Chapter 9: Of coin and plan...

She came back in through the door that lead out back behind her house, the hammer and sack of nails in one hand and the axe clutched by the haft in the other. Placing them on the floor she looked at me and smiled. “One Kuul, three Haas,” she said hands on her hips. I was either about to be cheated or it was an honest price, the problem was I really had no way of knowing if it was one or the other.

In hindsight I should have brought Hrofdaal with me his reaction alone would have been informative on whether this was a decent price or not. Seeing as I had not done that I decided the only thing to do was to hope and to ask some questions, this was a small town and if she scalped me then that would get around, and either I would look like an idiot to everyone or she would look like she was dishonest, it all depended on how people looked at it.

“Okay,” I said, “Here is the deal,” and I watched as her face hardened, clearly she thought I was coinless or something and was about to ask her for a reduced price or something, so instead I preempted her, “I have coin, I just don't know what they are called, so you will have to describe them to me.” her face cleared, and she smiled it looked like an honest smile, so I hoped that meant she wasn't about to bend me over and…

“It is pretty simple,” she said, reaching into a small pouch and routing around for a minute or two before coming out with two polished agate coins. The first was a small and worn green coin with various striations in the rock, it was clearly of the smallest denomination. “This is a Haas, it is the smallest denomination, well, there are broken Haas but not everyone will accept those, and the price is not set so let's just stick with full denominations.” She placed the Haas back in the pouch and held up the second coin. This one was probably twenty or maybe thirty percent larger and was a pretty purple color with swirls of lighter and darker hues of the same color. “ This is a Kuul, it takes twenty Haas to make a Kuul,” she smiled at me and I nodded, fishing out the asked for price. I had way more Kuuls than Haas to tell the truth, I paid exact change and made sure to tuck the bag away without her seeing anything in it. I thought it had all gone really well when I caught her look, her eyebrows were raised and she looked surprised as she looked at the money I had placed in her hand. “Normally I wouldn't say this, as I like money,” she said, still looking at it in her hand, “but when someone quotes a price it is customary to argue it down, this means that the seller often increases the price in anticipation of that bargaining,” she pinched two of the Haas and tried to offer them back to me, but I didn't move to take them.

“Thank of it as a payment for the lesson, both in bartering as well as in the names of the money, speaking of which, what is the name of the coin larger than a Kuul?” her raised eyebrows shot up at that and I had to scramble to cover my self, I really didn't think it was a good idea letting people know I had quite a few of the larger coins. “I saw a man in a large city, he was wearing fine clothing and he kept flashing this coin, it looked bigger than these Kuuls, so I was just wondering what exactly it was.”

“He must have been quite wealthy,” she said a look of general skepticism on her face, it was hard to tell but she might have not believed my story. “That would have had to be a Vulum, they are worth twenty-five Kuuls and are the largest denomination of coin.” I paused and thought about the prices, if my mental math was correct then this axe, hammer and nails cost about half the wergild of an Esne, essentially a human life was worth two axes two hammers and a bag of nails or at least that was what a murderer or rapist's life was worth. And according to Hrofdaal the wergild for someone like me and him was 15 Kuuls, and he said the wergild was what a person could reasonably make in a year of work. I had two of these Vulumns, six Kuuls, and a hand full of Haas, if the average man-made 15 or so Kuuls that would mean I had fifty-six Kuuls and some change, meaning I had almost four years of wages saved.

That was fantastic, really really fantastic, and nerve-wracking. After all, I was simply carrying this all in a bag right now, and it wasn't like there was a bank I could deposit it all in, I was going to have to find a damn good hidey-hole for this or risk losing it all. Four years is a long time, but as I thought about that meant that the entirety of things I owned and all of my life’s assets boiled down to four years, well three and some change, and that was including all the things that Dad had left me. That was nice, it would allow me to do what I needed to do without having to get a job right away.

“Is there anything else you need?” she asked and I shook my head, thanking her for the time and for the lesson both in coinage and bartering, I got a big smile in reply and gave her a wave as I stepped back out into the street, the tools in my hands. I had been planning on seeing the blacksmith again about the whole no saw thing, but I decided I needed to not be walking around town with more money than most saw in a few years. Going home I looked around for a place to hide the coin, wondering what the obvious place for something like that would be should someone come looking for it?

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In my culture there was the cliche of hiding it under the mattress, or under a floorboard, but did the same thing apply here? Or was it more common to put things hidden in the attic? In the end I decided to put the coins in their pouch under a loose floorboard near the south side of the house in the corner. Resolving to put my bed over it to hide the coin, after all, when it was only one of the things it was a cliche but if I were to do two, well, it either made it doubly cliche or it made it the perfect place to hid things.

I looked around the house and made myself a mental list, the most important thing I needed to do today before the night fell was to make a door, I could sleep on the floor again, it was kinda uncomfortable but was largely doable. For a door I wanted to eventually build it out of planks, for now that was out of my grasp, so instead I stepped out of the house and moved looked left towards the treeline. About forty feet away from my new house the forest sat, but between me and it was a mountain stream, well I say stream but in actuality it was a small river. It looked like it was permanent and if I had to guess was something that formed due to runoff of snowmelt higher into the mountains. If I had to guess I would say it was three or four feet across and a foot or two deep, and as I stood there looking up and down it I noticed that the grade of the stream was pretty steep.

The water was moving pretty fast, and going down the hill at a decent clip as well, if I were to make a wooden shoot and make it level instead of following the grade I could make a man-made waterfall of a sorts. The water would go into the shoot, then fall off of the end, and though I had never in my life made a water wheel, I was pretty sure I would be able to make one if I had enough time and the right tools.

Water wheels were amazing things, the force of that falling water would spin the wheel and the shaft on which it was attached. Later versions of this device were used to make electricity, which was out of the question here, but the less modern variants were used to turn grindstones or whatever else you needed. And though I was unsure if I should base my hopes on it, but in Skyrim the sawmill in Riverwood and several other places was run using the power of the river. Now, I know that the way they did it was unlikely to work, what with the wheel simply floating on the river and flowing past it to spin the massive thing, but falling water had much more force to it than when it was flowing. And if I could get the central shaft spinning then it would be relatively easy in theory to get a flat belt system up and running that allowed a fixed saw blade to go back and forth. If I could do that…

I shook myself, that was definitely something I was going to have to put more thought and planning into, but for now I needed to make a door, the waterwheel and sawmill idea could wait, would have to wait. I hopped over the creek, almost losing my footing and falling in on the slick bank on the other side but after I recovered my balance I set off to the woods, axe resting on one shoulder. Until I could make planks I was going to need to do this door a little differently. I started cutting saplings and branches, anything long and thin and mostly straight with a height that was taller than I was,and when I had a bundle of about thirty or more I made my way back to the house and deposited them on the ground in front of the house. Using a bit of cord that was leftover from the thatching I went and laid them all in a straight row and started weaving it between the sticks, going in and out between each one at the top and the bottom to tie them all together. I also laid one diagonally across and two more horizontally across the top and the bottom and tied them together.

The result was a makeshift door that had lots of gaps where light and heat could escape but that was quickly rectified with clay from the nearby creek. Once the gaps were packed I started a fire and using some of the leftover wood I propped it up over a fire I built outside to dry the clay, making sure the wood was not close enough to burn. It was all mostly green anyway, so the likelihood that it would spontaneously combust was pretty low, but I would rather not have to make another door. While it dried and hardened I went and on the area where the door frame would be I made holes all the way through the wall using my nails and hammer one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. On the opposite side of the wall at about waist height I went and hammered in the nail, this time leaving it in place sticking out of the wall about halfway.

Once the door was good enough I carried it over. The bottom of the door was pretty damn flat, seeing as I had made it so that the bottom lightened up, but the top was a little jagged looking due to the different length of each of the sticks. It didn't really matter though, only the bottom of the door really needed to be flat, I wasn't actually going to fit this thing inside the door jam but rather use it to close up the outside. Running the twine through the holes in the wall next to the door I put more holes in the door itself at the same height and through that as well. Effectively creating rope henges, they wouldn't hold the door up and if I needed to open and close the door I would need to lift it as I swung it in or out, but they would hold it in place well enough. I swung it opened and closed experimentally a few times before nodding to myself in satisfaction, this was going to work nicely. Creating another hole in the door, this time where the nail was I put the cord through it and made a loop so that when the door was pulled shut I could pull the loop over the nail and effectively make a latch.

I nodded in satisfaction, sure it was a temporary door, but hell, I think I did a damn good job on it. With that door it would be much warmer and safer here in the house tonight, and really it just made the place feel so much more like a home. Nodding in satisfaction I turned myself to the task of making the next thing I needed. A bed…