How many households lived outside Runestone Castle?
There should have been ten thousand. After all, its army alone numbered nearly five thousand, including fifteen hundred men in iron armor.
There should also have been several thousand households within the castle estate!
Viewed directly from above on a map, Runestone Territory's Runestone Peninsula looked like a thumb jutting straight from west to east into the Narrow Sea.
The narrowest part of the Runestone Peninsula measured about ten li from north to south. From the western edge of the Gull Mountains to ten li farther west, all of it belonged to Gulltown.
For historical reasons, part of Gulltown's eastern territory had been forcibly placed under Runestone's jurisdiction, leaving Gulltown with three thousand square kilometers.
Traveling roughly twenty kilometers north-northeast from Gulltown brought one to Four Crossroads. Why was it called Four Crossroads?
Because Hardstone Road to the east of Four Crossroads led into Runestone Territory, while Strongstone Road to the southwest followed a vast stretch of Redwood Forest into House Strongstone's territory—to Strongstone Beach! Heading northwest led to Ironoaks!
Four Crossroads held great military significance! At present, the Earl of Runestone had only built Four Crossroads Fortress there! One purpose was to defend the great eastern plain against raids by medium-sized barbarian tribes in the Gull Mountains, which might number several thousand people.
The other was to protect the trade routes, along with commoners and nobles passing through!
Meanwhile, Keir Keep, at the westernmost end of Gull Territory where four baronies met, was currently only a small town of around a thousand people. Of course, it also belonged to Su Qin!
The local vassal family was House Keir!
Its head, Hall Keir, had passable administrative ability, [Politics 4], just barely usable!
Su Qin had given him a hundred gold coins, along with a monthly salary of five gold, to buy ownership of the lands outside Keir Keep! Su Qin had not yet bought back the area inside the castle!
He had also transferred Hall to Gull Manor to handle some matters with the Master of Coin, which Hall was quite happy about!
Su Qin had likewise reclaimed, one by one, the lands of the minor nobles in the other two places, whose fiefs were Aite Keep and Osgood Keep, excluding their castle estates.
And their family heads were none other than the right Master of Coin and his two deputies!
These terms had been negotiated with the Master of Coin while Su Qin held firm control of the army!
He had also promised to provide more funds in the future to compensate the three families!
After negotiating with Su Qin!
They intended to establish new family estates in Gulltown, and Su Qin had already approved the land grants.
They were one li east of the Gull River, near Crab Bay! Each of the three families received forty thousand square meters. Not much, just a square two hundred meters on each side, but certainly enough!
And weren't the smiths from Smithy No. 3 leading a hundred men to build their estates every day now! The money spent buying back the territories had already returned to Su Qin's pocket: three hundred gold coins!
In effect, he had reclaimed their territories for a monthly salary of five gold coins!
But for nobles above the rank of baron, their territories could not be arbitrarily reclaimed under the kingdom's laws!
Their records were kept in both King's Landing and the Citadel!
The eastern bank of the Gull River was intended to become a noble district. He could not have all these new and old nobles living in Gull Manor every day!
Gull Manor's four square kilometers had to be reserved for the families of his personal guards, smithies, handicraft workshops, arrow-making workshops, the administrative hall, and other necessary buildings.
Of course, the main reason Su Qin had been able to reclaim the three families' fiefs was that he had paid enough! Once the territory developed, he would continue improving the treatment of these old nobles. That was necessary.
Those three families formed the staff of Telang, Su Qin's current right Master of Coin!
Telang Osgood, chief right Master of Coin! Hall Keir, Telang's deputy financial officer, the left deputy! Paul Aite, the right deputy!
Their loyalty was decent, all around 85. Nobles' loyalty was rather difficult to raise. When he first met them, they had all been around 50, quite unreliable!
Back to the subject of territory: Augustus Territory and Aite Territory divided the fifteen hundred square kilometers of the Gull Mountains evenly between them, though most of those mountains were already under Su Qin's direct rule by then.
At present, apart from the residents of Keir Keep in the far west, whom Su Qin had not relocated, he had moved the inhabitants of all the other territories to Lower Gulltown to farm!
Traveling thirty kilometers west along Strongstone Road brought one first to Aite Keep, and another forty kilometers west led to Keir Keep!
Under normal conditions, a warhorse could travel roughly twenty to sixty kilometers in one hourglass.
Thirty or forty kilometers also happened to be about the distance between the smallest fiefs!
But if one did not care about the horse, it could keep running for several hundred kilometers in a day!
So if Su Qin wanted to go to Keir Keep, it would take a little over two hours at the fastest, or half a day at a slower pace!
(From now on, narration will use hours throughout, while character dialogue will continue following Westerosi conventions.)
Runestone was a hundred and forty li away. With an overnight rest at Four Crossroads, the journey took two days of daylight!
A horse's comfortable pace was twenty kilometers per hour. The faster it went beyond that, the more rest it needed, and the greater the harm to the horse!
What about the Gull Mountains, then?
Surely not every part stood over five thousand meters high like the main peak!
Of course not. Below the main peak lay many rolling mountain ranges and several valleys, and clans or Wildlings lived in those valleys!
Why could the Wildlings speak the Westeros language? They were Andals and First Men too! Their clans consisted of the descendants of people who had fled oppression by nobles!
Originally, Westeros had belonged to the Children of the Forest. Then the First Men arrived and seized their lands!
Later came the Andals, who began their war against the First Men in the Kingdom of the Vale, steadily conquering the First Men and the Children of the Forest!
Thus, the title of House Targaryen's king was:
Ruler of the First Men, the Andals, and the Rhoynar!
The Wildlings of the Vale were tribes gradually formed over long years by Andals and First Men seeking to escape the nobles' extortionate levies.
The Gull Mountains had relatively few Wildlings. In the two enormous mountain ranges to the west, the northern and southern Mountains of the Moon along the boundaries between the Kingdom of the Vale, the Kingdom of the Riverlands, and the North, most of the Wildlings had First Men blood!
That raised a question!
Why did the Earl of Runestone, with several thousand soldiers, not wipe out all the clans in the Gull Mountains?
The answer was that he was caught in a dilemma!
If he sent a large army through Redwood Forest into the valleys, the Wildlings would simply retreat deeper into the mountains, even abandoning their clan settlements! They knew preserving their people mattered more!
Every three years, the lord of Runestone Territory would lead around a thousand men into the mountains to fight the clans as a deterrent!
If left alone, the clans would certainly push their luck!
The largest clan lived in Moon Valley, where there was a very large lake covering several dozen square kilometers. That largest clan was called the Moon Clan! Its tribe numbered several thousand, with over fifteen hundred warriors!
The women were concentrated in the large clans, so the small clans lacked women and had to come out to raid. Apart from copper coins, they plundered grain, livestock, weapons, and women!
Heading south from Moon Valley and out of Redwood Forest brought one into the lands of Augustus Castle. Generally, the large clans would not come out to fight the local nobles, because their technology simply could not compare!
Their axes were made of pig iron, and their shields were merely wooden! Pig-iron or wooden arrowheads-was that a joke? Even bronze arrowheads were better than pig-iron ones!
Conditions in the mountains were very complicated, so, taken together, the nobles held a greater advantage. That was what kept the large clans from daring to invade the interior! Their smithing techniques were terrible!
Smithing was not just a matter of hammering away, with more blows always being better. If it were, everyone would be a smith! Who the fuck would farm?
Bellows, temperature, purity, materials mixed in, and other factors were also very important!
The clans had neither the knowledge nor the time to research these things! They could barely survive-research, my ass!
And even just considering the hammering!
Too little hammering left it soft! The weapons made from it would go blunt without cutting through the enemy's armor!
Too much left it brittle, snapping with a single chop!
And most importantly, the techniques for removing the various impurities in pig iron were all in the hands of the nobles' private smelters!
Even when Su Qin bought iron ingots, he had to bring his lord's seal and receive the goods in person!
As for clan armor, leather was the best they had!
So the clans that usually invaded were all small clans in Redwood Forest on the fringes of Moon Valley. For a long time, Gulltown's main concerns had been confronting these small clans and maintaining maritime trade! Incursions were common, happening every year, but at most, only bands of two hundred would attack the outlying villages and towns!
Augustus Castle and Aite Keep had been built precisely to prevent large-scale barbarian invasions into the interior! But ordinarily, the minor nobles paid little attention to defending remote areas, especially the small villages on the fringes!
Their castles' outer walls, their defensive walls, were three meters high!
They were just small estates, hard-pressed to withstand regular troops, but quite good as strongpoints for defending against barbarians!