Chapter 59 — Management Problems
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Gao Yang was well aware that Norris had no real idea what the "position" he had spoken of actually meant, nor what form the new system about to be rolled out across this land would take. The old man was simply drifting in a hazy delight at the prospect of becoming a "respectable man," and the truth was that even the way respectable town-dwellers lived their daily lives was likely beyond this old farmer's imagination.
But it did not matter. What Gao Yang intended to build in this world was an order and a state of affairs that had never before existed—something not only Norris could not imagine, but neither Hedy nor Rebecca could imagine either.
He knew he had to move carefully, to let it all proceed smoothly and under control, lest excessive haste provoke a backlash from this age. Yet he could not afford not to act. The alarm from the satellite monitoring station still rang in his ears from days past. If the demon tide truly could not be avoided, then making some effort was better than making none.
Once Norris had left, Hedy finally could not hold back her question. "Ancestor, are you really going to let him manage your fields?"
Gao Yang had expected the question, so no surprise showed on his face. He only looked at her with a smile. "Is something wrong with that?"
"He can read, but he..." Hedy had meant to say his birth was base, but on second thought she rephrased it. "His understanding is likely insufficient, and he does not know the ways of polite society. If you make him steward of your land, I fear he will botch things and end up punished for nothing."
Gao Yang merely watched Hedy quietly, until she began to grow uncomfortable, and then he asked abruptly, "This polite society you speak of—where is it?"
Hedy was taken aback.
Gao Yang laughed and raised a hand to gesture around them. "Look. This land holds nothing—there is no polite society here, no noble propriety, no rules for commoners. Take all those musty old things and throw them onto the scorched earth of the old Cecil domain! On this land everything begins from zero. Every rule, every law, every standard will be brand new!"
Hedy stared blankly at the wasteland being cleared, and at the camp in the distance that had already begun to take shape. Here she saw no towering castle, and no hovels of the poor. The camp had been built in strict accordance with the four principles Gao Yang had laid down—"orderly, sanitary, efficient, with room reserved for growth"—and the old rules were nowhere to be seen: that commoners' houses must not face the castle, that the noble quarter must be separated from the poor quarter by at least one street, that serfs must not dwell in the middle or inner rings.
Dimly, she began to grasp Gao Yang's meaning.
Gao Yang, for his part, studied Hedy. He knew she was not deeply rooted in the traditional notions of nobility. As a fallen noble, the pinch of poverty in daily life was the finest spur to an active mind. The recent generations of the Cecil family had been shut out of the core noble circles, and so they had grown ever less "noble" in manner—Hedy, for instance, would even go to the worksite to lend a hand. Her intellectual flexibility was beyond question. It was only the habitual and social constraints that came with the identity of "noble" that were hard to shake, which was why she instinctively assumed that a farmer of poor peasant stock, no matter how literate or numerate, was unworthy to help Gao Yang manage the domain—and to manage its most vital matter, food.
Watching his descendant's expression shift, Gao Yang knew she had already formed an opinion, but needed one more push. So he went on, "As for whether a farmer of poor birth can serve as steward—do you know what the ancestor of the Franklin family of the Eastern March did?"
"The Duke of the Western March?" Hedy blinked. "I recall the histories say the Franklin ancestor wielded steel, that he was the 'Iron General' of the expeditionary army..."