Chapter 5: Chapter 5: A Simple Task

I had decided to try and spend my time productively while Jerimiah wrangled the farmers into agreeing with our plan. I sought out the surveyor who had drawn the original map and asked him for a copy of my own – which he gave me in return for a promise of a favour in the near future. Mine was slightly more refined that the one Jerimiah had, but I had little need of drawn detail when the King’s Eye was capable of turning into a map that would make a video game blush from envy.

My investigation into the state of the caravan was interrupted by a firm hand on my shoulder. I turned and came face to face with Jerimiah. “Hey, I was looking for you.”

“How did it go?”

“I managed to get them on board, after a lot of arguing. But now they’re all up in arms about how to fairly cut the land up.”

I glanced back at the cart I had just visited, “I just talked with the surveyor, can’t they do it?”

“Not at the moment they can’t. Too busy working on the charts.”

I looked down and saw a bag of wooden stakes in one hand and a mallet in the other, “Let me guess – they’ve asked you to go measure them out?”

“They did. But short of counting how many steps it takes from one end of the field to the other…”

“You’ll be there all day if you do it like that.”

He shrugged, “Don’t see any better way to do it.”

“You want me to help?”

Jerimiah nodded, “You seem educated, and that coat…”

The implications in his words were clear. I understood his trepidation, I don’t know why Celeste insisted that I try to fit in, before adorning me with a silken coat that probably cost more than your average house. “Don’t ask me about the coat. Come on, let’s go get this done with before they start throwing punches.”

I followed Jerimiah out of the forest and to the fertile land. It was a twenty-minute walk. My legs were screaming in frustration by the end of it. Jerimiah dumped the stakes and the mallet down onto the ground and slicked back his messy brown hair. “Now… where do we start?” I pulled the map from my pocket and unfurled it.

“Ideally we could measure it using some tools and just divide it by twenty, but since that’s out of the question – we just have to do it by eye.”

Magical, godly eye. Obviously.

I summoned my magic map and zoomed in until the four edges of the fertile land were in clear view. I marked a corridor down the middle for a future road to be built. I summoned the ghostly farms and spread them out across what remained. Amazingly as I placed them down on the ground, they appeared in the real world in much the same manner. Timber frames and rustic looking windows outline in a glowing gold.

But more importantly, the exact dimensions of each plot were visible on the ground below us. I grabbed the bag and the mallet and slammed the first one into the dirt where the edge of the farm hovered slightly above the ground. Jerimiah kept his silence as I walked across and began to hammer each one down in sequence. After the first dozen, and meandering between some of the pegs to try and see if they were even, he became content to let me handle the measurements.

An hour later and we were only half done. I had underestimated the size of the land that we were trying to cover. “I was going to ask you back at the camp, but why the eyepatch? You’re not some kinda’ pirate, are you?”

“Pirate? I’ve never been on a ship in my life.” He hadn’t noticed the difference in colour between my two eyes somehow. Perhaps it wasn’t the type of observation that he’d make. I decided to put the truth out there before it became too much of a burden, “I have a special eye, see?” I pointed to the wheat coloured orb with my finger, “And when it’s not covered, it blinds me with a bunch of crap I don’t want to see all the time.”

“…That’s how you knew where all the resources were!” he concluded.

“Keep it on the down-low, please. I know some people are superstitious about that kind of thing.”

Whack! I planted another stake into the ground.

“Okay. I’ll give you that much. So these plots…”

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“Accurate to the foot.”

“If I knew you could do that, I would have asked you in the first place.”

“I didn’t know I could do this either. You learn something new every day.”

Jeremiah scratched his beard, “I feel kinda’ bad about knowing that now.”

“Pay me back with a secret of your own then.”

Jerimiah took a moment to conjure a random factoid about his life, “Uh. There ain’t much to tell. I used to run a bakery back in Red Cliffs.”

“A bakery, sounds like good work.”

“It was. I took a lot of pride in it. Best bread in the city is what I’d tell ‘em.”

“But you aren’t in this convoy for fun.”

“No sir. I ain’t. Those Lomarac bastards decided they wanted our patch of land for themselves and forced us out. For all their talk about being too good for the rest of us, they’re a dirty bunch when you have something that they want.” The name tickled the recognition centre in the back of my mind. The Lomarac family was a big one, with branches that stretched out and touched several major cities and courts. They were one of the main groups to note in the notebook that Celeste had given me.

He entered an uncomfortable and irritable silence for the rest of the hour, the memory leaving a bad taste in his mouth. I was glad to see the end of the task. My back was aching something fierce. I had planted all of the stakes perfectly, cutting out twenty equally sized plots, plus space for a road to run through the middle in the future. I stood up and groaned as my body protested.

“Happy that’s done,” I muttered. I looked out over the field and admired my work for just a moment longer. I pulled out the map once more and dismissed the ghostly buildings. In the future this would be a bustling farm community. For now it was unclaimed land.

Jerimiah interjected with an intrusive thought, “I don’t know if I can trust you just yet, but you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. Thank you kindly for doing all this.”

“Don’t worry about it. Hopefully the farmers will be happy.”

We endured the long walk back to the camp together. I followed Jerimiah to the huddle of farmers who had gathered around one of the fires, “Folks, we’ve finished. There are twenty pieces of good farming land out there with your names on ‘em.” This elicited a cheer from the group, who were excited to get back to work. “Got to give a hand to my new friend here, he did some good work measuring them for you all. So make the most of it.”

I received a good deal of firm handshakes and verbal ‘thank yous’ from the group. Eager to lay a claim on each plot, they quickly shuffled out of the camp and headed down the way we came. I turned back to Jeremiah, “How many people will that feed?”

“Back in the old city, not enough – but now that we’re living somewhere a little more remote, it’ll be enough for everyone in the convoy and then some. The only problem is money.”

“Money?”

“All we have is what we brought with us, and for some folks that isn’t much at all.”

I wasn’t expecting them to give away the fruits of their labour for free. That would make things too easy. But it did pose an important question. How would the town’s economy develop when we only had such a limited amount of coinage? Would one person hoard as much as possible? Did everyone have what they needed to live here? And what would we do if we needed to make more? “Can I have a look at one of these coins?”

Jeremiah obliged by digging into the pouch attached to his belt, tossing me a small bronze coloured coin. There was enough detail contained within the design that they would not be easy to imitate. Given the state of the world that I was in, the coins themselves probably had some innate value thanks to the metal they were made from. If we could find some precious metal of our own, a stopgap solution would suffice until outside trade started for real.

The only thing that needed to happen for any ‘currency’ to have value was for everyone to agree to it. That would be a radical concept to a group of people who were used to things working a certain way though. I gave Jeremiah back the coin and thanked him. It was getting too dark for any more significant work to take place, so I said my goodbyes and headed back to my temporary lodgings at Emmerich’s fire.

There was a lot to think about.

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