Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

With Egil’s arrival, bringing laughter and crude charm to the camp, also came something far more valuable to Alpheo—manpower.

The prince of Yarzat had finally gathered the means to breathe life into his vision.

No one, not even his most fervent followers, could deny the terrible strength of the capital city of Herculia. The city stood like a stone mastiff, ancient and unmoving, its twin rings of towering walls making any attacker think twice before going forward . Even Alpheo, for all his victories, held no illusions: he could not breach it by brute force. Not before reinforcements from the rest of the princedom arrived to squeeze his army between two grinding stones.

And so, he turned to history, his history.

Specifically, to Julius Caesar—the Roman general who, conquered a continent and wrote the report himself.

Caesar’s siege of Alesia had lived in his mind ever since his studies in military history. There, the Gallic chieftain Vercingetorix had holed up in a fortified city And in response, Caesar had surrounded the city with two walls—one facing inward, the other outward—cutting off not only the defenders, but also any hope of relief.

If Caesar’s account in the Commentarii de Bello Gallico was even half-true, he had constructed nearly forty kilometers of fortifications in three weeks—ramparts four meters tall, bristling with traps, towers, and trenches.

Of course, Caesar had an army of tens of thousands of legionaries, men who were not only killers, but also trained engineers and craftsmen. Alpheo had only his core of footmen in the white Army, who were trained to build and construct as the romans, but they were needed to patrol and defend, not to hammer nails or swing axes.

He could not spare them for this task.

And so, the burden fell upon the peasants. Thousands of them, rounded up by Egil’s relentless raids, men who just weeks earlier had been tending fields or hiding in cellars. Now, they became the bones and sinew of a new war machine.

From the very day Egil had returned, the peasants were put to work.

But Alpheo was not a man to leave anything to chance.

For months, he had prepared for this siege—not just in war councils and supply manifests, but in maps, routes, and resources. He had studied the surrounding terrain as if reading scripture. He knew where the soil was soft, where the streams flowed, and most importantly, where the trees stood.

Roughly a kilometer west of the camp, just across the buffer of controlled territory, lay the nearest forest—a thick green patch that had fallen fully under Yarzat’s control. No risk of ambushes. No risk of enemy scouts. It was a carpenter’s treasure chest, and Alpheo had already cracked it open long before the siege began.

Weeks earlier, he’d ordered a woodcutting camp to be constructed in secret, manned by trusted laborers and guarded by scouts. They had worked tirelessly under moonlight, felling every usable tree and preparing the timber for rapid transport. By the time Egil returned, there were no more axes ringing in the forest—only carts loaded with seasoned trunks ready to roll.

Thanks to that foresight, the process that would have taken five days—cutting, shaping, and hauling timber—was reduced to a matter of hours. All that was needed now was to move the prepped logs to the construction sites and set the peasants to work.

The first phase of construction began that very evening.

Ditches were dug by torchlight. Stakes were sharpened and pounded into the ground. Wooden palisades rose slowly but steadily like a second horizon. The outward wall, facing away from the city, was being laid out first—to prepare for any attempt from loyalist forces beyond the plains to break the siege.

The work was slow but steady.

The 1,900 peasants Egil had herded in like reluctant cattle were however truly a godsend.

Their arrival effectively doubled the available workforce—an immense boon to Alpheo’s ambitious siege plans. None of them were trained builders, of course, but labor was labor. Paired with skilled engineers, many of whom had been teached by Pontus who had proven himself admirably capable, the raw manpower would be enough to fill in the gaps. Dirt and sweat could do what finesse could not.

But every solution has its own price.

The prince soon found himself staring down a new and very real enemy: food consumption.

Shit, he muttered internally as he remade his counts, I planned this entire siege to the last grain. I limited the number of men I brought, chose the leanest complement possible, even accounted for spoilage... With that setup, I could have sustained the army for three months. Maybe a few days more.

Now, with Egil’s human windfall, that number had dropped significantly.

A third more mouths to feed... That cuts us to two months. Maybe less, if work delays us.

Fortunately, Egil hadn’t returned empty-handed. Among the farms he razed, he’d salvaged what little stores could be taken—sacks of grain, jars of dried legumes, even a few barrels of smoked fish. Most had gone up in flames, but Egil, for all his savagery, understood what to preserve and what to plunder.

Yet the true treasure was not the grain. It was the herds.

Milk-producing animals—goats and cows, mostly—herded from scorched fields to Alpheo’s camp like livestock refugees. It wasn’t the meat he cared about; killing them would be short-sighted.

Instead, these herds would serve as a renewable food source for as long as the siege lasted. As long as they had grass to graze on, they could keep providing milk, and meat.

It’s been ages since I’ve had milk for breakfast, Alpheo thought, a faint smile tugging at his lips. Add some grain, a bit of oats... and we could be feeding breakfast to thousands.

The absurdity of the idea—milk and cereal on a battlefield—almost made him chuckle out loud, reminding him of the time when he was a boy and would eat just that in the morning before going out to aid in his family’s farms, his first and loving one of his first life.

So, of course, the thought of sharing that meal with the thousands behind him brought a small smile to his face.

But absurd or not, it was real.

Perhaps when this war ends, I should encourage more villagers to take up herding, he mused, thoughts already drifting to post-war reforms. Cut all taxes on herding for a year, see if more farms adopt livestock as part of their practice. Less risk of famine , for as long as there is grass there is milk .

He thought back to how his creation of the White Army had inadvertently reshaped the economy around the livestock a bit .

With thousands of men needing uniforms, particularly woolen surcoats to layer over their mail and breastplates, villages across his territory had seen a surge in demand for wool. Many peasants, seeing the opportunity, had taken to sheep farming, creating an unexpected boom in wool production.

The demand hadn’t waned either. Surcoats wore down with time, battered by rain, mud, and the cruel kiss of spears. Even a perfect strike might not pierce steel, but it would certainly shred the cloth above it. Replacements had to be made. And in war, that meant steady work and steady coin for those back home.

As a matter of fact if there were 2,000 in need of them, the crown would buy 6,000.

After all, for the prince, killing was one thing, but killing with style was another.

Now, perhaps milk would follow wool.

Victory builds nations, he thought. But it is peace that lets them breathe.

He knew very well that a gain in war could only last so much, for if they were not properly taken care of the benefits they could bring would be limited. An example of that was for example, Cyrus the Great, who having learned from the mistakes of his foes, the Babylonians, made sure that whatever richness the capital would take from a province would not completely leave its native land, but instead be invested in things like infrastructure or the economy.

I would do well to properly think about what I am goi-

His focus was deep, as it usually was when he cared about matters that he deemed important, but of course it wasn’t impenetrable, and it cracked the moment a familiar voice, thin but firm, called from just beyond the canvas flap.

”Permission to enter, Your Grace?”

Alpheo paused . He knew that voice too well—measured, respectful, but always with a touch of strained patience riding beneath it. He set down his quill, leaned back, and exhaled through his nose.

”Enter, Pontus.”

The flap was drawn back with precise care, and in stepped the chief engineer,. He walked like a man allergic to dust, shoulders stiff, gait clipped, a draught of chill air clinging to his cloak as if it didn’t dare part from him without permission.

But it wasn’t the usual fussy demeanor that drew Alpheo’s eye. It was the man’s face.

Sour. Pinched. As tight and furrowed as poorly-laid mortar. The sort of expression that spoke louder than any report—bad news approached, wearing the face of a man who knew it wouldn’t be welcome.

Alpheo’s brow twitched faintly. Gods, I hate that look.