Page 3 of Valdemar

History books seldom mention what any event smelled like, and so people come to expect no smell at all. The fact is, cities stink, as a side effect of functioning. A wise leader thinks ahead about abating the intensity of repugnances to improve the morale and health of his charges.One of his grandfather’s precepts.

The unstressed wave to the fighters on the wall was a signal that they could go back to standing guard. Or, if they were on simple watch duty instead of patrol, sitting on tall swivel stools instead of standing. Imperial military doctrine required standing on duty, but Kordas didn’t think that was necessary here. They weren’t on a war footing, and he figured it was better to have the momentary delay of standing up if action was needed than a guard complement with aching backs, ankles, and knees for years to come. As he’d reasoned it, that too had a reassuring effect: if you had plans for people’s long-term health, it told the people that they had a future.

“I rode out to check on the tree nursery yesterday as you asked,” Restil said into the silence. “Healers managed to find a cure for that rust disease, and walked it back. There’s no sign of it on any of the saplings now.”

“Well, that’s an arrow dodged.” The Hawkbrothers had been very, very adamant about one thing: Do not disrespect the land. It is your host. Let it breathe. Nurture it. Kordas had decreed leaving numerous trees around and between buildings, and planting a tree for every tree that was cut down. And not just any trees; no single type planted in rows like a sort of tree farm. It had to be mixed trees, just as in a natural forest. Fortunately, no one had argued with this. He’d half expected a battle with farmers who were impatient about wasting planting time on something that couldn’t be eaten, but no.

The discovery of native nut and fruit trees helped with that. The Hawkbrothers had passed along lessons in understanding local animal behavior early on, to learn about the land’s health by its subtle signs. Where raptors gathered meant vermin infestations; where lavender or mints grew, beetles and larvae would avoid; and so on. The brightest farmers diversified all they could.

Kordas deeply appreciated how reasonable people had been once things settled down to the point where life wasn’t a distressing struggle every day, and people had enough leisure to start to complain about the things they missed from back home. And he couldn’t blame them. There were things he missed every day, and he was relatively sheltered and very privileged, and was well aware of it. Sometimes he wondered how people coped with good humor, because the changes and adaptations they’d had to make included everyone, from the highest to the lowest, right down to the sculleries and pot-boys.

That sent his thoughts drifting off to the very interesting breakfast he’d had this morning: egg pie, but with seasoning that was only now becoming familiar. Gods know everyone in the kitchen has had to learn a hundred new things since we got here, at least. Old herbs and spices unavailable, new ones to adapt to the recipes, new woods to learn for a quick and hot or slow and steady fire . . . and it’s the same for every other trade. Adapting what Was to what Is.

Which just brought his thoughts back to the erring Hakkon.

“Where do you think Hakkon got his inflated notions of self-importance?” he asked his eldest, who could generally be counted on to know exactly what his siblings were up to.

Restil snorted. “That’s an easy one. He’s been spending time with some of the highborn younglings I don’t care for, a lot of sycophants that fluffed up his ego. He got snarky with me the day before the stunt with the sheep, and I warned him if he didn’t make a course correction, he’d run aground.”

“I see you’ve been spending time yourself with the shipbuilders from the Duchy of Olinian,” Kordas replied.

Under the original plan, they would never have had builders of proper sea-going ships among them. Canal boats and the small vessels that plied lakes were the closest to real ships that the Duchy of Valdemar made; the Duchy had no more than repair docks since several other baronies and duchies nearby boasted experts in naval architecture, with excellent shipyards. But the emergency evacuation of the Capital by every means possible, including the entire Gate network, had meant that their private Gate, the one to what they had initially thought would be their new home, had experienced what mage Jonaton had blithely called “little glitches.”

In other words, we got plenty of uninvited guests. I love Jonaton dearly, but sometimes he can be aggravating. A glitch is a fly in fresh paint, not being re-routed across the world!

A number of people who were not Kordas’s subjects had flung themselves into Gates without a destination key, and ended up coming out to safety through Valdemar’s secret Gate back on Crescent Lake. In most cases, they had come through by ones and twos, but the civilian shipbuilders outside the Capital had crammed themselves, their pets, their Dolls, and their families into light craft at once, and left through a supply Gate at the commercial shipyard. That Gate had interpreted this as being a “single party” like a shipment of several barges, and that was why Kordas now had a small population of shipbuilders from the coast—people who built sturdy boats with crafted wood, not fungal paste. They had liked the Empire even less than Kordas, and were happy to stay with the Valdemarans rather than taking the Crescent Lake Gate back to their home.

Of course, their shipyard home had a strong chance of being incinerated after they’d left. No one had done any scrying to see what was left of the Capital once Pebble’s mother had finished with it. That was partly because not too many people actually cared, and there were enough eyewitnesses and accounts of the annihilation that it was well-understood that there was nothing left to look at. The final decision against scrying was mostly so that, if there were mages left in what remained of the Empire with the capability of detecting a remote scrying spell, they wouldn’t be alerted to the escapees.

Having people who built boats with wood had turned out to be a very, very good thing, since Kordas’s live fungus had not taken to its new home. It had turned itself into a gray powder and blew away in the first year. The Healers thought it might have been infected by a local disease, like a couple of their food crops had. Some of those crops had produced twisted or inedible yields, but weren’t completely lost. Others were.

No purple beans, no softbeets, no catbells anymore. There’s a chance they could be reintroduced if we sent agents to Imperial destinations, but . . . I’d rather do without old familiar flavors than risk discovery. Thank the gods the Tayledras had their own analogs to what edible flora we completely lost. Some of them are better, actually. We’ve lost a lot of people, sad to say, but it hasn’t been to famine.

The river, on either side of the rapids, had basins teeming with edible life. The rapids seemed to be virtually unsurvivable to anything, which made them like a wall for species diversification. As a precaution, Kordas ordered the debris from the Red Forest thrown into the river upstream of the rapids, for fear it might give rise to a new Forest or poison the ground—and down to the twig, none was seen again after entering the rapids. Downstream, water from the rapids was as clear as air, no matter how deep the riverbed. There were drastically different versions of the same species north and south of the rapids. To the north, the horrific underwater spiders had become something essentially like deepwater crabs, and just as delicious. Sunfish the size of pie plates, eels that tasted like beefsteak, and catfish from the southern side—the Valdemarans would need dedicated fishing boats before long, when barge- and bridge-fishing weren’t enough. Right now, the shipbuilders applied their woodworking skills to building houses, barns, and sheds, but their real love was ships. Anyone unwary asking for tales could find themselves drowning in stories about real ships and the beauty of them, with only the slightest provocation.

Restil shrugged. “I like boats. I like how they look, and how they move. I like how they feel under my feet. For all we know, someday we’re going to discover a big enough body of water that actual ships are required. So I’ve been talking to the shipmen, writing everything down, and getting them to make drawings for me about how to make those big seagoing ships, so we can have records in the Archive when that day comes.”

“Well, if that’s what you’re doing, you have leave to recruit a helper or two, and let it be known I’ve said that’s your permanent assignment when you’re not with me. And you might want to think about any other trade that we don’t need now, but might need later, and get those recorded as well. We won’t live forever. Mastery dies with the master, unless their knowledge is recorded.” They approached one of the three smaller side gates in the wall now, which would lead them out into the half-built city they were calling Haven. A tunnel led through the wall, dark and unexpectedly chill, with stout iron portcullises at either end, heavy iron-bound doors, droppable spike chains, and murder holes in the ceiling.

Those had been added by human builders, not grown. Without the full Heartstone, only a node, it was better to rely on physical protections than magical. Spells could fail, but gravity was reliable.

The horses picked up their pace through the tunnel. They either didn’t like the darkness and close walls, or were eager to get out of their usual pastures and into something less familiar. Horses got bored, too.

Right outside the gatehouse was what would eventually be the most imposing structure in the city besides the manor itself. They stopped long enough to observe the work. “I see Lord Hedron found something else in his hoard to entice another half-dozen carpenters to come work for him,” Restil observed, after some silent tallying. “I wonder what it was?”

“Who knows?” Kordas replied, mentally comparing the building in front of him with the plans his Lord Chancellor had shown him. “When we all made those jokes about Lord Hedron and his crazy collecting—and how it was even crazier that he managed to bring it all with him—who would have guessed he’d be just about the only one of the highborn with goods that actual workers wanted! What was it the last time?”

“Needles and pins. There was almost a riot over them,” Restil supplied.

His father nodded. The “really good” steel that they had brought with them was all that they would have for quite a while, until there was time to use the mine and the smelter—a gift from the Hawkbrothers—to make refined metal for things that were not strictly necessary. And until the steelworkers managed to hone their crafting techniques to create delicate, specialized objects like pins and needles, if you lost or broke something like that, you’d be doing your sewing with a clumsier bone needle, and pinning with thorns. So every lost pin and every broken needle was a notable upset in most people’s households.

All the things we took for granted that we’d never thought of, even with the decades of planning that went into our escape. Things like, certainly, every village blacksmith was a fine metal craftsman, but they couldn’t make precision items like needles and pins. The same theme arose all the time, like discovering that the clay here was like nothing the potters had ever seen before, and there were actually a few moons where some folks were eating off turned wooden platters, or on washed leaves, and drinking out of horns and wooden cups because their crockery had succumbed to wear, and the potters hadn’t yet mastered how to reliably work and fire this new clay.

The question of currency arose after only a few months. The Council had agreed early to disdain Imperial coinage, so it was only worth its melt value regardless of denomination. Practicality ruled the day, and the value of currency was ultimately based upon what could be made with it. If a cup cost twenty copper, it was because making the cup required twenty copper pieces to be its raw materials. Craftsmanship fees came after. Paper notes wouldn’t make anything, but royal clerks could keep tallies of values for later days. Copper was the most versatile metal they had, followed by brass and tin, and it was in short supply compared to the demand. Claiming a copper deposit was proposed, but that would have meant an armed expedition going into land that was only just cleansed—an expedition of fighters, plus some miners and metalworkers who were needed doing things here, not wandering around fighting off who-knew-what sort of perils. “Cleansed” only meant the rapidly mutating, actively murderous conditions of an area were eliminated, not that lethal monsters were gone.

The dilemma had been solved not by the highborn and Guildmasters on the Council, but by the people themselves. They had come to the Council in the form of one of the master smiths and one of the master potters with their idea. A trade, in which Kordas would pay the smiths and potters with foodstuffs or beasts from his herds to make exclusive goods for that trade, and would in return get back all the copper that came in. “Copper for crocks,” they called it, although those who turned in copper cooking utensils got cast iron in return rather than more fragile pottery. With the copper under Baronial control, pricing standards were established, there was no waste, and there was no arguing. Kordas had been touched deeply when he realized how much they all trusted him to be absolutely fair.

Kordas realized his mind had been wandering when Restil flicked him with the end of a rein and said, “For the third time, Father, what route are we taking?”