Mid 269 Spring
With one final clank of a blunted sword against the steel clad head of a man smaller and slower than me, I earned twenty gold dragons and nearly doubled the total gross of this entire hundred fifty man trading trip. Money free of tariff and taxes as no goods changed hands, just pure income. All because some Lannisport Lannister chose to celebrate the birth of his son while I just so happened to be in port for my second trip of the year.
As a visiting lord, and the winner of the melee, I was given the 'honor' of watching the 16 man jousting tournament with the hosting family. The patriarch was a man twice my age and two thirds my size, though I he didn't know the first part as no one expects the six foot seven guy with a beard and three kids who just put six men on their asses to win a combat sport battle royale to be fifteen.
It's just not an idea that sprouts naturally.
After introduction to Ser Lionel Lannister and his wife, the former Brenda Crane, I set in to focus intently upon the men smashing each other with lances at breakneck speeds. The host kindly narrated the action for his wife, who quietly humored him until she stood up and shouted, 'Get it in the cradle!' at a knight who was fumbling his lance, revealing herself to be an avid sports fan, much to the astonished delight of Ser Lionel.
It was wholesome.
The man in charge of the festivities invited the champion of the joust, who won forty dragons (and earned it considering I walked out of the melee in a heavy sweat and he took a pounding that'll see him needing a least a month's recovery), out for a meal and drinks at an upscale eatery. For the first time in years I got to see beef even close to approaching prime quality, as the hairy cows of the North are awfully undersized and raised more for milk with the slaughter of steers a happy byproduct.
Ser Lionel was happy to spend that Lannister gold feeding grilled steak to me and to the young knight who won the joust, Ser Lyle Crakehall. It was weird running into a named character with a connection to my backstory at a random event populated by nameless NPCs, and it was even stranger to build the foundation of his eventual defeat at the tourney at Lannisport that will celebrate the victory over the Ironborn on his advice.
Throughout the meal as the wine flowed, I steered the young knight into talking about himself and his training as a knight and for his victory in the tournament. Ser Lionel happily confirmed the information Lyle gave me every time he mentioned doing so himself during his days as an aspiring knight, and generously offered Ser Lyle a few ideas on how he might improve his game.
Of course, I didn't get off without talking about myself as Ser Lionel obviously intended to get his every dragon's worth out of this networking event. The young Ser Lyle reacted quite poorly when he discovered that I was an active lord out conducting mercantile affairs, and my explanation of the conditions of my lands did little to change his ingrained reaction. Ser Lionel remained quiet on the matter, he himself a working man from branch of a cadet family, but his wife declared the tarnishing of my honor for the betterment of my people was heroic. The man did smile when I told her that only my reputation was tarnished, but my honor remained the same.
Afterall, my sense of honor is what I deem it to be so, thus a little trading would never harm it. I'm flexible like that.
I left that dinner with actionable intelligence and a new contact in Lannisport who rapidly proved his worth when he brought me several opportunities and new connections during the additional three trips I managed to make before the end of the year. I repaid these tips by taking him and his wife to dinner often with a few of their friends, and telling tales of the North and Bear Island for them.
I got more coin on my trips and they got a night out where they could show off their exotic friend from a part of Westeros few ever travel too. I was near as exotic as someone from Asshai in this busy port city, and far less creepy.
It didn't matter to me if they were using me or even laughing behind my back if such things occurred, I got mine and that was all that mattered. Plus I had a slightly larger cheering section than just my men during the tourneys that Ser Lionel and his wife helped me plan my visits around, and I got a good laugh when the man insisted I start participating in the jousts because my natural athleticism and talents would see me quickly rise to meet the competition. His face when I told him that I wanted to wait unit I finished growing up to buy my first set of jousting armor was priceless.
The extra funds my networking generated came in handy as I needed to purchase pelts and grease to expand my stock back at Bear Island. The woodsmen paid their taxes in fur, but that would only see me through to the New Year, so I gave the men the best prices I could for any stock they had of worth and padded out my stores with another year's supply.
The price cut down my profits, but I wanted to support these men that helped me on my way up and develop a reputation for generosity. The coins would come back to me anyways when the men purchased the food, fuel, and iron and steel goods made from the resources I stockpiled from my trading ventures.
Those stockpiles purchased the labor of my small folk on projects that I needed pushed to see my social designs come into being. Able to provide both food and warmth to my workers, demand for my jobs was never smaller than my supply. First I flooded the local smiths with young apprentices. It drove the ornery fools crazy to have to deal with young and clumsy idiots, but I didn't need all of them to learn the full craft, and was fine with most of them just processing my iron ore and making nails, rivets, and chainmail, all incredibly valuable to me and with a low skill requirement.
I needed full sets of arms and armor for my crews before the new year, both the men sailing my ships now and those to sail in the near future, three hundred fifty sets of equipment. It was the largest single order my family ever placed for war gear, but by separating the tasks among their apprentices and limiting their own involvement to only the aspects completely necessary, the smiths made it happen. Three hundred and fifty full sets of chainmail armor head to toe, helmets, spears, shields, daggers, and axes, one for cutting men and one for cutting wood.
The next big spend came once Maester Lyle and I finished our exhaustive documentation of the Ironborn longships we captured and with the help of Cley, the woodsman I suspect to be the father of Maege's children, we put together the specifications for producing our own ships.
Even with over half a year to do so, we only finished two ships at great personal cost before the new year, obviously lacking the building abilities of the real Ironborn and the Bravossi Arsenal, but we laboriously trudged our way through building up the shallow hulled ships of overlapping split oak fitted and riveted together for maximum strength and speed.
Unlike Earth where the Vikings lost their advantages after two hundred years of dominance, the Ironborn have maintained themselves as a menace for millennia. We only had the meanest examples of their craftsmanship available to us, and with materials such as ironwood, they built ships far beyond the likes of even the largest Viking ships in history.
Scaling the technology up would require capturing a working example, or costly experimentation. I didn't favor the latter as even with all my 'modern knowledge' I wasn't going to beat out thousands of years of hands-on stress testing done by the Ironborn. Part of me hopes I can get my hands on one before the Greyjoy rebellion starts, and the smarter part of me dreads the situation where I'll be in hostile conflict with a ship bigger, stronger, and crewed by more men with more experience than mine.
We'll just have to hope that by the time it finally happens I've turned the men of Bear Island into better Vikings than the Ironborn.
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We are at the turning point in the story. Up until now we've seen the typical, if grounded, rise of a driven man willing to cast off social convention and pressure in the pursuit of gains. I hope I've delivered that as pleasurably to the audience as it has been a pleasure to write.
But more importantly, I hope I've established enough foreshadowing that when I say it's time for the story to go dark, you all understand that doesn't mean dark things are now going to happen to Jorah and the people he cares about. It means it's time for Jorah to begin doing dark things to other people and the people they care about.
It feels weird to do a trigger warning for a GoT/ASoIaF fandom story, but I've read as much Self Insert/Isekai content in the setting I can find and all I can say is that excluding anything meant to be angsty or edgy (which is almost always so poorly done its almost comical), ya'll motherfuckers are nothing but sweet summer childs.
So if you still expect this story to be about a hero who manages to create perfect solutions that make everyone happy, go read something else. Jorah is a character that delivers effective and believable solutions to complex problems with a deadline no one knows is coming and he has no means to effectively convey.
On the plus side, in all my time combing through GoT/ASoIaF fanfictions, I've never seen a Self Insert/Isekai MC enact this solution. So if you're a pussy, cry me a river of tears for me to paddle my story to uniqueness on.
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