Chương 33: The Village Reborn

Giles stopped at the edge of the abandoned village street, his jaw dropping open. The carpenter had expected to find a few dozen lopsided, poorly shaped lumps of mud. Instead, laid out in perfectly straight rows across the snow-packed ground, were thousands of flawless, uniform wet clay bricks. The men behind him murmured in disbelief. Giles slowly walked forward and knelt beside the nearest row. He held his hands over the wet clay, inspecting the top of the bricks.

He noticed a faint, rough pattern stamped into the surface.

"Wood grain," Giles whispered, tracing his thick finger over the faint lines in the clay. He looked back at his men, his eyes wide with profound respect.

"The mages didn't just pack the mud with their hands. They used flat wooden paddles to press every single brick down perfectly smooth. The discipline it takes to do this thousands of times in the dark…" High up on his stone balcony, Jack watched the distant commotion through the morning light. He couldn't see the fine details of the bricks from this high up, but the perfectly aligned rectangular rows covering the street were unmistakable. He leaned heavily on his cane, letting out a long sigh of relief.

The paddle-glove trick had worked perfectly. The secret was safe.

"Alright, men!" Giles shouted, clapping his hands together and breaking the silence.

"The mages have done the impossible again. Now it is our turn! We need to dry these out and get the kiln hot. Move!" The village erupted into organized chaos. Giles knew his trade. He knew that if they put wet, freezing clay directly into a roaring fire, the moisture trapped inside would expand and cause the bricks to shatter into pieces. He ordered the men to carefully move the bricks into the tall, circular stone kiln they had built the day before.

They stacked the bricks with small gaps between them to allow the air to flow. Then, Giles built a very small, low-burning coal fire at the bottom of the kiln. For the first few hours, the goal was not to bake the clay, but to slowly and safely dry the moisture out of it. By early afternoon, the smoke rising from the top of the kiln stopped looking thick. The moisture was gone.

"Stoke the fires!" Giles yelled, his face covered in soot.

"Give it the heat!" The men shovelled Jack's premium coal into the iron grate at the bottom of the kiln. The fire roared to life, burning with an intense fury. The updraft pulled the extreme heat straight up through the stacked clay. The firing process took hours. Jack came down to the village to watch the progress. He sat on a wooden stump near Barnaby's forge, listening to the crackle of the flames and the steady ringing of the blacksmith's hammer as Barnaby continued forging the heavy iron spearheads.

When the sun finally began to set, casting long shadows across the valley, Giles gave the order to pull the fire. They let the kiln cool down enough to approach. Wearing thick leather gloves, Old Miller carefully reached into the side opening of the kiln and pulled out the first brick. He held it up for the crowd to see. It was no longer gray, freezing mud. It was a solid, hard, deep red brick. It was completely dry, incredibly sturdy, and perfectly shaped. The villagers cheered loudly.

They had raw building materials.

"Start hauling them to the cabin sites!" Giles ordered, a massive grin on his face.

"We build the hearths tonight!" Over the next week, the village transformed at a steady pace. Using the freshly fired red bricks, Giles and his men carefully built the underfloor hypocaust heating channels for the four remaining Winter Cabins. The smooth bricks lined the trenches perfectly, sealing the hot exhaust beneath the wooden floorboards so no smoke could leak into the living spaces. As soon as a cabin was finished, a new group of families was moved out of the crowded Great Hall and down into the village.

By the end of the week, the Great Hall was completely empty. The village was officially reborn, a small cluster of five large, double-walled timber cabins that stayed incredibly hot using only a tiny handful of coal a day. But Jack knew that a warm room was only half the battle of survival. On the afternoon the final cabin was finished, Jack called Giles and Old Miller to the far edge of the new village perimeter, a good distance away from the river and the cabins.

The wind here blew directly away from the settlement. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"The snow will not last forever," Jack said, tapping his cane against the frozen earth.

"In three or four months, the deep freeze will break. The snow will melt, and the ground will thaw."

"It will be a muddy mess, Lord Jack," Old Miller agreed, wrapping his coat tight against the wind.

"We'll have to lay wooden planks just to walk between the cabins."

"We are packed tightly now," Jack stated firmly.

"Before, the village was spread out over eighty huts. Now, we have everyone living in just a few cabins. If people keep relieving themselves in the snow near the homes, the filth will build up fast. It will seep into the soil and run directly down into the river where we get our drinking water." Giles nodded grimly. He knew the dangers of cramped living quarters, bad water and foul air always brought the camp fever.

"Aye, Lord Jack. We usually just walk further into the woods during the winter to keep the areas clean."

"The woods aren't safe anymore," Jack reminded him.

"We are going to dig trenches right here. Deep trenches. And we are going to line the bottom and the walls of those trenches completely with the new red bricks, sealed tight with clay." Giles frowned, looking slightly conflicted.

"You want us to use our fired bricks to build a latrine, My Lord? Firing the clay takes a lot of coal and effort. The bricks are meant for hearths and the bathhouse."

"A warm hearth means nothing if the village dies of soiled water," Jack stated, his voice leaving absolutely no room for argument.

"From this day forward, no one relieves themselves anywhere near the river or the cabins. Everyone uses the brick-lined latrines. The bricks will stop the waste from seeping into our groundwater. Anyone caught breaking this law will lose their daily coal ration for a week." The threat of losing their heat was absolute. Giles nodded quickly.

"I understand, Lord Jack. Better to use the bricks than risk the fever. I will tell the men. We will dig the trenches today."

"Good," Jack said.

"Because the latrines are only the first step of the cleaning. Tomorrow, Barnaby finishes his work on the bathhouse." The very next evening, a thick cloud of steam was rising into the freezing winter sky. The Communal Bathhouse had been built right next to the edge of the frozen river. It was constructed exactly like the Winter Cabins, featuring thick, double-timber walls packed tight with ash and sawdust for perfect insulation. Inside the large wooden building, the air was sweltering and thick with humidity.

In the center of the room, a massive red-brick furnace was burning brightly. On top of the furnace was a giant, heavy iron boiler that Barnaby had forged from the scrap metal of bandit shields. The villagers had spent the afternoon hacking massive blocks of ice out of the river and dragging them inside to be dropped into the iron boiler. The intense heat of the furnace easily melted the river ice, bringing the water to a steaming boil.

The exhaust from the fire was routed under the stone floor, making the entire room feel like a summer day. Karen stood near the door, holding a large stack of rough linen towels and a few bars of harsh, lye soap she had salvaged from the castle storage.

"Women and children first!" Karen announced loudly, acting as the strict warden of the bathhouse.

"Men, wait your turn outside in the cabins!" The women of the village shuffled into the warm room, carrying their shivering children. For a moment, they just stood there, closing their eyes and breathing in the thick, hot steam. They hadn't felt this kind of encompassing warmth in months. Along the walls of the room were several large, round wooden tubs that Giles had built and sealed with pine tar to make them watertight.

Using a wooden bucket, Karen scooped the boiling hot water from the iron basin and mixed it with handfuls of clean snow to cool it down to a bearable, wonderful temperature. She filled the wooden tubs.

"Get in," Karen ordered, handing a bar of lye soap to a tired, young mother.

"And scrub hard." The women and children stripped off their dirty, soot-stained layers of clothes and stepped into the wooden tubs. The moment the hot water covered their skin, a collective sigh of relief echoed through the bathhouse. It was a feeling of absolute luxury. The hot water soaked into their tired muscles, easing the deep aches of endless winter labor. Mothers scrubbed their children's hair, washing away weeks of grease, dirt, and lice.

The harsh lye soap stung slightly, but the feeling of being truly clean for the first time in months made it entirely worth it. After an hour, the women emerged from the bathhouse. Their hair was wet, but their faces were glowing red from the heat, and their skin was completely clean. They hurried back to their warm Winter Cabins, wrapping themselves in blankets with bright, happy smiles on their faces. Then, it was the men's turn. Giles, Old Miller, and the village militia filed into the bathhouse.

They didn't care about modesty; they only cared about the hot water. The men scrubbed the grime, sweat, and soot of the coal mine and the forge off their bodies. They washed the dried blood from the recent bandit skirmish out from under their fingernails. When Giles finally stepped out of the wooden tub, he felt ten years younger. The heavy burden of the winter felt like it had been washed down the drain. Later that night, the village was completely quiet.

Jack stood on the stone balcony of his castle, looking down at the settlement. Smoke was rising steadily from the chimneys of the five Winter Cabins and the bathhouse. Through the glass windows of the cabins, Jack could see the flickering orange light of the fires. He knew the villagers inside were sitting on warm floors, completely clean, their bellies full of hot porridge, safe from the howling winter wind outside. They were no longer a desperate group of starving peasants waiting to die.

Jack leaned on his cane, a deep sense of satisfaction warming his chest. He had provided the coal, the food, the shelter, and the safety. In return, the villagers had given him something incredibly valuable. Their absolute, unbreakable loyalty. If Jack told them to march into a blizzard tomorrow, they would do it without a second thought, because they knew their young lord would never let them freeze. But Jack knew the peace was only temporary.

He looked past the warm village, his eyes settling on the dark peaks of the mountains in the distance. They were entering the absolute peak of winter. And with the deepest cold, the starving beasts of the high peaks would soon be driven to madness, beginning their desperate march down into the valley. The village was clean and warm, but now, it was time to turn it into a fortress.