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burning eight women wasn't pretty either.
We left them hanging as we rode out about our duties. I suppose that somebody buried them.
I expected to get a lot of flak from the Church over the thing, but there wasn't a word. And in later years,
when the insanity of witchhunts was all the rage in western Europe, there were none in Poland.
The buck stopped here.
Chapter Nine
Anna found the mine site without difficulty, and we went to work. We had temporary shelters up in a few
days, and then the carpenters started felling trees, the masons collecting stones, the miners digging for ore.
The mules were sent back to Three Walls to get lime for mortar, the sawmill was set up, and word was sent
to the surrounding towns and villages that we were hiring workers temporarily for the summer. If they did
well, they might be sworn in permanently.
There was no lack of applicants, since word had spread quickly about how well my people lived. The
winter before, I'd made up some blocks and puzzles of the sort that modem psychologists use, and tried to
get some idea of the men's intelligence. I tried to hire the bright ones, because there was no hiring all the
applicants. Thousands came and there was only room in the budget for three gross on a permanent basis
and a thousand more temporarily. I hated to send so many of them away, but what could I do?
The ore was right on the surface, so tunneling wasn't necessary. We could dig it out of an open pit, which
was much safer and cheaper.
The duke had sent six knights to take care of security, so that was one headache I didn't have to worry
about.
In a week, things were progressing well enough for me to leave for Eagle Nest. I left Yashoo, my carpentry
foreman, in general charge, and only nominally subordinate to the duke's knight, Sir Stanislaw. I took
Natasha along, since she was handy to have around, and Anna hardly noticed her weight. By evening, Anna
had us at Eagle Nest.
Vitold, Count Lambert's carpenter, was in charge there and things were going well. There were probably
more men available than could be efficiently administered, but they were mostly logging and digging,
which doesn't take much supervision.
Count Lambert had left the day before, and the setup was his idea, so I didn't change anything. We left for
Okoitz that afternoon and got there in time for supper.
One of my miners was getting the coal mine dug without problems, and the cloth factory, with its two
hundred attractive and available young ladies, was going full blast.
Count Lambert rather proudly offered me a cold beer. "You were right again, Sir Conrad. A cold beer is a
wonderful thing on a hot day! I'm glad you talked me into finishing the icehouse below the grain mill."
The next morning, I was at Three Walls and found that Sir Vladimir and Annastashia were the proud
parents of a healthy boy.
Trivial matters delayed me a few days, and then I headed to Copper City again, this time with Yawalda
riding Anna's rump.
The whole summer went that way, with me constantly racing from Three Walls to Copper City to Eagle
Nest to Okoitz and back to Three Walls, the whole circuit taking us a week to run. Since many of my
workers were separated from their families, and since they could read and write now, I was playing
postman as well as roving supervisor. It was fun and exciting at first, but it got very old after a while.
By fall, things were settled down to the point that Copper City only needed to be visited once a month, and
I tried to keep my traveling down to two weeks a month, staying at Three Walls as much as possible.
We had another good harvest in 1233, the third in a row. Everyone gorged on sweet corn and watermelon,
honeydews and zucchini, pumpkins and muskmelon. The beehives were a great success, and the price of
honey and beeswax dropped by a factor of twelve on the open market.
The grains, potatoes, and legumes I'd brought with me had done well, and I computed that in two years we
would be eating them rather than keeping it all for seed as we had been. And glory be to God, we had sugar
beet seeds, over a hundred pounds of them! Next fall, I'd have to worry about refining sugar.
The new plants were almost untouched by insects, which cut heavily into most crops since insecticides
weren't available. Most insects are very specialized in their eating habits, and the local ones couldn't cope
with the crops that I'd brought in. They'd catch up with us eventually, but for the time being we were
getting a free ride.
In fact, the only sour point was the squashes. I hadn't realized that they could interbreed, and they had been
planted too close to each other. The bees, or whatever pollinated them, had made a mess of things. We got
veggies that were half butternut and half spaghetti squash, and every other combination possible. Lambert
and I set up a breeding program at six widely separated manors to try to breed back to the original forms,
but that would take time. I moved six varieties of beans to those same six manors just to be on the safe side.
Most of Lambert's knights and barons were quickly taking up his new crops and other improvements,
running only a year behind him. And everyone was using wheelbarrows now, and the entire harvest was
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