Chapter 16

Walking through the city, the damage wasn’t as bad as Ky had feared, and most of that was centered around the west gate where the bulk of the fighting had been.

Thankfully, despite being where the battle started and, at least part of it, ended, the docks were in good shape. Although the Emperor had already decided to keep Devnum as the capital of the Empire, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Londinium would eventually reassert itself as a major center for trade and commerce. Its river-borne trade and road connections to major southern ports were why both the Carthaginians and the Romans, before they’d been forced to the north of the island, had based their capitals there in the first place. Its docks were a key part of that and would be helpful in bringing in supplies for rebuilding the damaged portion of the city.

The population wasn’t as lucky. Thanks to the governor’s decision to keep nearly all of the food for himself and the soldiers, the population that had come into the city for protection had been all but starved for a month, and legionnaires conducting a survey of the city for survivors and looking for soldiers in hiding had found the bodies of more than a few families that had starved to death unnoticed in their homes.

Ky had ordered food supplies brought in, but they were running into problems there as well. Between feeding the legions now spread over two islands and the large number of prisoners they’d managed to acquire, food supplies were starting to run low and the harvests were still months away.

Prisoners were less of a problem. To keep his men fighting to the last, the governor’s lieutenants had spent the previous months drilling into their heads the brutal ways they could expect to be treated by the Britannians if the city fell. Although Ky couldn’t see how they could have possibly believed some of the tales that were communicated to him, they clearly had, as the bulk of the city’s garrison had refused to surrender, choosing instead to fight to the last man.

Although Ky didn’t like the idea of slaughtering any enemy when their situation was hopeless, this time it cost the lives of hundreds of more Caledonians than necessary, which he very much regretted. Part of him thought that, if he’d been there instead of chasing down the governor, he might have been able to make a difference and save a lot of lives, but he knew that was just a soldier’s guilt talking.

Although he hadn’t yet been able to introduce things like debriefings or after-action reports, that could help the officer corps learn from battles and pass that experience to the next batch of officers, he did spend some time interviewing the men there personally. From everything he could tell, the men had fought well and hadn’t taken any undue risks, or at least, no undue risks from the Caledonian point of view. Unless he’d been prepared to kill every Carthaginian single-handedly, it was unlikely the death toll on their end could have been any lower.

In the end, there were less than a hundred survivors from the Carthaginian forces, and most of those were Carthaginian conscripts, laborers who had migrated to Britannia for a chance at prosperity on their empire’s frontiers but had ended up as cannon fodder. While the low number of prisoners meant there weren’t as many mouths to feed, these were the exact people that were agreeing to walk away from the Carthaginians and become Britannian citizens instead, since all they were looking for was a chance at prosperity.

“I understand you’re having a supply problem,” Lucilla said in his ear as he made his circuit of the east wall, to see how that side of the town fared through the siege.

“I see Sophus has been talking to you,” Ky said.

Although he valued the AI’s input, which had been invaluable in keeping him alive, it had developed a habit since gaining sentience of telling on him to Lucilla if it didn’t like a decision Ky was making. It was an annoying development, to be sure.

“Only because we have been dealing with the same issue here and I’ve been working on some solutions that might help.”

“I’m glad to hear it. We did a good job getting the harvest in before winter, but the increased size of the legions and all of the prisoners are starting to take a toll. I’d hoped the Caledonians would be able to help blunt some of that, but they saved less than we did. I don’t suppose the Ulaid have supplies we can buy from them?”

“No. In fact, that’s part of why I’ve been working on this problem already. Velius has asked for supplies of food, clothing, and medicine for the civilians there, since entire villages have been wiped out by raiders, brigands, and the Carthaginians.”

Ky sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Thanks to his altered biology and the medical nanobots swimming through his system, he didn’t get stress headaches, so the gesture was more of a habit he’d picked up from the locals than something to relieve actual pain.

“That sounds less like a solution and more like a compounding of the problem.”

“It isn’t my solution, just an explanation of why I’ve been working on one.”

“I see, then what’s the solution?”

“I’ve been talking to some of the Scandi traders, and I think we can get them to begin bringing food shipments here on their return voyages after taking our finished products to the eastern markets to sell.”

“Scandi isn’t exactly a major food producer. As I understand it, near the end of winter they have to get a lot of their food from external shipments themselves. I find it doubtful they’d have much excess to sell on to us. Even if they did, we’re also buying up all the raw materials for the foundries we can, and pound for pound, they’d make more money on those shipments than they would on foodstuffs. I’m not sure how much we can rely on the charity of Scandi traders to give up profit in order to bring us food.”

“I wasn’t planning on appealing to their charity. I was planning on appealing to their greed. The new, stronger steel, along with heavy plows and arcuballista, although we are allowing only a small number of those to be sold, are in high demand in the northern and eastern ports, so we’ve put a high tax on them. My thought was that we reduce, or even eliminate, that tax if they agree to allot at least fifty percent of their hold space on the return journey for foodstuffs, which will also not be taxed. While they still make less money on the food, eliminating both the export and import taxes will change that math enough that I think we can get them to agree to those terms.”

“That’s a good idea, but it doesn’t solve the other problem. The Scandi don’t have an excess of food to sell us, and neither do most of the free Germanic tribes. The Carthaginians are the only ones with that kind of harvest, and we’ve already told them none of our products may be sold into Carthaginian markets, and that we’d cut them off from our ports entirely if we find out they have been selling to them.”

“Apparently, they have an Asian port in the east that’s accessible to them that leads to a lot of grassland and tribes that have excess food to sell. Now that the ice is thawing, it’s accessible and close enough that it can be profitable for them to buy from those markets.”

That was a good point as well. Although Ky had not forgotten about the Eurasian ports on the Baltic, the tribes that lived there in his timeline did only small-scale trading with the people from Scandinavia and were more often a market to sell finished goods into rather than a source of raw materials. He’d assumed the changes in this timeline, which had led to tribes pushing into Roman lands hundreds of years before they should have, would have also destabilized the region as a whole, leaving less organized villages and conglomerates to trade with.

That was a problem he needed to get over, thinking of these regions as they were in the original timeline instead of investigating the situation as it really was now. It wasn’t hard to do locally, where he could see, or at least get regular reports, on conditions and determine where those changes had a direct effect on him. It was much harder to do for faraway places. Even Ramirus, with his far-flung net of spies and sources, knew little beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. He knew cultures existed and some goods still made their way from China and India, or what would be China and India in Ky’s timeline, but not much else beyond that.

The Carthaginian control of the Middle East meant that only their agents made the difficult trek through the traditional trade routes, and sailing technology hadn’t developed to the point of allowing boats to circle the Horn of Africa and take the long way around. What information Ky did have came from the Steppes tribe - Scandi pipeline, which was much less reliable than traditional trade routes, at least with information.

“That’s interesting. Do the traders you’ve spoken to say they’d be interested in that option?”

“They do. They wanted to skip paying any export taxes now, and they aren’t happy that, instead, we’ve told them we’ll give them a credit for it once they bring in the foodstuffs, but everything they’re saying is hedged with “ifs” and “maybes,” as far as what food is available to import. They’ll get over it and do it though, I think. Money always wins out.”