The money was important because it permitted us to expand faster. I no longer had to worry about whether I could feed a man's family when I hired him. If he looked to be the sort we wanted, I swore him in and found a place for him later.
But I think that Boris's greatest triumph was when he invented the Tupperware party. You see, one of my major expenses was maintaining over a hundred schools in Lambert's county. Our kitchenware line wasn't selling very well, largely because women didn't know how to use them. We made very good cast-iron frying pans, for example, but frying was an unusual way to prepare food in the Middle Ages, probably due to the lack of a decent frying pan!
So that summer, Boris invited two dozen of the schoolteachers to Three Walls for a week, and saw to it that they learned how to use every utensil we made. I even found myself showing them how to make pancakes!
Then he set up a system whereby the schools bought things from Three Walls at below wholesale prices, and the teachers demonstrated and sold the utensils to the other women in their towns at normal retail prices. Everybody knew that half the money spent went to the local school, and that the teachers were making a commission on the sales in addition to their salaries. By fall, we were in danger of making a profit on the schools, which was a bit much. So we used the surplus money to put up school buildings.
Up till then, school had been taught in the church, somebody's house, or even in a barn. Now there were schoolhouses, and each one of them had a store attached. We expanded the product line available to the schools to include everything we made, and the smallest town now had a general store. If they didn't stock it, they could get it.
Every school had a post office, too. This was usually just a drawer in the store, but you could send and receive mail.
Most of the towns were small farming communities, with only a few dozen families, so most of the schools had to be small, one- or two-room affairs. But they all had hot running water, in part to demonstrate our plumbing products.
If most of our teachers only had a year or two of schooling themselves, well, it was the best we could do and the quality of teacher education went up in time.
I refused to allow any money to be made off the schools, so there was nothing to do but expand the system. In three years, we covered the entire duchy, and in six, all of Poland.
Just in time for the Mongols.
By late fall, Boris knew that he had found a new niche in life, and he and Natasha came to me during one of my regular biweekly court sessions. They wanted to be married, and had already gotten her parents' written permission to do so. I gave them my blessings, and told him that he was a very lucky man, which he was. A fine lady!
Construction never stopped at Three Walls. That summer we added a second housing unit, made of brick, outside of our existing building. It tripled the living space available to the workers. Yet because everyone was on different shifts, our existing kitchen, dining room, recreation facilities and church were still adequate, not to mention the factories. A considerable savings.
We also finished the sawmill and carpentry shop that had been stopped last fall in order to build housing for the Moslems. Besides cutting logs into rough lumber, there was a drying kiln, and power-operated planers, joiners, and routers.
Surprisingly, medieval carpenters didn't know much about cabinet-making. Despite the lack of inexpensive fasteners, they had never heard of a dado or a rabbet or a dovetail joint. Their methods of fastening were limited to butting two boards against each other and doweling them together. If more strength was needed, they had iron straps made up. I had to teach myself cabinet-making just so I could teach it to my own carpenters.
Then there was the whole problem of getting mass production going. They were used to making things one at a time. If somebody needed a chair, a carpenter made one. If somebody wanted three, he made one and one and one. This was an emotionally satisfying way to work, but it wasn't very productive. Equipping one of our dining rooms took a thousand chairs, and mass production was in order.
We needed barrels, chests, and other shipping containers by the tens of thousands. Standardization was necessary, unless we wanted to haggle over the price of every barrel of lime shipped. It took a lot of work and a few temper tantrums, but I made believers out of them.
By midsummer, I had over two thousand men sworn to me and on my payroll, and that's not counting their families.
The place was crawling with kids! Almost every woman continued having a baby a year, but now, with better nutrition, sanitation, and housing, they weren't dying off as fast as they were born. Our infant mortality rate was fast approaching modem levels.
Modern doctors and other medical-types like to take all the credit for the vast improvements in public health, but the fact is that it is the lowly sewer inspector and the despised customs inspector and the humble sanitation engineer who really keep people healthy!
So we had a population explosion on our hands, but it didn't bother me. At least these kids were going to grow up clean, well fed, and well educated! We could afford to feed all the extra mouths, and the population of the country wasn't a twelfth of that of modem Poland, which isn't all that crowded.
In the long run? Well, historically, a high standard of living inevitably results in a lowered birth rate. And if that wasn't good enough, there was a whole empty world out there to repopulate.
Everywhere the Mongols had gone.
I was spending more time than I was actually required to at Eagle Nest, mostly because I liked working with the kids. They were the most eager, enthusiastic, friendly, and earnest bunch of people I'd ever met. They were so absolutely convinced that they were going to conquer the skies that they damn near had me believing it.
In the course of the winter, they'd each built several model gliders, and many of them were as good as those done by modem boys, despite their lack of balsa wood, silk paper, and quick-setting glues. In the spring, they were back at kites again, and getting innovative about it. The winner of one combat contest was really a section of aircraft wing, with three strings controlling it.
But toward summer, I could see that they were getting a little bored, so I told them about hang gliders, and they built a dozen of them.
A hang glider is controlled by the pilot's moving his body to shift the center of gravity of the craft, rather than by the more conventional use of control surfaces. What can make them deadly is that in a downdraft, the plane and pilot can experience zero G. At this point, the pilot has absolutely no control over his plane. Shifting the center of gravity has no effect when there is no gravity! Coming out of the downdraft, the glider can be in any orientation, even upside down or backward, and a fatal crash is likely.
Downdrafts can't happen close to the ground, and for this reason I forbade them to go more than a dozen yards in the air, under penalty of being grounded for a month. By late fall, most of the boys had been grounded at least once. I even caught Count Lambert flying too high, but I couldn't do much except admonish him for it. The joy of flying was too much for him.
We had our first fatality that year. One of the boys broke a dozen regulations by taking a glider to the top of the big conical hill alone during a windstorm. A shepherd tried to stop him, but the kid was airborne by the time the old fellow got there. They say he was high out of sight before he got into trouble.
His body was sent back to his parents and three other boys were pulled from the school.
But two weeks after that, the new class arrived., twice as large as the first one, and things went on, twelve dozen boys strong.
Krystyana had a fine healthy boy that summer, and pretended that she didn't notice what anybody said about her lack of a husband. I got to sleeping with her occasionally, mostly because I felt sorry for her, and by Christmas she was pregnant again.