Chapter 204 — The Shift of Magic
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Hom was a serf, but he had not been born one. In earlier days, he had been a miner in the mines.
A miner, not a slave laborer.
The men who worked the mines fell into two kinds: miners who possessed their freedom and slave laborers who did not. The former were free citizens who voluntarily went down into the dangerous mines to "dig rock" in order to feed their families; the latter were the private property of the mine's slave owner, on par with the tools and livestock in the shafts. And yet in some respects the two were no different at all—both were expendables who might die in the mines at any moment, and once dead, no one would ask after them.
The manner in which Hom lost his freedom had a certain dramatic quality: he had never been a "dutiful" miner. Rather than digging rock in the tunnels day after day without change, he preferred to hunt for new things—be they new ores or new plants, anything novel would do. On this account people often teased him that there must be a drop or two of dwarven blood in his ancestry, and Hom always accepted such teasing gladly. He worked in the shafts, and all day long his mind dwelt on whether he might dig up some marvelous treasure underground—and at last, one day, he really did "dig up" a "treasure."
He stumbled upon the mine owner's wife in an affair with one of the mine's overseers.
It was a simple enough matter for an overseer to beat one or two miners or slave laborers to death; so long as he afterward muddled things over with some excuse like a tunnel collapse, there would be no trouble at all. Hom had even witnessed such scenes with his own eyes, and so his first instinct was to run—and once he ran, he never went home again.
After a year as a vagrant, he settled in the Old Cecil Territory. The previous Viscount Cecil did not drive him out, but he had no choice but to sell himself into serfdom in order to survive.
Under normal circumstances, that would have been the whole sum of his brief and wretched life. Once bound to the land, the serf Hom would know no further change, no new fortune and no hope; bearing the crushing weight laid on him by the landowner, he would crawl among the dirt for the rest of his days, living out the remaining ten or fifteen years of his life as a serf. And if he should be lucky—or unlucky—enough to father a child along the way, that child would inherit his serf status and live under the landowner's lash for generation upon generation, while his early years as a miner and that small, restless curiosity of his youth would one day fade utterly from his memory.
But after that disaster, everything changed.
The Old Cecil Territory was gone, the landowners were gone, the land was gone. A new lord stepped out of legend and led the survivors to build a new home at the foot of the Dark Mountains. Facing brand-new land and a Dark Mountains full of secrets, the lord issued one incredible new decree after another, and the serf Hom was rewarded in that autumn's "defense battle" for his part in building traps. He became a free man once more—freer, even, than a free citizen.
The lord permitted his people to take up all manner of work according to their individual talents, and rewarded anyone who worked hard. On the notice board at the center of town, new recruitment notices went up almost every day, and anyone in the territory who wished to earn a little extra for the household could answer the lord's call through this channel. To the people of this age, the lord's opening up of so many positions and paying wages for them was nothing short of an inconceivable boon—all the more so now, in winter, when in former days one could only sit at home and starve while waiting to die. And so whenever a new recruitment notice was posted, countless people waiting for work (or rather, waiting to feed their families) would come swarming in to seek a position that suited them.