Chương 465: 459. Planning - I

Five days had passed since Trevalo had arrived in the village. At the moment, Kivamus was waiting for the majordomo and the captain to arrive so they could go for the testing of the rebuilt scorpion. The young merchant had returned to Cinran the very next morning after their meeting with six fully loaded wagons of coal, and as planned, eight guards led by Tesyb had gone with him.

From now on they would make that run every week, with around a three-day journey on each side and a day in between for loading and unloading. Here in Tiranat, most of the coal was being kept in a large dump in the northeast of the village. Only a small amount was stored here in the manor, in the two barns. That stock was for the manor's own use and as an emergency reserve. It kept the miners and other workers from needing to come in and out of the manor every day, and that was vital from a security perspective.

The fewer outsiders who regularly entered the manor grounds, the easier it was to manage security and to keep things like paper-making away from curious eyes. The small team marking out the wide roads through the village had nearly finished the northern half by now, which was all that mattered at the moment since the southern third was still taken up by vegetable patches.

The workers had laid out 10 meter wide roads with drains on both sides, and were now in the slow part of the work, flattening the ground so gravel could be spread later. That meant a lot of new 25 meter blocks had already been marked out in the north, with a few of them combined where he intended to put up larger buildings in the future. The summer sun kept getting worse with each passing day.

Kivamus had started avoiding it where he could, except in the mornings when he joined the guards for a run and some light training. Still, one worksite or another needed his presence almost every day. Workers liked seeing that their baron had come himself to inspect the progress, and he knew that mattered for morale. He only wished there were some way to make those daytime visits under the hot summer sun a little less miserable. A glass of chilled water would have been enough.

Even a can of cold beer from Earth would have felt like luxury here. Instead, all he had was shade and patience. He was still thinking about a primitive solution which could be implemented here this summer, but that would have to wait until the blueprint for the tenement block was finished. He was in the last stages of that design now. Another day or two would be enough to check everything properly and hand it over to the construction workers—not that any of the three construction teams were free yet.

The first team, led by Taniok, had left with a dozen workers and even more guards for the encampment site in the eastern hills around a week ago. The wagons had returned yesterday with word that there had been no major trouble so far and that the work was progressing smoothly. The guards there had been helping dig the trench for the palisade wall, while the construction workers had been clearing trees and leveling the ground.

Within a few more days they were expected to begin digging the foundations for the dormitory and the losuvil processing hall. This morning the three wagons had gone back there with a fresh load of timber, more food, and barrels of water. They still had to bring water from the village because the well at the site had not been dug yet. The second team was busy with the barracks east of the manor. They had just finished digging the foundation for the first one.

It was nearly evening by now, but the timber was already stacked and ready, so starting tomorrow the workers would begin setting the posts and raising the walls. A few of them would move off to start digging the foundation for the second barracks while the first one was going up. They were two-story buildings, so even with all the material ready it would still take around two weeks to complete the first one, and another fifteen days after that to complete the second.

Still, the important part was that the work had started. The third team was in the final stretch of the fourth longhouse block. They were putting on the roof and fixing the bunks in place. A few more days should be enough for that.

Once it was done, the people who had been sleeping on the floors of the third block would be moved there and finally given proper bunks, and there would be no need of people having to sleep on the floors after that, since for the very first time in the village the housing construction was outpacing the arrival of refugees and migrants. After that, this third team would begin work on the first tenement block. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He had already chosen the site for it, one of the empty blocks marked out by the road workers in the center of the village. The first and second longhouse blocks formed the northeast part of a larger layout, while the third and fourth blocks formed the north side of it. The fifth and sixth would later form the northwest side. The empty space two blocks wide in the middle would become the northern edge of the new market square.

From there it would run farther south, with the market being two blocks wide for the whole stretch, until it reached and joined the old market square in the south. That would mean many of the shops and houses near the old market square would eventually have to be shifted or pulled down. But it would also create a new market space around ten times larger than the one the village currently had. At first glance that may look excessive.

But the old market square had only ever been enough for a village of just over 300 people. With the two-story longhouse blocks, even the northern third of the village had enough room for around a dozen such blocks, which meant enough housing for around 4, 000 people. If the same kind of development spread into the southern part later, that capacity would roughly double. He knew it would take a long time for Tiranat to reach that kind of population though. Or maybe not.

Once they began sending out more rumor-spreading teams and, later, more slave-liberating teams into the north, the flow of migrants would likely pick up again. Even so, he did not want the longhouse blocks to remain the main form of housing forever. They were useful, cheap, and quick to build, but they were still spartan.

That was why he intended to keep the longhouse blocks limited to the northern third of the village, while the center would increasingly fill with tenement blocks on either side of the new market square. They could house a smaller number of people than a long house block could in the same footprint on the ground, but these were far more comfortable and private, close enough to living in an apartment, but not quite.

The proper apartment blocks would come later in the southern third of the village once he had brick, better materials, and the ability to build at a higher standard. That was why he had left the southern section to vegetable patches and animal pens for now. The point was that in the coming future, the village was going to become much more crowded than it had ever been before, and that meant it needed room for people to buy, sell and trade all kinds of goods and services.

The large market square might look like a waste at first. For the next few months it would probably seem like an oversized open field with too few stalls around it. But as the population grew, more shops would be built there, and the place would slowly become the kind of market a proper town needed. And a town was exactly what the village of Tiranat was going to become. Maybe in a year. Maybe a little sooner if things kept moving like this. But it would get there for certain.

The wide gravel roads with drains on the side would serve the village well enough until he could replace them with something better in the future. He had learned by now that it was always worth planning farther ahead than people around him first thought necessary. That was why the roads were so wide and why the market square was being laid out so large. He only had to hope the village stayed safe long enough to grow strong enough to defend all of it properly.

The mercenaries were expected in just around a month and a half from now. So before they arrived, he really needed the village and the new industrial area to be in better shape defensively. One thing at a time, though. For now he had to take care of the housing problem. Despite containing rooms instead of bunks, the tenement block design would still make efficient use of space, since they would be three-story tall, but smaller. Four such blocks could fit inside the same area as one longhouse block.

That meant the first one should not take too long to build, even though it would be the first three-story building in the village. He knew the fourth longhouse block wouldn't stay empty for long, but it would solve the immediate housing problem for the moment. So he had decided that the third construction team would build four of these tenement blocks to begin with, in the same footprint of a single longhouse block, before they returned to make the fifth longhouse block.

He still needed to finish the blueprint and speak with the foreman about timing, but hopefully it would be built in reasonable time despite the added challenge of the height. Once the first tenement block was underway, Tesyb would finally have a proper reason to tell Isuha that she really could move here. That part made Kivamus smile a little. That would give him all the assistance he needed to complete the designs of the cloth making machines, but that was for later.