The peasant soldiers Jason recruited were simple folk, raised on farms and beholden to the land. They were a far cry from the unruly sellswords and hardened men-at-arms that roamed Westeros.
His operations in the winter town, the store and the hospital, were moved to the new, burgeoning settlement of Starfire City, built on the shores of Saylor Lake. The city's inner wall stood complete, a fresh stone barrier against the wilderness, though the great Starfire Castle, meant to be the seat of Lord Jason's power, was still just a blueprint and a patch of cleared earth.
Following Jason's designs, the new store and hospital were built on a grand scale within the inner city. With the luxury of space, the store was five times larger than its predecessor, and the hospital was a staggering ten times its original size.
The hospital was an impressive two-story building, nine meters high and covering nearly two thousand square meters. The ground floor housed a pharmacy and several consultation rooms, while the second floor was dedicated to patient wards. Drawing inspiration from the hospitals of his world, Jason had designed rooms with multiple beds, a concept foreign to Westeros.
Boris, the acting head of the hospital, took charge of training the staff. He oversaw assistant maesters drawn from the commoners sent by the city and trained dozens of recruited boys and girls, all around fifteen years of age, to serve as doctors and nurses.
Jason didn't expect these novices to perform miracles. For now, their duties were simple but crucial. They had to learn to identify the various modern medicines, memorize which symptoms corresponded to which drug, and master the technique of injecting penicillin. Even with these basic skills, their medical capabilities already surpassed ninety percent of the maesters in Westeros.
The effectiveness of modern medicine felt like magic here. A fever or a common cold could be cured in two days with a few capsules. For more serious infections, the protocol was straightforward: conduct a skin test, then administer a shot of penicillin. If it worked, the patient was saved. If it didn't, there was little more they could do.
Given the primitive state of medicine in the world of Game of Thrones, where resources were hoarded by the nobility, this was a revolutionary change. Having access to common remedies for everyday illnesses was a blessing the smallfolk had never known. Other, more complex diseases remained beyond their power to heal. Thankfully, most ailments they encountered were common ones, and modern medicine dealt with them swiftly.
The workers who had followed Jason to build Starfire City were the first to experience this new standard of care, and their gratitude was immense. They knew that under other lords, a commoner's sickness was often a death sentence. The precious few maesters served the lords in their castles, leaving the smallfolk, who were often treated no better than livestock, to fend for themselves.
Under Jason's rule, they received efficient and equal medical treatment for the first time in their lives. This earned him their unwavering loyalty and respect. Not a single person who had come to work for the East family had left.
It was an easy choice to make. Compared to the cruel and indifferent lords of Westeros, who might beat, starve, or kill their subjects on a whim, the merciful and generous Lord of Starfire City was a figure of hope. These commoners might have been uneducated, but they weren't fools. They knew which lord offered them a chance at a better life.
In the past, they had no choice. The lords were all the same, treating them as property rather than people. Now, with a benevolent foreign lord in their midst, the smallfolk flocked to him, eager to become his vassals.
This mass migration, however, began to cause problems. Jason soon received a flurry of warning letters from the major houses of the North. Even Robb Stark, the acting Lord of Winterfell, sent a raven, formally persuading him to cease his recruitment. The lords were worried that if this continued, all their peasants would abandon their lands for Starfire City.
The North was already sparsely populated. If the East family poached their labor force, the northern lords would have no one to till their fields, hunt in their forests, or pay taxes. Their entire way of life depended on the smallfolk they ruled. Without them, a noble house would collapse.
Under this mounting pressure, Jason had to relent. He couldn't afford to alienate the lords of the North, and he had to respect the authority of House Stark, the Warden of the North. He sent word to his men to stop recruiting from northern lands. Instead, he set his sights on the more densely populated regions to the south, like the Riverlands.
However, his reputation was mostly confined to the North. In the Riverlands, he was largely unknown. Recruiting there proved difficult. He had to rely on agents—farmers who were originally from the Riverlands—to sneak back and persuade people to move north. Progress was slow.
This covert recruitment didn't go unnoticed for long. The lords of the Riverlands grew wary and began sending their own soldiers to prevent their smallfolk from leaving for the North.
As a result, Jason's population growth slowed considerably. Over the past six months, his city had grown to nearly forty thousand people. Considering the entire population of the North was just over two million, commanding forty thousand subjects meant he controlled nearly one-sixtieth of the region's total populace. It was a staggering number that made the other northern lords deeply envious.
Despite their envy, no one dared to move against him. His good relationship with the Stark family offered him political protection, and his private army of over two thousand soldiers provided the necessary military strength.
Two thousand full-time, professional soldiers. This was a force that only the most powerful noble houses in the North could hope to field. Even for the Starks, maintaining such a large standing army was a significant financial burden.
The reason was simple: it was incredibly expensive. The backward economy of Westeros couldn't support a standing army of two thousand men who were not involved in production. Most lords would rather spend that coin on feasts, wine, and their own comforts.
If war broke out, they had a simpler, cheaper method. They would summon all the peasants from their lands, and an army of several thousand could be raised almost overnight.
Did it matter that these "soldiers" were armed with little more than hoes and pitchforks? Not really. It was what every lord did.
When battles were actually fought, the outcome was decided by the small core of elite, trained soldiers and knights that each house maintained. The peasant levies were mostly there for show. All the nobles of Westeros understood this. The peasants were there to create an imposing presence. In a favorable battle, they could help chase down routing enemies and were useful for looting the enemy's territory to collect spoils of war.
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