I had an uncle who had survived being a partisan in the 1944 Warsaw insurrection. There's a nice European feel on occasion to the use of language in the telling of this tale, as for example when Conrad is discussing with his companion Father Ignacy the latter's detestation of Germans. He ends up at a remote settlement, Okoitz, ruled by the moderately powerful Count Lambert Piast, who befriends him and allows him a lot of latitude to do all the engineering he can manage relying on memory and the local tools and materials in his enterprises he is helped, yet again without his knowing it, by the fact that his uncle works for the Historical Corps and, having located in the distant past, has planted, for the young man to acquire, a hyperintelligent horse and a hi-tech sword. As he eventually discovers, he has been transported back to the Poland of the year 1231 his knowledge of history tells him that in a mere decade or so this country will be overrun by the Mongols, with extraordinary loss of life. When he wakes in the morning, everything seems. He stumbles into the basement to sleep it off, little realizing that he's doing so within a time machine. Polish computer engineer Conrad Schwartz, on a mountain walking holiday, drinks too much one night at an inn which is, unknown to him, a sloppily run front for the time-travelling Historical Corps.
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