The Duke's army had retreated, replaced by a far more demanding invader, Efficiency.
To Alaric, the blast furnace was a living creature that needed constant feeding. To the villagers of Oakhaven, it was a monster that never slept. In the 21st century, Arthur Vance had lived by the digital clock, a slave to the nanosecond. But here, time was measured by the position of the sun and the grumble of a stomach.
"My lord, the men are refusing to stoke the night fires," Old Tom said, his face haggard in the moonlight. "They say the 'dark-shift' is against the natural order. That even the soil sleeps, so why shouldn't they?"
Alaric stood in the center of the courtyard, looking at a tall wooden post he had erected. At the top was a primitive Water Clock (Clepsydra), a series of dripping bronze bowls he'd designed to mark the hours with a steady, metallic ping.
"The furnace doesn't care about the natural order, Tom," Alaric said, his voice flat with exhaustion. "If the temperature drops below the melting point of the slag, the iron freezes. The furnace dies. And if the furnace dies, we have no steel for the Duke's next 'investment'."
---
By the third week of the new regime, the tension snapped. A group of twenty laborers, led by a burly woodsman named Harl, stood outside the North Tower. They weren't carrying pikes, they were carrying their tools, and they were dropping them.
"We're done, Lord Alaric," Harl shouted, his voice echoing off the stone. "You've turned the village into a hive. We work when the bowl drips, we eat when the bell rings. We're men, not gears in your machine!"
Kaelen moved to draw his sword, his instinct for feudal discipline screaming. Alaric held up a hand, stopping him. He stepped forward, not as a lord, but as a man who had seen the end of this movie before.
"You're right, Harl," Alaric said, his voice carrying over the crowd. "I am asking you to be gears. Because a gear, when it turns with others, can lift a mountain. A lone man in the mud can only sink."
"We were happy in the mud!" someone yelled from the back.
"Were you?" Alaric's eyes flashed. "Were you happy when the Duke's scouts took your horses? Were you happy when your children's bellies were swollen with hunger because the scratch-plow couldn't pierce the clay? The 'natural order' you love so much is a slow death."
---
Alaric reached into a leather pouch at his belt and pulled out a handful of copper tokens. They weren't the Duke's currency, they were stamped with the gear-and-tower sigil of Oakhaven.
"This is a Wage," Alaric announced. "In the old world, you worked for the right to live on my father's land. In the new world, you work for value. For every hour you spend on the 'dark-shift,' you earn two of these. They can be traded at the granary for extra meat, for salt, or for the new woven wool from the loom-house."
The men looked at each other. The concept of selling time rather than tribute was a foreign language.
"And if we don't want your tokens?" Harl asked, though his grip on his axe loosened.
"Then you go back to the mud," Alaric said simply. "But the mud doesn't have pikes to protect it. The mud doesn't have the 'Thunder-Tubes.' And when the winter frost comes, the mud doesn't have the surplus grain I've stored in the new dry-cellars."
He turned to the water clock. Drip. Drip. Drip.
"The world is moving, Harl. You can either turn the gear, or be crushed by it. Which will it be?"
One by one, the men picked up their shovels. They didn't do it for love of Alaric, or for the glory of Oakhaven. They did it for the copper. Alaric watched them go back to the fires, a bitter taste in his mouth.
"You just bought their souls, brother," Kaelen whispered, staring at the copper tokens.
"No," Alaric replied, looking at the flickering orange glow of the furnace. "I just introduced Labor-as-a-Commodity. It's the only way they'll survive what's coming next."
"And what is that?"
"The Market," Alaric said. "The Duke isn't the only one who saw our smoke. The Merchant Guilds from the Coast are sending a caravan. They don't want to fight us. They want to buy us."