~ Kivamus ~

It was late evening now, and the sun had nearly set by this time. Right now, he was looking at the blueprint of the scorpion he had sketched, which was spread out on the long table in the manor hall. Duvas was sitting nearby rechecking the tax ledger once again, while Feroy and Hudan were discussing something amongst themselves. Gorsazo had gone into another room to give the evening lessons to Syryne after he had returned from the longhouse blocks and given the very basic classes to everyone there.

An hour ago, Kivamus had returned from the farms after explaining all the levers and controls of the seed drills to Pinoto and the other farmers. They had been surprised to see that it was so simple to change the depth of the seeds sown and the distance between them, and by the end of the day, just those two seed drills had been able to sow a decent area of the fields, which was far more than what those farmers could have done manually.

By the time he had left from the farms, all of them had become admirers of the new machine, as well as staunch supporters of new developments like that. That had pleased Kivamus more than anything, since he wouldn't be able to raise Tiranat's progress further just by designing and constructing new machines. He needed the support of the locals for that, and thankfully they all have been receptive to his new ideas for now, even though one day people would certainly only start to fear the machines replacing their jobs, like it had happened in England during the first industrial revolution, but it would take a while. At least the first step of becoming self dependent in food production had begun well, so Zoricus and other nearby nobles wouldn't have the power to bend Tiranat to their whims just by threatening to starve out the village.

From tomorrow, Pinoto had promised that he would explain the process to the other farmers as well, and they would start using all twelve seed drills to start sowing. The old farmer had given a rough estimate that if there weren't any problems, it should take around two weeks to complete all the sowing, which would also give some extra time to the loggers to clear some more area of the fields in the south.

The best thing about it was that while those two weeks were longer than he had expected with the dozen seed drills, it would still only need less than thirty farmers in total to operate all the seed drills while also doing the necessary weeding and irrigation, which would leave the remaining villagers to keep mining coal as well as to work on the other construction projects. He still needed to find a better solution for irrigating the farms instead of relying on the farmers hauling buckets of water from the village wells to the farms, even though the wheelbarrows would help in that. Hopefully, they would be able to buy enough wheat in those two weeks to use as seeds.

After returning from the farms, he had met with the carpenter Darora and the blacksmith Cedoron and had shown them the preliminary design of the scorpion he had made. Darora had been enthusiastic to try something new - now that he had given the last crossbow to the manor today and didn't have any other pending tasks - especially about the pair of gears which were to be installed on the sides of the scorpion to allow guards to load it easily. On the other hand, Cedoron had grumbled about the shortage of iron ingots, which was preventing him from doing anything more than just simple repairs to the broken and damaged tools being used all around the village.

The coal miners were also having to make do with less than half a dozen safety lamps which had been built until now, which meant there simply weren't enough of them to ensure all the mineshafts could be used safely. That's why they had to revert to using tallow candles again, although that was only done after confirming the mineshafts were safe by checking ahead with the safety lamps, which was better than the past years, at least.

The blacksmith had already used up the iron from all the rusted swords they had gotten from the bandits, so while he had also seemed eager to learn to build something new - particularly something he hadn't even heard of before - but without getting more iron, he could only sit and watch the carpenter at work for now.

Even so, while his preliminary design of the scorpion had seemed good enough to both of the craftsmen, Darora had suggested adding a small wooden board outside the watchtower platform at the same height as the parapet to fix the scorpion's pivot, instead of fixing it directly above the parapet. This would allow the scorpion to be placed a little ahead of the platform, and this way, the guards could even shoot easily to the sides of the watchtower without the corner pillars hindering their sights. Kivamus had grinned seeing the ingenuity of the talented carpenter, and had agreed to make some changes in the design.

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Once that was done, he had assured them that he would finish the design as soon as possible, so they could start working on it. Or at least, start familiarising themselves with their design in the blacksmith's case. Eventually, he sent both of them back to their tasks and looked at the guard captain.

"Hey, Hudan! You've made sure that all the crossbows have been put out of sight, right? We can't risk letting the tax collector or anyone else from his escort and guards getting to know about them. They must be reaching here any day now."

Hudan nodded. "Yeah. I took all of them from the watchtowers and put them in a storage room of the servants hall. There is no way any knight worth his salt would ever enter the servants hall for any good reason. Sir Duvas has already told me that the tax collector is nearly as old as him, so he wouldn't be going around too much for walks either."

"I have to say, milord," Feroy interrupted, "I don't like this. The only reason we made those crossbows was to allow the watchtower guards to kill any bandits before they approach the walls or try to set them on fire or something. By hiding the crossbows until however long this tax collector stays here, we are playing with fire here. What if the bandits attack before that, maybe even tonight? What use would the watch towers be in that case?"

The guard captain looked at the ex-mercenary. "I have already arranged the watch shifts so that there is always an archer on watchtower duty at night."

Feroy shook his head. "Other than Yufim and Nurobo, none of our other archers are worth their salt. The crossbow-women are much, much better shots than all of our archers except those two, but without those weapons they can't do anything anyway." He shrugged. "Still, even assuming Yufim and Nurobo are able to pull an extra long duty every night for 12 hours instead of the usual 8, that's still just two good archers we have, but by tomorrow we'll have four watchtowers to post guards at. How's that going to work?"

Kivamus thought about the problem and he couldn't say that he disagreed with Feroy's opinion. It was true that the primary reason for making crossbows was to make the defence of the village easier, but what was the point if they couldn't even use them when needed? That fact was even more true when they were already expecting a raid and from probably the most powerful bandit group in this region. It would have been so much better if they could keep using the new weapons...

He futilely wished that instead of crossbows, they had something smaller like guns here, which could be hidden much more easily on someone's body compared to the crossbows which were much larger. In that case they could have allowed the watchtower guards to keep the guns with them even when the knights and the tax collector were coming, since it wasn't like they were going to do a full body check of the guards to see if they had some new and unique weapon on them.

Wait... that was a good idea, actually. Why couldn't they just hide the crossbows too? There had to be a way for this... He thought about the talented carpenter whom he had just sent back - who was also mostly free these days - and grinned.

"Hudan, I have a good idea. Go and bring the carpenter back. He must still be in the manor."

The guard captain nodded quizzically, and ran outside, and before long, he was back with Darora inside the manor hall.

"What is it, milord?" The young carpenter asked with worry about being called back so soon.

Kivamus smiled at him. "I have a new task for you. This is of utmost importance, so you need to do it as soon as possible."

Once the carpenter nodded, with curiosity easily visible in his eyes for another new challenge, Kivamus continued, "You already know that the tax collector is coming soon with his usual escort of knights, but we can't let them know about the crossbows just yet. For now we have hidden them away from the towers but that's not good for the village's safety, so I need you to make a secret compartment on top of the watchtower platforms. It needs to be big enough that it can easily hide a big quiver of bolts as well as at least one, and preferably two crossbows there - since I don't want you to build it again."

Darora nodded slowly, while gazing into the distance. "I think I see what you mean."

Kivamus continued, "It also needs to be made in such a way that it is not easily apparent that it is actually a hidden compartment." After thinking for a moment, he decided that a cuboidal shape would work here. Then he spread his hands around half a metre wide. "For that, I think you can fix a plank around this wide parallel to the parapets as the vertical side of this compartment on one inner edge of the platform, and then cover it with a removable plank, which should be around one half - no, one third of that width. That should be enough to make a compartment which is as wide as the full side of the platform, while being half a meter high and around 20 centimetres deep."