Capítulo 163: Arthur 54
Well.
I fucked up.
I did abuse my father's trust, the good of the family or of humanity be damned, and to be frank I was going to continue doing it, at least to a lesser extent.
Except now I was thinking about it while I did and that felt bad. Really bad. Not telling your dad about the coming apocalypse so you can use it to your advantage bad.
Strangely I felt less bad about not revealing my aunt and cousin's status, mostly because I already knew that that tidbit of information would throw Westeros into a pointless meatgrinder, whereas knowledge of the long night, even if largely disbelieved, might well save people's lives.
It just meant that I would have a far harder time taking Westeros afterward, without the excuse of the White Walkers.
So yeah, that little stepping stone of my ambition sat like a rock in my gut, but like a good little prince, I swallowed that discomfort and moved along.
Even with the risk of having them taken from me as part of my punishment, the realm still needed to be improved, and working on that meant taking my mind off other things, things like my inherent betrayal of my father's trust, even in working to his benefit, or things like how much I wanted to sail to Dorne and hand off the marriage contract personally, just for a chance to see Arianne.
Yeah, work was good for taking my mind off of that stuff.
And it wasn't as if there was a shortage of it. Now that piracy had been essentially exterminated since they had nowhere cooperative to restock anymore in the stepstones, the process was beginning of converting my merchant marines largely back into being just merchants.
I was still keeping a Navy of course, but I had been hemorrhaging funds during the conquest, and it wasn't as if tax revenue in the islands would provide much income, not for a while at least.
Anyhow, the process involved was a multi-stage one, and diplomatic to boot, to keep my own captains from leaving. The vice admiral sorts, though they had held no special title, we're all becoming governors of course. Until the general council was established at least. Then I could start looking more towards administration. Their jobs for the moment mostly settled on resolving disputes in the islands I couldn't personally see to and using part of the unclaimed lands on the islands to establish new military infrastructure. Expanding a network of forts and outposts designed to support my future endeavors.
The largest of these was right here on Storm-Sky, where I had decided to establish a training base around where I wanted my new capital to be. I had some thoughts towards eventually turning it into an officers academy, but at the moment, those could wait.
For now, it would help to have the manpower around when I finally started work on my capital there.
Of course, while all of that was nice, I did have a bigger concern and a more recent one.
Refugees, and copious numbers of them. While most of the Myrish had gone to Tyrosh, the population of the numerous towns and small cities of the disputed lands weren't willing to rely on my Uncle's prowess to save them, and had started turning up on my shores in significant numbers, especially in the southern islands, carried over by fishing boats and ferries that were willing to brave the often stormy waters since the trip was so short.
While I certainly wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth regarding this windfall in solving my population issues. There were still quite a few headaches.
For one thing, many just didn't seem to get the message regarding slavery, and I had to use the Marines liberally as military law enforcement. Posse Comitatus be damned, given that I hadn't written it into the Island's constitution, not yet at least.
Anyhow, lots of slave owners upset about having their slaves freed, a couple with broken noses who tried to get physical with armed soldiers.
Honestly, while it did require the use of force, it wasn't that big a problem.
No, the big problem was the question of citizenship. The refugees had not been on the islands at the Kingdom's founding, and thus, by the definitions I wrote, we're not citizens.
This was a real problem. Giving them citizenship now would be a public betrayal of existing citizens, and cheapen their voting rights while supporting a group of people they already didn't like very much.
I did already have an ideal solution in the form of the foreign legion I intended to create down the line, but at the moment I really wasn't big enough to need it, or, more importantly, feed it.
Still, I did ultimately come up with a solution, which led to my current situation, fabricating yet another institution from scratch.
The Bureau of Immigration had quickly grown into my largest and most significant department, simply because of how many requests it needed to process at once. I even ended up cannibalizing the department of land claims I set up into it for the time beings, since in the islands at least all of that was already done.
The solution for the refugees, though an obviously unsustainable one, was at least one that ought to placate both sides mostly, fair to the refugees and hard enough that the existing citizens feel like they earned it.
Essentially, it was indentured servitude, or contract labor if one wanted to be technical. I, as the majority landholder in all of the islands, through my immigration bureau selected plots of land and areas that I would like to see developed into farms, pastures, or other industries, and assigned new immigrants to work these plots on a fifteen-year contract, at the end of which they could keep the land. Furthermore, during these fifteen years, they were subject to three months a year of Corvée labor. Something I did not intend to subject my citizens too outside of the military draft.
At any rate, I thought it a fairly elegant plan and one that helped me deal with the first waves of refugees quite well. Starting work on a new system of roads in the process.
Shame that not every future immigrant was quite so happy to accept it.
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