Confident that they were not here to raid, I gave permission for Jarl Injeborg’s crew to disembark and make camp. Outside the walls of course. Whatever their intentions, if they could see how weak were our defences, they might well be tempted to sack the town. I took Carradock’s comment on their piratical nature perfectly seriously.

Back among my people, I organised a rota of pretend guards to face the Vikings, sent Carradock off to separate the prisoners and bring back the ones from Southway, then took Figus and Carlena with me to the keep.

There, in privacy, I explained the food situation and how important those 30 units of food in the ship were to us. We were up to 6 units of meat daily, with consumption at 15 (hopefully 14 when I got rid of the prisoners). Reserves were at 38. That gave us 4 days and then people would be on short rations. Unless we had the fish in the longship, which give us 8 days before the stores were empty. Even then, we’d have plenty of iron but I had no idea how long it would take to build a ship, crew it and make a return journey to the Kingdom of Lost Souls. More than 8 days surely?

‘Which is why,’ I concluded, ‘I think Figus will have to go to the necromancer and ask for an advance.’

‘Tonight sire?’ Figus looked carefully at me.

‘Right away.’

‘Perhaps the morning would be better, it is Moon Day and I have been working on entertainment that might raise the morale of the people.’

‘What’s the significance of Moon Day?’ I wondered aloud.

‘What’s going on?’ Immediately Figus turned to Carlena with a face of pure suspicion. Feeling a flush of embarrassment, I realised I’d asked a question that King Carlos would not have. I had been too caught up in the menus and had dropped my concentration.

‘Well?’ now he turned his startling blue eyes on mine, expression hard and suspicious.

‘Well what?’

‘You’re not King Carlos, are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t talk like him. You don’t think like him. And you don’t know that on Moon Day the burghers of the town attend you in the evening.’

‘Listen carefully, Figus,’ Carlena didn’t move but her sharp, clipped words leaned over the bard. ‘If you go around talking like that, you’ll bring ruin on us all. If his popularity gets any lower, no one will work or fight. And they’ll abandon the realm.’

‘I’m no fool Carlena, even though you think me one. Just tell me.’

‘My real name is Sean de Courcy,’ I said quietly, ‘I was summoned here by Carlena to replace King Carlos.’

‘Summoned?’ Figus looked at the sorceress.

‘That ignorant slob was a fool. All he cared about was his dinner menu. And he thought we could do nothing about his ruin of the kingdom. That we couldn’t lift a hand against him without the realm losing its menus.’ Carlena was becoming impassioned, her normal pale face flushed and her words coming fast. ‘He underestimated me though, and Miya, our goddess. She didn’t want her realm to be destroyed. She came to me in a dream and guided me in a ritual to replace King Carlos with a hero from another plane.’

This was the first time I’d heard that a goddess had been involved in the summons. The role of gods and goddesses was clearly another aspect of this world that I needed to understand better.

‘Pause there, please Carlena. Can you tell me more about Miya and the other gods? Can we get her help? Does everyone have the help of a god? How can I talk to her?’

‘I’m a sorcerer. All I can tell you is what everyone knows, that the gods created this world. Each has one kingdom and they are all rivals to each other.’

‘But how much do they intervene? How can we ­– or our enemies ­ – draw on the powers of our gods?’

‘They provide divine spells to their priests daily: clerics, druids, paladins and bards.’ The sorceress waved a hand towards Figus. ‘Otherwise, hardly at all. I had never seen or heard from Miya before my dream.’

Figus nodded, then spoke, still with a tense and clipped voice. ‘I believe… Sean de Courcy… that if you were to build the church up to a cathedral, and have very large numbers of worshippers for her, that Miya might be able to intervene more and provide significant benefits to the realm. Her attributes being those of fertility and renewal, they would most likely involve crops and healing.’

‘Interesting.’ And it really was. I was already thinking that upgrading the church was an attractive option and this information reinforced that idea. ‘There you have it, Figus. I’m a newcomer. I don’t know the name of the days of the week here, let alone the rituals around them. But I’m confident I can save the kingdom and, in time, go on the offensive.’

‘This makes sense of everything that’s happened in the last four days.’ After my last words, the tension in Figus seemed to melt and all at once he was his usual devil-may-care self. ‘Hello Sean,’ he offered his hand. ‘Welcome to our world. I’m sincerely glad you are here. We need someone like you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘This is exciting news. I feel hope again. And you know what? I think most of the people of the town would too, knowing the old King Carlos has gone...’ Figus gave the sorceress a rueful expression, as though apologising in advance for what he was about to say. ‘You might consider telling them all. Especially if the goddess approves.’

‘It’s too soon. He’s doing well but we need to come on a lot more before we can risk a collapse in authority. I think his popularity has to be able to take a much bigger drop than it currently can.’

‘I might be able to help with that.’ Figus grinned and turned to me. ‘If I have permission not to depart until morning.’

‘Permission granted.’

‘In that case,’ he stood up and bowed to us both. ‘I’ll take my leave and make my preparations.’

When he had left, I looked over at Carlena. ‘I like him.’

‘I am a difficult person, Sean, because I’m uncompromising. Figus was at King Carlos’s right hand most of the time. I understand that he had to play the lackey to avoid punishment. But still, he used his skills to mock other people for the king’s entertainment.’

‘I see. Including yourself, no doubt. But you can still work with him in our joint enterprise?’

‘Of course.’

‘What’s the Moon Day event he’s planning for?’

Carlena looked tired at the thought. ‘The town has burghers.’

‘Burgers?’

‘Yes. Each guild has a representative: the chief baker, the chief butcher, the supervisor of the mines and so on…. These are the burghers of the town, they have a committee to govern all matters in Carrick that are outside of your menus, such as holding court on property disputes, and they have the right to a seating with the king on Moon Day.’

‘A seating?’

‘They come to a grim and dull evening meal in the castle. Where you sit at the top of the table, hear any complaints they have and resist the urge to hang the lot of them. At least, that’s what I think King Carlos usually does, to judge from his expressions.’

‘I see.’ I didn’t really but I could manage to sit at the table and listen. It might even be useful, teaching me something about the way in which the orders I made through the menus resulted in changes in the town.

‘Carlena.’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you happy?’

‘Happy? Of course not. We are on the cusp of destruction. I’m a sorceress with the minimum number of spells and few prospects to change that…’ she shot me a penetrating glance. ‘Worse, this is a miserable kingdom with a cultural level not much higher than that of the barbarians outside the walls. My existence is incredibly boring.’

‘What would make you happy?’

‘I’ll be honest with you Sean, although many would feel revulsion at my answer. It’s power. Power over magic. Power over the other kingdoms. Power not for the sake of it, but to live free from the fear of capture or death.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you though?’ Again that appraising look. ‘I think you do, Sean. I think you understand everything.’

There was a weight on the word everything that was important, as though she were letting me in on a conspiracy. I couldn’t grasp her meaning though, nor did I want to reveal my ignorance by asking.

‘What about you Sean, are you happy?’

‘Very. Before you summoned me, I needed a purpose to my life. A cause. And that moment when I thundered down on the enemy as a rhino?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve never been happier in my life.’

Carlena laughed. ‘I think you share something with the old King Carlos then. He would have been content to live his whole life as a rhino.’

***

That afternoon I’d made sure to keep on top of all my town management choices, namely, assigning the completed steel pickaxes to the mines and deciding what to build, now that hunting lodge 3 had been completed.

Barracks 2 had its appeal, as it unlocked ballista crew training, and with just one more ballista on the large tower (therefore covering the bridge at the same time as the first ballista stopped groups of archers from congregating under the tower), I could hold Three Ways even against much larger armies. A scriptorium was attractive too. When I had stood before the Vikings and made my bluff about Fireball, it had really struck home to me how disproportionately important was magic here. If we had a research option that led to the discovery of more spells and really did obtain Fireball, Carlena would make our army ten times more threatening.

Upgrading the mine to level 3 would work as well. Given how important iron was becoming to our trading and diplomatic negotiations, I obviously couldn’t have too much of it. Also, the description of the level 3 mine said that I would have a chance at discovering seams of silver and gold. Yet while I certainly would push up mining production as a priority, I’d run into the problem that I had no unassigned people after putting the last into the new hunting lodge.

It was during my investigation of the question of how quickly new people would become available that I discovered to my dismay that this was proportional to the realm’s happiness score. Greyland’s happiness had to be above 25 to even attract one new adult a week.

Which is why I used 110 planks of wood to set about the upgrade of the church. A bigger, more noteable church increased overall happiness, improved healing rates and attracted a new cleric to the town. Then too, it strengthened Miya, our goddess, and even though I wasn’t sure how to quantify this, it was surely an important consideration? The timer on the upgrade was 2 days and 14 hours.

During the afternoon, I’d also worked on my core muscles, although training wasn’t at all the same on my own as when Carradock had been present. In the evening, I’d bathed and, on dressing for dinner, had been provided with furs and impressive jewelled rings to wear for the Moon Day dinner.

The castle hall looked splendid, with silver places laid out for a dozen guests, glittering in the light of candles and a huge open fire. Banners and tapestries covered large areas of the stone walls and again I saw one of a white rhino on a green background. The people present included the chief carpenter, to whom I had promised the role of shipbuilder, and a dozen other men and women, wearing their finest clothes and bronze chains of office clasping emblems with the symbols of their guilds. These were middle-aged people; there was a dull emptiness in their eyes that made me wonder at first whether they were fully human or some kind of limited NPC.

It soon became clear to me that the dullness of their faces was a reflection of their interests rather than their intellect. Insofar as it was fair to generalise across them all, the issue was that their horizons were narrow. One after the other, they made the same kind of speech when their opportunity came to address me: the need to upgrade their factories or premises or equipment.

The ‘factor’ of the hunters, as she called herself, was rather less given to whinging, after all, she’d had two upgrades recently and twelve new hunters to lead. But even she wanted upgraded bows and knives.

I couldn’t ask directly about how my choices in the menu options affected their work: it would reveal me to be an imposter. But I did get the impression from their remarks that they had free will, that they had ambition, rivalry, and passion even, somewhere beneath their solid exteriors. It also became clear that my instructions appeared to them as menus that the office holders could open, albeit that they couldn’t make any amendments. Once or twice the burghers expressed thanks to our goddess, Miya, in a way that indicated that the divine power of the gods lay behind the menu system.

One question I thought would not be entirely out of character was that of reallocating workers. ‘Ladies’ – the baker, the brewer, the huntress, the seamstress and the scholar were female – ‘and gentlemen. Today, we reached the maximum capacity of workforce in our town. Until such time as we attract new residents or the young come of age, I can only reassign workers. Tell me, is there any penalty for doing so?’

All their faces were turned towards me, orange tinted in the light of the large fire. Then factor of the hunters spoke. ‘I believe sire, that while the gods allow this and the workers will immediately know the relevant skill, those reassigned are very likely to be discontented and that will reflect in the overall happiness score for our community.’

Something to be avoided then. Raising the population had become a problem almost as urgent as that of the food supply.

When the meal was done and all the goblets refilled, Figus took the floor. His dress, as always, was smart. Tonight a leather waistcoat lay on a silk shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, that appeared purple in the candlelight but which may well have been blue by day.