"Not at all, my lord."
"Then that's settled. Well, Krystyana, Sir Conrad? You have your orders. Go, but come back while the sun is still high. There is the matter of your oath of fealty."
Krystyana and I went down to the basement strong room. An army would have had trouble getting in there if it was defended, but a thief could have walked in if it was not. Most of the time, it was not. I would have to do something about locks.
We followed the count's instructions, and I began counting money. Krystyana looked at me strangely. She got out a balance scale and weighed the money. It seems that the coinage was not all consistent.
When we were through, I found that I was the owner of 112,200 pence. Krystyana told me that this was enough to hire every commoner in the fort for over five years!
It was absurd that a single person should have such wealth, especially a good socialist! I was dazed as we went back up to the sunlight.
At that time, throughout most of Europe an oath of fealty was taken with the vassal on his knees. His hands were placed together as if in prayer, with his lord's hands around them. The lord was seated.
That was not how it was done in thirteenth-century Poland. Here, you walked outside on a sunny day, with the biggest possible crowd of witnesses. You raised your right hand to the sun and made your oath in a loud voice. This was doubtless a thing held over from pagan days, but I still think it a more fitting ceremony.
My oath was, "l, Sir Conrad Stargard, promise to come to the aid of my liege lord, Count Lambert Piast, if ever he or the people on his land are oppressed. I shall obey him for nine years. This I swear."
The count returned: "I, Count Lambert Piast, promise to defend my vassal, Sir Conrad Stargard, to the best of my ability. I shall see to his maintenance and will do such other things as are, from time to time, agreed. This I swear. "
People applauded, and that was it. No forms in quadruplicate, no committees to be consulted. I was beginning to like the thirteenth century.
The holidays drifted by pleasantly. I often slept in sometimes almost missing 10 A.m. dinner. The sauna was fired up daily during the Christmas season as opposed to the usual twice weekly. Commoners and nobility used it indiscriminately.
Afternoons I played instructor, teaching fencing, first aid, accounting, and arithmetic. I taught base-twelve arithmetic rather than the usual base-ten, in part because Boris Novacek insisted on it, in part because the people thought in terms of dozens and grosses rather than tens and hundreds, but mostly because they had convinced me that twelve is a more useful number than ten. Twelve has four factors; ten has only two. A circle can easily be divided into twelve parts, but it is almost impossible to divide it into ten without a protractor. Base-twelve is more condensed; you can state larger numbers with fewer digits.
In fact, the only advantage to the base-ten system is the unimportant biological fact that human beings happen to have ten fingers. I have heard that the American Maya Indians always went barefoot and so developed a basetwenty numbering system, counting on their toes as well as their fingers.
It was a simple matter to set up a base-twelve system. Zero and the numbers one through nine remained the same. Ten and eleven required new symbols; I picked the Greek letters delta and phi.
Counting went one, two three ... nine, ten, eleven, twelve, oneteen, twoteen, thirteen ... nineteen, tenteen, eleventeen, twenty, twentyone ... twenty-nine, twentyten, twenty-eleven, thirty, and so on. Eleventy-ten was the equivalent of decimal one hundred forty-two. Obvious, right? Then it was a matter of constructing multiplication tables and so on; again, straightforward.
I was astounded at how quickly some people picked up all this. Twentieth-century schools take eight years to teach children arithmetic, yet I had some students learn it in two weeks! It was as if their minds were dry sponges, eager to suck things in.
Class size varied between four and fifty. It was agreed that after the holidays, classes would be continued on Sunday afternoons.
The learning procedure was entirely by lecture, backed up with chanting for memorization. I had part of one wall of the hall plastered and painted black for use as a blackboard. There were no books, no paper, no pencils, no tests beyond verbal questions.
Despite those handicaps, learning proceeded well. By the end of his stay, Boris had a parchment ledger book that he understood better than I, since I was never able to learn to think in base-twelve arithmetic. I could do it but not think in it.
Boris complained that carrying and using slow-drying ink would be awkward on the road, so I suggested using a sharpened piece of hard lead. That worked fairly well, and a few years later we were producing and selling lead pencils, made with real lead instead of the modem graphite and clay mixture.
On the feast of the twelfth night, I was expected to give gifts to the commoners, and by then I knew precisely what to give them. The people were obviously suffering from a number of vitamin deficiencies. The seeds I had with me could make a valuable contribution to their diet if handled properly. I sorted carefully through the seed packages, dividing them into six piles.
The first pile consisted of those which could be eaten and the seeds saved: the pumpkins, the squashes, the melons, the luffas, the tomatoes, etc. Those, I could give to the peasants and be sure that there would be seeds for future crops. There were ninety-two packets of those, enough to give one to each farmer.
The second pile contained those plants of which one ate the seeds themselves. Those were the really important crops: the grains, the maize, the potatoes, the peas, and the beans. It would be best if those were planted and harvested strictly for seed, at least the first year, since my understanding was that the modern varieties were more productive than the ancient ones. Those were best grown on the count's own lands since a peasant might get hungry and eat the seeds next winter. After some thought, I put the biennials, where I knew how they reproducedthe onions and garlic-in with this group.
The third pile consisted of the long-term plants: fruit trees, berry bushes, sugar maples, asparagus, grapevines, and so on. Those too were for Lambert's lands, since he could afford a long-term investment and a peasant probably could not.
The fourth pile contained plants that were decorative but had no economic use: decorative trees, flowers, and so -on. Roses were nice, but I wasn't going to worry if we lost a strain. Those I would give to the women of the fort.
It turned out that I was completely wrong about the usefulness of some of these. Goldenrods were an excellent insect repellent, and people ate some of the flowers. And roses were their major source of vitamin C. The Japanese roses grew into a huge, tangled mass that became an excellent military defense, vastly superior to barbed wire! They also kept cattle out of the crops.
Then, there were plants that wouldn't grow in Poland at all. I had two packages of rice, six kinds of citrus fruits, and a package of cotton seeds. I didn't know why that redheaded bitch had sold them to me, but she had, and they were useless in Okoitz.
But Boris was going into the warmer lands of Hungary; I knew that rice and oranges would grow there, and who knows?-maybe cotton would, too. I felt guilty about Lambert's settlement with Novacek, and the gift of seeds was a way I could help make it up to him. If he played his cards rightand Boris was no fool-those plants could make him rich.
The cotton was especially important. Cotton is better than linen, and it takes much less labor to make it into thread. In this clothing-conscious age, cotton could make Boris the vast fortune he so much desired.
Now if there had only been some tobacco seeds ...
The last pile was of plants about which I had no idea how they reproduced. These were mainly root crops: carrots, turnips, radishes, and beets, along with the cabbage and its sisters cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. The last six are all really the same species and can be interbred. The best I could do with that pile was to turn it over to the count, and we'd try our luck. I was troubled because the sugar beets were in the last pile. With the incredible prices paid for sweets, sugar beets could be a very valuable cash crop for the count, but I didn't know how to make them reproduce.
The party went off fairly well. The people were all willing to try something new, and the count was willing to invest a few hectacres for seed production. The next spring, Father John and 1, the only literate people in the fort, were kept busy reading and rereading seed packages for people.
It is annoying and time-consuming to be surrounded by illiterates. You can't leave a note for someone. You must find a messenger and trust his memory. You can't give written instructions. And somehow there's something wrong about illiteracy.
I found Father John working on a wood carving, a statue of a saint.
"Father, I think that we should start a school."
"Indeed? And teach what?"
"Why, reading and writing, of course."
"Now, what possible good would that do for my parish?"
"What possible good? These people are all illiterate! They can't write their own names, let alone read."
"And if I taught them to read, Sir Conrad, what then? What would they read?"
"Why, books, of course."
"The only books in Okoitz are a not particularly legible Bible and my own copy of Aristotle. These I can recite from memory. As for writing their names, where would they have need to sign them? On latrine walls?"
"But surely literacy is more important than a carving!"
"Indeed? Consider that the peasants tithe, but they give me only a tenth of what they sell to merchants, which is perhaps only a tenth of what they grow; they eat the rest. The count provides me with food and shelter but little else. I have a wife with ... expectations. I can sell my carvings, and I cannot sell learning."
"Okay. I get your message, Father. How much do you earn by carving?"
"Five, six pence a week, sometimes."
"Very well. I will pay you-or, rather, donate to the Church-a penny a day for your teaching. Teach a dozen students, the bright ones, five days a week, from dinner until sundown during the winter. I especially want the Kulczynski boy, Piotr, taught. He has learned arithmetic in two weeks, and a mind like that must not be wasted."
"There will be expenses. Parchment, ink, wax tablets."