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Chapter CXXXIX – It shall elevate thy republic, and thou shalt cultivate their land.
🕑 Added 2025-06-08 18:05:45 +0000 UTC19th of Spring 5860 Imperial Highway №04-030, State of Casamonu It was a beautiful day down in Casamonu. The snow had completely melted, the
19th of Spring 5860
Imperial Highway №04-030, State of Casamonu
It was a beautiful day down in Casamonu. The snow had completely melted, the birds were back and chirping, and there was a beautiful road for Rabanowicz to her horse on. She was accompanied by Watanabe who was clinging to her from the back, squeaking a little bit in fear every time he felt like he was about to fall off.
It had turned out that, for a man used to the conveniences of subways and buses, a horse was a beast of chaos. They went up, and down, sometimes let out a neigh, flopped their tails, and did whatever their animal mind pleased. Watanabe had his eyes closed tightly shut. His forehead was dripping with sweat despite there being a pleasant breeze. He was suddenly forced down back on to the Earth by Rabanowicz, who proudly plopped her boots on the road she had helped build. “Come on now, are you a newborn kitten shaking like that?” She nodded towards a village just to the side of the road “Time to do our job.”
“Right, right- oomph.” Watanabe was almost knocked out when Rabanowicz threw a stack of tablebooks on his arms to cradle. They had been stored in a satchel hanging by the horse’s saddle,
“Alright, the name of this place is…” Rabanowicz spotted a sign right outside the periphery of the village. “New Libertycave.”
Watanabe opened one of the tablebooks, cradling the rest with one arm with the tablebook open at the top of them, while holding a charcoal pencil with his other hand. He flipped to the relevant page and wrote down “New Libertycave… this is the ninth New Libertycave.”
“Hmm… Call it “New Libertycave-by…” Rabanowicz looked around for a significant landmark to note the name of the village down. She spotted a large oak tree nearby. “New Libertycave-by-Oak.”
Watanabe scribbled the new name down “Doctor, that is the second New Libertycave-by-Oak in record.”
“…New Libertycave-by-Oak-on-Thirty.”
Watanabe had to carefully minimize his letters to be able to fit the name before he hit the corner of the page. “New Libertycave-by-Oak-on-Thirty.”
“Exactly. New Libertycave, by an oak, on number thirty of the Imperial Highway. A descriptive name.” Rabanowicz took a look at the village from afar. It seemed pretty standard for a newly-built freemen village, and it definitely deserved to be called “New Libertycave”. The freemen who had moved out from Libertycave to the countryside had brought over the distinct style of Libertycave with them. A pile of drying clay bricks had been left by the roadside, right next to a brick building that looked newly-built. The village houses of course had copper rooves imported from Libertycave, colored orange as they hadn’t been exposed to the air long enough to become green. The houses had no glass windows, only wooden slits that had been opened for the spring. Around the houses was a large open area of tilled soil, with the newly-minted peasants already hard at work sowing crops. Rabanowicz made her way towards the village, hailing the first peasant saw “Good morning, sir, where is your mayor, headman, or whoever represents your village?”
The man in question paused, clearly unsure what to do, before he said something in a foreign language and ran off. “What’s his problem?” asked Watanabe.
“Let’s ask someone else. There has to be someone who can speak Gemeinplatzish.” Rabanowicz tried to talk to a few more people in the village, getting the same response every time.
After a while of asking around, to no avail, Rabanowicz and Watanabe leaned next to the walls of one of the houses to take a breath. “I think we’ll have to get a translator to talk to the people of this place” mused Rabanowicz, taking a mental note.
“That’d take way too long for just one village, to find someone who can speak both our languages.” Watanabe was thinking whether to leave, when he spotted a group approaching them. A large mob of peasants, led by quite a large man. “Uhh, maybe we should book it?”
“Don’t be a coward.” Rabanowicz walked towards the man in the front and gave him a wave “Good morning.”
“Good morning. Were you looking for me?” The man towered over Rabanowicz, a scar on his face, and he looked suspicious of the newcomers.
“Yes, I assume you’re the mayor of this place? We’ve been sent by the Commander-in-Chief to conduct a survey of villages around Casamonu.” Rabanowicz extended a signed paper from Brown, so did Watanabe. They held their papers forward awkwardly for a second before realizing that nobody in front of them could read.
“I haven’t been elected mayor or anything, but I do speak for the village. All the people here are new-arrivals to your realm, including me.” His expression softened up as he said something to the crowd, which made them disband. “They were worried that you may be men of the Imperials. Especially the otherworlder with you – otherworlders usually don’t bode well.”
“Apologies for being myself” replied Watanabe, the errant otherworlder.
“Would you like to take a seat?” The man took out a pair of stools out of the house which Rabanowicz and Watanabe had been leaning on. “My name is Mifele, nice to meet you.”
“And I am Doctor Rabanowicz, and he is Watanabe.”
“Watanabe Haruhi! The hero!”
“Everyone calls you Watanabe, you might as well not a have a name, Monsieur Watanabe.”
“Hey-”
“So, what’s this about a survey?” Mifele had dragged himself a stool and joined in the sitting.
“A survey, and then a census. The Republic needs to know how much men we have, how much to tax, how much volunteers we can expect in the army, how many people will be voting… We need to know how many households you have here, plus how much land you’re cultivating for this season.” Rabanowicz and Watanabe had only been assigned to Casamonu thankfully – there were other people doing the same job as them over in Karabush. So, if you’ll allow us…”
“Of course, that’s the least we can do to help you people.” Mifele proceeded to get up, and lead Rabanowicz and Watanabe throughout the village. Watanabe was tasked with counting every house they passed, adding up to get a number of households in the village, while Rabanowicz was busy measuring the fields with some rope and stakes. She’d later use these numbers to calculate how much, on average, one peasant produced in Gemeinplatz for taxation and mobilization purposes.
The peasants were watching Rabanowicz do her work. From the outside, with how esoteric the science of statistics was, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that she was doing black magic in front of their eyes. Rabanowicz almost bumped onto an onlooker, and as she reeled back she asked the mayor “Could you ask them to leave me alone for a second? It’s distracting me from my work.”
“Of course.” Mifele clapped and shouted some words, which caused the crowd to disperse. “They’re getting adapted to life in the boonies as well, with all that staring at awe at a city-dweller.”
Rabanowicz continued laying out a piece of work, conversing while working “Where are you from, Monsieur Mifele? I assume you’ve been in Gemeinplatz for a while.”
“No, I have only been in your realm for… two or three seasons at most. Time in captivity passes by quickly, it’s hard to tell, and the seasons here are very different.”
“You speak Gemeinplatzish very well” replied Rabanowicz. She drove a stake into the ground, to hold the rope tight. “Were you a trader? A diplomat? A scholar?”
Mifele spoke slowly and somberly “I used to be the captain of the royal guard of a king down in Ginye. The lords of my realm train young slaves, my family sold me before I could even remember them, to be loyal soldiers and officers of state. You’re right about me being a diplomat – I’d often accompany my lord with his court, and it’s pretty useful to be able to communicate with Gemeinplatzish merchants when you encounter them.”
“A pretty bad fall from grace, then.” Rabanowicz dug another stake on the ground, completing two corners of a triangle. “What happened?”
“My lord was a gracious man, maybe too gracious, and by the time he noticed a plot to overthrow him it was too late. I got sold off to a slaver caravan as part of the spoils of war captured by the rebel lords.” He let out a painful chuckle “The lightskins in Gemeinplatz are fools, to use their slaves so inefficiently. They have so many men they rule over, yet all they can make them do is dumb labor.”
“Right? A total waste of men.” Rabanowicz completed the triangle with her last stake. The farm plots were square, but she could easily calculate the area of a square plot of land by multiplying the two sides of her triangle together, and then multiplying it by two. It saved a bit of rope, which she had marked regular sections of to use as a flexible ruler. She quickly concluded her head math, and jotted down the area on a small tablebook in her pocket. “That’s the last field, right?”
“Indeed, it is.” Mifele helped Rabanowicz coil her rope back up, and soon she had a bundle of rope and a job well-done on her hand.
“Good day to you then. Good luck with your village, Monsieur Mifele.” Rabanowicz waved goodbye, and made her way to collect Watanabe for the next village on the road.
Comments
The Cabbage Preacher
That's for the later chapters!
Anton Josef Bronola
I love occasionally seeing the more logistic side of running a country. I sometimes wonder how the Republic’s legal system would work. Especially in a bigger and more developed country like the Republic.
