He checked in with both Kornel and Dayna every day for the first two sixdays. Finally—
“Ser Kaldwel, there’s nothing new to report, the same as I said yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. I’ll let you know when there’s any progress or a problem I don’t think we can solve. So, please go away and leave us alone.”
Mark knew Kornel was right. He steeled himself to check only twice a sixday; then for three sixdays, it was only once a sixday. On a rainy day, with his mood matching the weather, Mark walked into the work area he had rented for Kornel and Dayna. Both of the project members were waiting for him, Dayna with a wide smile and Kornel with a smirk. Mark’s heart rate quickened.
“I hope the way you look means there’s good news.”
“There is!” said Dayna, clapping her hands. “The many spinner works!”
“Well, sort of works,” said Kornel. “It works for a few minutes, then the threads bind on something, the thread breaks, it runs out of fibers to spin, or the spindles don’t spin at consistent rates.”
Mark’s hope sank. “Then how is it working?”
“Oh, those are just details,” said Kornel. “Dayna and I will work those out in a few days. Well, maybe a sixday. But it all looks good enough that I’ll begin preparing the extension components, so we can increase it to a four-spindle spinner. I might even go ahead and make enough parts to go to eight spindles as soon as we see four are working. I don’t think we should try to do more until we have more experience. If you need more thread than eight spindles at a time, you should look to hire more people, and I can build more machines.”
Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Kornel and Dayna sounded confident enough. He figured this was one major hurdle soon to be behind them. The loom was something else, as he found out.
“How about the speed loom? How’s that going?”
Dayna’s cheerful mood vanished, and she flushed and glared at Kornel. The young carpenter looked away but didn’t say anything.
“Kornel keeps telling me it’s not working because I’m not using the new loom correctly. As if he knows anything about weaving!”
“Kornel?” said Mark, his tone of voice indicating he expected an explanation.
“All right. Maybe I said things I shouldn’t have, but Sen Firman doesn’t want to hear anything I say. She wants to weave with exactly the same position and motions as she did before, and that’s not possible.”
Mark sighed. He wanted to shake both of them hard, but he took a breath instead.
“Let’s look at the latest version, and each of you tell me what you see are the problems.”
Both Dayna and Kornel opened their mouths, but before they could rush to tell their sides, Mark cut them off. “Stop! You’ll both get a chance to talk, one at a time.”
In the next hour, the three of them clarified, at least in Mark’s opinion, that Kornel was not taking into consideration that the weaver had to sit for hours at a time performing repetitive motions. Mark didn’t try to explain ergonomics or repetitive-motion injuries but got a grudging acknowledgment that weaver comfort was a critical factor. For Dayna, he got her to acknowledge, as grudgingly as Kornel’s acquiescence, that she had to modify her position and motions for the new loom. Both workers ended up unsatisfied but seemingly resigned to working together better than before.
The third pillar of Mark’s textile plan, in addition to the many spinner and the speed loom, was a large enough supply of fibers. Of the three pillars, the last was the first to be solved. Although the territory within a hundred miles of Tregallon was not a major weaving area, it was a major producer of fibers: “wool” from krykors, “flax” from the flurox plant, and fibers from the risolum plant that were similar to hemp and used in rougher clothing, burlap-like sacks, rugs, curtains, and upholstery for higher-status families.
Mark was interested only in flurox and wool, and he had decided, after conferring with Dayna and several tradespeople in Tregallon, to focus initially on flurox.
There were no large growers or companies, as in the United States. Although fiber production was a major part of the Tregallon area economy, it came from hundreds of small farms. However, garnering commitments to produce all the fiber he needed came refreshingly easy. The individual farmers transported and sold processed fiber bundles to a small port seventy miles from Tregallon. A typical farmer made three or four trips a year with wagonloads of fiber bundles to the port to sell to traders from Kaledon and Brawsea—mainly the latter.
After talking about fiber prices with five farmers without revealing the purpose of his questions, he offered them slightly less than the farmers averaged from selling at the port. Although they forwent the possibility of higher prices, the certainty of Mark’s offer and not having to transport the fiber led most farmers to accept his offer with minimal bargaining—at least, after Mark walked away from two farmers who wanted to dicker beyond his tolerance level.
On the day that Kornel and Dayna proudly demonstrated a fully functional two-spindle many spinner, Mark changed the intended plan. He made a leap of confidence, or possibly his patience had worn too thin, and he ordered Kornel to go straight to the eight-spindle spinner. At least part of Mark’s decision derived from his worry that a warehouse would fill up with unused flurox fiber bundles. Yet Ulwyn had told him he could always transport and sell the fiber at the port if his plans fell apart. In that case, he would take only a small loss at worst. And who knew? If God was smiling on him, the price might even be higher.
The speed loom was finished to Dayna’s acceptance, if not total satisfaction, by the time the spinner was successful. Kornel and Dayna spun enough thread to keep the new loom busy for a sixday while he expanded the spinner to eight spindles.
It was a tense day for Mark when Dayna began the first serious weaving of a roll of cloth. Smaller tests had been successful, but the real test was whether the machine would work continuously for a whole day and how much faster it was than the traditional loom.
Dayna started slowly, checking the packing of threads every five to ten throws of the shuttle. The loom worked, but Mark barely controlled his impatience with the speed being even slower than Dayna’s old loom. Finally, he left, saying he had other business to attend to and would return later.
Six hours later, Mark couldn’t wait any longer and returned to find Dayna in a glowing mood.
“This is going to work just like you said it would, Mark. I’m already going faster than I can with my other loom, and I think within a day or so, I’ll be going perhaps four times as fast or more. Kornel also had an idea of how to do a faster beat up of the weft threads, and it works!”
She referred to needing to push each new weft thread firmly against the previously woven threads. Mark resolved to have Kornel show him the improvement in beating later. For the moment, his mind moved on to planning the next stages.
When Kornel finished the spinner expansion, problems arose almost immediately and centered on feeding eight simultaneous thread lines. Different flurox batches didn’t work the same with the spinner. Some batches of fiber contained enough particulate matter to jam the process at different points. Compounding the problem was finding the level of tension needed for different fiber batches.
After a sixday of little apparent progress, Mark left his other work and stayed with Kornel until they worked out the problems in three days. A month passed, and the cloth workforce expanded to ten weavers and supporting spinners. New workers trained on a dedicated set of machines, sometimes in shifts of six hours each. When Dayna and Holt declared them sufficiently competent, the newly trained moved to their own machines and joined the production effort. When Mark was satisfied there was nothing more he could contribute, he left bolt production to the two Firmans.
CHAPTER 12
BRAWSEA
Mark preferred to go earlier to Brawsea, the Frangel capital, but they had too much to do with selling safety pins and leaf springs in Tregallon and Kaledon and getting the mul
tiplex weaving project working.
Sales of safety pins in Kaledon had fallen off, as expected, as other makers flooded the market. Wiflow had already decreased production on pins for Kaledon and focused on reaching their goal for Brawsea. That there was still a good market for their pins in Kaledon was due to Argah selling them as “genuine Tregallon pins.” Mark didn’t know how long that piece of subterfuge would work.
Still, Mark’s share of the profits from pins and springs was about 200,000 copper/silver coins, or $200,000, as he translated into familiar monetary units. The total accounted for products sold and people placing preorders and paying half the price up front. Mark had been surprised by preorders coming from shops and traders who immediately saw the pins as a necessary product to have in stock. In addition, his ongoing share from springs and the arrangement with Kaledon smithies promised a steady stream of coin into the future, though at lower amounts.
Finally, it was Wiflow who asserted they needed to act.
“If we’re going to sell in Brawsea, we don’t dare wait any longer. We need to move as soon as we reach the planned number of pins and leaf springs.”
“What’s the count on pins?”
“Our original target was seven hundred thousand. We’ll pass that in two sixdays, but production of leaf springs is slowing the timetable down. The last time Stillum wrote, he said sales within Kaledon are still more than we projected, so storing springs for Brawsea hasn’t kept to schedule. I’m worried that if we wait for the leaf springs, the loss in pin sales will cost us more than if we go right away.”
Mark was torn. He didn’t want to lose the advantage of a blitz campaign in Brawsea dependent on being the only source of safety pins, but he had thought to arrange a similar deal with the Brawsea blacksmiths as he had with Kaledon. He now conceded that the long-term selling of springs in Brawsea needed to wait.
Then there was the next project just about to come online—faster cloth production.
“No matter what we do, there are advantages and disadvantages,” said Mark. “Here’s what I think we’ll do. We’ll send a rider to Stillum with the message to continue production of springs for Kaledon and send all they have for Brawsea there by ship.
“Wiflow, you continue pin production here in Tregallon for another two sixdays, then we’ll load everything on wagons and head for Brawsea. We should arrive there by the time the ship arrives, which should give us time to prepare for pin sales and meet with the local blacksmiths.”
“Ulwyn tells me he was teaching you some Suvalu,” said Wiflow. “I probably know more than he does. I lived a few years in Kaledon near the harbor, where many shopkeepers and tradespeople speak the language. If your ideas are to work, you’ll need to speak the trade language. On the way to Brawsea, I can work with you to add any words and phrases you didn’t learn from Ulwyn.”
Wiflow gripped Mark’s forearm. “Remember, Mark, the situation is different in Brawsea. The guilds are much more powerful than in Kaledon, and we won’t initially have a contact blacksmith to help. We may need to go straight to the blacksmith guild leaders and hope they’re agreeable to working out an arrangement like we have in Kaledon. I don’t have enough experience with the Brawsea guilds to know how it will go, but things I’ve heard should make us cautious in our assumptions.”
“What we don’t know, we don’t know,” said Mark, sighing. “The trip to Brawsea has three objectives, and the leaf springs are the least important. First priority is selling all the pins. We need to recover the coin we’ve put into amassing the pins, and it’ll be our only chance for maximum sales there, as it was in Kaledon, before others jump into the market.
“As for leaf springs, yes, we want to sell those already made and see if we can make a similar arrangement for long-term sales, as we did in Kaledon.
“And third is the project you’re not directly involved in—the weaving of cloth. I’m going to need some time to investigate how I should go about entering the cloth-making market—what the market is, the prices, issues with different guilds, possible export markets, clothing makers who would buy my cloth, and . . . oh, I don’t know . . . probably a dozen other issues I haven’t thought of yet.”
Two sixdays later, a six-wagon convoy left Tregallon heading east along the main road that paralleled the coast toward Brawsea. Each wagon was pulled by an extra pair of horses, more than usual, in order to make the 400-mile trip faster and put less strain on the horses from the heavy cargo. They tied two riding horses behind the wagon Mark rode in. The wagons contained 782,500 safety pins—approximately, according to Mark, although Wiflow insisted he had an exact count. The wagons also carried 200 leaf springs made by all the blacksmiths in Tregallon. Hamston had initially resisted Mark’s suggestion to bring in the other two blacksmiths, but Mark argued it was a chance to ameliorate future relations among the three Tregallon smithies.
Also in the wagons were extra wheels, tools to repair wagons, food, tents, personal possessions of the twelve men, and sample textiles. In addition, the wagons themselves were outfitted with springs.
In the last three sixdays before leaving, Kornel and Dayna had the many spinner, the speed-loom machines, and the staff working hard. The weavers had spent long hours weaving enough cloth for a set of sample bolts. Half were the color of the original fibers, while the other half were solid colors using the only three dyes easily available in Tregallon: green from the dried bodies of an insect analog, yellow from a wildflower, and red from an ash soda extract of a mineral deposit common in the Tregallon area. The three dyes fixed permanently on fibers. A clothing maker told Mark that dyes for other colors were available but needed different ingredients to fix the dye on the fibers or the cloth.
After looking at the colors of the first set of shirts, Mark wasn’t impressed by the subdued shades and tones. He had seen clothing of different colors, but most common people, including the Hoveys, wore clothing of the natural color of the fibers.
He had stood near what he considered a puke-yellow bolt, thinking, It’s examples like this that make me wish I were a chemist. There must be more varied and brighter colors than these. Of course, if I were a chemist, I might not know how to make steam engines, much less internal combustion ones or aircraft.
In the first section of the trip, they reached a spot in the road that looked familiar to Mark. As they approached Derwun Bay, Ulwyn called out from the next wagon.
“Mark. This is where I found you. Right here is the path to the beach.”
Mark told his driver to stop, and he walked down the winding, narrow track to the water, followed by Ulwyn. He stared up and down the beach and remembered waking, the waves, crawling to shade, then fighting through growth until he stumbled onto the road.
This is where the damn aliens dumped me, thought Mark. I wonder how they did it. A craft of some sort . . . small enough not to be noticed, unless it had cloaking of some kind, like the main ship must have to avoid being seen flying around Earth? Maybe a transporter like on Star Trek? He laughed. Who knows? But the beach is hidden enough from the road that they could have dropped me off and left within moments.
“And you still don’t remember how you got here?” asked Ulwyn.
“No. Nothing more than what I already told you. It’s almost as much a mystery to me as it must sound to you.”
Mark’s curiosity satisfied, they returned to the wagons. Twenty minutes later, they left sight of the bay and climbed a series of low forested hills until dark. For the next two days, they passed through fertile valleys separated by bare rocky ridges that he estimated ranged from two to five hundred feet high. Then the terrain changed to rolling grassland with farms, ranches, and more people as they traveled farther east.
It took two complete sixdays to reach the crest of a ridgeline west of Brawsea, where they could see the city and the distant ocean. They still had ten miles to go, but the stiff onshore breeze resulted in clear air, a rarity Mark hadn’t appreciated until he experienced the oppressive odors the capital was
famous for.
“Yep, there it is,” said Ulwyn. Mark had given the elderly trader a small share in the weaving business. He figured Ulwyn’s experience would be useful.
“The view from this ridge hasn’t changed since last time I was here, though I’m sure there are changes in the city. I suggest we stop early today. If I remember correctly, a few inns in outlying towns along this route are large enough to provide rooms and stables for us. By stopping early, we should still find space available that might be taken by sundown.”
Ulwyn’s coming had been argued against by Gwanel, who cited his age and what sounded to Mark like serious arthritis. However, she acquiesced when her husband claimed it was likely his last chance to see Brawsea, and the convoy meant he wouldn’t be driving a wagon.
His other excuse was to help Mark make useful contacts. Even though it had been five years since his last trip to Brawsea, Ulwyn thought tradesmen he’d dealt with previously might remember him. They could provide useful insight on whom to see about Mark’s textile project and who could advise him on getting space in the Brawsea main market, an eighty-acre square in the center of the city. Every Godsday, the Great Plaza of Brawsea filled with stalls of goods, crafts, animals, and foods. Ulwyn had made it a point to experience the market every time he visited, and he had fond memories.
“The problem you have, Mark, is that this isn’t like Kaledon. Here, there aren’t simply empty spaces you and Wiflow can set up on. Every possible space for a stall is already assigned. Some families have used the same space for generations. Your only option is to find a space holder willing to let you use his space if you pay him enough.”
Passages Page 14
