"I only wish it had been an honorable war wound, your grace, but the sad truth is that I had no sooner gotten to Duke Henryk's camp at Legnica than my horse slipped on the ice and I went down on an iron spit that was loaded with a duck that was roasting next to a cooking fire! The damned thing went right through my leg and into my horse. It nailed us together, and after they put the poor beast down, they had to cut it — and the saddle! — in half to get the carcass off me. And all the while I had to lie there half in the snow and half in the burning coals, and me not a Radiant Warrior!"
It occurred to me that on the average he must have been reasonably comfortable, but I didn't say it. "Horrible!" I said.
"Yet I tell you that the pain of the wound was nothing compared to the mortification I felt while everyone stood around trying to figure out how to get us apart, and the squire who owned the duck screamed at me the whole while. The entire infamous affair took hours to resolve, and I am sure that the foreign knights were taking bets as to how it would work out. Then the damned surgeons thought that my leg would have to come off, but I wouldn't allow that. It seems to be healing well enough now, though."
"Oh, you poor fellow! While you're here, you might want to ask one of our army doctors to have a look at it. They're better than most."
"I'll do that, your grace, but I doubt if there's anything they can do to mend a man's broken pride! The greatest war in history, and I missed it because of a roast duck!"
The girls seemed to like him well enough. At least I noticed one of Cilicia's maids sneaking into his room that night. My household seemed to be developing the morals that Count Lambert's had had. Yet Lambert's dying wish had been that all the ladies would be properly loved, and I had promised him that I would do my best to see it so. It wasn't any of my business, so I pretended that I didn't see her.
The next morning I got a double-sized research crew going on light bulbs: a glassblower, a machinist, and four apprentices. They didn't have a good source of electricity yet to power it, but there were plenty of problems to be worked out first. How to blow a glass bulb around a fragile baked thread. Coming up with a metal wire that would be wetted by molten glass and have a similar coefficient of thermal expansion so that the glass wouldn't crack as the bulb heated up and cooled down. Developing decent hardware, like a screw base and a light switch. And harder yet, making a good enough vacuum pump.
An electric generator was a separate problem for a separate team. I designed what I thought would be a decent DC generator and had them get to work on building it. I knew full well that we'd go through a dozen models before we got something good enough to go into production with. Generators were one of those things that I studied in school and had seen working but had never had a chance to design. It was another one of those specialized things that a generalist like me never got involved in. It would be years.
Then there was plumbing. We were casting our pipes out of copper. This required making the walls much thicker than was necessary to carry water, but we couldn't dependably cast them any thinner. Modem copper pipes are drawn, stretched into shape by pulling the copper alternatively between outside dies of the soil used to draw wire in order to make the copper pipe longer, and inside dies in order to stretch the metal to a larger diameter with thinner walls. Simple enough machinery, in theory at least, and it seemed likely to drop the cost of pipes threefold. I got another team on it.
Yet another team was put to work on some better wiredrawing machinery.
Teams were also assigned to develop a clothes washer and a dishwasher. One group got going on a sewing machine, although privately I considered it to be a very longterm project, since it was so complicated.
I wish we could have worked on power hand tools, but that looked impossible to me. For a long time to come all powered installations would have to be permanently mounted. We didn't have any rubber or plastic with which to make an extension cord!
I thought about getting a few teams going on new weapons and developing some of the things that had been invented just before the war but too late to get into production, but I decided against it. For one thing, we had more arms and equipment of the old style than we had men to use them. New weapons would require new tactics and new training, with a lot of man-hours required. We were already so superior to anybody else in the world that making us better was simple overkill. And mostly, in twenty years, there would be as many Big People around as there were Little People. We wouldn't be mostly infantry then; we'd be almost all cavalry. Best to wait a few years and then start working slowly on some good cavalry weapons and tactics.
A relaxing week slid pleasantly by before I got a message from my team of accountants at Okoitz. Angelo Muskarini was under arrest!
Chapter Twenty-seven
Sonya wanted to go and visit Okoitz, so I took her along, even though taking a woman to Okoitz was on a par with hauling coke to Coaltown.
I got there to find Muskarini chained up in a storeroom. He was a mass of bruises, his teeth were loose, and both eyes were blackened shut. "Resisting arrest?" I asked.
"No, sir," said my senior accountant. "He just made us angry."
Well, my accountants were not the mousy sorts who live on American television. They were warriors first, bookkeepers second. Of course, they shouldn't have beaten the man up. I'd talked to my detectives on the importance of using the minimum possible force, but it had never occurred to me that the accountants needed the lecture as well.
After we stepped into the hall and away from the cell, I said, "You shouldn't have done that. It's not nice to beat up someone who can't hit back."
"Sorry, sir. But this dog turd was robbing his own liege lord of a fortune!"
"Can you prove it?"
"Of course, sir. I can show you the figures. Muskarini has been stealing nine parts per gross of the entire factory output ever since the first year he got here. It was no accident. He was very consistent about it, and Count Lambert doubtless thought that it was a normal production loss."
"That must be a lot of money."
"One gross, eleven dozen, and four thousand, a gross, nine dozen, and three pence, sir."
I whistled. They were talking base twelve, and that came to almost a half a million, the way I was brought up. "Has this money been found?"
"Yes, sir, and then some. The figure I mentioned was just on the missing finished cloth. We think he might have been getting kickbacks on the dyes and other supplies that were bought by the count. That was what much of the beating was about. Finding the money. He was keeping it in the dye supply side shed. He had the only key to the place."
"Hmph. You know, he couldn't have stolen that much alone. He would have had to have accomplices. No one man could possibly have carried out that much cloth and not been noticed. After all, hundreds of people work around here, and many of them were Count Lambert's knights."
"We know, sir, but he won't talk about that."
I went back into Muskarini's cell. He knew I was there, even though he couldn't see me. "Well, Angelo. What do you have to say for yourself?"
"I didn't steal that money, your grace. It was mine."
"Yours? Almost half a million pence was yours? Look, I was there at the beginning, remember? You were absolutely penniless, starving to death in a garret in Cieszyn! I hired you as a gift for my liege lord. How could you have gotten such wealth? You'll have to tell a better lie than that before I believe it!"
"Count Lambert gave it to me, your grace. He did, I swear!"
"No, Angelo. The count was very generous about a lot of things, but not money. Lands, yes. Women, yes. Money, no!"