Chapter 57 — Elves, Currency, and Irrigation
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Amber had barely finished speaking when Gao Yang whipped his head around and fixed her with an unblinking stare, one that made the half-elf thief's skin crawl. "Wh-what's with that look...?"
Gao Yang's eyes held the expression of a man beholding an alien creature. "Why do you know a druid?"
"And why shouldn't I know a druid!" Amber planted her hands on her hips, wholly self-righteous. "I'm half an elf, aren't I? Every druid order under the heavens traces its roots to the elves—you've never heard of that?"
Coming from any other pointy-eared sort, the line might have passed. But from this disgrace to elfkind, it carried not a shred of conviction. Gao Yang looked her up and down, and she kept the self-righteous face firmly in place. At last he managed to squeeze out: "The kind of 'know' where you stole from him once, he's held a grudge ever since, and wants you hunted down across the world?"
"That's an insult to my character, I'll have you know!" Amber bounced up as if she'd been stepped on. "How could I ever get caught stealing!"
Gao Yang: "..."
Somehow he felt her rebuttal had missed the point entirely.
Still, skeptical as he was, her confident manner made it seem she really did know a druid, and she was already pressing the case like a travelling salesman: "Let me tell you, this fellow isn't just any druid—he's a scholarly druid, the sort who knows a little of everything. His order is the genuine, purebred 'Heart of the Grove,' and his specialty is plants and animals. Absolutely reliable..."
Gao Yang finally believed her. He did not press for details—how she had met this mysterious druid, the man's name and origins, and so on. It would have been rude to ask now. After hearing out her sales pitch, he asked only two questions: "Can you still reach him? If you can, how long would it take to bring him here?"
"Reaching him is easy. Folk say druids keep to themselves and are hard to find, but I know that fellow's range—it's fixed, right here in the Southern Reach. As for how long to bring him..."
Amber talked on, all the while shooting Gao Yang meaningful looks. "On the way there I can go by Shadow Step the whole way, but coming back I'll have to plod along on the road. How fast the two of us travel depends on our means of transport. Means of transport—you catch my drift?"
Gao Yang understood at once. He waved a hand and fished out a few copper coins, pressing them into her palm. "Go buy yourself a new pair of shoes."
Amber's eyes bulged. "...You can't do that to me! And you have to give me a little money to pay him a deposit, at the very least—even through a friend, you still have to pay the hiring fee!"
"Why didn't you just say so from the start?" Gao Yang had only been teasing—watching the girl hop about was amusing—but once the joke was done, it was time to get serious. From another pocket he produced strips of gold and silver pressed to a uniform size. "Take these. Get the job done, and whatever's left over is yours."
Amber took the glittering treasures with a grin that split her face.
Because the work needed for minting had not yet been readied, "Cecil coinage" remained a thing of concept alone. So Gao Yang had temporarily had the craftsmen turn some of the gold and silver in the treasury into these chips for trading with the outside world.
This was nothing strange in this world. In a medieval age where precious metals served directly as tokens of exchange and the commercial system was still primitive, gold and silver of sufficient purity were currency in themselves. Most often coins were struck simply to make the metal easy to carry, check, and count, but merchants accepted gold and silver directly as well—the transaction merely added a step of testing fineness and weighing out the amount. Thus when one bought goods with raw gold or silver, the price tended to rise a little.