricultural revolutions as fast as necessary simply by doing it and paying a fee or buying land if it was required of me. A little persuasion was all that was usually needed. As an independent king, or whatever, I'd have to fight a war every time I tried to open up a new market. Insanity!
I sent a runner to find Baron Pulaski and ask him to come have a talk with me.
My designers and draftspeople had all shown up at dawn and had spent the morning getting their work area cleaned up and ready to go. It had been more than a year since we'd used it, what with the war and all. Most of them were back in civilian clothes and feeling a little unusual about it.
"I'm not going to enforce any dress codes around here," I told them, "but if you have to go out to the field or even to the shops, I'll expect you to be in uniform. You're still in the army, after all. Now then, we have some factories to design, and we'll need at least the foundation drawings finalized in two weeks so the troops can start on them as soon as they finish cleaning up the mess we made on the Vistula. Now here's what we need. "
Once I got them going, I went back to my "manager" office, called for my secretary, and asked if there were any messages. She brought in a stack as thick as my arm, sorted as to what they wanted. An efficient lady.
Baron Gregor wanted to release all his men who had been workers at Three Walls to get the factories going again. He was particularly worried about the ammunition situation. I wrote "granted," with a note that all men who had served in the Construction Corps should be sent under Baron Yashoo to East Gate to rebuild the Riverboat Assembly Building. Since almost all these workers had at least a half-dozen new subordinates who had gone through only four months of training, these subordinates would be assigned to other knights at no more than a dozen new men each.
There were six dozen letters of congratulations and then a request from a priest that in the future all Mongols should be baptized before they were beheaded. Denied. The bastards didn't deserve to go to heaven.
There were a lot of requests for discharge, mostly so the men could search for their families. Denied, put your request through channels. There wasn't much to worry about, since most army personnel had their dependents at army installations that had not been attacked, and nobody had gotten killed at any of them.
I made an exception in the case of Captain Targ, whose family was far to the east, near what would be Zakopane. I owed him a serious favor, since he had saved my life, and I thought this was a good way to pay it. I sent orders to his baron that he and his brother should be given indefinite leave and lent horses if they wanted them. I really meant to do him a favor, but I guess it didn't turn out that way. The two brothers headed east, crossed the Vistula, and were never heard from again. Their family was also among the missing.