At first this frightened me, but I soon reasoned that down was precisely the direction that I wanted to go, could I but do it slowly enough.
Eventually reaching the hub of the wheel, I was able, with considerable difficulty, to remove myself from the blade and stand on the axle.
I was still a great distance in the air, but at least I was now upright and had something beneath my feet. I paused a moment to catch my breath.
By then, Sir Conrad had fifty peasants on the roof and together they were able to turn the stalled wheel. But the first motion took me unawares and I started to fall from the huge axle.
I saved myself by grabbing on to another blade of the wheel, this time to the one Sir Lestko was on. He was the last man in line, so perforce I was carried again higher, but now with my feet toward the hub.
They turned the wheel sufficiently for Count Lambert to step off, but by this time the force of the wind and the weight of the men was such that the wheel again turned of its own accord. The other knights were able to remove themselves without difficulty as they each came to the bottom, but I was halfway between rim and hub and thus continued around.
Sir Conrad saw my predicament.
“You must slide toward the rim!” he shouted. “If I cut loose the sails now, there’s no telling where it will stop. You might end up on top again. Slide down when you are on the bottom half of the cycle and hold tight when you’re at the top!”
I could see the wisdom of his suggestion, but the doing of it was no small task. In all, I went around nine times before Sir Conrad and Count Lambert could pick my weary body off the wheel and set me upright.
“Sir Conrad,” Sir Stefan said, “your liege lord bid you attend him and you did not! I call you coward!”
There had long been bad blood between Sir Conrad and Sir Stefan. Sir Conrad stared at him for a moment, then shook his head.
“My liege lord asked for help and I gave him help! I got him and the rest of you fools out of the stupid predicament you’d gotten yourselves into. The first rule of safety is that you never touch a piece of moving machinery!”
“That’s enough, gentles,” Count Lambert said. “Sir Conrad, we thank you for your timely aid.”
“Well! That worked up an appetite! Shall we retire to dinner?”
FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ
On returning to Cieszyn, I continued the work of getting my expedition ready.
I wanted seasoned hickory for the handles of the tools, but I didn’t get it. Seasoned wood didn’t exist and the idea of using old wood struck the carpenters as being absurd. When they needed wood, they went out and cut down a tree. That’s the way that it had always been done and if I wanted it any different, I could wait five years for the wood to season.
You couldn’t just buy a wheelbarrow. Nobody had ever heard of a wheelbarrow. You had to design a wheelbarrow and design all the metal parts in a wheelbarrow. Then you had to contract out the metal work, check all the work when it finally got done, and generally reject half of it because the blacksmith had ignored your drawings and instructions. Then you had to get the parts over to the brass works for heattreating, and once that was done you had to get them to the carpenters who by that time had forgotten what you wanted in the first place.
And once completed, once they got it right, they’d stand around and ask why you wanted such a silly thing in the first place.
I tell you, if the workers hadn’t needed work so badly that they were starving, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done at all. But the combination of money and hunger is a powerful incentive.
As it was, I ended up spending a quarter of my considerable wealth on a few tons of hand tools.
Then there was the problem of hiring the men who would use the tools to build my facilities at Three Walls,
I One of the carpenters, Yashoo, could read and write and was good at following instructions. Furthermore, he was about the only one who picked up reading technical drawings without difficulty. I made him my carpentry foreman and together we picked out his crew.
Many of these people were his close friends and relatives and I suppose that this was nepotism, but in a small medieval city, everybody in a given trade knew each other and many of them were related. Had I made a no relatives rule, I don’t think that there would have been enough carpenters left to fill my table of organization.
Then there were the masons to hire, and the miners. Well, there weren’t that many miners available and I hired every one of them. All five.
Then we needed a blacksmith for repairs and a brewer and a baker and leather workers and all sorts of specialists.
I wouldn’t bargain on pay. I offered every man a penny a day plus food, take it or leave it. Every man took it.
At long last it all started to come together, but by then it was time to make my monthly visit to Okoitz.
I had asked Count Lambert about the girls. He said that they could visit, but only if they came each in the company of a knight. That way they would be a cut above the peasants, and their upper-class manners wouldn’t be so offensive. The Banki brothers were more than willing to visit Okoitz, although after that they had to get back to their estate, their summer holiday over.
So it was a two-day trip for a party of ten to Okoitz, with a stop at Sir Miesko’s. A waste of time, but when a bunch of young girls is giving you everything they’ve got, every night, it’s hard to say no.
The mill was working just fine when we finally got there. All of the peripheral equipment wasn’t going yet, but a crew was sawing wood in the sawmill and another was pounding flax with the trip hammer. I left my sword with one of the workers, climbed up to the turret of the mill and went to a small turbine in the back.
Well, it was small only by comparison with the thirty yard diameter of the main wheel. In fact, it was four yards across and was set at right angles to the big one. It was connected with reduction gearing to the turret such that if the big wheel wasn’t facing directly into the wind, the small wheel started spinning and turned the turret to face the wind’s new direction. It seemed to be working perfectly.
I went into the turret and found that all the pumps were in operation. There were two sets of pumps. One pumped fresh water from a well to a tank at the top of the tower. This was used only for emergencies at present, with a fire hose at the base of the mill. Eventually, I hoped to install pipes for running water throughout the whole complex.
The second set of pumps took water from a tank below ground level up to a tank halfway up the tower. Water running down from this middle tank was working the sawmill down below. This arrangement let work go on even if the wind stopped.
There was only a gentle breeze blowing, but all of the pumps were going full blast. I had seriously underestimated the amount of torque a windmill of this size could generate. Well, better that than having overestimated it. The next model, if there was one, would have bigger pumps.
As I left the turret, I heard a delighted shriek from above. I looked up and saw Sir Wiktor, hanging upside down from the top of the highest turning blade. It seems that he had heard of Sir Vladimir’s adventures on the windmill and had to try it out himself.
In time, this became the standard thing to do for every young buck who visited Okoitz, a regular rite of passage. I had invented the ferris wheel.
Vitold was at work constructing the cloth factory, which surprised me. I’d expected him to be working at the second windmill, the one for threshing and grinding grain.
“It was Count Lambert who told me to build this factory first,” Vitold said. “You’ll have to talk to him if you want it done different.”
I found Lambert out in the fields.
“Sir Conrad, you really must learn to report to a castle’s lord as soon as you arrive. Courtesy requires it, and I saw you come in hours ago.”
“Yes, my lord.” Lambert had his moods and in this one it was best to speak when spoken to.