‘Is there no way…?’
As Dawi pondered, a thought suddenly occurred to him.
‘Come to think of it, how do they trade with the dwarves? They said they live in the rocky mountain region… If they want to trade there too, they’d have to cross the mountain range.’
“Come to think of it, how did you trade with Snowhill? You have to cross the mountains, and there are wild animals… Isn’t it dangerous?”
“It is indeed dangerous, since the Alos Mountains are teeming with wild animals. Even just circling around the mountains to the east to get here was an ordeal. We fought wild animals, fled from them, hid from them, and finally arrived here.”
The dwarf continued.
“But since there is a road, the travel itself is convenient… We arm ourselves thoroughly, and several of us escort the carts of iron ore…”
“Wait, there’s a road? Enough to pull carts along it?”
“Yes? Yes… We paved it with stone… Since there are many stones in the rocky mountains… D-did we perhaps do something wrong…?”
“Ah, no, it’s not that. I’m just surprised that you paved a road in the mountains. Your skills must be excellent.”
“Ah, yes. We cannot use magic, but instead, our craftsmanship and construction skills are outstanding.”
“Hmm… Excellent skills, you say… Follow me for a moment. There’s something I’d like to show you.”
Dawi led the dwarves to the stone icehouse.
“This is…?”
“It’s a stone icehouse I built. It lowers the temperature with ice so that food can be preserved even in summer.”
Right now, the stone icehouse was piled full of corn. Of course, there was also bighorn meat and silver trout inside.
“S-so much corn…”
“In any case, this is truly an incredible idea. To store winter ice and use its chill to preserve food in summer…!”
“You should be able to build one in the rocky mountain region too. If you have no ice, you can simply use the snow that falls in winter.”
“Oh..! That’s right! Ah… but we don’t have enough food to preserve…”
“If you could take the corn piled up here, then you would need a stone icehouse as well.”
“Y-you mean you will give this corn to us?!”
At the dwarf’s words, Dawi shook his head slightly.
“Unfortunately, that would be difficult. It would be impossible for you to carry this over the mountains.”
If Malmari had not been extremely sturdy, and if he had not had the shotgun, Dawi would not have been able to go to Snowhill territory and sell the corn either.
“And I have signed an exclusive trade contract with the Snowhill baronial family. In exchange, I received tax-exemption privileges. So I think it will be difficult to trade with your tribe.”
“Ah…”
“However, I can send food to you through Snowhill territory.”
“Ah…!”
“If I sell all this corn to Snowhill territory, Snowhill’s food situation will improve by that much, and the surplus food that creates will flow to your tribe.”
“Ooh, there’s such a way…!”
“The problem is that the road is rough. Since we can’t cross that mountain, we have to circle west, cross the mountain range, and go all the way to Snowhill… but I found I couldn’t transport all this that way.”
“Ah… Crossing the perpetual snow mountain is certainly impossible. But circling the mountains and crossing the range is difficult as well…”
“But you have already built a road that cuts across the mountain range. If you build a road from here to Snowhill territory, wouldn’t food flow along that road?”
“Ah… If a road is built, that would certainly happen. But as you know, that was thanks to the abundance of stone in the rocky mountains. If we merely cut down trees and make a dirt road, it will be ruined before long. Transporting stones here and laying them down… would not be impossible, but it would take a very long time. We… do not have enough food to endure until then.”
At the dwarf’s words, Dawi smiled faintly and said,
“Follow me.”
He already had materials that could replace stone.
After leaving the stone icehouse, Dawi showed the dwarves the temporary kiln he had built.
“Is this not a kiln?”
The dwarves, who had forges, naturally knew what a kiln was.
“Yes. I made it temporarily, so it’s a bit crude.”
“N-no! The fact that you built this alone is already incredible!”
“T-that’s right!”
“Now, in any case, I used this kiln to make bricks.”
“Ah! We know bricks as well. We have stone, so we have not used them much, but… Ah! You intend to pave the road with bricks!”
“Mm… But the main material for bricks is clay. We have no clay in our rocky mountains…”
“If you were going to make bricks in the rocky mountains and transport them, you might as well transport stone. From what I saw, a river flows through Snowhill territory.”
The Alos River flowed straight from the Alos Mountains into the North Sea.
As such, it was short, steep, and fast-flowing.
Because of that, a proper delta had not formed, but even so, there should be a certain layer of clay in the lower reaches of the river.
“If we dig clay from the lower reaches of that river, I think there will be enough bricks to pave a road from here to Snowhill territory.”
“Oh! That is certainly true!”
“Good. Then let’s go to Snowhill territory. Since there is already a road, it won’t take long to get from there to the rocky mountains, right?”
“Yes!”
That day, Dawi took the dwarves and went back to Snowhill territory.
This time, they were not carrying cargo, so they were able to arrive at Snowhill much faster.
During the journey, the dwarves saw Dawi’s thunder magic countless times, and their fear of him grew even greater. In turn, they began to treat him with even more utmost respect.
The dwarves of the rocky mountains were bewildered.
The young dwarves who had gone east had suddenly appeared from the west, together with the knights of Snowhill territory.
Their position had changed drastically.
“Survival means coexistence! Coexistence is the answer!”
“Just as we did not abandon the refugees and chose coexistence among dwarves, we can coexist with humans as well!”
“Coexistence! Coexistence! Coexistence!”
The dwarves wondered if they had perhaps been put under some kind of hypnosis magic by the wizard. But the information the young dwarves brought back was useful.
‘Make food flow.’
By ensuring that Snowhill territory had surplus food, they could make it flow all the way to them.
It was a way to obtain food without any need to become hostile with Snowhill territory.
The next day, the dwarven chief personally visited Snowhill territory and signed a road construction contract.
The baroness of Snowhill had welcomed this plan from the moment she heard it.
After all, once a road was built, Dawi would travel back and forth more often to subjugate wild animals, and they would be able to receive the corn from Dawi’s ranch more easily.
From building kilns in the lower reaches of the Alos River and producing bricks, to laying the brick road, the dwarves took charge of everything.
The wages of the dwarves put to work on the road construction were to be paid in food by Snowhill territory.
Of course, that food was the corn produced by Dawi’s ranch.
The amount was not large. Each dwarf working on the construction received one ear of corn a day.
But to the dwarves who had been on the verge of starving to death, even that was something to be grateful for.
They flocked to the construction site for a single ear of corn, and in the end, the dwarven chief had to limit the number of people assigned to the work.
Also, since it was impossible for Dawi to keep transporting corn himself, the ones who suffered were the knights of Snowhill territory.
The knights combined their winter training with the subjugation of wild animals in the mountains, carrying bilberry wine, jam, salt, garlic, and the like to Dawi’s ranch and exchanging them for corn.
The baroness was extremely grateful that Dawi was willing to trade even for bilberry wine and bilberry jam, which were common in the territory.
As they fought monsters and built the road, time flew by.
During that time, Dawi erected a fence around the lakeshore and was able to build one more large ranch building.
In the center of the ranch building, he installed a large brick stove and set the chimney straight upward.
It would be responsible for heating the ranch during winter.
He also put up a fence around the brick stove to keep away the livestock he would raise later.
During the dwarves’ road construction period, more corn was consumed than produced, so the corn piled up in the stone icehouse gradually dwindled.
When the corn in the stone icehouse began to show the bottom, and Dawi completed the ranch building and fence, the dwarves’ road construction came to an end.
A road paved with yellow bricks.
The timber produced from cutting down trees became fences set up on both sides of the road.
These fences blocked the approach of wild animals to some extent.
And as the road construction ended, winter ended as well.
The wind began to shift from a damp and cold north wind to a hot and dry south wind.
***
In the end, the dwarves could not completely prevent deaths by starvation.
But the dwarven chief knew that this was the best outcome, one that had minimized the number of deaths.
Had they chosen war with Snowhill territory, the dead would have been twice as many as now.
While the dwarves were sighing in relief that they had passed the winter relatively safely, Snowhill was in the midst of harvesting potatoes.
In truth, the potatoes of the Alos Mountains were a different species from the potatoes of the continent.
Their precise name was “snow potatoes.”
This potato, a native species of the Alos Mountains, had a long growing period. If planted in spring, it could be harvested the following spring.
Instead, it could endure the five long months of winter.
The potatoes planted in spring sprouted leaves as large as possible before winter came, absorbing sunlight.
When winter came, the leaves fell, and only the potatoes underground remained.
During winter, the potatoes underground absorbed the moisture from the snow and the nutrients of the soil, growing as large as they could.
Then in spring, those large potatoes were harvested.
Then how had this potato, with its growing period of a full year, become a staple food?
The answer was simple. It was the only crop that had survived in Snowhill.
Other crops with short growing periods could not withstand Snowhill’s short and dry summer.
They either died when winter came while they were still growing, or dried up and died from lack of water.
One might ask whether they could not draw water from the Alos River, but there was a limit to how much water people could carry and give by hand.
In the end, the only thing they could grow that way was potatoes.