Chapter 180 Agricultural Survey of Daze Township

After the two major issues of "the establishment of the United Kingdom" and "the end of the Thirty Days War" were determined, the crisis was finally safely resolved, but Horn could not sit idle.

Most of the queens were dispersed and asked to take away their hundreds of naughty children.

Horn, as the Emperor of the Aiel Empire, the Pope, and the Emperor of the United Kingdom, left behind several powerful queens.

Among them are Queen Amazon of Hittite, Queen Dido of Carthage, Queen Gasa of the Wolf Fang, etc., all of whom are core figures in each camp.

After receiving Horn's invitation, several queens stood up from the small stools on the sedan chair and walked up to Horn together.

There was a stone slab on the ground, and they stood in a row on it.

Horn seemed to hear the sound of stone slabs breaking, and several centipedes quickly crawled out from under the stone slabs.

Looking at Horn sitting in the carved armchair, their gray animal ears trembled, driving away the flies and horseflies that attached themselves to them.

Most of these queens are strong and powerful. After all, the Beastman Kingdom is also ruled by female warriors, and most of the previous elite divisions were female warriors.

However, surprisingly, the two commanders, Dombio and Haliba, happened to be men, while the commanders of both sides in other battlefields were basically female warriors.

Glancing at these beastman princes, Horn cleared his throat and said, "I kept you here mainly for two reasons."

The two main issues Horn wanted to discuss with them at the moment were the land donation and food from Qiumu Island.

The problem with Qiumu Island is relatively easy to solve. Even if they don't give it to him, they can't stop Horn from going up.

Horn also promised that if they succeeded, he would provide them with a two-story villa garden and gold on the island.

As for the food problem, the beastman princes were in trouble. They looked at each other, and no one said anything.

Horn slowed down his speech: "You can tell me any difficulties you have, and we can solve them together. Is there not enough food for the winter?"

"That's not the case." Queen Amazon of Hittian scratched her scalp with her dark fingers. "We just don't know how much the 25,000 you mentioned is. And we don't know if we can afford to provide you with food."

"Have you never calculated these things?"

The queens all shook their heads. The Queen of Carthage shook her head and said, "We harvest rice and crackers in the late summer, fish in the autumn, and hunt in the winter. There is nothing we can do about the famine in the spring. We can only endure it."

What kind of civilization is this? How dare you call others barbarians?
Horn usually saw that they were dressed very politely and spoke in a simple manner. Although their clothes were simple, they did have some of the style of the Ancient Aiel Empire.

But now it seems that this level of civilization is not so well-educated, but at least they are still eating raw meat and drinking blood.

"How about this." Horn stood up and said to the queens, "Whose kingdom is closer to me? I'll go and investigate."

The queens looked at each other and focused their attention on Dido, Queen of Carthage.

"Your Majesty, our Kingdom of Carthage is nearby." The Queen of Carthage did not refuse and said straightforwardly.

Led by the Queen of Carthage, Horn and several guards walked along the path in the mud towards the capital of Carthage.

The leaden white sky of early winter pressed down on the misty mountains in the distance. Among the withered yellow leaves and wild grass, Horn rode on a horse, while the Queen of Carthage rode on a sedan chair.

This kind of stretcher is essentially a small wooden stool mounted on two pieces of wood, used to carry a person forward.

On the mirror-like water surface on both sides, the marsh islands seem to be suspended between the foothills and the shore by paths and bridges, swaying in the wind, and it is impossible to tell whether they are ripples on the water or ripples in the sky.

The wind in late autumn and early winter was a little cold and carried a foul smell. It blew from the foothills and hit Horn in the face.

The fishy smell and water vapor blew coolly around Horn's cheeks, almost like a sea breeze.

Horn closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the free air. The air in Daze Township was so fresh and sweet that it seemed particularly luxurious. He heard a fisherman's song that he couldn't understand. Horn looked at the lakeside, where several fishing boats were casting nets to catch fish. The King's Hand of Carthage, the Queen's biological father, began to introduce Horn to the lake.

"This is our Carthaginian kingdom's ocean-going fishing boat." Pointing to the raft on the lake, the old man explained, "We will catch enough fish for the whole winter and salt it to survive the winter."

"Why don't you pickle more? Is it because we didn't catch enough fish?" Horn asked, looking at the wicker basket full of fish of all sizes.

The old man shook his head and said, "We do catch a lot of fish. To be honest, it's a bit too much. We can catch enough fish for the whole winter without much effort every year.

It's just that it's difficult to preserve. If you want to make salted fish, there's a lack of salt. If you want to make dried fish, the swamp is too humid and the fish will either not dry out or get moldy easily.

The war between our two camps before was not only due to religious factors of Kongge Mengge and political factors of Heila Kingdom, but also to resource factors. What we are fighting for is the salt well at the foot of the mountain. "

Keeping this information in mind, Horn and the others continued walking along the narrow path, and several pieces of land divided by rivers appeared in front of everyone.

What surprised Horn the most were the square fields in the swamp, which were stacked and gathered around the lake to form a maze of waterways.

This standard shape makes it obvious that it is a man-made product.

Seeing that the Emperor was interested, the Queen of Carthage led a group of people to the vicinity of the polders.

When Horn approached the polders and took a closer look, he discovered that the structures of these polders were much more sophisticated than he had imagined.

These polders were built by driving long wooden stakes into shallow water areas and then covered with fishing nets. The silt on both sides of the polder was dug out and spread on the fishing nets, which were then covered with a layer of dead branches, broken leaves and fine sand dug from the mountains.

Then this process was repeated over and over again, until the polder was piled up to a height of more than a yard above the water surface, so that deep enough waterways were dug around the fields to facilitate the passage of small boats and water extraction for irrigation.

Horn lowered his head and thought. Judging from the situation, most of the beastmen live a life of fishing and farming.

They eat livestock and farm in the spring, survive on hunting in the summer, and harvest and fish in the fall to get through the winter.

The Queen of Carthage stood beside Horn and said proudly, “This polder was built by my great-great-great-grandfather, or even earlier, when there were fewer people in our kingdom.

Although we don't know how much land is needed, we know that the more land there are, the more people there are, and the more people there are, the more polders will be built.

Give us a few hundred more years, and sooner or later we will be able to turn the entire Blackbone Swamp into polder."

Looking at the high-spirited Queen of Carthage, Horn did not say much, but just smiled and responded: "I believe that day will come soon."

Following the Queen and the Hand of the King to the fishing boats and confirming the catch and output of the farmland, Horn did a quick calculation and found that there were definitely enough fish in the swamp to eat.

But the problem was that they couldn't preserve it for too long because of a lack of salt. Even though there was a lot of salt in the supplies Horn brought, it was not enough to salt enough fish for 25,000 people for a month.

Or you can use primitive canning, add water to a fish pottery jar and boil it, plug the mouth of the can with a wooden stopper, put it in a steamer to heat, and then seal it with mud.

This method can extend the shelf life by two or three months, but the prerequisite is to have a pottery workshop.

But is it that easy to run a pottery workshop? They don’t have any skilled workers, and it takes about ten days to make pottery.

Once they are able to produce pottery jars stably, they also have to produce enough pottery jars. Although Horn did not count them specifically, he estimated that it would take at least three to four thousand pottery jars.

They still don't know what the yield rate of the pottery pots is or where to dig the clay for the pottery pots.

By the time the pottery workshop finishes firing those pots, it will probably be winter already.

Horn suddenly had a headache.

Or think of a way to solve the salt mine problem over there?
(End of this chapter)