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and the accountants decided that I deserved to be reimbursed for my expenses incurred because of the
war. They arrived at the figure they did by taking the gross income of all my lands and factories for the
last nine years, plus the value of the lands I had been granted or had inherited, and subtracting from that
the value of my current nonmilitary properties. The difference between these two must be what I had
spent on the war, they claimed. It came to two-thirds of the gold and silver we took!
Then they awarded shares of the booty to the conventional horsemen who had served under Duke
Boleslaw at Sandomierz, in accordance with their rank. Since over half of them were knights and one in
seven of these were barons, the shares were large. Since many of them had died without heirs, much of
this money escheated back to me as their duke.
A generous fund was set up to take care of the dependents of the army personnel who had died in the
fighting or in training. And of course these dependents also inherited their share of the booty besides.
The value of the money and jewels taken from the Christian dead at East Gate was spent on aid to
refugees and war orphans, and when this proved to not be quite enough, the balance was paid by the
booty fund.
All of this dubious accounting was published in the first monthly issue of The Christian Army Magazine,
along with an invitation to object to any feature of it that was felt to be unfair. Only four letters of
complaint were received, and those complaints all concerned the war trophies, not the money. I felt a
little guilty about it. I mean, it looked to me like I was being paid for the Pink Dragon Inns that had been
burned down, but everybody seemed to think it was fair. Maybe by medieval standards it was.
Anyway, by the time all this settled out, I had these two huge stacks of metal bricks, one of gold and one
of silver. Worrying about the difficulty of guarding it and the wasted man-hours that would involve, I had
each stack cast into a single massive cube, except for 150 tons of the silver, which was earmarked for
silverware.
Up until now we had been using brass forks and spoons, and brass sometimes has a funny taste. I let it
be known that I would be happy to hear about any good use for our precious metals, and quite a bit of it
was used for things such as church vessels and medical equipment.
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But most of it went to these huge solid cubes, which were put on public display at Three Walls. I felt
safe, since they were too big to move without heavy machinery, and passersby would act as guards
against that. People got quite a kick out of just walking up and touching them. From then on, no one ever
doubted the army's credit!
And the jewels? Well, no one knew how to value them, let alone divide them fairly, so they just gave
them all to me. I separated out the diamonds, which were useful industrially, and put the rest into a big,
sturdy chest. Then, one day, I snuck out to the woods and buried them, very deep, with Silver as my
only witness. She promised to show them to my successor after I was gone. Damned if I was going to
waste good men guarding the stupid baubles!
In late summer, word came from Hungary. We had won the war! The Christian and Mongol forces had
been fairly evenly matched, and they had slugged it out all summer long. Veterans returning from the
south all seemed to make the trip around the battlefields in Poland, which was now running as a regular
guided tour, and they were generally astounded at the number of Mongols we had encountered.
Apparently, the main enemy force had been sent to Poland, and only a small one to Hungary. Bulgaria
hadn't been invaded at all despite the fact that the Mongols had promised to do so. In my timeline the
Bulgarians had paid tribute to the Mongols for a century.
Most of Lambert's knights came back from Hungary alive and well, including Sir Miesko and both of Sir
Vladimir's brothers. They had plenty of stories to tell and occasionally even a bit of booty to back it up.
Yet be that as it may, knights returning from Hungary bought an awful lot of Baron Novacek's absolutely
genuine Mongol war relics!
Chapter Twenty-eight
Construction was the big game on campus, as usual. Doubletracked rail lines were laid north to Plock
and beyond, and west to a few miles from the Holy Roman Empire. A road east from Sandomierz was
sent as far as the Bug River, and another went from the Vistula to the salt mines. I seemed to own those
mines now, since none of the former owners could be found, and in such cases, as in modem times, the
property goes to the state. Only now I was the state. The old works manager at the mines was gone, too.
A pity. He had been rude to me once, and I was looking forward to firing the man.
The Reinforced Concrete Components Factory was completed, and soon it was providing structural
sections for our ambitious building plans. To a certain extent the factory built itself, since at first it was
nothing but a vast field with foundations, plumbing, and concrete molds built into the ground. As these
molds were completed and pre-stressed concrete members were cast into them, the first use of these
pieces was to put up the walls, pillars, and ceilings of the building itself!
Housing for the workers went up at the same time, and within a few weeks the first additional factory
was erected, a major cement plant. A continuous casting operation for steel reinforcing rods went in next,
and after that it all became routine. Plumbers followed the masons, and window glaziers came next with
carpenters on their heels, putting in the doors.
The new R&D machine shop at Okoitz was built of brick to match the existing castle and the inn there,
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