Lord Conrads Lady by Leo Frankowski

Author:Leo Frankowski [Frankowski, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Of their remaining sisters, ten Big People were assigned to the postal service, and the mails started to move again. Six other Big People were assigned to the Detective Corps, since crime was on the rise in the wake of the social disruption of the war. The rest of them were assigned to the scouts, since I was still worried about our borders, and the few planes we had up couldn't be everywhere.

Captain Wladyclaw was sent to patrol the eastern marches, a good place for him. I got the feeling that he was more attached to my wife than to the army, and nonsense like that belongs in The Three Musketeers, not in Poland. He was promised the twenty Big People that would be coming of age in the fall, but for now he was just going to have to make do with what he had. I kept Silver, of course, and Anna seemed to have attached herself to Francine, so I let them stay together. And there were still four Big People with Duke Henryk.

I'd never thought to stockpile farm machinery, war production being what it was, and major orders for plows, cultivators, and harvesters were placed with the factories.

The last of the booty was finally sent to Three Walls, and Baron Piotr was put in charge of counting it. Working with the Moslem jeweler we'd picked up years ago, he simply had it all melted down, refined it into bricks of pure gold and silver, and then weighed it, except for some pieces that were judged to have sufficient artistic merit to be worth saving. Silver City, the zinc smelting and casting works in the Malapolska Hills, was put into full production making coins. We'd decided that the men should be paid in standard army currency rather than in actual silver and gold. One currency around was-enough.

Jewels were sorted as to size and type, and some wooden warehouses were thrown up to store the war trophies. Just how those fancy swords and armor were to be divided was still unclear. Was it worth sending the entire army back to Three Walls just so each man could take his pick?

After much discussion, we decided that each warrior should be paid his back pay and one thousand pence as an advance on his share of the booty. Knights would be paid two thousand, and so on up the line. Not that they had to draw that much immediately, but they could.

A major headache was determining which men wished to stay with the army and which wanted to return to the semicivilian life of the reserves. And after that there was a major reshuffling of personnel to make up the three battalions of troops that we were keeping on a full-time basis.

None of this concerned the people who worked at my factories, of course. They were aboard forever!

There were crowds of refugees that needed to be fed on their way home and thousands of lost or orphaned children that needed taking care of.

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