Chapter 1: Arrivals (Part 3)

Slowly, brick by brick, the walls of Yll'adelia arose. From the hills and valleys to the east huge quarries of stone were found, and copper and tin mines. Gold, too, had been found in small quantities further north. New Erennia was a place of huge mineral riches and the Erennin exploited every single acre of land they occupied. In only a few months huge volumes of stone were flowing towards the new capital city, slowly taking shape.

Skager carefully guided the barge down the Aresh’Erenn. Sails furled, the current of the river brought the cargo of stone it carried at a manageable speed down the river towards Yll'adelia, located almost at the river’s mouth, as further scouting had discovered. It had been two days’ journey, and progress was slow, the deck of the barge almost reaching the waterline. He felt vaguely uneasy each time he made the journey downstream with full cargo. The barge began veering to port; Skager’s eyes opened in horror. If this was not stopped it would run aground!
“Steerers! All of you! To port, now! Hurry!” Frantically gesturing, Skager picked up a long pole himself and joined his men on the port side, desperately pushing the ponderous barge away from the riverbank. Despite their best efforts the ship seemed to never change direction; then slowly, it inched its way back towards starboard. Correcting the ship’s heading so that it was heading directly downstream, Skager heaved a deep sigh of relief. Such problems were common; some shipments had been lost by negligent captains who did not see the barge heading towards the shore until it was too late. The barge would strike land, and if it was lucky, merely stop there, mired in the mud, inextricable until the stone was removed. If it was not, it would hit the bank at an angle, flip over, and either break in two and sink with its cargo, or simply capsize, heavily laden (and therefore ballasted) as it was.

The citadel of Yll'adelia came into view ahead and slightly to port. The fifty-pace-high plateau was already surrounded by a high wall, by estimation, some ten paces high. Within it a great keep arose, and from the distance Skager counted at least ten rows of arrowslits on its facade, twenty paces high. At the very top of the keep, a great tower, fifty paces high now and still incomplete, dominated the entire city and its environs. As the barge crept closer to Yll'adelia—almost running aground again amidst Skager's screeches—the walls of the city came into view, still covered in scaffolding and men swarming around it, cutting stone, hoisting them into place, or plastering the walls. The gate portals were still empty, but they would soon be filled. Yll'adelia was nearing completion; and it looked to be every bit as grand as Mirynium had been.
They pulled alongside a stone pier, one of three built specially to withstand the weight of the stone shipments that now came almost daily. The dock officer came to meet them; a woman in a blue dress, Skager knew her face but not her name. He had asked before, but had always forgotten the reply. Nowadays he simply called her by her title. Almost immediately, in a well-rehearsed procedure, as Skager gave his name and handed over his cargo manifest, teams of labourers boarded the barge and began unloading the blocks of granite onto large carts that immediately trundled off to Yll'adelia. Leaving them to their work, Skager got on one of the carts and hitched a ride to the capital, about a kara away.

The streets of Itayra were simple packed dirt, its buildings cluttered but homely. Smoke curled out of the chimneys of a dozen inns, sprung up seemingly overnight as Jodias ordered the construction of a port town to give Yll'adelia access to the sea. Now home to almost a thousand people, it was constantly busy as ships arrived and left incessantly, driven by the industry of construction and the beginnings of internal trade. Walled with an enclosure of stone eight paces high, there was talk of Jodias planning a walled road linking Itayra with Yll'adelia. As it was, the road to Yll'adelia was flat and straight as an arrow. It took less than half an hour to arrive there, and Skager alighted at the gates. The walls were going up at a phenomenal rate; construction had only begun some two months ago. Already they were nearly twenty-five paces high, and nowhere was there any sight yet of the battlements that would crown them; the wall was rumoured to be planned to be at least forty paces high, fifty-five over the truly massive gates, which would surpass the portals of Mirynium, by comparison mere doorways. The portals, now that he stood in front of it, towered more than twenty times the height of a man, and were so wide that thirty men could march abreast through it with space to spare. And within the city, too, the buildings were in various stages of construction; some completed but covered with sawdust, plaster dust, stone dust and soot, and some just begun, and some completed but for the lack of roof tiling. Workshops, forges and factories were going at full speed to manufacture the materials needed for building the city, everyone was feverishly working, and even the children were engaged in carrying things, running errands or planting parks and green spaces, goodness knew where they got the seedlings and saplings from.

Skager took his time to walk around the city, examining it. Spending a brief moment gawking at the gleaming white palace walls perched atop the plateau, he made a quick return to his barge, now lightened and far more manoeuvrable. Within an hour he was out of sight of the capital, his men pushing the barge steadily upstream, the unfurled sails catching a brisk wind from the south that sped it on its way back to the quarries of the north.

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