Thaumaturge

by Terry Mancour

  From the Scrolls of Brother Bryte the Wiser

  Chapter Eight

  The Ten-Penny Rebellion

  “Who are those people?” I asked Gareth, as we crossed the market toward his office to discuss the grand resettlement planned for after the equinox. A caravan of horsemen leading six well-laden wagons had arrived a few moments before, bearing an odd standard: a golden shuttlecock crossed with a golden key, on a sable field. Many of the principals of the caravan wore tabards with the same device, and it was emblazoned on the shields of the accompanying guards.

  “The Wilderlands League,” Gareth grumbled. “They’re a local merchant guild. They run caravans from here all the way to the Westlands, including Vorone and Tudry, and they still have a lot of contracts in Gilmora left over from when Alshar owned it,” he explained. “They aren’t nearly as large or as wealthy and important as the Cotton League, for instance,” he said, naming the powerful mercantile company that controlled about forty percent of the cotton trade in Gilmora. “But they try. Their stock is wool and wine. They trade wool from the Wilderlands for cotton from Gilmora, and then trade that for wine from Enultramar to sell to . . . well, everyone,” he shrugged.

  “Why so glum, then?” I asked. Usually Gareth shared Banamor’s eagerness for trade, so his manner seemed unusual.

  “Because they’re a titanic pain the arse,” Gareth said, frustrated. “Astyral warned me about them – he had some trouble with them, after he took control of Tudry. They showed up to collect their expected cargo of wool from Tudry. There wasn’t much available, with all the chaos, but they were insistent. When they didn’t get all they were pledged, they demanded he make up the difference.”

  “And he let them live?” I asked, surprised.

  “He’s not Azar; Astyral is a civilized man. No, he politely refused, and when they pressed, he suspended their charter for Tudry for the duration of the war. That put them on equal footing with all the other merchants in town for what little wool was for sale, so they closed their manufactory there. Astyral didn’t like that, so he spared them the expense of transporting their wine.”

  “Yes, that sounds more like him,” I chuckled. “So, what are they doing here?”

  “They heard we were buying sheep in Vorone,” Gareth chuckled. “A lot of sheep. I heard through the Mirror that they were sending a caravan north on an exploratory expedition to determine whether to establish a new manufactory here. And secure long-term mercantile rights for their League,” he added.

  “What do those entail?” I asked, curious.

  “Oh, the League does its best to secure a complete monopoly over all wool sales in their market towns. And all wine sales. Then they move on to other commodities. They try to establish iron-clad charters ensuring preferred placement in the market, low rates and rents, exemption from tolls, all sorts of things. Once they have a decided advantage over the local merchants, they begin manipulating prices. And acquiring their competitors.

  “This particular caravan is loaded with presents to help do that,” he continued, as he led me inside his office. “I . . . acquired a partial manifest,” he said, conspiratorially. “A trick Banamor showed me. It’s all stock they think we need to get a wool industry going here. They plan to sell it cheap, dump a lot of low-end Gilmoran table wine at low prices on the market, and start wooing local officials for trade concessions.”

  “We’re local officials,” I pointed out.

  “Then prepare to be bribed,” he suggested, unimpressed. “But they’re going to be very disappointed. Much of their stock are items like sheep shears,” he snickered.

  “I guess they haven’t heard about the magical collars,” I nodded. In Sevendor, we developed simple enchanted leather collars that caused all the wool on a sheep to fall off painlessly with a command. It took far less time and effort than wrestling with a cantankerous ewe and a sharp pair of shears.

  “They’ll learn. They’ll also learn that the local taverns are already well-stocked with good Alshari vintages that make their Gilmoran dreck taste like bathwater,” he dismissed. “But that is concerning, as well. If they look too closely at what we have here, and start asking questions about our stock . . .”

  The Wizard’s Mercantile had ensure that a wide selection of wines fresh from the docks of Enultramar made it into the weekly shipments via the hoxter network. That kept rich snobs like Astyral and Thinradel happy, and made Vanador Town a little more pleasant to live in. I enjoyed it, myself.

  “We should have Rael send a few caravans up from Vorone, just to confuse the issue,” I agreed. “But what could they possibly do? Complain to the Count?” I snickered.

  “They can complain to the King’s Exchequer about how we’re flagrantly avoiding the rightful duties on that wine . . . and a hundred other commodities. That could be trouble,” he pointed out.

  “That could be,” I agreed. I paused in thought and continued sipping the delicious Alshari red I was enjoying for a tithe of what it would have cost transported overland. “Perhaps we’re thinking about this the wrong way. They are here to add a potentially lucrative town to their League. What if we added their League to us?”

  “What do you mean?” Gareth asked, confused.

  “I mean, what if instead of them wringing concessions out of us, what if we infiltrated and took control of their network? Especially if they have a presence in Gilmora?”

  “Why do we want a presence in Gilmora? Isn’t Astyral already there?”

  “Yes, in Losara, and he’s going to be invaluable,” I conceded. “But he’s in northern Gilmora, and this League will have a much wider penetration into the south, where the richest cotton lands are.”

  “How is that helpful?”

  “Look at it this way,” I said, recalling that despite his training, Gareth wasn’t a warmage. “There’s going to be a power struggle eventually between the Prince and the Duke of Alshar. It may even come to civil war. Should that happen, Gilmora will be the fulcrum upon which that war will turn.”

  “War? When?” Gareth asked, mystified.

  “That one? Within a decade,” I predicted. “Gilmora and its wealth of cotton is a prize worth fighting over. That’s why Castal and Alshar fought over it for so long. Tavard proved that he can’t lead an invasion of Alshar. I’m not about to let him take the Wilderlands or the Magelaw, and he has little interest in either. But Gilmora is worth hanging on to. And Anguin wants it back.”

  “So we want more of a presence there,” he nodded, following my reasoning.

  “We want to be positioned to take advantage of any regional instability,” I amended. “Quietly. Outside of the Arcane Orders and the magelands. This Wilderlands League might have the positions we need to establish ourselves elsewhere. It would be cheaper to take them over than it would to establish bases of our own,” I reasoned.

  “I suppose it would,” he agreed, nodding. “That’s the sort of thing Banamor would suggest. And I suppose having a mundane mercantile league as cover for our other activities could be helpful. It would certainly confuse matters when it comes to taxation and such.” He sighed. “All right, I see your point. So, what do you want me to do?”

  “Let them bribe you. But don’t make it easy for them. Point out that they don’t have much to offer Vanador. We don’t need much wine, and the locals have a limited desire for cotton,” I suggested. While the material was favored amongst the Wilderlord aristocracy, there weren’t many of those left in the Magelaw. Many of the domains in the Wilderlaw grew their own, albeit inferior, cotton, or a decent quality of flax for linen. “I think we need to make it known that If they want our business, they’ll have to work for it.”

  “So what do we want?” he asked. “Something that they can provide that we can’t make for ourselves?”

  “Looms,” I answered, after considering the matter. “They’re right about the profit in Magelaw wool, from what I understand. The sheep here are favored, at market. But we need cloth now. Selling wool only to re-purchase
it at greater price after it has been shipped to Gilmora and back to get spun and woven just doesn’t seem very wise. If they can deliver sufficient horizontal looms to Vanador to begin some industry, we might feel well-disposed enough to grant them freedom of passage through the Magelaw. As a token of good faith,” I added.

  “I see your point,” Gareth nodded. “That would employ many, as most weavers purchase their thread from cottagers, of which we have an abundance.”

  “That spreads out the commerce to many more folk than other industries,” I agreed. “I hope to see the strength of Vanador in its iron industry, but I’ve seen the profits the Fistan Abbey monks make on wool. The vales here are far better suited for sheep than the Riverlands. The colder clime portends thicker wool. Better to fetch a higher price for it as cloth, employing dozens, than just a few shepherds.”

  “So, looms,” Gareth nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Let’s see how large a bribe they offer you, and then we’ll see. But our goal is to infiltrate their league with ours. So we need to start with a representative in their councils. That will take some time and persuasion, but if we’re persistent – and we cheat – we can get enough people within their operations to take advantage of their position. At least, that’s the plan.”

  Gareth shrugged. “If Banamor has taught me anything, it’s that merchants are easy to deal with. Give them a chance to make money and they’re your best friend.”

  “Right now, friends are more important than money. Talk to them. Keep me apprised of their negotiations. But stop short of agreeing to anything serious until they talk to me. That way, I can be the asshole and hold out the serious negotiations. All you have to do is stand there and get bribed.”

  “The things I do in the name of civil administration . . .” he said, grinning and shaking his head.

  “Politics and commerce are essential parts of civil administration. As are bribes. A skilled governor has to be adept at it all.”

  That wasn’t the only business we had that day. The purpose of our meeting wasn’t trade, it was to accelerate the planned resettlement of the plateau and the eastern vales of the Wildwater. And for that Gareth had a detailed vision. As usual, he’d combined the best of old traditions with the potential for innovation and had arrived at a reasonably adaptable system to turn more freed slaves into well-organized, prosperous peasants.

  The seeds of the project had been sown the previous autumn, when Gareth had sent foraging gangs into the woods and abandoned fields to clear them for fuel, in preparation for winter. Those gangs had been overseen by some of Gareth’s staff, who were observant for natural leaders among the freedmen to cultivate into future yeomen and reeves. These men were taken aside and convinced to recruit others among their fellows, men who they felt would work well together. That core of leadership became the basis for the formation of the Hundreds.

  The Hundreds that Gareth sent out into the freshly-cleared lands around the Anvil after the Equinox holiday of Ishi’s Day was also a means of reducing risk in the marginal territory, he explained to me. He’d given the matter much thought, and investigated life before the invasion. A single isolated freeholder family could starve or prosper, year to year, depending on the whims of the weather and the gods. If the crops failed, the entire family was stricken. Mostly, they’d scraped by in hard times, borrowing from friends or distant family until things improved and making up the deficits in their diets with hunting and fishing.

  The Hundreds system gave everyone a lot more security, Gareth insisted. For one thing, each Hundred was meticulously constructed in a fairly democratic fashion, not dependent upon family or feudal ties. Every Hundred was also a legal entity bearing a charter from the baroness. They were highly interdependent. Each group was not only legally and financially responsible for its members, they also operated as a means of sharing the risky business of agriculture.

  One family might starve or prosper, but on average a hundred families would be able to make up the deficit with surplus from elsewhere and keep anyone in the group from actually starving. In addition to the common fields, each family in the Hundred was rented a parcel between twenty-five and thirty acres, with the first two years’ rent in abeyance. That provided plenty of space to develop vegetable gardens, private pastures, chicken yards, meadows, and fields for useful crops like flax or hemp. The communal nature of the Hundred allowed peasants to pool labor and materials on important jobs and overcome any one family’s tragedy.

  By the terms of their baronial charter, a tithe of the harvest beyond seed was put aside against such disasters, and the rest was distributed more or less equally. Eventually, it was hoped, the surplus could be sold at market by the Hundred with the profits re-invested in the community. The wording was hazy about that, but that was the idea.

  Gareth was very specific about the nature of the new colonies in their written charters: the agreement only included communal obligations about labor related to grain, not horticulture or stock. That allowed the more enterprising among the peasants to improve their holdings over time through breeding and cultivating, without indulging in the kind of unseemly competition for the best grain lands that plagued the Riverlands fiefs.

  They were further helped by the elimination of the need for a plowshare, harness or team. Usually, such expensive but vital investments were held by a village or manor in common. Stock used to pull the plow was sometimes owned by one man and rented to everyone else at a steep premium.

  But with the agricultural wands we were using in abundance, that expense was eliminated by a pasty-faced apprentice waving a stick in the air until the fields were thoroughly churned and neatly furrowed. Eliminating the brutal labor involved in dragging an iron plow through the rocky ground, even with the help of a team of oxen, was a boon to all.

  Without those costs in coin or sweat, the administration of the farmlands no longer revolved around the push to get the fields planted in a timely manner, desperately fighting for their time with the communal plow while their neighbors were already sowing.

  In Vanador, everyone planted and harrowed at the same time. There was still plenty of work involved in removing the larger stones, and tending to the edges of their new plots. Magic did not stop the weeds creeping in as quickly as the barley and wheat sprouted. But while the Riverlands peasants were still struggling from dawn until dusk behind a stubborn plow, the Vanadori freedmen were working to clear their home garden plots and dig the foundations to their new homes.

  There was a tremendous amount of work involved in tearing working farms out of the fallow Wilderlands. But after the suffering and loss the freedmen had endured at the hands of the gurvani, the promise of a new beginning and a better life made them bend to their tasks with purpose. They were not working at the behest of a lord, or under the lash of an overseer. They were building their new lives with their bare hands and scant help.

  The Hundreds were an improvement in another way: allowing a collective to attack the complex job of agriculture together allowed them to improve their yields far beyond what they could have managed on individual smallholdings too distant from each other to offer support at plowing and harvest times. The unmarred state of the land and its ownership allowed fields to be tended without breaking them down into strips. That kept the Vanadori peasants trudging between strips far less than their Riverlands counterparts.

  Not all of them prospered equally. Nor did those new estates led by lords necessarily do better than those administered by elected peasant reeves, despite the better equipage the noble-run estates usually boasted. Part of the problem was the struggle some of the Gilmoran freedmen had with the unfamiliar social organization – most holdings in the south were comprised of villeins or outright serfs, men so indebted to the manors they worked that their very freedom was forfeit.

  That wasn’t the case in the Magelaw. If a Hundred accepted the leadership of a Magelord or Wilderlord (usually due to lucrative bribes of stock and tools) it was a voluntary agreement between free
men and the lord. The usual obligations for work service and petty fines and fees that accumulated over generations weren’t there – I’d abolished them when I declared all the rescued slaves to be freedmen. If a man indentured himself to a lord after that, it was his business . . . but there was simply too much naked opportunity in the Magelaw. The economic desperation that led to such indentures wasn’t there. Everyone was equally poor, coming out of the camps.

  Alas, some of the nobles who attempted to reassert their traditional prerogatives over the Hundreds simply did not know how to contend with such a thing. The peasants were a servile class, mere resources to be used and exploited by ancient right. In the marginal lands in the Magelaw, when they tried to assert more control than their new peasants were comfortable with, they found themselves lacking labor at critical times.

  Part of the problem was that labor was, thanks to me, actually worth something at that moment. I’d pumped so much coin into the economy that Gilmoran peasants who’d never had more than a few coppers in their entire lives were now making four pennies a day as day-laborers, and far more if they had specialized skills. Experienced thatchers were commanding ten pennies a day, for instance, and the makeshift lumberyards that sprung up across the plateau were paying seven pennies a day for sawyers and carpenters.

  Certainly, there were plenty of willing hands to do the labor, but those hands demanded coin, and that was a situation that the nobility was unaccustomed to. When a peasant artisan has a choice between working for the manor lord for three pennies or working for his neighbor for ten, only an idiot would choose the manor.

  But that didn’t keep them from trying. Many expatriate nobles took the risk to establish new holdings in the Magelaw, and we welcomed them. About the time that Gareth and I were discussing the matter, on fellow in particular who seemed to epitomize this mis-placed sense of position had arrived in town just behind the Wilderlands League’s caravan. He was to become the example that Gareth and the rest of us used for How Not To Manage A Magelaw Domain.