Chapter 661: On The Road (Part One)
The Village of Maeril was one of the most comfortable and familiar-feeling places that Isabell had visited since coming to Lothian March. Nestled against the River Luath, the village spanned both the north and south sides of the river with ferries ready to carry people and goods across the river for as little as a snip of tin per person.
Two stone platforms marked the place where a demon bridge had once spanned the river, but local legend claimed that the demons destroyed the bridge themselves in order to prevent crusaders from pursuing them when they fled north of the river. Now, those ancient stone platforms served as loading stations for barges filled with beef, lamb, and wool from Dunn Barony or wheat, barley, and produce from Hanrahan Barony, all flowing down river to the markets in Lothian City or beyond.
In another decade or two, if the village continued to grow the way it was, it might transform into a proper town with more tradesmen popping up to refine the raw materials coming in from the edges of the frontier. Already, it played host to a number of mills turning grain into flour and timber into usable lumber, but both operations felt relatively small in scale compared to the potential Isabell saw here.
Still, the village was large enough to possess a number of inns for travelers, including one that catered to visiting knights and merchants, where Marcel had asked Isabell and Tiernan to wait for him until he could arrange for their transportation to meet with Lady Ashlynn.
"It would have been nice to see the ancient bridge," Isabell mused as she sat in a small, private dining room with Master Tiernan, Sir Rain, and Sir Hugo. "I never appreciated how sophisticated their engineering was until I saw the roads they left behind out here. Any surviving demon structures in Blackwell County were destroyed so long ago that there’s nothing left to study."
"You praise demons?" Sir Rain said darkly as he paused eating, holding the bone of a mutton chop halfway to his mouth. Unconsciously, his grip on the bone tightened enough to crack the slender bone as he recalled the last time he had confronted demon ’engineering.’
The traps set by the Flat Tailed demons were both fiendishly clever and expertly hidden and more than a dozen men had been crushed to death by falling logs or impaled as they fell into concealed pits filled with spikes before Owain’s raiding force drew within sight of the demon’s nest, not to mention the men who drowned or were buried alive in the flood of water and mud that surged into the gully they were marching through when the demons shattered their own dam just to drag a few more of Owain’s soldiers to their death.
When they had finally reached the village, there hadn’t been nearly enough demons to slaughter to make up for all the men they’d lost and no matter what the priests from the Church said, a promise of paradise on the Heavenly Shores was cold comfort when you were staring into the vacant eyes of men you had been drinking with just the night before.
"That kind of talk can land you in the Inquisition’s hands before you see your next sunrise, you know," Sir Rain warned as he stared at the gray-haired engineer.
"You don’t understand," the gray-haired engineer said with a heavy sigh, wishing that the stubborn frontier knight could put aside thoughts of war for just a few minutes to consider how useful something like a bridge that could span the entire width of the River Luath would be in times of peace. Or, if he had to think of war, how useful it would be for moving soldiers and knights on their horses between the Dunn and Hannrahan baronies.
"Engineering is all about math," she said, sounding much like the school teacher she so often resembled as she tried to find a way to reach the younger man. "It doesn’t matter who does the math, one plus one will always be two. The load-bearing capacity of an arch and the strength of stones will always be the same. Math is truth, no matter who tells it, and even the Church can’t claim it’s heresy."