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GoldForestSaga of Astrid - Year 3 Day 166
With the birth of Sigmund and Sif, it felt like Astrid was concerned with more social problems. She gave order to Vilkas's domain and though she tried her hand at individual taxation, she quickly realized she did not have the manpower required to set up such a massive endeavor, neither the people trained in accounting to do so nor the armed guards to protect these accountants from getting murdered by the first farmer they tried to tax. She could not tax people, but she could tax villages and ships. Vilkas was more than happy to help her set this up and make his vassals understand it was in their best interest to collect these taxes, or else.
Money thus flowed into the treasury with a very important side benefit: Money actually began to flow, period. Astrid insisted that all taxes be paid in coins, coins that she also happened to mint! That way the economy was slowly becoming more liquid, less based on barter which in turn would make more taxation efforts easier and also gave her and Vilkas significantly more control over the economic activities of Sardinia.
A lot of that money went back into Vilkas's military ambitions of course, he couldn't get enough of imported Cretan iron weapons that were so much better than bronze, but there was still a lot left for what would be Astrid's most ambitious project thus far.
Saga of Astrid - Year 4 Day 254
Great projects often come with great challenges to overcome. Oh she had already overcome plenty of those, but the main problem were the unforeseen problems that kept arising from that project of Astrid's.
But what was that project?
Phase 1 was a watermill. The village had the perfect stream going through it, she went a bit up the river to find a passage narrow enough with a water speed high enough to install a wheel, then another, then a third. Those waterwheels alone were massive tools for human productivity and allowed grain to be milled at lightning speed in comparison to the archaic muscle powered ways of before, but this was not what this was meant for, not by a long shot.
Phase 2 was the crusher. A weight would be raised by a bucket of water, that would spill over and empty when it came at a certain level, causing the weight to fall down and crush rocks, rinse and repeat. But not just any rock: Copper oxide ore, the kind with a copper concentration so low huge piles of it as mining refuse just laid around the local mine.
Phase 3 was the acid bath. Sulfur, or brimstone as some called it, was actually decently abundant and did not have many use at this time, though Astrid being a chemist knew it as one of the building blocks of modern industry. It was imported for cheap from Sicily and mixed with water made a noxious smelling acid that dissolved the copper oxide in the ore. There she had met her first problem, acid bathes made of... of what? Copper that gets dissolved? Bronze that was also made of copper? No one knew how to work iron so she had to order bowls made of extremely heavy stone to soak the ore to leech the copper out of it and move the sludge to another bowl to extract impurities and finally be left with a copper concentrate of sort.
Phase 4 was the main roadblock. Normally she'd use Electrowinning to strip the copper ions from the sludge with an electric current... but that was not going to happen. So she had to use more crude methods. Centrifugal force with the water wheels, boiling the sludge, steps after steps to remove impurities.
In the end, she turned what was seen as a waste product into a source of high quality copper, producing more than the entire island would ever know what to do with!
But this was not the only thing she produced. Astrid pretty much created the first toxic wastes in human history and as the chemicals ran off her mill and into the river that went through the town down bellow, people started to get sick, as did the workers of the mills who gained strange new afflictions from breathing the fumes of Astrid's chemicals. She knew those things, she knew how to prevent them too, but it was such a complex affair to make others understand. The water smelled bad, but to climb up the hill to get water before it entered the mill? It was such a bother! And likewise Astrid had to get Vilkas to go as far as to threaten to whip the workers of the mill for them to finally wear the leather protections and follow a strict rotation in and out of the building to prevent the fumes from dizzying them.
As Astrid was doing her best to design some kind of aqueduct to bring clean water to the town so people stopped drinking from the river she was now poisoning, Astrid was seeing the limits of what she could do alone. She needed iron. Cast iron buckets what could handle hellish levels of heat, that despite their weight would still be more mobile than stone.
Luckily, she had heard of a master smith who knew how to forge iron living east, in Crete.
@TruckKun
Hail to you, master smith.
Tales of your work have traveled far and wide, reaching my home of Sardinia. I am in need of a smith that knows how to work iron better than anyone in the world. I will pay handsomely to have your services and am willing to build you a forge the likes of which have never been seen before if you would agree to spend five years teaching your skills in Sardinia.
Attached are some designs I hope you might be able to make.
The very corporate terms of the letter would make someone suspicious of its modern overtone, but what comes with it is what makes it a dead giveaway that someone from modern times wrote it. The drawings are rough, but definitely made in the style of a blueprint, with front and side images and measurements in centimeters and meters, with a wooden ruler sent for reference. The images themselves show buckets, screws and other industrial implements.
TL;DR
-Astrid begins basic taxation of villages and shipping to and from the island.
-Astrid builds a watermill and experiments with Hydro-chemical metallurgy, but also creates the first toxic wastes in history that poison the local river.
-To further her goals, she sends a letter inviting a legendary master of iron smiting to her island.