Chương 340: 336. Progress Check - I

"We started sowing again this morning," Pinoto said as they reached him.

"We just can't afford to wait too long with the weather already getting warmer. Anyway, if you provide us enough seeds, we'll still be able to finish sowing this whole stretch within a week. The weather should hold until then, I think." The foreman pointed into the distance, where a small group of people were hard at work, with the huge log-mover visible next to them.

"The loggers have kept clearing more ground in the south while the sowing is still going on, just like you wanted, so the farms are growing for now, but we can still manage the sowing, I think."

"Whatever we can produce here will be helpful to us in the next winter," Kivamus said.

"I'll also try to get you more seed as soon as I can." Pinoto's gaze turned toward the distant rows, where men and women were working in pairs with the new seed drills.

"It's still hard to believe though..." he muttered.

"Barely thirty of us are sowing a field which should have needed more than a hundred men easily, if not even more. I'd never have imagined such a miraculous machine existed in this world if you hadn't made them here..." Kivamus smiled faintly.

"It's only a start. I'll keep improving them, so that the same number of people can sow an even larger area in the future. We are going to need all the grain we can produce in the coming years." The foreman nodded, half lost in thoughts.

"Well, I'd best check on the rest before they start to slack off." He raised a hand in farewell and started walking off toward the other end of the field. Kivamus stayed a while, watching the steady rhythm of the farmers at work, before turning back. They entered the village again through the southeastern gate, passing under the sturdy wooden structure. He decided to visit Darora's workshop next - which was basically just a makeshift shed in the northwest of the village.

Their group walked next to the palisade walls of the manor, before they reached the northern areas. The longhouse blocks stood on the right side of the wide dirt road—their broad, square courtyards surrounded by a single story timber building. A thin plume of smoke was visible on the top of both of the blocks, indicating food being cooked in their kitchens.

However they were nearly vacant at the time, since all of the working age men and most of the women were out working: whether it was mining coal, trapping and hunting small game in nearby forests, clearing brush and hauling timber in the south with the help of the log mover, digging the trench outside the village walls or just helping out on the farms.

The few who remained—mainly the mothers with small children—were cooking lunch for the residents of these blocks, before the kids took them to those workers later, while a few elderly people were sitting next to the Bilona trees in the courtyards, keeping the youngest ones occupied with simple games, while their mothers cooked. From an open window of one longhouse came the soft murmur of Gorsazo's voice. The older children and the kids must be gathered there now, sitting on the wooden floor of the blocks.

He guessed that they must have already finished their morning shift of sawdust gathering, so they would study until midday before having lunch and going out again to gather more of it while carrying lunch for the others. Kivamus paused briefly to listen—the steady rhythm of words and laughter mixed with the faint scratching of charcoal on wooden boards—which gave him a lot of satisfaction and hope of a bright future for Tiranat, before he moved on.

While they walked, he noticed Duvas making furtive glances around them, like he was waiting for a quiet place to talk about something. Kivamus thought of prompting him to speak his mind, but then decided not to. It seemed like the matter might be sensitive, and this really wasn't the place for such a talk. Hopefully the majordomo would come around in a few days and speak about whatever he wanted to say.

As they continued walking, he decided to check on the progress of the trench work before heading to the carpenter's workshop. From the longhouse blocks, he walked north, then turned east until the northeastern gate came into view. Two guards stood there, leaning on their spears, who straightened and saluted him and the captain as soon as they saw them. One of them hurried to open the gate. He stepped outside along with others, and turned left, and found the air smelling of fresh earth and sweat.

A few dozen paces away, the sound of digging reached him—steady, rhythmic thuds mixed with the scrape of metal on soil. A small open stretch separated the trench from the wall to avoid weakening its foundation. Next to that, about two dozen men and women were hard at work. Most were shoveling dirt from the growing ditch, their movements constant but slow with fatigue from working under the midday sun. He knew lunch break couldn't come soon enough for them.

Some others were pushing heavy wheelbarrows, moving the loosened soil either toward the outer edge of the wall, where it was piled against the logs for extra reinforcement, or back through the gate to be used on the inner side. Kivamus paused near the edge, watching for a while. Duvas and the others stood next to him as well. The trench stretched parallel to the wall, about five feet deep and wide enough for two wagons to stand side by side, which was just around six meters.

In the sections already finished, rows of sharpened stakes jutted out of the mud like jagged teeth. A few off-duty guards sat nearby, cutting small but straight branches with machetes and shaving them to sharp points for later use. The foreman, Yeden, was standing near the diggers, calling out curt instructions and checking the depth of the trench with a wooden rod. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"How long will it take?" Kivamus asked.

"I spoke with Yeden yesterday," Duvas said.

"He thinks four to five weeks in total to complete the trenches around the village at the current pace." Kivamus nodded slowly.

"Longer than I expected," he said.

"But this is the best we can do unless we pull more workers from the other jobs." He stood another moment, watching the diggers work in the damp soil under the warm light of the sun, before he turned back toward the gate. The guards opened it again for him, and he stepped inside the walls, brushing dirt from his boots for a moment, before giving up. From there, he took the road running parallel to the walls to walk westwards. Soon, he saw an older villager posted at the middle watchtower of the northern wall.

Only the head of the man was visible from here on the ground, which meant he must be sitting on the hidden compartment which they had made to hide their new weapons from the knight, but he looked alert and was gazing into the distance, ready to alert the manor with the horn if any danger was seen. One of the two crossbows allotted to each watchtower must also be kept next to him, while the other one had been given to the newest hunting groups who had left yesterday after the raid.

He noticed the uncovered ladder which the watchmen used to climb up the tower, and remembered how easy it had been for a single archer outside the walls to pin Hyola up there. He had been thinking about providing it some cover by using planks nailed on the outer side as a shield from any arrows so the guards could climb up and down the tower without any risk.

However, it would need a lot of planks to cover all the towers, and the valuable time of the carpenters, which meant the task had been postponed after that previous raid. But it had to be done soon. Thankfully, Torhan had decided to siege the village instead of attacking it directly-including with archers-so that hadn't been a problem in this raid, but it couldn't be left as a weak point of the watchtowers for too long.

For now, the older men only had to pull duty on the watchtowers during the daytime, while the female guards would take over the duty again in the evenings, both for the early night shift lasting from four bells of the temple till midnight, as well as for the late night shift starting from the midnight till eight bells of the temple were rung in the morning. This only allowed a single set of eyes on each tower, which wasn't ideal, but it was the best they could do to send hunting groups out regularly.

The three hunting groups who had returned yesterday would only be given a day of rest in the village, before they were sent again tomorrow morning to bring more meat, this time with the help of a single crossbow with each group. He kept walking to the west with the others and before long, he saw the carpenter's shed located on a stretch of open ground some distance away from the palisade walls.

It was little more than a wide wooden roof set on posts, with a makeshift wall made of leftover planks on one side, but the various workbenches around the place were crowded with hammers, chisels, saws, planes and other woodworking tools. A few wooden rulers were also kept in many places for easy measurement, with both the metric measurement - which was used commonly by the craftsmen these days - as well as the older one marked on them for reference.

Several men and a woman were working on one thing or another at the moment, their tools moving in a hypnotic rhythm. Noticing everyone working normally, for the first time in weeks, he felt the village moving again, step by step, toward something that looked like peace. Darora looked up from one of the benches when he noticed their group and jogged over, dusting off wooden shavings from his hands.

"Milord."

"How's the work going?" Kivamus asked.

"On the scorpion?"

"Better than expected," Darora said, scratching his cropped black hair before he led Kivamus and the others into the shed.

"Taniok couldn't get to the triphammer site with all the bandit trouble, but I haven't missed even a single hour of daylight to work more on this project, since I didn't need to leave the village like him. There's a lot of work to do." The smell of fresh fedarus wood hung thick in the shed. On one wall, Kivamus's blueprint of the scorpion was pinned flat—a set of clean lines and careful angles.

On a table below it lay a collection of many carved wooden parts in different shapes and sizes, sanded smooth and ready for fitting. He picked one up and turned it in his hands, looking at what would become the trigger for the new weapon in the future. From the sharp angles along with the smooth curves, it was clear that the craftsmanship involved to make it was no less than top-notch.

"You've done good work here," Kivamus praised the young carpenter. Darora's grin was quick and proud.

"First time I'm building something like this, so I want it done right. I've settled all the measurements already. Once I've made a full set of all the parts so I can get a good idea of what can go wrong, I'll start training one of the apprentices to help in it after telling them about it. That should speed things up." Kivamus nodded.

"Good. We'll need more men to work on it if we're to make all six of them soon." Kivamus looked around the shed again, his gaze moving over the four others working nearby—three men and a woman—each bent over their own tasks. The air was filled with the sounds of steady work: the rhythmic rasp of a saw, the thud of a hammer, the sharp tap of a chisel, the creak of clamps being tightened. Sawdust and wood shavings littered the floor in soft curls.

"How are they coming along?" Kivamus asked, while gazing at the apprentices.