When we were most of the way through, the tree parted with an explosive crack! It leaned way over as the top came crashing past us, then snapped back like a released bow.
It was like being on the end of a whip half the length of a football field that was snapping back and forth fifteen stories in the air. The trunk now came only to our waist and I could see Yashoo digging his white fingertips into the bark. Mine were pretty white, too.
My mother told me I should have gone to the beach.
“Well, Yashoo, what do you think? Should we walk down, or shall we have the men saw down the tree so we can ride?”
He stared at me but didn’t answer.
After we got down he said, “Do I have to do that again?”
“Not today. Go back to supervising. I’m going to see how the masons are doing.” I swaggered away, stopped at a latrine and vomited my guts out.
Eventually, we had four good topmen. They considered themselves to be something of an elite, strutting around and wearing their spikes constantly, even to church.
Chapter Seven
After the first few days, I put myself on a schedule which I have tried to stick to ever since. Mornings, I played manager and was available to anyone with a problem. Afternoons, I was a designer and your troubles had to be serious before I was bothered. Natalia did a good job keeping me from interruptions.
I had my drawing board set up in my hut and went through parchment by the bundle, drawing the buildings and making detail drawings of every sort of board in them, a job made easier because I used a lot of standard parts. That is to say, many parts were identical and the same design could be used over and over.
I had a few dozen sticks cut to exactly the same length and as long as I remembered Lambert’s yard to be. These became our standard of measurement. A lot of the men had difficulty with the concept of standards. They were used to cutting each piece to fit as they went along and all this measuring and looking at plans struck them as a stupid waste of time.
As the weeks went on, there was a growing pile of finished parts, but that was not as satisfying as watching the buildings going up.
I delayed assembly of the buildings for a good reason. Wood set directly on the ground rots and I wanted our buildings to have masonry foundations and basements.
We couldn’t do masonry construction without mortar and we couldn’t make mortar without coal.
There was coal in the mine, but the mine was still full of water. Parts for the steam pump were arriving regularly from the Krakowski brothers, and the pump functioned well enough after some reworking, or TLC as the Americans call it, but it all took time.
Oh, we could have used charcoal to make mortar, but that would have been time-consuming, too, and the coal would be there soon.
Getting my way was rarely an easy task. I had to talk and persuade and cajole. I shouted and screamed and pretended to throw temper tantrums. But what helped most was when I dug out my bible and read them the description of the building of Solomon’s Temple. It put God on my side, which generally helps.
Piotr Kulczynski, my accountant, was commuting regularly between Cieszyn and Three Walls, keeping the books on our operations here as well as on the Pink Dragon Inn and the Krakowski Bros. Brass Works. He was a very efficient young fellow except when he was looking wistfully at Krystyana, which, it seemed, was most of the time.
The poor kid was obviously smitten, and just as obviously, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. It wasn’t any of my business. I just don’t like to see anybody in that much pain. They were both about fifteen, and that can be a very rough time of life.
I supposed that a certain amount of opposition to my plans from the workers was inevitable, but I never expected Vladimir and Piotr to be against my building plans. I had my drawings unrolled before us.
“I tell you that these indoor garderobes are a bad idea,” Vladimir said. “I’ve seen them in some of the big stone castles. They make sense if you have to stand a siege. But that’s the only time they use them, during a siege when you can’t do anything else. The rest of the time, they use an outdoor privy just like everybody else.”
“Shit stinks and you don’t want it in your house! In the second place, wood buildings can’t stand a siege. They’re too easy to burn down. So there’s no sense in putting in a garderobe in the first place.”
“I agree with everything you’ve said, but you’ve never seen indoor plumbing. It’s completely clean and sanitary. No smells at all. And this will be more than a garderobe. Besides the flush toilets, there’s a washroom and a shower room. We’ll be able to clean ourselves and our clothes even in the wintertime. We’ll have hot water, too. There’s a big hot-water heater built above the kitchen stove. I tell you that a hot shower on a cold winter morning is a glorious thing.”
“What happens to the shit?”
“It’s flushed down these brass pipes until it leaves the building. Then it goes by clay pipes to these septic tanks and finally to this tile field.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Vladimir said.
“Sir Conrad, what troubles me is the expense of all this,” Piotr said. “I have calculated that for what you are spending on cast brass pipes and all these pottery toilets and washbowls and the valves and all, you could hire twenty chambermaids for fifty years!”
“That’s a pretty ugly job, isn’t it? Hauling away someone else’s chamber pots?”
“There are many who would take it, sir, and be thankful.”
“I’ll allow that it’ll be pretty impressive, if it works,” Vladimir said. “But if you must have these gimcracks, why share them with the peasants? Put in a smaller bunch of fixtures for yourself and your high-born guests.”
“Someday, everybody is going to have indoor plumbing. We might as well start here. I’m not going to deprive my people of something that basic.”
“Your people would be far happier if you took what this cost and divided the money among them.”
“Probably. But I’m still going to put in the indoor plumbing.”
“It’s your castle,” Vladimir sighed. “These firewalls take a vast amount of stone and mortar. If you used that amount of material on the outside wall, it could be entirely of masonry, adding greatly to your defenses.”
“I’m more worried about a fire than a war, at least in the next few years. We have over six hundred people here and the next settlement is eight miles away. If this building burns down entirely next winter, we might not survive it. With the firewalls where they are, it’s likely that we wouldn’t lose more than a fifth of our housing and we could live through that.”
“You are lord here,” Vladimir said. “Another problem with this plan is the gate. It’s too big. Six knights could ride abreast through that thing. Reduce it by half, at least. It’ll be a lot easier to defend.”
“At this point, I’m not worried about defending against anything but thieves and wild animals. As you said, a wooden building can’t stand a siege anyway. In later years, we’ll build other walls, farther out, of bricks or stone. But even they’ll need big gates. Remind me to tell you about railroads.”
“Now what in hell is a railroad?”
The days rolled by. We set up a saw pit, an arrangement whereby a log was rolled over a deep pit; then one man stood in the hole and another on top of the log, working a saw between them. It was a miserable job, with the man below eating sawdust and the man above breaking his back. They often traded jobs, but never decided which was worse.
And it was slow. I did some time studies and calculated that, even with all of our ripsaws going constantly, the snow would be flying before the place was half done.
Something Vladimir once said gave me an idea and we built a walkingbeam sawmill. We made a huge teetertotter out of a halved log that was fifty yards long. At each end, ropes and pulleys connected it to a long ripsaw, each two of our longest welded together. Wooden troughs, running downhill, guided a huge log into each blade.
A railing ran around the teeter-totter’s edges, and sixty men walked back and forth, working the thing. You walked uphill until the high end came down, then you turned around and walked uphill again until the high end came down, then …