Chapter 7: Doing the Town

By the time the parade came back, we were downstairs and Jim was showing me all the different types and sizes of shield. Large and small, heavy ones of solid wood and lighter ones wood framing covered in leather. What did the Roman legions use? According to the movies they had huge shields, big enough to hide behind, but that was Hollywood.

I was pretty sure I wanted one of the smallest ones, the ones that Jim was calling ‘bucklers’. They were the size of a dinner plate and were light enough to move around quickly. It wasn’t something huge to hide behind, it was something to use to parry a sword with. Or maybe block an arrow with. A crossbow bolt? At any rate, it had to be easier to use than a saddle.

We’d also looked at crossbows. I knew I wanted at least one of those, as it would be a long time before I was any good at a regular bow. Jim said that regular bows were better, since they had longer range and were much quicker to fire, but he agreed that they also took far more skill to use well. At short range, though, a crossbow was fine as long as you only needed one shot. I was thinking that Weldon had been pretty well fed, so if a bolt went all the way through him it had to have some power.

I also wanted armor. Eric may not need it, but I did! They had a little bit of chainmail and a lot of leather armor. It all had to be in different sizes, since the armor couldn’t easily be re-sized. Jim said that it would be best to have your armor made for you while you waited, but that took several days and most customers didn’t want to wait that long. They ran in, bought a sword or knife, took whatever armor came closest to fitting, and ran out again.

I was surprised at how tough the leather armor was. Jim said that if you boiled leather for a while, when it dried out it hardened. And, if you added some special dirt to the boiling water, it was even harder. That made sense. It was probably a salt of some kind, something that dissolved in hot water but would be a solid rock otherwise. Minerals leached into the leather would make it a lot harder. It would be like concrete, with the minerals making it hard while the leather added toughness the way steel rebar added strength to concrete.

I’d have to ask Eric if we had time to have armor made for us.

We both jumped when someone pounded on the door.

“I sure hope that’s Eric!”

“Yes, sir. What do we do if it’s not?”

“I don’t know. I guess we find out, first.”

I picked up one of the shields I’d been playing with and drew my right-hand heavy sword, and stood ready while Jim opened the door.

It was the parade with Eric, Millie, Henry, and Anson in front and all the spectators behind them, hoping for another fight. Sorry boys and girls, I’m working for Eric, and Eric and Jim and Henry are working for Millie. No fight.

Eric asked me “What were you up to?”

“Jim was showing me around, and we thought that we shouldn’t leave the door open if we weren’t right here.”

“Well, that was the right thing to do but it surprised us to see the place closed again. Millie, this is your place now. If Jason and I stay here for a few days with your two apprentices, you should be safe. Do you still need Anson?”

“No, I don’t. Anson, thank you for all your help. Please let me know if you need any help with your equipment.”

“Thank you for that offer. Millie Armorer, I bid you good day.” With that, he walked off.

I asked “Do we want the shop open today, or do we have enough to do that we just leave it closed until tomorrow?”

Everyone turned to look at Millie.

“I’d like to bury my children. Maybe I can put something of David’s in with them.”

Eric said “Well, I have no idea how to set that up. Why don’t you send Jim, here, to go get whoever digs graves around here, while the rest of us go with you to do whatever it is that you need? Henry, can we close this place up for now, or does someone have to stay here to watch everything?”

“Master Weldon had a lock we would put on the door when we all left. I know where it is and I can go get it, but he kept the key with him. Mistress Millie, do you have his key?”

“I have three keys. Let us hope one of them works.”

I let the matter sit for a few seconds, but no one else had anything to add. When Henry got back with the lock, I asked “Does anyone have any idea what the other two keys might be for?”

Henry answered “There’s a room upstairs that Master Weldon kept locked up. He also had a strongbox with a lock, but I don’t know where that is. Maybe inside the room.”

By then I’d noticed that they were referring to Weldon in the past tense, but I decided that I just didn’t need to know everything at the moment. I could catch up on all the gossip later.

The burial turned out to be fairly simple. We went back to her husband’s shop where Millie wrapped the children in cloth while the gravedigger was digging a hole big enough for all three of them. We carried them to the cemetery and set them in, and Millie put some things in there for each one.

She also put some of her husband’s things in there, and last she cut some of her hair off to lay on top before the dirt was filled in. They’d get a stone to mark the grave, and Millie would go lay flowers on the stone whenever she was feeling sad and missed them. That was about it. Without a church presence, there was no big ceremony.

After that she had us gather up everything that she wanted to keep from their old shop on the river road, and we carried it all to her new shop down by the docks. While we were doing that Eric and I got some time to talk. Weldon had brought a huge fortune with him when he only recently moved to Widemouth. David, on the other hand, had been in Widemouth as their only armorer for a decade or more.

The assumption was that Weldon was moving from town to town, picking fights with shopkeepers, and then after killing them selling all the goods at a discount for a free profit. Now, of course, Millie had all his money and all the goods from both shops. All she really needed was a husband and she’d be set for life.

All four of us men wanted to know what was in Weldon’s locked storeroom, but Millie wanted to get the shop straightened out and fit to be lived in, first. Still, I talked her into opening it up immediately, just to make sure that there were no people or animals tied up in there, about to die of thirst. No, no beautiful naked slave girls tied up in there, just a bunch of stuff that looked valuable. Dammit.

Henry pointed out the strongbox on the floor, so we knew what the last key did, and we locked the room back up again. Millie would go through it when she was ready.

Millie invited us to both stay with her as long as we wanted, and we took advantage of her offer. We spent a couple of days getting outfitted just the way we wanted, since Millie was giving us basically a blank check for anything the shop had or could make.

I kept both of my swords, but I also took a small shield and a long bowie-sized knife. Depending upon what we were doing, I could go double sword, sword and knife, or sword and shield. I also got my armor. Eric agreed that it was best if I wore it, since I wasn’t up to combat without it yet.

Eric had a set of hardened leather armor made for him, too, but he wasn’t sure he’d want to always wear it. Still, better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

He also started giving us all lessons in sword fighting. Me, Jim, Henry, even Millie. Eric wasn’t going to try to turn Millie into a swordsman, but she should be able to help us defend the shop if we had a problem with brigands. Millie’s willingness to pick up whatever was handy and stick whoever was in front of her could be the difference between us all winning and living, or us all losing and dying.

While Jim and Henry were working on our armor Eric and I got to know the town. To my mind it was a sleepy little fishing village, but Eric said that by local standards it was prosperous and well on its way to becoming a thriving and important town. One key indicator was the bank, which as we already knew was actually an instrument of the Crossroads organization. They only put banks in the larger towns, so having a bank was clear proof that Widemouth had arrived.

We heard a lot about what was going on out in the rest of the world. Apparently, the island’s victory over the Brotherhood the previous year had made the island the place to go for those escaping from the strife on the mainland. The island had gotten quite a few penniless starving refugees, but it had also gotten a lot of people who were better off and chose to leave before they lost everything.

King Tom’s policies had refugees working for food, and his assistant Lord Paul had introduced enough labor-saving machinery to create a revolution in farming. Weeding still had to be done by hand, but planting, plowing, and harvesting had all benefited from his inventions. Grinding grain for flour also got improved, with gristmills being driven by both wind and waterfalls.

Refugees who came to the island before they were starving were put to work, also, but usually as skilled laborers. The island needed them, too. At any rate, business was booming and no one who was willing to work would go hungry. If you couldn’t do anything else, you could go help on the road crews.

King Tom was linking all the towns together with paved roads. In some places they were just laying gravel over depressions in the bedrock to make a level surface, but in other places they were building bridges over low areas. When necessary, they were building Roman-style roads with several layers of foundation before the top layer of stone.

Anyone who was willing to work for food could join the teams and eat well. It wasn’t forced labor, anyone who wanted to could leave the teams at any time, but they only got fed if they worked. Oh, and if a man or woman on a work team had children, they’d feed the children, too. That meant that the teams had a lot of stable family men working on them besides the usual day-laborers who would work for a day, get fed, and disappear for several days.