Chapter 1436: Behind close doors(3)

He would not be parting with Pardunum. That much was carved in stone.

The fortress was no simple collection of ramparts and crenellations; it was the iron lock upon a heavy gate, guaranteeing that his flank remained cold, quiet, and securely shut. Speeches of brotherhood and eternal goodwill were sweet to the ear, but the annals of the world were littered with "eternal" treaties and how many held true when grandsons inherited the vaults?

Alpheo could glady give it away , and then his grandson would curse him for that foolishness when it is he that has to face the Kakunian armies on the field.

Yet Alpheo wanted the Kakunian’s friendship just as fiercely. The men of Kakunia were hard, stubborn, and wrought of passionate iron. With Merelao firmly seated on the throne, Yarzat would have a ferocious hound that could lick its own wounds and hold its own line, which was well far from Yarzat’s.

Which meant Alpheo had to sweeten the broth to keep him happy, and he needed an offering tempting enough to outshine the strategic fortress, yet far less dangerous than handing over the keys to his own throat.

Fortunately, he had just the lure.

For what was the think Merelao truly wanted?

"The legions," the King said, breaking the silence with quiet finality.

A long, dead heartbeat dragged by before Merelao could master his tongue. To strike the silver-tongued princeling utterly dumb was a small, petty victory, but Alpheo relished every drop of it.

"The... legions?What about?" Merelao blinked, faltering.

"Aye. The legions. Rather difficult to overlook, aren’t they?" Alpheo allowed a thin, wolfish smile to touch his lips. "Same discipline, same lacquered iron, same scarlet standards. Half the line veterans carry three notches on their scabbards and scars across their ribs. It is because of them that I rule as I do.

When my vassals drag their feet on tax day, I do not plead, nor do I wait two moons to muster a feudal levy. I need only a fortnight to march a cohort to their gate and drag them into the yard. They keep my roads clear of bandits in high summer and dead winter alike. When I rode into Yarzat, it was a sodden, provincial cesspit. I found a city of mud and reeds, and with the legions, I rebuilt it in marble and iron. The legions are to thanks in that order."

Alpheo leaned forward, his dark eyes locking onto the prince.

"I will give that power to you. I will help you build your own legions."

The hunger flared in Merelao’s golden eyes so violently it could have been spotted across an open plain. The trap had sprung.

The great orator had been reduced to a single, breathless rasp:

"How?"

Alpheo laid the proposal out.

"You are familiar with my pact with the Kanzakoune of Romelia. Every moon, my caravans cross into their markets laden with Yarzat’s finest manufactures. They turn a profit by giving it to the Romelians, who themselves be gladly be hawking my goods across the Eternal Empire.

I take a lesser margin than I might on the open docks, aye, but I purchased an unbroken northern border without shedding a drop of blood. Whatever I lose in coin , I make do in other ways.

The gods gave Yarzat rich, black loam, but flattened every hill; without natural bastions, I would have bled tens of thousands of silver denarii every winter just garrisoning wooden outposts against their raiders if war was to be. Instead, I filled their bankrupt treasury with trade, and in return, their borders remained quiet."

Merelao saw the blade gleaming beneath the silk before Alpheo even raised the hilt.

"You would offer the same to me."

"I would," Alpheo said.

Merelao tried valiantly to summon his haughty mask, though his fingers betrayed him as they tightened around his silver cup.For what rain could hope to quell a forest fire? "I ask you for a stone fortress to guard my back, and you toss me a sack of coin?"

"Do not insult my intelligence by playing the pauper, Merelao. What is that you hunger for more? An army loyal only unto you or a pile of masonry." Alpheo held his gaze without flinching. "Was it not you who swore half an hour ago that with my cohorts at your back, you would clasp fair the great deceiver’s with a grin? Where’s that grin now in your face?"

The Kakunian remained silent, his jaw twitching.

"I offer you the exact monopoly I granted Romelia," the King drove on, his voice striking like an anvil. "Soap, parchment, fine-pressed cider, everything my artisans forge will pass exclusively through your hands. I will bar my own merchants from peddling past your border posts, and I will shut the palace gates in the face of any Kakunian lord foolish enough to ride south seeking his own private charter. You will control the flow. You will amass a fortune so vast your cousins will choke on their own envy."

Alpheo tapped the armrest with a knuckle

"And with that mountain of silver, you will not hire fickle sellswords or cajole rebellious lords for your cause. You will forge a standing army. Men armed from your own armories, fed from your own granaries, paid from your own purse. No court factions. No feudal squabbling. No begging a dozen petty lords for a handful of farmhands when war arrives.

You will have legions that know only one god and one master: Merelao. They will march where you point, break who you command, and die where you stand.They will take your banners for themselves, until when people think of a Bull , they think not of your stories but of your soldier."

Alpheo leaned back, spreading his hands wide.

"Now tell me, friend... would you rather hold an empty tower in the rocks, or command the iron that tears them down?"

Merelao stared into the dark depths of his chalice, the silence in the chamber stretching until the crackle of the cooling tallow candle sounded like snapped kindling.

The vanity, the haughty mask, the practiced royal sneer, all of it peeled away, laid bare by the raw, naked temptation of an authority he longed for.

To possess an army that did not whisper in corners, that did not owe its allegiance to scheming uncles or grasping lords, but looked only to his banner and his gold... It was a poisonously sweet dream for a man whose entire life had been spent navigating the fickle treachery of feudal lances.

Alpheo watched the Kakunian’s throat bob as he swallowed, masking his own quiet amusement behind a stone face.

The Fox was not remotely troubled by the prospect of putting iron into the Mad Bull’s hands. In truth, the danger Merelao could pose to Yarzat with a standing force, or rather, a single solitary legion, for Alpheo’s internal ledger knew the trade margins would scarcely support a man more than some hundreds footmen, was utterly negligible.

Yarzat fielded veteran cohorts forged in blood, anchored by a properly built supply line and backed by a likewise disciplined military commanders. But more importantly, Alpheo held the purse strings. A standing army was a beast with an insatiable belly: it required hard silver every single moon, rain or shine, war or peace.

By tying the prince’s treasury entirely to the trade concessions of Yarzat’s goods, Alpheo was not creating a rival; he was slipping a gilded collar around the wolf’s or better yet the bull’s neck.

The moment the Kakunian’s ambition strayed an inch too close to the wrong border, poof!

The King would simply close the mountain roads . He would deny the merchant wagons, seal the border posts. He would not even need to raise an army.

A year or two without trade , and Kakunia’s proud new legions would find their pay chests empty, mutinying in their barracks while their prince drowned in a sea of catastrophic debt. He was strengtening Kakunia against his enemy, but making it weaker against itself. Of course he would be incurring in losses, but who cared about it? Who in the long-term would be the one truly winning? If he truly liked to see coins stacked in his treasury he would just have to disband all the legions, after all were those not his biggest expenditure?

Yet even as Alpheo watched the Mad Bull salivate over the feast laid before him, the King knew the pot still lacked its richest dollop of butter.

Merelao had not yet formally spoken his assent, but his mind had already galloped leagues ahead. Alpheo could see the gears grinding behind those amber eyes, the Kakunian was already sketching the dye of his banners, debating whether his line-cohorts should march beneath crimson plumes or black, tallying the weight of their iron cuirasses.

Alpheo leaned back and let him wallow in the daydream. There was no better time to gut a fish than when it was choking happily on the lure.

When he judged the prince thoroughly drowned in his own imperial ambitions, Alpheo delivered the killing stroke.

"There is one final matter to our covenant," the King murmured, tapping the rim of his cup. "One last boon I am prepared to slip into your ledger for said alliance to extend farther than till your uncle breath his last."

Merelao’s golden brow arched, a slow, teasing smirk pulling at his lips. "Just when I began to believe there lived no creature more charitable than the Fox of Yarzat. What is it, then? Have you decided to toss in that lovely pile of rocks at Pardunum after all? If you do I may yet threaten you with a kiss."

Don’t be a fool. I may be generous, but I haven’t lost my bloody wits, Alpheo thought. Outwardly, he merely offered a cool, dry smile.

"Hardly. It is another manufacture I intend to bind exclusively to your trade charters. One that scarcely five living souls in this realm even know exists."

"Am I to consider it a rare honor to be whispered the secret?"

"You will care very little about the honor once you count the earnings," Alpheo said, his voice flat, steady, and utterly stripped of boast. "I have perfected a compound. A treated mixture. Work it into the plowed furrows before the spring planting, and it drives the harvest yield up thirty percent in the first summer alone. By the third turn of the season, the gain reaches seventy in some lands."

He paused, letting the idea settle in the overly-satured mind already.

"I have tested it upon the Crown’s private estates. It works"

And to that, the silver-tongued orator of Kakunia had not a single word to offer.

He just sat utterly frozen in his crimson silk, staring at the King of Yarzat as though beholding a man who had figured out how to make gold from stone. Or better yet gold form dirt and soon shit.

Mayhaps truly did the king shit silver.