Tulian Republic

  Capital

  Five Weeks Until Spring

  Sara was trying to pay attention to the farmer's words. She really was. He was a kind fellow, happy to show her around his property, and he'd gamely answered all of her questions.

  It was just so hard to ignore what was going on behind him. His family was tilling the nd, readying the nd for the next set of crops, but the way they were doing it astounded her.

  By hand. The man's wife and children were bent over the dirt with hoes, dragging them through the soil in neat rows. The youngest child, four or five, walked behind them while clutching a bag full of seeds, grabbing grubby fistfuls and tossing them haphazardly across the tilled area.

  "...the crop rotations are funny things, but if they do as ye say, Governess, we'll be gd to figure 'em out," the farmer was saying, "and you've done a swell job of making sure the seeds are in market. Not a worry in the world, at least there." Sara blinked, tearing her eyes away from the dispy of utter inefficiency behind him.

  "I'm gd to hear it. About your farm, though. Do you not have ploughs?"

  The man gnced over his shoulder, frowning mildly. "Did, once upon a time. Before the storms. Haven't had the ox to pull 'em, though, and the bdes wore down mighty quick. Smiths left quick to better pastures, so to speak, so none to make us a new'n, 'till you came along. Doing it the old way works well enough."

  "Does it?"

  "Fed ourselves fer ten years off it, at the least. Can't ask for much more than that, can I? Countin' blessings and all."

  "I... suppose not, no."

  The farmer continued on unconcerned, speaking of the difficulties he'd encountered on his property that he thought the near-mythical Governess might be able to help with. Hearing his compints was why Sara had come out to the farms surrounding Tulian, after all. Written reports and productivity numbers were great, but they never told the whole story. She'd wanted to look the farmers in the eye, thank them for their work, and see for herself how things might be improved.

  Sara had anticipated finding problems. Things like arguments over nd, or difficulty acquiring the seed necessary to rotate crops, or maybe animals marauding through the fields. Not... this. Men, women, and children breaking their back at an agonizing pace, achieving in a day what should have taken a handful of hours. She'd obviously known there was going to be room for improvement, there always was in a medieval society, but the farmers in Tulian had clearly regressed past medieval. A decade of demographic colpse, with the vast majority of those who had a marketable skill fleeing north, had left those that remained barely in the bronze age. These farmers seemed one step away from using their hands to dig trenches in the mud.

  Sara spent the entire ride back to the capital lost in thought, digging through what few memories she had of her history cssses. All her efforts turned up was the term "agricultural revolution", which she thought coincided with the industrial revolution, and Eli Whitney's Cotten Gin. A lot about Eli Whitney's Cotten Gin, actually. Her teachers had some bizarre obsession with it, bringing it up incessantly each time they touched on the early 1800s, so often that little more than the name itself had stuck in Sara's head. She didn't know what it was, beyond the fact that it had made cotton harvesting much more profitable, which had helped bolster the failing early-1800s sve trade, supposedly. She didn't give a shit about it then, and she still didn't in her current situation.

  Funnily enough, the only helpful tidbit she managed to drag into the light came not from her school days, but television. She vaguely remembered an episode of Dirty Jobs, one set on a farm, and from that episode she could ever-so-barely recall the sight of old-timey farming equipment.

  Thanks to Amarat's blessings, that was enough. She and Evie went straight to Hurlish's forge when they arrived in the capital, and Sara had summoned up an illusion of the device. As she hadn't seen it in real life, it was a two-dimensional representation, essentially a perfect recreation of her TV during the brief few seconds the device had been on screen. Thankfully, for Hurlish, that was enough.

  "One fancy plough," Hurlish grunted, inspecting the illusion. "Got a bunch of big-ass springs, like half the weird future shit you show me. Still haven't figured out a good way to make those, by the way."

  "The springs might help, but I don't think they're essential," Sara said, inspecting the image with Hurlish. "Besides, the less metal we use, the better. We'll want to roll them out fast, if we want to make a difference before the war."

  The device was a seed drill. It was mechanically simple, but revolutionary in its effect on crop pnting. It was essentially a hopper on a wheeled set of braces, not unlike a wheelbarrow, carrying a container filled to the brim with seeds. As the contraption was pulled along, the wheel turned, rotating an attached gear that allowed a set of seeds to fall into pre-tilled soil below. By adjusting the timing and speed of the gears, the result was a perfectly spaced, perfectly optimized field of crops.

  The particur design that Sara had conjured up looked about six feet wide, featuring many evenly dispersed wheels that were attached to spring suspension, so that bumping over the terrain wouldn't jostle things out of pce. Each wheel was accompanied by a trough for the seeds to slide through, plopped down in clusters of two or three, which Sara reasoned was due to the fairly high odds of a seed not being viable. Better to double up. Sara doubted they'd be able to recreate the complex suspension, considering how difficult it was to create springs by hand, but even without that the device would be quite literally revolutionary for the farmers of Tulian.

  Hurlish and Sara had sketched up the basic wooden framework while Sara's spell still lingered, then had Evie send it off to a carpenter to begin construction. That done, they fired up the forge, intending to start creating the iron mechanisms necessary for the prototype to function.

  Hurlish's forge itself, Sara was proud to say, had been greatly improved. The hand-pumped bellows had been supplemented by a tall windmill peeking above the surrounding roofs, spinning what once would have been considered an impossibly long metal shaft. The iron pole had been cast in multiple pieces before being welded together by Sara's new dagger, and then a cog was attached to its bottom in simir fashion.

  When Hurlish wished to heat the forge, all she had to do was lever a cog into pce, catching the mechanism beneath the windmill. A series of gears would then engage, iterating down in size to increase rotational speed, the chain ending at the old pumping bellows. There two metal gears were pced, half their sides missing cog teeth, allowing the central gear to repeatedly switch which side it was in contact with, and thus which gear was powered.

  The end result of the mess of tangled cogs– which Sara wasn't sure she understood herself, despite having helped make it– was an automatically pumping bellows. The left cog caught, opening the bellows, then disengaged at the same moment the right cog engaged, driving the bellows down, blowing air into the forge. A constant roar of heat resulted, fires fring without any effort on Hurlish's part. The exact temperature varied depending on the day's windspeed, which would've made the process useless for modern precision forging or alloying, but not for Hurlish. All the smith needed was heat enough to melt iron and steel, and she didn't much care if the temperature exceeded that threshold.

  While Hurlish worked on the design, Sara chatted with some of the other smiths in the courtyard. They'd gotten more used to her presence than just about any other group in Tulian, and chatted amicably with her whenever she wasn't actively helping Hurlish's work. The main topic of conversation, naturally, was the recently completed construction at the center of the smithing yard.

  Like a knobbly stagmite, a spire of dense brickwork had emerged from within the horde of construction workers crawling over the scaffolding. When it had been under construction, the structure called to Sara's mind a va mp, if one was built to be nearly three stories tall. Now it was just a cylinder of brick with an open top and a small slot at the base, but that simple design made it one of the new economic pilrs of Tulian.

  A bst furnace.

  When Sara had initially proposed the idea, she'd expected to require a research team and months of effort to recreate her shaky recollections of ye-olde bst furnaces. Instead, a half dozen smiths at the meeting had piped up, mentioning cities where they'd heard bst furnaces being used before. To Sara's incredible relief, the technique wasn't alien to this world, even if one had never been built in Tulian.

  In hindsight, she should've expected it. A bst furnace was expensive to build, but simple in principle. It was obvious to any ironmonger that bloomeries, the older and more common way of melting iron, got exponentially more efficient the rger they were. Scaling them up was a logical next step, one already taken by others in the industrial hubs of Sporatos and the Northern Fiefdoms, where there was enough demand for iron to justify the expense.

  Unlike her maze of windmill powered cogs, which she was almost certain were a terrible solution to her problem, the bst furnace made perfect sense. Air was continuously pumped in through the bottom, heating the entire thirty foot interior to a cherry glow, while fuel, iron, and limestone were fed into the top. The rger the interior, the hotter it got, until eventually raw iron ore was turning molten in a matter of minutes, instead of the hours required of a bloomery. Iron, being denser than the other materials, would end up pooling at the bottom, where it could be drained out, while the excess sg would meld with the limestone and settle at a higher yer, where it was drained out. So long as the bst furnace was kept in constant operation, it was cheaper, faster, and more practical than bloomeries.

  Which was, ironically, a point of contention with the smiths. As Sara watched Hurlish work, more than one concerned bcksmith came up to her, speaking ill of the bst furnace. Sure, they'd admit, it was great while preparing for the war, but what about after? Did Tulian really have the popution to justify such iron production? It was producing over fifteen hundred pounds of iron per day, and required several multiples of that weight in charcoal and ore to operate. With how time consuming it was to heat up the entire structure, a bst furnace was designed to be operated 24/7, and that meant that it produced a constant flow of nearly one ton of molten iron each day. What would happen, the smiths asked, to the price of metal after the war, when armor and weapons weren't in such demand? The price of iron and its associated goods would plummet, and so too would their business.

  Sara smiled at each and every one of them, offering vague assurances that never dared stray near her true thoughts, which could be summed up simply:

  I don't give a shit.

  Really. There wasn't much more Sara had to say on the topic. Who gave a shit? So what if iron got cheap? That meant more people could have access to high-quality goods. She grew up in a world where steel was so common her forks and spoons had been made of it. If the bst forge cut into the Smithing Guild's bottom line, Sara didn't care. As a whole they were already some of the best-off of Tulian's burgeoning middle css, and the most successful bcksmiths were starting to stretch towards true wealth. Even if they weren't actually rich, hearing them whine to her about maybe making less money than they already were was starting to tickle Sara's old sensibilities. Sure, they couched it in terms of destabilizing the economy, of risking the development of future industries and the like, but that only firmed Sara's opposition. Wording like that smacked too much of callous nobility, or even worse, American corporatocracy.

  It was one symptom among many of where Sara had already gone wrong with the rebuilding of Tulian. When the scattered popution of the half-abandoned nation had first started to colpse into the old capital, Sara had happily coopted the age-old idea of Guilds. She twisted their wordings, shuffled around their goals, and generally altered the concept of "Guilds" as she pleased, all in the name of creating a patable way to introduce unions to Tulian. Her intention had been to provide common ground for the workers of Tulian, giving them their first taste of css consciousness.

  To a certain degree, that had worked. The level of disorganization that the once divided crafters of Tulian had suffered under was nearly abolished, and Sara had firmly cemented in their minds the power of collective demands. The word "strike", despite none having yet been necessary, was known to nearly every industry worker in Tulian.

  The problem was, Sara had– just a teensy little itsy bit– completely fucked it all up.

  As the months had gone on and Tulian's war preparations kicked into gear, the organization of the Guilds had continued unchecked. Actually, not unchecked. At first Sara had actively encouraged it. But what she had originally intended to be a forum of open discussion, a pce to organize mutual action against hypothetical oppressors, was more and more becoming a pce to organize business decisions. She'd succeeded at uniting the workers, yes, but instead of in mutual defense against the elite, they were colborating to manipute prices and secure their own futures. Union dues were slowly morphing into Guild taxes, which were used not just to organize rallies and the like, but to be distributed as wages among the members, under the justification of helping folks through slower business times. A sort of proto-UBI. Naturally, however, the Guild's already-wealthy elites got given the highest wages of of all.

  In short, poorer smiths disliked the Guild, while wealthier smiths loved it. That disparity was the brightest and most obvious red fg Sara could possibly imagine.

  As she fended off her sixth concerned citizen of the day, nodding her head to their compints, a lead bullet worked its way down her throat, settling in the burning bile of her gut. Despite the best of intentions, she hadn't created unions. She was halfway to creating this world's first corporations. It wasn't all the way there yet, thank the gods, but the framework was built. To her cynical eye, the bcksmiths coming up to Sara weren't members of the guild, they were employees. The terminology may not be there, nor the mindset fully settled, but she could see the insidious tendrils of greed worming their way into the cracks she had inadvertently left behind.

  As the most recent malingerer left her, Sara returned to Hurlish's side.

  "How's it going?" She asked. The orc was buried in her work, paying careful attention to the heating of the disc of metal that she would soon shape.

  "Good."

  "Good." Sara looked about. No one was near. "So, you know the smithing guild? You're kinda one of its big wigs?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Think I'm gonna have to kill it."

  "Huh." Hurlish flipped the iron, pressing a different face into the coals. "How'd they piss you off?"

  "It's turning into one big business."

  "That'll do it." Hurlish moved the cherry-hot disc to the quenching barrel, which hissed boiling steam as she shoved the iron in. "They as bad as the big whatcha-call-its in your old world?"

  "Corporations. And no, not yet, but they're heading that way. Slowly, though. Truth be told, I could probably kick the can down the road for years until they really started causing problems. If anything, having one pce to go for all my war material has been a huge help. They sort out all the complicated who-does-what, and I get a good product in the end. Kinda how corporations and the government were supposed to work, I think, back when they started up on Earth."

  "But we know how that ended up," Hurlish said, finishing Sara's unspoken thought. She plucked the iron disc from the quenching barrel and took it back to the fires. "So why aren't you waiting for the war to blow us by? Seems easy enough to take advantage of the good days now, then smooth out the rough edges when you've got all the time in the world."

  Sara sighed, sitting on an anvil. "Dunno. You've got a point, I guess. Just thinking that..." Sara trailed off, cking the words to express her sentiment.

  "You're the damn Champion, and you can do what you want?"

  Sara barked her ughter. "Maybe? Damn close, probably. I don't know, maybe I'm falling for my own hype. When I read the history books of my old world, it was filled with people in my position putting off the little things when they had a bigger problem to wrestle with. My country's founders didn't ban svery, even though a lot of them wanted to, because they had to keep the despicable fucks that liked it on their side while they fought an Empire. An Empire that also used sves, which helped make the decision more patable, I guess. Funnily enough, by the way, that Empire ended up banning sves before my country did."

  Sara blew out a long breath, tasting the forge's heat. "Really, Evie and Vesta'll hate it. I'll have to break up all the Guilds, or at least shake up their rules enough that I might as well have smashed 'em to bits. That'll be throwing water on an oil fire, as far as the question of money is concerned."

  "We got a lot of coin, though," Hurlish said, waving a hand to the mess of expensive gears Sara had cobbled together. "So who gives a shit? If people are being assholes, fuck 'em up."

  Sara snorted. "Hopefully I won't have to do that. Patron Saint of Diplomats and stuff, that's me. But some people just like money too damn much, and if any of the greedy fucks were smart enough to worm their way into the Guilds, they'll give me a hell of a time prying them out."

  "Can't you just kill 'em?"

  "I mean... I guess I could. That's overkill, though. They've barely done anything wrong at this point. They're trying to turn a profit as best they can, because that's what businesses do. It's really half my fault, for setting up the Guilds in the way I did."

  Hurlish pced the disc onto the anvil Sara was sitting on. "Scram."

  Sara scrammed. A chisel was pced on the glowing disc, followed an instant ter by an earsplitting cng. Hurlish's hammer, as always, struck home. She adjusted the chisel's position, then smmed her hammer again, then again, moving in a circle. Sara watched her work fondly. The orc smith started speaking between blows as she pounded her way through the steel.

  "Evie and Vesta'll thank you ter."

  Cng!

  "'Cause you're making their lives easier, in the long run."

  Cng!

  "And like you said, you're the Champion of Amarat."

  Cng!

  "If you can't talk someone outta something, no one can."

  Cng!

  "So if you run into some stubborn bastards?"

  Cng!

  "Fuck 'em up, and don't feel bad about it."

  Cng!

  Hurlish lifted the disc, inspecting her work. With a few strokes of a hammer and chisel, she'd blown enough chunks from an iron pte to morph it into the rough shape of a cog. Sara would've killed to have some way of measuring the force of the woman's hammerblows; she'd busted through a solid inch of iron with each hit. Hurlish blew off the chipped bits of iron, then eyed Sara.

  "At the end of the day, it sounds like you gotta do it, you wanna do it, and it's the right thing to do. What're you whining to me for?"

  Sara cocked her head, then ughed. "Well, when you put it that way, who knows?" She shoved herself off the support beam she'd rested against. "Evie and Vesta'll give me a lot of other arguments against it."

  "And I'm sure they'll use lotsa very pretty words to do it, too."

  "They are pretty women, after all."

  Hurlish chuckled. "Yeah they are."

  The smith quenched the cog in oil once more, then set it with the others by a grinding wheel. That done, she wiped her hands with a rag and faced Sara head-on.

  "So, were you coming to me just to have someone that'll talk pin to you, or were you going to learn how to do some smithing?"

  "Depends. When are you going to learn how to weld?"

  "Soon as you rustle up some of that ass-el-taint for me, I'll hop right on it. Until then, forging's still the best way to go."

  "Acetylene," Sara corrected, "And that's a ways off. Still not sure if I should, to be honest with you. Chemistry's a nasty door to open."

  "Yeah, well, forging ain't. You been practicing your hammering form?"

  Sara picked up a hammer and made a jerk-off motion with it before her hips. "Every night, babe. You couldn't hear me under the covers?"

  "Ha!" Hurlish's ughter boomed across the courtyard. "I know you got plenty of practice with that, but we'll have to see how well it transtes." She spped another one of the discs onto the anvil. "Now, show me your form."

  Sara hefted the hammer up, taking her stance, and, for just a brief while, didn't think of anything other than what was right in front of her.