Chapter 33: The Village Reborn

Giles stopped at the edge of the abandoned village street, his jaw dropping open.

The carpenter had expected to find a few dozen lopsided, poorly shaped lumps of mud. Instead, laid out in perfectly straight rows across the snow-packed ground, were thousands of flawless, uniform wet clay bricks.

The men behind him murmured in disbelief.

Giles slowly walked forward and knelt beside the nearest row. He held his hands over the wet clay, inspecting the top of the bricks. He noticed a faint, rough pattern stamped into the surface.

“Wood grain,” Giles whispered, tracing his thick finger over the faint lines in the clay. He looked back at his men, his eyes wide with profound respect. “The mages didn’t just pack the mud with their hands. They used flat wooden paddles to press every single brick down perfectly smooth. The discipline it takes to do this thousands of times in the dark…”

High up on his stone balcony, Jack watched the distant commotion through the morning light. He couldn’t see the fine details of the bricks from this high up, but the perfectly aligned rectangular rows covering the street were unmistakable. He leaned heavily on his cane, letting out a long sigh of relief. The paddle-glove trick had worked perfectly. The secret was safe.

“Alright, men!” Giles shouted, clapping his hands together and breaking the silence. “The mages have done the impossible again. Now it is our turn! We need to dry these out and get the kiln hot. Move!”

The village erupted into organized chaos.

Giles knew his trade. He knew that if they put wet, freezing clay directly into a roaring fire, the moisture trapped inside would expand and cause the bricks to shatter into pieces. He ordered the men to carefully move the bricks into the tall, circular stone kiln they had built the day before.

They stacked the bricks with small gaps between them to allow the air to flow. Then, Giles built a very small, low-burning coal fire at the bottom of the kiln. For the first few hours, the goal was not to bake the clay, but to slowly and safely dry the moisture out of it.

By early afternoon, the smoke rising from the top of the kiln stopped looking thick. The moisture was gone.

“Stoke the fires!” Giles yelled, his face covered in soot. “Give it the heat!”

The men shovelled Jack’s premium coal into the iron grate at the bottom of the kiln. The fire roared to life, burning with an intense fury. The updraft pulled the extreme heat straight up through the stacked clay.

The firing process took hours. Jack came down to the village to watch the progress. He sat on a wooden stump near Barnaby’s forge, listening to the crackle of the flames and the steady ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer as Barnaby continued forging the heavy iron spearheads.

When the sun finally began to set, casting long shadows across the valley, Giles gave the order to pull the fire.

They let the kiln cool down enough to approach. Wearing thick leather gloves, Old Miller carefully reached into the side opening of the kiln and pulled out the first brick.

He held it up for the crowd to see.

It was no longer gray, freezing mud. It was a solid, hard, deep red brick. It was completely dry, incredibly sturdy, and perfectly shaped.

The villagers cheered loudly. They had raw building materials.

“Start hauling them to the cabin sites!” Giles ordered, a massive grin on his face. “We build the hearths tonight!”

Over the next week, the village transformed at a steady pace.

Using the freshly fired red bricks, Giles and his men carefully built the underfloor hypocaust heating channels for the four remaining Winter Cabins. The smooth bricks lined the trenches perfectly, sealing the hot exhaust beneath the wooden floorboards so no smoke could leak into the living spaces.

As soon as a cabin was finished, a new group of families was moved out of the crowded Great Hall and down into the village. By the end of the week, the Great Hall was completely empty. The village was officially reborn, a small cluster of five large, double-walled timber cabins that stayed incredibly hot using only a tiny handful of coal a day.

But Jack knew that a warm room was only half the battle of survival.

On the afternoon the final cabin was finished, Jack called Giles and Old Miller to the far edge of the new village perimeter, a good distance away from the river and the cabins. The wind here blew directly away from the settlement.

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“The snow will not last forever,” Jack said, tapping his cane against the frozen earth. “In three or four months, the deep freeze will break. The snow will melt, and the ground will thaw.”

“It will be a muddy mess, Lord Jack,” Old Miller agreed, wrapping his coat tight against the wind. “We’ll have to lay wooden planks just to walk between the cabins.”

“We are packed tightly now,” Jack stated firmly. “Before, the village was spread out over eighty huts. Now, we have everyone living in just a few cabins. If people keep relieving themselves in the snow near the homes, the filth will build up fast. It will seep into the soil and run directly down into the river where we get our drinking water.”

Giles nodded grimly. He knew the dangers of cramped living quarters, bad water and foul air always brought the camp fever. “Aye, Lord Jack. We usually just walk further into the woods during the winter to keep the areas clean.”

“The woods aren’t safe anymore,” Jack reminded him. “We are going to dig trenches right here. Deep trenches. And we are going to line the bottom and the walls of those trenches completely with the new red bricks, sealed tight with clay.”