“Your swordwork isn’t bad, if a bit slow,” he said at last.
“I’m used to a lighter sword.”
“More the fool, you. But your real problem is in your shieldwork. The shield is even more important than the sword, since you can make a mistake with the sword and live. That doesn’t often happen with the shield. We’ll work on it a bit.”
I received a further bruising while he kept yelling about how slow I was. I got to anticipating his blows, but that didn’t satisfy him either.
“No, stupid! You’re covering your eyes too soon! You don’t even know what I could be doing!”
“So what else could you do?” I yelled back.
“I could do this!”
I awoke some hours later, still stretched out on the ground. My helmet had been removed and a pillow put under my head. A horse blanket was stretched over me. I groaned.
One of Sir Boleslaw’s squires got up from the stool where he’d been waiting.
“Sir Boleslaw told me that he still feels that your most sensible route is to run away, but that if you must fight, your only hope is to defeat Sir Adolf with your lance, since you have no hope with sword and shield.”
“He also asked me to remind you that you owe him twelve pence.”
I got up, paid the kid, and rode back to Three Walls in the afternoon.
A Herald from Duke Henryk arrived. The Trial with the Crossmen had been Arranged. I was to be In Arms on the Field of Honor at Okoitz at Noon, Three Days Before Christmas. I was to have All Property Seized in the Affray with me, including The Slaves.
The guy was actually able to talk with capital letters. He even kept it up when he was off-duty, all the way through supper. The girls were not impressed. We gave him one of the spare huts for the night, but I’m pretty sure he slept alone.
Still, the duke had gotten me a longer stay of execution than I had expected.
I’d been trying to spend at least an hour a day talking to Anna, though often I couldn’t spare that much time. It was fascinating to talk to a member of an alien species.
She was very fuzzy about her ancestry. She was definitely of the seventh generation since the creation of her species, yet she always talked about her ancestors in the first person, as though she had been the first one created. She was perfectly capable of using second and third person with regard to everyone except her direct ancestors. Furthermore, she always used the feminine forms on them, never the masculine. I couldn’t figure it out.
In most ways she was simple, down to Earth. She had no interest in philosophy, nor could she see why anyone would. Mathematics beyond simple arithmetic, theology beyond the simplest moral rules, scientific theory or anything else the least bit cerebral were completely uninteresting and totally beyond her.
Yet she was by no means stupid. Given a practical problem, she never failed to come up with a practical solution. A case in point
U KENT PUT LENS EN HOL, she spelled out. Her spelling was as atrocious as she had warned it would be. Furthermore, it never improved.
“I can’t put the lance in the hole,” I agreed. “Yes, that about sums up the main problem.”
I KEN.
“You can skewer the quintain? Anna, you don’t have hands. How could you hold a lance?”
PUT HUK EN SADL. PUT HUK EN BRYDL. PUT BRYDL EN ME. PUT LENS EN 2 HUK. I PUT LENS EN HOL.
“You think you can? We’ll try it girl! I’ll have the saddler work up those hooks right now. I bet he can have it done by morning. Good night, Anna, and thanks for the idea.”
We were on the practice field half an hour before Sir Vladimir. We tried out Anna’s idea, and it worked, every time. She was as deft with a lance as Sir Vladimir.
Furthermore, her guiding the lance left my right hand free to do other things, like having my sword drawn and hidden by my shield. If Anna’s lancework didn’t get the bastard, I’d be there a half second later with my sword!
We were practicing this double-hitter plan, striking the top of the post with the flat of my sword after Anna threaded the shield, as Sir Vladimir came out. He watched us dumbfounded.
“Sir Conrad, I can scarcely believe that you are finally scoring on the quintain. Getting in a swordstroke besides is-is fabulous, How-?”
So I explained Anna’s idea to him. Sir Vladimir had taken Anna’s spelling-out of words in stride, as if it was only to be expected. Any horse who could run the way she could had to be magic, and after that anything was possible, even probable. Furthermore, Annastashia had been teaching him to write. His spelling was about the same as Anna’s, so it looked all right to him.
He scratched his chin. “I don’t think it’s illegal, but I wouldn’t brag about the tactics you plan to use.”
“Right. This is my secret weapon!”
“Well, in all events you seem to have it down pat, so let’s get into some of the fine points of the lance. . .”
The weeks drifted by. It was a brisk fall day and the carpenters were assembling the combination outer wall-apartment house.
We had strung two hefty ropes from the tops of the cliffs on either side of the entrance to the valley. A framework was hung on wheels between the ropes and a system of ropes, pulleys, and winches allowed eight men aloft to use the framework like an overhead bridge crane. It gave us a “skyhook” over the entire construction area, and things were going up pretty fast. After months of preparation, when it seemed to the men that nothing was getting done, suddenly we had almost a quarter of our future home up in a single day. The happy mood was infectious.
Count Lambert and a retinue of a dozen knights arrived in the late afternoon.
“Count Lambert, welcome, my lord!” I was on the top of the building, seven stories above him. I signaled the crane operators, who quickly lowered me to the ground.
“Hello, Sir Conrad. Dog’s blood, but that looked like fun! May I try it?”
“If you wish, my lord, I’ll have them take us both to the top.” Six men running in a huge hamster cage high above soon got us to the top. All of the foundations were visible from up there, and I pointed out where the church would go, and the inn and the icehouse, and the sauna.
“You’re making good progress, Sir Conrad. In another year or two, this will be a fine town.”
“Another year, my lord? These buildings will all be up in three weeks.”
“Impossible! Not even you could accomplish that.”
“Another wager, my lord? Say twenty muleloads of your cloth against forty loads of my bricks and mortar?” I’d never bet money with Lambert again, but somehow he saw goods and services in a different light.
“Done! You’ll be making bricks then?”
“Yes. We found clay in the old mine, and we’ll be building brick ovens as soon as we get our living arrangements set up. We’ve also found a seam of iron ore, and by spring I hope to be producing iron in decent quantities.”
“My boy, you won’t be alive in the spring. You won’t be alive on Christmas. Have you forgotten your trial?”
“No, my lord. But I’m going to win.”
“Your faith is touching. What’s that big round stone hole?”
“That will be our icehouse, my lord. Actually, it will be three buildings, one inside another. The circular stone wall you see will be decked over and used as a dance floor. It will have a roof over it but no sides.”
“A second building, four yards smaller in diameter and three yards shorter will be built inside of it, completely underground. The space between them will be filled with sawdust and wood chips, a fair insulator.”
“The third building will be inside the second, and will be six yards smaller and six shorter than it. Here, the space between will be packed with snow this winter. I calculate that this much snow should take more than a year to melt. We’ll have fresh vegetables well into the winter and cold beer all summer long.”
“Still, that’s a vast hole.”
“Sixteen yards deep, my lord, and thirty-six across.”
When we got down, I had Krystyana scurry off to the kitchens and see what could be done about something special for supper, and I told Natalia to spread the word among all the young ladies that if any of them wanted to spend the night with a real count or one of his knights, now was the time to get fancied up for a dance. She certainly knew his tastes.