The Abandoned Duchess Seems to Want a Peaceful Life - Chapter 12

Chapter 12: The Serf Settlement and Change

Three days later, with the Sabbath in between, Nid was bewildered by Melfina's second visit to the serf settlement.

In Nid's life, nobles had been nothing more than those who tore away half of the harvest as tax. Even in his childhood, when he had lived in town, he had only ever seen a splendid carriage passing along the highway from a distance now and then, and this was the first time he had seen a living, moving noble up close.

"Please suspend the clearing of the forest for now. Even if we resume it someday it will take too long, so apart from felling trees to procure lumber, let's develop the wasteland first."

After he gave a rough explanation of how far the village's development had come, Melfina asked whether there was a desk where she could write.

No serf could write, and no one sat at a table to eat. In houses with nothing but a dirt floor, they laid out a mat and the family sat in a circle on it to eat; that was the norm.

When he hinted at this indirectly, Melfina placed the parchment she had brought on the ground and crouched down right there.

It was common sense that a noble never lowered her head. Even Nid, who knew no other real nobles, understood well that the princess before him was an eccentric.

"For now I intend to cultivate from here to this range as fields. I'll make a plot of twenty meters by fifty meters one section, one unit of cultivated land. We'll do the surveying, so I'd like you to plow the inside of the area marked off by stakes."

"But Lady Melfina, wasteland is easier to open up than forest, but the ground is hard, and even when plowed, crops barely grow."

Clearing forest was a great deal of work: felling trees, digging up deep-set roots, removing rocks, picking out stones. It was common to fell only a few trees in a whole day, and then cutting the felled trees into several pieces to haul them out, or turning them into firewood, was all heavy labor.

Yet the forest soil was black and soft, and once it was cultivated as a field, growing crops there was comparatively easy. That was exactly why the landowners who used serfs all told them to clear the forest.

Wasteland, on the other hand, was flat land with no trees, where thin, tall grass grew thickly. It was probably not that trees didn't grow there, but that the land lacked the strength to raise trees.

Even when they painstakingly cleared the grass, the soil was lumpy and hard, and before vegetables or crops could grow properly after plowing, the highly fertile weeds would crowd back as before.

"It's all right. There are crops that grow even on wasteland, and we'll improve the soil too."

"Soil... improvement?"

"It means not planting crops in soil where they grow easily to begin with, but making it so that crops grow easily even on poor land. Ah, it looks like they've arrived."

Nid finally noticed that something was going on around the village entrance.

Around here, adults and children alike spent the days clearing the forest or going deep into it to gather food they needed to live, so the village was often empty. The only outsiders who came were the tax collector and the landowners who worried about the size of the harvest at harvest time, and since almost no one owned anything worth calling property, this had never been a problem.

Melfina stood up and headed for the village entrance, so Nid hurriedly followed.

Outside the village, which was ringed with a bare minimum of fence against beasts, a long line of roofless wagons stood.

"I ordered them when I left the ducal capital. Twenty wagons, and forty donkeys to pull them. It seemed a waste to have only empty wagons delivered, so I had them bring farm tools, seeds for crops, seedlings and so on as well."

Nid caught his breath. His eyes were seized by an ax among the unloaded cargo.

That ax looked as if it would cut very well. With that, even a big tree could be felled cleanly in a few hours.

Though serf villages existed for the purpose of pioneering and clearing, they were given almost no decent farm tools. Worn-out axes sometimes snapped from a misjudged stroke, and replacements rarely came, yet the landowners still hurled abuse at them, asking why the clearing wasn't going faster, whether they were being lazy.

It had been so normal that at some point he had stopped wanting anything at all.

To drive an ax that well sharpened into a tree would surely feel wonderful.

"Tools are important if you want people to work efficiently. I also put out a call for a blacksmith to maintain them, but it's hard to find anyone willing to come to the frontier, and I haven't found one yet. I'll ask the guild to send someone sometime, so could you wait a while for that?"

"No, we can do the bare minimum of upkeep ourselves, so, um... no, may we really use these ourselves?"

"Of course. Grapes grow comparatively well even on wasteland, so I want to make a vineyard as early as I can, at least. It will take a few years before they can be properly harvested, so let's expand little by little. The highlights this year are beans and corn. I want to make fields for them as quickly as possible."

"Not wheat?"

"If I made wheat fields, we'd have to pay taxes, wouldn't we? That can wait until after we've built the foundation for everyone to eat their fill."

It was common knowledge that the size of a wheat harvest was the value of a territory. Wheat was in great demand for bread and ale, and it translated directly into profit.

But what went into a serf's mouth was mostly potatoes and beans.

Half of the wheat went straight to the lord as tax. From the remaining half, a further sixty percent went to the landowner as ground rent, and what was left was the serfs' share. That was exchanged, through the brokers the ale breweries hired, for cloth and daily necessities.

The meals of serfs were generally made of potatoes and beans grown in the fields during the fallow season, stockpiled and eaten through the year.

"I've heard corn is grown as livestock feed in the towns and villages near the royal capital. Will you be raising dairy animals here?"

"I'm thinking of that eventually, but for a while chickens and pigs will do. This year I intend to focus on food production above all. Also, corn is delicious for people to eat too. It's a favorite of mine."

After laughing that easily, Melfina said "Oh!" as if remembering something and covered her mouth with her palm.

"Please keep that between us. It's unseemly for a noble. Though it's a bit late for that."

The princess who laughed with such mischief was cuter than anything in this world.

He was convinced that she lived in a different world from his own; at the same time, that the princess of that different world was laughing in front of him was strange, and yet not unpleasant at all, Nid thought.

* * *

The sky was clear and the air dry, but there was almost no wind. It was perfect weather for slash-and-burn farming.

The rainy season would come soon and the rain would increase, but at this time of year it was dry, and the wasteland, scattered here and there with dead branches, burned well.

"The fire seems to have finally reached the edges."

"Yes. We were thorough about weeding the borders of the fields, and we ringed the places near the forest with stones, so I think the fire will go out on its own after it burns itself out."

"Once it's completely out, leave it a few days and then start plowing. Nid, could you post a few lookouts at night just in case? You can think a fire is out, and then embers get fanned by the wind and catch again."

"I'll assign some fast runners."

"Please plow the ash from the weeds carefully into the soil. On land where tall weeds grow, mixing in ash and charcoal makes crops grow better. Marie, did the things I ordered from Enkar Village arrive?"

"They are stacked beside the field."

"Then Nid, I'd like you to build things out of boards fitted together near the fields like this. Twenty for now. Each about five of your paces to a side."

When she handed him the diagram she had drawn on parchment, Nid said yes and promptly led off several serfs.

"Hey, hey, Lady Melfina, won't you grow potatoes in this field?"

"No potatoes this year. Do you like potatoes, Rod?"

"I wouldn't say I like them, but I heard you'd let us eat our fill, so I figured it'd be potatoes. Seems like it isn't, though."

"The corn and beans we're about to grow are delicious too. Look forward to it."

Corn was a fairly common crop in this world too, but it was recognized almost entirely as livestock feed. In her previous life as well, most of the corn planted around the world had been for feed.

That said, it was not used for people not at all; poor farming villages seemed to eat the kernels and give the rest to goats, and corn soup, processed until its shape was unrecognizable, sometimes appeared on noble tables.

Since there were tomatoes and eggplants too, she wondered whether the new continents had been discovered or whether they were native to this land and had been bred, but it was vague. Corn seed was sold as feed, so she had bought a large amount.

In this world, taxes were paid in wheat and the commoners' meals were mostly potatoes. Potatoes grew reasonably well without much effort and filled the stomach. Above all, what was grown now was mostly a single high-yielding variety.

Then what would happen if a plague specialized for that single variety broke out?

In history in her previous life, a similar plague had occurred. Because of what was called the Great Potato Famine, Ireland, at the center of the damage, lost several tenths of its population to starvation, and even two hundred years after the blight the population had not recovered.

Two years before the timeline of Maria of the Kingdom of Hearts begins, from before the potato harvest, the potato plague that breaks out in this world would cause terrible damage, dragging in not only the Francesca Kingdom but the surrounding countries as well.

In her previous life, twenty percent of the population was said to have starved, and in this world too, the outcome would probably be much the same.

The plague itself would die down thanks to the presence of Saint Maria, who would descend on this world two years later, but how many people would go hungry and lose their lives in those two years was not told in the game.

If she knew a famine was coming, she should simply grow large amounts of crops unrelated to the plague. It was a simple way of thinking, and she didn't know whether it would work, but it was better than doing nothing.

"Lady Melfina?"

"...It's nothing. Come, let's do what we can too, Rod."

"Yeah!"

She smiled at Rod's lively voice.

—Ah, please, I hope it goes well.

She had begun managing the territory so as to make Melfina's position unshakable even if the day the game began came and Maria entered Alexis's route.

In her memories of her previous life, she had been a perfectly ordinary working woman. She had held no ambitions to become a millionaire or start a successful business, and there had even been times in busy periods at work when she'd given up going out to vote in an election.

Unlike this feudal world, in her previous life every citizen had the right to choose politicians, yet it was commonplace for more than half of eligible voters not to go to the polls. There were that many people who left politics and the economy alone, thinking "it seems difficult" or "I don't really understand," even when it bore directly on their own lives.

The ordinary woman she had been in her previous life had felt much the same way.

Melfina, on the other hand, was entirely a member of the ruling class. To her, commoners and serfs were "numbers" that paid taxes; she might learn that the environment needed adjusting, but they were hardly objects of goodwill or relief.

The Melfina of now was different from both of them. As she went back and forth to the serf village and dealt with its leader Nid, with Rod and the other children, and with the village women who helped her with a hint of reserve, her awareness that as lord she must not let them go hungry grew stronger.

Above all, what had greatly changed her values was her handmaiden Marie leaving the protection of the ducal house and becoming Melfina's secretary.

Maria of the Kingdom of Hearts, which she had played in her previous life. Naturally, this world had revolved around the heroine, Maria.

Supporting characters other than the capture targets were almost never explored in depth, and not even the existence of Melfina's handmaiden had appeared on the game screen.

Even she, who had played the characters through on every mode in her previous life, had had no room to even speculate that Melfina's handmaiden was Alexis's half-sister, harboring resentment over her position.

Many people lived in this world, each with circumstances of their own; the matter of Marie had driven that home.

As she worked to change Melfina's position, she felt she herself was changing too.

She didn't know how the future would turn out, but for now Melfina was the lord of this land.

Let me do what I can for the people of the territory.

Changing like that was not an unpleasant feeling.