A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1653 - 1653: Swirling Fires - Part 6

The Colonel narrowed his eyes. "You know, I do find myself wondering how it is that a merchant – especially one like yourself – ended up in the position that you are? Naturally, I see the current state the Patrick Army has been reduced too, but after the death of the good Volguard, I would have thought that there would still be a better man suited for the job..."

"Pardon?" Greeves said. "Volguard didn't deal with supplies. He dealt with defences. He looked at the numbers when he had need for them, but that was as far as his influence went."

"Is that right?" Colonel Stopdon said. "Well, our General requires things to be more precise. I am sure you will appreciate, in a war like this, every scrap of bread must be accounted for. Every lump of dried meat. We will need to count the smallest of fractions if we are to find any advantage above our enemy. So I would give you the scope of the questions that I would ask you, and I would pray – for the sake of your head, and that of your master – that you have the information squirreled away somewhere. If not, you had better find it. How many sacks of grain do you have in your own supply? And how many sacks have you stolen from the enemy?"

"The Emerson's were using non-standard grain bags," Greeves said. "They were two point four times the capacity of ours. You'll want that in your calculations, if you're recording all this."

The scribe that Greeves had directed the comment to gave his Colonel a look, to which the Colonel hesitated for a brief second before nodding. "Then, what of the grain bags that you use, merchant? How many pounds?"

"Twenty-five," Greeves said.

"Twenty-five?" The Colonel said. "Those are rather small bags, if I might say…"

"Aye, perhaps for you," Greeves said. "But the folks around here don't have the money. There ain't much point having sacks of grain that no one can afford to buy in one go. Smaller increments are better. You marching men will want bigger ones, for convenience."

"Quite right," the Colonel said. "And to confirm, is that figure of two point four accurate? If we are to draw the size of the Emerson grain bags from your own figure of twenty-five pounds? It would make the size of their sacks seem rather non-standard."

"I told you it was, didn't I?" Greeves said. "And aye, it'll be non-standard in terms of weight, by our metric. But they're doing it in terms of sacks, ain't they? They're filling each bag to the top, and using that as a measure, rather than weighing each one."

"Less accurate," the Colonel commented.

"But a damn sight quicker," Greeves said. "And I can see the value in it too. A merchant has room to skimp, doesn't he? He can fill that grain bag below a certain line. Or he could overfill it, to the point that it spills out. If you've got the grain bag as your measure, there's a way of measuring your merchant's honesty too. He'll oversell you, or undersell you. Ain't as daft as it first appears."

"…A strange custom," the Colonel said. "I suppose I can see some measure of validity in it. Very well, we shall hold to your figure of two point four, but we will check it at a later date, and you had best hope that it's as accurate as your confidence seems to believe that it is."

"It'll be accurate," Greeves said with a scowl. "It's not the sort of figure you'd forget. Two point four. What do you think I'm an invalid just because I'm not dressed like a nobleman? Or like a soldier?"

"Ehhh… Boss," Judas nudged him when Greeves' anger started to get the better of him.

"I think for everyone else, two point four is exactly the sort of figure they'd forget…" Nila commented in a whisper.

The Colonel shook his head as he looked at them. "It is not my place to say this. It is an issue for your master. But this is a lacking presentation. You may be peasants, but you had better carry yourselves with a better degree of conduct."

"Let's get through this, Colonel," Greeves said, his own politeness evaporating to the wind. "You and your scribes prepare your little pens. I'll give you all your figures, and then you can complain to your own master about how impolite we were. I'll give you that, aye – we're impolite. But don't you be acting like it's only natural that we'd cock the job up. We were given it to do, and we've seen it done."

"Such things can be said, merchant," Stopdon said, "but you will forgive me if I do not merely take you at your confidence. I would prefer to see the facts, and only the facts."

Greeves straightened himself up, and he listened, his eyes glinting as if this were a personal challenge. Stopdon aligned his next question as to the number of bags of each type, and without missing a beat, Greeves had his answer for both the quantities – the initial Patrick numbers, and the Emerson numbers.

"Those are what remain, correct?" The Colonel asked, after giving his scribes the go-ahead to write the figures down. "And now let us convert this into a total that we can use, seen as though you've given us two types of grain bags to work with…"

Greeves tossed the total at them long before the scribes could begin working on it, and he did so with all the anger and vitroial of a man that had been personally offended. Even Nila looked up at him, impressed. But the merchant himself did not notice – he did not even seem to realize that it was an impressive feat to remember the figures that he had. So contorted was he by his own irritation that he was blinded to everything else.

"That much?" The Colonel said. "That doesn't sound right. There's a falsity in this information. Even rudimentary guesses as the consumption of your army before now, and the consumption of the Emerson prisoners that you've captured, would have set you far further back. That is, unless the initial reports of how much grain you had were off…"