The Flying Warlord Read online

  “Indeed. I’m surprised that the Church hasn't come down on you for it.”

  “I’m sure that they are keeping careful notes, my lord. The inquisition concerning me is still up in the air.”

  “That’s not all that's up there! I trust you've looked up sometime in the last hour?”

  I hadn’t, but I did so now. There was this thirteenth century sailplane circling overhead.

  “I guess I must have been thinking about something else, my lord. There must be quite a thermal above the town.”

  “Quite. It’s doubtless helped by the way every fire in the town is burning bright on a warm, calm day. You don't think that's cheating, do you?”

  “I guess not, my lord. We never qualified what it had to do to stay up, only that it had to fly for two hours. It looks like it’s climbing. The wager is yours.”

  “Good! Then where is my aircraft engine?”

  “Still in my head, my lord, but I’ll get working on it as soon as I get back to Three Walls. Perhaps I can deliver something to you in a few months.”

  “It will take that long? The boys were hoping to get started immediately!”

  “It will take at least that long, my lord. Do you realize what you’re asking? It's not just designing and building the mechanical parts, though that's going to be hard enough! I have no idea how we'll go about machining a crankshaft on one of our lathes! There's a lubrication system to worry about and a carburetion system. And how am I to make a spark coil with nothing but beeswax and paper for insulators? And spark plugs! Thermal expansion problems alone could kill us right there! And-”

  “You will solve it, Baron Conrad. You always have before. Shall we say by the Harvest Festival, then?”

  “My lord, I will work on it diligently, but I cannot promise results by any fixed date. There’s the problem with fuel. I think we can use wood alcohol, but—”

  “We’ll discuss it again on the Feast of Our Lady of the Harvest. Oh, yes. There was another thing I wanted to talk over with you. When first you came here, you showed us the zipper things that fastened your clothes and equipage together. You distinctly said that you could show my workmen the way of making them. Well, almost six years have gone by and you still haven't done it. I want you to start on that as well.”

  “My lord, don’t we have more important things to worry about than zippers? In less than four years, the Mongols will be arriving. There are all sorts of things that need doing if we are to survive that.”

  “Indeed? Like what? You are training some very good infantry, and you should have plenty of them in time. As to the cavalry, well, our Polish knights are always ready. All the more so once you have them in plate armor. But I’ve seen your stamping presses work, and they'll have no difficulty getting the job done. As to the air force, if you can build the engines you promised, the boys and I can do the rest. What more remains to be done?”

  “Plenty, my lord. Remember the binoculars I gave you on the first day we met?”

  “Of course! Marvelous things! I keep them in my chambers.”

  “Well, I think we may be able to produce something similar called a telescope. It will be bulkier and will be used over only one eye, but it should do the job. What if I could have enough of them made so that you could give one to every Polish baron, count, and duke before the battle? What would that do for your fame?”

  “I like it, Baron Conrad, and I would even pay the cost of it all, in cloth of course.”

  “Then I’ll put a team to working at it, my lord. It would help if I could borrow those binoculars back for a week or two.”

  “Take them for as long as you need them. But what does that have to do with zippers and Mongols?”

  “I’m just trying to say that we have a lot more to do. Now let me tell you about railroads…”

  The conversation went on for hours while the party went on around us. The upshot of it was that Lambert would provide the land to run a line from Coaltown to the Vistula, and from Three Walls north to the., line, along with two square miles of land along the Vistula where I would build a fort and a riverboat assembly factory. The fort would be at Count Lambert’s expense, in cloth, and he would be in nominal command, but I would see to the manning of it, since the people there would be working at the riverboat factory and the railyard. I would build the track at my expense, and all my goods, and the duke's, would travel on the line free. Others could use it by paying a toll to Lambert, but they'd have to rent railroad cars from me. After that, we'd run a line from the east end of the line to Silver City, and that part of it on Count Lambert's land would be managed on the same basis as the rest.

  Medieval business deals were always complicated, especially when Count Lambert was in something like his current mood. Actually, I didn’t care who owned what, so long as the job got done. As to the division of the profits, well, I'd have to keep my liege lord happy in any event. After that, the accountants all worked for me so he would be rewarded as I saw fit!

  “Done, Baron Conrad! This has been a good day’s work! I feel right about it. But I still think that when the Mongols arrive, we should be dressed in our best, so do get to work on that zipper machine, won't you? At your own expense, of course.”

  With that, he got up and walked away and I started thinking about how one would go about building a zipper-making machine.

  Interlude One

  I hit the STOP button.

  “Tom, something’s been bothering me since you mentioned it a few days ago.”

  “And what is troubling you, my son?”

  “Well, you said that you found out about Conrad’s trip to the Middle Ages when you went to the Battle of Chmielnick during the Mongol invasion. You said that the battle you saw had a different outcome than what's written up in the history books. And you said that the investigation teams you sent out came back duplicated. Why weren't you duplicated as well?”

  “Well, I was! It was strange, meeting myself. Not because running into yourself is all that odd. With time travel, we do that all the time. But protocol is that the senior self always talks first, and the two of us just stood there, each waiting for the other to speak first, since neither of us remembered being there before. It was quite a while before I asked him why he didn’t say something. Eventually, we figured out what happened. Being a sensible person, both of me, I decided to timeshare the management of the place with my other half. We flipped a coin and I got it for this century and he gets it for the next.”

  “Good Lord!”

  “Well, what else could I do? Fight myself? I suppose it would have been more complicated had I been married, but after a bit of youthful insanity, like Conrad, I’m not the marrying kind.”

  He hit the START button.

  Chapter Three

  FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD

  Part of my deal with Count Lambert was that I would spend two days a month looking over the projects we had going at Okoitz, so I couldn’t go back to Three Walls immediately. I checked the windmills and went down the coal mine. I looked over the progress made on Count Lambert's new castle, which was now more than half built, and spent more time than was necessary in the cloth factory, mostly because all the girls working there wanted to talk to me about something or another. Mostly, they were just trying to get me interested in themselves, and since I was still pretty seriously involved with Cilicia, they were out of luck. None the less, it's fun being pursued by scantily clad young ladies, even when you don't intend being caught, so I ended up spending half of both days there. Cilicia spent her time teaching dancing to the ladies of the town, charging all the traffic could bear.

  Then it was back to Three Walls, where I got a half dozen research teams going on the new projects. My usual approach to research was to set up a team of two young men, apprentices, generally, along with one older craftsman. The rule was that they had to try out everybody’s ideas, and the older man was not allowed to squelch the dumb ideas that the kids came up with. I reviewed the progress with each team
every week or two and threw in my own thoughts, and usually something workable resulted. On really important things, I'd set up two competing teams and let them work independently. The reward for all this, besides their pay, was in the form of cash bonuses if they were successful and the fact that if the new product went into production, the men on the research team were the obvious people to manage the new factory, so promotions were in order.

  The railroads and the steamboats were just a matter of design and build, with little real research required at first. Sir Piotr’s first survey job was for the railroad track.

  Yashoo was sent with a crew to the new lands, which we called East Gate, to build a boat-assembly building and the foundry got busy making cast-iron railroad track. The construction crews were scheduled to go through the Warrior’s school in the winter, when there wasn't much else for them to do anyhow.

  We didn’t have the machinery necessary to roll steel track, and with the comparatively light loads that our track would be handling, malleable cast iron was good enough. Cast iron also had the advantage of being not worth stealing. A blacksmith couldn't make anything out of it. If he tried heating it and beating on it with a hammer, it just crumbled. This fact, coupled with Anna's outstanding ability to sniff out thieves, reduced our theft problem to almost zero.

  I was almost tempted to try to build a telegraph again, but not quite. There was no way that I could make copper not worth stealing, and the Mongols would probably be smart enough to cut our lines once the invasion started, so its military advantage would be nil.

  Our roiling stock consisted of small flatcars big enough to carry a single container, with a load limit of ten tons. A tenth the size of modem cars, they were huge by the standards of the thirteenth century. They would all be horse or mule drawn, since our line would be only thirty miles long. There wasn’t any need for greater speed and the mules already existed. Locomotives were for the future.

  Sketching up the boats and the railroad took less than a week, since I had a staff of draftsmen (and draftswomen) now. The aircraft engine was something else.

  My first thought had been to make an air-cooled single cylinder two-cycle engine, the sort that is used on lawnmowers, but I got to worrying about balancing it. Static balancing would be no great problem, but dynamic balancing without any sort of test equipment seemed impossible. The thought of vibrations tearing one of our frail wood-and-canvas planes to shreds in midair bothered me.

  I went to a two-opposed cylinder design, where both pistons went out at the same time. If every part was identical to its opposite part, it all should balance perfectly. I hoped.

  Lubrication? All we had was various animal fats and imported olive oil. I designed a pressurized lube system, knowing that it would be contaminated with the wood alcohol I hoped to use. After that, we would just have to try different mixtures and bum out engines until we found something that worked reasonably well.

  Carburetion? All I could do was to sketch up what I think I saw in a textbook fifteen years ago and hope.

  Ignition? I put one research team to work on a magneto system and another on the battery-and-coil type and again I hoped.

  Then there were the mechanical parts. The engine had to be as light as possible, which meant that I needed the best possible strength-to-weight ratio. Sad to say, our best cast steel was weaker than ordinary cast bronze. Bronze was expensive, since it was made, in part, of tin that had to be imported from England, but hang the expense. I’d get it out of Count Lambert somehow. Everything on that engine was bronze except for the bearings (another research group), the cylinder liners, and the piston rings. These last two were cast iron, just like on many modem engines.

  As more and more problems were encountered, more research teams were set up. Did we have a ceramic that had a coefficient of expansion similar to some metal we already had, so we could make a spark plug that didn’t shatter when the engine heated up? Get the machinists to make spark plug jackets out of as many metals as they had , and for each type, have the potters mold in all their different types of clays and try to fire them. Could we insulate wires with some sort of varnish? Put a team of alchemists on it!

  But many of the problems had to be solved sequentially, rather than in parallel. We couldn’t test bearing materials without a working engine, nor could we work on lubricants or carburetion or propellers. The first big snag was ignition, and the problem there was the lack of a decent electrical insulator for the spark coil. The damn things kept shorting out.

  While this was going on, there were innumerable problems with the factories, since the entire upper management, everybody above the foreman level, was out playing soldier. And besides Three Walls, I still had to keep tabs on all the other installations, which were also running without their best men and women.

  Then there was the problem of the barony that I had just been given. It was previously owned by my enemies, the Jaraslavs. These men had hated everything about me and as a result, they had refused to allow any of my innovations on their lands. Because of this, the barony was the most backward in the duchy. The spring crops were already planted when I got the place, so not much could be done in that direction until next year, but there were a lot of other things that needed doing.

  The school system had to be extended into it. That meant more work for Father Thomas, who ran the schools, but not much for me. Along with the schools went our distribution system and the mails. Boris’s job. Teaching the farmers about the new crops and machines? I managed to “borrow” two dozen of Count Lambert's more mature peasants, men with grown sons who would just as soon take over the family farm. I made these men my bailiffs and assigned farmland to them scattered over the barony, along with a complete set of the newest farm equipment, with the understanding that they had to teach their new neighbors about the new stuff.

  Understand that none of these were trivial jobs. That barony was big! There were four thousand three hundred peasant families living on it. No wonder Baron Stefan had been able to ride around with solid gold trim on his armor!

  As to the fifty-odd knights and their squires that were sworn to Baron Stefan, I pointed out to them that their previous liege lord had been killed in a fair fight when he was fully armed and on horseback. And that this deed had been done by scrawny and naked little Piotr, one of my students at the Warrior’s school. If they wanted to swear to me, they had to go to the school, too. And there I was a school for their wives as well.

  Those who had manors still kept them, but it was many years before they could do more than occasionally visit. They were in the army now!

  All told, it was a rough summer and fall.

  In the middle of this, my alchemist, a heretical Moslem named Zoltan Varanian, came to me with a vast grin on his face. He wanted to show me something in the valley I had set aside for the use of his people. He took me to a cave in the hills, which had centuries of bat droppings on the floor.

  “You see?” he said. “We will no longer have to haul shit up here to make into your gunpowder, my lord! On this very floor is sufficient to make nine hundred tons of gunpowder! I have calculated it!”

  This was extremely good news. Getting enough manure to meet the gunpowder quotas was a problem, and the peasants complained that we were taking the only thing they had to fertilize their fields. Furthermore, the manufacturing process for gunpowder was one of our major secrets, as were the ingredients that went into it. Having an internal supply of saltpeter eliminated one possible security leak. On top of that, why couldn’t bat droppings be used as fertilizer? There were a lot of bat caves around.

  We still had a problem with the sulfur needed, and were importing it from Hungary in the form of cinnabar, mercuric sulfide. We were just storing the mercury, except for a little that was used in thermometers, but it would find a use someday.

  The annoying thing was that Poland has vast deposits of sulfur, but they are so far down that we couldn’t get to them without some sophisticated drilling equipment that we hadn't ha
d time to develop. Many of the ores we were mining were sulfides, and in roasting them, we were able to recover the sulfur dioxide and convert it to usable sulfuric acid. But taking sulfuric acid back to sulfur is harder than getting toothpaste back into the tube! As Zoltan put it, “Can the child be put back into the mother?” For the foreseeable future, we were stuck with imported sulfur.

  I gave Zoltan my hearty congratulations, and two dozen huge bolts of Count Lambert’s cloth as a bonus.

  By fall, the team working on the zipper was successful, since all they had to do was duplicate the zipper on my sleeping bag, and this mollified Count Lambert somewhat, but the boys at Eagle Nest were disappointed with me. They had done their part and I had failed to do mine. I finally invited the entire senior class to Three Walls so that they could see the problems we were having with the aircraft engine and try their hands at solving some of them.

  And the little bastards did!

  A fourteen-year-old kid came up with an incredibly simple and efficient ignition system. Our cigarette lighters made a spark, didn’t they? They worked on the principle of hitting a quartz crystal, didn't they?

  So he made a spark plug with a hefty quartz crystal inside of it, which was struck by a little hammer connected by a linkage to the crankshaft. It didn’t need insulation for the wires because there weren't any wires!

  So we named the system after him, calling it the Skrzynecki ignition, and threw a party in his honor. What troubled me about it was the fact that I should have thought of that one myself. After all, I was the one who had designed our lighters in the first place. I just had to put it down to a mental blind spot.

  It took a few months to beat down the other problems, but by Christmas we had an engine that could run for six hours without an overhaul and that was good enough for starters.

  By spring they had six powered aircraft flying. It is astounding what a bunch of motivated kids can come up with!