Herald of Steel

With summer ending and autumn fast approaching, Alexander soon got busy tidying up his affairs in Zanzan.

This was because he was scheduled to attend this year's annual pilgrimage, Jtaama at the capital Adhan at the invitation of Ptolomy.

Given his great triumph over Tibias, it was a basic courtesy to meet the king and 'obtain his blessings'.

As a matter of fact, Alexander was expected to have done this much sooner.

And this time, Alexander too wanted to meet with the king.

Because there were many things he needed to discuss in court too.

There was the matter of another Matbar (Marquiss) Kyuam coming to Adhania's sworn enemy Tibias's aid during Alexander's campaign, on which he wanted to know how to proceed.

He also wished to address the concern that one of Sybarsis's ducal families- the Kaiser family was involved in that matter.

Then there was that little trick Manuk played, and lastly, let's not forget the event of discussing the twins' marriage with Pasha Farzah.

All this did not even include discussing future strategies regarding Amenheraft and how to neutralize that threat.

But before Alexander could leave on his merry way to iron out these important objectives, he still needed to get all the various things here in Zanzan in order.

Two years of absence had left him with an enormous backlog of paperwork to catch up on.

So for the proceeding five months, Alexander worked hard to set all the critical things in order, to that Cambyses could once again smoothly take over the day to day.

These things mostly included handling more decision making power to her, such as letting her change tax rates, making trade deals with foreign dignitaries in his absence, and even being able to call a levy if the need be.

And speaking of levies, Alexander also spent time on expanding the army, turning it from a standing force of 10,000 to 20,000, literally doubling it.

The entire process was not completed yet but was scheduled to be by the end of next year.

And in that same category, Alexander also asked his smithies and armor shops to start ditching the standard issue bronze cuirasses and begin to make the famous Roman lorica segmentata- which was a breastplate made from thin sheets of steel formed in an overlapping pattern.

Alexander at first wanted to form a solid breastplate out of one single piece of iron but found that the blacksmiths were struggling, with the iron sheet constantly cracking when they were trying to shape it.

Thus this compromise.

Along with overseeing the army, Alexander also managed to place the 5,000 hired mercenaries disguised as workers in his western workshop to be his trump card, putting the command in Cambyses's hand, with Bartholomew to lead them to battle if need be.

And then Alexander then spent a lot of time setting up the way Tibias would be governed from Zanzan.

This included linking the proper administrative departments with each other, such as Tibias's tax department with Zanzan's and declaring who reported to whom, detailing which department of the government was subordinate to whom and vice versa, dictating which types of seals to use and where, and inventing new seals if necessary, bridging the gap with the judicial systems of the two places, introducing a whole host of policies to help Tibias recover from its war torn states and make it more prosperous, to name only a few of the thousand other tedious things.

And although most of them did not need Alexander's oversight at every corner, many of them still needed his approval.

Which to be frank made Alexander quite irritated, as he felt like he was a glorified rubber pusher, putting his seal on whatever landed at his desk.

He understood that there was indeed a reason why most of the work in a modern government was done by bureaucrats and ministers- because a lot of it was tedious and repetitive.

And for a moment Alexander even felt a bit frustrated by what he was trying to do.

Because usually, things were not this byzantine when conquering new lands.

Typically those lands would mostly be left to their own devices, with the conquering side perhaps at most sending a small delegate to replace the top honcos, so that they could safeguard their interests and make sure the people of that land knew who their new masters were.

But Alexander was different.

He wanted to eventually abolish the feudal system of Adhania in favor of a much more centralized system, just like the one Tibias had.

And to accomplish this, he needed to link the two 'provinces' and slowly convert.

Thus all the mundane and head scratching pencil pushing.

Along with these administrative works, Alexander also took stock of the expenses of his land that had raked up for that year, and the numbers at first seemed quite shocking to him.

Because even when not considering the expenses of maintaining the military, just the cost of running the relatively small amount of land owned by Alexander came to a staggering 150 million ropals!

This was almost equal to a Pasha half a year's revenue.

All spent on one, single city!

"Has Cam been dumping gold coins into the sea?" Alexander loudly cried out, almost having a heart attack.

But as Alexander then calmed down, he could see where the expenses went- almost all to paying out the salaries for the workers.

Almost 50,000 of them!

Which was basically the entire workforce of the 150,000 people in the city!

Among these listed 50,000 were the workers in all the workshops, the various farmers who worked for a wage in the field, the laborers at all the various industries like the foundry, cement, brick, and coal briquettes making plants, the miners at the coal, iron, and limestone mines, as well as the quarries, the construction people employed in the various infrastructure projects, the city guards, the priests and priestesses at the temples, the civil workers such as the street sweepers and sanitary workers, subsidy for Camius and Laibak's intelligence network and lastly the many administrators and clerks that kept the entire city ticking.

Alexander employed so many of the available workforce here that it could basically be said that the entire city of Zanzan was his personal property, not just theoretically, but in full fledged reality.

There were perhaps at best 10,000 to 15,000 men who were not employed by Alexander, mostly small businessmen and their workers, and even then they were undoubtedly indirectly connected to him as they mostly sold his product in retail stores or to people working to make those products.

And so when you looked at it like that, as the biggest breadwinner for Zanzan, it was only natural for Alexander to cough up this much.

And besides, this 150 million was hardly an expense when you considered using them, the city made sales equivalent to 10 times that amount- 1.5 billion!

But still, as Alexander looked at the numbers, he did find the raw value unnaturally high.

And the search for the cause of this led him to discover that although many of the 50,000 workers were actually slaves, Cambyses had still chosen to pay a lot of them.

Now, this was not the lady of the house trying to pocket the money for herself, nor was it an accounting mistake.

Alexander had indeed sanctioned this.

Aside from those who were made into slaves due to criminal sentences, Alexander made sure to pay those captured in battle or bought from the market a stipend after deducting their food and living costs, promising to pay the lump sum after their emancipation a few years later.

However, although this generosity had a great effect on worker's productivity, it also exposed Alexander to large amounts of spending.

And as he glanced at that number, he began to see another reason why slavery existed at this time.

Because paying a fair wage to everyone for their work would either bankrupt the economy or leave so little that you could barely do anything with it.

Such as raising and maintaining a good army to protect yourself.

It was very likely those egalitarian societies that chose to give everyone a fair wage were attacked and conquered by those societies willing to use slave labor, as that let them have bigger and better trained and armored armies.

The total civil expenditure of running Alexander's Zanzan province for the previous year came to around 200 million ropals, while the amount of tax revenue generated during that time was barely half of that- at precisely 95 million ropals.

And even out of that, a staggering 80%, i.e.- 75 million came from the goods Alexander sold, on which he even paid a premium 5% tax!

For context, sales tax capped at 4% in Adhanian law.

And even with that compromise, Alexander had to foot another 100 million ropals.

150 million if you counted the cost of the military.

This was clearly not fair.

And Alexander very much wished to have a talk with the nobles on tax reforms.

But before he could that, a ship from Lady Miranda had arrived, one bearing news grave enough to take him to take to that distant island of Galiosos.