Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Paratime Police Saga. H. Beam Piper
of Hostigos was a blue halberd-head on a red field. The infantry wore canvass jacks sewn with metal plates, or brigandines, and a few had mail shirts; their helmets weren’t unlike the one he had worn in Korea. A few looked like regulars; most of them were peasant levies. Some had long pikes; more had halberds or hunting-spears or scythe-blades with the tangs straightened and fitted to eight-foot staves, or woodcutters’ axes with four-foot helves.
There was about one firearm to three polearms. Some were huge muskets, five to six feet long, 8- to 6-bore, aimed and fired from rests. There were arquebuses, about the size and weight of an M-1 Garrand, 16- to 20-bore, and calivers about the size of the Brown Bess musket of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. All were fitted with the odd back-acting flintlocks; he wondered which had been adapted from which, the gunlock or the tinderbox. There were also quite a few crossbowmen.
The cavalry wore high-combed helmets, and cuirasses; they were armed with swords and pistols, a pair in saddle-holsters and, frequently, a second pair down the boot-tops. Most of them also carried short musketoons or lances. They all seemed to be regulars. One thing puzzled him: while the crossbowmen practiced constantly, he never saw a firearm discharged at a target. Maybe a powder-shortage was one of the things that was worrying the people here.
The artillery was laughable; it would have been long out of date in the Sixteenth Century of his own time. The guns were all wrought-iron, built up by welding bars together and strengthened with shrunk-on iron rings. They didn’t have trunnions; evidently nobody here-and-now had ever thought of that. What passed for field-pieces were mounted on great timbers, like oversized gunstocks, and hauled on four-wheel carts. They ran from four to twelve pound bore. The fixed guns on the castle walls were bigger, some huge bombards firing fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred-pound stone balls.
Fifteenth Century stuff; Henry V had taken Harfleur with just as good, and John of Bedford had probably bombarded Orleans with better. He decided to speak to Chartiphon about this.
He took the broadsword he had captured on the night of his advent here-and-now to the castle bladesmith, to have it ground down into a rapier. The bladesmith thought he was crazy. He found a pair of wooden practice swords and went outside with a cavalry lieutenant to demonstrate. Immediately, the Lieutenant wanted a rapier, too. The bladesmith promised to make real ones, to his specifications, for both of them. His was finished the next evening, and by that time the bladesmith was swamped with orders for rapiers.
Almost everything these people used could be made in the workshops inside the walls of Tarr-Hostigos, or in Hostigos Town, and he seemed to have an unlimited expense-account with them. He began to wonder what, besides being the guest from the Land of the Gods, he was supposed to do to earn it. Nobody mentioned that; maybe they were waiting for him to mention it.
He brought the subject up, one evening, in Prince Ptosphes’ study, where he and the Prince and Rylla and Xentos and Chartiphon were smoking over a flagon of after-dinner wine.
“You have enemies on both sides—Gormoth of Nostor and San-ask of Sask—and that’s not good. You have taken me in and made me one of you. What can I do to help against them?”
“Well, Kalvan,” Ptosphes said, “perhaps you could better tell us that. We don’t want to talk of what distresses you, but you must come of a very wise people. You’ve already taught us new things, like the thrusting-sword”—he looked admiringly at the new rapier he had laid aside—“and what you’ve told Chartiphon about mounting cannon. What else can you teach us?”
Quite a lot, he thought. There had been one professor at Princeton whose favorite pupil he had been, and who had been his favorite teacher. A history prof, and an unusual one. Most academic people at the middle of the Twentieth Century took the same attitude toward war that their Victorian opposite numbers had toward sex: one of those deplorable facts nice people don’t talk about, and maybe if you don’t look at the horrid thing it’ll go away. This man had been different. What happened in the cloisters and the guildhalls and the parliaments and council-chambers was important, but none of them went into effect until ratified on the battlefield. So he had emphasized the military aspect of history in a freshman from Pennsylvania named Morrison, a divinity student, of all unlikely things. So, while he should have been studying homiletics and scriptural exegesis and youth-organization methods, that freshman, and a year later that sophomore, had been reading Sir Charles Oman’s Art of War.
“Well, I can’t tell you how to make weapons like that sixshooter of mine, or ammunition for it,” he began, and then tried, as simply as possible, to explain about mass production and machine industry. They only stared in incomprehension and wonder. “I can show you a few things you can do with the things you have. For instance, we cut spiral grooves inside the bores of our guns, to make the bullet spin. Such guns shoot harder, straighter and farther than smoothbores. I can show you how to build cannon that can be moved rapidly and loaded and fired much more rapidly than what you have. And another thing.” He mentioned never having seen any practise firing. “You have very little powder—fireseed, you call it. Is that it?”
“There isn’t enough fireseed in all Hostigos to load all the cannon of this castle for one shot,” Chartiphon told him. “And we can get no more. The priests of Styphon have put us under the ban and will let us have none, and they send cartload after cartload to Nostor.”
“You mean you get your fireseed from the priests of Styphon? Can’t you make your own?”
They all looked at him as though he were a cretin.
“Nobody can make fireseed but the priests of Styphon,” Xentos told him. “That was what I meant when I told you that Styphon’s House has great power. With Styphon’s aid, they alone can make it, and so they have great power, even over the Great Kings.”
“Well I’ll be Dralm-damned!”
He gave Styphon’s House that grudging respect any good cop gives a really smart crook. Brother, what a racket! No wonder this country, here-and-now, was divided into five Great Kingdoms, and each split into a snakepit of warring Princes and petty barons. Styphon’s House wanted it that way; it was good for business. A lot of things became clear. For instance, if Styphon’s House did the weaponeering as well as the powder-making, it would explain why smallarms were so good; they’d see to it that nobody without fireseed stood an outside chance against anybody with it. But they’d keep the brakes on artillery development. Styphon House wouldn’t want bloody or destructive wars—they’d be bad for business. Just wars that burned lots of fireseed; that would be why there were all these great powder-hogs of bombards around.
And no wonder everybody in Hostigos had monkeys on their backs. They knew they were facing the short end of a war of extermination. He set down his goblet and laughed.
“You think nobody but those priests of Styphon can make fireseed?” There was nobody here that wasn’t security-cleared for the inside version of his cover-story. “Why, in my time, everybody, even the children, could to that.” (Well, children who’d gotten as far as high school chemistry; he’d almost been expelled, once. . . .) “I can make fireseed right here on this table.” He refilled his goblet.
“But it is a miracle; only by the power of Styphon . . .” Xentos began.
“Styphon’s a big fake!” he declared. “A false god; his priests are lying swindlers.” That shocked Xentos; good or bad, a god was a god and shouldn’t be talked about like that. “You want to see me do it? Mytron has everything in his dispensary I’ll need. I’ll want sulfur, and saltpeter.” Mytron prescribed sulfur and honey (they had no molasses here-and-now), and saltpeter was supposed to cool the blood. “And charcoal, and a brass mortar and pestle, and a flour-sieve and something to sift into, and a pair of balance-scales.” He picked up an unused goblet. “This’ll do to mix it in.”
Now they were all staring at him as though he had three heads, and a golden crown on each one.
“Go on, man! Hurry!” Ptosphes told Xentos. “Have everything brought here at once.”
Then the Prince threw back his head and laughed—maybe a trifle hysterically, but it was the first time Morrison