The strangest look came over the village chief’s face. It was as if she didn’t know what I was asking. “Yes, I suppose it could.”
“So then, for instance, suppose we built up an earthwork mound and put wooden fencing around the houses. Would that qualify as a city wall?” I asked.
“The word ‘town’ signifies a central location that permanently governs the area around it. So a place surrounded by earthworks or fencing would be nothing more than an encampment.”
“So that option is available to us, as well. For our…‘village.’”
“But wooden fences on top of dirt mounds are far too unreliable to protect a permanent territory. Not to mention the amount of labor it would take to repair them. And they would be completely unreliable for protecting the houses.”
I’m pretty sure she knew what I was getting at, though.
“Hm,” Alexandricia murmured, tilting her head to one side as she fell into thought.
Even in the world I came from, there were plenty of legal loopholes that anyone—rich or poor—could learn to exploit. In any world, you’ve got to try your best to take advantage of those.
“And one other thing,” I said, “is it possible to bend the definition by building part of the wall as a true rampart and then making another part out of the fenced mounds? That way we would be able to build stone walls at the most important places and close the rest off with more easily constructed fencing.”
“Well now…”
I’d read about fortifications like the Taga Stronghold and Dewa Stockade in history textbooks and articles. Long ago, during the northern expansion of the Japanese imperial government, the imperial forces built governmental and military strongholds that allowed them to advance into the northern territory and settle there, despite violent clashes with the powers native to the area. I remembered an artist’s reconstruction in one book showing fortifications of clay mounds and wooden fences built all the way around the strongholds.
There weren’t many historical examples of villages completely surrounded by walls, but at that time, the fighting with the native tribes was especially heated, so the fortifications were built to allow settlers to flee their homes and take refuge inside the stronghold if they needed to.
“That’s an interesting suggestion, Shooter.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Do you think it would work?”
“As long as the colony isn’t completely enclosed by earthworks or ramparts, I think I should be able to talk my way out of trouble. If you leave just a few places open, then the fortifications would be too deficient to qualify as city walls and we could argue that we’re not a town.”
“Would that work?”
“Even if we do become a town someday, we don’t have enough resources or people to do it yet. So we can just say we’re not at that stage.” Alexandricia chuckled conspiratorially. Her expression was more devious than I’d ever seen it before. It was the face of ambition itself. Not an innocent ambition, either; she seemed to be reaching toward something far in the distance, beyond anything I could picture.
“If I may ask, what do you envision once the settlement has advanced and we’ve extended your territory?”
“I’m not sure what to call it. Redemption, perhaps?” the village chief said.
I frowned. “Redemption?”
“When I was younger, I was in the military for quite some time, serving as a knight in the royal palace and in Bulka. The royal palace is an endless performance, a bloody theater where power struggles play on and on. The nobility band together and pull strings with the king, the royal family, and powerful nobles to decide whether a group should be allowed to live or not.”
“Wow…”
“You know that I’m half-goblin, yes? That’s why I still look so young. The nobility of backwater territories along the borders always laughed at me and treated me like a child. It went on for years, Shooter. It filled me with resentment for the blood-drenched stage of the kingdom’s political theater. When I was married off to a family near where I grew up, it was a relief.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“The man I married had a distasteful predilection for goblin women. He was the successor to a noble military family of no fortune.” The village chief might have been talking about another person’s life, for how casual she sounded about it all. “When I first met him, he was a monumental fool who had caught a venereal disease from flinging money at women from barbarian tribes while he was serving on the front lines. He started to feel strange, so he went to a religious order for treatment, but they told him he was too far gone. I realized I had to build a place in the world for myself on my own. My husband ignored his disease and went out to subjugate a tribe of barbarians, and that’s how he died. We had only been married for a year.”
“What terrible misfortune.”
“Hm. It seems to me that most men are like that. You stare at my chest every chance you get.”
“Ha ha ha! What a wonderful joke, madam.”
I had at that moment been examining the way her dress fell across her bosom. I quickly averted my eyes. Alexandricia’s breasts were on the small side compared to Nishka or my new wife Tanne d’Arc—I wouldn’t quite call them bazongas, and certainly not bodahogazongas, though they might’ve qualified for zongas—but the allure of a widow with breasts that size was immeasurable.
I found it difficult to resist. I just couldn’t do it. I’m not a bad person!
“Just be sure it’s never anything more than a joke. I played matchmaker for Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc, so if anything were to happen, it would reflect poorly on me.”
“Y-y-y-yes, of course, madam.”
“All right, then. On with our little tale. When the chief of this village, my late husband, approached me to become his second wife, I was hesitant. I thought I might catch his venereal disease, and if word got out that his wife was half-goblin, I didn’t think it would go over well.”
“But then you inherited the village chiefhood.”
“Correct. I found it difficult to go back home to live with my parents after my husband died, and the fact that I had goblin blood in my veins didn’t sit well with people. Nothing had changed at the royal palace or in town. So I came to my husband’s village.”
Alexandricia had been through so much more than I’d known. I wished there was something I could do, even in some small way, to make up for all the suffering she’d endured.
“What were you looking for?” I asked. “A way out? A place to belong?”
The village chief let out a quick breath. “Who can say? But now I know what I must do.”
“Oh?”
“It’s been ten years since my husband died so suddenly, but he left me with my stepson, who was kind enough to love his father’s widow like a mother. The settlement I built with my husband has grown so much.”
“It has.”
“Nothing has come easily in my life, but this land on the outskirts of the kingdom is brimming with possibility. People get fifty or sixty years at most to live their lives, and I have almost half of mine left ahead.”
Alexandricia tightened her grip on the parchment survey she held. “I intend to use what remains of my life to build my own town in this place. And if at all possible, I will usurp the kingdom and drive the fools screaming from their castle.”
“Are you serious?” She was still so blasé!
A sinister smile came over her face. “Of course. If at all possible. The king ordered my husband to colonize the borderlands, and it has been nothing but trouble and suffering ever since. It’s always trouble and suffering, bleeding down from the ones at the top to drown the ones at the bottom. I think it’s high time the people of this village were repaid for their work. You don’t agree?”
The village chief turned her gaze on me, her eyes sparkling with hunger.
I had no place commenting on the difficulties of settling out here, but she wasn’t wrong, exactly. These frontier lands were rife with ogres, kobolds, and minotaurs, not to mention wyverns and basilisks. I could easily imagine how impossibly difficult things must have been for the settlers even before my arrival.
But the audacity of declaring that a village chief would usurp the kingdom if at all possible was something else entirely. It was a dangerous idea.
I wasn’t too familiar with feudalism in Europe, but I don’t think such ambitions were very common back then. Even looking at Japanese history, you could count on one hand the number of people who had thought about overthrowing the imperial family. The only people I could even think of were Taira no Masakado, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and Oda Nobunaga.
“Well, I am your slave, ma’am. If you order me to do something, I have no choice but to do it.”
“That doesn’t sound very enthusiastic. What do you want? Hm?” Alexandricia fixed me with a bewitching gaze, as if testing me.
I swallowed. The inscrutable charm of this widow set my heart racing.
“I suppose my rewards for you haven’t been well suited for each other. It’s difficult to build a family and also serve as my knight.”
“What do you think would balance them out, Alexandricia?” Could this be something good? A positive development? Could Alexandricia end up my wife…? But as soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. I was always calling her “Alexandricia” in my head, and now I’d accidentally said it out loud.
“Alexandricia, eh?” she chuckled. “I didn’t know we were on a first-name basis.”
“W-well, you are younger than me, after all. And you’re practically family, with everything you’ve done for me,” I replied boldly, grinning at her. I didn’t try to weasel my way out of my mistake.
“Oh? Then if we’re family, I hope you’ll listen when your little sister asks you for a favor. Older brother.”
“B-brother?!”
“I have a little sister already, but I’ve never had a brother. And now I have a big, strong elder brother to start relying on. As for your reward…”
“Yes?” I gulped.
The widow gave another alluring chuckle. Then, in a teasing tone more suited to a much younger girl, she declared, “When the two of us are alone, how about I call you that? I’ll talk to you like…hm. Family. Not blood family, but…” She smirked. “Get cracking on expanding my territory, O brother mine!”
And unfortunately for me, her big brother assented immediately.
Man, she was good at this. I don’t think I’d ever felt so pathetic and so happy at the same time.