Frankowski, Leo Conrad 3 The Radiant Warrior

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given me, land which had been in his family for more than three hundred years, he said. He wanted the land
back and for me to pay damages for the trees I'd cut down and the fences I'd put up.
They gave me a few months of needless worry until the duke was passing through one snowy day and
threw both cases out of court. Or rather, he dismissed both suits because he was the court.
Count Herman's suit was dismissed because I had delivered the property agreed upon and had never
promised that it would be profitable. He gave the count a fatherly lecture about trusting to the workingman
rather than to the man's tools and nobody mentioned the fact that the duke himself owned the factory that
had run the count's factory out of business.
The duke became angry when he found that Baron Stefan had failed to come at Count Lambert's summons
to beat the bounds between our properties. He said that if the baron lost land because of that, he deserved it,
and a horse whipping besides for disobeying his liege lord.
It helps to have friends in high places.
Also that winter, Anna and I scouted out the Malapolska Hills, north of Cracow, where I knew there were
deposits of zinc, lead, iron, and coal. She said that winter was the best time for smelling out this sort of
thing, since there were fewer other smells around '
We found deposits of zinc and lead fairly close together, or at least there were two different ores and Anna
said that they both stank like sulfur and I knew that both ores here were sulfides. Lead and iron had been
smelted here for thousands of years, and some archeologists believe that it was here that iron was first
made.
But zinc was unknown as a separate metal. It was used as an alloying element with copper to make brass,
but the ores were mixed before smelting to make brass directly, or zinc ore was mixed with copper before
casting and copper was actually used to reduce the zinc!
Late that summer, I found out why.
The fact is I wouldn't have gotten zinc at all if I hadn't added some pollution-control equipment to the blast
furnace there. There wasn't even a real need to control pollution, since our facilities were tiny by modem
standards and didn't seriously effect the environment. But the problem would grow unless we started off
doing things right, so I was adding dust collectors where possible.
When we tried to smelt the zinc ore, after roasting it to convert the sulfide to the oxide, all we got was slag.
No metal at all came out. It was only when we cleaned out the dust collector that we found drops of zinc
there.
The zinc had left the furnace as a gas! Small wonder the ancients never found it. They weren't worried
about pollution at all!
By the next winter, we were producing zinc in quantity, but I get ahead of myself.
Work started on the training base as soon as the ground thawed. I'd chosen the land because of the varied
terrain, with both mountains and plains on it, and because it was the least populated area of my lands. I only
had to pay seven yeomen to move their families off it.
Eventually, the main barracks would be a square castle a mile to the side and six stories tall, but it was
modest enough to start out. It had bunk-bed space for sixteen dozen men and a dining hall that doubled as a
church, both made of concrete blocks. There was a big concrete parade around and a twelvemile long
obstacle course that was rougher than anything that I'd ever heard of.
On schedule, over a gross of peasants arrived from Count Lambert, or rather one from each of his knights. I
had specifically asked for rough, disobedient characters. Peasants who were "too smart for their own good."
They certainly looked the part. If ever there were a bunch of men who looked like they should be hung on
general principles, this was the gang. With one exception.
Piotr Kulczynski was with them.
Chapter Nineteen
FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI
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I had spent much of the winter in preparation to attend Sir Conrad's warrior school. I had trained one of my
subordinates, Jozef Kulisiewicz, to take over my position for a year, taking him twice on my rounds of Sir
Conrad's factories and inns, and saw to it that his replacement was well trained.
I had artfully observed all the exercises that Sir Conrad and his knights were doing, and diligently practiced
them myself. And I had worked on Count Lambert very carefully, and eventually got him to appoint me to
the school. This was not easy, for while my father was one of the count's peasants, I was not, being sworn [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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