Lord Conrad's Lady.

Adventures of Conrad Starguard.

By Leo Frankowski.

Prologue.

On the lush African plain, at two and a half million years B.C., two small brown individuals were sitting naked on a small hill. To all outward appearances they were a pair of type twenty-seven proto-humans.

"There's blood on your leg," he said.

"I'm menstruating. The antifertility vaccine is wearing off. It's been a hundred and eighty years, and the shot was only supposed to last a century."

"Yeah. My shots are wearing out, too. My eyesight is going bad, and my joints hurt a lot in the mornings.

"We're getting old," she said. "Just like people used to grow old before technology."

"They'll never find us, you know. If they were looking, they would have been here by now."

"What did we ever do to deserve this?" she said.

"I didn't do anything. You dumped the boss's cousin into the thirteenth century when the guy didn't even know about time travel."

"Shut up! I don't want to talk about it again."

"Well, there's something we ought to talk about. We're getting old. Before too many more years, we won't be able to take care of ourselves anymore. If we stay with the protos, they'll treat us the same way they treat their own parents when they get too old to be useful. They'll just abandon us," he said.

"So?"

"So we have to do something about it! We have to make sure that there's somebody around to take care of us when we get really old. See, my antifertility shots have worn off, too. For the next few years you can still have children, and I'm still fit enough to take care of you and them. If we raise them right, they'll take care of us when it really gets bad."

"You're such an a.s.shole. Do you think I'd have children and raise them to live in this environment? To be savages two million years before any other real people exist? No way. "

"Will you say that when you are starving to death because you have no teeth to chew your food with?

By then it'll be too late to do anything about it!"

"You're also a d.a.m.n coward," she said.

Chapter One.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF COUNTESS FRANCINE.

Everyone seems to be keeping diaries now, and I suppose I should do so, too, though mine will be written in French so that the maids can't read it. Perhaps writing will help me take my mind off the horror of my situation.

I sit here in my husband Conrad's city of Three Walls on the tenth of March, 1241, looking out from a tower window on the area that he calls his killing field. He named it thus because it was used yearly as a place to slaughter the surplus wild animals on his extensive lands here in southern Poland. It is a part of what he calls his game management program.

The field still earns its name, though in a far more gruesome way, for the beasts now concentrated on the field below are an entire horde of besieging Mongols!

My husband trained all his men into a mighty army and took them to the east to defend the land against the Tartar invaders. In so doing, he left the defense of his cities to the women, and we are less sure of our abilities than we pretend to be. Why he left our strong walls to fight hundreds of miles away is a matter of dispute among us. For mine own part, I think that if he wanted to find Mongols, he could have saved himself the trip.

We wait here, not knowing if our loves are alive and not knowing how long we ourselves may yet live.

My reader, if any there might chance to be, will therefore forgive me if I write on more pleasant times in more civilized places.

My childhood was a pleasant one, for my grandfather was a bishop, and to be a bishop in France means to be wealthy and powerful. This was all the more true because his diocese was centered on the wealthy city of Troyes, and it stands astride the major trade routes between Flanders, where the cloth is made, and Italy, where the world's cloth is dyed and finished. Two great fairs were held there every year, and Grandfather got his share of it.

My mother was his only child, and since my father held the very high post of Grandfather's privy secretary, we lived in the palace as part of Grandfather's household.

Grandfather's palace was a vast and beautiful place, as full of color and statues as the great Cathedral of St.-Pierre, which stood just across from our courtyard. Our palace was much larger and far more sumptuous than the palace of the Count of Troyes, though of course the count had other palaces and castles in the countryside.

Suffice it to say that until I was nine years old, I had four servants, and my mother had twice that number. My days were spent in pleasant amus.e.m.e.nts and in learning from my tutors the arts of reading and writing and sewing.

We were very happy until two great tragedies struck us within a year. The first was that the Church declared that all members of the clergy must be celibate. They may not marry, and further, they had never been married! This meant that both my mother and I were illegitimate, for my father was also an ordained priest. This ruling was none of my grandfather's doing, and for a time he was able to protect us from this calamity.

Then, within the year, my wonderful old grandfather died of a plague. Since my mother was no longer born in wedlock and my father was but a priest who was living in sin, there was no inheritance for us. The new bishop had no desire to a.s.sociate himself with the sinful life of his predecessor, so my father was turned out of his job, and we all were turned out of the palace. We had neither friends nor influence, for although my father was a learned man, his family was of no great means or prominence. For a long time we were at great strife to get enough food to eat.

At long last my father secured a position as a professor at the University of Paris, so we made the long, hard journey to that city. Being a mere university professor was of course a position far below his previous one of secretary, and we had to subsist on whatever the students felt like donating after they heard his lectures. Somehow, my mother was able to make a sort of home for us in our single rented room above a tavern and across the street from a brothel. I was able to continue my education by attending free of charge my father's lectures and those of his fellow professors, for they made this arrangement with each other. Thus we lived until my fourteenth year, for my father considered our location to be convenient for him. He taught cla.s.ses in a room that the university rented above the brothel.

Then my dear father died, and our situation became dire indeed. Many told me that I had become a great beauty, and I was much noticed by the students and the young guildsmen of the city. Yet being poor and without a dowry, I got no offers, or at least no offers that a virtuous young woman could accept. Indeed, the most persistent of my followers was the owner of the brothel, and his proposal was for a position that I did not desire. Such a life is sinful, dirty, and short!

Then I met a young student who had recently taken Holy Orders and would soon be returning to his native land of Poland. He asked my mother for my hand, and at first she turned him down, for a priest could not possibly marry. It was this fact that had caused all our difficulties in the first place! But he persisted and proved to her that the Gregorian reforms that forbade the marriage of the clergy had not yet been ratified in Poland and, further, that they were not likely to be.

Thus, my mother blessed our marriage as the best that I could do without any dowry at all. The very day of our small wedding, she left us to join a convent, being tired of this world and its pain.

As the rent was not paid on my mother's old room, I spent my wedding night with my new husband in his bunk in a student dormitory. Nothing took place that night, but I put this down to his shyness, considering that there were other students in the same room. And truthfully, I was not precisely sure at that tender age just what should have taken place, anyway.

It was early spring, and we left the next morning to go to Poland on foot, for my young husband was almost as poor as I was. We traveled all spring and summer across France, over the many Germanies, through Bohemia, and into Silesia, that westernmost of Polish duchies. We made the trip barefoot for lack of the price of shoes, and indeed we were often hungry, yet as I look back on it, we had a good time. We were young, we were in love, and we were traveling through a world that was forever new.

Yet our love was not physical in the carnal sense of the word. John did not seem to want to talk of it, and I decided that he did not want to burden us with a child until such time as he could properly support it. This made his actions seem pure and n.o.ble to me, and of course I did not press him further.

At length, in the fall, we got to the city of Wroclaw and reported to the bishop there at his palace.

Compared to that of my grandfather, it was an inferior place, yet for two ragged and barefoot travelers, it seemed sumptuous indeed!

The Bishop of Wroclaw was a pompous old man, with a character far different from that of my beloved grandfather. He acted not at all pleased with his two new ragged guests. Indeed, we seemed to embarra.s.s him. He gave us each a new set of cheap clothes and sent my husband on to a new post within days.

This was at the new town of Okoitz, which Count Lambert was then just starting to build. When we arrived, there was nothing but a clearing in the woods with a half-finished wooden wall and a few huts built against it. And in this we had to survive a cold Polish winter!

My husband still did not properly consummate our marriage, yet it seemed to me that to endure pregnancy and childbirth in those difficult conditions would be dangerous indeed and that poor John was again sacrificing his pleasure for my own welfare. I loved him all the more for it.

Count Lambert, on the other hand, had no such inhibitions. His wife stayed on their other lands in Hungary while the count merrily swived every unmarried peasant girl in the village, and did this somehow without a bit of complaint from their parents! In truth, my husband never chastised him for his actions, either, in part because had we been sent away by the count, we might have had a hard time finding another parish that would take us in. Though the marriage of the clergy was legal in Poland, yet was there much prejudice against it.

And so the years went by at Okoitz. In time, a large wooden church was built adjoining the count's rustic pal ace, and we had a decent enough room adjoining the church. Our situation be( came comfortable and secure, and I began to yearn for a child. Also, the count's example with his eager peasant girls convinced me that physical lovemaking must be as enjoyable for the woman as for the man, and it was a pleasure that I still had not partaken of!

After many long, tear-drenched conversations, my "husband" finally admitted that his abstinence was not the result of the n.o.bility of his mind. It was the result of the inability of his body! He couldn't properly play the man's part in the game!

There was no one with whom I could talk this problem over. Indeed, the women of the village all came to me with their difficulties, but as the wife of the priest, I wasn't supposed to have any troubles of my own. I had to be sweetness and light and wisdom, me, an aging virgin of seventeen! Slowly I decided that I was perhaps not a married woman at all, for by the laws of the Church and of the state, a marriage must be consummated to exist.

Then Sir Conrad came to Okoitz out of the east, burdened by some geise that he might not tell of his origins. All the town was buzzing about his prowess as a warrior, for he had single-handedly rid the county of an entire band of outlaws that had been murdering the people and stealing the cattle.

Yet when first I saw Sir Conrad, I thought that I was looking on a messenger of the Lord! He was incredibly tall and handsome, with a true hero's litheness of body, with fine, broad shoulders and - dare I write it? - the most lovely posterior I had ever seen! And there was about him such an astounding aura of wisdom and learning and kindness that my heart went out to him in that instant. In truth, I remember that I let out a little squeal of delight, despite the fact that my husband, John, was in the room with us.

In the months that followed, I tried to convey to Sir Conrad that I would be eager to do anything that he desired, but such was his sense of honor that he would not even think s.e.xual thoughts about a woman that he thought to be married. And since Count Lambert let Sir Conrad make full use of his peasant girls, there was no need for Sir Conrad to look farther afield. Not to mention the fact that those girls were all years younger than 1.

Sir Conrad had an almost magical horse that could run at an amazing pace for hours on end. It could answer questions by nodding or shaking its head, and it never soiled its stall but went out in the bailey like a well-trained dog. It was astoundingly gentle to all, even the smallest child, unless it felt its lord was in danger, at which time it became the most deadly of beasts! I greatly admired this animal and often visited its stall.

Sir Conrad was a great master of all the constructive arts, and he built for the count great windmills and an entire cloth factory. He brought with him hundreds of types of seeds that grew into vastly productive food plants and radiantly beautiful flowers. He knew a thousand songs, and I was sure that he thought them up on the spot, though he denied it. He could dance a dozen new steps, and I thrilled to be in his arms for his waltz, his mazurka, and his polka. He could tell a thousand wondrous stories of lands and times far, far away. Many were the nights that he talked until midnight of the adventures of ninefingered Frodo or of Luke Skywalker. He loved children and was always telling them some new story or teaching them some new game or making them some new toy. He was a master of the sword, the chessboard, and the pen. How could I help but love him?

For all this work, and to encourage him to continue it, Count Lambert gifted Sir Conrad with a vast tract of lands in the mountains to the south of Okoitz. Sir Conrad went to these lands with a half dozen of the count's peasant girls, and I feared at the time that he was leaving my life forever.

He returned monthly, but not to visit me. He did it in feudal duty to the count, to oversee all the new construction at Okoitz. I watched from a distance and hoped. My relationship with John was steadily deteriorating, and it got so that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him, let alone the same bed. Yet such was as it had to be, for while we had food, clothing, and shelter, we had very little money.

I wanted to leave John and again try my luck in France, but in years of scrimping I had hardly saved a small handful of silver pfennigs. To travel takes money, and to establish oneself in France takes even more.

Things finally came to a head with John one winter's night. I left our room the next morning and found that a merchant's caravan was leaving Okoitz immediately. They were going east instead of west, but it might be long before another caravan came by, and I leapt at the chance to leave, no matter what the direction. Of course, I did not tell John or anyone else that I was going.

One of the merchants mentioned that there was a new Pink Dragon Inn at Sir Conrad's new industrial town of Three Walls. I had heard long before that the waitresses at these inns could earn more money than at any other trade, no matter how sordid. They required that a woman be beautiful and a virgin, but I qualified on both those counts. They required that a waitress wear a costume that consisted of little but high-heeled shoes and a loincloth, but the barbarians of this backward land have no shame for their bodies, and indeed, the only way to bathe among them is to sit naked together in a sauna, so I was well used to exposing my body in public.

I left the caravan and spent the night in one of the barns at Sir Miesko's manor. I hid because I was well known to that good knight and did not want him to be able to tell John of my whereabouts. In the morning a small caravan left for Three Walls to deliver food, and I went with them.

The Pink Dragon Inns were all that they had promised to be, and in the first week there I made over forty pfennigs, almost as much as a belted knight with horse and armor would have been paid by a caravan. Further, my food, room, and such little clothing as I wore were provided me free, and all that I earned could be saved. All this for the light and pleasant work of serving beer and being decorative! I was wondering if I really needed to return to France at all when my "husband," John, found me.

Interlude One

I hit the STOP b.u.t.ton, popped the tape, and looked at it. There was nothing unusual about it. It looked completely authentic. So why had that guy acted so strangely when he'd handed it to me? He'd just walked up, put this tape in my palm, and walked silently away.

I rubbed my temples and pushed the call b.u.t.ton for one of Tom's naked virgins. She was in before my finger was off the b.u.t.ton, and I ordered some Blue Mountain coffee and something for a hangover. Last night's bull session had turned itself into a weapons-grade binge.

The girl was back immediately, doubtless having literally pa.s.sed herself in the hallway. You do that sort of thing when you have a time machine handy. Whatever they used for Alka-Seltzer around here worked fast. I sipped my coffee and considered things.

Item: A lot of very weird things were going on. The temporal structure of all creation seemed to be shattering, even back here in 60,000 B.C. The supposition was that Conrad had something to do with it, although n.o.body had the slightest idea how, including Tom, and he had been one of the inventors of the time machine.

Item: Tom had agreed to meet me here this morning and hadn't done so. That was odd. With time travel, if you didn't want to go someplace at a particular time, you could always go later and still get there on time. Tom always kept his appointments, even when he was five years late, subjectively. I'd written him a note already and put it in my letter box, and his reply hadn't popped immediately out of the other side of the box the way it was supposed to. There was nothing in those boxes but a timer and an ejection mechanism. Not much there to go wrong.

Maybe he just wanted me to watch this tape first.

I looked up at the girl who was awaiting further instructions.

"Do you have any idea what is going on?" I asked her. "No, sir."

"Then sit down and watch this tape with me."

"Yes, sir."

I hit the START b.u.t.ton.

Chapter Two.

It was a bitterly cold night, and John's hair and clothes were rimed with frost. He had lost his hat, and his eyes were red and shot through with blood. In front of everyone, he grabbed me and demanded that I return to Okoitz with him immediately. When I managed to free myself from him, he pulled out his belt knife. I was frightened and hit him on the head with a stool. I swear before G.o.d that it was never my intention to kill John, or even to seriously harm him, yet it happened.

Sir Conrad was called to the inn, since he was lord of the city. He rarely frequented his own inn and was shocked to find me there. Yet on hearing the tale, he said that I was not guilty of the murder of my husband, for it was an accident and done in self-defense, but that Count Lambert alone had the right of high justice.

On returning from Okoitz, Sir Conrad told me that Count Lambert had said that since a priest had been killed, my case came under canon law rather than civil law, and the matter would have to be taken up with the Bishop of Wroclaw.

Now, it is normally desirable for a criminal to have her trial brought before the Church. The penalties demanded by the clergy are usually far less severe than those handed out by the local lord. But in my case I felt this change of jurisdiction was for the worse, for the Bishop of Wroclaw did not like me, but Count Lambert certainly did. With John dead, I knew I could easily enter the count's bed, were I willing to share that honor with a dozen peasant girls!

Also, the Church moved very slowly on legal matters, and many years could go by before I might be free to return to France. I spent the uncertain months of winter working at the inn, saving my money.

In the spring, Duke Henryk came to Three Walls to see the wonders that Sir Conrad was building in his factories and furnaces. The duke was a robust old man of seventy, with an outside that was as hard as the crust of good French bread and an inside that was just as soft. The duke made me an offer that I couldn't refuse-more money than I was currently making, his considerable protection from any Church prosecution, and duties that involved only serving the duke himself. I left Three Walls in the duke's company.

Thus I spent the next five years as the personal servant and confidante of the most powerful man in Poland, and in the process learned much about the politics of this new and somewhat barbarous land. I learned who wanted what and for what reason, who hated who for no understandable reason at all, and, sometimes quite literally, where all the bodies were buried. As opposed to the feuding n.o.bles of England, Italy, or even France, Polish n.o.bles were less likely to go to war with one another than to resort to poison, a trap, or a knife in the dark. Perhaps this was because the Polish fighting man was often a member of a large, extended family and was ever ashamed to kill his own cousins, who might be on the opposing side. Family loyalty often took precedence with them over mere oaths of fealty.

My duties to the duke were not well defined. I simply did whatever he wanted me to do. Since he wanted me to continue dressing much as I had as a waitress, my legs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s were rarely covered, save in the coldest weather. Indeed, it started a fad, a clothing style that many of the ladies of the court followed, at least to the extent of baring their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Almost none of them adopted the short dress, feeling that naked legs were a bit much.

I always traveled with the duke and was privy to his many secrets. Indeed, an old man will always tell everything to an adoring young woman! One of the strangest things that I learned was that Sir Conrad was not a native to our own times but rather had come here somehow from the far future! Just how this was done was a mystery even to Conrad himself. All that I can think is that the future must be a grand place indeed, for if Conrad was but an ordinary man from that time, as he has so often insisted to me, what must the exceptional men be like?

I usually slept in the duke's bed, to comfort him. However, like my late "husband," the duke was incapable of actual s.e.x, though seventy-five years on G.o.d's earth certainly gave him a fair excuse!

Eventually Duke Henryk raised me to the peerage, making me the Countess of Strzegom, with a nice manor house and a few hundred peasants. I am not ashamed of anything I did with that fine old man, and I certainly do not regret my years with him.

The duke did not die of old age, as all expected, but rather by a cowardly a.s.sa.s.sin's crossbow while he was sleeping at my side in Wawel Castle.

The duke had long and carefully trained his son to wield the sword of power, and young Duke Henryk easily stepped into his father's position. Yet the younger Henryk was not his father's puppet but did things in his own style. The very day of the a.s.sa.s.sination, all the ladies of the court were wearing dresses that covered everything but their faces and hands, knowing the new duke's displeasure with the old bare styles. Though young Henryk was absolutely honorable in all things, I knew it would not be wise for me to remain at court.