Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 974: Anew(2)

Over the last few years, Alpheo had waged a war inside his own borders. He had unleashed his bureaucrats to conduct a grueling, exhaustive census of every asset the Crown possessed across the sprawling, newly expanded Princedom.

Nothing escaped the ledger. Farms, herds, low-slung tanneries, sprawling vineries, and the fragrant groves of the oileries.

Everything was stripped of its anonymity and pinned to a page. Each administrative district had been forced to vomit up its secrets, sending bundles of data to the capital regarding ownerships and reports of the tax season, where clerks worked by candlelight to standardize it all in one.

Something that clearly did not aid in the prince’s widespread fame , which was not only so in the lords’s circles now, which would be his obsession with order.

Still, the results spoke for themselves.

Last year’s projections had been so precise they bordered on the occult; the actual revenue had differed from the estimate by barely four thousand silverii,a rounding error considering what they were working with.

What came out of the census too was staggering.

After a decade of conquest and a relentless campaign to settle refugees on royal fiefdoms, Alpheo’s direct reach now extended over nearly 600,000 souls. In a Princedom of roughly two million, nearly thirty percent of the entire state now lived, breathed, and labored under the direct shadow of the Crown.

With that one had to review that Alpheo had streamlined the taxation of his subjects to a fault.

The number of taxies levied on the people was notably far less in numbers than those of the average lords. There was in fact, no head tax, no toll for cities nor bridges.

In cities, there were the home tax and the shop tax, which many times were often bundled in one, considering that most people were not rich enough to own both, but usually worked where they slept.

Then there were the "banalities," the taxes on the great gristmills. Most lords were petty; they stationed a guard at the mill door to snatch a handful of coin every time a peasant walked in.

Alpheo, however, could not be bothered in such inefficient and counterproductive ways.

He demanded instead an annual tribute from the surrounding villages for the use of the mills. By shifting the burden to a yearly lump sum of pure coin, he made the tax invisible in the daily lives of the peasants. They processed their grain in peace, and only paid a small sum, considering the tax was divided among the whole village.

Then, of course, there was the most important tax of all, that of the soil.

While distant farms still paid in sacks of grain, a logistical nightmare of rot and rats, the farms surrounding the capital and the great city of Aracina were evolving.

By announcing public projects and doing everything he could to move coins around, he had managed to incentivize the market of the royal cities and the surrounding villages into making use of actual coins.

A farmer near the capital now found it easier to sell his harvest in the city’s bustling squares, and simply hand the tax collector a few coins rather than a dozen sacks of wheat, whose relative value was higher than that of the coins they would have to pay.

Recent surveys showed that 80% of the capital’s surrounding villages now paid in cold, hard currency. In Aracina, it was 65%. Further down the capital of the crown was in, the numbers slowly went down. Which was obvious considering that the majority of the prince’s attention was in the central area of the crownlands.

The bundle of all of this, was that the crown had, in fact obtained the means to calculate how much taxes they were to expect each year, which made the creation of such a financing system he was trying to implement actually possible.

Of course it could not be perfect, considering there was no way to standardize how much they gained in trade, and all they could do was calculate on average how much they would make and then base the remaining parts of the budget on said arithmetical estimations.

Anyway the result was good, and Alpheo could work with it.This certainly made the headaches the prince usually suffered much less in number, which really was something one would not expect to conclude looking at the current situation.

"We have double your soldiers!" Jarza roared, his voice hitting the stone walls like a siege hammer. "Is it normal to demand double the budget? How the fuck are you going to tell me, with a straight face, to divide this equally? Double the numbers, double the expenditures, double the budget! Don’t you know basic math? What the fuck do you read all the time?Is it erotica?’’

Jarza’s entire frame that had sent seasoned warlords into cardiac arrest, leaned so far over the oak table that his shadow completely swallowed his opponent.

His attempt at intimidation, however, failed miserably against the commander of the Third. Asag didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink. He merely sat there, looking up at the towering Jarza with the bored detachment of a man observing a particularly noisy insect flying near his ears.

"I mostly learn how to make a decent argument,if you wish to be told." Asag replied, his voice a cool, razor-sharp contrast to Jarza’s heat. "Which, in light of this current display, seems to be working perfectly. I will make sure to drop some books by your quarters next time I pass. Perhaps you could make use of them to substantiate your claims with logic, rather than volume.

You should leave the pathos of raw emotion to your old ward; it suits him better."

Asag realised what he had said then shifted his gaze to Edric, the commander of the Fourth, who was currently lounging in his seat with a vacant expression, looking as though he were contemplating the lifespan of the candle near him rather than the defense of the realm. "No offense meant, Edric."

"Uh? What?" Edric blinked, his head snapping back as he struggled to rejoin the waking world. He looked around the room, genuinely baffled by the vibrating tension in the air. "Sorry. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t we already decide on how much we got from the budget?What’s all this talk about then?’’

Jarza let out a sound that was half-growl, half-sob. He realized he didn’t have the spiritual fortitude to explain the concept of proportionality to a man who had clearly checked out of the conversation twenty minutes ago. With a huff of pure exasperation, he slumped back and gestured toward Rykio, leaving the thankless task of explaining the dispute to the silent man in the corner, while he turned his focus back onto Asag.

"Twice the numbers, twice the expenditure. What logic is against that?" Jarza demanded, thrusting two thick fingers into the air.

Asag sighed. "Friend, do not force me to say things that we will both find unsavory, you now, and me in the morning. I shall not call you a liar, for I know you are not, but you most certainly have no qualms about hiding certain... inconvenient facets of your truth."

"And what facets would those be? Mh?" Jarza loomed, his shadow stretching across the table . His tone and words doing enough to make a man lose the patience he was trying hard to keep.

"That you are a charlatan!" Asag snapped, his cool veneer finally cracking. "What expenditures are you actually debating? The salaries are already accounted for! The grain like the first! The camp followers are on the ledger! Liar, liar, pants on bloodyfucking fire!" He shouted, his love of logic had already seeped away.

"If we are to talk of actual maintenance," Asag hissed, leaning in, "each of my men is a masterpiece of frugality.We have double the steel, twice the repairs. Do you have any idea how much oil we consume just to keep our legion’s plate from turning into a pile of rust?The vinegar and wine to fight off the decay of our plates? We got not shield to change at every battle, you know how fucking dented our armor is at the end of the day?I don’t see any of you complaining about the chirp on their shields. Guess why?Cause they are fucking cheap!

It is I who should be demanding a larger slice of the pie! But I was prepared to be civil because I believed the budget would be enough to swallow such costs!So much for that now!’’

At the far end of the table, a sudden, violent thump startled everyone in the room and stopped the two before they could escalate further, a confrontation that probably all knew how it would end.

Still they all turned their head around to look at the Commander of the Fourth who had slammed his, into his palm with the wide-eyed epiphany of a man who had finally figured out what gave him the problem. .

"Oh! I see it now!’’ he stated as he turned to Rykio, who could see that everyone’s eyes were on them ’’They’re trying to divide the budget of the budget. How queer! Why don’t we just do the sensible thing? A clean cut down the middle, like a nice loaf of bread. Everyone takes a slice, we all go home, and I can finally see if Mila has had her puppies yet, I hope they are a mix of Mila and Shar colours. We’ve been here for the bloody half of the midday already!"