"And I can still carve in the mornings?"
"Yes, damn it!"
"Then we are in agreement."
As I left Father John, I saw Count Lambert talking to a newly arrived knight. The fellow was very splendidly dressed in purple and gold. His armor was gold-washed and of very small links, the kind you see in museums. His embroidered velvet surcoat matched the velvet barding worn by his fine white charger, and the trim on his helmet and weapons looked to be solid gold.
I was just in blue jeans and sweater, but I went over to introduce myself.
"Ah, Sir Conrad," Lambert said. "I introduce you to Sir Stefan. Sir Conrad is my newest vassal; Sir Stefan is the son of my greatest vassal, Baron Jaroslav. The two of you will be serving together until Easter."
"I am honored, Sir Conrad," Sir Stefan said, somewhat taken aback by my size and strange clothing. "I had thought that I would be serving with Sir Miesko. Still, anyone who can do guard duty for the other half of a long winter's night is warmly welcome."
"Well, uh..." I stammered.
"Sir Miesko is on a mission for me in Hungary," Lambert said. "As for the rest, you touch upon a problem, Sir Stefan. You see, my arrangement with Sir Conrad is that he will have no military duties save in an actual emergency. I regret that this means that you will have to take the night guard by yourself."
"Dusk till dawn, seven nights a week in the winter, my lord? Surely that is excessive!"
I had to agree that he had a point. At Okoitz's latitude, there could be seventeen hours of darkness in the winter. Three months straight of night duty under those circumstances could make a man crazy and old before his time. I felt sorry for the young knight, but not enough to volunteer my time. It wasn't my job. I had my own work to do.
"Count Lambert," I said. "Can't you get another man to help him out?"
Lambert shook his head.
"For another knight to come, he would have to make arrangements with yet another warrior to look after his own estates; then that man would have to make similar arrangements, all of which would take time. It probably couldn't be done within three months, by which time it would no longer be needed. No. The lots were drawn last Michaelmas, and I won't upset the schedules for anything less than death or the threat of war."
"I resign myself," Stefan said. "But Sir Conrad, couldn't you occasionally help out?"
"Well, I'm sorry, but there are a lot of other projects I have to work on."
"Sir Conrad will have his own duties which only he can perform," Lambert said. "I am afraid that you are left with an arduous task, Sir Stefan."
"But alone, my lord?"
"Damn, man! I've explained it to you. Who else is there? The place must be guarded! I can't leave guard duty to a peasant. They'd start thinking that they were our equals. And surely you don't expect me to do it. It is more than sufficient that I must be awake during the day. I am your father's liege lord! Enough of this! It is settled!" I think Lambert felt as guilty as I did.
Sir Stefan glared at me as though it were all my fault and stalked off to the castle.
My first task was to get a gross of beehives built. There was really no hurry since bees don't swarm until June, but I wanted to establish a good working relationship with the carpenter before we started building a loom.
It was soon obvious that I was going to have difficulty with the man. Vitold had to be competent; he had supervised the construction of the entire fort. Yet when it came to sawing up some boards and building some simple boxes, he had a great deal of difficulty understanding what I wanted. I drew pictures on the snow, but three-view drawings were incomprehensible to him. He asked innumerable questions about bees and what it was that we were trying to accomplish. That went on for hours, and I was losing my temper by suppertime. We agreed to discuss it the next day. Admittedly, we were talking about a gross of the things and it would probably take a month or two to get them nailed together, but a box ought to be a simple thing.
The next morning, he caught me on my way to the blacksmith. If I couldn't get a box made, what was I going to do about the twentyodd complicated steps involved in making watered steel?
"Sir Conrad?" Vitold asked. "Would it be all right with you if I just went ahead and built what I think you want? If you don't like them, we can always use 'em for firewood."
"That would be fine, Vitold." I figured that it would keep him out of my hair for a while, and once we had a sample, I could show him what he was doing wrong.
The blacksmith, Ilya, was the man who had been chosen king during the holidays. He had put me in diapers, and I did not have a favorable impression of his character.
"Ilya, the count wants me to tell you about steel."
"Well, since the count wants it, I'll listen. But I already know about steel."
He was working at his forge and didn't look up when he talked to me. This forge was a primitive affair about the size of an outdoor barbecue. It was a table-high rock pit with the back wall raised as a windscreen. A crude leather bellows forced air into one side. A roof without walls covered it and his anvil, his other major piece of equipment. A few pliers, punches, and hammers completed the smithy's small collection of tools. Charcoal in the forge burned yellow-hot.
"You know something about wrought iron. You know nothing about steel," I said.
"Huh." He still didn't look up. He was a short man, but he looked to be immensely strong. Even though we were outside in the snow, his sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms twice as thick as mine. He was repairing the armor that the pig had worn when I killed it a few weeks before. "Damned lucky work, here. You must have hit a couple of weak links."
"I did nothing of the sort! I killed that pig because my sword is good steel and that armor is cheap wrought iron!"
" Nothing wrong with this armor." He still didn't look up. He was beating an iron ring into the mail shirt draped over the anvil, working over the tip of the point.
"Damn it, look at me when I'm talking to you!"
He glanced up. "I see you." Then he went back to his work.
"Well, if you won't look at me, look at my sword!" I drew it to show him what watered steel looked like.
"Skinny little thing."
Obviously, I was going to have to get his attention. It occurred to me that chopping a hole through the mail he was working on might do the trick.
"Damn you, Ilya! You stand back or you're going to lose a hand!" I swung at the armor draped over the anvil and he got out of the way in time.
The results were surprising. Fortunately, Ilya was too busy staring at the anvil with his mouth open to notice my expression. I had cut three centimeters off the end of the anvil, and the armor was almost in two pieces, hanging by a shred. My sword was undamaged.
My experience as an officer had taught me to recover quickly. "Now fix that, Ilya," I growled. "Then you come to me after supper tonight and we'll talk." I walked off as though I knew what I was doing.
The carpenter was selecting logs from the firewood pile, about a meter long and half that thick, splitting them in half and laying the halves side by side on the snow.
I didn't want to ask.
I went back to the castle, thinking about a mug of beer. Maybe the count would want a game of chess. A noble wasn't allowed to play with commoners because he might lose.
Janina got my beer, and the girls pounced on me.
"Sir Conrad, you promised to show us how to make that wonderful knot work." Krystyana wasn't very good at playing the coquette. I think she was trying to imitate Francine, the priest's wife.
"Hmm. I don't remember promising anything, but I'll think on it." Thinking did me surprisingly little good. Understand that my mother knitted constantly. Unless she was cooking or sleeping, her needles and yarn were always out. My grandmother had done the same while she was alive.
And, you know? I had never really looked at what they were doing. I knew that there was a needle in each hand, with little loops of yam that connected them to the fabric below. She did something complicated with them in the middle. I spent more than an hour trying to visualize what it was, and the girls drifted away, embarrassed.
Then a partial solution occurred to me. I didn't know what knitting was, but when I was seven, my grandmother had shown me how to crochet. I got some heavy slivers of wood from the carpenter, who was still splitting logs and laying them out.