"Look, Sir Stefan. If I hadn't been out there today, Mikhail would have lost more than his foot. He would have lost his life."
"Well, what of it? What damn use is a crippled peasant?"
"You're disgusting."
"I'm disgusting? You've just drenched the kitchen table with human blood! I have to eat off that table while you sleep soundly!" He stomped out.
Mikhail was a model patient. The wound was never seriously inflamed and seemed to be healing well. I visited him several times a day. His wife was tending him, sleeping beside him. The children, including the kid I had brought in from the storm, had been farmed out except during Ignacy's feeding time.
We talked about his future. He was thinking about becoming a trader. Traders were mostly on horseback, weren't they? I promised to advance him money and introduce him to Boris Novacek.
Within a month, I carefully pulled out the long strings, removed the rotted ends of the arteries, and then closed the wound. All seemed well. In a few weeks, we were talking about moving him back to his home.
Then one night he got a fever and was dead in the morning.
I don't know why.
Two weeks after the funeral, Lambert decided that it would be good if Ilya the blacksmith married the widow; a month later there was an Easter wedding.
Lambert had eleven barons subordinate to him. These men held lands from the count. Each had his own fort or manor, and all of them but one had subordinate knights, often with manors of their own. The number of their knights varied from zero to twenty-six. In addition, fifteen knights, including myself, reported directly to the count.
The great majority of the noblemen held their positions on a hereditary basis, but it was still possible for an outstanding commoner to be elevated.
And, of course, the count ran things at Okoitz. A number of specialists-the smith, the carpenter, the baker, and so on-had specific areas of responsibility and worked directly under the count. The castle itself was run by a constantly changing group of adolescent handmaidens, but on closer observation I found that the cook exerted a strong, steadying influence on them.
The farmers worked through a half dozen foremen, who in turn took directions from Piotr Korzeniewski. These leaders were neither elected nor appointed but attained their positions and got things done by a system of consensus that I never fully understood. People just talked things over for a while and then, somehow, things were accomplished.
Piotr had no official standing or title. In theory, all the farmers worked directly for Lambert. I was at Okoitz for months before I realized that Piotr was really the chief executive of the whole town.
Knowledge of Okoitz's ghost structure was to prove very useful to me over the years. Most of the nobility were interested only in fighting, hunting, and playing status games with each other. When I wanted something of a manor- sanitation measures or workers for my factories-the quickest way to do things was to have one of my subordinates talk things over with the informal executive.
But I get ahead of myself.
Chapter Sixteen
My third endeavor was the loom. The count insisted that we set up the loom as a permanent fixture in his hall. The situation in the cloth industry annoyed him, and he wanted the loom as a showpiece for his summer guests. The concept of keeping a profitable trade secret was entirely foreign to him. I never saw him really concerned about money at all. What he wanted was the prestige of being the man who cracked the strangling cloth monopoly.
Understand that the hall was a large room. It could handle a hundredpeople at a sit-down dinner. It took up most of the ground floor of the castle, and the ceiling was fully four meters high.
In order to use as little floor space as possible, my loom design was more vertical than horizontal. A loom, in essence, is a simple device. It has a framework to support a few thousand spools of thread that go lengthwise through the cloth produced. Whether this was the warp or woof, I didn't know. I wasn't a weaver, and in fact I made up my own terminology as I went along. We didn't have a warp or a woof. We had long threads and short threads.
There are some frames that loop around the long threads to spread them apart in the proper order so that the short threads can be passed through. The simplest number of these spreaders would be two, but I wanted the loom to be able to produce more complicated weaves, like tweeds, so I built it with six spreaders, each of which connected with one-sixth of the long threads. There is a shuttle that holds the short thread as it gets tossed back and forth, and there is a thing that beats the short threads tightly together. Finally, there is a roll for the finished cloth.
I was sure that on modem looms there is a friction device that holds the long threads tight, yet lets them advance as cloth was made. However, I couldn't think up a simple way of doing it. It would have to be very simple, since we needed a thousand of them.
I solved the problem by bypassing it. The carpenter drilled an array of holes, thirty-six wide by forty-eight high, directly into the wooden wall of the count's hall. Into these he pounded 1,728 pegs to hold the long spools of thread. This was a convenient number, since it was twelve cubed-a thousand in our new base-twelve arithmetic.
From there, the threads were to loop up over a pole near the ceiling, down under a suspended pole that could be raised as the threads were consumed, and then up to the four-meter ceiling again and down through the spreaders, the beater, and the cloth bolt.
This arrangement let you make eight meters of cloth before you had to loosen each of the thousand spools and lower the suspended pole again.
A working solution if not a perfect one.
The finished loom took up about four square meters of floor space, eight if you counted the area for the two operators. It produced a band of cloth two meters wide.
Sir Stefan waddled in one sunset as I was talking to Vitold about the spreaders. Sir Stefan was in full armor and heavily bundled and cloaked against the cold. "Another piece of witchcraft, Sir Conrad?" His voice was weary.
Vitold crossed himself but remained silent.
"A loom for making cloth," I said. "I wish you would knock off this nonsense about witchcraft."
"Nonsense, is it? Then how do you explain that witch's familiar of a mare you own?"
"I bought Anna in Cracow not two months ago. She's nothing but a good, well-trained horse."
"Indeed? Do you know what I saw last night? I saw your familiar leave the stables, go to the latrines, and relieve herself there! I followed her back to her stall and saw her putting the bar back in place. That's no natural horse!" He was glaring at me.
"Yeah, the stable boy told me she didn't soil her stall, but so what? If a dog can be housebroken, why not a horse? I told you she was well trained."
"Well trained? She's some manner of demon! Conrad, know that my father is Baron Jaroslav, the greatest of Lambert's vassals and well known to Duke Henryk. I swear that they will hear of your warlock's tricks!" he shouted as he stomped out into the snow.
Vitold crossed himself again.
"Damn it, Vitold, don't you start believing that horseshit! You've been building this thing. You know there is nothing magic in it!"
"I can only do as my betters bid me." He returned to work, but you could tell that his heart wasn't in it.
We were a month getting the loom built, and then I asked for 1,728 spools of thread, each perhaps 500 meters long, to string it with.
I was looked on with horror. That amount of thread simply did not exist.
I said that I had to have it or I couldn't thread the loom. At least that much more would be needed for the short threads.
So the girls dug out their distaffs and went to work.