Iberis: Every year’s about the same, yep.
Hubert: You don’t have good and bad seasons?
Iberis: No such thing as bad seasons for us goblins. We’re careful about managing the environment.
Hubert: But I would have thought that the seasons or the tides would have some impact on fishing conditions, no?
Iberis: When you can’t find fish in one sea, you go to another. Simple as that. But like I said, we goblins are careful about the environments we live in. We never overfish. Come to think of it, I always used to wonder why it was that humans would sometimes cast their nets where there were no fish, but that makes a bit more sense now that we’re talking.
Hubert: What happens after you catch fish in your nets?
Iberis: We take them to where our buddies are waiting and we eat them. Sometimes we’ll cook them up on the surface, but not often. Fish are easier to digest when they’re cooked, so usually that’s what we do when somebody falls ill.
Hubert: What else do you eat outside of fish?
Iberis: Crabs, shellfish, squid, octopus, and seaweed, mostly. We can eat sharks and whales, and other bigger fish, but they don’t taste great and they’re a pain to hunt, so we don’t usually go for them. We only hunt them to cull their numbers when there’s too many.
Hubert: How many monsters are there beneath the sea?
Iberis: The sea’s a big place, so bear in mind that there might be a whole lot of monsters living where we’ve never been. That said, miasma weakens the deeper you go, so we usually only see monsters closer to the shallows.
“I...see...” murmured Hubert. “That was most informative...and extremely educational. Thank you so much. One last question, if I may: If, say, we requested that you bring us a set amount of fish on a regular basis, would that be possible?”
Hubert’s eyes were on the tables as he asked his question. Iberis must have really liked the seafood, because he’d eaten a lot of it. He washed another mouthful down with his drink before answering.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “We’d need to get paid appropriately for the work, of course, but fishing is part and parcel of our daily lives, so it wouldn’t be a big deal. The hardest part is dressing the fish and then carting them over here, which is why we’d expect some payment. As for what we’d accept, some steel tools from the cavekin would be most welcome. The stuff we brought back with us earlier was really popular, and most of the goblins back home were blown away by it.”
Hubert thought long and hard about Iberis’s answer, but Ellie, who was standing next to him, clenched her fists in excitement.
“Yes!” she cried. “Yes! A thousand times yes!”
“The fish cuisine is mighty tasty,” I said, eating a little more of the cheesy fish dish, “so I get why you’re happy, but is it really worth getting that excited about?”
Ellie nodded vigorously.
“Narvant and the cavekin tell me they’ve got quite the ore surplus from their mining so far. If we can use that in exchange for fish, we’ll be that much closer to being an entirely self-sufficient domain! We won’t have to rely so much on outside imports!”
Ellie explained that usually we had to be especially careful when it came to who we sold our ore to, but the goblins were basically residents.
“It’s not like people are going to go trawling the oceans looking for weapon-worthy steel, right?” Ellie continued. “And I know this isn’t the nicest way to say it, but the steel is going to wear away more quickly in the sea too, which makes the goblins good customers!”
At that point, Ellie’s thought spun off onto a tangent.
“Oh, and about those nets of yours,” she continued to Iberis. “The cavekin are awfully talented when it comes to knitting and whatnot, and they might be able to make you nets from baar string. Baar wool is so valuable that we won’t be able to mass-produce nets for you, but I’m sure we can help with your fishing industry all the same. Given that toolmaking and baar wool are domestic industries, we’d be more than happy to trade them directly for foodstuffs!”
“Ah,” I said, putting it together. “Our fields are starting to finally pick up, but we’ve been relying on Peijin and Eldan this whole time. Expanding our trading partners is a good idea... And with all the ice we’ll gather over the winter, we can chill the fish we get and sell it elsewhere. That’s something to look forward to as well.”
The cavekin had built an ice reservoir and a number of storage cellars in which to put all the ice we made over winter. We were going to have a lot of ice on our hands come the end of the season. I’d figured we’d use that for what we hunted and gathered in the forest, but using it for fish wasn’t a bad idea either.
If we had loads of fish coming in, I thought it might be a good idea to build more storage cellars too. We might need the extra space for everything that was coming in.
“Lord Dias, that’s not all,” said Hubert, scribbling Iberis’s answers on a piece of paper and sounding very excited. “Some fish are good for wonderful oil and fertilizer! You can make it by boiling certain types of fish and putting them through a compressor. That’s the oil part, but if you let the oil dry then you’ve got fertilizer!”
Now I knew exactly why Hubert was so excited—fish was so much more than a source of food. If we were able to secure regular deliveries of fish, we’d be well on the road to thriving in a whole host of different areas.
“When fishing seasons go poorly, it can send nations into turmoil,” Hubert explained. “In Sanserife’s history there are records of clashes between communities that occurred as a direct result of famine when fishing hauls were especially low. Whole cities were left starving. But with the goblins’ help, we won’t have to worry about such problems—we’ll have a secure, stable supply of seafood!”
Hubert was aware we’d need ports before everything could be truly set in stone, but because the goblins were so mobile in the water, the ports weren’t nearly as big a deal as they would have been if we were only dealing with ships.
“Unloading will be much easier with dedicated ships and ports,” said Hubert, “so we’ll still want to get all of that infrastructure built. Actually, now that I think about it, is overfishing something we should be concerned about?”
“If you take too much from any one place, then yes,” Iberis answered, “but that’s not easy to do, even with the whole tribe fishing at once. We don’t even have enough boats and barrels as it is. But even if you had bigger barrels and were filling them with one, maybe two thousand fish, the sea would still be plenty full. There’s a lot of ocean out there, and near endless bounties in it. And at the end of the day, we goblins will make sure overfishing is never an issue. If we feel like we’re stepping towards the point of no return, we’ll let you know.”
Hubert nodded happily, then took some of the fish wrapped in bread and ate it. That just made him even happier still, and his smile grew. Iberis grinned at the sight, and all his pals grinned right there along with him. Some of them even stood up like they wanted to go fishing right away, telling Iberis they’d go looking for barrels and start readying the boat. Ellie saw that and she decided to help...which put an end to our taste-testing session, because the rest of us all decided to help out too.