CHAPTER 229: PEACEFUL REST

Dominic went to the horse shelter, and put a bit of mana into the pump to start the shower. It was just cold water, but for the stable hands, who had been out in the heat all day, that was not a drawback.

"I thought that was for watering horses." Jasmine laughed as she saw Dominic walking out of the shelter with dripping hair.

"Horses, stable hands, pretty much anything that fits under the shower head.

The dogs are a big fan of it on hot days as well. But it’s best not to leave it running all the time so that you don’t deplete the well." Dominic agreed.

The farrier nodded, making her long braid flip over her shoulders. "Personally, I would have just used the servant’s entrance and the shower there."

Dominic shrugged. "I like this one. It doesn’t have hot water, but the fresh air is a nice change."

Lunch was a properly fancy meal today, now that they had time to pick fresh vegetables from the garden.

Well, fancy was a relative term. Lunch was typically a light meal, but Beth had made some sort of cucumber salad sandwiches with vegetable stew, cold meat cuts and cheese.

Once that was done, Dominic led a handful of the Royal Guard into the village to prepare for the cleanup.

"What do you think, boss? You make the crypt, we will use empty rings to pick up all the bones? We can have different people do the villagers and the soldiers, so they don’t get mixed up.

If you’d like, I’ll do the soldiers, they’ll do the villagers?" Colonel Wilkes suggested.

"I would reverse that. There are a lot more dead soldiers in the area in and around the village than there were villagers." Dominic informed him.

"Right. Forgot that this wasn’t a defenceless village." The leader of the Royal Guard Team replied.

Dominic just shrugged. Mostly, they were. Except around the Manor itself, the real carnage hadn’t started until he had arrived after the villagers were dead.

"Don’t forget to clear the woods near the village. Some of that used to be open ground, and there will be bodies all over." He added.

Then he headed for an open area on the edge of town, where the kids used to play in the grass when they didn’t want to go to the sports field.

That was a good spot for the memorial, so Dominic used [Fieldstone Wall] to create a stone floor, then three stone walls and a central dividing wall so that the two forces could rest in peace.

He would close in the front and build a roof once they had all the skeletons inside, and he knew that they weren’t going to run out of space.

Even if most of them were enemy soldiers, they still died here, and deserved to be properly buried.

It wasn’t long before the soldiers came to the site with full rings and ashen faces.

"There are so many bodies. They’re just everywhere. You can’t walk without having to check the ground for bones. I can’t guarantee that all these bones were people. Some might have been animals that the hunting dogs killed. But I only picked up skeletons with the remains of Dagos army equipment, and bones that were too close to them to tell them apart." The first guard to return explained.

"That works for me. Just pile them in the larger side as neatly as possible. If the official reports are right, there should be at least a thousand soldiers in the immediate area. And then a hundred and some villagers." Dominic explained.

Load after load of skeletons were laid within the crypt, carefully piled in layers along the walls. Four hours later, they were fairly sure that the houses were empty, and that there were no more skeletons laying on the surface out in the open.

They would come back and look a few more times before the first villagers arrived, but already the village felt a bit less creepy. Less like an open air mausoleum and more like a ghost town.

"We’re going to need clay. Can someone go grab some from the pit on the east side of town? I will lay it out and use clay to copper to make the doors. I won’t seal them yet, in case we find more occupants. But we should at least close it against the elements." Dominic explained once the work was done.

"Of course. You make a nice domed roof for that out of stone, and we will get you the clay for the doors."

Making the rest of the building was easy, and Dominic built the front wall to have a double door, right where the dividing wall was so that it would be impossible to batter the doors inward.

History had taught him that it didn’t matter what the building was intended to be. During an invasion, the locals would go for any secure fortification that they could find.

The men watered the clay before they brought a whole wheelbarrow full to the crypt. That let them dump and smooth it with ease, while Dominic grabbed a few handfuls to shape into the hinges set into the walls.

The pins would be moulded into the doors, which Dominic quickly drew a simple decorative design around the edge of. It wasn’t much, but it was better than a plain copper door.

The spell converted the doors to pure copper, and all six men immediately realized their mistake.

A ten centimetre thick copper door was heavy.

Not just a little bit heavy, either.

In the end, it took all six of them and some leverage to get each of the doors in place and hung. But they could say for certain that nobody was getting through those easily once they were closed and locked.

"Good work, gentlemen. Let’s go see what Miss Beth has whipped up for dinner. We’ve gotten more done on the first day than I thought that we would, and I would say that we’ve earned our keep." Dominic joked.

"Bringing the best cook was a good call." Colonel Wilkes agreed.