Herald of Steel



The situation inside Zanzan for its part had become relatively calm.

At least much calmer than during the start, when many residents genuinely feared the city might be lost.

There were even some very hushed whispers of it being 'all the Thesians' faults', as some of the populace pointed the blame squarely at Alexander and his origin as the reason for their defeat, implying they were incompetent due to their place of birth.

But to be honest such opinions were very, very rare, and only resided in the most extreme of extremists, their numbers so low it hardly managed to stir the waves as of yet.

And though there was the possibility of their voices being amplified if the situation developed in certain directions, but after Perseus's boisterous first-week offensive, which saw both sides trade quite a bit of casualties, the intensity began to die down.

The siege attacks became light, and after the men got over their surprise of the catapults, they found they were not really that big a deal to deal with.

So without that fear, such rhetoric failed to stir much resistance in most of the city's populace.

Instead, with Perseus's attack being so easily staved off, especially after his so-grand speech that hyped up his so-called divine weapons, most of the commanders began to feel quite optimistic about their ability to hold the walls.

But though the external problems did not seem to affect Zanzan that much, all was not sunshine and rainbows for Cambyses inside the city.

For one there was the usual stress of running the city during an active siege.

And though she left the day-to-day nitty-gritty of managing the soldiers to the military leaders, she still wanted to at least hear how everything was going, and then make suggestions based on that.

For instance, in one of the reports Menes stoically said, "Yesterday we executed three men for falling asleep during the night watch. And sentenced another five to fifty cane strikes for dozing off in their stations."

This strict instruction was written by Alexander personally, as he felt there was nothing as dangerous as a watchman falling asleep, thus giving the enemy an opportunity to waltz right into one's camp unimpeded.

And Menes seemed to agree, which was why he decided to follow the order to the tee.

While Melodias, who usually was a bit more lenient with his troops a bit disapproving slightly shook his head and added, "Poor lads. They simply dozed in the cold just as Menes was making his rounds. Bad luck."

He felt that in this bitter cold, it was very easy to want to shut one's eyes and nod off a bit, especially given the enemy was very unlikely to attack at night and so wished Menes could have been a bit more lament given the circumstances.

While Cambyses hearing this said, "Lord Menes did the right thing in following my husband's orders. Those falling asleep during the watch indeed deserve to be put to death no questions asked," before turning to look at Melodias,

"But I also believe Lord Melodias raised an interesting point."

"It is indeed very cold. And many soldiers might feel it is too hard to stay focused for so long staring blankly into the black night."

"After all these are new recruits and not trained soldiers." Cambyses added understandingly, before cautioning Menes, "And frequently executing them will not be good for morale."

So she then suggested, "So I propose trying to make life up there a bit more bearable for the men."

"Since Lord Melodias has bought up the issue about the cold, perhaps we can install some kind of portable stoves to keep them warm,"

"We have a lot of iron just lying around. Why not use them to make the stoves?"

"And we have a lot of coal. Let's use that as the firewood."

This idea came to her when she remembered seeing Mean bringing a small earthen stove to her room to make it warmer.

"Yes! Yes! That is a great idea. Giving the soldiers something to stay warm around will definitely improve morale and prevent them from dozing off," Melodias naturally was ecstatic at having anything that could prevent further executions, adding with a large grin,

"Hahaha, my lady truly cares for the soldiers. They will surely be overjoyed to know you think so much of them."

While Menes too quickly joined Melodias in buttering up Cambyses a bit, a side reason being he still felt guilty about losing and hoped Cambyses would not push Alexander too hard to punish him, as he said, "Yes, I agree to."

"Furthermore, my lady's idea of making it out of iron is truly ingenious. We will simply need to cast the thing, so making it will be much faster than pottery. I can have the stoves distributed around the walls in a week!"

After becoming a general Menes had spent some time around blacksmiths designing new types of weapons or simply overseeing the production of them, and so the man had gained some rudimentary knowledge about metalworking.

Hence the man was able to make that comment.

Thus with that Cambyses's portable stoves were soon created, which was just a hollow iron cylinder with many small holes in its walls, where coal and other kindling would be put and then lit, while the holes would work to let in air and keep the fuel burning.

And this was just one of the ways Cambyses contributed to the war effort.

But though the military affair of things was going quite well for Cambyses, contrary to Perseus's expectations of Cambyses leading a rosy life, currently she was facing all kinds of internal problems.

And among all the domestic problems, the main one was undoubtedly the problem of overcrowding inside the city.

When the populace of Zanzan got the news that there was an enemy army, most of all who lived around the city naturally flocked to enter inside its strong walls to take shelter, resulting in quite a large population spike.

And the fact was Zaznan city was already relatively quite small and on top of that was currently going through a renovation, meaning it was simply unable to properly house such huge numbers of men, women, and children.

And so given the lack of proper housing, and the general congestion, the city administrators and city guards found it hard to keep law and order in the city.

Cambyses in her office every day would receive more and more reports of crime and thievery as opportunistic scums tried to take advantage of the situation, with the number of incidents increasing every day.

And the limited number of city guards seemed to struggle up to their necks to try and deal effectively with it all them.

Furthermore, given that a lot of the populace was recruited into the city garrison, many bad fish had managed to slip through the net, meaning a lot of these scoundrels were actually armed and dangerous.

Making the job of the city guards ever more dangerous.

In fact there was one particular incident of some of the guards being jumped in dark alleys by such people and many were even killed.

An incident that forced Cambyses to draft some of the original mercenary members from the military into the city guards, and then lead a punitive task force against that part of the city, resulting in the capture and subsequent execution of a few hundred people.

The snow-covered streets of Zanzan had become red that day.

But at least after that day, the city cooled down for a while.

As for Cambyses, while dealing with this mess she only said this to herself in relief, 'Thank goodness I listened to Menicus and took care of well-known troublemakers beforehand. Otherwise, things would have gone nasty.'

Yes, things could have certainly gotten much worse without the original resident rats of the city.

But without the experienced big fishes present to lead the mostly inexperienced shrimps, though the many incidents were hard for Cambyses to suppress, it never got out of control.

Another reason why these problems were irritating but ultimately small scale was because many of the criminals were not criminals per se, but desperadoes, and simply took the crooked path when they could not get the basic necessities using the straight and narrow.

For example, in this cold, the populace always found itself though not starving but certainly hungry, though the populace was not freezing, they were certainly cold, and though the populace was not dying of sickness, certainly diseases like cold and fever were everywhere.

Then was the sanitation issue, where the rudimentary public toilet system and the still-under-construction sewage system could not handle such volume.

Filth had soon began to build up all around Zanzan, and the sanitation workers proved simply too few to tackle it effectively.

In fact, given the widespread disease of mostly innocuous diseases such as cold and fever, combined with the intense crowding and now the build-up of such huge piles of filth, Cambyses was pretty sure that if it was not too cold, surely a plague would have gripped the city.

And to avoid that, the lady had quickly ordered all fecal matter to be dumped into the nearby sea, while thanking the gods they had not been blockaded this time.

Though the side effect of that was the port water soon began to change color and a pungent, ammonia smell began to daft into the air from there.

But still, that was still better than a plague.

And like this, Cambyses still managed to keep the city ticking, even through the hard times.