King's Road
The King's Road is an established roadway that links the City of Beldoah with the City of Northridge via a series of connected tracks of varying completion. The Road stretches nearly 500 miles, and not quite half of that distance can be traveled on paved surfaces.
The King's Road is the primary route for north-south overland travel (the other being the Caldar River from Beldoah to Wessfall) for nearly all private, military or commerical traffic in the Kingdoms. It is one of the largest sources of income for both the High King and the King of Lesser Imesse. Each monarch collects a toll for use of the road through their realm, amounting to a tuppense at each tollhouse per person using the road, and a thurppense per cart or wagon, loaded or empty. Receipts are issued with each toll paid, and travellers are expected to produce these receipts to show royal officials that everyone using the road is paying to use the road. There are ten tollhouses on the southern section of the Road, and ten tollhouses on the northern.
A merchant with a wagon load of goods and three hired hands that travels from Beldoah to Lorancourt would pay a total of 20p per person and another 30p for the wagon, for a total of 9s 2p for the trip. This half of the King's Road is 276 miles long and would take the merchant and his wagon roughly 8 or 9 days to travel.
This same merchant, after crossing the Caldar River at the Bridge at Lorancourt (which is another toll entirely, and not part of this calculation) and continuing on the Road all the way to Northridge, would pass another ten tollhouses and pay another 20p per person and 30p for the wagon, totalling another 9s 2p in tolls. This northern half of the Road is 215 miles long and would take between 6 and 7 days to travel.
In Lesser Imesse, there is an established series of posts manned along the Road that provide a station where couriers and messengers can stop and mount fresh horses between stations. The stations are located between 10 and 15 miles apart on the Road, and can provide multiple mounts and some accomodations to the riders. This allows royal couriers and messengers to average 10 or more miles per hour travel, or about 75 to 100 miles per day. There are similar stations located in the north, but these are less likely to be fully manned and supplied at all hours of the day and night. Courier traffic in the north moves at about half the speed as in the south.
Purpose / Function
A safe, efficient means of overland travel for military, commercial and civilian traffic. Just over 200 miles of the entire Road (488 miles) is paved with at least a hard-packed gravel surface (sometimes even cobbles or granite pavers).
Alterations
While the King's Road is an important and busy means of tranporting goods and people across both Kingdoms, it is by no means uniformly governed or maintained.
Architecture
Section design varies greatly between geographic locations and topography, but the majority of the Road is nearly 20' wide with a distinct crown to the center of the road to allow surface water to shed off. Bridges along the road are stone and well maintained, and only a very few miles of the roughest terrain is bare earth. There are over 100 bridges of varying sizes along the Road, all built to replace fords that made water crossings during seasonal flood events very difficult.
Defenses
In the south, way stations and many towns and villages that dot the route have towers adjoining the Road. These towers are manned day and night by local (and sometimes royal) soldiers to provide security and enforce the King's tolls along the road.
History
Some sections of the King's Road are truly old. Parts of the Road from Beldoah to Ricken have been estimated to be more than 1,000 years old simply by the height of the banks that have grown up on either side of the road. These sections of highway are invariably found to be constructed (at least partially) of finely-finished granite blocks fit so tightly together that even a needle can't be inserted between them. Many historians have speculated that these granite surfaces are related to the nearby Teeth of the North structures and the more distant ruins of Teboba, but there are many unexplained discrepancies in the construction style and in the measurable age differences that make the truth of this speculation hard to determine.
