Hunting the Fire-Field Folk
The festival ran on through the night, and it was not without its troubles. Having suddenly gorged themselves on food swimming in grease, every household spent the dark hours racked with diarrhea. And so the first day of my installation as lord of the domain came to an end.
The next day, the village chief gathered the people as he had been ordered and sent them into the forest. They were to race to every fire-field hamlet still within reach and carry the news.
Once he had seen them off at first light, I called him back in. I had fed them well; now it was time to work them. A lord's first need was a work of civil engineering grand enough to match his dignity. Whatever else I meant to do, planting my footing came first.
I asked the chief where a castle might best be raised. My condition was that it had to meet the sea — I intended to make use of the sea roads before long. Under his guidance I cut across the forest and came out on the coast.
"This is the place, my lord. I thought it might be the sort of ground you had in mind."
Leaving the cautious chief behind me, I took in the lay of the land. The coast cupped inward, the sea filling the hollow, while the ground running out to either side held the water in like a natural breakwater. Cliffs rose on both flanks, and the water between them ran deep. I had wondered why a people living against the sea did no fishing at all, and the ground answered me: even if they built boats, getting them from dry land out to open water and back again would be a misery. A harbor, though — this was the finest ground imaginable for one. It suited me perfectly.
"Good. We'll do it here."
"Yes, my lord. Only… how is the work to be done?"
"Starting tomorrow, muster every soul of the domain on this spot."
"My lord? B-but if they don't tend the fields, they'll have nothing to live on, and no way to pay their taxes. Might you not call just one from each house…"
"Food? I'll see to that. Just bring them all. To build here I need people who know this ground. And for as long as they work, I'll pay them wages to match."
The promise that I would see to their food left him wavering, but he had no choice. Refuse the lord's word, and the only end was death. The chief bowed his head like a man resigned.
"Yes, my lord."
And so the great work began. Marco took charge of the construction, and beneath him the village chief directed the people of the domain. To each of them I attached three or four slaves.
They had come braced to suffer through the whole day, and found, to their own surprise, that working alongside the slaves lightened the worst of the labor. Seasoned by years of keeping a village — raising houses, packing earth, breaking new ground — they took the slaves in hand and drove the work forward with practiced skill. The iron tools I had brought from Earth, shovels and pickaxes and the like, doubled their efficiency. There were packhorses and oxen in plenty besides, and the construction golems above all pried buried rock free and loaded and unloaded heavy cargo from the wagons with a ruthless economy, each one doing the work of a hundred men.
And the thing that raised the pace of the work above all else—
Dig! Dig! Dig!
Tamp! Tamp! Tamp!
Blast! Blast! Blast!
—was magic made for civil engineering.
Rather than hire a mage, I had gone down into the Archmage's Underground Dungeon. The finest magic items I still could not touch, bound as they were by the contract, but the low-grade pieces I was free to carry out as I pleased. I asked Aphago, hauled back a great heap of suitable lesser items, and handed them out to the domain folk supervising the work.
"Use them gently, and see that they're returned."
Dozens of magic items were turned loose, and on the strength of them a work of earth and stone that should have taken months raced forward in a matter of days. We drove underground channels for the water supply and the drains, bored wells down to the groundwater, and laid the foundations. The great stones for those footings were cut from the rock mountain the domain folk had pointed out, loaded onto wagons and trucks, and hauled in; golems and magic items set them down again, and we packed them over carefully in well-kneaded clay and left them to harden. Even the hardening we shortened with items that breathed out heat.
And so, changing by the day, the lord's castle and its walls began little by little to take shape.
While everyone else was sunk in the raising of the castle, I prepared the next stage.
The lord's castle I meant to build in two parts: an inner keep at the center, and an outer wall raised to enclose the town. The city itself I would lay out like a planned city — a central road, cross-streets branching from it, and the blocks between them filled with houses.
The next stage was securing the people to fill that town. Counted by adults, the folk of the domain numbered barely three hundred and fifty. Even adding those who had returned to the village on the chief's word, they came to a little over seven hundred. The term I had proclaimed was past. From here on, I had my pretext for the hunt. First I had to fix where the fire-field folk were.
The domain of Transilia, granted to me, was ringed all around by mountains. That made an outside enemy's invasion difficult — and getting out just as hard. With so little coming and going, trade had never taken root, and where growth lagged, there were plenty of places to hide. Finding fire-field folk who had made their hamlets inside that vast sea of forest was no easy thing.
But look down from the sky, and the story changed.
Early morning, the sun just up, I took out a drone. Vrrrrrnnnn— It climbed slowly into the air, caught its heading, and shot out of sight. On the monitor linked to the controller, though, I could still take the footage it shot. Hanging overhead, it circled and laid the whole stretch of country out in image: high ranges unfolding far off, and here and there the faint rise of smoke.
"There."
The fire-field folk had to eat their morning meal too, and in the feed I could see hearth-smoke climbing up through the trees. I set the terrain on the screen against the map and marked the rough positions.
"Let's see. That's Southwest One. Southwest Two. Southwest Three. Over that way, Northeast One…"
On the map, the marks denoting fire-field villages went on multiplying, one after another.
A fire-field hamlet, deep in the forest.
Its forty people tilled the ground among themselves and raised their children there. Word had come from the village chief not long before, but the hamlet's mind was made up: they would stay hidden. Serf or slave, it came to the same thing. Better to hope they might somehow go uncaught, and keep the ground they had made with their own hands.
As on any other morning, the adults ate, left the children, and went out to the fire-fields cut into the slope. They burned the trees to clear a place, then broke the soil with their bare hands. Clearing land without a proper tool was no easy labor, but they had no choice. The fire-fields they had kept for more than twenty years had settled into a living by now, and they could raise food that did not overflow, yet did not fall short either.
They were making ready to go out to the fields today, the same as any other day, when the shouts broke over them.
"Attack!"
"Take every last one of them!"
"Don't kill them — take them alive!"
"Waaaaaah—!!"
The roar of several hundred voices rang out, and what met the eyes of the people who came running in shock was hundreds of sturdy men bursting from the forest at a run, each with a club and a rope in hand, and behind them horses and armed mercenaries.
The suddenness of it threw the hamlet folk into panic.
"The lord! It's the lord! The lord has come down on us!"
"Run! Run!"
They bolted in a stumbling terror, but they were already surrounded. At the sight of the lord's men closing in from every side, fear dropped them to the ground, and all they could do was grovel and beg.
"Spare us! Please, spare us!"
"Waaah— please, if nothing else, our lives—"
The hundreds who had poured in took the hamlet in an instant and seized its people and their children. Wrists bound behind them, the captives were dragged to one place and made to kneel.
A moment later a black-haired man appeared before them, armor flashing over every inch of him, mounted on a black horse.
Sitting a horse still felt awkward to me. Even so, practice stolen in the gaps between other work had gotten me far enough that I could walk one at a slow pace without falling off. Mounted so, I drew myself up before the hamlet folk. At my side stood mercenaries grim to look at, and grimmer still an armored giant with an axe in his hands.
"I am the one who showed you a last mercy — Baron Terra, lord of Transilia."
At the sight of their lord, the hamlet folk flung themselves down in terror and begged.
"My lord— please, spare us."
"We were wrong. The children, at least—"
"Waaah—"
At the word slave, some of them sank into despair. Most, though, wept from the sheer fact of being alive.
"Thank you, my lord—"
"Merciful lord. Thank you—"
"Oh, my lord— the gods' blessing upon our lord—"
"March them to the castle worksite."
The mercenaries took the oversight, and the slaves bound the newly caught and strung them together on ropes. Once the children too had all been seized and tied, the number cleared a hundred with room to spare. Slaves with clubs in hand, and a portion of the mercenaries, led the bound column off to the site where the lord's castle was rising.
I spread the map and circled one of the marks on it.
"Right. This one's done. On to the next ground."
What remained of the force moved back into the forest.
The same thing repeated itself all through the forest sea of Transilia. Every day, anywhere from dozens to hundreds of new slaves were fed into the castle worksite. With the added hands, the pace of the work found a sharper momentum still.