Chapter 348 — The Wind Shifts
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
After the Month of Revival arrived, the weather in southern Ansul began to warm rapidly.
For the people who worked in places like the harbor docks, this was a welcome change.
As the temperature rose, the frozen rivers began to thaw. The moisture that had been locked in the earth as ice and snow melted under the sun's power into trickling streams, and the trickling streams gathered into brooks and small rivers, and finally poured into the great waterways together with the glacier meltwater running down from the mountains. As the water level rose, the number of merchant ships moving along the rivers gradually increased, and these coming-and-going merchant ships in turn fed the dockworkers commonly known as "mules."
Sam was an old resident of Tansang Town. His family's history of settling in this mining town could be traced back a hundred years, to when the town had just raised its outer wall and the docks had only two piers. His ancestor had been a "mule" on the docks, and the trade had passed down generation after generation—to his grandfather, to his father, and finally to him.
Over those hundred years his forebears had witnessed every change in Xuanque Town, yet for the greater part of that time the town had in fact scarcely changed at all—the walls were the same walls, the piers the same piers. The mine shafts in the back hills and the farmland beyond the walls could support only so many people, and the lord could govern only so much land. So once a town grew to a certain size, a hundred years might pass without anything changing. Over the whole of Sam's grandfather's life, the greatest thing he had ever witnessed—and the thing he most often bragged about to his children and grandchildren—was that he had seen with his own eyes a new pier added to the docks, and a mill built by the lord south of the town.
And Sam, in the past two months, had seen three piers, two trading houses, four warehouses, and a great new bridge rise from the ground at the southwest corner of Tansang Town.
He felt that in his lifetime he would likely witness more than all his ancestors put together.
The ore output of the back hills had multiplied several times over in the past two months, and the merchant ships on the river had multiplied several times over as well. Many strange machines and magical devices had been hauled into the town, and it was said that all these changes were connected to the "Cecil Territory" that had so recently appeared downstream on the Whitewater River. The lord, it was said, had reached an agreement with that Duke Gaoyang Cecil and reaped enormous benefits in the process, and the whole town had prospered along with it...
But these things were hard for Sam to understand, and he did not pay them much mind. He cared only about his work on the docks—and the glad thing was that he had plenty of work.
As an old resident of the town and an old hand on the docks, Sam held no ordinary standing in this increasingly busy place. True, he too worked for others and took orders from the dockmaster, but Sam was the head of the "mules," with a dozen men under his command, and that was the thing he considered most "respectable."
Early each morning, after crawling out of his dark, damp shed, Sam hurried to the docks to direct his brothers in loading and unloading the ships.
As the Whitewater River's level rose, large ships had begun mooring at the docks these days. Most came from the Carol Territory to the north or from the direction of the Holy Spirit Plain, loaded with spices, tea, and fine cloth. Once unloaded, these goods were carried by wagon to the town's "citizens' quarter" and the lord's castle; the empty ships were then reloaded, mostly with ore, and sailed downstream to Cecil Territory, where the shipowners could earn another tidy sum.
"Move it, all of you! It's barely morning and you're acting like you haven't eaten!"