Chapter 57 — Elves, Currency, and Irrigation

Amber had barely finished speaking when Gao Yang whipped his head around and fixed her with an unblinking stare, one that made the half-elf thief's skin crawl. "Wh-what's with that look...?"

Gao Yang's eyes held the expression of a man beholding an alien creature. "Why do you know a druid?"

"And why shouldn't I know a druid!" Amber planted her hands on her hips, wholly self-righteous. "I'm half an elf, aren't I? Every druid order under the heavens traces its roots to the elves—you've never heard of that?"

Coming from any other pointy-eared sort, the line might have passed. But from this disgrace to elfkind, it carried not a shred of conviction. Gao Yang looked her up and down, and she kept the self-righteous face firmly in place. At last he managed to squeeze out: "The kind of 'know' where you stole from him once, he's held a grudge ever since, and wants you hunted down across the world?"

"That's an insult to my character, I'll have you know!" Amber bounced up as if she'd been stepped on. "How could I ever get caught stealing!"

Gao Yang: "..."

Somehow he felt her rebuttal had missed the point entirely.

Still, skeptical as he was, her confident manner made it seem she really did know a druid, and she was already pressing the case like a travelling salesman: "Let me tell you, this fellow isn't just any druid—he's a scholarly druid, the sort who knows a little of everything. His order is the genuine, purebred 'Heart of the Grove,' and his specialty is plants and animals. Absolutely reliable..."

Gao Yang finally believed her. He did not press for details—how she had met this mysterious druid, the man's name and origins, and so on. It would have been rude to ask now. After hearing out her sales pitch, he asked only two questions: "Can you still reach him? If you can, how long would it take to bring him here?"

"Reaching him is easy. Folk say druids keep to themselves and are hard to find, but I know that fellow's range—it's fixed, right here in the Southern Reach. As for how long to bring him..."

Amber talked on, all the while shooting Gao Yang meaningful looks. "On the way there I can go by Shadow Step the whole way, but coming back I'll have to plod along on the road. How fast the two of us travel depends on our means of transport. Means of transport—you catch my drift?"

Gao Yang understood at once. He waved a hand and fished out a few copper coins, pressing them into her palm. "Go buy yourself a new pair of shoes."

Amber's eyes bulged. "...You can't do that to me! And you have to give me a little money to pay him a deposit, at the very least—even through a friend, you still have to pay the hiring fee!"

"Why didn't you just say so from the start?" Gao Yang had only been teasing—watching the girl hop about was amusing—but once the joke was done, it was time to get serious. From another pocket he produced strips of gold and silver pressed to a uniform size. "Take these. Get the job done, and whatever's left over is yours."

Amber took the glittering treasures with a grin that split her face.

Because the work needed for minting had not yet been readied, "Cecil coinage" remained a thing of concept alone. So Gao Yang had temporarily had the craftsmen turn some of the gold and silver in the treasury into these chips for trading with the outside world.

This was nothing strange in this world. In a medieval age where precious metals served directly as tokens of exchange and the commercial system was still primitive, gold and silver of sufficient purity were currency in themselves. Most often coins were struck simply to make the metal easy to carry, check, and count, but merchants accepted gold and silver directly as well—the transaction merely added a step of testing fineness and weighing out the amount. Thus when one bought goods with raw gold or silver, the price tended to rise a little.

Of course, this held true only so long as the nobles' "monetary credit" still sufficed. If one day the impurities the nobles mixed into their gold and silver coins reached the point of stinging a merchant's sense of business, then unofficial bullion would overtake the coinage issued by kings and dukes and become the mainstream medium of trade—and if you tried to buy something with coins, you'd find yourself paying more.

This is why the emblem of the god of commerce is a set of scales, with a pair of iron shears on one pan and an eye on the other. The shears and the scales are what every merchant carries with him—the first to snip apart bars of gold and silver, the second to weigh them—and the eye is the good judgment a good merchant must have, the eye that can tell gold from silver and true from false.

In fact, if Gao Yang had not been a touch obsessive, insisting on fine coins with a distinctive character, he could have "minted" by the crudest method of all: cast the metal into a round rod, slice it directly into thin wafers, and stamp Cecil's emblem onto each with a steel die. In Anzu 536, the Duke of the West, to save time and trouble and cut the cost paid to artisans, used exactly this method, and that year's western coinage was nicknamed "the miser's toll," because the law then decreed that every merchant entering the Western Province must exchange a third of the money on his person for western coins, and must settle his accounts at every checkpoint with that shoddy coinage.

So wondrous were coin and commerce in this world.

Amber departed in transports of joy. The half-elf girl all but floated out of everyone's sight, which left Hetty profoundly worried: "She isn't going to run off with that gold and silver, is she..."

"Abscond with the funds?" Gao Yang muttered, then became deeply convinced that this disgrace to elfkind very well might do exactly that...

Never mind. For now, a little faith in her was in order—there was no other hope to be had anyway.

Could anyone else in the whole camp claim to know a druid?

Once Amber had gone, Gao Yang turned his attention back to the land-reclamation project before him.

The old farmer named Norris had waited all this while in silence, head lowered. Unlike common paupers, he did not shift his weight about or crane his neck to look around in such a situation, nor did he presume to speak first—it was as if he had been waiting all along for Gao Yang to ask.

"Any other problems with this land?" Gao Yang asked. "Whatever might become a problem, best to say it now."

"If I must speak of it—the ground sits a little above the riverbank, so a channel can't easily draw water straight here. We'd have to dig a ditch from upstream, or sink a well," Norris answered. "Though there is a boon: if a storm swells the Whitewater, we needn't fear the fields being drowned."

Drawing water... a pump, or some similar lifting device, would settle it handily. Or one could use this world's "specialty"—fetch a mage specializing in water elementals to water the fields. But that second path was plainly unreliable. Once the camp was on track, Hetty would only have more and more to see to; there was no chance of her running over to serve as a human pump. And hiring a proper mage to do the watering... not even the Violet Kingdom in the north or the elves in the south would indulge in such extravagance. Besides, even if the Cecil family's money fell from the sky, how many mages would be willing to come out to the fields and do "filthy work fit only for the lowborn"?

They would sooner take half the pay to set off fireworks at the banquets in the castles of kings and great nobles, all to please those noble ladies and young misses pale as corpses and less than human from their potions.

So Gao Yang dismissed at once the notion of finding a mage to serve as a human pump, and turned to a mechanical solution. By the ordinary rules of this world, of course, the noble solution to such a problem was to find more serfs to do the work—but to Gao Yang, squandering manpower on such a thing was far too extravagant.