Chapter 523 — The Banquet
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
A grand welcome banquet was held in the lord's manor—the first of such scale since the great building had been completed.
Gao Yang was not a man who enjoyed banquets. Though Hetty and Rebecca came from proper noble stock, they too had little fondness for such affairs (chiefly, of course, because they were poor). Yet even without any interest in banquets, they understood their necessity in upper-class society—a well-prepared banquet often carried political, economic, and even military significance. It could display the host's financial strength, and within a relaxed, pleasant atmosphere accomplish deals that elsewhere might have required swords to "negotiate." This was undeniably a most worthwhile bargain.
To this day Gao Yang had never built himself a "castle" in the traditional noble fashion; he still preferred houses comfortable enough to live in. So even as his domain developed, he had merely added to and expanded part of the lord's manor, and laid out an area of open ground around the courtyard for future annexes—in the end, the manor would likely become a building somewhere between a castle and a palace. And for the duchess and the princess from the North, this was unquestionably something quite novel.
In the main hall where the banquet was held, musicians from the Leslie region were playing comfortable, pleasant music. After a few short, light dance pieces, the guests began to help themselves to food at the great tables along either side of the hall. Men and women in sumptuous formal dress—members of the envoy party from the capital, the "new nobles" of the south who still remained and were entitled to attend, and the important officials of the Duchy of Cecil together with their kin—moved to and fro through the banquet hall. Victoria drifted through them like a weightless snowflake and came to a stop before Gao Yang.
"How does it feel?" Gao Yang looked at the Northern duchess before him and raised his cup. "This place must be quite different from what you're used to."
"Few nobles, more officials with real power—it's certainly very different from the noble banquets of the North. And there are far fewer rules here as well."
"Empty formalities are oppressive. In my day we had no such fuss—in my view, those young people chasing classical noble etiquette would do well to try one of Cecil's buffet dinners. If you want true classical, you should learn from an ancient like me."
"...A fair point," the duchess said after a brief pause, wearing a somewhat stiff smile. Then she looked around—at the neat, brightly lit hall, at the great floor-to-ceiling windows in the distance—and could not help but marvel. "Compared to this banquet, your 'castle' is the more striking thing... I've never seen a castle of this kind. It seems you never designed it as a fortress... and you haven't placed barracks in the courtyard either?"
Gao Yang laughed. "Barracks? My legions couldn't be stuffed into this courtyard. Besides, old-style castles are damp and freezing—you have to light a fireplace in every room just to make them barely livable. To my mind they're nowhere near as comfortable as a house like this. I am, after all, a seven-hundred-year-old old man."
"Then there is probably no healthier 'old man' in this world than you," Victoria said helplessly. She was not one for jokes, but faced with an elder so witty and humorous, she had to adapt nimbly. "I notice there are no fireplaces here—does Xuanque Castle use magic for heating?"
"The heat source is a fire-element array located underground. A system of copper heat exchangers carries the warmth throughout the building; there are cavities inside these walls, with metal pipes and brick channels laid within them," Gao Yang explained. "Not just here—most buildings in Xuanque City have similar systems. In each district there's a large central heating station; its heat can warm the whole district. I designed it."