Chapter 5

Surprisingly, I wasn’t in as much trouble as I thought I’d be when I got back to the castle. In fact, the women easily forgave me for sneaking off this morning to work. With all the construction we planned, Audoflede suggested sending messengers throughout Clovis’ territory with an offer of work for laborers, hoping to attract craftsmen, too. That way we would have more help available to do all the new things I wanted. Once the new help learned our new ideas and techniques, they could spread out across the kingdom and teach others.

Clovis liked the idea even better than I did and issued a proclamation to that effect. He laughed when I questioned my ability to feed and house everyone. “My very generous dowry for Syagrius was hidden in a false compartment of the wagon Audoflede rode in. The dowry is now yours to use to build up the Duchy as you see fit,” he explained, grinning.

“You could also send traders to the Burgundians and the Visigoths to buy more slaves. The prices there for slaves are lower than here. The Romans have more slaves because they have more money. The Visigoths and the Burgundians have few people wealthy enough to buy slaves so prices there are only a third of what they are here,” Ines said.

“The pig used to send someone there to buy slaves,” she explained when I asked how she knew so much.

I sent for Gaudulfus, the trader she mentioned. He made two trading trips a year through Burgundian territory and agreed to leave in a few days to see how many slaves he could secure--especially any skilled craftsmen. I authorized him to tell the slaves he bought that they would be indentured for five to ten years and would even be allowed to marry while indentured.

I also warned Gaudulfus that any slaves he bought, especially female ones, were not to be mistreated. They were to be treated like free men and women and not forced or coerced into sex. His men could pay for whores while they were on the road if they were that desperate. I would punish them severely if I heard about the mistreatment of even one woman. I also authorized him to purchase contracts of promising apprentices willing to complete their apprenticeship here and to remain here once they finished.

In addition, I gave him a grocery list of ores and other items for which I hoped to find sources. He already knew where to buy over half of them. He also agreed to send a friend to me who traded with the Ostrogoths and a man who traded with Britannia. He promised to get word to traders he knew who traded with the Bretons, Swabians, and Visigoths. I warned him that I expected an exact accounting of the money I gave him, and this would be his last trading trip for me if I even thought he might be lying to me about how much he spent. I reminded him how this would undoubtedly be the most profitable trading trip he ever made since he could also conduct his own business.

The next few weeks were brutal as we simultaneously set up a new government, dealt with the remaining Roman citizens throughout what used to be a Roman territory, and welcomed new laborers and craftsmen to town. In addition, we had to get the new people settled in, sort out the mess of freed slaves with no place to go, and begin implementing rudimentary changes and improvements to enhance the health of the people. Audoflede was an immense help and eagerly took up the reins of government. I still had to hear several disputes among the people of the Duchy who insisted that I hear their case. I felt like Judge Judy listening to their petty squabbles.

Listening to the final case before lunch today, I was tired of listening to petty grievances and was pissed at the two grown men arguing over twenty acres bordering both of their properties. The Magistrate had previously ruled that they had to share the land, but they could never agree on what to do with it, so it sat there, unused, for two more years.

“Since you have both lived profitably without the land for years, I award the land to the church. Neither of your families may live on, use, lease, nor buy the land for fifty years. If I hear of any more troubles between your two families, I will give each family one wagon to fill with their belongings and will send you far away to different towns of my choosing. You will lose everything you cannot load into your one wagon. With your trivial bickering, you have wasted my time; time better spent seeing to matters that will save the lives of thousands of my subjects. I fine you each twenty-five denarii for wasting my time,” I charged them sternly. Oddly, after lunch, the remaining petitioners decided that their cases weren’t so critical after all.

Clovis, Audoflede, and the rest of my wives congratulated me on my handling of the case and agreed that I had set a precedent for what happens if they bring trivial and banal matters before me.

I spent the afternoon checking on each group of craftsmen to see how they were progressing, and then stopped in to see Muriel. I insisted that she take over the estate’s study so she had more room, that she hire assistants to help her keep track of everything, and use the older children as messengers. With tears of gratitude in her eyes, she hugged me and thanked me for being so good to her and especially to her daughter. Seeing her daughter elevated from slave, destined to be an abused bedroom toy for a rich, married Roman to pleasure himself with, to a freewoman, and then to a Duchess in such a short time had been emotional for her.

“Remember,” I said quietly as I lifted her face to mine “I’m still waiting for you to fully heal so you can keep your promise to me and show me if you are better than your daughter--if you still want to,” I reminded her as her face colored.

“Also, since you now represent me at the estate, I expect you to use my money to obtain enough fine clothing to allow you to attend functions at the castle. Your daughter or Audoflede can introduce you to their seamstresses.”

“I’m healed enough now to keep that promise,” she whispered suggestively as she kissed me.

“My daughter is a lucky woman,” Muriel sighed contentedly as she lay atop me afterwards. She scolded me playfully, swatting at my hands as I did my best to keep her from covering her interesting parts when she tried to get dressed.

Philippe had horses, wagons, seeds, tools, building materials, saplings, and cuttings of grape vines arriving from every direction. He already had my berry cuttings and sugarcane planted, although I doubted the sugar cane would thrive this far north. I just wanted it to survive until I found a more southerly location to grow it. I suggested to Philippe that any “extra” helpers should be put to work gathering bat guano from nearby caves, and manure that had been sitting for a year or more, especially chicken manure. That suggestion left me needing a place to make black powder.

After explaining to Muriel what I needed as far as location, space, resources, and security, she suggested one of the smaller estates farthest from town. It was easily accessible to the farms that would have manure available. It was also next door to an estate with an iron mine and smelter where I would be able to make charcoal without anyone knowing what it was really for. Sulfur would have to be imported. Hardwood ashes were available everywhere.

New help continued to arrive with all but the new slaves arriving voluntarily. The troops brought back more Roman families while spreading confirmation that rumors about the emancipation of most slaves were true.

Building housing and planting crops became our top priorities, followed by building or expanding facilities for the craftsmen. The new plows dramatically reduced the time and number of people needed to prepare the fields for planting, although each plow required more horses to pull it than before. I found Philippe one day just staring at acres and acres of newly green or just-plowed fields. “I have never seen so much land planted before,” he said in awe as he waved his hand indicating fields as far as we could see. “Even with so many new people we will have three or four times as much grain as we will need,” he said in wonder.

“I intend to make sure nobody in my lands goes hungry unless they choose not to work,” I replied.

The glassblowers were amazed by the new facility we built for them. The annealing oven was massive, and the large, wooden work surfaces were extensive.

I showed them how to make sheets of glass for windows using an iron cylinder I had our blacksmiths make. The glassblowers blew the glass inside of the heated iron cylinder, then removed the tube of glass and cut off the rounded ends. Next, they cut down one side of the glass tube and then lay the glass out flat and put it into the oven to soften enough to flatten it completely into a two-foot by three-foot sheet of glass. The sheets weren’t nearly as good as modern glass, but they were still nearly fifteen hundred years ahead of their time. The two glassblowers were stunned at the relative simplicity of the technique. Once I was sure they had it reasonably mastered (their worst effort was still far better than anything I could have done), I had the construction of two large greenhouses begun where we could raise fresh vegetables throughout the winter, as well as protect my banana trees, coffee plants, rubber plants, and sugar cane.

We built large stone silos, ready to store the excess grain when we harvested it, covering the bottom six feet of the outside of each silo with smooth ceramic tiles meant to deter rodents. We even covered the sturdy, tight-fitting iron doors with the ceramic tiles.

My first piece of machinery was a huge success. The blacksmiths bent iron rods that looked like smooth half-inch rebar into an elongated “U” shape. Rather than smooth bends, they bent the corners into a circle so it looked like “lo___ol.” The corner circles were just big enough to insert another piece of rebar. Wooden spools were used to space three pieces of shaped iron about eight inches apart. The bottom of a woven basket like a bushel basket fit perfectly in the space.

Using long timbers, I constructed a frame and had wooden rollers crafted to make a crude conveyor belt. Two men on each side operated a long iron handle shaped like a bicycle pedal, and steel gears moved a belt made from the special bent pieces of iron to carry baskets of grain to the top of the silo. A platform built inside the top of the silo allowed two men to stand while they dumped the contents of full baskets into the silo before tossing the empty baskets back to the ground. Next, the blacksmiths created a similar conveyor belt to use for lifting hay up to the upper floor of our barns.

Philippe couldn’t understand why I had thousands of odd-looking birdhouses built and installed all over town, especially near fields, streams, and ponds. I explained that bats would love them and told him how many insects a single bat ate each night, so there would be fewer insects to bother our crops or us.

When we harvested our first rice crop, we saved the rice straw and made a crude paper from it. This paper was just for use until the paper mulberry bushes were big enough that we could prune them and use the inner bark for paper.

The brass workers were thrilled with the pumps I showed them how to make.

We made thousands of beveled clay pipes about a foot in diameter and put them together by cementing the narrow end of one inside the wide end of the next one. Soon, water began flowing from wells, streams, and rivers through the clay pipes to estates, new irrigation ditches, water cisterns in town, and to the black powder estate.

I took several potters to an area east of Paris that my notes reminded me had a large deposit of kaolin, the special clay needed to make fine porcelain. Once they found it, they began mining in earnest, using help from nearby towns. Then, I showed the potters how to make porcelain. When their first attempt was finished, they were as excited as every other group whose wares I had helped to improve.

At the black powder estate, I had stone and mortar beds twenty-five feet long and five feet wide laid out with the sides raised two feet. Some of our slaves brought any urine collected overnight that wasn’t needed by the local tanner, adding it to the manure beds. The beds were sloped slightly to the south so there was a six-inch difference in height. We started with the aged bat guano and chicken manure, washing it, collecting the water, filtering detritus out of the water, and then pouring the water through hardwood ashes. After that, we let the water settle and again filtered out anything not dissolved in the water. Next, we boiled most of the water away, evaporating the remaining liquid slowly over very small fires at first, and then using either sunlight or small braziers filled with glowing coals. When the water was gone, the remaining nitrate crystals were gathered and ground into a fine powder.

At this point, convict slaves purchased by Gaudulfus mixed in finely ground charcoal and finely ground sulfur. They did the mixing in wooden bowls in ground-level huts surrounded by a six-foot high and six-foot wide berm of soil. Clay pipes beneath the berms allowed any rainwater to drain out of the enclosure. I didn’t mind letting criminals do the dangerous work. I warned each of them how dangerous the work was and how to do it safely. If they screwed up, the fault was their own. The batches they made were small enough that any explosion should be minor, and the berms would limit the damage to a single hut.

The floors of the huts they worked in were covered with sawdust and bark chips. No metal was allowed inside the huts, all to minimize the risk of sparks from static electricity.

Our bowyers quickly created a big demand for sinew. We used sinew from game animals and slaughtered farm animals for making new bows and used more sinew to reinforce the clay pots I was having made to use as a crude type of grenade. We made fuses with some of our first rice paper, rolling thin strips of paper around black powder with extra sulfur and charcoal added to it so it burned slower. We coated the fuses with the same waterproof glue we used when making bows and coated them a second time with a crude varnish to make them even more waterproof. We added small shards of sharp metal, pieces of broken glass and ceramic, and small, square pieces of lead (goose shot) to the grenades. To make the goose shot, we used square bars of lead about an eighth of an inch wide and chiseled off cubes.

I had two, eighty-foot square stone buildings built into a hillside. The floors were stone and mortar sloped to the center where water drained into clay drainpipes that ran beneath the floor and drained at the base of the hill, well below the level of the rooms. When finished, we re-covered the rooms with several feet of soil and planted alfalfa to help stabilize the soil. We divided the interior of the rooms into eight sections--four to the right and four to the left of the five-foot-wide center aisle. The wide aisle allowed us to take handcarts into the room to unload.

Pairs of stone posts two and a half feet apart stretched from floor to ceiling every eight feet. Wood planks wedged between the posts held two-foot blocks of ice in place, forming a solid wall of ice from floor to ceiling between each section. The back four sections were used to store meat, especially in the fall when we slaughtered any livestock we didn’t want to feed all winter. The front four sections stored dairy products, as well as fresh fruits, and vegetables.

Not knowing if it would weaken them or not, I gambled and put the first five hundred Mongol-style bows in a barn and allowed the warm summer breeze to flow through the barn to dry them faster. Meanwhile, production of bows continued using the tried-and-true drying method. While the first five hundred bows dried, the best archers practiced with my small bow and all the archers began strengthening their arms. I tested one of the new bows after allowing it to dry for two months and found that it was ready to use; the gamble had paid off! Not knowing if the gamble would have long-term effects on the performance of the bows, I let the rest of the new bows dry slowly.

The five hundred best archers started practicing in earnest after that, with the other fifteen hundred archers taking turns sharing the bows when the first five hundred finished practicing each day. When the next fifteen hundred bows were ready, so were the rest of the archers.

Production of the new swords was also increasing. The swords were the light, one-handed, slightly curved swords they already used. The difference was that these blades were stronger than the current blades in use throughout Europe and could break or slice through most enemy blades. In addition to the new swords, new bows, and explosives, I trained the men to use a nineteen-foot lance. The lance consisted of three, six-foot pieces of wood that could be coupled together securely using steel tubes so they were easier to transport. The lance was topped with a one-foot steel tip. The men also practiced fighting with just the six-foot top piece of the lance and its foot-long razor-sharp steel blade. They trained to use it both as a short spear and as a staff. The practice blades were unsharpened and made with iron instead of steel.

Evidently word about our improved and unique weaponry was spreading. Even before the winter snows melted, the Visigoths sent a messenger to King Clovis asking to ally themselves. By now, Clovis had watched us practice and witnessed what our weapons and troops were capable of doing. He sent the messenger back telling King Euric that he could never trust someone who helped try to kill his sister. Before giving the Visigoth messenger his reply, however, Clovis dispatched one of his messengers to me. I had my two thousand men headed south three days later. All the black powder “grenades” that we had finished to date were packed and every man led six horses. Four of those horses carried twenty sheaves of arrows each; one horse carried grenades, fuses, and ten sheaves of arrows, and the sixth carried food, their lance, a bedroll, a tent, and five sheaves of arrows.

Two weeks later, we were in Visigoth territory. We warned every town and village we went through that we would kill their men and take the women and children back to Soissons as slaves if anyone tried to warn or help Euric. If they minded their own business, we would leave them in peace, and they would find themselves ruled peacefully by King Clovis. Still, our scouts and pickets caught and eliminated several men trying to get word to King Euric. Our forward scouts finally found Euric’s ten thousand troops two days ahead of us, headed our way. We mined half a mile of the road with larger versions of our clay pot grenades that were loaded with lots of shrapnel and buried fuses that ran to a good vantage point. I stayed to light the fuses. Aside from a small detachment of bodyguards, the rest of my troops returned to camp to set up defensive positions and waited near our chosen battlefield.

I watched impatiently as the Visigoth troops approached and then reached the mined section of the road. I fidgeted nervously, trying to guess when I should light the fuses, and hoped they worked. The Visigoth cavalry led the troops and I snickered quietly thinking about the archers and infantry walking behind them in the horseshit. Finally, I decided it was time to light the fuses in hopes of catching most of the Visigoth cavalry, as well as a large portion of their archers. The first fuse I lit was the one that had the farthest to go, guessing at how long to wait between lighting each additional fuse. I lit the fuses for the far side of the road and waited since their cavalry hadn’t yet reached the spot where the fuses crossed the road. Finally, I lit the fuses for the explosives on this side of the road and watched anxiously through the bushes in front of me.

My timing wasn’t perfect, but the charges all exploded within a minute of each other. The infantry and surviving archers froze for several seconds with the first explosion, and then ran back the way they came, trampling others who got in their way. The horses that weren’t killed or severely injured reared or bolted, usually dumping their rider since stirrups hadn’t been invented yet.

From the quick look I got, the bulk of their cavalry and many of their archers were dead or wounded. I took off almost immediately using a series of horses my troops had waiting for me, and changed horses every fifteen minutes. An hour after setting off the explosions, I galloped into our camp. The archers were already in the hills above the road, ready to rain arrows down on any pursuing Visigoths. They each wore their sword and had their pike handy to help protect themselves if the enemy got that close.

My first scout reached camp an hour later, reporting that I had killed or severely injured a quarter of Euric’s troops, and he now had barely three hundred cavalry that were healthy enough to put into the field against us. The second scout reported that the Visigoths were regrouping near the ambush site. They set out pickets and started setting up camp so they could tend to their wounded. They also sent scouts to check the road ahead, not that they knew what to look for.

That night I took a hundred archers with me and rode towards the spot King Euric had chosen to regroup and tend to their wounded. We arrived at their camp near midnight. Their sentries were pathetic, and I snuck up on and killed the three who were supposed to be watching the direction we came from. Some of our first volley of arrows targeted Euric’s tent. The next three volleys targeted their remaining horses. Then we each sent twenty more arrows into camp, targeting the larger tents before having our horses brought up. With no coordinated effort to counterattack, we continued picking off targets of opportunity for nearly half an hour. We finally left when five thousand of the six thousand arrows we brought with us were in the enemy camp.

Several men stayed behind to observe and reported later that any remaining soldiers who were able broke camp and began a disorganized, walking retreat in the morning, leaving their dead and wounded behind. Two companies of my men chased them on horseback, harrying the professional soldiers until they surrendered or died--most surrendered. The peasant conscripts we sent home, unarmed, and with a warning that there would be no survivors if they ever tried to attack us again. When we got back to their devastated camp, my men were helping the wounded that they felt we could save, and had retrieved all our arrows and gathered the enemy’s weapons. They showed me where they had stuffed the body of King Euric into a nearby snowbank.

We draped his body across a horse and took it with us to Toulouse, his capital. There, I sent it into the city with one of the ambulatory, wounded, conscripted peasants. After he told them about the defeat, and about my troops surrounding the city, the small force of defensive troops surrendered rather than face a siege and the promised destruction of the city and enslavement of all survivors if they didn’t surrender. I told them they were now subjects of King Clovis and left one of my commanders in charge until Clovis named a replacement. I had my men empty the treasury and bring every member of Euric’s extended family to me. I also offered to take widows and orphaned children of the dead soldiers to Soissons and provide for them if they didn’t have family here who could. We appropriated wagons, horses, and food; the wagons to carry the belongings of the widows and children. Any who came with us would be free citizens when we got to Soissons.