Lord Conrad’s Lady Read online

  The girl was back immediately, doubtless having literally passed herself in the hallway. You do that sort of thing when you have a time machine handy. Whatever they used for Alka-Seltzer around here worked fast. I sipped my coffee and considered things.

  Item: A lot of very weird things were going on. The temporal structure of all creation seemed to be shattering, even back here in 60,000 B.C. The supposition was that Conrad had something to do with it, although nobody had the slightest idea how, including Tom, and he had been one of the inventors of the time machine.

  Item: Tom had agreed to meet me here this morning and hadn’t done so. That was odd. With time travel, if you didn’t want to go someplace at a particular time, you could always go later and still get there on time. Tom always kept his appointments, even when he was five years late, subjectively. I’d written him a note already and put it in my letter box, and his reply hadn’t popped immediately out of the other side of the box the way it was supposed to. There was nothing in those boxes but a timer and an ejection mechanism. Not much there to go wrong.

  Maybe he just wanted me to watch this tape first.

  I looked up at the girl who was awaiting further instructions.

  “Do you have any idea what is going on?” I asked her. “No, sir.”

  “Then sit down and watch this tape with me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I hit the START button.

  Chapter Two

  It was a bitterly cold night, and John’s hair and clothes were rimed with frost. He had lost his hat, and his eyes were red and shot through with blood. In front of everyone, he grabbed me and demanded that I return to Okoitz with him immediately. When I managed to free myself from him, he pulled out his belt knife. I was frightened and hit him on the head with a stool. I swear before God that it was never my intention to kill John, or even to seriously harm him, yet it happened.

  Sir Conrad was called to the inn, since he was lord of the city. He rarely frequented his own inn and was shocked to find me there. Yet on hearing the tale, he said that I was not guilty of the murder of my husband, for it was an accident and done in self-defense, but that Count Lambert alone had the right of high justice.

  On returning from Okoitz, Sir Conrad told me that Count Lambert had said that since a priest had been killed, my case came under canon law rather than civil law, and the matter would have to be taken up with the Bishop of Wroclaw.

  Now, it is normally desirable for a criminal to have her trial brought before the Church. The penalties demanded by the clergy are usually far less severe than those handed out by the local lord. But in my case I felt this change of jurisdiction was for the worse, for the Bishop of Wroclaw did not like me, but Count Lambert certainly did. With John dead, I knew I could easily enter the count’s bed, were I willing to share that honor with a dozen peasant girls!

  Also, the Church moved very slowly on legal matters, and many years could go by before I might be free to return to France. I spent the uncertain months of winter working at the inn, saving my money.

  In the spring, Duke Henryk came to Three Walls to see the wonders that Sir Conrad was building in his factories and furnaces. The duke was a robust old man of seventy, with an outside that was as hard as the crust of good French bread and an inside that was just as soft. The duke made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse-more money than I was currently making, his considerable protection from any Church prosecution, and duties that involved only serving the duke himself. I left Three Walls in the duke’s company.

  Thus I spent the next five years as the personal servant and confidante of the most powerful man in Poland, and in the process learned much about the politics of this new and somewhat barbarous land. I learned who wanted what and for what reason, who hated who for no understandable reason at all, and, sometimes quite literally, where all the bodies were buried. As opposed to the feuding nobles of England, Italy, or even France, Polish nobles were less likely to go to war with one another than to resort to poison, a trap, or a knife in the dark. Perhaps this was because the Polish fighting man was often a member of a large, extended family and was ever ashamed to kill his own cousins, who might be on the opposing side. Family loyalty often took precedence with them over mere oaths of fealty.

  My duties to the duke were not well defined. I simply did whatever he wanted me to do. Since he wanted me to continue dressing much as I had as a waitress, my legs and breasts were rarely covered, save in the coldest weather. Indeed, it started a fad, a clothing style that many of the ladies of the court followed, at least to the extent of baring their breasts. Almost none of them adopted the short dress, feeling that naked legs were a bit much.

  I always traveled with the duke and was privy to his many secrets. Indeed, an old man will always tell everything to an adoring young woman! One of the strangest things that I learned was that Sir Conrad was not a native to our own times but rather had come here somehow from the far future! Just how this was done was a mystery even to Conrad himself. All that I can think is that the future must be a grand place indeed, for if Conrad was but an ordinary man from that time, as he has so often insisted to me, what must the exceptional men be like?

  I usually slept in the duke’s bed, to comfort him. However, like my late “husband,” the duke was incapable of actual sex, though seventy-five years on God’s earth certainly gave him a fair excuse!

  Eventually Duke Henryk raised me to the peerage, making me the Countess of Strzegom, with a nice manor house and a few hundred peasants. I am not ashamed of anything I did with that fine old man, and I certainly do not regret my years with him.

  The duke did not die of old age, as all expected, but rather by a cowardly assassin’s crossbow while he was sleeping at my side in Wawel Castle.

  The duke had long and carefully trained his son to wield the sword of power, and young Duke Henryk easily stepped into his father’s position. Yet the younger Henryk was not his father’s puppet but did things in his own style. The very day of the assassination, all the ladies of the court were wearing dresses that covered everything but their faces and hands, knowing the new duke’s displeasure with the old bare styles. Though young Henryk was absolutely honorable in all things, I knew it would not be wise for me to remain at court.

  Sir Conrad—or rather I should say Baron Conrad, for Count Lambert had enlarged him-was in Cracow, and gifted the new duke with four of his marvelous horses, that they might protect him against assassins. While testing these horses, I persuaded Baron Conrad to let me go with the party, riding apillion. When we were racing through the fields, an attempt was made by three crossbowmen to kill the new duke, and Baron Conrad drew his wondrous sword and killed all the assassins while the duke’s bodyguards took their lord to safety.

  There was something unbelievably exciting about the chase and the fight with the assassins, bouncing behind Conrad and holding him tightly while he dealt death to the attackers. When we dismounted in a secluded wood to see if we could identify the bodies, well, to state it simply, I seduced him. I suppose I should be ashamed of myself, but in truth I was then twenty-six years old, and that is a perfectly stupid age at which to be a virgin. And how could I ever regret the wonderful pleasure that he gave me and that I had so long been denied!

  Baron Conrad was then not maintaining a harem in the manner of his liege lord, Count Lambert, but was contenting himself with a single woman, a dancer from the far cast who wasn’t even a Christian. I had met Cilicia often, and she was a pleasant enough person, but I thought that I would have little difficulty displacing her in Baron Conrad’s heart. I traveled with him to Three Walls, part of the way on his new steam-powered riverboat, an almost magical contrivance.

  Yet he would not dismiss the foreign girl, but tried instead to make us join together into a single household! A foolish attempt—of course it did not work. My love, so wise in all things technical, is like a little boy when it comes to solving the far simpler problems of people. He needs my help so much and so often!

>   But at the time I could accomplish nothing with his other paramour, Cilicia. She seemed to think that she had prior claim on him, and indeed she was again pregnant with another of his children. After a month of trying, I left for my own estate.

  Conrad contrived to visit me there at least once a month and often twice. And always I gave him a warm welcome. I wanted more, much more. I wanted a proper marriage and children by him, but I settled for what I could get.

  In his own way, he was generous with me. I remember best the time when forty men and as many loaded mules came to my manor gate and announced that they were my birthday present. Since they were from Conrad, I bade them do as they would, and they fell to it with a will. One band of them put glass in every window of my manor, on frames with hinges that could open out and with screens of a coarse metal cloth that fended off insects in the summer but let the breezes through.

  Another band took the roof off my highest tower and mounted there a small windmill and a huge water tank with a new well below it. Yet others dug pits and trenches in the kitchen garden and buried clay pipes and even a small stone room. My kitchens were rebuilt with a big copper stove and sinks with running water, but my favorite was the bathroom, with hot running water and a huge porcelain tub large enough for two! We used it often together, Baron Conrad and I. For years I spent much of my life waiting for his return.

  Then, just prior to last Christmas, Count Lambert did a remarkably stupid thing. His wife, whom he had not seen in twelve years, died in Hungary, and his daughter, a girl of fourteen summers, came north to live with him. The count decided that Baron Conrad would be the perfect match for the girl and ordered Conrad to marry her. This at a time when Conrad was making final preparations to defend the land from the Mongol invaders! Conrad refused, saying that he had never met the girl, and anyway, they didn’t even speak the same language. Count Lambert became incensed and ordered Conrad off his lands. Conrad, disgusted, packed his saddlebags with gold and headed west like a knighterrant in a story, without so much as a change of underwear.

  Fortunately, he stopped at my manor on his way, and I was able to talk. some sense into my poor little dumpling. Count Lambert wanted him to marry his daughter, and to be sure, young Duke Henryk wanted Conrad to marry somebody and to stop living in sin with a Mohammedan. I suggested that he marry Cilicia, knowing full well that it was impossible. This made Conrad say that he could never become her sort of heathen and that he had been a failure at trying to convert her to the true religion. Therefore, no priest of either persuasion would ever marry them, nor a Jew either, for that matter.

  I then suggested that he marry me. This would satisfy the duke, and Count Lambert would no longer force the issue if it could not possibly bear fruit. Conrad decided that a small wedding would be all that was needed and that things could go on pretty much as before, with nothing changed but one small ceremony. I, of course, knew all the players in the game, and I knew that nothing of the kind would take place. But a wise woman always knows when to keep her mouth shut!

  In the morning he, asked me to be his wife, and I consented with all my heart. His proposal was particularly welcome since I had twice missed my time and knew that I was heavy with his child.

  We rode to Cracow to talk to the duke, who, after all, was my legal guardian, and he gave us his blessings, along with a promise to have a serious talk with Count Lambert. Conrad was enlarged to count, since a mere baron could hardly marry a countess. We had a beautiful wedding in Wawel Cathedral, and all the nobility of Poland attended it. Indeed, there were so many that the heralds could find room in the cathedral only for barons and above, and my husband’s party was almost excluded for being mere knights! He solved this problem by enlarging his entire party to baronies.

  Our marriage has had no time to be blissful, for my husband has spent the months since our wedding almost exclusively in preparation for war with the invading Mongols. Conrad is facing grave political difficulties as well as military ones, yet despite the fact that I am far more adept than he at anything concerning people, he will not let me help him with politics.

  The duke has invited many foreign knights to aid us against the Tartars, and he bade all the fighting men in Poland to rally to him near Legnica, where provision has been made to support so large an army. The dukes of Sandomierz and Mazovia have refused to do this, as it would involve abandoning their own lands and peoples to the Mongols and :hen having to reconquer them again. Further, the nobles of Little Poland were also loath to abandon their estates and start the war by retreating hundreds of miles to the west. They left Duke Henryk as a group and swore to serve under Duke Boleslaw of Mazovia, despite the fact that they had once sworn fealty to Henryk.

  And Conrad, with the biggest and finest army of all, though none will credit it, felt that he could not follow Duke Henryk either, since much of his force was with the riverboats on the Vistula River, and these could hardly go west overland to Legnica. There were flying machines that flew from Eagle Nest, near Okoitz, but they could not fly from Legnica, needing the catapult to launch them. Further, Conrad’s huge land army needs the railroads that have been built for the purpose along the Vistula. They cannot fight efficiently in the west. And lastly, Conrad was loath to abandon his factories and cities to the enemy. My love therefore felt obligated to disobey Duke Henryk and rather go to the aid of young Duke Boleslaw of Mazovia, who was leading the Polish forces of the east.

  But Duke Boleslaw is a boy of fourteen who has heard too many tales of knightly prowess and sees no need of saddling himself with “a lot of peasant infantry.”

  If ever there was a blood-soaked need for some adept political maneuvering, this is the time! Further, I seem to be the only person about with the political skills necessary to unite the military forces of this confused and barbarous land.

  Yet Conrad is so naive and helpless at all things political that he does not even realize how stupid he is! I could not persuade him to let me smooth his path. He treats me like a pretty child who needs protection rather than as the one person who could solve at least some of his obvious problems. A few weeks ago it got so bad that he even had a guard posted at my door “for my protection,” he said, but in fact to keep me from going to Duke Henryk and Duke Boleslaw and bringing them together as the old duke certainly would have done.

  Three weeks ago my love marched out with the largest and finest army in Christendom to seek the Mongol foe. I stayed behind, almost as a prisoner, when I should have been aiding our efforts. Being six months pregnant didn’t help, either.

  And two days ago the Mongols found us! We beat off their first two attacks with our swivel guns and our grenades, and the field below is dark with their bodies. Now they are camped beyond the range of our guns, more of them than we can count with our telescopes, and they are building huge siege machines to close with us.

  Conrad has not come, and we know not whether he is alive or dead. But if he be alive, he must come soon, for if he is late, it is we who will be dead, and our children with us.

  Chapter Three

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  Two hundred miles from my home the weather was still foul, the lightning and thunder went on without rest, and the cold drizzle had been replaced with sleet. The troops were nearing exhaustion, but three days after our battle with the Mongols, the cleanup was just about completed. By actual count, 216,692 of the enemy had been killed, and that was in our base-twelve numbers. In the base-ten numbers that I had grown up with, we had done in more than half a million of the bastards here. Their bodies had been stripped and buried twelve deep in long trenches, but their heads were set on stakes and lances in neat squares, a gross skulls to the side. There were more than two dozen of these squares stretching across the battlefield, quite a monument to Polish arms.

  A ghastly sight-I’d had it done so that no one could ever doubt what we had accomplished here, so that no one could ever say that we had exaggerated.

  The booty taken was equally vast. Ea
ch of the enemy had carried an average of five and a half pounds of gold and silver, three years worth of plunder in the Russias. There were no commercial banks available to looting Mongols, so they had to carry their spoils along with them. It was easy to see why most medieval troops were so eager to break ranks and loot. That much gold and silver was easily six years’ pay. My troops, of course, were better disciplined We would share out the loot in an equitable manner once it was taken home and counted.

  Just how I was going to do that in such a manner that my entire army didn’t quit and retire was a problem I hadn’t solved yet. There was so much money suddenly available that it could ruin the economy with inflation, the way Spain was ruined after the conquest of the Americas. I’d have to think of something.

  Since our supplies of food and ammunition were partially exhausted, each of our war carts could carry about an additional five tons, yet it took two gross of the things to haul the gold and silver alone. Another six gross carts were needed to carry the captured weapons and other gear that looked worth saving for trophies if nothing else. Each of these carts would go back toward Three Walls with a platoon of forty-three men to pull and guard it.

  Most of the enemy horses had been killed in the battle and in Ilya’s night raid ;he evening before. Baron Vladimir had felt that a half million horsehides was a prize well worth taking, and he had had the animals skinned before the carcasses were buried. Salting them down would have to wait, since we’d have to get the salt mines working again first. For now the skins were just stacked on the field, with a prayer that the cold weather would hold and they wouldn’t rot. Near those stacks was a huge pile labeled “scrap iron,” junk arms and armor that nobody would want to hang on a wall. The forges could always use scrap. We’d be back for it eventually.