Some of the pressure was relieved by new/old technology. The harvesting that Mike was engaged in would have been done by a team of six, at least, in preindustrial times. Powered looms, Bessemer forges, meant that there were fewer people producing more per person. But even with the productivity increase there weren’t enough workers for all the potential positions. Which meant fewer soldiers as well.

It was an insoluble problem, but one that Herzer wrestled with constantly. The dispatch rider, for example, was supported by way stations in the controlled areas of Overjay. Each of the way stations had to be manned, and what’s more had to have horses at it. Figuring out a better means of communication would mean freeing up all of those people, and horses, for soldiers. Which might have meant sending more than one barely trained lieutenant to Harzburg and ending the problem in a week instead of a year and a half.

These musings carried him through the fields on the way to town and up to the gates. Most of the fields had been cleared before he left but he saw new orchards on the hillsides as well as new outbuildings. The town, whatever Courtney might think, continued to build.

There was work going on at the top of the hills north of town as well but it was more martial in nature. A wooden gate was under construction and a stockade stretched up the hill to the Academy on the right. On the left the stockade had been torn down and a bed of gravel followed the track of the top of the hill.

“Lieutenant Herrick,” the team leader of the gate guards said, nodding his head.

“The duke’s pushing ahead on the curtain walls?” Herzer asked, nodding at the gravel that was being dropped by ox carts then leveled out by prisoners. More than a few of the prisoners were Changed, taken in the brief foray by Dionys McCanoc against the town. They were, as far as anyone could tell, normal people who had been caught up by McCanoc and converted, against their wills, into soldiers for him.