One yeoman's cottage was taken apart and the ground under it dug up, for no other reason than he lived a mile from the camp. Then a crew rebuilt it for him.
Countless trees were climbed and no few hollow ones were chopped down, but to no avail.
Novacek affirmed that he had lost just under four hundred thousand pence, and not a penny of it was ever found. The reward on the treasure was never claimed.
Eventually, it became a normal pastime, a thing to do on one's day off, to head into the woods with a shovel, and many young couples claimed that this was what they were doing in the woods as well. It became a standing joke to ask how you dug a hole with a blanket.
Yet it was a game my love would not play.
Interlude Three
I hit the STOP button.
"So what happened to the treasure?" I asked.
"It was right where Anna said it was. The outlaws hid it under their latrine, or rather they used the hole as a latrine after they buried the treasure, figuring that nobody would look through somebody else's shit. They were right, and the effect was doubled once there were sixteen dead bodies over it."
"Oh," I said. "Another thing, why didn't flint work in Conrad's lighter?"
"Lighter 'flints' aren't flint, kid. They're made of misch metal, an alloy of rare earth elements. Anything else troubling you?"
He hit the START button.
Chapter Sixteen
It was another summer spent running around on Anna, usually with Cilicia riding behind me. I had originally intended to put her on the payroll like everybody else, but at first I didn't get around to it. Then she started teaching dancing to the women at Three Walls, charging a penny for six lessons a week. All winter long she had more than sixty women in two classes, and was making more than twice what anyone else at Three Walls was making, so there was no point in paying her on top of that.
I was even considering charging her rent on my living room, where the classes were held, but then found out that she was giving most of the money to her father. My deal with Zoltan hadn't included giving him any cash. I could see where land, clothes, and food weren't quite enough, so I let it ride. It was years later that I discovered that she was charging him fifty percent a year on his loans.
Had a Polish girl done that, I would have spanked her ass, but these were a different people, with different morals.
Different strokes for different folks.
Cilicia wasn't really eager to spend half her time traveling with me, but she wasn't happy about letting me out of her sight, either. She came, despite the money she was losing by not teaching school. But she made up for it by dancing for the men at each of my installations, and then teaching dancing to the women when she was there. After six months, she had enough girls well trained to act as instructors, and she built an organization that paralleled my own, teaching dancing for all the traffic would bear. About the same time, dancers became standard fare at the Pink Dragon Inns. Oh God, how the money rolled in.
Cilicia's people were survivors. They had to be, after all they'd been through.
Zoltan worked out a sideline of his own, making and selling perfumes and cosmetics. I wasn't all that happy with it, since it seemed a waste of resources, and a girl who can blush doesn't need makeup. But he found a ready market for his products, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway, so I didn't try.
Visiting the duke's castle at Wroclaw, we found that not only were the serving girls topless, but most of the other women were doing it, too. The serving wenches were dutifully clad in miniskirts and mesh stockings, and were clumping around inexpertly in high heels. The noblewomen were wearing clothes reminiscent of something worn by snake goddesses in ancient Crete. But not all of them.
There were two factions. The largest felt that if the duke wanted it, he should get it. But a substantial minority noticed that the duke's son, Prince Henryk, was a lot more straightlaced than his father, and that the prince's wife wasn't going along with the new fad. Figuring that the prince was the wave of the future, these ladies were dressing like Queen Victoria.
The first thing we built at Coaltown, the installation on the Odra, was a brickworks. It was cheaper to manufacture bricks on-site than to haul them in on mules from Three Walls, and we needed an awful lot of bricks.
The previous fall, I'd put Zoltan to work seeing what he could do with coal tar. He'd come up with ammonia and a wood preservative. Further, he knew of a process of combining salt, ammonia, and carbon dioxide to make sodium bicarbonate and ammonium chloride. We tried the ammonium chloride out as a fertilizer. Sodium bicarbonate has lots of uses, but the big one is to melt it down with sand and lime, both of which are plentiful, to make a good quality glass. I wanted plentiful glass more than I wanted steady sex!
Of course, I might not have said that a few years ago.
A beehive coke oven isn't very efficient at producing byproducts, so the ovens at Coaltown had to be of the complicated modem design, with brick heat regenerators, chemical separators, and tall brick chimneys.
Okoitz started to get a major face-lifting that summer. During the winter, Count Lambert had repeatedly enlarged my plans for the workers' dormitories until they were bigger than the rest of the town! He not only had room for three gross of young ladies, but moved his own quarters there as well. There were six dozen guest rooms, a huge dining hall, a big new church, and an indoor swimming pool. And plumbing, sewage disposal, limelights in the public rooms, and steam heat.
As an afterthought, he let me add a wing for the peasants as well.
I made the place look like a proper castle, with machinations, crenelated walls, and dunce caps on the towers. There was even a drawbridge over a moat that doubled as a swimming pool in warm weather.
His old castle became an addition to the cloth factory and the peasants' housing was turned into stables.
To build it, he contracted with me to take all the surplus bricks and mortar we could produce for three years, and gave us all the surplus cloth his factory could make for the next five. Essentially, we became his sales force.
I'd long felt sorry about the poor living conditions at Okoitz, even though they were no different than these throughout most of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was just that when I first came to medieval Poland, these people took me in and made me feel at home. This was the first chance that I had to do something really nice for them, and I spent a lot of time on the designs of that building. It was going to be nice!
As to the financial arrangements, well, as long as I could meet my payroll and keep food on the tables, I really didn't much care who owned what. I was doing my job, I was having fun, and I wasn't missing any meals. Why should any rational man want anything else?
I'd appointed Natasha to take care of Boris Novacek, since without hands he wasn't capable of doing anything for himself, and she had the patience to wait on him literally hand and foot. They hit it off pretty well together and he recovered fairly quickly under her care.
Yet even after he'd reconciled himself to the loss of his hands, he was still in the dumps. His fortune was gone and he saw no way of supporting himself.
So I offered him a job, salary plus commission, as my sales manager. We had not only the products of my factories to unload, but the duke's copper works and Count Lambert's cloth works as well.
At first, he seemed to lack confidence in himself, but within a month he was in the full swing of it and enjoying himself. He was a past master at dealing with other merchants, and I think he used his disfigurement to his own advantage. Gesticulating at his opponents with his handless arms seemed to intimidate them. In half a year, we were not only selling everything that we wanted to sell, we were getting thirty percent more for it.