Chapter 27: Lord of the Bow

Jon and I decided not to fight in the tournament; it would just be unfair and cause resentment. Luckily it seemed Ned had managed to convince Robert to follow suit.

Then there was a special bill and bonds auction, and every hope I had for a prosperous fiefdom was fulfilled when the first slot of Valyrian steel production was auctioned off.

Harrenhal was both a rich and a totally broken fief to hold. On the one hand, it was fairly populous and prosperous. It had a total population of about four-hundred and twenty thousand, average family size of about five and a half, and average income of four and a half dragons per family per year, which was about one and three-quarter dragons above the poverty line.

Of those four hundred twenty thousand people, four hundred thousand of them lived on lands within my territory; I ruled those lands, and taxed them, but didn’t directly own and administrate the land. That was left to a patchwork of yeoman landowning farmers, knights, and various local semi-independent villages and towns. I ended taking about one fifth of their income above the poverty line in taxes and fees, with the rest going to the Tullys (one tenth), the crown (another tenth), village and common use (three twentieths), and about a quarter to the peasants to spend with another fifth to save.

Then there were twenty thousand people that lived on lands that I directly owned and managed. I managed to get my greedy mitts on about half the profit that those lands provided. That gave me a total general income of about twenty eight thousand six hundred dragons, an amount of wealth roughly equivalent to earning two hundred and sixty million dollars a year.

Which sounds like a lot until I take into account how much I have to spend. Twelve hundred on guardsmen, between pay, food, and equipment. Two thousand on the castle staff. A thousand on maintenance for the castle, and that was much reduced from what it was before. Four thousand to maintain the roads, shitty as they were, throughout my fief. Eight thousand of the taxes were taken as service with the militia, rather than gold; most of that was time spent training, and even then my people were about as useful in a fight as a wet blanket. Another eight thousand for bailiffs, constables, and as the small stipends for village heads and the like. A thousand on tax collectors, another thousand on the entertainments and feasts I was obliged to fund, and finally a thousand dragons on things not accounted for or overbudget.

That meant that at the end of the average year, Harrenhal’s territory only made some one thousand, four hundred dragons in profit. That was still pretty damned good, even if most of those profits came from the reduced cost to maintain the castle. If I were back on Earth making thirteen million dollars a year, I wouldn’t complain.

But it didn’t take into account that instead of two hundred guardsmen at twelve hundred dragons a year, I really needed at least a thousand guardsmen which would cost around five thousand dragons a year. That would put me deeply into the red on my earnings sheet, and still didn’t take into account the one-time cost of expanding the military rather than just maintaining it. Further, I didn’t just want my lands to get by, I wanted them to fucking thrive.

Now, some things would have a big impact. Four-field crop rotation, for example, would roughly double my territory’s income by improving the agricultural yields. Granted it would also mean I’d need to fund more mills, granaries, and other infrastructure, so it might cost a bit to begin with. The poverty line wasn’t going to shift, so doubling the income meant that my peasants would have a lot more disposable income to tax, going from one and three quarter dragons to six and one quarter dragons. Since I’d squeeze out extra taxes to “cover improvements” and the like, keeping my relative taxation rate on the peasants’ profit consistent, I wouldn’t be doubling my tax income; I’d increase it by about three and a half times.

Again, I was barely breaking even, but that was because both my expenses and my income were high. Better than triply my income, and that meant my territory’s profits would go from fourteen hundred dragons to almost seventy three thousand dragons, increasing by a factor of fifty. With that money I could fully equip my castle and further modernize my territory.

However, historically speaking the gains from the agricultural revolution were pretty slow. It could take ten to twenty plus years before I saw those kind of gains, and at the very best with a Four-field rotation I’d be looking at four years for full impact.

I wasn’t that patient. Beyond which, I was effectively in turn one of a game like Medieval Two Total War. I’d grow my territory a lot faster if I used building cheats and money cheats. I’d already done the building cheat, fixing Harrenhal in a day. Next, I wanted to earn a shit-ton of money. And for that, there was nothing better or easier for me to do than produce Valyrian steel. As was obviously shown in the first auction.

Sixty four thousand dragons.

Sixty four thousand dragons.

SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND DRAGONS!

I felt like screaming in glee as I sat in the auction, the sound of ringing gold in my mind. It was a stupendous amount of money. Not a year ago, and I was worried that a cost of a hundred thousand dragons might send the whole realm into a financial tailspin.

Gods bless rich nobles who get their pride mixed up in having the very first Valyrian sword of the modern age, that’s all I could say. Though to be fair, they’d likely get their names in the history books that mentioned this moment, and nobles lapped that sort of useless honor up like cats drinking the sweetest cream.

The second spot went for twenty two thousand dragons, the third for twelve thousand. A total of ninety eight thousand dragons, more profit than my fief used to make in a lifetime. It was paid in the form of Royal Treasury Bills, which had quickly become the standard method of moving large amounts of money around in Westeros.

With that, I was in business. It was time to go back to Harrenhal and get started.

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About a month after I returned to Harrenhal, and my smiths and alchemists had finally settled in. I gave the alchemists a decent budget, and set them to figuring out how to make paper. I suspected that the process would change a lot in the future. Once they figured out exactly what was important in the paper making process I was sure I could figure out how to make a tree or bush that provided useful materials. I just needed some parameters to design my plants.

The smiths, meanwhile, were ready to make the first true Valyrian steel equipment in an age. I had spent a lot of time with them enchanting files, cutters and other equipment to be invulnerable. They had practiced daily with meditation and focus exercises to achieve the correct states of mind, and grown their skills to make Damascus-style patterned steel blades.

The first item we worked on was Ned’s new sword. He had decided that Ice was pretty much the epitome of an excellent blade, and that it would be nice for Winterfell to have one for the Lord and one for the Heir. So we set to work, and created a copy of the same size, weight and dimensions. Its name read Frost.

The second was a bit more complicated. Robert had asked if we could manage a Valyrian war hammer with a blunt head, a curved spiked beak back, and a spearhead at the top of the shaft for thrusting. After consulting with my smiths, I’d sent Hue with the reply that we could, but it would be difficult. Even more than a sword, a hammer relies on its mass to cause damage. Which mean that the head of the hammer had to be true Valyrian steel for the impact.

The problem was, the head didn’t have an edge. Couldn’t have an edge. And instead of blade essence, had to be full of hammer essence in the crafting while the metal was folded and refolded into the shape of a hammer-head. On my part, the enchantment had to be modified slightly. The first time was an utter failure, the magic within the hammer-head detonating. The only reason the blast didn’t kill one of my smiths was that I’d thought ahead and given them some protections. I still ended up having to regrow one of their hands.

A much warier group returned to try again. The second failure was less explosive; the enchantments took, but the hammer didn’t achieve the hammer essence it needed and so the weapon was useless.

The third time, we succeeded in making the hammer and claw. Then we took a shaft with a spearhead sized blade on it, fit them together, and I fused the metal. And it was done. The world’s first Valyrian steel Warhammer. At least, the first I’d heard of.

Fucking Robert. Only he would want something like that.

Once the hammer was done, productivity went up. I had them make Valerian steel swords and lances for Jon and I. We even had Valyrian steel belt knives, a true extravagance. If I hadn’t taken care of my facial hair with Green, I’d have used it to shave too.

Harrenhal began to feel more like a home over time. I bonded the whole fortress; the five towers, the main gate, the east gate, the great hall, the kitchens, the barracks and armory, the outer and inner yards, the bathhouse. My fortress was the size of a small town, but over time I bonded it all. Eight White, four Blue, six Black and five Red from the memory of dragons and fire.

With all the extra wealth, I ordered Ser Deran to expand the Guard’s cavalry. I thought about expanding the infantry too, but decided against it. I wasn’t overly impressed by the foot soldiery of the Seven Kingdoms. Roman infantry or Spanish tercios would hand them their asses. Eventually I’d see to training up a decent bunch of professional infantry, but until then I saw little point in expanding what was essentially an antiquated an ineffective force.

Generally I liked the expanding cadre model for the military: a small core of permanent professional soldiers, who served as the cadre for part time semi-professionals, basically the reserves, who in turn served as the cadre for their local militias. That way, I’d have a relatively consistent force, with a hardened, seasoned core I could call on at a moments notice. If I needed to mobilize for war, I could do so quickly and with a relatively high quality of levy.

But most importantly, my territory was soft. It wasn’t highly urbanized, with defensible cities, but was spread out with insignificant villages. That’s where the lowest tier of militia troops came in. They didn’t have to be great to see off bandits, and if everyone in my territory was trained to fight it would be easy to spot and recruit the best for my army and reserves. Beyond that, I just generally believed people should know how to defend themselves.

However, training infantry would take a lot of time and effort on my part. So instead, I decided to go for a different option, one that would also take a lot of time but make my territory one of the best protected in the land. I decided to spread the practice of archery.

It wasn’t very hard. First, I grew thousands of heavily recurved bows from the oaks in the godswood, ranging from light draw-weight pieces for children to medium and heavier draw pieces for adults. I also grew arrows by the thousand, their shafts falling down like rain from the tree limbs.

Then I drafted a proclamation. I laid out a number of different achievements that I wanted people to be able to manage, with different requirements for children and adults. These ranged from what I thought reasonable out of a militia archer, which most fit men and a number of women could manage, to what I wanted out of a reserve archer, which still wasn’t overly difficult but would take a degree of time and dedication to training, to what I wanted out of the archers in my guard which would take at least a modicum of skill and more extensive dedication.

I added ranks, different colored badges that these achievements would allow and a sliding scale of cash prizes; the payout for truly top archers was enough that a master archer could be a person’s profession. It wouldn’t pay well without other jobs, but anyone that good could join my guard anyways, and likely as a sergeant of archers which paid well. There was both an active badge, which you had to qualify for yearly, and a historical achievement badge associated with each rank to drive competitiveness.

The most skilled archer in an area was offered the responsibility of Range Officer. This meant they had to organize for a skilled archer to be present each day for at least two hours to help student archers practice. They were graded on a point system based on how many archers they had of each skill level, and offered incentives for their students to perform well.

And then, for the real overachievers and ambitious people, there was horse archery. Similar to regular archery there were badges and prizes, but unlike regular archery any sufficiently skilled horse archer, regardless of age, could get an automatic slot as a squire at my castle with a knighthood to follow once their training was complete.

For richer landowners, that was the opportunity of a lifetime for their children. To make sure it was available to those of poorer backgrounds but higher skill, any child sufficiently skilled at regular archery would be offered a spot as a squire-candidate at my castle until they turned eighteen. That way, I could have them taught their numbers and letters during the training. At the worst, anyone skilled enough for a squire-candidate slot would make a great guards archer, and with some literacy would be likely candidates for positions as corporals and sergeants.

The bows and arrows I grew allowed me to offer them for free to anyone who wanted to try and qualify; the only requirement would be logging a certain amount of time a week on the shooting range or paying a penalty. Selling the bow would be considered theft from their lord; few were so stupid as to do so.

All children aged twelve to sixteen were expected to practice at least three times a week for two hours each time; part of the budget I assigned to this was earmarked for payments to the villages to offer meals to each of these children following their practices. To motivate higher practice, the children could attend practice and receive a meal every day if they wanted.

When tax wagons left my castle for my outlying lands, unlike in the past when they’d leave empty and return full of grain, now they left loaded down with bows and arrows. The project was crazily expensive; just the food for the children ran me four and a half thousand dragons. Overall, I budgeted thirty thousand dragons a year to it, and that was after I made the bows and arrows essentially for free.

It was incredibly popular, and my people ridiculously competitive over archery though, so the project was well worth it.