From Londoner To Lord

The majordomo continued, "While the snow is helping to prevent the meat from going bad for now, but with the amount of meat coming in being more than what we consume these days, it would be better to smoke it and store it for the future."

"That's true," Kivamus agreed. "But do we have anyone here who can smoke the meat properly?

"That won't be a problem," Duvas replied. "Once in a while we did get some extra meat in the past, on the rare occasions when the previous baron went out to hunt. So some of our servants have good enough experience smoking meat that they can handle it easily if they have a dedicated smokehouse. Fedarus wood is also good enough to smoke it well, and we have a lot of small branches lying around everywhere so we don't have to worry about that either."

"Good," Kivamus nodded. "A smokehouse will only need to be a small room at the edge of the village, so it might only take a day or two for Taniok to build. Let him know to build it first before starting work on the gates."

"I'll do that today," the majordomo replied. He continued, "We are also getting a decent number of animal furs now, but we neither have a trained tanner or enough quantity of cheap alcohol here to make fur coats from them, so for now we are just salting them and keeping them dry, which will keep the rawhides usable for at least a year. That should be long enough for us to sell these to any merchants after the winter." He added with a smirk, "They go for a good price as well! I'm glad that we bought a good quantity of salt from Pydaso before the winter."

Kivamus nodded. "It would have been ideal if we could tan them and make fur coats from them right here, but selling the rawhides to the merchants is still a better idea than letting them go to waste." He looked towards the outer door again. "When will Darora be here anyway? Didn't he say that he would come here in the morning? I really want to see what he has come up with."

"I can't say, he might have run into some problems," Duvas guessed. "Not that I know much about it, but crafting a crossbow isn't going to be easy, or every town and village would be doing it and there would be a widespread use of them in every noble's retinue, but it's certainly not so if even the Duke's knights didn't have them, at least outside of the Fort Aragosa. I'd be surprised if Darora can make it at all."

"Well," Hudan said with a shrug, "those other carpenters didn't have access to any detailed crossbow designs like the one Lord Kivamus had provided to Darora. Let's hope he is able to craft it using them. It would add a lot to our defense if he is successful."

*******

The outer door of the manor opened, and Syryne walked inside wearing a fur coat. She seemed to be grinning.

Kivamus thought of asking about the reason, but before he said anything she spoke up herself.

"Milord, I did it!" she beamed.

"You did what?" Hudan asked in confusion.

"I mean my losuvil experiment!" Syryne replied with a wide grin. "They work! They still work!"

"That's... that's impossible!" Gorsazo exclaimed while standing up. "The hunters had brought those leaves a month ago, there is no way they are still usable!"

Syryne grinned. "But they are! That's why I had gone to ask about it from a few guards who had gotten small cuts yesterday."

Gorsazo looked angry now and was probably going to shout again in anger, but Kivamus held up a hand. "Calm down, Gorsazo. She is not lying. I had given her full freedom to do the experiments as she wanted, but I still went to give her ideas once in a while, so I know what she's talking about. I was going to tell you about the progress a few days ago, but you have to go to the longhouse block for your classes for hours, and I have also been so busy these days that I never got the chance."

"But... my lord..." Gorsazo slowly sat down while shaking his head. "If it is really true... if there really is a way to preserve losuvil leaves to make them last so long... then it could have saved so many lives." He held his head in his hands. "If only this had been done in the past... then my wife might still be alive today..."

Kivamus knew that no words would be enough to console him, so he just walked closer to his past teacher and gently patted his back. After a while, Gorsazo sat up straighter, and gave him a wan smile.

Kivamus walked back to his seat and gazed at Syryne for her to continue, but she looked decidedly uncomfortable now, and stayed quiet.

"It's okay, Syryne," Gorsazo said with a weak smile. "I apologise for shouting at you. Go on and tell us more about it".

Syryne took a moment to compose herself and then continued. "It would be better if I showed you all."

"That's a good idea," Kivamus remarked and stood up while gesturing everyone to follow him towards the inner door of the manor house.

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As they walked there, Gorsazo muttered towards Syryne. "You could have at least mentioned it at some point in our lessons. I teach you every day for Goddess' sake!"

Syryne gazed downwards. "I just... wanted to be completely sure that it worked before saying anything. I just didn't want to give false hopes to anyone. I'm sorry..."

Gorsazo exhaled loudly and shook his head. "Don't worry about it anymore."

Kivamus waited for Hudan to lead ahead with a tallow candle to provide some light before crossing the inner door, then entered a short corridor with a series of doors on both sides. He walked to the last one on the right, and walked inside the room behind the huge guard captain, with others following him inside as well, making the small room feel a lot more crowded.

Glancing around, on a few wooden tables kept on the periphery of the room, there were many different clay pots kept in a series, and a small parchment with some scribbles kept next to all of them. He had already visited this room a few times, but Syryne was the one who had claimed it as her laboratory, so he gestured to her to continue.

Syryne nodded, looking more in her element now, and began, "I'll start from the beginning then." Pointing at the clay pots, she explained, "Lord Kivamus had told me to divide the sack of losuvil leaves which the guards had brought here from the eastern hills into separate batches, so I had used fourteen different clay pots for this. I've tried a different method to preserve them for every batch - including cooking them in boiling water with and without some salt, drying them near a fire, immersing them in vinegar or alcohol, or even both in one case and so on. I had also kept one batch without doing anything to it - as the control group - so that I could compare the results of the other batches to this one."

She gave a shrug while looking at Kivamus. "We don't have a big amount of vinegar, alcohol or other such things in storage, but Lord Kivamus had told me to use them freely for this, so I did exactly that." She continued, "Apart from that, for some batches I'd kept the leaves intact instead of making a paste from them, while for some other batches, I made them into a paste first, before starting any method to try to preserve them."

Once Duvas and Gorsazo nodded, she continued, "But as I had expected, the leaves in nine of the fourteen batches had lost any healing effect within a week of the plucking of leaves, as is normal in this weather - including the control group."

"But how were you testing them," Gorsazo asked curiously, "that they were still usable?"

"That's on me," Hudan grunted. "I'm not going easy on training our guards, and once in a while I even make them fight with real swords instead of wooden ones, and that always causes a few nicks and cuts. It's not like we had many losuvil vines nearby, so usually they just washed it off and wrapped it with a boiled bandage, but when Syryne told me that she needed uh... test subjects for her experiment, all of the guards agreed to volunteer when I told them that it meant they would be getting free losuvil paste to apply on their wounds."

Syryne nodded. "I was using a baseline that a fresh batch of losuvil paste starts working within an hour, and as long as it is a small wound, usually the person doesn't feel pain anymore after a few hours. So every time I gave them some losuvil paste from different batches to apply, I told them to use it only after they heard the next temple bell, and to remember how many hours it took before they felt pain-free. If it had no effect, then I considered that batch to have become a waste, while the ones which still worked more or less as expected from a fresh paste were to be considered viable."

Kivamus smiled mentally, seeing that she had taken to that scientific jargon so easily. He had also noticed in his earlier visits here that she had started applying rational methods and scientific thinking properly after he had taught her about them, making him feel quite satisfied inside. She was certainly going to become a great botanist in the future, and likely a good inventor of medicines in this world. So instead of disturbing her by congratulating her for that, he just let her speak.

"Didn't any of the guards complain that they had to wait for the temple bells to apply the paste," Gorsazo asked, "even when they were already in pain?"

Hudan gave the answer. "Oh, they complained alright!" Then he gave a savage grin. "But I made it clear to them that anyone who went against those orders wouldn't get any losuvil paste in the future at all. Knowing that their training isn't going to get any easier in the future, that made all of them fall in line immediately."

Duvas chuckled. "I was there at the time, and I have to say, the previous guard captain never managed to control our guards this well."

Kivamus grinned, and remarked, "It just means that I chose a good captain of the guards!" making everyone laugh.

Once everyone had quieted down, Syryne continued while pointing at a few clay pots, "Of the five remaining batches which were still viable after a week, three of them lasted for another few days, but then they also became completely ineffective. I was thinking that I must have done something right with those batches, but Lord Kivamus told me to focus on the remaining two batches - the ninth and the twelfth batches - since it was possible that the leaves in the batches which lasted just a few more days might just have been stronger or healthier than the initial ones, and it wasn't anything special in the process since they only lasted a few days longer. By that time the weather had also become colder which might have affected this."

"That's true enough," Gorsazo commented. "What about the last two batches?"

Syryne finally gave a grin. "These two were the real surprises." She pointed at one of the two pots kept on the middle table. "The ninth pot was effective for around fifteen days in total, but then it lost its effect quickly, while the twelfth pot was still viable at the time. So Lord Kivamus suggested to me to repeat the preserving process of the ninth batch with the twelfth one, so we could get the benefits of both processes in that batch."

She pointed at the other pot on the table, which was kept covered like others. "That's the twelfth batch. That's the one which I had given to the guards this morning after their daily training, and I just returned from the training grounds to ask about the effects." She finished with a beaming face. "And it works! The guards told me that it worked just as fast as a fresh batch of losuvil, if not even quicker."

"But how did you preserve this final batch?" Duvas asked curiously.