After the meeting concluded, Vig didn't make things difficult for Erik's envoy. Instead, he invited the man to stay for lunch.
Once the envoy tasted Bordeaux's fine wine and dishes laced with costly spices, his manner softened a great deal. He sighed repeatedly over how generous and decent the duke was.
After several rounds of wine, his guard loosened. With a bit of subtle steering from Vig, he unintentionally revealed details about King Erik's newly constructed castle.
"Hic… Ever since His Majesty seized York with Ragnar seven years ago, he's been obsessed with those Roman stone buildings. Said grand structures were essential for displaying a ruler's majesty.
Honestly, he's got a point. Look at me—before docking today, the moment I caught sight of your castle, I was impressed. I imagine most travelers feel the same."
Vig smiled.
"I appreciate the compliment. But truth be told, I built mine purely for defense. The northeast coast of Britain suffers constant pirate raids. I had no choice but to spend a fortune on fortifications."
"A fortune?" The envoy perked up. When he learned Tyne Town Castle had cost only two hundred pounds of silver, he stared wide-eyed.
"That's absurdly cheap. Erik's castle—from quarrying the stone to the ongoing construction—has already cost twelve hundred pounds! And it's only half done. It'll need several hundred more to finish."
Twelve hundred pounds?!
How much money had Erik's men embezzled?
Vig silently thanked his stars Herligev was well-read in Latin texts and knowledgeable about construction. Without her, the stonemasons would have fleeced him blind.
Suppressing his astonishment, he raised his cup.
"Erik is a king. His castle must defend against enemies, serve as an administrative center, and receive foreign guests. With such functions, higher costs are only natural."
"Foreign guests?" The envoy's expression collapsed.
"The treasury's empty. Before construction began, guests could enjoy mead freely, sometimes even Frankish red wine. These days ordinary visitors get only… beer. Ahem—no offense, my lord, Tyne Town's beer is excellent, but its price is far too humble for a royal table."
"No harm done. Beer is a commoner's drink. Mead and wine are of a different rank entirely."
Vig waved aside the comment and guided the conversation back to Erik's castle—then to the fiscal state of Norway and the salaries of officials.
At the mention of wages, the envoy couldn't stop complaining.
"Since last August, His Majesty has been paying us in goods—woolens, grain, amber—whatever the warehouse happens to contain.
From January through April, everything was wool cloth. So the moment we received our pay, we rushed to the market to sell the fabric. Supply flooded the stalls; prices crashed. Most of us lost ten to twenty percent of our income."
Lunch stretched on for nearly an hour before ending with the envoy snoring drunkenly at the table.
Vig had a maid carry him upstairs to a guest room. Fighting his own drowsiness, he took up pen and parchment, summarizing everything he'd learned.
According to the envoy, Norway's royal income amounted to roughly 1,300 pounds of silver per year—slightly below Wessex.
"By later-age measurements, Norway covers 380,000 km², Britain about 230,000, and Ireland 84,000. And yet the King of Norway is poorer than a single duke of Wessex. Truly, the North is a harsh land."
Rubbing his eyes, Vig set his worries aside. Erik was old and timid, and the castle construction had drained years of surplus. The likelihood of him attacking Tyne Town was practically zero.
"Next will be the tedious back-and-forth," Vig murmured.
Paper and Secrets
After seeing the envoy off, life returned to normal. Vig handled daily governance, spent time with family, and strolled through the town when free.
One day, while passing the parchment workshop southeast of the castle, he discovered the artisans had finally cracked an early form of papermaking.
For years, Tyne Town had relied on three kinds of writing material: expensive parchment, imported Mediterranean papyrus, and a local birch-bark paper invented by the shaman Kami Fire-wild.
Each had pros and cons, and due to cost and quality constraints Vig had been forced to mix their usage:
Official documents and letters: high-quality parchment
Books: parchment or birch-bark paper
Informal notes: papyrus
To reduce costs, Vig had shared fragments of papermaking knowledge he still remembered. After several years, the artisans had finally unlocked this new technology.
In the courtyard, workers hauled up from the soaking pool bundles of old linen, discarded nets, and other fibrous waste. They chopped the materials, boiled them with limewater, and stirred continuously.
The boiled fibers were rinsed, pounded into pulp, diluted into a cloudy slurry, then lifted from the vat using a wide wooden screen. After draining and drying came the final product—usable sheets of paper.
Inspecting the finished sheets, Vig found the quality acceptable and made an immediate decision: the papermill had to be relocated.
Tyne Town's population had surpassed 3,000, commerce was booming, and the risk of the technique leaking grew by the day.
He chose to move the mill more than ten kilometers south to the River Weir, whose surrounding marshes were sparsely populated—ideal for keeping secrets. Though papermaking would inevitably spread someday, earning a few extra years of monopoly was still worthwhile.
Leaving the workshop, Vig began calculating potential profit.
The raw materials—bark, old cloth, scrap rope—were cheap. The real challenge lay in sales.
Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe's literacy rate hovered around 1%–2%. Most literate people were clergy; only a tiny number of merchants or craftsmen could read or write.
Nobles valued martial skill far more than letters. Their bookkeeping and correspondence were outsourced to stewards and priests, allowing the Church to burrow deeply into administrative authority.
As for the vast masses of farmers and artisans? They had no opportunity for education and no need for literacy. They simply lived their lives in ignorance.
Thus, aside from supplying Tyne Town's administration, temples, and schools, the bulk of the new paper could only be sold to monasteries across Europe.
And to the Church, Vig was little more than a cunning, untrustworthy pagan lord. Once they discovered that these cheap, high-quality sheets came from Tyne Town, they would publicly boycott them while privately reverse-engineering the technique. They would never allow Vig to earn large profits.
Realizing this, most of his earlier enthusiasm evaporated.
"So much for making a fortune from papermaking. Still, meeting our own administrative needs is good enough. Since the creation of the four northern counties, demand for writing material has surged. At least now we can stop paying a premium for imports."
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