Since we bought in quantity and our markup was only a hundred percent, instead of the usual three hundred, our prices were generally much less than a backpacking peddler could sell for. Yet it was profitable, since one sales girl, Janina, ran the place, and volume was decent.
Prices were marked and that’s what things sold for. No haggling allowed.
We treated our vendors the same way. We requested bids, specifically stating the quantities and qualities desired. We always bought from the lowest bidder, and if it turned out later that the product was substandard, we didn’t ask him to bid next time. These business methods were denounced from all quarters, but since it was profitable to do business with us, our suppliers eventually came around.
Before long, where the town guilds let us get away with it, each of the Pink Dragon Inns had a similar store. Where they didn’t, we often set up a store just outside the city limits, and ran it on a breakeven basis. We busted more than one guild that way, but in so doing we drastically raised the standard of living.
Above the gate were my own quarters, with a small restroom, two toilets and two sinks.
Sir Vladimir stayed at my apartments, as did Krystyana, her four main ladies and a varying number of other girls.
With Krystyana managing a kitchen that fed eight hundred people, Yawalda taking care of the animals and coordinating all our transport, Janina handling the store and our stores-both buying and selling-Natalia acting as my executive secretary and records keeper, and Annastashia managing my personal household, I could hardly expect the girls to keep the place clean besides.
To do that, we brought in a half-dozen of the workers’ daughters. My handmaidens had handmaidens.
But I got the use of them. Krystyana believed that fair was fair.
My apartment was larger and more sumptuous than I had originally planned, but Sir Vladimir convinced me that it was politically necessary to impress noble guests.
Anna had her own stall in the barn, which she used mostly for eating, since she preferred the usual fare of horses to that of humans. But she usually stayed with us. This meant that the stairways had to be bigger, the floors stronger, and the door handles had to be designed so she could work them, since she liked sitting in on the conversations. Everybody was already convinced that I was insane, so what the heck. Anyway, I was lord, and rank hath its privileges. Anna was good people.
Over the rest of the buildings were apartments, four stories of them. The typical apartment was nine yards long and three yards wide, although they varied somewhat in size, according to the size of a man’s family.
Bachelors usually bunked four to a room, as did bachelorettes. As time went on, and the ladies discovered that it was possible to be single and survive without social stigma, more and more of them stayed single longer. Some of them even held out until they were eighteen, but I get ahead of myself.
On each floor, apartments were arranged in clusters of five, around a stairway that zigzagged between floors. On the second of the four floors, the hallway was much smaller and there was a restroom. Two toilets and sinks for twenty families.
By the standards of the twentieth century, it was a crowded, substandard slum dwelling. By the standards of the thirteenth century, it was fabulous luxury, and everybody, including the people who lived there, thought I was crazy to build so lavishly.
The Pink Dragon Inn Number Three was running under the command of Tadeusz’s second son, Zygmunt Wrolawski. This was a smaller version of the inn at Cieszyn, and at about the same level of plushness. It had stables for animals and thirty rooms for rent, mostly for merchants.
But the inn was essentially a workingman’s bar, for a man needs to get away from his family occasionally, and to fraternize with other men. The costumes of the waitresses encouraged that and eventually the place went topless. One waitress tried it on her own and without any encouragement from me. She made more in tips than all the others put together. In a week, they were all doing it.
Somehow, despite the lack of a nudity taboo, and despite the fact that we only had the one shower room and men and women used it together, and despite the fact that beer was far cheaper in the dining room not two hundred yards away, the men still preferred to have their beer brought to them by a pretty bare-breasted girl.
The topless fad spread to all the other Pink Dragon Inns, and when it did, profits increased remarkably.
The men paid for their pleasures. The inn recaptured over forty percent of what I paid out in salaries, and the store took in another thirty-five. Most of the rest was saved. That is to say, they could leave their salaries uncollected and draw interest on it, although we had to resort to certain subterfuges to get around the Church’s silly usury laws. The workers claimed damages against me to the tune of eight percent a year for not paying them on time, which was, of course at their option. It’s not like I ever missed a payroll.
As things turned out, salaries were only a small part of my net outgo. I soon yielded to pressure for better pay for foremen and general foremen. It really didn’t cost much at all. I got most of it back through the inn, the store, and the savings bank.
Then there was a barn for our eight horses, thirty-six pack mules, and fourteen milk cows. Yawalda was in charge of the animals and transportation.
I had insisted that all of our animals be well fed, not for any economic reason, but because of basic decency. I refused to allow any animal of mine to be mistreated. That was contrary to the usual medieval custom of using animals as scavengers, and keeping them underfed so they’d keep at it. So people said that I was crazy; when they noticed that the milk cows continued to give milk all winter long, instead of drying up for lack of food, they claimed it was magic on my part, but they still thought I was crazy.
We also kept two hundred chickens, which lived mostly on table scraps and kitchen waste. Krystyana was a tight-fisted little manager. I am partial to fresh eggs in the morning, and had breakfast served at dawn. More and more people started joining me at it, especially when I moved the dinner hour from ten to noon.
Besides being what I was brought up to be used to, the three-meals-a-day system has certain advantages. Most of the ladies worked half a day. The ten o’clock dinner hour came in the middle of the morning shift. During the winter, many of the men were working at logging operations too far away to come back for a hot lunch. At least we could give them a hot breakfast.
What’s more, I liked it that way and I was lord.
I suppose I went a little overboard on the design of the church, but we had all these huge logs and it seemed a shame not to do something that pushed them to their structural limits.
And though our population was still well under a thousand, it would continue growing. Building more apartment houses was to be expected, but a community ought to have one church. If you have two churches, you have two communities.
So we built a church that sat four thousand.
I thought a long while before I decided on a name for the place. I called it the Church of Christ the Carpenter.
Imagine two big A-frame buildings, each as long and as high as it is wide, crossing in the middle, and you have the shape of it. Four massive masonry pillars went down to bedrock, and supported the structure, one at each corner.
The four huge triangular walls, each eighteen stories high, would eventually be in stained glass, but for now they had to be boarded over. Even without the glass, it was impressive, as a church should be. No fancy statues or bright paint, just huge rough logs high in the hills.
Without a traveling crane, getting those logs in place was a problem. We deliberately left several big trees standing right within the construction site. Those trees became the masts to which we attached ropes and pulleys to haul up the biggest structural components.
Once the central pyramid of our four biggest logs and a massive wooden central hub was up, and could be used as a support to haul up the rest of the parts, we carefully cut down the original trees. There were some tight moments when they were felled, for if they came down wrong, they could wreck the structure, and we would not be able to set it up again. But I guess that God didn’t want his church to fall over. It worked.