Vol 8, Chapter 18

◆ First Duchy, Len POV ◆

Len was gradually getting used to the mad order of the First Duchy.
Admittedly, this was not what he had expected when he accepted the assignment.

In the Kingdom, it was common enough to encounter rulers who treated peasants as playthings. Outwardly they maintained a veneer of decency, while in secret—they killed them for amusement. Magic allowed grain to be preserved from drought, soil fertility to be enhanced, and harvests to be secured. Thus, of all the kingdom's people, the peasants… seemed the most expendable, especially if their numbers grew too large. They were thought of as nothing more than raw stock for those who truly mattered—craftsmen, mercenaries, guardsmen, and, on rare occasion, knights. Far more often the Gifted simply vanished, their bodies consumed in secret rituals or brewed into alchemical draughts.

Of course, many lords who had resources in their lands exploited their subjects, driving them to death. Yet even those often relied on criminals, inventing ever more absurd laws to ensure a steady supply of convicts. In most domains, peasants lived with enough freedom to leave for another lord's service… but the First Duchy was not such a place. Serfs were forbidden on pain of death from leaving the village to which they were bound, so few ever attempted escape.

Len had expected to see a shriveled, cowed populace crushed under exploiters. The very apotheosis of what he had sworn to fight. The pinnacle of aristocracy debasing the working people.

Instead, to his surprise, the people… adapted. They did not see the aristocracy as an enemy, but rather had shaped a twisted symbiosis, borrowing the nobles' worst traits.

The people certainly suffered… but in measured doses.
Where he had expected to find smoldering embers, ready to flare at the faintest spark of powder, there bubbled only a swamp. Viscous, foul, barely warm.
Apathy.

He felt it creeping over him as well, returning from his shift having met his quota. The sun was still high, yet the work was finished. Meager portions of salty porridge and then complete freedom until morning. Truth be told, it seemed to him more torment than if they had forced him to labor all through the night. Idleness killed the mind.
Idleness, and alcohol.

Crammed into a separate barracks, the men pulled out homemade birch-bark flasks. They gathered to mark the arrival of a new villager, though to Len it seemed… drunkards could always find some excuse.

Out of courtesy he sampled the strange brew, nearly spitting it onto the packed-earth floor. How could anyone drink this?
A gray, nearly black murk, tasting like pickled cockroaches. Its reek was so sharp even the alcohol barely registered.

"What is this filth?" Len rasped after coughing.

"Ha, you'll get used to it, just like the rest of us," Dimitry laughed. The other woodcutters joined his laughter.

"Couldn't you buy something better? Something that doesn't make you want to puke?"

"Buy?"

"Yes. Can't you earn money and buy?"

"Well, you see, getting hold of things is always…" one of the workers began, but Dimitry cut him off.

"No." He answered sharply, took a swig, then added, "No one here ever sees coin… but we have something better than money. Ale is liquid copper, moonshine is liquid silver, and gold… gold I've never seen in my life, but I suppose that must be wine. The drink of the rich."

He smacked his lips dreamily, and Len noted silently that his curator was not so simple. With one word he had silenced another worker, who hadn't dared protest. That meant Len had been entrusted to no minor figure in the village.

"Never had wine," one worker lamented.

"And better that way. Otherwise you'd be pissing blood, like all our lords. That's why they're so sour."

Len stared at the man in puzzlement. Blood from wine? What?

"Turns black from our swill… but wine's red, so you can figure it out, eh?" Dimitry whispered in his ear.

"What do you even make this out of?"

"Well… I suppose no harm if I share the secret. The sap of our trees—it's sweet as honey, but poisonous. In spring we collect it, along with birch sap. Out of season, like now, we chop the branches fine, into shavings, soak them for a week or two, then add a special starter. Boil it, skim the muck, then bottle it to settle. After that, boil it again… Long work, tedious. Easier in spring, you can brew a bit from the seed grain."

Len's eyes nearly bulged from his head. Using seed grain for swill?

"… back when we had surpluses," the curator went on, not noticing Len's shock. "But this year is hard. Only the old stock is left."

"Wait, and you were allowed to…"

"Who's to stop us from pocketing a bit?" Dimitry winked.

The conversation left a heavy impression on him. Everyone seemed intent on stealing, scheming, tricking. They did not resemble honest peasants, toilers of the field, but rather thieving refuse from the slums.

And yet he had to show them the right path, and for that he needed authority... But he sensed that if he only worked honestly, he would gain no authority among these people, only a reputation as a fool. So he would have to find another way.

"I know a thing or two about alchemy. Let me help fix your brew so this filth tastes a bit more like real alcohol?"

Dimitry thought for a moment, then nodded permissively.

"Well, if you know something of the craft, why not? Let's see what you've got to say. But let me warn you right away, this is secret work. Not a word to the overseer. He's just waiting for us to slip up." The curator spoke in a conspiratorial whisper.

A test, Len realized instantly. Hard to believe the overseer wasn't in on it.

His suspicions were confirmed when Dimitry led him to a cellar in the ruins of a stone house. It had likely belonged once to a knight or merchant, for few could afford stone dwellings outside a city. From the ruins rose a haze of smoke and the sour stench of mash.

Oh yes, to ignore this would have taken real effort on the overseer's part.

The doors opened, and the heavy spirit of alcohol and the stink of bedbugs rushed into his nose. Inside, a young man drenched in sweat from the heat was feeding wood into a stove beneath a large army cauldron. The maker's mark was hidden under a thick layer of soot, but most likely the cauldron was stolen, since such huge ones were normally used only on campaigns.

Instead of a lid, a hide was stretched fur side down across the top, with water pooled in its sagging middle.

Dimitry went to the cauldron and dipped a finger into the water.

"Hot," he muttered in displeasure.

"I was just about to go change the water," the young man began to excuse himself.

"Of course you were. Daydreaming again, were you?" Dimitry cuffed him on the head and began scolding.

The youth said nothing, wilting at once under the stern gaze, and slunk out, yoke over his shoulders.

"My son, Olaf," Dimitry explained shortly, then waved Len over. "Come here, help me. Time we wrung it out."

Together they unhooked the hide, secured over the cauldron by iron hooks. Clouds of steam scalded their hands, and the hide itself was burning hot. They drained the water into a bucket, then flipped the hide, twisting it so that boozy liquid streamed into a tub.

"This is what we drink," the mentor said, nodding at the tub brimming with gray swill. Len easily spotted several hairs floating right in the drink.

"Why the hide?"

"The fur purifies the alcohol. So my grandfather said."

Len took the claim skeptically, but did not argue. It was time to cover the cauldron again.

As Dimitry secured the hide once more, Len took the chance to peer inside the cauldron. At its center, atop a stone, stood a small pot filled with a cloudy yet noticeably cleaner liquid. It seemed to be what had dripped down from the hide.

"And that's our reserve, for when we need to make a deal," Dimitry explained, threading hooks through the hide. "Those sealed tubs there—that's the wort. The barrels—that's the mash. Out of season, all we've got left is 'wood-brew.' Well, you've seen it now. So, what do you think, 'alchemist'?"

Of course, Len was no alchemist. But he lived by one principle: learn, learn, and learn again. He never found it shameful to attend lessons at school alongside much younger pupils.

And since theory without practice is dead, he had made a point of visiting factories, workshops, weaving mills whenever he could. The sight of raw material being turned into product by human hands always inspired him.

Naturally, he had also visited a plant producing medicinal alcohol. Healers needed it in large quantities for disinfecting wounds. Hard though it was to compare this grimy, soot-blackened vat with the massive, gleaming steel tanks, the physical principle was always the same.

He already had plenty of ideas on how to purify the raw brew, but to make a quality product, he knew he could not do without one thing: a coil.

"Where am I supposed to get you such a tube?" Dimitry's eyes went wide. "Not every blacksmith could forge one, maybe only a lord-mage at that. Fool's errand. Do you want little glass flasks too? We work with what we have, there's no alchemical workshop here!"

Len noted that the peasant, distantly at least, had heard of the tools alchemists used. Not the most common knowledge, when you thought about it. One more point in favor of his curator being sharper and better educated than he let on.

"I don't need a perfect serpentine. Even a crooked, crude one will do… Though if you get me copper, I'll make it myself."

"Yourself, heh. Copper's costly, you'd have to trade many liters for it. Would lead not do? Easier to get."

"No. With lead, this swill would become even more poisonous than it already is."

"Suppose so. And how do you plan to turn copper into a tube? You're not a mage, are you?" Dimitry narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

"If I were a mage, what would I be doing here?"

"Fair point…"

He was silent for several minutes. It almost seemed the bubbling in the room came not only from the mash but from his own brain churning away. At last Dimitry gave a slow nod.

"All right. I'll give you a chance."

***

With each passing day Len sank deeper into the new way of life. It turned out there were two kinds of work here after all. Alongside the daily quota, a large portion of the populace took part in brewing the wooden swill.

Yet they worked abysmally, which struck Len as especially odd, since they were paid with that very swill. Why then did they act as if it wasn't for themselves?

He saw negligence bordering on idiocy. Saw men so tired of shaving splinters they tossed whole sticks into the wort. Saw the fire-tender simply fall asleep, forcing the entire batch to be redone. Saw mash spoil simply from laziness and neglect.

He didn't interfere—he had his own difficult task. Yet thoughts crept into his head that the chief reason the brew turned out so foul was not primitive technology at all.

Still, his first blow would be struck there.

A metal tube is a simple enough thing.
A fire mage could mold it bare-handed, unharmed by burns. A metal mage could conjure it with a wave. But that did not mean an ordinary man could do nothing. One only had to think.

He had no smithy where he might hammer a plate from a bar, then bend it into a rough tube and rivet it shut. No tools, not even a furnace for smelting copper…

So first he would make one.

Scraps of hide, sticks, stones, stones and clay. A little work, and a primitive forge was ready. An anvil was another matter, and Len was unsure of his blacksmithing skills anyway.

But he had seen how the earliest cannons were cast.

With a snort, Len laid a copper mirror into the forge and lit the fire. He would need to cast not only a tube but also a thumper—a vessel where volatile oils would collect. The sand mold was already prepared. To make it, he had used the dried stalk of a weed that grew everywhere here. This vile, burdock-like plant had overrun everything around the village, another reminder to Len of neglect.

The thing was, this weed was viciously hardy. Give it the slightest chance and it overran everything. Its roots drained the soil, leaving even potatoes reluctant to grow, and grains perished outright, unable to sprout.

To let it seed was to condemn oneself to long days of toil. It grew fast.

As a child, Len had loved fighting these weeds with a stick, and hated when he had to switch to a spade, for digging them up was far duller. Grown taller than a man, the weed looked vaguely like a swordsman shielding himself. The perfect target. He remembered always wanting to leave a few standing, to see them grow bigger…

Now he understood the elder perfectly, who threatened to whip anyone who let even one of the weeds seed.

What he couldn't understand was how the locals had let the land around their village fall so far into ruin. A veritable forest of two-meter-tall dried stalks stood there. Their umbrella tops, dusted with snow, showed they had scattered their seeds long ago.

Still, he had set his forge near the stream at the edge of the village, so it was his own fault the thickets offended his eyes. And the endless tramp of feet as people went down to the stream offended his ears as well… Perhaps he should move it elsewhere.

"What are you doing?" Olaf asked. A yoke hung on his shoulders.

"Working."

"I am too," the boy replied, but did not leave. Instead he set his buckets down and stood watching as Len worked the homemade bellows. Len felt the boy's curious gaze on him.

"What do you want?" Len snapped after five minutes.

"They smelt steel in forges like this, don't they?"

"No," Len answered, relaxing inwardly. At first he had thought the boy sent to spy by his father, but it seemed he was simply curious. "To smelt steel you need far hotter fire."

"I can help!" he blurted, leaping closer.

"No, it… w'gks differently. Right now I'm blowing cold air on the coals, which cools the flame."

"Cools it?" he smirked skeptically, listening to the roaring fire. Each stroke of the bellows sent the flames streaming out of the forge. The very idea that stoking the coals cooled them seemed absurd.

It did sound illogical, much like many things Len had learned in the last two years. Like the fact that fire burned stronger because of gases present in the air. Hard to grasp, harder still to explain…

"Of course, since the air is cold. If you heat it, the result will be much better."

"You were a blacksmith before? Before you ended up here?"

"No. Just know a little about it."

"Could you… tell me?"

"About smithing?" Len clarified.

"About everything." The boy's eyes burned.

He might make a good investigator one day, Len thought.

Of course, he was reluctant to distract himself from his work to chatter with a boy barely out of childhood.

But enlightening others—that was his duty. Besides… if anyone here could be reformed, it would be those not yet out of their third decade.

Len scratched his bald head, then smiled.

"Have you ever heard the word 'proletariat'?"