How To Steal A Road

Dotton was a backwater. It was a small village surrounded by rolling hills, rocky fields, and crooked forests, backed up against a mountain range to the northwestern edge of the continent. Beyond the mountains were sheer cliffs running down to a dangerous and unpredictable coastline where nothing of importance could be found. There were no great trading routes, no strategic features that an enemy might want to secure, no great wealth of knowledge. The King knew this, his advisors knew this, the lords and ladies surrounding the royal court (if they had ever heard of Dotton at all) knew this, and the residents of Dotton knew this.

They didn't mind at all.

Villages with valuable mines were plundered, and cities with great libraries and ancient wisdom were sometimes burned to the ground for heresy of one sort or another. Centers of trade were the first place invading armies went, and any village on a line between the border and capital was a likely target for sacking and pillage. Bad business, the old men of Dotton agreed, as they leaned back in their chairs in front of the local store with their pipes. Not anything a fine, hardworking Dotton man should get tangled up in. They blew smoke rings into the evening air and watched children chase each other through the muddy streets, dodging wagons full of grain and washerwomen carrying their bundles.

Dotton had one feature that even a larger city might envy. They had a road. Several centuries earlier, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of the current King Withelm had declared that all cities, great or small, would be connected to the capital by a road. But first, an advisor had pointed out, it was necessary to know what constituted a "city" and what made a city different from a village, or a town. Or even a logging camp. It would be an overwhelming task to build a highway to every collection of shacks in the kingdom. After much discussion, the King and his advisors had decided that the main feature separating a city from a village was the number of people who lived there.

The King, with only a bit of throat clearing, made a slightly less resonent proclamation that all cities, villages, and towns would participate in a general census to determine which areas would be connected to the capital.

On hearing this, the elders of Dotton ruminated on the matter. It would be a great boon to Dotton, they agreed, if the town had a real road to the capital. Easier to sell their goods to cities in between, easier to receive help during famine or after the great storms that sometimes devastated the area. They read the announcement to each other again, mulling over the number of citizens that determined whether a village was a village, a town, or a city. None of them knew how many people lived in and around Dotton, but it certainly wasn't enough to warrant a highway.

Dotton had a mayor, and while the old folk gave great weight to their own discussions, they had no true power or influence and were generally ignored by everyone else. With one exception. A boy of fifteen, the weaver's apprentice, had walked away from the messenger and the grumbling cluster of old folk, thinking about the message himself. He agreed with their assessment. Dotton could use a highway.

Six months later, the census taker arrived to a very different village. Every street corner was crowded with boys and girls, their sisters and brothers, their cousins, concerned aunties, nephews, and uncles. The census man commandeered the main room of a local inn, and requested that all of the citizens of the village present themselves, which they were only too happy to do.

The first person to do so was a smiling boy of fifteen, who presented the man with a pie as a welcoming gift.

The man may have noticed that some of the people who presented themselves to be counted were suspiciously youthful, despite claiming to be of age. He may have noticed that some of those who came in on the second day looked suspiciously similar to those who had presented themselves on the first. He might, if he were the inquisitive sort, have wondered why the boy who had given him pie stood against the outside wall of the inn, organizing and managing the line that often stretched down the street.

But it was a very good pie.

When the elders of Dotton received word that the village had been declared a city, they nodded to each other and stroked their beards. A lot of folk living out in these woods, they said. Perhaps Dotton wasn't a city like the capital, with everyone crammed together in tight little streets and hemmed in by walls, but there were a lot of people out in the forest. Not traditional folk, maybe, but good people all the same. Why, the streets were positively overflowing when the census man had come.

Some of them eyed the whistling boy who was cheerfully repairing a loom nearby. Too clever for his own good, they grumbled to each other. But they grumbled quietly.

Eventually, the road was completed. It ran from Dotton and through a number of other villages, towns, and hamlets, eventually merging with other great highways and smaller lanes before reaching the great gates of Ardglas, the capital. Each village and town along the new road was pleased to find themselves connected to their neighbors in the northwest and southeast, but there was a distinct lack of surprise among the people. Many had been visited by a young man from Dotton well before the census man had arrived, and taken impromptue holidays during the census itself.

Families whose children had grown, married, and moved to neighboring towns were now able to visit each other. Packages, goods, and even letters could be sent easily up and down the highway, and while the price of wool (Dotton's primary export) lowered somewhat in towns closer to the capital, the increased quantity that they sold more than made up for it. All in all, everyone agreed, the road was a vast improvement over the various muddy tracks and trails that had previous connected each town to its neighbors.

The mayor of Dotton eventually told his wife about the odd visit he had received from the weaver's boy, who had asked many insightful questions about how roads were planned and constructed. Civic planning and trade were subjects that the mayor thoroughly enjoyed, and they had spent a pleasant afternoon pouring over the maps in the mayor's office.

If anyone noticed that on all subsequent censuses Dotton was registered as a village rather than a city, they kept it to themselves. Over the the next century, invaders attacked and were repelled, bandits destroyed bridges, cities were sometimes sacked or abandoned. The roads, which were never entirely finished in the first place, began to fall into disrepair. Dotton had no great wealth to attract bandits, no borders with aggressive neighbors, and no cities to sack. Within two generations, only a handful of the great roads were still intact, and the road between Dotton and Ardglas was one of them.

The story about a clever Dotton boy who had swindled a king was well known in Dotton and the surrounding area. Lively arguments sometimes still broke out, with different families claiming him as an ancestor. Most of these claims were based on half-remembered family trees or the presumed infidelity of someones great-great-great-great-grandparent. In the end, though, it was not much more than a historical footnote.

And then a wizard came to town.