Death After Death-Chapter 334 - Inspiration

The months that followed Simon’s return were productive ones, and he took full advantage of them before the snows were so deep that even moving around the city was impossible. The first thing he noted was that his reserves of paper were steadily climbing. So much so that the men he’d hired to man his printing press thought he should be selling it.

“We have nothing to print,” his foreman insisted. “This will rot if we just keep stacking it to no end!”

Simon shook his head as he felt the smooth, cream colored pages. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It was probably the best paper he’d seen this far north. “Soon the mill will shut down for the winter as the river freezes solid,” he explained. “And in the spring, we will start going through it faster than we can make it. I think then we’ll be glad for the overstock.”

“On what?” the foreman asked, slightly exasperated. He was a good worker and an excellent woodcarver from the clan of Borimvar, but he had no imagination. “Even if we start a new book and print a page a month, we’ll—”

“A page a week, to start,” Simon corrected him. “A thousand copies of each page. Then, after a few weeks, I’d like to get that down to every five days. Maybe eventually every three.”

“Five? Three?” the man looked at him with skepticism. “That’s not possible. Not even if we hire more men and work nights.”

“It will be fine,” Simon assured him, placing his hand on the man's shoulder. “The pace will be the easiest part. It will be the pictures that are harder.”

The idea of printing pictures on Simon’s machine made the man pale, but when Simon explained how he planned to do it, that part, at least, he accepted. Anything that involved finely carved wood, at least, was achievable to the man… everything else would take time.

Such a schedule didn’t give Simon much time, though. While he’d given a great deal of thought to what he wanted to print on the way back, and he’d been inspired by people’s reaction to the Light of Keldonsland, he still hadn’t actually put pen to paper. That was what he spent the rest of the week doing, as he cranked out page after page of his synthetic epic.

It started simply enough with a praise to the High Karl, and the network of clans that made Charia strong. Then it praised lands that they ruled in flowery language that felt over the top to him, but was consistent with the way storytellers told such tales to their countrymen. He didn’t call them mountains. Instead, they were impregnable walls. Likewise, goblins and ogres became the armies of the night, and the clanholds became beacons or fiery hearths.

It was more important that it spoke to its audience in the manner that they expected than that Simon loved it. He didn’t care about the medium as much as the message, which was that the clans needed to work together. It didn’t matter what he was talking about on any given page. That idea was always present.

The section following his broad appeal was easy. It was an ABC, but each one was a clan. A is for Aldor, B is for Borimvar, etc. Each clan got a few paragraphs on their history, and what they were known for, along with their heraldry. Simon sketched those out on blocks of wood and left them to his woodcarvers to cut and sand so that those blocks would fit in with the rest of their letters.

“Isn’t it a waste to make these if you’re just going to use them once?” Simon was asked as they printed the first picture of Aldor’s banner on the 19th page.

“Art is never wasted,” he countered.

Despite their haystack-sized stockpile, they ran out of blank paper just before Yule. That didn’t stop Simon from writing, though. Once he got through all the letters, he started adapting the tales of the region to his themes. He interlaced those with lessons, rather like the fables he’d been taught when he was young. Simon couldn’t remember any specifics of those, of course, but the format was enough, and between Ionia and Charia, there was fertile ground, and he had plenty of stories to improvise.

So he wrote a story about the bear and the well, the pine that grew too tall, and the winter that never ended. He also mixed in tales that were supposedly true, like Char the Axeman, from whom the country derived its name. He was someone whom all clans claimed as their own, and when Simon drew up a great tree that showed how all the clans were related and separated over the generations, it was he who was the roots of that tree.

Simon didn’t show what he was working on to almost anyone outside of his workshop until the spring, not even Eddek, because he wasn’t very good at keeping secrets. The only exception was Kayla, because he was still teaching her to read when he had the time. She received the ABC section as soon as it was finished as a late Yule present, and though she couldn’t read through the whole thing unassisted, she still flung her arms around his neck and thanked him just the same.

“You made this?” she asked with a tone of amazement as she leafed through the pages. “The pictures and everything? And you made more just like it?”

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“A lot of people made this,” Simon answered, enjoying her reaction. “It takes a lot of people to make anything important.”

“That’s so amazing,” she sighed. “And to think I once thought you were just a swordsman.”

As she complimented him, it was clear to him that she was flirting with him. It was clear she’d never quite gotten over her crush, but he fended it off as gently as he could. She was 18 or 19 now, but the last thing she needed in her life was a thirty-something who was really more like 300 and something, and as pretty and sweet as she was, he didn’t need one more woman to feel guilty about.

She wasn’t the only one vying for his attention these days anyway. Thanks to his increasing wealth, he’d been forced to start lying about his status just to keep fathers trying to marry off their daughters to him away. He’d invented a whole arranged marriage and a fictional fiancée that he claimed he’d have to return to in the next year or two. Even that wasn’t enough to stop all offers, though.

“Binding yourself to Clan Hrothmar with blood would be far more advantageous than any Brinnish marriage!” one particularly drunk Karl insisted after Simon politely but firmly rejected his generous offer of any of the man’s eligible daughters along with a fine dowry of horses and cattle.

These offers only intensified after Simon was invited to court one cold day near the end of winter to present one of the books he’d been constructing to the High Karl and his advisor. Simon had known that he wouldn’t be able to keep such a thing secret forever. Still, he’d hoped that he’d have more time. While there was nothing illegal about what he was doing, that could easily change if it rubbed someone the wrong way.

He’d hoped to have a few more sections done, including the carving of Char, their mythical ancestor, to show, but resisting the summon would look like he had something to hide. So, instead of trying to delay, all he could do was make a quick copy with a sewn binding and dress in his finest clothes to put his best foot forward.

As the bells tolled the hour the following day, Simon was escorted into the receiving hall of the High Karl. It was crowded, but quiet, and he was walked by dozens of men and a few women who stood near the door and against the walls until he was a dozen paces in front of the old man who ruled over all the other clans of Charia. There, he knelt until he was given the command to rise.

As a subject of another nation, there was no law that required him to bow to the country’s ruler, but exercising that unique Outlander privilege would be disrespectful, and almost certainly make everything that followed worse. Instead, he displayed the utmost courtesy, and when he was addressed and allowed to rise, he answered all questions that were addressed to him.

What was it he was writing? Was it true that he’d built a magical contraption that allowed him to copy whole books as many times as he wanted? Where was all the money he’d made from the good clans of Adonan really going?

The High Karl himself asked fairly simple questions. It was his advisors who answered the more complicated and paranoid ones.

Simon had largely expected suspicion; that came naturally with envy. He fended those off by citing the amount of taxes he’d paid last year and the number of good works he was currently pursuing. Not only had he paid hundreds of silver pengs last year, which was an amount more suitable to an entire clan than to a single man. In addition, no matter how much some might want to deny it, his work with the sick had paid real dividends, making it very hard for anyone to doubt his contributions to the city.

As the advisors saw the book, and passed it between them, they started to nitpick any details they could find, but when the High Karl saw it, he was silent, instead, while everyone talked around him, he flipped through, one page at a time, which Simon took as a good sign.

He was in the midst of defending the changes he’d made to the local tale of the bear and the well as a regional variant when the High Karl finally spoke up. “There is no treason here, not any ill intent that I can see,” he declared. “And the art is truly lovely. I cannot believe that you plan to make many copies of this and not just the one? How long will it take to work such a miracle?” 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

“I expect to have a few dozen copies next year,” Simon answered, trying not to smile too broadly. “That will, of course, depend on some of the more complicated woodcuts, and the binding process, but I—”

“A few dozen copies? Before the end of next year?” the man roared with laughter. “I think that you boast too much, but I’ll humor you. Bring me all you have, then, and I’ll buy them for double the price you plan on selling them. They’ll make wonderful Yule gifts for my grandchildren.”

“I’ll do just that,” Simon promised. “Though, I should let you know that double zero will still be free.”

“Free?” the High Karl asked, as a hush fell over the room. “Why would you give such things away. They must cost a fortune to produce!”

“Only a small one. Fortunately, I have one to spare,” Simon admitted, before he went on to explain exactly how he planned to give them away to the poor of the city and even the communities beyond it. Had the conversation not been going well, he would have held this part of his plan back until he was already distributing books.

He knew this could harm him; trying to bring power to the people in any society was a dangerous gamble, but in this case, he did his best to couch it in terms of distance, not class. He also welcomed any additions that the High Karl or his advisors might have.

“It’s my dream that everyone from every clan works together on the big issues, no matter how much they might quarrel on the smaller ones,” Simon added at the end. He knew the High Karl would like that line, since he’d been the one to say it in his closing speech at the Moot Simon had attended two years before.

The High Karl smiled at that and blessed the endeavor, which was worth more than any other largess that the man might have offered. Simon entered the court that day with a few bound chapters and a pocket full of worries, but he left with a clear path forward. Barring fire, war, or any other major disaster, this was something he’d be able to accomplish before he finished this level and moved on to other tasks.