Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Basil would never have thought he would see a sovereign look with so much favor at a pile of stable filth. And yet, here was his father, practically leering at the goat feces he held in his hand.

For a long moment, the heavy silence of the barn held. Basil waited, fully expecting his father to break it and explain the grand praises he had just heaped upon the substance. When it became abundantly clear that the King needed a small shove to get his tongue moving, Basil gave it.

”Are you going to honor your son with an explanation, Father?”

His father didn’t move to answer, his eyes still locked on his handful of dirt as if he hadn’t heard a single word. Basil shifted his feet, the stench prickling the back of his throat.

”Please?” the prince added, softening his tone.

The King finally nodded, the corners of his mouth twitching. ”That’s better. I don’t remember raising a rude boy for a son.”

The ecstatic smile he had been displaying to the goat feces was now turned fully onto his heir. Basil braced himself for a grand revelatory explanation about secret warfare, but the King was apparently not in the mood to make things easy.

”Tell me, Basil,” the King asked, stepping closer. ”What is the true basis of any state?”

Basil blinked, slightly annoyed. ”Isn’t it a bit rude to answer a direct question with another question?”

”Don’t try to get cute with me, boy. You don’t have the equipment to win a wit-matching against your old man,” Alpheo said. His tone was casual, yet there was an hint of reproach in it as if he misliked the boy making jest of the moment.

Basil was reminded immediately as his old man towered over him , that back when Yarzat was basically nothing more than fractured tribes of naked men running around in the mud, his father was the man who had dragged them together and gifted them fire.

Basil took a slow breath, his eyes glancing over the endless rows of wax-sealed boxes. I just wanted to know what kind of weapon we were looking at, he thought bitterly. He searched his mind for the grandest philosophical concept his tutors had hammered into him.

”Laws,” Basil chose firmly, squaring his shoulders. ”Laws are the basis of every state. Without law, there is no order. Without order, there are no limits. Without law, there is no peace, and therefore, no state can exist, for that is born of abstract conceptions between congregations of men..”

He thought the answer was a fitting one for a prince.

”Wrong,” his father replied instantly, tossing the chunk of dung back into the crate with the shifting sound akin to sand.

”Food is the basis of every state, you foolish boy. Without food, there is no guard patrolling the street to enforce your precious laws. Without food, there is no farmer toiling in the dirt to pay your taxes. Without food, there is absolutely nothing but graves. Take two populations, one without law, and one without bread. Tell me, which of the two is the one that falls into the dirt first?Every society is nine meals away from collapse remember that, we used it as a weapon against the Herculeians, if you recall.

There was no foot to go aroun, people starved , and people died.”

’’And those who did not, took up weapons against their better’’

The king nodded ’’In every man there is a beast, you just got to find the key to let the cage door open.’’

Basil supposed the logic was unassailable, yet his mind still reeled. How did an empire-defining truth fit with a warehouse full of stable sweepings?

”I understand that, Father,” Basil said, gesturing to the rows of pine crates. ”But how does that truth connect to... all of this?”

His father’s smile widened, bright and sharp like a sunlit river. ”This,” he said, holding up his dark, stained palm, ”is to be our greatest weapon. You must have read the accounts of the agricultural reforms I passed down through the ministries these last three years. Didn’t you?”

”I did,” Basil said, recalling all that his father did , ranging from opening up farmland, settling other cultures in their land , spreading animal husbandry and giving iron-tools everywhere that he could. ”The yields were steady.”

”Well, those numbers were just poultry,”

”Poultry?” Basil’s jaw dropped slightly. ”Father, the food production in the southern valleys increased by at least half!”

”Give a proper handful of this specific mixture to a farm, my dear boy, and you will see our harvest yields increase from thirty to fifty percent in the very first year alone,” Alpheo whispered, his voice vibrating with an intense, quiet power. ”And then, it will climb to a firm seventy-five percent after the first few seasons of proper rotation.We made experiments about it already, and it works.”

Basil looked around the damp stable, utterly stupefied. The nausea in his stomach vanished, replaced by a sudden, dizzying realization. Let alone a pile of goat shit,this building was a literal gold mine.

If a kingdom could grow twice the wheat of its neighbors on the same amount of dirt, it didn’t need to fight wars to conquer land; it would simply out-eat, out-breed, and out-live them.Not to speak about the size of army they would be able to field in a war.

The King saw the sheer shock dawning across his son’s face, and he seemed thoroughly pleased by the display. His eyes narrowed into small, dark slits, glinting with the ruthless satisfaction of a fox that had just secured the entire henhouse.

”The Voghondai nomads have always called our realm the Golden Land, Yarzat, I mean,” his father murmured, his voice ecstatic, almost drunk with the grand joy of his vision. ”We are finally going to make a truth out of that old name. Our valleys shall be swarming with food. Food to sustain our armies . Food to triple the number of warhorses grazing in our stables. Food to settle more and more of the frontier tribes permanently into our territory until they forget their old languages.

I will conquer the South with this pile of shit.”

It was certainly an ambitious plan, but Basil could hardly fault him for that.

Though what his father said next caused the prince to furrow his brow in deep, sudden confusion.

”That is, of course, if we were to distribute it to every single inch of our territory,” the King sighed, a rare, heavy sound that made it seem as though the very thought pained his marrow.

”You speak as if you have no intention of doing so,” Basil noted, watching his father carefully.

The King nodded.

”May I ask why?”

”Well, it falls on a good deal of complicated reasons, boy,” Alpheo said, turning back to the open crate. ”It’s called fertilizer, by the way, it is demeaning to call it pile of shit.

You know, the most infuriating thing about it is that it is remarkably easy to make, costing basically a single copper coin. Hell, even a thick-headed farm child could brew it with what he finds rotting in his own village commons.” He let out a sharp huff of air. ”What do you think would happen if every peasant from here to the coast got a hold of a serving?”

Basil opened his mouth to answer, well, we would have swarms of food and happy subjects, but he stopped himself. He looked at the vast rows of crates, tracing the logic of a kingdom’s ledgers. The romantic notion of a utopia faded.

”The price of grain would plummet,” Basil realized aloud.

The King nodded, his dark eyes glinting with quiet contentment at his son’s swift thinking. ”Exactly. The high lords and nobles would see the majority of their incomes collapse overnight. Unless, of course, we forced them to buy the mixture from us at a steep premium to control the supply. But a secret like that wouldn’t stay penned within our borders for long. It would inevitably bleed into the neighboring realms. The Romelians and the Kakunians would demand their own cut of the pie. And what happens a decade down the line when every nation under the sun is using the mixture? Do you possess any earthly concept of the sheer, maddening volume of production required to meet that kind of global demand?”

Basil understood perfectly. If Yarzat tried to supply the entire continent, the scale of the operation would become so monstrously large that the secret would be impossible to guard. The moment the monopoly shattered, the strategic advantage would evaporate into the wind.

”What is your plan then, Father?” Basil asked, stepping closer to the crate, the smell long forgotten under the foot of politics

”We maintain a strictly fixed amount, with barely a handful to spare for outsiders,” the King revealed, a ruthless edge creeping into his tone. ”I intend to draft private, heavily guarded contracts with the royal houses of Romelia and Kakunia. We will sell the mixture exclusively to the sovereign princes. How they choose to divide it among their own squabbling lords or whether they choose to hoard the entire supply in the crown vaults to starve out their rivals, will be entirely their own business.I’ll have no hand on that.”

The revelation left Basil standing in silence, his mind racing through the political ripple effects. It was a terrifyingly brilliant stroke of statecraft. By controlling the fertilizer, Yarzat wouldn’t just be exporting a premium product, they would get a lot of political leverage outside their border and coin with it besides.

It would magnificently strengthen the central power of their royal allies against their troublesome nobles, while simultaneously rendering those very same foreign crowns entirely dependent on the grace of Yarzat for their increased harvest.

One wrong move from their part, and they would be cut off.Earning not only the ire of their nobles who would suffer the loss with their liege, but also their own and personal reduced income.

Yes... Basil thought, looking at his father with a newfound sense of awe. He could see it working. Habadia had tried to enforce its rule over sword and fire. Yarzat could insted do it by plow and grain.

Now, wasn’t that a bargain?