Here in the country, things were even worse. The blacksmith and the baker did things until they felt about right. The saddler just cut and trimmed until it fit. The carpenter did a bit of measuring-in cubits and spans and finger widths-but he used his cubit, from his elbow to his fingertips.
We didn't even have a meter stick.
Of course, I could invent my own system of weights and measures easily enough, and it would at least have the advantage of consistency.
But I would lose a lot doing it. Every person, and certainly every engineer, knows hundreds of numbers. I knew the speed of light and the diameter of the earth and the distance from the earth to the sun. I knew the tensile strength of wrought iron and what could be expected of concrete and, well, all sorts of things.
But I knew all these values in terms of the metric system. Without a meter stick, I was stuck with guesswork. With one, I could derive all of the weights and measures and from there translate the data I remembered into any other system at all.
But none of my equipment contained a single reliable measurement. I had nothing that I knew was a definite length or weight.
At gray dawn, the answer hit me. I had my own body! My weight might not be reliable-I had put on muscle and lost some fat since arriving-but surely my height hadn't changed. I was precisely 190 centimeters tall. I had only to measure myself in stocking feet, divide by nineteen, multiply by ten, and I had my meter stick. With that, a cube of cold water ten centimeters to the side has a volume of a liter and a mass of a kilogram.
From there it was simple arithmetic to translate it into the basetwelve system that these people could use.
Dead tired, I got Krystyana out of bed and had her standing on a chest, marking my height on the wall with a piece of charcoal.
"Sir Conrad," Lambert said as he saw us. "Just what are you doing now?"
I tried to explain how I was developing a standard meter and about engineering constants. Some things I had to repeat three times, perhaps because I hadn't slept in twenty-four hours and Lambert was just out of bed and bleary-eyed.
"So by measuring yourself, you will somehow know the distance from earth to moon? My dear Sir Conrad God may have spanned the universe to his own measure: but it is rank blasphemy and profound hubris for a mere mortal to do so. In all events, the standard of measure here is the Silesian yard, not this foreign meter thing. I won't have you changing it."
"Yes, my lord." After yesterday the last thing I wanted was to irritate Lambert. "Uh, how long is a Silesian yard?"
"I'll show you." Taking Krystyana's charcoal, he marked it on the wall. With his head turned left, it was the distance from his nose to his right fingertip.
"Thank you, my lord," I said, and he left.
Forever after, I used yards instead of meters rather than offend my liege lord. I soon knew the ratio of yards to meters and that was enough to save my data.
My fourth endeavor was engineering the mills.
Understand that I had no reference books, no instruments, and no measuring devices. I had no drawing equipment and darned little parchment. These last two wouldn't have done me much good anyway, because I didn't have anyone who could read a blueprint.
For the comparatively small items I'd had to build thus far, it was possible to give instructions like "We need a piece of wood that's this long, and it's got to have holes in it so it can fit into this thing and that thing."
This technique was not suitable for building a mill, and we needed two of them; I built one-twelfth scale working models, because the people had to see how things moved in order to understand them.
Okoitz didn't have a stream suitable for damming, so that left wind power. The problem with wind power is that it works only when the wind is blowing. This is not a great complication on something like a flour mill, because only one operator is required and he can work strange hours if the situation requires it. But a lot of processesbeating flax and sawing wood-are both energy- and laborintensive. If a crew is working and the wind stops, twenty people are left standing around, which is blatantly inefficient. An intermediate energy shortage device is needed, and we had water.
The first windmill was a water pump and some storage tanks. Actually, it was two sets of water pumps. One set of four pumps pumped water from a new well to a tank near the top of the mill. We needed a new well anyway because the old well was entirely too close to the latrines. The top tank provided fresh water to the community and supplied the lower, working tanks. I used four small pumps because I did not know how much power the mill would produce. If we only had enough torque to operate two pumps, the other two could be disconnected and used as spares. Also, if one pump malfunctioned, it could be repaired while the others continued in operation.
This is called contingency planning, or in the colorful language of my American friends, "keeping your ass covered."
Four larger pumps operated between the lowest tank and the middle tank. These provided water power to several machines in a circular shed that ringed the base of the windmill.
The sawmill, for example, had a straight saw blade operating vertically between two ropes. These ropes were connected by a pulley system to two short, fat barrels mounted at the ends of long pivot arms. A barrel, reaching the top of its stroke, pushed open a weighted door that allowed water from the middle tank to fill it. Filled, it descended, pulling the saw blade and raising the other barrel. Reaching the bottom, a fixed peg pushed up another weighted door on the bottom of the barrel, which drained the water into the lowest tank. At the same time, the second barrel was filling and the process reversed itself.
This "wet mill" was a fairly big thing. The body of it was a truncated cone twenty-four yards across at the bottom and twelve at the turret. The walls were vertical logs flattened on two sides. The cone shape resulted from the natural taper of the logs. I was learning.
The foundations went a full story into the ground, and from the ground to the top of the highest blade the thing was as tall as a ninestory building.
A windmill must be kept facing the wind, so the turret has to rotate. Ours did this on ninety-six wooden ball bearings, each as big as a man's head. One of my college professors had shown us a device to accomplish this automatically. A second, much smaller windmill was built on the back of the large turret, with the blades at right angles to the main blades. This was geared down to rotate the turret if the small windmill wasn't parallel to the wind. He claimed it was the world's first negative feedback device.
I could have made the turret manually rotatable, but I wanted the mill to operate unattended at night.
One of the engineering problems I faced was that the weight of the water tanks, besides pushing downward, also pushed outward. Some crude calculations indicated that a wrought-iron band strong enough to hold the middle tank together would have weighed eight tons. I wasn't sure that there was that much iron available on the market, and in any event the cost would have been fabulous.
My solution was exactly the same as that used by my contemporaries, the Gothic cathedral builders. These cathedrals have purely decorative internal stone arches that produce an outward thrust. I say purely decorative because the cathedrals were topped by wooden truss roofs that kept the rain out and didn't touch the arches. They actually built the outer walls and wooden roof first and then built those magnificent arches later, working indoors out of the rain.
I used the circular work shed as a flying buttress, leaning into the tower and squeezing it together.
Between the high-water level of the lowest tank and the bottom of the middle tank was a space of four yards. This was at ground level, but the area would be dark and wet, and I could think of no good use for it. I didn't bother putting a floor there.
This resulted in the lowest tank being used, over my protestations, as a swimming pool.
By the time I got the model of the wet mill done, the weather had broken. The bitter cold of winter was over, the snow had melted, and the first warm breezes kissed the land.
A mood of wondrous relief and joviality filled the community. It was so glorious that I had to rip my shirt off and stand in the warm sunshine, soaking up the vitamin D. I wasn't alone in doing this; Krystyana and Natalia were suddenly standing naked next to me.
This mood lasted for about a day, and then it was time for spring plowing and planting, an all-out effort for those people, who got up before dawn and performed fifteen or sixteen hours of grueling labor before collapsing exhausted, only to repeat the process the next, day.
The count kept equal hours supervising, and the carpenter and the smith were kept busy repairing tools. There were only three or four weeks to complete the task, and if the planting didn't get done, next winter we would starve.
I seemed to be the only one at loose ends-as a knight, I was not allowed to work- so I wandered about observing things, seeing what improvements could be made. What they needed most was a good steel plow, and I saw no way of providing one.
Lambert owned more than half the land surrounding Okoitz. Well, actually, he owned two hundred times as much besides, but much of it was farmed out to his knights, most of whom ran manors similar to, but smaller than, his.
Peasants were expected to work three days a week on his land and had the balance of their time "free" to work their own. Special workers-the bakers, carpenters, etc.had their own separate and often quite complicated arrangements, but in general it amounted to a fifty percent taxation, with the count being the entire government.
In return, the people got what amounted to police and military protection, much of their clothing, and a fixed number of feasts per year. In addition to the Christmas season, there were twenty-two days of feasting. I estimated that twenty-five percent of the food consumed by the commons was eaten at these feasts.
Also, and very important, the count made arrangements for the sick and needy. Since Lambert was an intelligent and decent person, it really wasn't a bad system. Under a stupid or greedy lord, you could see where it could be pure hell.
I wasn't accomplishing anything at Okoitz. No feast days fell during the planting season, church and state being practical about such matters. By the terms of my punishment, I didn't have to stand guard duty. I was told that right after planting and Easter there would be plenty of manpower available to start work on the mill.
There were some parts of the mill that we could not produce locally. I wanted the main rotor bearings to have brass or bronze collars riding on lead bushings. The lead we could cast in place, but the heavy collars troubled me until the count mentioned some bell casters at his brother's city of Cieszyn some thirty "miles" away to the south.
I was soon riding along the road to Cieszyn on a fine spring day. My equipment was much the same as that I had purchased in Cracow last fall, only now I wore conventional padded leather under my chain mail. I had a new scabbard for my sword, and its garish brass hilt had been replaced, a wrought-iron basket guard added. The shield and spear were as before. Anna had a new saddle and bridle of modem design, and she was happy to be traveling.
Riding a palfrey beside me, Krystyana was even happier. Three hours of her begging and pleading had persuaded Lambert to let her go along to "take care of me." He didn't mind her going, but he hated losing another horse during spring plowing.
She was wearing her best dress, covered with a large traveling cape, and had four others-borrowed-in her saddlebags. She was taking her first trip away from Okoitz since she had moved there with her family when she was ten years old.
Krystyana was a competent person and actually handled most of the day-to-day management of the castle. But she was trying to remain on top of an unfamiliar sidesaddle-I don't think I could have stayed on one of the silly things -while trying to play the part of a knight's lady.