20demayo Chapter 1: The Stranger at Blue Fork River
Chapter 1: The Stranger at Blue Fork River
Chapter 1: The Stranger at Blue Fork River (Revised Edition)
The salty, fishy smell of pickled river fish seeped in through the cracks in the wooden walls, mixing with the burnt smell of old firewood ash, creating an indescribable murky atmosphere in the low-ceilinged house.
The rough wooden tabletop, infiltrated with years of grease, feels like dry, cracked tree bark.
Someone was chopping firewood in the neighboring yard, the sound muffled and slow.
Otto Hohenzollern sat at the table and spread out the entire stack of parchment, one sheet at a time.
The head of the village has been in charge of this village for more than ten years.
The ledgers had never given him a moment's peace—not because he was greedy, but because the war three years ago had burned down the village's arithmetic-savvy monk, and the remaining villagers relied entirely on their memory and intuition to keep accounts, which naturally became a mess over time. The village head pushed these papers in front of the unfamiliar young man, not as a request or a test, but simply because he had no one else to pass them on to.
Some of the parchments in that stack weren't even accounts, just blurry numbers drawn with charcoal. A few had been soaked in water, the ink stains smudged into grayish-yellow patches. Otto rearranged each sheet by month, and using the worn-out charcoal pencil on the estate manager's table, he created a simple comparison table in the blank spaces—placing the loss figures for each household side by side, from last autumn to the end of this summer.
It's not an abacus, not complicated calculations; it's simply placing numbers in a position where they can see each other.
In Braavos, he ran errands for the Iron Bank's moneylenders, handling far more chaotic accounts than this, accounts that sometimes even involved lives. This small village of a few dozen households upstream on the Blue Fork River was nothing compared to this.
But there was one place he saw after he finished lining up.
One household reported higher wheat losses than others. This wasn't an isolated incident, but rather a consistent higher loss for several months, as if measured with a ruler.
He didn't say anything.
He folded the comparison sheet and placed it under the beer mug that the estate manager usually used, then neatly stacked the remaining account books on the right side of the table, got up and left.
The head of the village found the paper the next morning. He only glanced at it before understanding what it meant.
That afternoon, the household's losses returned to normal.
The headman didn't thank him in person. But when it came time to distribute the pickled river fish that day, Otto's portion included two extra fat fish compared to the others.
From that day on, the way the head of the farm looked at him changed slightly. It was hard to explain, but it could be described as: he no longer saw Otto as a stranger who might steal his chickens at any moment.
The idea of digging an irrigation ditch came to him in his third week in the village.
The radish fields needed water carried by hand, and strong laborers spent a great deal of their energy traveling back and forth on the muddy roads every day. Otto had seen the rules of setting up camp in the mercenary camp in Braavos—the first thing to do after setting up a camp wasn't to hone wooden stakes, but to dig drainage ditches. If the camp flooded first, even before the enemy attacked, dysentery would take down half the men. This principle applied perfectly to the fields.
He diverted a shallow branch canal from the Lancha River.
The canal wasn't wide, and it was made entirely of riverbed pebbles and deadwood from the woods, costing not a single copper coin from the village. The young hunters who participated in digging the canal weren't hired; they were volunteers. They were willing to work not because Otto promised any reward, but because Otto was the first to jump into the knee-deep mud pit, working under the morning light until sunset, only swallowing half a piece of black bread as hard as a rock, without uttering a single word.
The afternoon the irrigation canal was completed, the first stream of water flowed along the newly dug trench into the radish field, making a slight seeping sound as it passed over the still-uncompacted mud bank, as if something underground was whispering in response. The women carrying water standing by the canal were silent for a moment, a silence more resolute than any words. From that day on, they could get home an hour earlier.
Otto didn't mention the canal to anyone, nor did he ask anyone to remember his kindness. But some villagers began to associate the canal with the mud-covered man who hadn't changed his clothes since the day it was dug.
Going into the mountains was the third thing.
The woods near the village were not lacking in prey, but they were also not lacking in danger. He had gone in with the young hunters a few times, and when they encountered wild boars and gray wolves, he used a method that the hunters had never seen before—he did not confront them head-on, but instead circled around them, using the sliding steps of a Braavos water dancer to use their momentum to deflect them and let them fall off balance due to inertia.
The hunters stared in disbelief.
When pressed for details, he only said that his father had trained new recruits for a mercenary group on the other side of the Narrow Sea, and he had learned some basic skills from them.
This is true. Telling part of the truth is less likely to be exposed than fabricating a whole set of lies.
After several encounters, the hunters' attitude towards him underwent an inexplicable change. Three months ago, they were willing to go hunting with him in the mountains because he could find prey and bring everyone back. Three months later, they were willing to sneak into a house full of deserters with him in the dark.
As the long summer of that year drew to a close, the surrounding area began to deteriorate in terms of security.
Three years have passed since the end of the War of the Usurpers, but the disbanded soldiers still roam the countryside of the river region, in small groups, stealing harvests, livestock, and intimidating farmers living alone. The village head only has a few young men who can hunt with bows, and can only manage the village entrance, not the area beyond that.
Otto found the head of the farm and said he wanted to go and take a look.
The headman gave him seven men—five hunters and two young farmers. Their equipment was light: hunting bows, short spears, and a longsword with its nick worn down. There were no shields or armor.
Three attacks were launched over a period of two months.
The first time, three deserters were in the abandoned mill. First, their escape route was blocked, then they were called out to them. One tried to escape through the window, but a hunter waiting outside shot an arrow that pinned his sleeve to the window frame, leaving him unable to move. The leader drew his sword, but it was parried, the blade striking his wrist, the knife slipping from his hand. He was bound, but no blood was seen.
The second time, it was five stragglers in a hut in the woods. Without direct confrontation, they spent two days staking out the enemy's water route, and on the morning of the third day, they took action by the stream, as swiftly as cutting grass.
The third group was the largest, seven men, who occupied an abandoned hunter's hut. He chose a rainy night, the sound of the rain masking their footsteps. The sentry, dozing under the eaves, was knocked unconscious by a single blow from the side, the entire process utterly silent. The others, their ears muffled by the rain, were mostly still snoring in the haystacks. By the time they realized what was happening, knives and ropes had already been crammed into the hut.
Three operations resulted in the capture of a total of fifteen people, with none escaping.
The spoils of war—a few short knives, copper coins, and dried meat—were all distributed among the hunters who participated in the operation and the farmers who were victimized. He kept nothing for himself.
Before each action, the village head must be notified, and afterward, a truthful report must be given without any false reporting or exaggeration.
The way the head of the farm looked at him slowly changed from "this young man might actually be useful" to something else entirely. That something was heavier, hard to describe in words, but it lingered in his eyes.
In autumn, as was customary, the head of the estate traveled to Seafront City to give his annual report to Earl Jason Mellist.
Year after year, it's the same: how much was harvested, how much was lost, how many people died, how many new lives were added. The headman had been in the area for too long and knew that these were the figures the Earl would truly look at.
But this year, he said a few more words at the end.
"Sir, a young man named Otto Hohenzollern has come to the village. His father fled to Braavos during the war, where he worked as a moneylender and accountant at the Iron Treasury. He also trained new recruits in a mercenary group, specializing in drills and swordsmanship. Since this summer, this lad has led a few hunters to wipe out several bandit dens, and the village is much safer now. Would you like to see him?"
He placed Otto's name after the harvest data and before the loss data. He used the terms "Iron Vault" and "Mercenary Group," avoiding vague terms like "good person" or "brave." Each word carried specific information—he was knowledgeable in accounting, skilled in leading troops, and worldly-wise.
Each of these two points is enough to make a border count, who has long been short of manpower, pause his gaze.
Earl Jason Mellist's reply was only a few words.
"Have him come to see me."
That evening, when the news reached the village, Otto sat on the threshold of his repaired, dilapidated house.
As the setting sun sank below the treeline, it bathed the surface of the Lancha River in a dark orange glow. In the village, some people were collecting the burlap drying in the sun, others were herding chickens that hadn't yet gone into their pens, and there was the sound of firewood being gathered into piles of wood. These sounds blended together, creating an ordinary evening.
He took the iron ring engraved with a two-headed black eagle off his right index finger and looked at it in his palm for a while.
It's made of iron, and it's old. The eagle pattern on the ring face has been worn away, leaving only a blurry outline in the afterglow, indistinct yet still there.
His father, Albrecht Hohenzollern, a native of the Riverlands, was a proletarian knight in his youth. During the war, his manor was burned down, and he fled to Braavos with his family. There, he joined the Second Sons, later worked for the Iron Treasury, and served as a bodyguard for wealthy merchants. Those hands had carried spears before Otto was born, held account books after Otto's birth, and finally, in a cold, damp attic in Braavos, slowly rotted away with tuberculosis.
On the night before he died, the old man patted him on the shoulder with the spine of his sword and said, "From this day forward, you are a knight of the House of Hohenzollern."
There was no sanctuary, no spectators, only a dying old man and a chipped sword.
Otto put the ring back on, stood up, and went back into the house.
He will set off for Haijiang City early tomorrow morning to meet the feudal lord who could decide his life or death at any moment.
He didn't know how long the negotiations would take, nor what the count's expression would be. But he knew the first thing he had to say when he entered that door. That sentence had been on his mind for many days; he had thought about it countless times, changed two words, and then changed it back.
This is not something someone who comes to beg for shelter would say.
The night wind slipped in through the crack in the door, carrying the fishy smell of the Blue Fork River—the scent he had been smelling in this land for more than three months. It was damp, carrying mud and sand, and the slight coolness unique to living water, like something slowly growing here, not yet fully formed, but its roots had already taken hold and couldn't be shaken off.
Otto sat in the dark for a while without turning on a light.