The Crosstime Engineer Read online

  “You know something about wrought iron. You know nothing about steel,” I said.

  “Huh.” He still didn’t look up. He was a short man, but he looked to be immensely strong. Even though we were outside in the snow, his sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms twice as thick as mine. He was repairing the armor that the pig had worn when I killed it a few weeks before. “Damned lucky work, here. You must have hit a couple of weak links.”

  “I did nothing of the sort! I killed that pig because my sword is good steel and that armor is cheap wrought iron!”

  “ Nothing wrong with this armor.” He still didn’t look up. He was beating an iron ring into the mail shirt draped over the anvil, working over the tip of the point.

  “Damn it, look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  He glanced up. “I see you.” Then he went back to his work.

  “Well, if you won’t look at me, look at my sword!” I drew it to show him what watered steel looked like.

  “Skinny little thing.”

  Obviously, I was going to have to get his attention. It occurred to me that chopping a hole through the mail he was working on might do the trick.

  “Damn you, Ilya! You stand back or you’re going to lose a hand!” I swung at the armor draped over the anvil and he got out of the way in time.

  The results were surprising. Fortunately, Ilya was too busy staring at the anvil with his mouth open to notice my expression. I had cut three centimeters off the end of the anvil, and the armor was almost in two pieces, hanging by a shred. My sword was undamaged.

  My experience as an officer had taught me to recover quickly. “Now fix that, Ilya,” I growled. “Then you come to me after supper tonight and we’ll talk.” I walked off as though I knew what I was doing.

  The carpenter was selecting logs from the firewood pile, about a meter long and half that thick, splitting them in half and laying the halves side by side on the snow.

  I didn’t want to ask.

  I went back to the castle, thinking about a mug of beer. Maybe the count would want a game of chess. A noble wasn’t allowed to play with commoners because he might lose.

  Janina got my beer, and the girls pounced on me.

  “Sir Conrad, you promised to show us how to make that wonderful knot work.” Krystyana wasn’t very good at playing the coquette. I think she was trying to imitate Francine, the priest's wife.

  “Hmm. I don’t remember promising anything, but I'll think on it.” Thinking did me surprisingly little good. Understand that my mother knitted constantly. Unless she was cooking or sleeping, her needles and yarn were always out. My grandmother had done the same while she was alive.

  And, you know? I had never really looked at what they were doing. I knew that there was a needle in each hand, with little loops of yam that connected them to the fabric below. She did something complicated with them in the middle. I spent more than an hour trying to visualize what it was, and the girls drifted away, embarrassed.

  Then a partial solution occurred to me. I didn’t know what knitting was, but when I was seven, my grandmother had shown me how to crochet. I got some heavy slivers of wood from the carpenter, who was still splitting logs and laying them out.

  Other groups were working. One bunch of men had piles of flax lying on the ground, and they were beating on them with large wooden mallets. Some women were shredding it into fiber. A few others were braiding a sort of rope. Some repair work was in progress on a straw roof. No one seemed to be in charge, but things were getting done.

  I took my sticks back to my room, and in an hour I had whittled three usable crochet hooks. The lack of sandpaper was a nuisance, but if you take your time you can get things fairly smooth with just a knife. I borrowed a candle from the count’s room and waxed them. I borrowed some yam and shortly produced a pot holder that was as good as anything I had done when I was seven.

  The girls were thrilled and picked it up without difficulty. Within a week I had two usable linen undershirts and Lambert was equally well equipped. The ladies were soon experimenting with variations, some of which were quite nice, and the peasant women were following their lead.

  One surprising thing about technology is that very often the simplest processes and devices take the longest to develop, or perhaps I should say that it’s surprising until you've been a designer. It is much easier, conceptually, to design a complicated thing than a refined simple mechanism. Those intricate machines that came out of twentiethcentury Germany are really the results of lazy thinking.

  Consider the evolution of the musket. The expensive and tricky wheel lock was produced for a hundred years before some nameless craftsman came up with the simple and dependable flintlock.

  Or look at this crocheting business. It’s hard to imagine a simpler tool than a crochet hook. It produces a useful cloth fairly quickly, yet I do not know of a single primitive tribe that uses it. Even nomads, who must carry all their belongings with them, haul along a simple loom to make cloth.

  A designer can mull over complicated designs for months. Then suddenly the simple, elegant, beautiful solution occurs to him. When it happens to you, it feels as if God is talking! And maybe He is.

  After supper, Mary escorted Ilya the blacksmith into my room. He was considerably less surly than he had been in the afternoon.

  “Sir Conrad, please understand that when I have the forge going, I have to work! It takes me two or three days to make enough charcoal to feed the fire for a single afternoon.”

  “Okay, Ilya. I’ll count that as an apology if you'll excuse my temper. Now, about steel.”

  The door was open, and Lambert walked in. “Yes, Sir Conrad, about steel! I want to listen in on this.”

  “You’ve had a productive day! All my ladies are busily tying balls of yam into remarkable knots, and I hear that you have invented a new technique for obtaining Ilya's attention. ”

  In a place so small, everybody seemed to know what everyone else was doing. “I’m sorry about losing my temper, my lord. I imagine that anvils are expensive.”

  “Yes, but Ilya fixed it and the mail as well.” His eyes twinkled. “I’ve occasionally considered using a similar technique on his head, but I feared for my sword. Now, tell us about steel.”

  “Well, the first step is to convert the wrought iron into blister steel. Wrought iron is almost pure iron; steel is iron with a little bit of carbon in it. Charcoal is mostly carbon, so the trick is to mix them.”

  “You start by beating the iron until it’s fairly thin, thinner than your little finger. Then you get a clay pot with a good clay lid. You put the iron in the pot and pack it all around tight with charcoal, crushed fine. You put the lid on and seal it with good clay. It's important that no air gets into the pot.”

  “Then you build a fire around it, slowly heat it up to a dull red, and keep the fire going for a week.”

  “What? A whole week?” Ilya interrupted.

  “Yes. A wood fire is hot enough, though. Now, if you’ve done this right and the pot hasn't cracked and no air has gotten in, the iron will have little pimples on it, and it will now be steel. Not a good grade of steel but good for some things. What I've just described is called the cementation process.”

  “You don’t know anything about heat-treating, do you? No, I guess you wouldn't. Wrought iron stays soft no matter what you do with it. Well, steel can be hardened. You heat it until it's bright red, almost yellow, and dunk it in water. This will make it hard, so it can keep a good edge. The trouble is, it breaks easily.”

  “Then there is tempering, which makes it tougher. After hardening, you heat it to almost red, then let it cool slowly.”

  “That’s what there is to it?” Ilya asked.

  “That’s what there is to making a decent kitchen knife or an axe blade, but it won't be springy enough for a sword. It might break unless you made it as heavy as the count's.”

  “So let’s have the rest of it.”

  “Hey, this is going to be a lot harder
than it sounds,” I said. “Just learning how to cook a pot that long without breaking it is going to take a lot of tries, and tempering is an art form.”

  “Well, I want to hear it anyway.”

  “Yes, Sir Conrad, tell us the whole process,” Lambert said.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you how they do it in Damascus.” Actually, I didn't know how they did it in Damascus, but I'd seen Jacob Bronowski's magnificent television series, and he had showed how they did it in Japan, which was probably similar. “You weld a piece of this cemented steel to a similar piece of good wrought iron. You know how to weld, don't you?”

  “Does the Pope know how to pray?”

  “I’ll take that as an affirmative. You weld them together and beat it out until it's twice as long as it was. Then you bend it over and weld it again. Then you heat it up again, beat it out long again, bend it over again, and weld it again. You repeat this at least twelve and preferably fifteen times. This gives you a layered structure thousands of layers thick.”

  “That sounds impossible.”

  “No, but it is difficult. Look carefully at my sword. See those little lines? Those tiny waves? Those are layers of iron and steel. It’s called watering, and it's the mark of the best blades.”

  “That’s it, then?”

  “Almost. Then you beat it until it looks like a sword. Once you start playing with hardening, you’ll learn that the faster the steel cools, the harder it gets. You want the edge very hard but the shank springy. You coat the sword with clay, thin near the edge and thick at the shank. You heat it, clay and all, until it's the 'color of the rising sun' and quench it in water the same temperature as your hand. Then you temper it and polish it. Soaking it in vinegar will bring out the watering.”

  “That’s a long-winded process,” Ilya said.

  “But worth it, I’ll wager,” the count said. “Ilya, you work on it-in addition to your other duties, of course. Good night, Ilya. A game of chess, Sir Conrad?”

  Lambert won one of our games that night. By spring he was beating me two games out of three.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I awoke to find that the carpenter was burning all the logs he had split and laid out the day before. Not one big bonfire, you understand, but hundreds of little fires, one in each split log. Furthermore, he had recruited half a dozen of the children to help him at this task. Two of the older boys were splitting kindling, and the rest were tending the fires under his supervision.

  I knew that I didn’t want to get involved.

  I scrounged up some splinters of about knitting-needle size and retired to my room.

  You see, it often happens with me that a problem that I have in the day gets solved in the middle of the night. I’d woken up in the dark with the answer, sitting bolt upright and startling Natalia.

  It was obvious. I had a product sample, a sweater that my mother had knitted. All I had to do was figure out how to stick the knitting needles into it and then perform the operation backward! Taking it apart, I could tell how to put it together.

  I had the needles ready by dinnertime, and I eagerly went at it as soon as the meal was over. It was not as easy as I had thought. I was not aided by the fact that my sweater was very fancy, with lots of embossing and special twists. Also, I did not know which end was up. It was a long, frustrating afternoon. I learned little and lost a third of my only sweater.

  Ladies wandered in and out, but I really didn’t have time to be friendly.

  The carpenter was still out there, burning his logs, with a new crew of helpers.

  After supper, I was at it by the smoky light of an off lamp when Count Lambert took the stuff out of my hands, handed it to Krystyana, and sat me down at the chess board.

  “Time for recreation, Sir Conrad.”

  By the end of the third game, Krystyana had my sweater partially reassembled.

  “You see, Sir Conrad,” the count said, beaming. “Another eldritch art that you have taught my people.”

  “Uh… yes, my lord.”

  “By the way, do you have any idea as to just what Vitold is doing out there with all those fires?”

  “In truth, my lord, he has been confusing me for the past two days.”

  “Now that is refreshing to hear. I hate to be the only one who doesn’t know what is going on. Sometimes I think they play a game called confuse the count.”

  “Bedtime. Coming, Krystyana? Or is it someone else’s turn?”

  At noon the next day Vitold showed me the first sample beehive; by dusk he had completed the entire gross. In three days he had finished a job that I had assumed would take months.

  It seems that boards were hard to make. They had to be sawed by hand out of tree trunks, using a poor saw. Nails were even harder. They had to be hammered one at a time out of very expensive iron.

  But though a modem carpenter thinks in terms of boards and fasteners, Vitold thought in terms of taking trees and making things out of them.

  As the firewood was already cut, splitting was a fairly simple job. He then burned out a hollow in each half log, carefully leaving about five centimeters untouched all the way around. An entrance hole was chopped in with an axe, and the two troughs were tied back together again with a sturdy, though crude, linen rope. To harvest, you untied the rope, removed the combs, and retied it.

  Vitold’s method was one of those brilliantly simple things that I was talking about earlier. There was a lot I had to teach the people of the thirteenth century. There was also a great deal that I had to learn.

  I haven’t talked much about children in this confession, perhaps because the subject is so painful. In modem Poland, children are cherished, as they are in all civilized countries. In the thirteenth century, this was not always true. Perhaps because so many of them died so young, you did not dare love them too much.

  From puberty to menopause, if they lived that long, the women of Okoitz were almost continually pregnant. Most of them averaged twelve to fifteen births. There was no concept of birth control, no feeling that one should abstain from sex. In that small community of perhaps a hundred families, there were typically two births a week. There was also more than a weekly funeral, usually a tiny clothwrapped bundle without even a wooden coffin.

  The adults, too, died young. Forty was considered old. The medical arts that can keep a sick person alive did not exist. You were healthy or you were dead!

  And there was nothing I could do about it. I was completely ignorant of most medicine. Oh, I had taken all the standard first-aid courses. I could give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could treat frostbite and heat stroke and shock. I could splint a fracture and tend a wound. But all that I had learned was learned for the purpose of knowing what to do until the doctor arrives.

  I got into this sad subject because Krystyana’s baby sister was dead. Her father had rolled on the baby while sleeping and smothered it. Because of the harsh winters and unheated houses, babies slept with their parents. It was the only way to keep them from freezing. And the father just-rolled over.

  The look on the man’s face-he couldn't have been much older than I was, but his face was lined and weathered, his hands were wrinkled, calloused claws, and his back was bent as if he were still carrying a grain sackthe look on that man's face was such that I couldn't stay through the all-too-brief church ceremony. I had to leave and I had to cry.

  Everyone already knew that I was strange, and they left me alone.

  I am not a doctor. I am an engineer. I did not know what most of those people were dying of. Hell, nobody here had cancer! People just got a bellyache and died! But I did know that a better diet, better sanitation, better clothing, better housing, and-damn it-a little heat would do wonders for them.

  A sawmill for wooden floors and beds that got them off the floor. An icehouse to help preserve food. Looms for more and better cloth. A better stove for heating and cooking. Some kind of laundry-these people couldn’t wash their clothes all winter!—a sewage system, and a water system.


  These were things that I could do; these were things that I would do!

  That and get ready to fight the Mongols.

  It was just after Christmas that I started working on my master plan, or at least the first few glimpses of it started to come to me.

  If we were going to accomplish anything with regard to the Mongols, we would need arms and armor on a scale unprecedented in thirteenthcentury Poland. We would need iron, steel, and-if possible-gunpowder by the hundreds of tons.

  That meant heavy industry, and heavy industry is equipmentintensive. A blast furnace can’t be shut down for Sundays or holidays. It can't stop working for the planting or the harvest. Its workers have to be skilled specialists.

  A steel works at Okoitz, or anywhere else in Poland’s agricultural system, was simply an impossibility, yet the work could not be done in the existing cities, either. Not when dozens of powerful, traditionminded guilds guarded their special privileges and were ready to fight anything new. Obviously, to have a free hand to introduce innovations, I would need my own land and my own people. Well, Lambert had said that was possible.

  I would need to be able to feed my workers, and the local agricultural techniques produced very little surplus. Here the seeds I had packed in should help. Chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and better farm machinery were a ways off, but work on animal husbandry should be started immediately.

  I’d already promised to get some light industry going—clothmaking and so on-which would improve my status with the powers that be as well as getting people more decent clothing.

  Windmills. We could definitely use some windmills, and I hadn’t seen one in this century.

  I talked with Lambert about my plans for Okoitz, and while I don’t think he grasped a third of what I had in mind, he gave me his blessings. “Yes, of course, Sir Conrad. These innovations are precisely what I wanted you to do. You are welcome to all the timber you can get cut and all the work you can get out of the peasants.”