“They’re still at the stage of trying a lot of things that don’t work.”
“But that means that there is a market here for the pain killers we use in the rest of the world,” I said. “If we bring in only refined chemicals, that can’t possibly reproduce, and distribute them only through legitimate medical people, it should be safe enough.”
“With the duke’s permission, of course,” Adam said.
“Of course.”
Then there were the food plants, and again, there were a lot of them. Even after we were told what they were, I only recognized about two out of five of them. People eat all sorts of things. But there were a few conspicuous plants missing.
“You don’t have any rice here,” I said.
“True. We have those food sources that were available from Europe, where we started from, and from the Americas, where we explored and traded extensively, but we are sadly lacking in those from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Perhaps your coming will help to rectify these faults in our collection.”
“Not to mention your diet,” Adam said. “You are also missing coffee, tea, and bananas, and you don’t have one single kind of pea or bean.”
“I thought that beans were known in medieval Europe,” I said.
“We do have bananas, but they are the original South American variety, and aren’t very popular. We used to have beans, but there was a blight, some forty years ago, when I was still an apprentice. We worked for years, trying to stop it, but we failed. In the end, we lost every single legume in the world.”
“In your world, maybe,” Adam said. “We brought a few tons of them with us on The Brick Royal. They were our emergency food supply.”
“So I had heard. But after they went through that canning process of yours, well, they would be useless to us here.”
“No. They were just dried beans. You could plant them if you wanted to. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t grow.”
“And I could have samples of these?” The old guy was suddenly excited.
“You can take every bag of the things we got. It was probably a dumb idea to bring them along in the first place. Give what you don’t need to the farmers here, or eat them yourself, for all I care,” Adam said.
“My lord, you are a true Christian!”
“Thank you. Send a crew around first thing in the morning and pick them up. Sorry that we can’t help you with the rice, but all we got is milled white rice, and it wouldn’t grow.”
With a bit of a flourish, we were shown the island’s pride and joy, their indestructible high-strength fiber, or rather the hemp plant it came from.
“They tell the story of the discovery of this strain to every new class of gardeners,” the chief gardener said. “It was in the fall of 1477, when a poor widow, Mrs. Eileen Tittle, was harvesting her hemp. Like all trained gardeners, she had always been taught to look for anything unusual in the plants she tended, but to the eye, this one was absolutely normal. It looked not a bit different from any of the hundreds of hemp plants growing around it. The hemp fields were much larger then, since with the way everything wore out so quickly, they had to plant many acres of hemp to clothe themselves, and still they could do but a poor job of it. Many of the poor went cold in the winter.
“So nothing was known to be different until she went to harvest her field. It was late in the day, and she was tired, when the strange thing happened. She grabbed the top of the plant with her hand and struck the base of it with her sickle, just as she had done a thousand times that day. But to her great surprise, the sickle bounced right off! What’s more, the plant had pulled a bit in her hand, and when it did, it cut her, straight across the palm.
“Now, someone else might have run off and tended her wounded hand. Or another person might have just run off in a fright, with such strange things happening, but Eileen Tittle was made of better stuff than that. She lay right down on the dirt and examined this strange thing. She looked it up and down and all over, but there was nothing to see but a perfectly ordinary hemp plant, although it was now a bit bruised. The only thing the least bit unusual about it was that there was only a single bud left growing on it, and that bud was not yet ripe. She knew that that bud was important, so she went straightaway and brought back sticks with which to build a bit of a basket around the plant, to protect it from the winds and the animals, for in those days there were still small wild animals on the island. That night she sent her only son out to sleep by the plant, to guard it, and the next day she watched it all the day long, while she tended her fields.
“They did this every day and every night for two weeks, until the single bud matured. Then, and only then, did she pull up the plant to find out just why her sickle had bounced off. Oh, it was eleven more years of selective breeding and propagation before the first good crop came in and old Eileen Tittle became the wealthiest woman on the islands, but if she hadn’t kept her wits about her in that first moment, the only mutant hemp plant in God’s universe would have been lost forever.”
“Quite a story,” Adam said. “You know, had she been harvesting with the kind of machinery we use in America, the plant would have been lost and the machine wrecked.”
“That is probably true, my lord. It goes to show that sometimes the old ways are the best.”
We were shown the plant that they made paper out of, with its large, smooth, and veinless leaves, but we saw no commercial use for it. At best, it made only small, single sheets of paper, and modern printing practice demands huge, seamless rolls of the stuff. The same interesting-but-useless label was put on the gourds that were ground up and made into a sort of plaster. It was needed on the islands, but not needed in the outside world.
The plant that made the rubber paint that they put on their floors and the bottom of their shoes was near the top of our need list, however. If a coat of paint would wear on your shoes for a year, and on the floor indefinitely, think of what it could do for rubber tires! Or for the highways they rode on!
It was getting late in the afternoon when we finally left Master Maimonides. He had promised to have his people collect samples of everything that we felt would be commercially interesting, along with instructions, in standard English, on how to use each one. We planned to carry only extracts of each plant back with us, and never a viable plant or seed. We were after trade, after all, not charity.
If any of these plants were to be grown elsewhere, we’d lose a bloody fortune, and so would everyone else on the islands.
TWENTY-NINE
Since Adam and I had a full day planned for repairing the boat, we agreed to having our guide make a quick trip through the animal caves, rather than putting it off for a day.
There were flocks of ducks and geese that lived off the plant life in the waterways around the islands. These were privately owned, though licensed, to keep their numbers from overgrazing. As far as we could see, they were no different from any other aquatic birds, and Judah confirmed this. Breeding them into something better had been difficult because they sometimes mated with wild birds, which upset things considerably.
We were on the largest and most populous of the five islands, and the caves we were led to contained half of all of the beasts raised in the entire duchy. Whereas plants were grown by half the people on the islands, animal husbandry was kept as a monopoly by the wizard’s guild. It was one of their major sources of income. We weren’t farm boys but, to us, there didn’t seem to be enough animals here to feed a thousand people, let alone six thousand.
“In part, my lords, it is because we get much of our protein from the sea,” the head keeper, Master Azzo d’Este, told us. “For feed, we have little else but those parts of the plants that people cannot eat, and indeed, our laws forbid the feeding of an animal with anything that a human could use for food, table scraps excepted. That does not permit the vast herds that I have heard your people possess. Also, it is my understanding that our animals are more productive than yours.”