The harvest was again good that year, and the new crops were starting to be plentiful enough to make a serious contribution to the food supply. I had new grain towers built at all our installations, each with a windmill to circulate the grain and keep it in good shape. If grain is just left to sit there, it soon becomes infested with insects, fungi, and rats. But if you regularly pump it to the top with an Archimedes' screw on dry days, any bugs and rats are killed and the grain stays dry enough to retard fungus, This is still the method used in the twentieth century.
We had tons and tons of sugar beets at Okoitz, and I had to figure out how to convert them into sugar. Sugar is a major industry in modem Poland, and entire sugar refineries are regularly sold to other countries. But the more important an industry is, the more specialized it becomes. There are engineers who spend their entire lives working on nothing but sugar refineries, with the result that a generalist like myself simply didn't get involved. I didn't even know the basic process!
Zoltan came to my rescue. He'd never heard of a sugar beet, but he had heard about the process for refining sugar cane, which grew on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This was wonderful, because by myself, I don't think that I ever would have thought of adding lime, the caustic stuff that mortar is made out of, to the beet juice to make it crystallize. But between Zoltan's chemistry and my machinery, we got a working plant installed at Okoitz before Christmas. It made a nice "winter industry" for the peasants, something to keep them busy between the harvest and spring planting.
Free popcorn became a regular feature of the Pink Dragon Inns. We had twenty-two of them now.
Every few months, I visited Father Ignacy at the Franciscan monastery in Cracow. He was my confessor, my confidant, the one person in this world that I could be honest and comfortable with.
This time, I found that the old abbot had died, and that Father Ignacy had been elected to take his place.
"Congratulations on your promotion, Abbot Ignacy," I said.
"Thank you, my son, although it was probably more your doing than my own."
"Mine? What do you mean?"
"It was mostly those looms and spinning wheels of your design that did it. I encouraged my brothers that we should do our own weaving, and the project has been a huge success. Somehow, I received most of the credit for it."
"But I thought that Friar Roman did most of the work there. "
"He did, but there is very little justice in the world. However, I'm sure that you would rather talk about the inquisition that the Church is conducting on you. At least you always ask about it," Abbot Ignacy said.
"I take it that there is news?"
The Church was holding that inquisition to determine whether I was an instrument of God, to be eventually sainted, I suppose, or if I was an instrument of the devil, to be burned at the stake. Yes, I was most interested in what they decided!
"There is. You will recall that I wrote up my report promptly within months of your arrival in this century. My abbot acted briskly, and within a few months sent the report, with annotations, to the bishop here in Cracow, but his excellency felt that perhaps this sort of report should go through the regular branch of the Church, rather than the secular one. That is to say, through the home monastery rather than through his office, so that summer the report was sent to the home monastery in Italy. But the home monastery felt that no, this was a proper matter for the secular branch to handle, and sent it back here."
"The report was therefore sent, with further annotations, to the Bishop of Cracow again. However, by this time you had established yourself in the Diocese of Wroclaw, so the Bishop of Cracow found a traveler going to Wroclaw and sent the report to the bishop there."
"Wait a minute, father. I was there when that report came in. It was at my Trial by Combat, and both bishops were in attendance. So were you, for that matter. Why didn't the Bishop of Cracow just hand your report to the Bishop of Wroclaw?"
"How should I know that, my son? Perhaps he hadn't had the opportunity to annotate it properly."
"In any event, the report was sent to the Archbishop of Gniezno, in northern Poland, who in turn sent it on to Rome."
"The report has now returned, through the proper channels, with a request that the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery at Cracow investigate the matter thoroughly, and report back. It happens that I am now that personage, so I have written a complete report and am currently looking for someone who is going to Wroclaw. Actually, writing it was an easy matter for me, since I had all the facts at my fingertips, having written the original report myself."
"So, you can see that the matter is proceeding smoothly, and as fast as can be expected."
All I could see was that after three years all that had happened was that Father Ignacy had written a letter in reply to his own letter! I became convinced that the bureaucracy of the medieval Church was as screwed up as that of the stupid Russians!
"Father, we now have a postal service that covers every major city in Poland. Why don't you just mail the report to the archbishop?"
"And bypass his excellency the Bishop of Wroclaw? Heaven forbid! You wouldn't happen to be going to Wroclaw, would you?"
"Not directly. Just mail it to him. It only costs a penny, and it will be there in less than a week."
"An interesting suggestion, Conrad. I'll have to mention it to my superiors."
"Through channels, of course."
"Of course!"
The Great Hunt went off very well, and our new killing ground was ready in time for it, so we didn't have thousands of wild animals running through what had become a substantial city. There were many fewer wild boars and wolves than before, at least locally, and many more deer, elk, and bison. But since I was now getting a rake-off from all the lands owing allegiance to the duke ' the total number of wolf skins delivered to me was huge.
I had a problem storing and curing all of them. But the price stayed up and it was vastly profitable. My aurochs herd was up to eight dozen animals, and we started culling some of the bulls for eating.
The wilderness was being pushed back, the land converted to farming and pasture, and large stockpiles of lumber were building up. On Lambert's lands, the rule was that any tree that gave an edible fruit or nut should be left standing, and except for certain areas preserved as forests-about thirty percent of the total-all else should be cut for more pasture area.
And so 1234 wound around.
Chapter Seventeen
The next year saw our first printed books, our first poured concrete, and our first mass production of glass. It also saw our first cannon.
There are some big advantages to doing something the first time. You can set your own standards.
When it came to printing, there were a lot of simplifications I could introduce, for no other reason than because no one had ever seen anything different. All the characters were the same width, as on an old-style typewriter. The use of lowercase letters was not common in the Middle Ages, so we didn't have any.
The width of a column was standardized at twenty-four characters, and our rule was that any word could be hyphenated anyplace, so all lines were the same width and no space was wasted. AH books were printed on paper that was a third of a yard high and a quarter yard wide, since that was the width that our papermaking machine made. And there were three columns on each page. Always.
Once you were used to it, it was easy enough to read, and almost everybody was used to it because all the schoolbooks were printed that way. It was the way you learned in the first place. For those who learned by reading handwritten manuscripts, there was no difficulty in learning something new. Up until then, every book had been in a different format.