Medipl fell silent for a moment, then picked up his explanation again.
“But once the Empire was founded, His Majesty the Emperor unified all the units of weight and measure throughout the realm.
He even changed the unit used for distance and named it the Imperial Mile.
One Imperial Mile was defined as one kilometer, and the other units were standardized in a similar fashion.
Over the twelve hundred years since then, the term ‘Imperial Mile’ has become something you only see in scholarly works, and nowadays people just talk in terms of so many meters or so many kilometers in everyday life.
But milestones are a little different.
The people who make and maintain the milestones are the mages.
Their organization, the Magic Society, has existed since long before the Empire.
According to written records, the earliest mention of the Magic Society goes back eight thousand years.
It must have been around even before that, but no one ever asked the mages, and the mages never volunteered to say, so no one knows.
In any case, ever since those unimaginably distant days, it’s been mages who craft these markers and sell them.
So the name ‘milestone’ is just as ancient.
The Magic Society did change the distances carved on the stones between villages over into kilometers, but they never changed the product name, and there was no real need to, so even now people still call them milestones.”
“I see.
Thank you for explaining.”
Watching a girl younger than himself ask such a clever question gave Rimas a strange feeling, as if he ought to come up with something just as clever to ask.
So he spoke up.
“Then, I have a question too.
Monsters can’t come within a radius of fifty meters of a milestone, right?
And because milestones are set up all over every village as well as along the roads, monsters don’t manage to break into the villages either.
So why is it always a radius of exactly fifty meters?”
To his surprise, the answer came not from Medipl, but from Rimgailee.
“Because you have to take into account how much magic power the stone can hold.
In short, when they set the range they had to balance the price, the effectiveness, how long the stone would last, and so on.
Eight thousand years ago and even before that…”
Rimas’s intention had gone completely wide of the mark, with Rimgaile answering instead of the teacher as he had hoped.
Medipl told Rimgaile she was right and praised her again.
Just then, seeing signs that one of the little children was about to get into trouble, he had to hurry off in that direction.
Rimgaile watched Rimas for a second, then followed after Medipl to help him manage the younger children.
After she handed back the book, Medipl gave the pupils a break so he could take the volume outside.
It was hardly the first time he had done this, so the children could look after themselves perfectly well for twenty minutes or so even without a teacher.
When Medipl gave them a break, Rimas stepped outside too.
Medipl carefully slipped the returned book into the leather bag that had been taken down from the donkey, then took out a few other volumes and lent them to Rimgaile.
She held them carefully so they would not be damaged and headed off somewhere, apparently to drop them at home first.
Rimas followed her retreating back with his eyes for a moment, then went back to his father.
During the day the men were out working in the hills and fields.
Here, “hills” meant quarries and mines, and “fields” were, of course, farmland.
The only grown men remaining in the village were those standing guard at the watchtower and gate, and the village chief.
Even the chief usually went out to farm, but with the itinerant teacher Medipl and a traveling merchant both visiting today, he seemed to have decided to stay in the village.
At this hour, then, Skelvis’s main customers were housewives.
The wives of farmers accompanied their husbands to work in the fields, and even if their husbands worked in the mine or quarry, they still went out to help with their neighbors’ farming in the fields and would be paid for it at harvest time.
Even so, there were always some housewives who stayed home and worked inside.
Those housewives came to buy things.
Many bought thread, needles, cloth and other textiles, or various kinds of ironware.
Pottery of different sizes and for different uses also sold well.
Imperial Foods sold, too, less as emergency rations than because if you bought the tea, you got the bottle as a bonus.
Once the tea was gone, the empty bottle could be used for all sorts of things.
They were earthenware ones, not glass or porcelain, but it was rare to be able to buy something of that quality at that price.
Some people would rather buy Imperial Foods for the bottle than pay money just for a bottle.
Surprisingly, paper was also a popular commodity.
In fact, toilet paper for wiping in the privy was manufactured separately, and merchants bought it wholesale to sell on.
This paper could be used and then thrown straight into the cesspit.
In small villages like this one, human waste is ultimately used as fertilizer, and there is a large difference in quality between compost made with paper mixed in and compost without it.
These days, even in remote hamlets, people use special toilet paper made and sold for that purpose.
This shift in people’s use of paper in private latrines, making things gentler on the backside and better for the compost, was said to have taken place less than a hundred years ago.
Back then, a certain Imperial prime minister, looking for a way to secure a steady supply of manure and improve public hygiene at the same time, ordered the development of a new kind of paper.
The scholars at the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the engineers of the Ministry of Industry succeeded in creating such paper, or so the story went.
According to the Imperial Medical Household, this innovation also led to a dramatic decrease in cases of hemorrhoids and similar ailments throughout the Empire.
Of course, Rimas knew all this, because Medipl had explained it to him.
Oil and vinegar and other foodstuffs were sold as well.
Vinegar was very hard to ferment properly, so even in villages that were otherwise self-sufficient in most food, people often bought products made by specialists.
Medipl had explained before that, because the Imperial Bounty caused all living things to thrive, bacteria thrived as well, and since the founding of the Empire the way rot and fermentation worked had changed greatly.
Rimas had found that hard to understand and had more or less just accepted that it was so.
What was more, Whitestone village was a source of limestone, and the local water contained a great deal of lime, which made it even less suited to vinegar-making.
Salt was sold too.
Even if a merchant failed to sell anything else when he came to a village, he could still count on selling salt.
This was true even here in the Shadowfoot demesne, despite the fact that there was a rock-salt mine elsewhere in the territory.
The owner of that mine, Duke Ainsle Landoran, outranked their lord and was a wealthier man, but that did not mean he sold salt cheaply within the territory.
Still, people praised him for selling it cheaper here than he did elsewhere, and no one criticized him.
For the most part Skelvis sold goods, but he bought some things too.
As far as food went, he was a buyer of chickens and eggs.
Naturally, those were for eating while camping on the road.
Flour only had to be bought when it ran out, but to keep eggs and chickens fresh, you had to buy them whenever you passed through a village like this.
Of course it was only for a father and son, so they did not need much, and the villagers’ chickens were mostly for their own use anyway, so there were never many to spare for outsiders.
Rimas was helping his father, taking money and handing over merchandise to a woman who had come to buy dye for making clothes, when Medipl stepped outside and called the children back in, signaling the end of the break.
Class began again.
Rimas left off helping his father for a while and returned to the schoolroom.
When six o’clock came, the children were sent home for supper.
The village chief invited Medipl and the father and son to join him for the evening meal.
Since lessons had to resume at seven, the chief had prepared the food in advance.
It was not only the teacher and the pupil Rimas who had to be done eating by seven.
The same was true for Rimas’s father Skelvis.
At seven the sun went down, and that was when the men working outside the village all came back.
The exact time varied depending on where each man worked, but it was almost unheard-of for anyone not to be back by seven.
At night it was difficult to work anyway, and the danger of monsters appearing became much higher.
In any case, the evening rush of customers began then, because that was when the men bought the things they needed.
So although it was not a silent meal where everyone simply ate without a word, neither could it become a leisurely supper with relaxed conversation.
They could not rest right after eating.
Medipl, being here on official duty, was entitled to have his meals provided by the village, but the invitation to the father and son was the chief’s personal kindness, so the two of them expressed their thanks and praised the food before leaving to get ready for the evening’s trade.
Some of the men who had returned early were already waiting in front of Skelvis’s wagon for him to come back.
No villager would lift the canvas and steal goods from the wagon just because the owner was not there.
Since the founding of the Empire, public order inside villages like this had been fairly good almost everywhere.
Rimas knew that as well thanks to Medipl.
There were said to be criminal organizations in the big cities, but in a certain sense that, too, was a sign of a firm kind of order.
It meant that without the backing of a major criminal organization, you simply could not commit crimes.
In any case, with the evening’s trade about to begin, the mix of people was quite different from the daytime, when mostly housewives had been in the village.
Now there were not only many more buyers but also more sellers.
Of the 254 residents of this village, most were miners, farmers, or stonemasons.
The men who stayed behind to guard the watchtower or the gate and protect the village in emergencies did not do so as a profession; it was a duty the villagers took turns fulfilling.
Class had not yet started again, and as Rimas was about to walk over to his father’s wagon, he saw Rimgaile standing and looking toward the village entrance.
Since his father’s stall was not busy yet, Rimas simply walked over to her without any particular reason.
Once he got there, he realized he had had no specific purpose in mind, but turning back now would have been awkward, and just then Rimgaile turned her head and spoke first.
“What is it?
Something wrong?”
“Uh, no, I was just curious about something…”
“I’m waiting for my dad.”
“I see.
They say all the adults in this village are either miners, farmers, or stonemasons.
What does your father do?”
“People say everyone in the village is a farmer or a miner, but there are exceptions.
There are exactly four people here who aren’t anything like that.”
“And?”
“Of those four exceptions, two are herbalists and two are hunters.
And my dad is one of the hunters.
He works with uncle Mancav.”
“I heard being a hunter is dangerous…”
“What job isn’t dangerous?
The people working the fields have to run for it too if monsters show up.”
Just as the roads and villages were protected by milestones, there were stones out in the fields as well.
Because they were expensive, they could not be set up to protect the entirety of every worksite, but there would be one or two stones placed so that if monsters appeared, people could flee to them.
Once they had taken shelter, they would shout, or do whatever they needed to do, to call the whole village out.
Then, with everyone working together, they would drive the monsters away.
A monster that could tear dozens of people apart could still be forced to retreat if several hundred farmers holed up in a safe zone and kept firing crossbows and such at it.
If it was something even more dangerous than that, they would send for help from another village or from their lord and wait it out.
Herbalists and hunters, however, had a much harder time securing even that minimum of safe ground.
Monsters only appeared in fields or mines from time to time, but the forest was their original habitat and far more dangerous.
It was not that monsters occasionally came where people were; rather, people were pushing into where monsters lived.
So despite what Rimgaile said, herbalists and hunters were far more at risk than farmers or miners.
She was well aware of that, of course, and her words were likely an attempt to soothe the unease she herself carried.
“Can hunters get permission to carry weapons?
What kind of weapon does your father use?”
How could a commoner get licensed to bear arms?
It’s people like your father, a traveling merchant, or Medipl as an itinerant teacher who are the exceptions.
My dad and uncle Mancav may be hunters, but they don’t hunt with weapons.
That sort of thing is for nobles.
Not that lords these days have their own private hunting forests or keepers anymore, so there are hardly any people who hunt with weapons now.
Well, except for the MOW..”
“Hunting forests?
Gamekeepers?”
“First time you’ve heard of them?
And here I thought you’d studied, but I guess you slacked off in history.
In the old days every lord had his own private hunting wood, and if anyone hunted there without his permission, they’d be executed.
It was only after the Empire was founded and, thanks to His Majesty’s blessing, the Imperial Bounty caused every living thing to flourish—and monsters to multiply along with them—that the lords could no longer maintain their preserves.
Back when only bears and wolves were really dangerous and monsters only showed up once in a while, it was enough to hire someone like the MOW from time to time.
But once monsters were appearing constantly, you could not keep a hunting forest unless you could afford to have the MOW on hire all the time, so the preserves disappeared.
That’s what the books taught me.
They say there are still nobles who keep hunting grounds these days, but that nobles would have to be at least grand lords.
You know the difference between grand lord, mesne lord, and lord, right?”
“I know at least that much.
I’m not an idiot.”
When the First Emperor unified the continent, he permitted the existence of twenty-eight vassal kingdoms.
Each vassal kingdom was defined as consisting of twenty Grand Fiefs.
In every kingdom, therefore, there were twenty Grand Fiefs, each subdivided into a number of middle fiefs, and each middle fief into a number of lesser fiefs.
Although the number of Grand Fiefs was fixed, the number of middle and lesser fiefs within each was left to local circumstances, as there were simply too many regional variables to regulate uniformly.
“They say that in the old days the fiefs weren’t divided neatly into Grnad Fief, median fief and minor fief like they are now.
Vassalage ties between lords were tangled up like a web woven out of tentacles and spider silk, and rights to rule and to levy taxes were broken into bits and pieces and exercised in all sorts of complicated ways.
They taught us that the clear system of government we have now only came about after the Empire was founded.”
“Oh, I heard that from the teacher too.
In the old days there were no solid administrative…
right, administrative districts like we have now, and the ranks of the nobility weren’t arranged in a clear hierarchy either.
I learned that.”
“Right.
You do know your stuff.
In this village, even if the kids learned it, none of them remembers things like that.
You’re definitely different.”
“Anyway, you’re out here because you’re waiting for your father, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So how do your father and this Mancav go hunting without weapons?”
“They’re not exactly unarmed.
They carry axes, of course.
You do too, don’t you?”
As Rimgaile said, Rimas’s father Skelvis did the same, and when commoners needed to arm themselves, their usual weapon was the axe.
Axes, like shovels and picks, were tools, as much for cutting wood as for fighting when things went bad.
Because axes were treated as tools, the authorities did not control them, so whenever commoners needed to arm themselves, they almost always used axes.
“But they don’t actually hunt with their axes.
Commoner hunters usually trap their game.
They set snares, or dig pits in the ground and cover them carefully.
They set their traps and pits here and there, check one place today and another tomorrow, and bring home whatever has been caught.
Most of the time the animals have fallen into a pit and worn themselves out trying to get out.
Even when a predator gets caught, if you take your time and are careful, it’s not really dangerous to experienced hunters like my dad.”
“Even so, if they ran into a predator or a monster on the way, it would be dangerous…”
“It is dangerous.
That’s why they at least carry axes.
And both of them are deadly with a sling.
But what my dad always says is that the most important skill for a hunter is sensing danger ahead of time and avoiding it.
Weapons are truly the last resort.”
From what she went on to explain, herbalists were much the same.
They wore axes at their belts and went looking for medicinal plants, dug them up, then dried or otherwise preserved them, and sold them to apothecaries or traveling merchants when they came by.
Of course, if someone in the village needed herbs, they would sell to them too.
Technically it was illegal for ordinary folk to sell medicine, but their lord could hardly police every little neighborhood deal involving a few herbs in a remote hamlet like this, so everyone just lived that way.
“The man who buys those herbs is my father.
I know that much at least.”
“Oh, you’re right.
I forgot.”
Then she began, a little shyly, to boast about her father.