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After all, it was a simple matter of assembling precut pieces, like putting together
a huge tinker-toy set. I had checked every piece myself, so of course they fit right
together.
Count Lambert was awestruck. "They did this much without your being here? I
might as well concede our bet right now. I'll ship your twenty loads of cloth as
soon as I return to Okoitz."
"I'll take it in medium-grade linen, my lord."
That gave us curtains and a spare set of sheets.
In the summer, everyone including me went barefoot, but with cold weather
coming on, the workers started making shoes for their families. The usual
peasant footwear was made of birch bark. You wrapped your feet in rags and
laced on soles of bark with leather thongs. The soles lasted a week or two and
then you needed new ones.
At first, I was saddened that this was all they had, but then I did some time
studies on what was required to tan leather and what was required to cut new
soles out of birch bark. A man could cut a set of bark shoes for his entire family in
less than an hour. Tanning a hide with medieval methods took months, and
leather soles didn't last out the season.
It was over fifty times cheaper to wear birch bark. I suspect that leather shoes
became popular only when birch trees became rare. But birch trees were not that
common on my lands. I had some birch groves planted, but for a few years we
were buying birch bark. I found that it was useful for writing paper as well as
shoes, and far cheaper than parchment.
By the time the first snows were flying, our basic living quarters had been
completed. Well, we never stopped building, but the apartment house was up and
the plumbing was in. I suppose I should describe it.
The building was a hundred ninety yards long, reaching from cliff face to cliff
face, and was eighteen yards wide. Structurally, it was really five buildings, with
firewalls between each.
The basement, with thick wooden fire doors, eventually to be sheathed in iron,
stretched the full length. Because of the slope of the land, it was mostly exposed
on the outer side, but it had no windows. From outside the valley, it was a solid
masonry first floor. The basement was mostly in dry-food storage, except that the
brewery was relocated there from its temporary building. A short tunnel sloped
downward from the basement to the icehouse.
The first floor contained the passageway to the main (and only) gate, and off this
passageway was a ramp down to the basement. Incoming food supplies could go
directly into storage. Next to the gate was the main bathroom, which had
showers, sinks, a hot tub, and a dozen flush toilets.
Then came the laundry room, mostly more sinks and draining racks. I'd had some
wooden scrub boards made, a major improvement over the local practice of
beating dirty clothes between two rocks. After all the trouble I'd had wheedling
cloth out of Count Lambert, I had no desire to see it beaten to shreds by some
ignorant women.
After that was the kitchen, where the stoves also heated the water for the other
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plumbing facilities. More porcelain sinks were dedicated to the business of
washing dishes.
Our only source of water was the mine. We split small logs, burned them hollow,
then tied- them together to form a pipe. A trench was dug following the contour
of the land, gently sloping from the mine to the apartment house. The wooden
pipes were carefully fitted together in it and packed in clay to slow leakage.
The water seemed pure enough all summer, but I knew that would change once
we hit coal. We had plenty of water head, so we built three big filters, each twelve
yards high, one of gravel, one of crushed limestone and one of sand. Our water
had to flow through all three before it got to us. The filtration system was
probably overkill, but I had no way of testing the purity of the water, and an
epidemic could wipe us out.
Below the filters was a big stone reservoir, and like everything else in the water
system, it was covered with at least a yard of dirt as an insulator. A frozen
waterline would have been a major nuisance. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]