From Londoner To Lord

The guard grimaced after hearing about the cut-off arm. "Feroy had already done cauterization of the wound soon after moving away from the ambush site, but the man was still out of it when I last saw him."

Kivamus didn't have to see that amputated guard to imagine how much pain he must be in. It wouldn't be just physical pain either . "Duvas, after we have heard everything here, go and tell Syryne to confirm that we have enough Losuvil powder remaining. Hudan, you tell Nurobo to be ready to check the injuries whenever the caravan returns. He is an archer but he is the closest one we have to a surgeon here."

"A surgeon?" Hudan repeated.

"I mean someone who has experience in dealing with serious injuries. We really do need to find someone with more experience in it in the future, but at least everyone is alive this time. It could have been much worse." Kivamus looked at the guard. "Carry on. What was the state of the refugees? How many of them are there?"

"There were fourteen men and women - twelve of them slaves - and they looked like they had barely eaten for weeks. Feroy had already used up the rations they had taken with them since the trip had lasted longer than expected, so he told me that he would be using some of the smoked fish to feed the refugees and the guards even though he hadn't taken your permission for it."

Kivamus waved it off, wishing he had a way to contact Feroy directly and tell him that. "That's nothing to worry about. The fish is for feeding our people anyway. Is that all?"

The guard gave a nod, so Kivamus allowed him to return and rest for now.

Hudan took a seat nearby. "Where are we going to house these new slaves, or uh... refugees?"

"Maybe we can put them in some of the abandoned shacks in the village since it's not that cold now," the majordomo suggested.

Kivamus glanced at the fireplace burning near them. "That's the only option we have anyway, even though It's still plenty cold despite the weather being above freezing now. Still, send someone to the longhouse blocks and tell the people that we need them to volunteer half a dozen huts for others."

"Do we even need to ask the villagers for this?" Hudan raised his eyebrows. "You own all the land here, and the material the huts are made from barely counts for anything."

Kivamus shook his head. "That's not the point. I don't want to turn into a tyrant who just takes people's homes away on his whims, like Feroy had told us to be happening in Kirnos these days. If these runaway slaves start to think that I'm the same as other nobles whom they are running from, they'd have no reason to stay here either."

"I'll send a servant to the blocks later this evening to ask them." Duvas added, "In that case do you also want to pay the shack owners something for this? Like we were doing when we asked people to take in the homeless people temporarily before winter?"

Kivamus snorted. "We don't have any money to pay for it even if we wanted to. Anyway, like Hudan said, I do own this land and the villagers had neither taken any permission to build their huts nor bought that land from the previous baron, so we have no obligation to pay them anything. But asking people for this in advance will still make them feel like I value them, even if they were planning to stay in the longhouse blocks in the near future with their shacks sitting empty anyway."

He continued, "That being said, it's easy to pack so many people in the longhouse blocks when it is winter, but it won't be feasible in the summer." He tried to remember if Gorsazo had ever mentioned how warm the summers were here, but couldn't think of anything. "How hot does it get in the summers anyway?"

"Oh, it gets plenty hot," Duvas replied. "It's certainly not going to be as scorching as it would get south of the Nisador mountain range in the arid wastelands there, but Tiranat is still located in the southern part of Cilaria so the weather always becomes sweltering for a few months in summer. That's because the frigid winds of Cilaria which blow from a north-easterly direction in the winter months and make Tiranat so cold in that season, start to reverse direction every spring and blow from the south-west for the summer months. You already know that there is an ocean not far away from us in the west, which is where Kirnos is located, and these south-westerly winds bring in moisture from the ocean which makes it very humid in the summers apart from being hot."

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Kivamus grimaced thinking about living in sweltering and muggy weather in the summer, after already dealing with subzero temperatures in the winter here. It explained another reason as to why Tiranat and maybe even Kirnos were such undesirable places for any nobles, apart from being one of the most dangerous places in the Duchy of Ulriga.

"Well, that decides it," he muttered. "We really can't afford to keep people stuffed in the longhouse blocks like they are right now for too long. We will need to start building new housing as well as more longhouse blocks as soon as we have enough workers for that."

"Couldn't the villagers just return to their shacks for the summer where they lived before?" Hudan asked. "It's not like they will freeze to death in the summer living in those huts."

"You are forgetting that we are doing everything in our power to get more immigrants here, and that means if it goes well, we will always have a shortage of living space." Kivamus added, "Even if we send all the villagers to live in their old shacks in the summer, and keep the new arrivals in the longhouse blocks for now, it is still going to get overcrowded eventually. And when winter comes again, we will be in the same situation as last autumn, where at least some people are going to freeze to death if they keep living in those poorly insulated huts. At that point, we wouldn't even have an option to shift them to the longhouse blocks again which would already be full."

"That's true enough," Duvas agreed. "You don't know how glad I am to see that nobody died this winter from cold or hunger. We have to make sure that everyone has a warm place to live before the next winter."

Kivamus nodded. "Of course. Anyway, for now we have to focus on mining enough coal to pay the taxes on time, and then we have to complete the sowing in the newly cleared forests. We will also have to return most of the workers to keep mining coal after the sowing so we can afford to buy enough grain to feed the village until the harvest time in autumn. That means we aren't going to have a labour surplus anytime soon. Still, we will have to manage somehow with the workers we have, and hopefully with more immigrants."

"Can we even afford to send enough labourers to start making individual houses right now?" Duvas asked. "We only get a surplus of labourers in the winter, and I know we built a lot more stuff in this winter than any year since the time Tiranat was founded. But now that the snow has nearly melted, we'll have to keep most of the labourers in the village occupied to mine coal until the northern road gets blocked before the next winter."

Kivamus exhaled. "We still have to try... even though new housing is hardly the only thing we have to build. We also have to make some big storage barns to store the wheat we will harvest in autumn, although we have some time for that. Another thing that we'll have to prioritise before all that is to dig a canal connecting the eastern stream to the farms, as well as a way to lift the water from the level of the stream to the farms so that they can be irrigated properly, probably using a new waterwheel. These are the things we need to do just for the bare minimum of survival. It doesn't cover some new projects which I want to start in Tiranat to diversify our revenue streams."

Seeing the blank look on Hudan's face, he explained, "I mean I don't want to let our village be dependent on mining coal forever. It's not very profitable, and we can't earn anything in the winters from that anyway. So I want to create more ways of earning gold, but that will only happen if our neighbouring barons and nearby bandits leave us in peace, which is not very likely, is it? So we will also have to take measures to secure our village more. After the first four watchtowers are built at the corners of the village walls, we have to make a few more of them to cover the walls better to make the village more secure, while also digging a small trench all around the village walls with sharpened stakes in it."

He continued, "Of course, we will have to recruit more guards and train them once we have more immigrants, while also working to make new equipment like better swords, spears and shields for them, apart from more crossbows which are going to be even more important. We'd already planned to make a new barracks in the east of the manor as well as a dedicated new training area for the guards there, which will become important in the future once we have more guards."

"All that will cost a lot though..." Duvas interrupted. "Paying the wages of so many guards as well as the craftsmen building those buildings will take a lot of gold. You had also planned to start paying everyone in coins instead of grain and coal after the winter, so I'm not sure we can do all that with our limited funds. Not that I think we can keep postponing that for too long, otherwise the villagers might just refuse to work. They can only keep working for so long in exchange for grain and coal before they start demanding ale as a part of their weekly rations."

Kivamus snorted. "That's why I said that I want to generate new ways of earning gold. Anyway, that's for the future. For now, send someone to the longhouse blocks to ask who is willing to give up their huts."

Duvas nodded. "I'll do it right now. The labourers must have returned from work by now, so it is a good time for that. We'll also have to feed those refugees, so I'll ask the head maid Madam Nerida to cook something for them tomorrow until we can think of a more permanent way to feed them. You don't know how glad I am that Feroy has managed to negotiate buying more smoked fish from that merchant in Kirnos, otherwise we simply wouldn't be able to feed everyone right now."

"Let's just hope that we still have enough seeds left for sowing after feeding everyone," Kivamus muttered.