Chapter CXLVIII – Whosoever shall compel thee to go a company, go with him in twain.

51st of Spring 5860
Copperworks, Libertycave

The copperworks was busy today; not only in its main building where its smelteries were, but its newly-established office that had been constructed right next to it. Its main room was quite large, currently housing Bilal and a few assistants. There was a central table with papers and writing implements stacked on it. On a cork board there was a map of Casamonu printed by the New Inkwell Printworks, and a series of pins were stuck to it. Each pin pinned a small piece of paper with a name and a number attached to it.

“Three crates from site number seven, four from number eight…”

An assistant, a young man named Ejike who had found employment, was noting these numbers down to a logbook. Most of Mount Curry had become abandoned as the owners of mines either lost their slaves to a raid or heard news of such raids and ran for their lives. Outside of mines, the only semi-regular inhabitants of the mountain were shepherds and the occasional eccentric hermit. Thus, the mountain had to be resettled, and there were many eager to do so in search for profit. Bilal had helped by subsidizing to-be-foremen looking to reopen mines, in exchange for getting more favorable prices for the copperwork of course.

Bilal checked through the numbers once they were in one place. A few months ago, he didn’t even know how to read or do math. Neither did most of his associates, and now they had become craftsmen, accountants, businessmen… He had begun to understand why one of the first things Brown pushed for was literacy. It helped quite a lot to have people educated in at least the basics.

“It’s always the dwarf-operated mines, huh” commented Bilal when he reached the bottom of the page. “So much output compared to everyone else.”

Ejike shrugged “I’ve heard of the human miners try to gleam information off of them about their techniques, but unsurprisingly, they’re quite secretive.”

“We’ll get them to speak eventually. Now that they’re part of the Republic, they should do their part to help everyone else.” Bilal let go of the matter now, and dragged a stack of stone tablets resting on the table towards himself. A bunch of orders for refined copper. He couldn’t read the dwarven script of course, but prospective buyers were usually helpful enough to include a tally mark at the back of the tablet. Each mark represented one fifths of a crate, a standard copper counting system developed long before between human and dwarven merchants.

“I think we should have enough to fulfill all these orders.” There were already a few spare crates of copper ingots left over from the last batch, so Bilal took a few of the tablets and dropped them into the crates. The deliveryman was a dwarf who could read the addresses given at the front of the tablets.

“No, we won’t exactly have enough once the ore is refined” Ejike pointed out.

Bilal paused, long enough to have a brilliant idea “I’m sure there should be a few copperworks in Casamonu willing to sell their copper to us, for cheaper than we can sell it for. We can get the deliveryman to pick up the copper on the way to Zon’guldac.” A bit of arbitrage, to put it in modern business terms.

Now that the copper side of the copperworks were done with, there were two letters that had stood at the bottom of the pile of stone tablets.

One, from the Commander-in-Chief. “An order for another thousand pikes.” He slid it over to Ejike. It was far from an unusual order by now. No more needed to be said. Another regiment, another bunch of pikes for the army of the Republic. Bilal didn’t demand payment still – from a moral standpoint, he understood well enough as a former slave that slavery was wrong and did his best to eradicate it. From a business perspective, it was favorable to them to expand the relatively laissez-faire market of the Republic. More labor to hire to the copper mines, more craftsmen to refine the copper, more people to buy it… A bunch of pikes weren’t going to make them bankrupt when the copper already sold like hotcakes.

Two, from Casamonu. “‘Mister Bilal, we currently lack anyone to head our branch in Casamonu.’ Oh. I did forget to designate someone…”

Bilal circled around the table a few times, thinking. There were… a lot of employees in the copperworks by now. He didn’t personally have much of an acquaintance with many of them, and that was true for the team he had sent over to establish business in Casamonu as well. Who was he supposed to pick out of a vast list of names? “Who did we send there? We should have a list.”

Ejike flipped and flipped the pages, until he came across notes from a few weeks ago. “Here they are.”

Bilal looked over the names and… he couldn’t even remember the faces of some of them. “…at this point, I might as well pick one at random.” He closed his eyes and circled his finger over the list, before being interrupted by a question.

“How about the people there elect someone into the role? Like how we do with mayors.” A simple idea: bring democracy to the workplace. “I’m sure the people there would know each other enough to pick someone capable?”

The eyes of Bilal opened. He could pick someone random… or, leave the responsibility to the people there. If something went wrong, it wouldn’t be his fault. If something went right, it was because he gave them the idea. “You know what, that’s an excellent idea.”

Bilal quickly drafted up the response to the workers over at Casamonu:

“Go elect your own leader.”

At that moment it was a decision to shoo away a minor headache, something seemingly inconsequential. But then Bilal had another idea. He was sure he’d get elected too, and it’d be a pretty good way to legitimize his leadership, so…

“Let’s hold elections for who leads the copperworks.”