The first three issues had only ads from my own companies, but in time I was able to largely disengage myself from the project, except for the occasional article.
The long-term effect of the magazine was astounding. Up until then, the only source of news anybody had was hearsay and gossip. Now they had a source of information about what the duke said in Wroclaw, and how the Palatine of Cracow answered him.
Within two years, we had correspondents in most of the major cities of Europe, and were the first news service. And the magazine was a great way to tell my story on sanitation, housing, and food supplies.
So it was a profitable trip, but I'd ridden to Cracow to get an artist.
Friar Roman had never made a church window, but that didn't matter. We had craftsmen who could do the actual construction. What I wanted was the artwork.
An engineer is probably not the person to choose as an art critic, but I was also the boss and I had definite ideas about what I wanted. I wanted to make a religious statement, and I didn't dare do it in words.
The Church in the Middle Ages depended far too much on fear to get its message across. When I go to pray, I don't want to be surrounded with representations of tortured human bodies.
To me, Christ's message was a message of love. Love for God and love for one another. I read nothing in the Sermon on the Mount about mutilating people for the glory of God!
For the Church of Christ the Carpenter, our church at Three Walls, I wanted a simple naturalistic scene of a young Christ helping Saint Joseph in his carpentry shop. On another wall, I wanted Christ with the little children. The third was to have Christ with the lilies of the fields and the last was to be Christ with the money-changers in the temple, because Christ wasn't a wimp.
So I put Roman on the payroll and set him up with a nice room at Coaltown, where the glass works was located. It had big windows on the north side, a drawing board, and a big stack of paper. I told him what I wanted and let him alone for a few weeks. Then I told him what I didn't like about what he'd done, and had him try it again.
It was four months before he started doing what I wanted, and I had to teach him about perspective drawing in the process. But eight months after I'd shanghaied him, we had the glass hung at Three Walls. Then I got him going on my other four churches.
It was not only important to save Poland from the Mongols, it was also important that I help make it worth saving!
There was a bad harvest in 1235. The fall rains had come much earlier than usual, and much heavier. Yet we barely felt the effects of it.
For years, Count Lambert had been selling the new varieties of grains as seed and by the pound at high prices. The result was that most of the farmers in Silesia and Little Poland were growing at least some of it.
The modem grains were shorter and had thicker stems than the older varieties, so they stood up to a heavy rain better. Most towns had at least one McCormick-style reaper, and they were able to get in most of the crop on the few dry days that we had.
Many farmers were able to sell their grains to harder hit areas, and made great profits doing it. At least, the sale of single-family plumbing packages skyrocketed, which is some sort of indicator.
My factories didn't buy any grain at all that year, since we had stockpiled enough the year before.
Anna's children were all healthy, and she had another batch of four every six months. The oldest bunch looked like horses now, but they grew slower than regular horses, and Anna said that they took four years to become adults. We had twenty of them, but it would be a few more years before the first bunch would be ready to join the team.
Anna spent very little time with them, only looking in on them every day or three to see that they didn't need anything. It wasn't that she was a bad mother, it was just that she was supremely confident that if they had enough to eat, they would grow up okay.
They were good little survivors. When they got cold, they burrowed into the hay, and if that wasn't enough, they burrowed into the ground below the hay. And they would eat anything. If they ran out of hay and grain, they would start eating the stall they were in, so you had to watch them. In fact, I think half of Anna's looking out for them was to protect the world from them, and not vice versa.
Krystyana was productive as well. After the birth of her second child, I promised myself that enough was enough. I wasn't doing anybody any good by producing illegitimate children. I stuck with that vow, except for once when she was crying and making love seemed the best thing to do.
Once was enough. By late fall, it was obvious that she was pregnant again.
The previous fall, I'd put Zoltan on the problem of making gunpowder, or rather the problem of making saltpeter-potassium nitrate-since once we had that, I knew the formula for gunpowder. It's seventy-five percent saltpeter, fifteen percent charcoal, and ten percent sulfur.
But all I knew about saltpeter was that it was made out of manure, or sometimes old mortar, and that it was a white crystal. Oh, I could give you the molecular weight and even sketch up a molecule of it, but that wasn't going to help Zoltan any.
He'd gamely gone at it, and had gone through seven frustrating months smelling like shit, as did his young Polish apprentices. The boys were all having trouble with their love lives until I ordered them to bathe after work and had them issued extra clothing to wear when not on the job.
Then one day Zoltan came in with his clothes in tatters, his hair gone, and his beard burned off. His face was covered with blisters but through them shown a great happy smile.
"I think we have done it, my lord!"
So I gave him the small brass cannon I'd had made up along with a supply of cannon balls. I told him about wetting the mixture down, drying it, and grinding it to turn serpentine powder, which was what he had, into black powder, which was what I wanted.
I explained how to load and fire a cannon and told him that I wanted him to play with slightly different mixtures to see which one could make the ball go farthest, always using the same small amount of powder.
I also made him, his apprentices and everyone around them swear to keep the process for making the powder a secret. I didn't want anybody to know how to make it but a few of his people and his apprentices. They realized the seriousness of having somebody else shooting cannons at them, and the promise was kept until well after the Mongol invasion.
Chapter Eighteen
By Christmas Of 1235 1 could see that it was all going to come together. There was an awful lot left to do, but I think the seeds of an industrial base sufficient to supply a reasonably modem army were there and well planted.
Getting the army was another matter. I had four knights sworn to me and that's where I had to start.
Actually, it was sort of strange for one knight to be sworn to another, but there was nothing in the rules against it. I had more knights than some of Count Lambert's barons, but all the lack of a baronage meant was that I sat farther down the table at a formal banquet and I wasn't permitted to knight anybody. But I avoided formal banquets whenever possible and hadn't wanted to knight anybody anyway.
The truth is that I am of a naturally egalitarian disposition. I didn't like this separation of people into hereditary cases, this silly business of noble and commoner. If I had my way, I'd scrap the whole unhappy system! But I didn't have my way and giving up my own knighthood would drastically reduce my own efficiency, as well as wrecking my lovelife. But someday I'd have the power to do something about it.