The roar of the crowd eventually faded, but the echoes of Alessandro's order—"Build nine more"—reverberated through the valley. Lorenzo stared at him, the smith's mind, accustomed to crafting unique masterpieces one at a time, struggling to comprehend the sheer scale of the command. It was not a request for nine more tools. It was a demand for an arsenal.
"Nine?" the smith rumbled, his voice laced with disbelief. "Boy, do you know the work that went into this one? The charcoal, the forging, the fitting? That is a year's work for a normal smithy."
"We are not a normal smithy," Alessandro stated calmly. "And we do not have a year."
That evening, in the smoky great hall of the tower, the leadership of Rocca Falcone gathered. It was a council of three: Alessandro, the mind; Lorenzo, the hands; and Enzo, the heart of the people. Before them, on the floor, Alessandro sketched not a tool, but a system.
"Lorenzo, you are the master," he began, "but you cannot hammer every piece yourself. You will oversee the most difficult work—the mouldboards, the hardening of the plowshares. Enzo, I need ten of your strongest, most reliable young men. Two will become Lorenzo's apprentices at the forge. They will learn to work the bellows, to hammer the rough shapes, to quench the steel. Their lives will be fire and sweat."
He drew a new diagram of the charcoal kilns. "Four men will do nothing but make charcoal. It is the fuel for our entire enterprise. Their work is as important as the smith's."
Finally, he turned to Enzo. "The rest will be carpenters. I will make a master template for the oak frame of the plow. Their job is to replicate it, perfectly, nine times over. Every hole drilled, every joint cut, must be identical."
It was a foreign concept—men with single, repetitive tasks, working as cogs in a larger machine. It was the birth of the production line.
The valley of Rocca Falcone transformed. The once-quiet fiefdom, which had previously marked time only by the rising and setting of the sun, now pulsed with a new, rhythmic heartbeat of industry. The charcoal team, under the direction of a steady older peasant, managed a series of smoldering earthen mounds, producing a constant supply of the vital fuel. The woodworking team, led by a carpenter from the village, worked tirelessly in the bailey, the scrape of the saw and the knock of the mallet a constant refrain. They worked from Alessandro's precise wooden templates, ensuring every frame was an exact copy of the first.
The heart of the operation was the forge. It was no longer a simple smithy; it had become a loud, hot, and brutally efficient factory. Lorenzo, initially a reluctant teacher, found a new kind of purpose. He was a harsh, demanding master to his two young apprentices, roaring at them for a misplaced hammer blow or a moment's hesitation. But he was also a brilliant one. Under his unforgiving tutelage, the boys were learning a priceless craft, their bodies growing harder and their eyes sharper with every passing day.
As the first new plow was completed, then a second, and a third, a new kind of pride swelled in the valley. The finished plows were lined up outside the smithy, a row of dark, powerful beasts, a testament to their collective labor. The plowing of the new fields began on a scale that was previously unimaginable. From dawn until dusk, multiple teams of oxen, guided by the fief's best plowmen, carved perfect, parallel furrows into the rich, black earth. The valley floor, once a cursed swamp, was being reborn.
Yet, a shadow lingered beneath the surface of their success. One evening, as Alessandro watched the plowing from the tower, Bastiano approached, his face etched with worry.
"It is a magnificent sight, my lord," the old steward said quietly. "A miracle. But I have marked the calendar. Autumn deepens. The Bishop's accountants have long memories, and their calendars are as accurate as ours."
The reminder was sobering. Their race against time was not over. The threat from the Baron of Monte San Giovanni also remained; patrols of his men were sometimes spotted on the distant ridges, watching, waiting.
The last of the new fields were finally turned in late autumn. The valley floor was a breathtaking sea of black, fertile earth, ready and waiting. A triumphant Enzo, his face beaming, approached Alessandro in the bailey.
"Lord, the land is ready!" he declared, his voice thick with emotion. "It is the finest soil a man has ever laid eyes on. It is hungry. It thirsts for seed."
Alessandro looked out at the vast expanse of perfectly tilled earth, a creation born from his mind and his people's labor. A cold spike of dread, an oversight so fundamental it was terrifying, pierced through his pride. He had been so focused on the engineering, the politics, the production…
He turned to Enzo, his own expression suddenly grim. "Enzo… the grain we have in the storehouse. The sacks we have set aside for planting."
"Yes, my lord?"
"How much seed grain is there?"
Enzo's triumphant smile faltered, replaced by a look of confusion. "Seed grain? My lord, we have what we always have. Enough to plant the old, tired hillside fields. Perhaps a little extra." He looked out at the massive new fields, the scale of the problem dawning on him. "But for this? For this entire valley?" His face went pale.
"We would need ten times that amount," he whispered. "My lord… no one has that much seed."
The terrible truth settled over them. They had forged the tools to create an unprecedented bounty. They had prepared the perfect earth to receive it. But the harvest that was meant to pay their debt to God and man could not be planted. They had built a magnificent fleet of ships, only to realize they had no cargo to fill them.