Although I was ready to stay, I still regretted it when Konstantin rode away, I wanted to follow him back to Varykov, and the Count's original arrangement was to let me follow Lucasino's house, and he didn't say that I should be allowed to come to the barracks, and it was not against his arrangement to stay in Lucasino's mansion in the city

But as soon as the cold wind blew, I came to my senses, and I still don't have this kind of thought

In the evening, sure enough, it started to snow

When it first snowed, there were people outside who were in a mess and began to pull up tents, and there were some large wooden boxes that had to be covered with thick cloths, otherwise the things inside would get damp when the snow melted, and some of the skins and dried mushrooms and fungus picked in the mountains were very afraid of moisture, and these were all sent by the surrounding farms as taxes in kind, and I wondered why I didn't just put these things in the barracks, and when I got to the barracks, I knew why: there were also countless things piled up in it, and they looked very rich in a mess. There has been no empty space for a long time

"Your name is Victor?" Giovanni was holding a candle, and a soldier threw a wooden candlestick, which Giovanni tied up and handed it to me

"Yes, Mistress Giovanni"

"You can write, huh?"

"Yes, sir," I replied to him, "I can write in Swadia and Wiki, but it can't be complicated, but it's okay to read."

"No problem, my former servant could only write more than 200 words, which is enough" Giovanni told me to walk in front, and when I came to a fork in the road, he showed me how to go

On the outside, it looks like the monastery has been dilapidated, but on the inside, it seems quite spacious, there are a lot of murals on the wall, and when the candlelight passes, there will be some murals of saints preaching from time to time, these murals are very beautiful, and there are some murals written in the words of Zenda**A mural of Gabriel angel lifting a sword to kill the infidels is very spectacular, and it depicts a certain Zenda emperor defeating the nomadic cavalry on the edge of the desert

I paused for a moment, and Giovanni turned around, he was whistling, and at this time he also stood up and looked at the fresco, "The sixth or seventh emperor of Chanda, the people of Salander were killed so badly by him, that he now thinks of him as one of his saints, which is really unreasonable."

As soon as Giovanni reminded me, I remembered that this was the seventh emperor of Zenda, but the reason why he was commemorated by Salander, in addition to his early military achievements, was that he allowed the Salanders to travel freely between the empire and the empire, and stopped persecuting the Salanders, the emperor opened the holy city for the Salanders to worship, and gave the stone that Allah stepped on when he ascended to heaven to an imam, and more than a hundred years later, the great sultan of the Salanders rose from among the people of that imam, and the great sultan unified the Salander tribes, and defeated the great-grandson of Emperor Chanda at the end of the desert and took away the True Cross

"Oh, it's weird" I didn't say much

We walked into a small room.

There was a pungent smell of leather nitrate, many sheepskins piled on the side, and some were in several large vats, and the pungent smell came from here

A nervous child was picking up the sheepskins from the vat with a fork, and by the hook hanging on the wall, another man took some of the dried sheepskins and handed them to a man with red, swollen and tearful eyes, who took the sheepskin, nailed it to a wooden table, and then skillfully cut off the head of the sheepskin with a knife, and then he nailed the second sheepskin to it, and cut off the sheep's skin in the same way, and behind him, a large pile of processed sheepskins had been piled up

The sheepskins were taken by a soldier-like man, placed on a large wooden table, spread out one by one, and then vigorously smoothed and polished with a file and stone stick, and finally scraped vigorously with a huge blade

The people were all busy with their own business, everyone didn't care what the people around them were doing, and when we passed, only the last one gave us a blank look and nodded at us

We walked through this room, and the fresh air filled my chest all at once, I don't know how long those people had been in it, and if I were to do those things all day long, I would have gone crazy in a few months, but Vladimir said: Don't underestimate people's adaptability, I shudder a little when I think about this, if I were sent to this little sheepskin workshop one day, I guess I would have survived, but I would have become that numb

"What does that do?" I asked, with some curiosity, "So many sheepskins?" ”

"To make parchment," said Giovanni, "the most expensive thing on a sheep is probably the sheepskin, the Salanders used sheepskin for rafts, the Kuguit people used sheepskin for robes, and the rest of the people used sheepskin for paper writing."

"There are places where paper has begun to be made from grass leaves and bark," I said to Giovanni, "and it is beautiful, white as snow, and it is very popular in the west, and it was brought to me by the Salanders through Rhodoc"

"Those things are not good, they are afraid of moisture, they will be broken when they are lightly pinched, they are all strange things that the Orientals came up with, and they are the same as silk, they are useless or these sheepskins are good, they are not bad, and every priest likes this kind of thing, and is willing to pay a lot of money" Giovanni smiled happily, "We collect thousands of sheep every year, and less than a thousand of them can be used to make parchment, and one parchment can make three large parchments and five small parchments, Skilled workers can cut out six, and every year the monastery will come here to collect sheepskins, and of course, there are some galleries that are also doing these things, because to record those strange things, tens of thousands of sheep are killed in the Donghu area alone every year, and it is still interesting to think that if one day the human skins are used for any good purposes, hehe"

Giovanni turned back to me and said mysteriously, "You know what? There are some tribes in the Kugit who like to sew human scalps into the mats, and you should be careful when you go to their house, maybe you are sitting somewhere

What is the top of the man's head?"

We went into the innermost room, and Giovanni motioned for me to place the candle holder on a table

Here, an old man was putting an oily wax on some sheepskins, which had been treated with a soft glow, and after each leather he twitched and sniffed something from a snuffbox

Here I saw the final product of the leather workshop, a few beautiful pieces of parchment stacked in a small wooden box, which looked beautiful, and on a large table was laid a smoothed plank with a parchment roll spread out on it, and beside it was a box of quills, a pencil sharpener, and a small bottle of ink

Giovanni went to look at the ink, and now it was a little icy in it, so he complained to the old man a few words, the old man was a little deaf, and after listening to it for a long time, he understood that Giovanni was talking about him, he shook his hand, and said angrily, "You don't add a stove to me, the old man is frozen into an ice lump, what's so strange about this damn bottle of ink frozen, I'll tell you" The old man roared while spitting

I was a little surprised, because I knew that Giovanni was the governor of this place, and I didn't know why this old man could talk like this in other places, and the old man would be punished, but this is the territory of the Valans, and I have nothing to wonder about, and when I encounter something, just think about it, 'This is Valan', and I will not be surprised

Giovanni didn't care about the grumpy old man, he took the bottle of ink, drew some warm water from a water bladder outside, and told me to come over

"Viktor Konstantin sent my servants home without my consent, in fact, there is nothing wrong with me having two servants, but my brother has already arranged it like this, I won't say anything more You will replace him from today"

Giovanni tapped his fingers on the table and pulled over a stake for me to sit on, and he spread out the parchment roll

I glanced at it, and it was a bill

The most recent record above is 'The purchase price of onions has risen from 40 small silver beans to 43 small silver beans a basket', and I also saw a few grammatical errors, thank God my predecessor's mistakes have boosted my confidence a lot

"Do you really write?" Giovanni frowned and asked, "Some people can read, but can't write, I've seen this kind of person, if you can't, don't force it, I'll find the Corwin family another day and ask for a priest to keep the accounts."

Giovanni was lying, there was only one priest in the Corwin family, and he was a member of Corwin's own family, and it was impossible for him to come to such a barren mountain to help him

"I will"

I moistened the ink with the quill tube, and as soon as my hand reached out of the cuff, I felt the cold in the room, and the old man was right, a stove was needed here, and I squeezed the pen tightly and wrote the words 'Victor' in the flat place above the table

Giovanni looked at it suspiciously, "It's not strange to write your own name, write something else"

I'm in

It's a random handwriting, "Tom admires Gothic, Jack is a pig, and the Romanovs are from Zhivadine in Vecchia, which later became Frost Castle"

When my handwriting began to fade, he dipped the ink again, but Giovanni felt that the test was enough, and he pointed to the line of onion acquisition and asked me to write it along

He asked me to make a special note next to me and explain that I am responsible for this bill from today onwards

"It was snowing heavily on a certain day of the month, Victor. Alexievich. Romanoff, who replaced my predecessor, Harry of the Rubin Forest, began to record the list of items in the Black Forest Barracks, which had nothing to do with me; After that, if the bill is wrong, I will be responsible."

These were all dictated by Giovanni, and I wrote along

"Okay, begin" Giovanni sat down in front of me, and began to recall the big and small affairs around him, he didn't even have a special notebook or a butler, he relied on his own memory to let me quickly record the things around the territory

"Forty-nine of the sheep of the Sheldon family on the farm under the Black Forest Barracks died of illness, and his neighbor Leonard suspected that it was a disease from Raj, a Salander from the town, and the Sheldon family waived this year's meat tribute, and instead served in the winter, and came to the cottage once a week to clean the roof when the snow covered the roof."

Here, Giovanni was talking about 'fortress', and I looked up at him and felt that the word was used too shamelessly;

Giovanni was also a little embarrassed, so he changed his words to 'fortress', and I still looked up at him;

He was a little annoyed, so he said, "Then use the castle", but I still didn't write;

He gave up and changed his words: "When the snow covers the roof, I come to the cottage once a week to clean the roof"

Giovanni watched with some reluctance as I finished writing the above line, and continued to urge me to continue to record, "This year's wheat harvest is poor, oats and barley harvests are not active in the farmer's milling, the stream mill grinds four hundred and twenty bags of wheat, and pays taxes twenty-one bags; Donglin Mill grinds three hundred and nine bags of wheat, pays taxes of fifteen bags Compared with last year, the decline in grain is obviously serious After investigation, farmer Howard built a water mill privately, and helped the farmer grind wheat according to the remuneration of sixty bags of one bag, which was illegal, and connived at the farmer to evade his obligations to the lord and fined Howard a cow and three bags of wheat The water mill was owned by the barracks, which was operated by Howard under the supervision of the barracks, and Howard himself was responsible for maintaining the mill and the farmer still drew wheat according to twenty to one, and after harvesting the wheat, Howard and the barracks were divided according to one to three"

"The orchard harvested forty-four baskets of apples, which were not of good quality and could not be sold; The pears were harvested in ninety baskets, and they were sold to Hefman, a candied fruit merchant in Xiaodonghu City, for a profit of one hundred king's coins; Importing three bags of olives from Hussein, a native of Salander, and paying forty small silver beans, Hussein threatened that if the purchase price is the same next time, he will not be responsible for delivering them to the barracks, and we can only pick them up ourselves."

"Due to the unusual rush to buy in Xiaodonghu City, wheat,

The prices of oats, turnips, bacon, and oilseeds have all risen, and in addition, the people of Xiaodonghu City have also ordered 90 barrels of pickled pork and 160 packs of mutton jerky, and sent people to negotiate, hoping that all the farmers in our department will plant wheat, and the stupid farmers will be instigated, and they will start winter ploughing in advance, and the fallow land must be prevented, in case this is the strategy of Xiaodonghu City, and when the wheat harvest is harvested next year, they will not buy it at the agreed price, and the purchase price will be lowered, and then the wheat will be hoarded and cannot be sold, and the farmers will inevitably be in turmoil, and the final losses will be transferred to our barracks."

Writing about this place, Giovanni suddenly stopped, "This is my previous idea, will the people from Xiaodonghu City come to buy wheat next year and next year?" He muttered to himself

"Maybe Valankov will"

I said to him and then put an end to the wheat project.

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