I had called Amelie, Jeremiah and Emmerich into my office for a meeting. Amelie was clearly not happy with the situation, being dumped here by her brother to 'keep an eye on us,' whatever that meant. I wanted to ask her a few questions about the situation in Lunarmar, but first I needed to tell Emmerich what happened.
"They came for tax money?" he pondered, stroking his beard.
"Not exactly. It was more a show of force to let us know that they're aware of this place. He only came with a small squad of troops, and they didn't look well trained."
"That's because they weren't," Amelie confirmed, "They were a bunch of drunk cretins that my brother had to collect along the way. The premium he paid is beggars' belief. The Kingdom simply cannot spare any soldiers to do work like this. Which is why many of the other towns in the Kingdom have broken away and stopped paying their tithe."
I knew all of this already thanks to my magic book. Lunarmar was struggling with a serious bout of internal strife, and with each passing day a new issue arose to make the problems even worse. Their army was occupied fighting inside and outside the borders. Without an army, they couldn't collect tax money using force. Without tax money, they don't have much of an army. The easiest solution would be to cut your losses and call the men back to the Kingdom. But when noble pride is on the line such an option is deeply unpalatable. The King's position could be in trouble if he did so.
I explained my reasoning, "Essentially, I think we're safe for a good while yet. At least until the situation in the Kingdom changes. The problem is that we don't have the people for an army of our own, so we're at the mercy of what they decide to do with us."
Jerimiah grunted, "It'll end the same way then. With us out on the streets with nothing to our names."
"That's why it's important for us to develop leverage over the Kingdom somehow, if not military, economic."
"Economic?"
"Simply put, cash is king. If we turn this town into a centre of trade that'd make the world envious, we could be safe. Get a port running with traders coming and going, industries and people producing goods to sell. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like such a good idea to mess with us. We're producing a bunch of tax money – and upsetting that finely tuned balance could end in disaster."
Jerimiah still seemed sceptical, "And how do you suppose we do that?"
I tapped the side of my head where the eye had been inserted into my skull, "We have something those other towns don't. You have me."
"Pah, isn't that just egotistical prattle?" Amelie huffed.
"Jerimiah's seen me work first hand. And something I didn't tell you is that I'm… well educated."
She quirked her brow, "Truly?"
"Yes."
She pointed to the wall, "But the writing on these papers is complete nonsense."
"I never said I was educated in your language."
"Ah, so that's where that curious accent is from," Emmerich concluded.
"It makes perfect sense to me, and that's all that matters. I know a lot of stuff, stuff that'll help us get a leg up on the competition. The first step of the plan is simple, we turn this town into an amazing place to live."
"Huh? That's not a plan!" Amelie sighed, "It's a concept really."
"I don't mean it like that," I explained, "What's the average town like in Lunarmar?"
She counted using her fingers, "Cramped, uncomfortable, disease-ridden, sewerage running down each side of the road."
"Suppose we build a town. Not just a modern town, but a forward thinking, futuristic town. How many people do you think will move here?"
Her face lit up for a moment, "…A lot."
"We have a huge blank canvas here to play with," I reached under my rickety desk and unfurled one of the maps that I had used to plan the town square. I had used a quill to copy down the markings that my eye showed me, resulting in a map that anyone could read. "As you can see here, giving the buildings space between each other will improve the quality of the plots, as well as mitigate the risk of fire."
I had plumbed the depths of my mind for all my historical knowledge and realized it wouldn't be much good if we built a huge, dense city and burned it down within the year. The Fire of London was evidence enough that tightly packing people together was a bad idea – additionally it made keeping waste and filth away easier.
"One of the key issues with dense townships is the waste. It causes disease and invades the senses."
"It causes disease?" Amelie says, stopping me in my tracks, they didn't even know that?
"It can."
"And how does that work exactly?"
I knew that a long-winded lecture on the mechanics of germ theory would merely be a waste of time, so I decided that a more rhetorical approach would suit best. "Lady Amelie, would you ingest the waste of another person if asked?"
"Of course not, how utterly foul."
"And what if you had no choice in the matter, or were unaware?"
"…If I didn't know, that's not the same thing."
"But my point is the same. Disease spreads between people, and one of the primary reasons is faeces. If by some chance it gets into the water supply that everyone is drinking from – the entire town could be disease-ridden overnight. Those towns you spoke of, do they not throw their waste into the streets with little regard for the consequences?"
She grimaced and nodded.
"We need people. People give us power, and money, and produce goods that we can use to make everyone's life easier. If we build a town where people can live like nobles, without having to be a noble, then they'll come in droves. All we need to do is work hard enough to make it happen. The first step is planning properly for the future. We're going to want a working sewer system to keep the waste away from the streets."
Amelie cut in once more, "Let me."
I was shocked to find that Amelie of all people had volunteered for the task. "You'd like to help build the sewers?"
"I'm familiar with the mechanism behind them," she explained, "Much more than you, anyway."
I didn't know at the time, but Amelie, like all of the children of her house, were taught a variety of trades and skills from a young age. To live a life of a noble was to wait to be parachuted into a newly established township as a Lord or Lady. To fulfil that purpose, they were taught everything there was to know about governance and had some freedom to select other subjects that would help them in specific circumstances. For Amelie, that thing was ships.
"Can you really trust her?" Jerimiah asked.
I couldn't really explain it, but I felt like she was being genuine enough. I shrugged, "I think her noble pride demands that she does a good job. You'll notice that the streets on my map are rather large. Plenty of space for us to do the work, and the houses aren't built yet. There's never going to be a better time to do it."
"I'm not going to sit in here and do nothing," she replied, "Give me some labourers and a source of stone, and I'll see to it that it's done."
I moved over to my wall and located my employment rota. A large portion of the people in the town worked as farmers, hunters and miners. Only a few had secondary roles in turning those products into something useful, as the homemaker usually took care of that kind of business. People would make their own clothes from raw materials and process all of their own food. There were ten people who were currently unemployed.
"I can give you ten, maybe we can draft in some of the miners to give you a hand."
"That might not be good enough," she explained, "This is a big project we're discussing."
"Emmerich?"
"I'll see what I can do," he nodded, "Living like a noble sounds good to me, and it'll sound good to a lot of the other young lads too."
"Oh, and get Lady Amelie something to wear. I don't imagine she wants to get that nice dress dirty working in the mud."
"I would not."
Emmerich nodded and headed out, "I'll see what I can gather up."
With the situation explained to the community leaders and my next big plan assigned to Amelie, it was time to get back to work. Those houses weren't going to build themselves.