“But-what have I done to the workers?”
“Nothing! That’s the problem! It is one thing to hire work done in a city or on another lord’s lands. That’s common and proper. But you have taken whole families onto your lands and worked them and promised them nothing but money!”
“Can you wonder why those two men this morning felt no loyalty toward you? You’d given them no place here! You treated them like lackeys to be hired for a job and then to be cast off.”
“All these buildings you are putting up. Who is going to live in them?”
“Well, I figured I’d hire-”
“You’d hire. What’s wrong with the men you’ve already got?”
“Well, nothing. But what should I do?”
“Do? Why, swear them to you, of course!”
“To me? You think they would?” I was flustered.
“They’d be damn fools not to. Your other subjects at your inn and your brass works are all becoming rich and these people know it. That and they know you’re a soft hand. Why, you haven’t whipped a man since we got here!”
“You think I should swear in everybody here.”
“Well, I can’t swear to you, of course. I’m already sworn to my father. But everyone else, yes.”
“Very well, Sir Vladimir. I’ll bring it up with them at tomorrow’s dinner.”
“You’ll do that only if you swear these ladies to secrecy! Without that, every man in the valley will be crowding you at first daylight.”
And that’s just the way it happened. At dawn, Yashoo came to me and asked if he might swear to me and be my man. Tomas, the masonry foreman, was on his heels with the same request. Within minutes, the whole population was crowding around me. It really touched me and I had trouble keeping the tears back.
One at a time, they raised their arms to the sun as I did by their side. They swore to serve me honestly for the rest of their lives and I swore to protect them for the rest of mine. Once all the men were sworn in, I surprised them by asking their wives if they wanted to swear as well.
Every one of them did. It meant that I would be responsible for them even in the event of their husband’s death. Krystyana was staring at me earnestly. “Sir Conrad, do you think- I mean could we-”
“You ladies want to swear as well?”
“Oh, yes!” came all five voices at once. “Then we’ll do it.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Dinner was two hours late, but somehow they got lot more done than on any day before. Now they were on their own land, building their own homes. It showed in the way they worked and in the way they walked.
Chapter Eight
I made my monthly trip to Okoitz alone. Anna can run like the wind and it took less than an hour, whereas with the girls and their slow, docile palfreys, the trip would take all day.
The count was still being taciturn with me, and still wouldn’t mention our wager. One of the knights told me that he suspected that Count Lambert was having some sort of financial problems with his wife in Hungary. I supposed that could be the reason for both the count’s tightness with money and his unusually rude behavior. But I could do nothing but try to live with it.
Vitold the carpenter and Angelo the dyer had everything going smoothly. The factory was almost finished and a hundred wheelbarrows had been built to speed the harvest. Mostly, I spent my two days talking with the farmers about the new plants I’d given them.
Most were growing well enough, but how did you harvest them? Could this sort last through the winter? How do you cook this thing? And most often, what part of it do you eat?
The flowers were doing beautifully, and everybody was astounded at the size and numbers of the blossoms. Particularly popular were the sunflowers, which were three yards tall and had flowers that moved in the course of the day so as to always face the sun.
There was a wedding that day, and the bride proudly carried a single sunflower as her bridal bouquet. I was getting ready to object to this, since that bouquet cost one-twelfth of the world’s known supply of sunflower seeds. But I couldn’t interrupt the ceremony, so I waited.
When it came time to throw the bouquet to the bride’s maids, the bride gave it a healthy toss over her shoulder. The sunflower, which must have weighed three pounds, caught one of the girls in the face, knocking her to the ground and giving her a fat lip.
I walked away. Nobody was going to waste another sunflower. Not that way, at least.
I left at dusk of the second day, and we made the run home in the night. I swear Anna can see in the dark.
Vladimir was up and around in a week, so tough was his constitution. And a week after that, he took to spending his mornings hunting with Annastashia. She turned out to be a good bowman, nothing like my old friend Tadaos the boatman, but good enough to bag her share.
I was delighted, since it put meat in the pot. Our diet was too heavy on grains and way too light on everything else.
One morning, they came back with a woebegone individual walking in front of them.
“What have we here, Sir Vladimir.”
“A squatter on your lands, Sir Conrad. It didn’t seem right to kill him out of hand, so I brought him to you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him. What do you mean, a squatter?”
“He has a hut hidden on your property. He’s been farming your land and hunting your forest.”
“Nothing to get upset about,” I said. “Well, fellow. Would you like to leave peacefully, or would you like to swear to me and stay on your land?”
“I could stay?”
“Certainly. You’d have to give me a share of your produce, of course. Say, one-fourth of what your fields yield and one-half of any game you bag.”
“I could even hunt? Oh, yes my lord!”
So I swore him in and had Natalia open up a file on him. After he left, Vladimir was looking grumbly. I asked him why.
“First, that man was probably an outlaw.”
“Well, I can’t condemn a man on a ‘probably.’ Anyway, maybe he’s ready to rejoin society.”
“Then there is the fact that the usual terms would be half his produce and he wouldn’t be allowed to hunt.”
“I know, but I didn’t want to lean on him too hard. As for hunting, well, there’s plenty of game out there and there’s no point in letting it go to waste. Half of something is better than all of nothing. Look, he won’t cost us anything, and if he works out, well, we have a lot of mouths to feed around here.”
“The decision is yours, Sir Conrad, but the other fords won’t love you for charging less than they do.”
The squatter came back two days later with six deer, a wild boar, and a bison. He had with him his wife, three children, and eight of his friends, squatters who also wanted to swear to me.
They were rough, sturdy-looking fellows and each carried an axe in addition to his belt knife. The axe was a Slavic peasant’s universal tool. With it he would build his house, slaughter his pig, and defend his land. It was just the right length to double as a cane, and the singlebladed axe head was shaped to be a convenient handle. They carried them everywhere, even on dress occasions. They even danced with them, at least in some of the men-only dances. It made a formidable weapon.
Once, in a museum, I saw an ancient Egyptian axe of almost exactly the same design. Oh, the Egyptian one was made for a prince, and was covered with gold decoration, but the basic shape was identical. Some things are hard to improve on.
By the end of the month, a total of twenty-six squatters were turned into yeomen. I never stopped buying food, but they sure helped.
Of course, my relationship with the yeomen wasn’t all one way. I invited them regularly to Three Walls for holidays and less formal social events. There weren’t any serious problems in the first few years, but if there had been, I would have had to do something about it. The only time-consuming thing I had to do was visit them all once a year. That took an entire week.
Vladimir said that I ought to have a bailiff or foreman for so many men, and thinking about it, he was right. I contacted one of the yeomen and told him to get together with his friends and elect a leader. The yeomen were delighted with my faith in them. Vladimir was scandalized.