“You should be proud to contribute. In a hundred years, people will be looking back on this Monto. I must go now for the city’s granaries. We have responsibilities to store food for famine and drought. We also use these numbers to find how much we can store. Before the markets buy all this and it’s distributed we have a short time to count and prepare. There is much to do Monto. If you cannot do this, I’m sure Lord Panthi and the King can find a job retrieving arrows on the front for you.” She sat and Marcos waved the officer on.
The princess and her Hjordis were pulled off to the next engagement. Marcos shooed the boy in. He tutored the boy in finding the volume of thirty boxed bushels of yams. He had him weigh them, restock the boxes, and count them in the boxes. It was simple and mundane work but necessary for large populations living and eating.
The work could have taken until mid morning but the boy dragged it well after lunch. As they worked, Ein reclined on unsorted and inspected piles of yams and dozed with a blissful smile.
Eventually Marcos left them to return with an open carriage and took them in for the afternoon.
“I never wanna do that again.” The prince said tiredly as they rode.
“Young prince what would you do?” Marcos asked genuinely curious for a simple answer.
“Well what do you do?” The prince turned the question.
“Protect and provide stability to the Immortal Crown and Eternal throne of Menthino. I serve as the First Knight. I am also a high priest of Mavvus and high advisor to Queen Mensillin. I’m like an inspector with a roaming license.” Marcos answered quickly before getting back to the question. “What do you want to do?”
The prince huffed looking around. “I don’t know. I don’t want to do that again.”
“There must be something. In fact, I think you want to go home.” Marcos ventured.
The prince seemed to reflect on that for a moment. “I… Yes. But I’d want it be how it was when…I want to be welcomed back.”
Marcos nodded. “We want that also. Not to have a claim on the throne. We want to have stability in that young country. Sellis has gotten boisterous of late” Marcos recalled.
“It’s the ‘Treaty of Passive Powers’. When we signed it, we thought it would protect us from you. Now it keeps us from incorporating cities along our borders. The generals grow restless because we speak of nothing else but surly towns and unruly cities on our border. They will not send a representative to our senate and join the commonwealth. Their diplomats come and tell us endlessly of the same problems that they debate in our senate.” The young prince explained.
Marcos realized the boy was only a few months ago a direct spectator into what they were doing. The few times anyone had tried to de-brief him had failed to find any real value in his knowledge.
“Like what?” asked Marcos. He had heard vaguely the same thing. His information came from the border towns, and from Sellisian nobles. It pointed to Sellis building an empire. He didn’t have too much information from their nobles. He collected a fair amount of gossip and he tried to focus on the moods of things. If the royals didn’t realize they had become something else at this point. They were headed into regional wars of conquest. It’s hard for a people even the leaders to not know what effect their actions are having. Someone must have noticed, since things were still rolling.
“In the senate, they are always obsessed about trade and land. Land is needed for raising horses without fences. You don’t do that here and it stunts the horse.” Lectured the prince. “Trade is needed to sell the horses but if we had the right amount of cities we could sell to ourselves. Everyone needs horses, dye, fine woven silk, wine, and whisky.” He said looking out at the market as they passed. People with hard tans looked around lost in the huge open market.
“So what do the diplomats from your neighbors say?” Marcos just realized a key thought. Unsaid, the prince just asserted that Sellis’ goal was to control trade everywhere in the region. Likely by the centralized control of the markets. The area was fertile so they shouldn’t starve despite how bad it would likely turn out.
“They complain when we stop trading with them. We get a new city and they stop trading with the people they used too because we always offer cheaper.” He said. “With our navy we trade everywhere. They got ships in Cardin right now.”
“Why does Sellis need to expand Prince Carthin?” Marcos asked plainly. He hoped the prince had this discussion around the dinner table once before.
The carriage turned out of the busier parts and got to the more quiet wide streets of the municipal district. Around them were Cardin’s municipal complexes the Council Chamber, the Customs house, Academies, Hospitals, and the Guard barracks towering behind matching iron fences. Students, guards, officials, and other citizens worked behind the fences doing the small things those complexes needed to do so things outside could run smoothly.
Cardin employs a relatively large portion of its workforce for this season until spring. Nevertheless, this is the critical time, when the population more than quadruples as the masses come pouring in. Many never know Cardin is a marvel of civil engineering.
“So that we’re all together. We can fight together without worries of the other cities army. This first started as Sellis grew from a city. We said ‘we won’t charge tax for people who join with us and they get a say in the senate what we do’.” The prince explained. “Cities took the chance to be able to have access to trade and we flourished. We offer aid to cities in time of suffering. We got an army trained together and it may not have Menthino’s numbers but our cavalry is larger.” He said looking toward the passing city guards’ barracks. The only horses they used were for drawing carriages and parades.
“So who picks what’s sold?” Asked Marcos.
“Our guilds that are dedicated to different services. The more cities we get the more they come together. So for instance, Sellis sells horse. We can help transport goods and provide a cavalry. We have a guild for all that, and all the horse related stuff from husbandry to making carts and tack. That’s what our city does. We need grain, and a guild does that, handling the farm stuff. The guild of storehouses and warehouses sets up and maintains granaries and warehouses. There are many more and it’s a great system. The young go and apprentice in these groups. Cities that join the common wealth pick what they want to be dedicated to. Cities still do stuff like grow their own food and repair saddles on their own. But not like the guild, they are the ones who really sell rare, exotic, expensive, or surplus mundane stuff, and set the prices for everything. They have market similar to the senate where they talk about the projects and work together.”
“Why do they want more markets to sell to?”
“They want more people to buy their stuff. And if enough people buy and sell we’ll have balance. When you’re in the commonwealth, the guild becomes the main supplier of many things. Kind of like Menthino I mean how do you get rid of all those yams?”