The North's Love House (1)
There was a time when I harbored fantasies about the “Middle Ages.”
It was hard not to, watching YouTube clips of European buildings raised in the medieval era and still standing to this day. Fantasy has a way of growing from that sort of thing.
But I should have understood that statement differently.
The medieval buildings that have survived into the present are the ones strong enough to survive. They are someone else’s highlight reel, the kind you only ever see in out-of-context stories—never the reality.
Naturally, the medieval world I saw with my own eyes was pure misery.
“Max. Is this… the ordinary living environment for commoners?”
“Ah, well. For what it’s worth, this household seems to be doing rather well.”
Doing well?
This?
The first home we visited was an absolute disaster. The Grand Duke’s castle was stone, so I had assumed the rest of the territory would possess at least a comparable level of craftsmanship. Instead, most dwellings were timber frames daubed with mud, roofs thatched with straw, barely holding together as places of shelter.
Even those were less “houses” than round huts—single rooms where an entire family lived packed together, with a livestock pen shoved into one side so the animals wouldn’t freeze to death.
You’ve got to be kidding me. Aren’t they going to catch every disease under the sun?
I truly had not expected it to be this bad. When I visited Asbil Village last time, the village headman’s house had at least been a proper wooden structure, so I figured the rest would be roughly on that level.
How wide is the technical gap here?
This house did not even have a fireplace. Curious, I asked how they managed a fire, and the homeowner brightened.
“A fire? Ah, you must be cold. I’ll get one going right away!”
He scurried to one side, gathered a few stones, and skillfully kindled a campfire right on top of them.
Inside the house, that is.
“?!”
“Hehe. It’ll warm up in no time.”
Heat rose along with a lazy curl of smoke. My eyes stung; breathing grew difficult. The only mercy was that the open-door windows at least provided some ventilation.
“Don’t tell me you heat the place like this every time?”
“Goodness, no, of course not.”
“Right? I thought so…”
“Only at night. Firewood doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and during the day we just tough it out.”
“…Wintershield, have mercy.”
In the North, everything was scarce. Even firewood.
“Enough—put it out. Max, when we get back, have the lord’s castle send this man some firewood as compensation.”
“Oh, there’s really no need…!”
No need, my foot.
His mouth is already grinning ear to ear.
I clicked my tongue, shook my head, and stepped back outside. Just in case, I stopped by a few other commoner dwellings. The situation was more or less the same everywhere—and in some cases, that first house had actually been the better one.
“Why is part of that roof missing?”
“Last week they lit a fire for the night and lost control of it. Burned the roof clean off. They patched it in a hurry with grass and scrap wood from around the village, but there simply weren’t enough materials…”
Okay. Enough.
By the end of the local inspection I had detailed intelligence on the problems facing us, plus a splitting headache, and I returned to the Grand Duchy.
“So this isn’t limited to that one village—it’s the average across the entire North?”
“Mm. Jemili Village is still better off than most.”
“Ah. So Jemili is above average. Understood.”
The insight I’d gained from Jemili Village, the nearest settlement we had just visited, made it clear what needed solving first.
Right now, nothing else even matters.
The greatest problem the North had to solve was this:
“Housing. We tear it all down and start over.”
Food, clothing, shelter—shelter first. We had to lock that foundation into place.
Every solution begins with recognizing the problem for what it is. Most problems, no matter how difficult, will eventually yield once you know exactly what you’re dealing with.
This was no different.
The North is cold.
Not merely cold—brutally, murderously cold. Cold enough that just breathing felt like it might freeze you solid. We needed a way to fix that.
“Young Master. As instructed, I’ve summoned the architects within the Grand Duchy.”
Old Max had called the territory’s architects to my office on my order. They shuffled in, awkward and stiff. Every last one of them was built like a mountain, and the way they froze solid the moment they saw me was almost comical.
“Ah, thank you for coming. Good to meet you all. I hear you’re the finest master builders in the North?”
I greeted them warmly first. They snapped to attention like fresh recruits who’d just heard the drill sergeant’s voice.
“Th-the finest master builders!! I-it is an honor!! Sir!!”
“Whatever Young Master desires, we shall build it!! Sir!!!”
Their discipline was rock-solid, I had to give them that. Feeling the boundless authority that came with the title of the Grand Duchy’s second son, I explained why I’d summoned them.
“Right. The reason I called you is simple. The housing we have in the North is so wretched that people can barely survive in it. I intend to introduce a new form of dwelling and spread it across the territory, and for that I need a prototype built. Will you help me?”
“A n-new form of housing, you say?”
They looked thoroughly flustered. Until now they had only ever been called for wall repairs or work on the lord’s castle; nothing like this had ever been asked of them. They hesitated, shifting from foot to foot.
“Y-Young Master… what exactly do you mean by building a new kind of dwelling…?”
“Exactly what I said. You’re Northerners yourselves. You know the conditions people live under here.”
“Well… yes.”
Round huts. Single rooms shared with livestock. They knew the setup well enough. My first goal was to separate those things.
One of the architects, after hearing me out, carefully raised an objection.
“B-but Young Master. If we do that, people and livestock alike may freeze to death far more easily.”
“Because of the heat, you mean.”
“Yes, precisely.”
It wasn’t as if people of old had been some breed of livestock fetishist, choosing to share a roof with animals for fun. They had their reasons—chief among them packing more living bodies under one roof to generate warmth. Without that, one side or the other truly would freeze. Which only proved how catastrophic the local heat management was.
“I’m aware. It’s an effort to preserve warmth by any means available. But I’ve found references in certain texts to a special building method from the East that achieves high thermal efficiency with far less effort. In that case, people and livestock must be kept strictly separate.”
“Such a technique exists?”
“Here. Take a look at these.”
I handed out the concept sketches I had prepared before they arrived.
“This is…”
“A rather unusual structure.”
“Digging a hollow beneath the ground, laying stone over it, then building the house on top of that…”
Every one of them looked fascinated. Traditional Northern construction amounted to clearing snow from bare earth, raising a timber frame, and packing the gaps with mud, stone, and straw. What I had proposed began with the floor itself.
“The principle uses heat conduction. You warm the floor with a heat source, and the floor in turn warms the air inside the room.”
“Pardon? Heat con… what did you say?”
“Never mind the terminology—it doesn’t matter.”
I dropped the modern jargon and explained it in words they could grasp.
“You lay broad flat stones beneath the floor of the room, introduce fire beneath them, and heat the space with the warmth those stones release. The critical points are these: separate the heat source—the place where you light the fire—from the living space; separate the path the heat and smoke will travel; and finally, build a long channel for the smoke to escape.”
Medieval architects knew nothing of modern scientific vocabulary. What they did have was decades of hard-earned experience in their bones. They grasped the brilliance of the method in an instant.
“This method… is revolutionary…!”
“Enclosing the fire pit in stone would naturally shield the flame from the cold. You could maintain a fire with far less wood—and once it’s lit, it would need almost no tending!”
“That’s not all. With a dedicated path for the smoke, people won’t have to choke and suffer every time they light a fire!”
“It’s common knowledge that heated stone holds warmth for a long time. Build a house over it, and that warmth will last even longer!”
“A heat source, you said? Since the timber never touches the flame directly, even if you lose control of the fire, the house itself is far less likely to burn to the ground!”
All trace of their earlier awkwardness had vanished. Each architect was blurting out his own revelation one after another. Leave it to the engineering types.
“I like the enthusiasm. Talking won’t get us anywhere—shall we build one and see? I’ll cover the materials out of my own purse.”
“Right this moment?”
“Of course. I told you already—I mean to spread a new form of housing across the entire North. If the performance holds up, we roll it out as fast as possible.”
“Th-then—!”
The architects headed straight for an open lot and began building exactly as I had described. It was a style they had never seen, but with decades of experience among them, a few trial-and-error runs were all it took. Within days they had finished a house in the new design.
“We’ve completed it, but…”
“Whether it will work as theory says…”
Having built it for the first time, the architects themselves remained half-skeptical. At times like this, though, seeing was believing.
“Shall we go inside?”
They lit a fire at the heat source and filed into the house one by one.
And then—
“Gyaaah!!”
“Hot—it’s hot!!!”
“No fire magic, and yet heat like this…!”
People started yelping as their rear ends met the floor.
Ah. Right.
One classic flaw of the method was uneven heating—certain spots got hot enough to scorch your backside. There was a reason the warm end of the floor always ended up with scorch marks. And without any floor covering here, the problem stood out even more.
But—
“Ahahahaha! We did it! We did it!!!”
“It actually works!! With this alone…”
“I—I have conquered the cold…!”
Worries about a scorched backside? For Northerners, that was pure luxury.
“Young Master, this is a revolution!”
“Indeed. Most of the materials are stone and earth, so there’s no need to waste expensive timber!”
“Especially if cooking can be done at the heat source—efficiency would multiply several times over!”
The architects swarmed around me, chattering like a flock of birds.
“What in the world is this method called?!”
“This is practically magic.”
To that, I answered simply.
“Ah. This is what we call an ondol.”