Outside, dusk kept a bruised vigil over the village. I heard the forge hammer pause, the farrier swear, and a child laugh at something small and temporary. Every sound reminded me that figures were not abstractions—they breathed and bled beyond my columns. I sharpened my quill anyway.
Six villages rallied—Uldorf the largest, its church roof still scorched from last month’s lightning. Two hundred thirty?one souls willing to follow orders, if not yet willing to die for them. sixty riders—Grave’s veterans plus farmhands who thought a musket made them cavalry. Mikel insists we can scrape another thirty once word spreads that bread is daily and pay is weekly. I believe him; hunger recruits better than patriotism.
From the doorway came a knock. Slow, deliberate. Mikel’s silhouette filled the gap, rain shining on his shoulders.
“Another family from Kirschfeld,” he said. “Three mouths, one musket, no powder.”
I scribbled: +3 (civ) | +1 musket (empty). “Any horses?”
“Only memories.” He managed a thin smile before withdrawing. His boots left wet crescents on the plank.
Grain: 501 bushels sound, 128 mould?specked. Olives: 298 casks, half leaking brine. Salt pork: enough to salt our arteries. Cheese: wheels dwindling from the nightly raids of bleary sentries. Fresh meat: fifty goats and whatever the Blemmyes can hew from the hillside.
I paused, stretching cramped fingers. Through the window the forge flared, throwing Grave’s shadow—broad?shouldered, one arm in sling—across the yard. He barked at a blacksmith about barrel?bands. Sparks died on wet ground.
Horses: 142 sound, 60 swayback, 21 hobbling wrecks, only fit for slaughter. Powder: 30 kegs of hunting charge—fine for fowl, anemic for war. Shot and scrap: plentiful; every cottage has nails. Crossbows: 204 confirmed, but this land has many hunters. Plus bolts pilfered from thatched rafters. Better than sticks, worse than wheel?locks.
The cottage creaked; Sul ducked inside, giant shoulders brushing lintel.
“Master Allemand,” he rumbled, placing a burlap sack on the bench. Inside—ironwood shafts, freshly fletched. He had spent daylight crafting instead of drilling. A Blemmye’s idea of a gift.
“Beautiful,” I murmured.
He touched the doorframe, hesitant. “More tomorrow.” Then he was gone.
The candle guttered. Wind slid through the warped frame and carried distant hymn notes. I sharpened the quill and turned to the blankest part of the ledger—Unknowns.
For two nights the talk has circled back to the natives. I have never seen one. Not once. Stories contradict themselves faster than I can write them:
“Small as children, you can spin them by the ankles.”
“Tall enough to step over hedgerows, legs jointed wrong.”
“Feathered jaws, horns of polished bone.”
“Eyes like lantern glass, can see a mile.”
“Half deaf, half blind, but they feel heartbeats through soil.”
They were once traders—so people claim—herding the highland sheep, accepting goatskins and iron scraps in fair exchange, laughing in a language that rolled like river stones. That was before the storms grew bold. Some drunk in Uldorf swore he saw a band vanish upslope the very hour the sky first purpled. Others insist they left seasons ago, into caves that burrow past daylight and sense. A few villagers hint they turned, same as the touched, but none dares finish the sentence.
The Blemmyes say nothing certain—only that the natives are “of the earth” and “remember older pacts.” Helpful as smoke in a ledger. Yet if sulfur vents lie in their hills, and brimstone is the throat of our powder, then a pact—old or new—will decide whether we hold this bastion or gnaw shoes by mid?winter.
I wrote a single stark line:
If we fail to find the natives, we must mine sulfur ourselves—or learn to fight with bows and stones.
Grave will not like that arithmetic.
Rumours (Qualitative, Uncosted)
- Lightning on the ground —shepherd from Altenruh swears it crawls like silver wolves.
- Fog that kills sheep —two flocks found stiff, eyes boiled white.
- Voices in the limestone caves —miners refuse to go deeper.
- Bandits regrouping north ridge —seen, not engaged. Their standard a thorn?crown over a skull. Charming.
I dipped the quill again, ink thinning with candle?fat.
Expenditure Projection. Assuming one hundred riders, two hundred militia, one thousand five hundred civilians:
- Daily bread → 24 bushels ground = 1700 loaves → stock lasts 21 days, barring rot.
- Protein ration (4?oz per head) → pork and goat sustain 30 days.
- Powder → at two rounds per musket per day (defensive drills only) → kegs gone in 9 days.
- Crossbow bolt attrition → 30% loss per engagement; resupply viable (wood abundant).
After that? We tighten belts or we bleed farmland.
Recommendations.
- Seize Lannbruck Mill —waterwheel intact, grain fields adjacent; secure flour stream.
- Mine the ridge path with broken glass & caltrops; delay bandits, buy powder days.
- Trade for sulfur —natives used to gather brimstone near the hot vents. Send Sul with olive bribes; horns and feathers are less likely to shoot him.
- Issue tokens of credit backed by grain. Not gold—trust. A ledger can move what coin cannot.
I laid the quill aside. Candle one had died, its stub drowning in wax like a ship in tar. Outside, night settled. I heard the distant patter of hooves—late patrol returning. Someone sang a hymn, off?key but earnest.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Funny thing, Grave calling me his quartermaster of destiny. My enemies used to be debtors in silk waistcoats. Now I count bullets instead of silver Skies. But the arithmetic is the same: columns balance or they do not. Economies crumble, empires starve, regiments rout. The ledger never lies.
I added one final line beneath all the tidy rows:
Unknown variables: storm pattern; native allegiance; touched migration; devils’ appetite.
“Well, Factor?” A voice from the door growled.
I closed the ledger, planting both palms on its cracked cover so he couldn’t read past the totals.
“We can keep everyone breathing for two weeks—three if no one fires a shot. After that, famine becomes strategy.”
Grave’s one good hand flexed against the doorpost. “You already told me the bad news. Give me the marrow—how many men do I need to squeeze, and what heads must roll?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “We can’t squeeze harder. The rind is gone. These villages are tilled down to prayer and vermin. If we treat the people like fodder, we’ll have fodder that can’t walk.”
He snorted. “I rear soldiers, not sheep.”
“You’ll have to rear both,” I answered. “An army marches on its stomach, yes—everyone quotes the general. But the rest of the sentence is always left off: and the stomach marches on the land. Fields, mills, smokehouses, wells. All of that is as sacred as powder. If we protect only walls, we starve behind them.”
He stepped inside, closing the door with a slow shove. The cottage felt smaller by half.
“You think I don’t know hunger?” he said, voice low. “I watched three campaigns die because the quartermaster lied. I fed men rat stew so they could hold a riverbank the crown never even wanted.”
His mouth twitched—a memory tasting of bile. “But I am a captain, Allemand. My trade is violence. Yours is counting coins. Do not ask me to plow.”
“I am not,” I said, trying to keep my tone even.
“I am telling you we must become something between captain and plowman. Joseph taught stewardship—that man is custodian of what he walks upon. Stewardship isn’t poetry; it’s simply logistics. If we cannot grow, mine, hunt, or barter, every musket you polish is a dead weight.”
He leaned over the table, scanning the neat columns I had tried to hide. “Your numbers say we’re doomed.”
“They say we’re perched on a branch that will crack unless we climb out and brace the trunk.”
Grave tapped one line: If we fail to find the natives…
“You really think these horned ghosts will trade brimstone for olives? Or listen to a sermon on stewardship?”
“I don’t know what they’ll do,” I admitted. “That uncertainty is exactly why we must look beyond garrisons. The natives might be enemy, ally, or neutral—but right now they control the sulfur vents, the high grazing, and the cleanest springs. That means they control whether our powder burns and whether our horses live.”
His jaw ground. “And if they won’t talk?”
“Then we learn to mine rock ourselves. Or we capture a vent. But we at least try a treaty first—because a treaty costs nothing but pride, and a skirmish costs powder we don’t possess.”
He straightened, arms crossed over the sling. Candlelight picked out the fine lines of fatigue around his eyes.
“You speak like a prefect counting census marks.”
I nodded. “Empire taught me ledger?ink. Trade taught me margins. And the Storm taught me humility. Survival is arithmetic—add what you need, subtract what kills you, multiply allies, divide danger. Right now our equation has too many unknowns.”
Grave walked to the window. Outside, the forge’s glow had faded to embers; night cloaked the yard.
“Bandits are massing,” he said to the glass. “Touched wander in pairs now—sentries report cries like calves being born. If I divert riders to escort hunting parties or millwrights, we thin every patrol.”
“Then pair each labor crew with a militiaman. Dig palisades around fields. Post lookouts in bell?towers. Work by daylight, drill by dusk.” I forced a thin smile. “Congratulations—you’ve invented feudalism.”
He barked a laugh—short, almost unwilling.
“You’d put pitchforks beneath my colors?”
“Better than starving under them.”
Silence stretched. I heard the cottage settle, boards sighing like tired lungs.
Grave turned. “Say we do this—mills, fields, treaties. Say we hold a season. What then? The storm will still be out there. Devils, mutates, whatever name you scribble. They won’t wait for harvest.”
“True,” I said, meeting his gaze. “But if we survive the season, we’ll have bread enough to march toward the storm instead of running from it. Bread buys time; time buys powder; powder buys distance. And distance is how you take the fight to whatever sits in the capital.”
He weighed that, shoulders rising, falling.
“‘Take the fight,’” he echoed. “You think like a soldier when it suits you.”
“I think like a merchant who finally understands margins of blood,” I corrected. “There is no profit left in retreat. We either build a country here—or die counting smaller and smaller numbers until zero feels merciful.”
He approached the table again, fingertips brushing the edge.
“Joseph said: The earth is lent, not owned. My chaplain loved that line. I always thought it monastery fluff.”
“Joseph also said: Feed the flock before you arm it.” I slid the ledger toward him. “We start tomorrow—Lannbruck Mill first. If we seize it intact, we double rations. After that the sulfur vents. And hunting parties along the alder ridge—crest gives visibility, rabbits are thick. I already drafted a rota.”
He lifted the page, studied my cramped scheduling.
“You put Sul in charge of the vent party.”
“He’s less likely to scare or offend whatever lives there. And the villagers trust him—they saw him tie a child’s boot, not crush a skull. That matters.”
A slow nod. “Very well.” He set the page down. “But understand this, Factor: if a choice arises between a plow and a pike, I will choose the pike.”
“Understood,” I said. “My job is to make sure the plow feeds the hand that grips the pike.”
He offered his good hand. I clasped it—ink?stained fingers meeting calloused ones.
“We ride at dawn,” he said.
“And I’ll bring extra quills,” I answered.
He paused at the door. “Allemand.”
“Yes?”
“If this seed of yours grows into a country, what will you call it?”
I shrugged. “Ask me after the harvest.”
The door shut. I reopened the ledger and beneath Unknown variables I added a single hopeful subtraction:
– Ignorance of the land (initial cultivation begun)
Then I blew out the candle and listened to the night. Somewhere far off, thunder rolled like a wagon over stone—but here, for this heartbeat, the only sound was the faint scrape of a hoe in a garden I hadn’t noticed before.
The shape moved slow and hunched in the dark. An old man, perhaps. Or a woman with her scarf tight against the wind. No torch, no lantern. Just the steady rhythm of spade and soil. Even now—especially now—someone turned beds and buried roots. They were too far off to see clearly, but I imagined the hands were cracked, the back bent, the steps tired but certain. I had seen a thousand market stalls run by such people. They never owned the land they worked. But they tended it as if something waited under every furrow: bread, maybe. Or memory.
I leaned against the sill. In all the rows of my tallies—powder, sustenance, shot, skins—I had made no line for these moments. For hoe strokes. For work done with no order given.
It pulled a memory from somewhere I hadn’t meant to revisit: the back room of a counting house in Vellandt. A storm outside. My hands blistered from scribes’ ink. I’d overruled a debt claim against a brewer who fed three families. I remembered the clerk’s shock. “That wasn’t your job.” And I’d said, “Then I’ve outgrown it.”
That night I walked the cobbled alleys alone, empty?pursed but lighter than I had ever felt. I had signed my own name on a page where none was required. For the first time, I had made numbers serve something else.
Here, now, under stars that knew no coinage, I felt that same knot loosen.
If the old man—or woman—kept tilling, I would keep tallying. One line at a time, one mouth, one barrel, one brittle hope. If they broke ground for food, I’d make space in the ledgers. If they planted flowers instead, I’d make space for that too.
I would not yet call it a country. But I would begin to count as if one were coming.