The Pruthenian children Vladimir and I had rescued from the Crossmen were all adults now, and they all spoke Polish well, but some of them still remembered their native tongue. Henryk borrowed a dozen of those who were bilingual for a diplomatic mission to the Pruthenian tribes. He also asked for and got my Mongol prisoner, why I don't know or care. I was glad enough to be rid of the smelly bastard.
Baron Piotr came up with a decent trophy-distribution program for our own troops. The stuff was sorted according to quality and put into separate warehouses according to army rank. There was a big warehouse filled with lower quality stuff for the warriors, a smaller one with nicer things for the knights, a much smaller one for the captains, and so on. Then each man was issued a chit that let him go to Three Walls any time in the next year and take his pick. New rooms were opened up over the months so that those who came late didn't get things that were too picked over. The system assured that the higher-ranking men who had been working in the army for many years got the better gimcracks and that there were some things left for the lowest-ranking men.
Coming up with 150,000 sets of eighteen-carat military decorations was no small feat, and production lines were set up to stamp and cast it all during the summer. Many workers were shocked at the thought of working in gold instead of their usual iron or copper, and all sorts of proposals were tossed around to make sure that none of it was stolen. Aside from carefully sweeping up after each shift and making everybody dust off thoroughly before leaving the area, none of these plans were put into effect. And you know? As close as we could weigh it, not one pound of gold was stolen!
Besides an average of five and a quarter pounds of gold military jewelry, the lowest man in the army got 6,200 pence in cash. Barons got thirty-two times that amount, but then, people in the Middle Ages were well convinced that rank had its privileges. All of this was paid in our zinc coinage, of course. I kept the actual gold and silver.
Even these large amounts were arrived at only after a certain amount of mathematical chicanery. Piotr and the accountants decided that I deserved to be reimbursed for my expenses incurred because of the war. They arrived at the figure they did by taking the gross income of all my lands and factories for the last nine years, plus the value of the lands I had been granted or had inherited, and subtracting from that the value of my current nonmilitary properties. The difference between these two must be what I had spent on the war, they claimed. It came to two-thirds of the gold and silver we took!
Then they awarded shares of the booty to the conventional horsemen who had served under Duke Boleslaw at Sandomierz, in accordance with their rank. Since over half of them were knights and one in seven of these were barons, the shares were large. Since many of them had died without heirs, much of this money escheated back to me as their duke.
A generous fund was set up to take care of the dependents of the army personnel who had died in the fighting or in training. And of course these dependents also inherited their share of the booty besides.
The value of the money and jewels taken from the Christian dead at East Gate was spent on aid to refugees and war orphans, and when this proved to not be quite enough, the balance was paid by the booty fund.
All of this dubious accounting was published in the first monthly issue of The Christian Army Magazine, along with an invitation to object to any feature of it that was felt to be unfair. Only four letters of complaint were received, and those complaints all concerned the war trophies, not the money. I felt a little guilty about it. I mean, it looked to me like I was being paid for the Pink Dragon Inns that had been burned down, but everybody seemed to think it was fair. Maybe by medieval standards it was.
Anyway, by the time all this settled out, I had these two huge stacks of metal bricks, one of gold and one of silver. Worrying about the difficulty of guarding it and the wasted man-hours that would involve, I had each stack cast into a single massive cube, except for 150 tons of the silver, which was earmarked for silverware.
Up until now we had been using brass forks and spoons, and brass sometimes has a funny taste. I let it be known that I would be happy to hear about any good use for our precious metals, and quite a bit of it was used for things such as church vessels and medical equipment.
But most of it went to these huge solid cubes, which were put on public display at Three Walls. I felt safe, since they were too big to move without heavy machinery, and passersby would act as guards against that. People got quite a kick out of just walking up and touching them. From then on, no one ever doubted the army's credit!
And the jewels? Well, no one knew how to value them, let alone divide them fairly, so they just gave them all to me. I separated out the diamonds, which were useful industrially, and put the rest into a big, sturdy chest. Then, one day, I snuck out to the woods and buried them, very deep, with Silver as my only witness. She promised to show them to my successor after I was gone. Damned if I was going to waste good men guarding the stupid baubles!
In late summer, word came from Hungary. We had won the war! The Christian and Mongol forces had been fairly evenly matched, and they had slugged it out all summer long. Veterans returning from the south all seemed to make the trip around the battlefields in Poland, which was now running as a regular guided tour, and they were generally astounded at the number of Mongols we had encountered. Apparently, the main enemy force had been sent to Poland, and only a small one to Hungary. Bulgaria hadn't been invaded at all despite the fact that the Mongols had promised to do so. In my timeline the Bulgarians had paid tribute to the Mongols for a century.
Most of Lambert's knights came back from Hungary alive and well, including Sir Miesko and both of Sir Vladimir's brothers. They had plenty of stories to tell and occasionally even a bit of booty to back it up. Yet be that as it may, knights returning from Hungary bought an awful lot of Baron Novacek's absolutely genuine Mongol war relics!
Chapter Twenty-eight
Construction was the big game on campus, as usual. Doubletracked rail lines were laid north to Plock and beyond, and west to a few miles from the Holy Roman Empire. A road east from Sandomierz was sent as far as the Bug River, and another went from the Vistula to the salt mines. I seemed to own those mines now, since none of the former owners could be found, and in such cases, as in modem times, the property goes to the state. Only now I was the state. The old works manager at the mines was gone, too. A pity. He had been rude to me once, and I was looking forward to firing the man.
The Reinforced Concrete Components Factory was completed, and soon it was providing structural sections for our ambitious building plans. To a certain extent the factory built itself, since at first it was nothing but a vast field with foundations, plumbing, and concrete molds built into the ground. As these molds were completed and pre-stressed concrete members were cast into them, the first use of these pieces was to put up the walls, pillars, and ceilings of the building itself!
Housing for the workers went up at the same time, and within a few weeks the first additional factory was erected, a major cement plant. A continuous casting operation for steel reinforcing rods went in next, and after that it all became routine. Plumbers followed the masons, and window glaziers came next with carpenters on their heels, putting in the doors.
The new R&D machine shop at Okoitz was built of brick to match the existing castle and the inn there, although the roof was of pre-stressed concrete. When I had sketched the shop, I had also sketched out the additional cloth factories to be built eventually, mostly to make sure that everything would fit well and look nice. Because of some snafu, these sketches were detailed and given by mistake to the construction captain sent to build the machine shop. So while he was there, he also put up both new cloth factories. Not that we had any machinery to put in them. It hadn't even been invented yet, let alone built!