The Clocks

"Well boy, it's like this. As near as can be told, about 720 years ago a great battle was almost fought here on account of two barons not being all that fond of each other. It wasn't like the wars we've heard about with thousands, or even tens of thousands of troops clashing. In those days a big battle in a remote area like this was then might have as few as 40 to 60 men on either side. At any rate, nobody is quite sure who was on which side, or who won...if it can be said that anyone did. Just as the lines were charging up that hill that's in the center of town (both sides wanting to control the high ground) there was a blazing light in the sky. It streaked down and hit exactly in the center of the flat at the top."

He cleared his throat and took a sip of his ale. Not because he needed to, but so as to build the tension. Above all a master merchant needed to be a good storyteller.

"So, as I was saying, whatever it was smacked into the top of the hill -- at least according to some stories. Others say that it stopped about 10 meters in the air and floated there. Regardless of which is true, all the tales agree that there was a blinding flash of light and a giant thunderclap that knocked every single soldier off his feet. All the nobles, being mounted on horses, were thrown off when their mounts spooked and ran away.

"It's said that the soldiers were so impressed by the miracle that they refused to fight any more." Ringvold bent forward, and Mario did likewise in response. "I think that what happened is that all the nobles got themselves killed (or at least seriously broken up) when they fell off their horses. When you're wearing heavy armor and get thrown off a horse, you may never stand up again. So what probably happened was that the fight ended before it began because there wasn't anyone left to give the order to attack. I expect that the armies being almost entirely made up of peasant conscripts had a lot to do with stopping the fighting. They surely were more interested in getting back to their farms than they were in killing strangers, or in getting killed themselves."

When one of the servers stopped to clear off the table, Ringvold drew back and coughed. Afterwards he continued his story.

"All those peasant soldiers found themselves standing around without anyone telling them what to do any more. Then a breeze blew up out of nowhere, and the cloud of dust from the, well, 'explosion' is the best word I guess.... Anyway, a breeze came and blew all the dust away. Then the sun broke through the clouds, and the soldiers got a good look at the valley surrounding them.

"The folks on both sides, well, they looked at the valley, then they looked at each other. By all accounts, right then and there they got together and stacked up all the weapons. They gathered up all the horses and then stripped the armor off all the dead nobles since they surely had no use for it any more. I suppose that it's possible that one or two of them might have survived the falls, but somehow all of them were dead by the time their former soldiers got them out of their armor.

"They were pleasantly surprised to find that each side had a blacksmith with them and at least a couple decent carpenters. They immediately set up makeshift smithies and began making ploughs, sickles, axes, hammers, nails, and such. Some men from each side went home and brought back their womenfolk, their animals, all that seed they hadn't had time to plant yet (on account of being drafted so early in the spring), and their children. After telling everyone back home about the glorious valley that they'd found, well sir, all the other families followed them too seeing as they'd all been living at the edges of the forest and the land there wasn't all that good for farming or grazing anyways.

"By the time they got back about three weeks later (it takes a while to strip an entire village and get set up to travel you know) those who'd stayed behind on that hill had built the start of a tolerable town. They'd even laid out streets, had roughly surveyed the valley, and had agreed on the size of parcels of land for their new farms and such. None of the tales recorded who had the idea, but someone (who in my opinion should be nominated for sainthood) had convinced the others to draw lots for the land. Farmers got to draw for the farmlands, and the herders drew for grazing land and such.

"There were a few real soldiers left on each side, so they ran things and made sure that nobody cheated. (To tell the truth, if you look around the valley today, you can tell that it hardly mattered who ended up with what land. It's still among the most fertile and productive in all of Europe, though nobody even now knows the why of it.)

"Right away they started in ploughing and sowing their seeds. Those who weren't needed for anything else, went back and forth from the villages and the baron's keeps, stripping every building there and bringing back everything that they could use.

"The ones who were crafters and such, they went from homestead to homestead and threw up one house after another. They weren't perfect, but they kept the rain and most of the wind away, so that was good enough. By the fall, they'd had plenty of time to seal them up better, make furniture, and build some outbuildings. But before that, they built themselves a church to celebrate the miracle that had stopped the fighting (and them dying from it) and had brought them to such a wonderful place.

"One of the oddest things that happened was the cats. Now I know what you're going to say, or maybe ask. What the heck do cats have to do with The Founding of The City? Well, you don't have to ask 'cause I'm a gonna tell you right now. You see, when the folks moved here, they brought everything they could, but they didn't have room for animals unless they needed them for food, for pulling ploughs, or for their wool, you ken? Oh, sure, some kids smuggled a cat or two along with them, but when they got here there weren't but five or six cats all together.

"Even a city kid like you should know what happens to your grain if you don't have cats to keep the mice and rats under control. In a worst case, you can lose as much as 30 or 40 percent of it and sometimes as much as half. Even in a good year with several farm cats around it would still be 10% to 15%. That's when the second miracle of The City happened.

"Just as the farmers were getting ready to harvest their grain that fall, two or three cats showed up outta nowhere on each farm. Let me tell you, that surprised everyone, in a good way to be sure, but the real surprise was how they acted. They weren't half-wild like most farm cats, especially as these cats and the farmers didn't know each other. For once, all the accounts agree. Those cats just moseyed into the farmer's homes and made themselves comfortable. That confused the heck outta the farmers. Farm cats usually sleep in the barn or whatever, not inside the house. Seems that these cats didn't know that and refused to sleep anywhere but indoors. Most of the time it seemed that they just lazed about, but every time they were let in before dark, there was a neat row of dead vermin at the side of the door.

"Two years later the folks had settled into their new town and started keeping more accurate tallies of the grain. Once they put their heads together and compared notes, they found out that they were losing no more than 5%. That winter they built another church to celebrate the Miracle of the Arrival of the Cats that saved their harvests

"It wasn't but a few years more before they had enough extra grain that they were sending a fair bit down south every fall. Legend has it that each year was better than the one before, and you know how much they export nowadays." Ringvold glared at Mario. "At least you'd BETTER know how much."

Mario bobbed his head and grinned back at his master. "Yessir, I do sir."

Everyone in the crowd that had gathered around chuckled then turned back to Ringvold. Aldus let it die down then went on with his tale. "Very good. Anyway, right from the beginning they'd decided that since nobles didn't have much use anyway, except to cause trouble, they didn't need any. That was why nobody bothered to send word to the king that two of his barons and all their hangers-on had died.

"Because of that, it wasn't until four or five years later that the king, or probably his Minister of Finance, noticed that they hadn't received any taxes from those two barons the past few years. The amount in arrears was a pittance really, given how poor the holdings of the barons had been, but still, appearances had to be kept up. If the king didn't exercise his authority, someone might think that he didn't care about that land and might nip it off and add it to their kingdom. Besides it gave him a wonderful opportunity.

"His personal crown-lands weren't all that extensive, and that had become a serious problem. He hadn't been the only one to be surprised when he had not one but three sons survive to adulthood, seeing as how most children in those days died before they were 10. He'd been mightily worried about whether his third son, who wasn't going to get any land as an inheritance, might accidentally kill off one of his older brothers so he could take the land they were going to inherit.

"When the king heard about the problem with the barons not paying their taxes, well, right then and there the king officially disenfranchised the barons. He didn't know that they were dead, and he probably wouldn't have cared anyway. What he did was make his third son a duke, and gave him the lands that had belonged to the barons. The next spring the king also gave him a small company of soldiers and a fair amount of money. Then he sent him off to take possession of his new lands before anyone, especially his son, could object.

"What the new duke found was that the former baron's holdings had been abandoned. He was extremely surprised to see that they hadn't been destroyed, which would have made sense if there'd been any serious fighting, but there weren't any signs of fighting at all. However everything that might be useful was gone. What little remained was undisturbed, which made even less sense. He pressed on, pretty slowly since things were looking sorta spooky what with all those people having disappeared and all, but he eventually reached the valley. What he saw had by then become a good sized and obviously prosperous town. His original dispatch back to his father, three months after he arrived, listed 512 souls and two churches...but I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Now, normally when a small army shows up, especially one headed by a noble, most towns, especially the ones like this that didn't want any nobles around in the first place, would close the gates and try to wait them out. In most circumstances that might have worked, at least temporarily, seeing as how the new duke's company tallied only 40 men. However, him showing up right then has been counted as the third miracle of The City, right after the one that freed them from their former masters five years earlier, and the arrival of the cats.

"What it was is that the town was already under siege by a rather large group of bandits. The legend has it that there were several hundred, but their actual number, also recorded in the duke's first dispatch, was 84.

"It's a fact that they numbered more than twice as many as the duke's force, but they were in truth a barely controlled mob, and all the men the duke had with him were professional soldiers. I'm sure you can guess what he did. The duke attacked from the rear and slaughtered all of the bandits. What happened next you don't need to be a genius to figure it out.

"The townsfolk, instead of being hostile, swarmed around them, cheering, and the womenfolk were the most enthusiastic of all. Quite a number of them had lost their men while the barons had fought various skirmishes before the 'big battle'. Even a number of the older boys had been killed or had died from the flux in camp, so there were a lot of women, and a fair number of girls who had recently become women, who didn't have a man.

"Now there were suddenly plenty of new men, each and every one of them a hero in the eyes of the townfolk. Within a month they'd built their new Duke, Alphonse, a reasonably fancy house, and there'd already been about a double hand of marriages. The 'Ducal Residence' wasn't anything like what he'd known at his father's court, but, even though it was all of wood, it was a lot better than what he'd seen at the former baron's estates.

"The next thing you knew, a third church was being built to celebrate the miracle of the duke rescuing the town when all had seemed lost and they were surrounded by darkness. (You know how tales exaggerate and use dramatic language and such as well as I do.) It wasn't long after that before word got around that this particular town was well protected, and by the next year the population had nearly doubled as people looking for safety and/or profit (never forget profit my young friend) moved to the town.

"Things went swimmingly the next few years. Once everyone had realized that things were truly, probably, going to remain peaceful, the townsfolk began to get nervous. The duke was still a young man, but he was as of yet unmarried. The fear that he would die without an heir was soon a frequent topic of conversation in the inns and on the streets. (You need to remember that 700 years ago 'medicine' was mostly nothing more than superstition and fable, and that diseases, seemingly arising from nowhere, would frequently sweep across the country leaving populations decimated.)

"It wasn't so bad, yet, that there was any active pressure on the duke to marry, so he soldiered on with managing his duchy and did his best to ignore the gossip. One of his major accomplishments had been to substantially improve the 'road' that ran south to the nearest of the king's highways. What had been a nearly impassable quagmire in the rainy season was now a well-drained, elevated, graveled, all-weather surface. All adult males had been required to either haul rock, break it up into gravel, or lay it down on the road. The mandate was that each one contribute 10% of his time to the project. The road was completed in July of 11 AF and saw its first heavy use after harvest in that same year.

"When he'd made his decree, there'd been substantial grumbling. However that faded fairly rapidly once it was pointed out to the farmers and herders that they'd now easily be able to take their surplus to markets farther away and not be restricted to the lower prices they'd gotten in the past because they'd had to sell locally. As for the merchants and innkeepers, it took almost no persuading at all for them. The city was already becoming something of a destination for pilgrims, and easier travel meant more money in their pockets.

"Even so a few were still unconvinced, but ongoing stories of increasing profits from those who had already managed sales in other areas eventually resulted in greed overcoming the resistance of even the most diehard 'you can't tell me what to do' members of the community. After that there wasn't even token objection to the duke's decree.

"The records show that it was then that the official motto of The City: 'Honesty, Loyalty, Frugality, Profit' was decided on.

"Late one afternoon the following spring, after the rains had slowed, a fancy carriage was spotted heading toward The City. There were two soldiers riding in front and two more behind, so everyone knew right away that whoever it was inside had to be someone important. That it ignored all the inns and headed straight to The Residence caused great excitement, and people from all over town could be seen running toward the square at the top of the hill."

Mario interrupted Aldus' narrative. "But, master, the maps show that the open area at the center of the city is circular not square."

Ringvold huffed at him, "I don't know why they call it a square when it's really a circle. Now shut up Mario and let me get on with it.

"Ahem... The Residence was still a wooden building, but, to give the duke his due, he'd been busy building up the town and had realized that he'd make more money in the long run if The City and the surrounding farms were prosperous."

Aldus stopped to take a few swallows of ale. He'd been talking for a while now and his throat had become dry in truth this time. Mario had his eyes locked on him, so the boy probably hadn't noticed that their table was now surrounded by most all of the other travellers staying at the inn. There were even some of the staff hovering at the edges who were obviously doing their best to listen while trying not to be noticed doing so.

The innkeeper, Alicia Strongbow, seemed to be of two minds. She was clearly irritated by her staff slacking off, but, at the same time, she was also pleased, as sales of ale and meals were at least 50% higher than usual for this time of the evening due to a number of patrons who would otherwise have gone to eat at restaurants catering to pilgrims, or to their homes if they were locals, staying to listen to Aldus.

As he surreptitiously scanned the room, Aldus noticed two of his listeners were merchants he'd planned on doing business with the following day. Normally there wouldn't have been so many locals present, but a number always retreated to the inns as the noise from the Festa bells was substantially reduced this far out from the center of The City. Or so they said. He suspected that it was really an excuse to go out drinking since the locals were mostly resistant to the noise, but he'd always chosen not to look into the matter very closely.

He continued speaking, as if only to himself, "Now that I think of it, all the dukes since then have likewise put the needs of their people ahead of their own wants, unlike some of those in the South." Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw smiles all around. He hid his own then continued his tale at his normal volume.