Chapter 2: Picking Up The Pieces

I mostly took it easy for the next couple of days. In fact, I spent a lot of my time in bed, with either Millie or Ceecee ‘helping me sleep’. Millie couldn’t stay, as little Jason wanted to be fed every few hours, but their help was everything a man could ask for. They kept me warm, they gave me something soft to hold, they let me play with whatever I wanted, and if I wanted services of any kind they provided them. They were really, really glad to have me home.

Nursing from Millie wasn’t as much fun for me as I’d thought it would be, but she really liked it. No matter what she said about it being wrong and me starving the baby, she got dripping wet and started squirming every time I did it so I kept doing it. “Millie needing cock” was even more fun than “Millie wanting to please me”.

I tried to nurse from Ceecee, too, but she wasn’t flowing yet. I promised to keep checking. She liked it too, but nowhere near as much as Millie did. Maybe as she got closer to giving birth they would get more sensitive.

Aldo got drafted as messenger boy and guide for Brian, going around looking for everyone I needed to talk to. It was really Brian’s job, but until he knew his way around town and who everyone was he needed a guide. Aldo, for his part, made sure that Brian was right there every time I sent him out to see someone. Aldo was torn between not wanting to be a messenger boy and not being able to do Brian’s job because he couldn’t read and write.

Filo was out with the Wrong Place. He had gone out, come back with a prize, not been able to sell it, and taken it to Small Cove to sell. I probably missed him by a few days. He had come back home to Widemouth, given the men a few days off, and gone out again. He’d probably been gone for twenty or thirty days.

No one knew how long, exactly. No one kept track of things like that. Fine, the fleet needs a calendar so we know when someone’s overdue.

Dolphin had been cleaned out and was usable as a cargo ship. No one in Widemouth wanted to buy it, though, so it was moored at the shipyard and every few days someone went and bailed it out. It needed to be hauled out and the hull cleaned and re-sealed.

Thunder had been overhauled, given two masts, a bowsprit, a square rig and a bilge pump, and was likewise ready to load crew and stores and go to sea. It had no missile launcher, though, as the carpenters wanted to be paid first. Great.

The shipyard wasn’t doing anything except working on the solid quay Filo, Erna, and I had drawn out in the dirt. Well, that was better than nothing.

The town had a new council, it had a treasury, and things got done when they were needed. The Widemouth Town Guard had been expanded with many of the militia being added. The Guard had fewer full-time members, but a lot more part-time and on-call members. Part of that was to better protect the town, but it was also to provide the Marines the ships needed. The Commander understood my plans and wanted to provide the tools I needed to make them happen.

No work whatsoever had been done on anything else I was interested in. No water-wheel up in the gorge, no sawmill, no cook-house for the ships, nothing. The shop was just about caught up on refurbishing all the weapons and armor we’d gotten from the pirates, though.

Five months had been wasted here, almost half a year, simply because I wasn’t here to get things done and no one else knew what was needed. I was really tempted to take that control ring and toss it in the ocean sometime when we were out of sight of land and there was no way to know exactly where it went, but I decided that it may be useful in an emergency. I gave it to Millie and told her to hide it somewhere. Don’t tell me where it is, just remember in case we need it. I still had the other one in my bank storage box, but who knew if it still worked, or where it would take me.

Meanwhile, I had a decision to make. My decision was that everyone would be better off if I was in charge. No, not literally everyone, certainly the other people who wanted to be in charge wouldn’t be better off if I kicked them to the curb, but everyone who actually did something for a living would be better off if I took personal control and responsibility for Widemouth and the area. What was it called? There was no real name, just ‘the west side of the island’.

I’d come up with some kind of fancy title. Feudal societies thought that titles were important. I remembered playing an old board game “Kingmaker” about the English Civil War, or maybe the Wars of the Roses, and every character had a title. Lord High Sheriff, Warden of the Cinque Ports, High Admiral, Duke of Blunderbum. Half of the titles did nothing, but having the title made your character ‘better’ somehow. “Warden of the Western Marches”? Remembering our trek down the Long Lake and then west of the Narrows I was half-tempted to spell that ‘Marshes’, but still...

I could be a warlord, and I could claim anything that I could control. I could control anything my men could reach, but would the people benefit from my attention or would I be just another jerk taxing the poor into starvation? I would have to provide something that made it worthwhile for the farmers to bend their knees and claim me as their lord.

What would a farmer want? Widemouth could provide markets, supplies, law, justice, tools, ideas, labor, probably a lot of things I hadn’t thought of yet. So could anyone else, but no one else WAS. Communications. Travel. Security. Someone to complain to and blame problems on.

If anyone improved that goat-path through the mountains, it would bind places like ‘the village’ closer to Bridgetown. So, leave that trail in horrible shape, but improve the one around the Narrows. If there were a decent road from Widemouth all the way to the head of the Narrows, and then a regular ferry service going the length of the Long Lake from the Narrows to ‘the village’, it would bind that whole area to Widemouth.

And if they couldn’t come up with a better name for their village, I’d come up with one for them. Once traders and other travelers started calling it Buttheadistan they’d come up with a name pretty fast.

Hey- Those people hadn’t mentioned Sir Tony and his relief expedition. And how did THEY get around the Lake? Oh, he had come up the coastal road. That may have been a better road, but if they had to march halfway around the island because there was no good way across it, no wonder it took them so long.

Well, once we had taken care of the pirates, people could sail from town to town and get there much faster. That was the primary task here, anyway. Get rid of the pirates. Integrating the Long Lake into the Greater Widemouth Economic Co-Prosperity Sphere could wait, I guessed.

After my two-day holiday I got back to work, keeping Aldo and Brian with me. Thunder was ready to go to sea, but it needed to be supplied and crewed. I got people moving on that. Filo had taken most of the officers, but Jono was available. Great, he’d be First Lieutenant on Thunder and Prize Captain if we caught anything. Once I had Jono onboard, I could turn the supply and crew problem over to him and move to the next project.

Dolphin needed to be pulled out; the watchmen had to bail it every couple of days and all it was doing was sitting at the fitting-out pier. Either a board had split, or one was rotten and just letting water seep through it. Why didn’t it have have a pump, too? The butter-churn pumps we’d installed in Wrong Place and Thunder weren’t that complicated. Probably every ship should have one. Why weren’t pumps a thing here? Even the Romans had pumps, surely a culture stuck in the European “middle ages” could do things the Romans could do!

Part of my studying on my ‘week off’ was on the development of machinery before machine shops existed. Many machines could be built from wood and leather. They wouldn’t last as long as machined steel or bronze would, but they would work. After the two single-cylinder pumps we’d already installed, a two-cylinder see-saw pump shouldn’t be too hard to build. We could probably make a fortune selling them to ship owners. Another project to get started...

I turned Dolphin over to the shipyard people I’d brought over from Small Cove to find the problem, fix it, and install a pump. I also mentioned to them that we desperately needed one or two cargo galleys or barges capable of moving cargo up and down the river.

If we had them, we could set up a port down at the sea and ships that couldn’t make it up the river could still trade with us. We could also easily move cargo upriver to the Narrows. Portaging cargo around the gorge would still be a problem, but one step at a time!

The soldiers and archers I’d hired? Rather than take them with me I set them up with the Commander. They’d learn what we did here that was better, teach what Small Cove did that was better, and start recruiting a company of Marines who worked for us instead of Widemouth. For now, the Captain -he’d reverted to that title when he was here in town- would command the whole force, but each detachment of Marines would have an officer in charge.

The paper-making apprentice, now promoted to journeyman, where did I put him? There really wasn’t anywhere good near town to grow hemp. He could use just about any plant matter, but we also needed to start producing our own rope so I wanted to put a hemp farm, a ropemaking facility, and the paper factory all together. And the best place to put a hemp farm was up on the Lake.

That became a major push to establish an outpost at the top of the Narrows, where the Long Lake entered the gorge. Hemp farm, food farms, paper factory, rope factory, a small fort to protect everyone from bandits, a cargo transshipment point, a couple of cargo ships for the Lake, on and on and on and on. It would all take years, and the sooner we got started the sooner we would see results.

Oh, and that meant a much smaller outpost at the bottom of the Narrows, to transfer cargos between barges and goats. Not that we actually used goats, but at first we used manpower. The first couple of expeditions up the river to set up the outposts carried everything on horseback, and a priority was to find the route that gave us the best road with the least work. Moving cargos up to the Lake and back down would become a lot easier if we found -or even built- a route that allowed wagons.

That was all in the future, but I got it started now so that someday we’d get some benefit. Oh, and I had to pay for it all myself. Sure, what else was I going to do with all that money I got from the Wrong Place’s chest and selling all those prizes?

Speaking of prizes, there was a great deal of anger in Widemouth about Thunder and Dolphin. The sailors and soldiers had risked their lives to capture them, and they wanted them sold so they could get their share. I agreed to buy them myself, at half their true value, just like we did at Bridgetown with the other ships.

We had some argument about what they were worth, but we settled on three hundred Conchs for Thunder and two-sixty for Dolphin. Half of that was two-eighty Conchs and I had no problem paying that. The town treasury got ten percent of that, twenty-eight Conchs. That made the new Council very happy. I paid myself one quarter of the sale price, of course, so I was really only out about two hundred Conchs.

The rest of it, about a hundred and eighty Conchs, all went to the men who had captured them. That made the sailors and soldiers very happy, too. Everyone was happy. Except for those men and women who had advised against us going out, of course. We were all going to be killed, stabbed or cut or drowned. We should stay home where we were safe. Those people weren’t very happy about being wrong, but in many cases they were the wives and parents of my crew so having their men back at home with all that money made it easier to be unhappy.

What with this, that, and a dozen other things, I blew through about three hundred Conchs in my first week at home, and I had obligated another hundred or so for the expeditions upstream to start those outposts. I tried to not worry about it. I still had six hundred or so in the bank, and if funds got too low we could go out, capture a few more pirate ships, and sell them at Bridgetown or on the mainland.

I had a theory about why it had seemed so easy to find the pirates. We didn’t go looking for them so much as we blundered across them wherever we went. Hunter Island was between the Pirate Isles and the mainland, and it was big enough to be a major obstacle. To get to their hunting grounds, they had to go around Hunter Island.