Читать книгу Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Paratime Police Saga - H. Beam Piper - Страница 12

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After that, he began noticing a subtle change in manner toward him. Occasionally he caught Rylla regarding him in awe tinged with compassion. Chartiphon merely clasped his hand and said, “You’ll like it here, Lord Kalvan.” It amused him that he had accepted the title as though born to it. Prince Ptosphes said casually, “Xentos tells me there are things you don’t want to talk about. Nobody will speak of them to you. We’re all happy that you’re with us; we’d like you to make this your home always.”

The others treated him with profound respect; the story for public consumption was that he was a Prince from a distant country, beyond the Western Ocean and around the Cold Lands, driven from his throne by treason. That was the ancient and forgotten land of wonder; that was the Home of the Gods. And Xentos had told Mytron, and Mytron told everybody else, that the Lord Kalvan had been sent to Hostigos by Dralm.

As soon as he was on his feet again, they moved him to a suite of larger rooms, and gave him personal servants. There were clothes for him, more than he had ever owned at one time in his life, and fine weapons. Rylla contributed a pair of her own pistols, all of two feet long but no heavier than his Colt .38-special, the barrels tapering to almost paper thinness at the muzzles. The locks worked like the tinderboxes, flint held rightly against moving striker, like wheellocks but with simpler and more efficient mechanism.

“I shot you with one of them,” she said.

“If you hadn’t,” he said, “I’d have ridden on, after the fight, and never come to Tarr-Hostigos.”

“Maybe it would have been better for you if you had.”

“No, Rylla. This is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”

She blushed slightly, and said nothing. He decided to let it go at that for now.

As soon as he could walk unaided, he went down and outside to watch the soldiers drilling. They had nothing like uniforms, except blue and red scarves or sashes, Prince Ptosphes’ colors. The flag of Hostigos was a blue halberd-head on a red field. The infantry wore canvass jacks sewn with metal plates, or brigandines, and a few had mail shirts; their helmets weren’t unlike the one he had worn in Korea. A few looked like regulars; most of them were peasant levies. Some had long pikes; more had halberds or hunting-spears or scythe-blades with the tangs straightened and fitted to eight-foot staves, or woodcutters’ axes with four-foot helves.

There was about one firearm to three polearms. Some were huge muskets, five to six feet long, 8- to 6-bore, aimed and fired from rests. There were arquebuses, about the size and weight of an M-1 Garrand, 16- to 20-bore, and calivers about the size of the Brown Bess musket of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. All were fitted with the odd back-acting flintlocks; he wondered which had been adapted from which, the gunlock or the tinderbox. There were also quite a few crossbowmen.

The cavalry wore high-combed helmets, and cuirasses; they were armed with swords and pistols, a pair in saddle-holsters and, frequently, a second pair down the boot-tops. Most of them also carried short musketoons or lances. They all seemed to be regulars. One thing puzzled him: while the crossbowmen practiced constantly, he never saw a firearm discharged at a target. Maybe a powder-shortage was one of the things that was worrying the people here.

The artillery was laughable; it would have been long out of date in the Sixteenth Century of his own time. The guns were all wrought-iron, built up by welding bars together and strengthened with shrunk-on iron rings. They didn’t have trunnions; evidently nobody here-and-now had ever thought of that. What passed for field-pieces were mounted on great timbers, like oversized gunstocks, and hauled on four-wheel carts. They ran from four to twelve pound bore. The fixed guns on the castle walls were bigger, some huge bombards firing fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred-pound stone balls.

Fifteenth Century stuff; Henry V had taken Harfleur with just as good, and John of Bedford had probably bombarded Orleans with better. He decided to speak to Chartiphon about this.

He took the broadsword he had captured on the night of his advent here-and-now to the castle bladesmith, to have it ground down into a rapier. The bladesmith thought he was crazy. He found a pair of wooden practice swords and went outside with a cavalry lieutenant to demonstrate. Immediately, the Lieutenant wanted a rapier, too. The bladesmith promised to make real ones, to his specifications, for both of them. His was finished the next evening, and by that time the bladesmith was swamped with orders for rapiers.

Almost everything these people used could be made in the workshops inside the walls of Tarr-Hostigos, or in Hostigos Town, and he seemed to have an unlimited expense-account with them. He began to wonder what, besides being the guest from the Land of the Gods, he was supposed to do to earn it. Nobody mentioned that; maybe they were waiting for him to mention it.

He brought the subject up, one evening, in Prince Ptosphes’ study, where he and the Prince and Rylla and Xentos and Chartiphon were smoking over a flagon of after-dinner wine.

“You have enemies on both sides—Gormoth of Nostor and San-ask of Sask—and that’s not good. You have taken me in and made me one of you. What can I do to help against them?”

“Well, Kalvan,” Ptosphes said, “perhaps you could better tell us that. We don’t want to talk of what distresses you, but you must come of a very wise people. You’ve already taught us new things, like the thrusting-sword”—he looked admiringly at the new rapier he had laid aside—“and what you’ve told Chartiphon about mounting cannon. What else can you teach us?”

Quite a lot, he thought. There had been one professor at Princeton whose favorite pupil he had been, and who had been his favorite teacher. A history prof, and an unusual one. Most academic people at the middle of the Twentieth Century took the same attitude toward war that their Victorian opposite numbers had toward sex: one of those deplorable facts nice people don’t talk about, and maybe if you don’t look at the horrid thing it’ll go away. This man had been different. What happened in the cloisters and the guildhalls and the parliaments and council-chambers was important, but none of them went into effect until ratified on the battlefield. So he had emphasized the military aspect of history in a freshman from Pennsylvania named Morrison, a divinity student, of all unlikely things. So, while he should have been studying homiletics and scriptural exegesis and youth-organization methods, that freshman, and a year later that sophomore, had been reading Sir Charles Oman’s Art of War.

“Well, I can’t tell you how to make weapons like that sixshooter of mine, or ammunition for it,” he began, and then tried, as simply as possible, to explain about mass production and machine industry. They only stared in incomprehension and wonder. “I can show you a few things you can do with the things you have. For instance, we cut spiral grooves inside the bores of our guns, to make the bullet spin. Such guns shoot harder, straighter and farther than smoothbores. I can show you how to build cannon that can be moved rapidly and loaded and fired much more rapidly than what you have. And another thing.” He mentioned never having seen any practise firing. “You have very little powder—fireseed, you call it. Is that it?”

“There isn’t enough fireseed in all Hostigos to load all the cannon of this castle for one shot,” Chartiphon told him. “And we can get no more. The priests of Styphon have put us under the ban and will let us have none, and they send cartload after cartload to Nostor.”

“You mean you get your fireseed from the priests of Styphon? Can’t you make your own?”

They all looked at him as though he were a cretin.

“Nobody can make fireseed but the priests of Styphon,” Xentos told him. “That was what I meant when I told you that Styphon’s House has great power. With Styphon’s aid, they alone can make it, and so they have great power, even over the Great Kings.”

“Well I’ll be Dralm-damned!”

He gave Styphon’s House that grudging respect any good cop gives a really smart crook. Brother, what a racket! No wonder this country, here-and-now, was divided into five Great Kingdoms, and each split into a snakepit of warring Princes and petty barons. Styphon’s House wanted it that way; it was good for business. A lot of things became clear. For instance, if Styphon’s House did the weaponeering as well as the powder-making, it would explain why smallarms were so good; they’d see to it that nobody without fireseed stood an outside chance against anybody with it. But they’d keep the brakes on artillery development. Styphon House wouldn’t want bloody or destructive wars—they’d be bad for business. Just wars that burned lots of fireseed; that would be why there were all these great powder-hogs of bombards around.

And no wonder everybody in Hostigos had monkeys on their backs. They knew they were facing the short end of a war of extermination. He set down his goblet and laughed.

“You think nobody but those priests of Styphon can make fireseed?” There was nobody here that wasn’t security-cleared for the inside version of his cover-story. “Why, in my time, everybody, even the children, could to that.” (Well, children who’d gotten as far as high school chemistry; he’d almost been expelled, once. . . .) “I can make fireseed right here on this table.” He refilled his goblet.

“But it is a miracle; only by the power of Styphon . . .” Xentos began.

“Styphon’s a big fake!” he declared. “A false god; his priests are lying swindlers.” That shocked Xentos; good or bad, a god was a god and shouldn’t be talked about like that. “You want to see me do it? Mytron has everything in his dispensary I’ll need. I’ll want sulfur, and saltpeter.” Mytron prescribed sulfur and honey (they had no molasses here-and-now), and saltpeter was supposed to cool the blood. “And charcoal, and a brass mortar and pestle, and a flour-sieve and something to sift into, and a pair of balance-scales.” He picked up an unused goblet. “This’ll do to mix it in.”

Now they were all staring at him as though he had three heads, and a golden crown on each one.

“Go on, man! Hurry!” Ptosphes told Xentos. “Have everything brought here at once.”

Then the Prince threw back his head and laughed—maybe a trifle hysterically, but it was the first time Morrison had heard Ptosphes laugh at all. Chartiphon banged his fist on the table.

“Ha, Gormoth!” he cried. “Now see whose head goes up over whose gate!”

Xentos went out. Morrison asked for a pistol, and Ptosphes brought him one from a cabinet behind him. It was loaded; opening the pan, he spilled out the priming on a sheet of parchment and touched a lighted splinter to it. It scorched the parchment, which it shoudn’t have done, and left too much black residue. Styphon wasn’t a very honest powder maker; he cheapened his product with too much charcoal and not enough saltpeter. Morrison sipped from his goblet. Saltpeter was seventy-five percent, charcoal fifteen, sulfur ten.

After awhile Xentos returned, accompanied by Mytron, bringing a bucket of charcoal, a couple of earthen jars, and the other things. Xentos seemed slightly dazed; Mytron was frightened and making a good game try at not showing it. He put Mytron to work grinding saltpeter in the mortar. The sulfur was already pulverized. Finally, he had about a half pint of it mixed.

“But it’s just dust,” Chartiphon objected.

“Yes. It has to be moistened, worked into dough, pressed into cakes, dried, and ground. We can’t do all that here. But this will flash.”

Up to about 1500, all gunpowder had been like that—meal powder, they had called it. It had been used in cannon for a long time after grain powder was being used in smallarms. Why, in 1588, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia had been very happy that all the powder for the Armada was corned arquebus powder, and not meal-powder. He primed the pistol with a pinch from the mixing goblet, aimed at a half-burned log in the fireplace, and squeezed. Outside somebody shouted, feet pounded up the hall, and a guard with a halberd burst into the room.

“The Lord Kalvan is showing us something about a pistol,” Ptosphes told him. “There may be more shots; nobody is to be alarmed.”

“All right,” he said, when the guard had gone out and closed the door. “Now let’s see how it’ll fire.” He loaded with a blank charge, wadding it with a bit of rag, and handed it to Rylla. “You fire the first shot. This is a great moment in the history of Hostigos. I hope.”

She pushed down the striker, set the flint down, aimed at the fireplace, and squeezed. The report wasn’t quite as loud, but it did fire. Then they tried it with a ball, which went a half inch into the log. Everybody thought that was very good. The room was full of smoke, and they were all coughing, but nobody cared. Chartiphon went to the door and shouted into the hall for more wine.

Rylla had her arms around him. “Kalvan! You really did it!” she was saying.

“But you said no prayers,” Mytron faltered. “You just made fireseed.”

“That’s right. And before long, everybody’ll be just making fireseed. Easy as cooking soup.” And when that day comes, he thought, the priests of Styphon will be out on the sidewalk, beating a drum for pennies.

Chartiphon wanted to know how soon they could march against Nostor. “It will take more fireseed than Kalvan can make on this table,” Ptosphes told him. “We will need saltpeter, and sulfur, and charcoal. We will have to teach people how to get the sulfur and the saltpeter for us, and how to grind and mix them. We will need many things we don’t have now, and tools to make them. And nobody knows all about this but Kalvan, and there is only one of him.”

Well, glory be! Somebody had gotten something from his lecture on production, anyhow.

“Mytron knows a few things, I think.” He pointed to the jars of sulfur and saltpeter. “Where did you get these?” he asked.

Mytron had gulped his first goblet of wine without taking it from his lips. He had taken three gulps to the second. Now he was working on his third, and coming out of shock nicely. It was about as he thought. The saltpeter was found in crude lumps under manure-piles, then refined; the sulfur was evaporated out of water from the sulfur springs in Wolf Valley. When that was mentioned, Ptosphes began cursing Styphon’s House bitterly. Mytron knew both processes, on a quart-jar scale. He explained how much of both they would need.

“But that’ll take time,” Chartiphon objected. “And as soon as Gormoth hears that we’re making our own fireseed, he’ll attack at once.”

“Don’t let him hear about it. Clamp down the security.” He had to explain about that. Counter-intelligence seemed to be unheard of, here-and-now. “Have cavalry patrols on all the roads out of Hostigos. Let anybody in, but let nobody out. Not just to Nostor; to Sask and Beshta, too.” He thought for a moment. “And another thing. I’ll have to give orders people aren’t going to like. Will I be obeyed?”

“By anybody who wants to keep his head on his shoulders,” Ptosphes said. “You speak with my voice.”

“And mine, too!” Chartiphon cried, reaching his sword across the table for him to touch the hilt. “Command me and I will obey, Lord Kalvan.”

He established himself, the next morning, in a room inside the main gateway to the citadel, across from the guard-room, a big flagstone-floored place with the indefinable but unmistakable flavor of a police-court. The walls were white plaster; he could write and draw diagrams on them with charcoal. Nobody, here-and-now, knew anything about paper. He made a mental note to do something about that, but no time for it now. Rylla appointed herself his adjutant and general Girl Friday. He collected Mytron, the priest of Tranth, all the master-craftsmen in Tarr-Hostigos, some of the craftsmen’s guild people from Hostigos Town, a couple of Chartiphon’s officers, and half a dozen cavalrymen to carry messages.

Charcoal would be no problem—there was plenty of that, burned exclusively in the iron-works in the Listra Valley and extensively elsewhere. There was coal, from surface outcroppings to the north and west, and it was used for a number of purposes, but the sulfur content made it unsuitable for iron-furnaces. He’d have to do something about coke some time. Charcoal for gunpowder, he knew, ought to be willow or alder or something like that. He’d do something about that, too, but at present he’d have to use what he had available.

For quantity evaporation of sulfur he’d need big iron pans, and sheet-metal larger than skillets and breastplates didn’t seem to exist. The iron-works were forges, not rolling mills. So they’d have to beat the sheet-iron out in two-foot squares and weld them together like patch quilts. He and Mytron got to work on planning the evaporation works. Unfortunately, Mytron was not pictorial-minded, and made little or no sense of the diagrams he drew.

Saltpeter could be accumulated all over. Manure-piles would be the best source, and cellars and stables and underground drains. He set up a saltpeter commission, headed by one of Chartiphon’s officers, with authority to go anywhere and enter any place, and orders to behead any subordinate who misused his powers and to deal just as summarily with anybody who tried to obstruct or resist. Mobile units, wagons and oxcarts loaded with caldrons, tubs, tools and the like, to go from farm to farm. Peasant women to be collected and taught to leech nitrated soil and purify nitrates. Equipment, manufacture of.

Grinding mills: there was plenty of water-power, and by good fortune he didn’t have to invent the waterwheel. That was already in use, and the master-millwright understood what was needed in the way of converting a gristmill to a fireseed mill almost at once. Special grinding equipment, invention of. Sifting screens, cloth. Mixing machines; these would be big wine-casks, with counter-revolving paddle-wheels inside. Presses to squeeze dough into cakes. Mills to grind caked powder; he spent considerable thought on regulations to prevent anything from striking a spark around them, with bloodthirsty enforcement threats.

During the morning he managed to grind up the cake he’d made the evening before from what was left of the first experimental batch, running it through a sieve to about FFFg fineness. A hundred grains of that drove a ball from an 8-bore musket an inch deeper into a hemlock log than an equal charge of Styphon’s Best.

By noon he was almost sure that almost all of his War Production Board understood most of what he’d told them. In the afternoon there was a meeting, in the outer bailey, of as many people who would be working on fireseed production as could be gathered. There was an invocation of Dralm by Xentos, and an invocation of Galzar by Uncle Wolf, and an invocation of Tranth by his priest. Ptosphes spoke, emphasizing that the Lord Kalvan had full authority to do anything, and would be backed to the limit, by the headsman if necessary. Chartiphon made a speech, picturing the howling wilderness they would shortly make of Nostor. (Prolonged cheering.) He made a speech, himself, emphasizing that there was nothing of a supernatural nature whatever about fireseed, detailing the steps of manufacture, and trying to give some explanation of what made it explode. The meeting then broke up into small groups, everybody having his own job explained to him. He was kept running back and forth, explaining to the explainers.

In the evening they had a feast. By that time he and Rylla had gotten a rough table of organization charcoaled onto the wall of his headquarters.

Of the next four days, he spent eighteen hours each in that room, talking to six or eight hundred people. Some of them he suffered patiently if not gladly; they were trying to do their best at something they’d never been expected to do before. Some he had trouble with. The artisans’ guilds bickered with one another about jurisdiction, and they all complained about peasants invading their crafts. The masters complained that the journeymen and apprentices were becoming intractable, meaning that they’d started thinking for themselves. The peasants objected to having their byres invaded and their dunghills forked down, and to being put to unfamiliar work. The landlords objected to having their peasants taken out of the fields, predicting that the year’s crop would be lost.

“Don’t worry about that,” he told them. “If we win, we’ll eat Gormoth’s crops. If we lose, we’ll all be too dead to eat.”

And the Iron Curtain went down. Within a few days, indignant pack-traders and wagoners were being collected in Hostigos Town, trapped for the duration, protesting vehemently but unavailingly. Sooner or later, Gormoth and Sarrask would begin to wonder why nobody was coming out of Hostigos, and would send spies slipping through the woods to find out. Counter-espionage; organize soonest. And a few of his own spies in Sask and Nostor. And an anti-Styphon fifth column in both princedoms. Discuss with Xentos.

By the fifth day, the Wolf Valley sulfur-evaporation plant was ready to go into operation, and saltpeter production was up to some ten pounds a day. He put Mytron in charge at Tarr-Hostigos, hoping for something better than the worst, and got into his new armor. He and Rylla and a half dozen of Harmakros’ cavalrymen trotted out the gate and down the road from the castle into Hostigos Gap. It was the first time he’d been outside the castle since he had been brought there unconscious, tied onto a horse-litter.

It was not until they were out of the gap and riding toward the town, spread around the low hill above the big spring, that he turned in his saddle to look back at the castle. For a moment he couldn’t be certain what was wrong, but he knew something was. Then it struck him.

There was no trace whatever of the great stone-quarries.

There should have been. No matter how many thousands of years had passed since he had been in and out of that dome of shifting light that had carried him out of his normal time, there would have been some evidence of quarrying there. Normal erosion would have taken, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of years to obliterate those stark manmade cliffs, and enough erosion to have done that would have reduced the whole mountain by half. He remembered how unchanged the little cliff, under which he and Larry and Jack and Steve had parked the car, had been when he had . . . emerged. No. That mountain had never been quarried, at any time in the past.

So he wasn’t in the future; that was sure. And he wasn’t in the past, unless every scrap of history everybody had ever written or taught was an organized lie, and that he couldn’t swallow.

Then when the hell was he?

Rylla had reined in her horse and stopped beside him. The six troopers came to an unquestioning halt.

“What is it, Kalvan?”

“I was just . . . just thinking of the last time I saw this place.”

“You mustn’t think about that, any more.” Then, after a moment: “Was there somebody . . . somebody you didn’t want to leave?”

He laughed. “No, Rylla. The only somebody like that is right beside me, now.”

They shook their reins and started off again, the six troopers clattering behind them.