Herald of Steel

As they say, the devil is in the details.

The problem here largely came in the form of land distribution, which was by its very nature a very messy thing.

So a large part of the next two days was filled with the Helvati delegation haggling with Alexander to get him to promise their people land in those areas best known for their good farmland while the various lords ruling them made the most creative of excuses, trying their best to dodge this poisonous bite.

Nobody wanted to give an inch more and nobody wanted to get an inch less.

And Alexander soon found that dividing the land absolutely fairly was the very definition of the word- impossible.

This was something very easy to see using simple math.

For instance, if you counted the land to be donated by each lord using a flat, absolute number, well the smaller, poorer Margraves lords would go bankrupt.

While if you used a percentage system, well the large lords would grumble because in raw numbers they were losing a lot.

And even though the second technique might still seem fairer, Alexander ran into trouble of deciding what arbitrary number to use.

If he used too small a percentage number, well then sometimes it would appear that a very small lord would have to pay so little land that it was virtually insignificant.

And since a lot of those lands were held by numerous tiny landlords, suddenly a huge chunk of the available land would become omitted from consideration.

While the problems of increasing that number were self explanatory, it would draw the ire of all the lords.

As for customizing the number to fit the situation, well where was the fairness in that?

But even if Alexander could somehow come up with a magic number that satisfied everybody, then came the question of the land itself.

Every plot of land was unique, located in a specific place and with its very own identifying characteristics.

Some of the lands were strategically placed along a crossroad, near a river, and all were worth different due to their differing population density and agricultural output.

Some may have good mines, some may have good lumber, some might have access to abundant fisheries while others might be particularly good for growing a certain type of crop…. the list could go on.

And naturally, the Helvati wanted those lands that produced the most valuable produce, while the Margraves lords were naturally unwilling to part with their treasures.

This debate was so complex that it would have been a fool\'s dream to think the entirety of it could be resolved in just two days.

Hence at first, only the preliminary details were hashed out.

It was decided here which counties would take how many natives and as well as the preliminary place where the natives would be placed.

Because Metztil demanded that his people be settled with their families, each of these settlements would basically have to be a village housing a few hundred people, surrounding which had to be the farmlands that were promised to them.

And given the number of people there, naturally, these farmlands had to be quite large.

However, the trouble was it was very hard for a single lord to have so much good, empty land.

So finally, unable and unwilling to work out all the nitty gritty deals, Alexander decided to leave the particular details to the individual lords and Helvati people themselves.

The more technical ones would be worked out once the Heeats were dealt with.

The idea was that once things calmed down, the two parties would evaluate the situation for themselves by going to the sight and try their best to work out a comprise that satisfied the aforementioned conditions in the treaty.

As for the discussion about the amount of land each lord would give, Alexander decided to outsource that trouble too.

He was already too exhausted by then to care.

The amount of effort Alexander had to go through just to make the nobles come to the table and agree to this in the first place had been skipped over.

But needless to say, it was a very arduous process.

Getting any noble to hand over his territory was perhaps harder than reaching the moon, and without Alexander\'s strong army and Lady Miranda\'s political support, Alexander did not think these greedy pigs would have ever agreed.

Even then, there was a lot of back room dealing, with Alexander promising the more powerful nobles various benefits, be it access to cheaper products from his markets, an exemption from giving up their land in exchange for pressuring his vassals to do so, or promising not to force them to provide men for the upcoming battle.

Despite all that these people were still whining.

For the man who had been working like a madman for the past week or so, putting in twelve to fourteen hours a day to get everything properly organized, this bit of sabotage strained his nerves to the limit.

So at all the bickering, Alexander with a hint of anger in his simply declared a flat sq km of land that each county had to give up.

This proved quite controversial as such administrative districts were hardly equal in size.

The establishment of these groups of land was not based on the population living there, its economic output, or even strategic significance, such as a critical river, dam, or mountain pass that easily blocked off attackers.

Rather these counties were really spheres of influence for a particular viscount or perhaps a bunch of allied barons.

Meaning the ones who had the bigger stick got to form the bigger county.

However, Alexander simply suppressed these voices with brute force, claiming this was the reality and in the grand scheme of things, even the smallest counties would only lose a tiny fraction of their land.

Then as a bit of ointment, he promised them that those counties that did not have to take the natives or took relatively less would be the ones to take the next batch of them, i.e.- the ones where land would be leased out.

This promise, along with support from the powerful lords who had been bought out by Alexander was finally enough to quell the complaints.

The battlefield thus shifted internally, as the larger lords in those counties tried their best to \'transfer the damage\' to their smaller retainers.

While the counties that were spared did not directly express any unwillingness to take in the natives but set up a limit of 40,000 men or about 80 large tribal families.

This was done not only as a condition to limit how much land they would have to give away but perhaps more than that, it was done to limit the number of \'barbarians\' living in their society.

Alexander was personally okay with this number.

50,000 natives was a nice whole 10% of their total population.

Also, he found that the nobles had forgotten to take into account the fact these \'barbarians\' were going to soon reproduce.

So the number 50,000 was bound to quickly double and triple within a few decades

The only problem Alexander however had with the nobles was the time they wanted.

The counties giving up their land wanted three years to satisfy all of the 10,000 men, while the leasing counties wished to start taking the natives only from the fourth year- a truly absurd demand.

They claimed they had no good, empty plots of land on hand to give and would have to spend the next four years clearing enough forests or woods or de weeding abandoned pastures.

And even after that, they only wanted to do this in small batches of 10,000 annually

The reason was- \'to be able to swallow such large volumes without choking\', as put by one of the noble spokesmen.

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Alexander simply snorted at this lame excuse.

It was clear these men were simply looking for an excuse to delay the transfer, perhaps hoping the entire thing would simply fall apart in the meantime.

And this hope was actually not nearly as misplaced as one might think.

It would only take a single large scale conflict with the migrating natives to destroy the entire project, if not at least freeze it indefinitely.

Something many of these scheming men were more than happy to fund.

However, although their thoughts were clear as day to Alexander, he did not argue here and rather pretended to agree and shake on it.

He understood these men were simply trying to make life difficult for him.

And the only way to make these slimeballs listen was to combine carrot with some good old stick.

So he first planned to show his prowess by winning the battle against Lord Parker.

Once he did that and took over Caira with no help whatsoever from these nobles, Alexander was confident in making them bow.

Thus, for now, he turned his attention to his military and ordered them to get ready to march imminently.

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