Chapter 4: Exploring

Me and Aldo and Brian took off up the road early the next morning, headed for the Narrows. We also took a couple of men who wanted jobs. I wasn’t paying them, but I’d feed them for the trip and get to know them and decide if they were men I wanted working with me or not.

Everyone was on horseback, and we had three more horses with supplies. We’d buy fresh food when we could, but the horses held enough supplies to get the five of us there and back if something went wrong.

I had trouble at home about that trip. Ceecee was supposed to go with me on trips like this. Ceecee and Millie agreed that she was the traveling wife, but she was nearing her term and riding a horse would probably make her drop her baby in the middle of the road. Riding a wagon would probably kill them both. And Millie wasn’t going anywhere even if she wanted, little Jay-Jay was too small to travel unless it was an emergency and his dinner had to stay at home and feed him.

Gina went as far as getting on a horse before I convinced her that she was not yet my third wife and she would not be keeping me warm on the road. Being pulled over my horse and spanked a couple of times may have helped convince her, but I may be wrong there. I can sleep alone if I have to. I may not like it, but I can do it. None of the other men riding with us have someone to keep them warm.

The trip was pretty boring. The road was fine, at least up to Epper’s Mill, and we couldn’t very well practice our writing with the horses bouncing us up and down. I did talk to the two hired men about my plans.

One was a woodsman. He had cut a lot of those trunks Erno used for the cofferdam, and he wanted to do something else like maybe being a sailor and getting prize money. The other was a farmer, but he was a third son and wasn’t needed on his parent’s farm. He’d be happy with a farm of his own, but he’d do whatever paid until then.

I explained to them -it was probably the third or fourth time that Aldo and Brian had heard it- that I wanted to build a sawmill, but that took a lot of power and the only source of that kind of power would be a waterfall. So, I was going up to the Narrows to see if there were any waterfalls we could use up there.

I also wanted to bring Long Lake into Widemouth’s influence. So, while we were up there at the gorge, we were going to look at where to place an outpost, a sort of compound near the road and the river where merchants could put their cargos for a couple of nights. Goods would come by boats on the river, wagons on the road, and horses down from the Lake, and goods would continue on, after changing at the outpost from boat or wagon to horse, or from horse to wagon or boat.

Once we had decided where to put the outpost, we’d bring up some workers and have them build a bunkhouse for travelers to sleep out of the rain, a stable for their horses, and a storeroom for their supplies and goods. Once they had the bunkhouse built we’d bring up some more workers and they’d turn it into a way station that served meals, fed horses, humped cargo, and so on.

Once the outpost could take care of workers, we’d send up even more men. Some of them would find the best place for a road around the Narrows. Some of them would actually build that road. And, some of them would build another outpost or way station up at the top of the Narrows. Some would be starting farms, both at the bottom and the top of the cliffs.

Last, once we had the top way station being built and a road that could take wagons being built to it, we’d send some shipyard people up there to build a couple of ships. All we wanted were some small cargo-galleys similar to what we were building for our part of the river. They would move people and goods between the top way station and the village at the other end of the Long Lake.

In the process of doing all that, we would open up the Wide River, all its tributary rivers, and the Long Lake for anyone who wanted to farm and mind their own business. If it just so happened that Widemouth was the only city that they could buy supplies from and sell their food to, well, good.

The two men we’d hired for the trip had endless questions about the area. I passed them all on to Brian, who had spent just as much time as I had where we were going. Neither of us could answer most of them. I told Brian it was good practice for when I was out at sea chasing pirates around and people came to him to ask questions that they wanted me to answer. Since I wasn’t available, they would go to him and he’d have to answer questions that he knew nothing about. He may as well get used to it now.

If you were on foot, carrying things, and maybe not used to hiking, Epper’s Mill was a good two-day journey east of Widemouth, following the river road. On horse, it was an easy day’s ride. It was easy for us riders, at least. I didn’t ask the horses. We got there in the late afternoon and the decision to stay for the night was easy.

Epper’s Mill wasn’t large enough to have a tavern with rooms for rent, but there was a blacksmith/farrier/veterinarian who took care of the village’s animals, and he could take care of our horses for a night. There was a sort of shopkeeper who brewed a rather nasty ale, and he would cook for visitors if there weren’t too many of us. There was nowhere for us to sleep, though, except out in the open or under a porch roof.

Still, the people there had taken in a lot of refugees from the attack and tried to help them. People had been fed whatever was available, and children had been put in bed with the village’s children. They had done everything that could be done and I thought that Widemouth owed Epper’s Mill a few favors.

I hadn’t really looked around the only other time I’d been here. I’d been intent on getting home. Millie was only one more day away! This time, I got to know the place a little better.

The village was on a stream, about three or four miles south of the river. Someone had set up an undershot water wheel at a place where the stream struggled to get through a rock ledge. I didn’t want to call it a waterfall, or even rapids, but the stream was stuck in its channel and couldn’t do anything to get away when someone cleaned it up some and stuck a wheel in the channel.

The mill ground grain for everyone in the area. Even some of the farmers around Widemouth took their grain here to the mill. There was a mill in Widemouth, but it was hand-powered and couldn’t keep up with the demand any more. We should replace it, too. Maybe with a larger one powered by a cow or two. Oxen. Powered by oxen.

I assume that the village grew up around the mill, but it was a long time ago. No one remembered when the mill, the village, or even the road through it was built. Surely the road was built to go to the village, or at least the mill? At any rate, the road proper, wide and well supported by a rock foundation, ended at the village.

East of Epper’s Mill there was a bridge that could handle wagons if they weren’t too heavy, and a much lower quality road to the next couple of villages. The quality got worse and worse at each stage, until it was just the goat-path around the Narrows. We were still retracing the route Brian and I had come a week before, so what little I had noticed was still fresh in my mind. If we were to do what I was thinking about, the bridge and the road would have to be improved.

Bridgetown, or at least King Tom, had several crews out improving the roads on their side of the Island. The people in the crews were mostly refugees from the mainland, working for food. Over here on the west side of the Island we had those captured pirates, but we didn’t have thousands of refugees we could put to work. Maybe we should start inviting them in, to settle here and provide a work force. It would be easy enough to bribe them with the promise of their own farm after some amount of work.

It wouldn’t even be that expensive. They would have to do all the work while we provided tools, materials, food for their first year, a couple of cows, pigs, or chickens. Within a year the farm would be producing more food than it consumed, and it would contribute to the economy.

In fact, that could snowball if we didn’t tax the farmers too heavily. One or two farms up on the Lake would help feed people who were setting up additional farms up there. What I had seen looked like very fertile land to my unskilled eyes, and the Long Lake could become the breadbasket for the whole Island.

Apparently Epper’s Mill was the only reason for this road. The other two villages farther east used the mill, and that meant horses and cows laden with grain, or occasionally even wagonloads of grain. On the other hand, I was told that I was wrong about seasonal demand. The people here didn’t all converge on the mill at harvest time with all of their grain at once.

Nature had provided the grain, which was really only a plant’s seeds, with a good protective coat that kept the seeds from going bad. Flour, on the other hand, went bad very quickly if not kept dry. So the farmers didn’t immediately take all their grain to the mill as soon as they had gotten it in from the fields. Instead, they gathered the grain, dried it as best as they could, and stored it however they could.

If the farmers had grown more than they would need to get through the next year, they would put the excess in baskets or bags and sell it. The rest would be kept in a cool dry place, a barn or a cellar or a cave. Then, slowly as they needed it, they would grind what they needed for a couple of days by hand or take a larger amount to the mill.

Okay, so this road never saw traffic jams in the fall. Instead, it saw slow but steady traffic all year long. Many people who lived within walking distance would periodically carry a bag of grain on their backs to be ground, leaving part of it with the miller as his fee. Others who were farther away would come less often but use a horse or a wheelbarrow to carry more.

There were even a couple of men with wagons and packhorses who served those farms too far away for the farmer to make his own trips. They made their living going from farm to farm collecting bags of grain and taking them to the mill. The miller would keep double his fee and pay the delivery-man in other goods, and the delivery man would retrace his route to return the ground flour to all the farms.

The delivery-men also served as mailmen and news carriers. At every farm they would tell the news, deliver messages from other farms, hand over whatever that farm had asked for, and get requests for the next trip. Those delivery-men were the only people who knew where all the farms were hidden in the woods.

The road west from the mill, to Widemouth, saw much more traffic than the road east did, from the farms and communities to the east. That was one reason why the road east wasn’t as good, and when we went through the next village it was nothing more than a rutted path. East of the last village it was just a trail.

Another reason was the terrain. Supposedly, northeast of Epper’s Mill the river was more of a central channel through a swamp or marshy area, and the road swung well south to avoid it. Did the villages and hamlets spring up at convenient places on the trail, or did they spring up along the edges of the marsh and the trail came later and merely connected them? All I knew for certain was that the path we were on veered south just before we reached Epper’s Mill and was no longer the “River Road”.

We reached the mountain-line that the gorge cut through four days after leaving Epper’s Mill, five after leaving Widemouth. We had passed our surveying team just past Epper’s Mill, stopped to talk with them for a bit, told them that they were doing fine, and gone on until we reached the line. Looking at it from the east, it was obvious that it wasn’t really a mountain-line so much as a cliff-line.

Sometime in the past either the western side had subsided, or the eastern side had risen, and the result was a long cliff-line that no one that I’d been able to talk to had ever surveyed. Surely the easiest way to find mineral deposits that could be mined would be to simply walk along the cliffs looking for coal, or iron ore, or whatever!

The cliff-line was old enough that it had crumbled in places, and people and horses could pick a path up it. We needed to find out if there was a path that could easily be widened for wagons. Of course it would have to be a gentle enough slope for horses to pull a loaded wagon up.

Or maybe we’d use cows. Cows were cheaper than horses, if not as smart, and I suspected that they were stronger. On Earth I’d always thought that ‘oxen’ were a different animal from cows, but I’d learned here that ‘ox’ was simply a term used for a male cow, a bull, which had been castrated. That made the bull a lot easier to deal with, and it was common when you didn’t need the bull to father more cows as much as you needed him to be calm.

It didn’t matter at the moment. We had to find, improve, or make a wagon-trail before we worried about how to get the wagons up it. We also needed to find a place for boats coming up from Widemouth, whether sailboats, galleys or barges, to load and unload. That made placing the outpost easy; we just put it where we had easiest access to boats and the road we were going to build.

And, if I thought about it, it would be a lot easier to build a road to a random part of the river than it would be to build a port facility at a random part of the river. The piers and storage facilities should go wherever we could find a safe place to moor the boats, and THAT pretty much meant “somewhere out of the current”.

Measured one way, the cliff line was really only a couple of hundred feet wide at any particular spot. Of course, it was probably a hundred miles long or more. Measured another way, the cliffs were only a couple of hundred feet high.