“Well, you have to do something. The abbey is normally safe, but having this much coin sitting in drawers is asking for someone to be tempted beyond his ability to resist. There was a robbery in Abersford last sixday, so it can happen here.”
“Then where can I put the coin?” Yozef groused. “There are no banks here.”
“Banks?”
“I don’t know the Caedelli word, but a place to put coin where it’ll be safe, which also lends money. A bank.”
Cadwulf rubbed a chin just showing the beginnings of a beard. “Bank? We don’t have a . . . bank.”
“Then where do people keep their coin, and how does someone borrow money?”
“They keep it anywhere they feel is safe. Most people don’t have much coin. What they have, they carry or keep where they live, hidden if there’s enough to worry about theft. They can also pay tradesmen for future work or purchases, and then the coin is the tradesman’s problem. As for borrowing money, you do it from relatives, friends, or tradesmen. Loans are private affairs arranged between individuals, whether they be related or unrelated to each other. Whatever the terms of the loan are by mutual agreement, including what, if any, interest will be added to the loan, and schedules of repayment. Such transactions are registered with the district for mutual protection, especially if the loan’s not between relatives or close friends.”
Cadwulf paused, giving Yozef a thoughtful look. “To be fair, I suppose I have to acknowledge your circumstance isn’t normal. The flow of coin to you has happened so suddenly. Still, something needs to be done.”
Thus was born the First Bank of Abersford, or B of A, as Yozef couldn’t resist referring to it. Cadwulf had jokingly suggested First Bank of Yozef. A structure was built into a rock face jutting from the ground just outside the village and in full view of both the village and the abbey. Coinage was stored in a vault carved out of the rock, with frontage and offices merging into the rock face. Coinage flow increased, as did the number of employees, starting with Cadwulf alone and rising to three assistants within a year.
This first primitive bank also changed local custom. A Keelan Clan registrar recorded all important records and transactions in the Abersford area. The man in this role, Willym Forten, owned a clothing shop, with registrar duties carried out in a side room. With the establishment of the bank, overlapping activities and the need to transfer all important bank transactions to the clan registration system led to the registrar spending half of each day at the bank, at a dedicated part of the main room. Local citizens, merchants, and craftsmen arranged loans and could deposit their funds in the bank once convinced it was secure.
The building itself was literally a fortress. It would have taken cannons of significant size to breach the outer walls, not to mention the vault sealed with locking mechanisms built by Abersford metalworkers. Records of all transactions were kept in ledgers, and a duplicate set of ledgers put into the abbey’s library storage area. Relevant records were transferred to clan journals and copies sent to the main registrar in the clan capitol of Caernford.
There were no dedicated guards at the bank, but Cadwulf’s assistants were men with varying handicaps from accidents or violent encounters with raiders, clan rivalries, or criminal activity, and all worked armed and were pleased to have employment to support their families. Moreover, the bank was visible from the office of the Abersford magistrate, Denes Vegga, a combination sheriff and local militia leader.
Cadwulf’s assumption of accounting duties for Yozef’s enterprises and his operating the Bank of Abersford initially perplexed his theophist and medicant parents. They had assumed, practically from the baby’s birth, that their precocious child would enter one of the three orders at the abbey. The only decision left for him was which one: theophist, medicant, or scholastic. In Cadwulf’s mind, he had long ago dismissed following his father’s path. Not that he didn’t believe in God, but the theophist life path wasn’t for him. As for the medicant option, while he recognized helping others was a noble calling, and he had enormous respect for his mother, his dealing daily with others’ body fluids, cutting off limbs, and telling families about loved-ones passing on wasn’t going to happen.
That left scholastics. Fortunately for Cadwulf, learning, books, and even lessons were not a chore, but something to look forward to. As an adolescent, he raced through all of the basic studies the abbey’s teachers could provide, including extra lessons and projects designed especially for him. Thus, at eighteen Anyar years old (sixteen Earth years), he possessed the broadest knowledge of anyone at the abbey, but no depth of knowledge in any one area, with one exception. He found numbers endlessly interesting. His parents either ignored or misunderstood this fascination with numbers, even the first evidence when a happy four-year-old Cadwulf told them of counting 627 butterflies that day. Sistian and Diera each had the same two reactions—pride that their four-year-old son could count to 627 and confusion over why anyone would bother counting butterflies.
By age thirteen, Cadwulf was led by his love of numbers to do most of the abbey’s accounting. For him, counting up columns of numbers was almost a meditation. The solution to Yozef’s problem of increasing in- and outflow of funds for workers and projects was a perfect fit for Cadwulf’s vocation need. Within a month, Cadwulf’s life without focus had changed forever. By then, he was bank manager, was the accountant for Yozef’s sundry enterprises, and was helping revolutionize Anyarian mathematics.
The coming of Yozef was a gift from God to Cadwulf. The mathematics on Anyar overlapped most of Earth’s classical geometry and elementary algebra and the beginnings of trigonometry and determinants. Cadwulf had absorbed all of the mathematics the abbey’s teachers understood and moved beyond them to texts on his own. To go further, he would have to move to another province to one of the two abbeys with mathematics scholastics. That was until Yozef realized mathematics was an obscure-enough field of study on Caedellium that he could risk transferring what he knew.
Although not grounded in theoretical mathematics, Yozef was able to give Cadwulf leads to establish or advance analytic geometry, linear algebra, the rudiments of probability, combinatorics, game theory, infinite series, and both differential and integral calculus. Cadwulf was in ecstasy. Whole new fields of mathematics opened up to him. Granted, while Yozef’s knowledge of those fields was limited to the equivalent of the first college course in each, they were either novel to Caedellium and Anyar or a logical coalescence of existing mathematics. What helped was that once again, Yozef found himself able to visualize entire pages of texts from courses he had taken. The explanations, the examples, and the proofs were more than enough to keep Cadwulf busy.
When the day came that Cadwulf asked Yozef to confirm a new extension he had developed of a combinatorics theorem, it convinced Yozef he would make a difference to Anyar.
While pretending to listen to Cadwulf’s explanation, Yozef mused, You know, while the ether helps people, it’s the mathematics that will have the biggest long-term impact. Cadwulf is already writing to other Scholastics around Caedellium. Within months, it’ll start to be all over the island. And even if the worst happens to the Caedelli from these Narthani, it’s likely the new mathematics knowledge will spread to the rest of Anyar. And I did this, no matter what else happens.