A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1704 - 1704: To Poke a Bear - Part 6

It was the rudeness of the peasants that started to get to the soldiers that Oliver had brought with him. They had never seen such indignance from the lower classes. The daring to speak to those above their station with such haste and hatred. It was the sort of thing that ought to have risked getting them killed.

But Oliver took it with the same patience that he had in the village before. He smiled his understanding – and indeed, it was true understanding. Looking at them, he could see himself in their shoes, when his name had simply been Beam, and it was the snow and cold he too feared more than anything else.

It was for that reason that he found himself unwilling to nudge them any further than that might have been willing to be nudged. He didn't want to twist them around his finger, and use such dark tactics as manipulation. He simply attempted to offer them an alternative path, as if it were a village full of Beam's.

For when he was that boy, starving in the cold, with digging as his only work, there had been a single thought that starved for satisfaction even more than his belly did. That was the want of opportunity, a want for something larger. A cause warm enough that it would burn through everything else. Something he could throw his life on. Something to make all the suffering worth it.

He attempted to offer them that. The smallest alternative, given lightly, to those that would be willing to hear it, and he knew full well that they didn't have the resources to execute upon it. But it was the news in particular of their victory that he wanted them to hear. When he spoke of the peasantry, and of their strength, he firmly believed it. He saw in them a potential that those with less harsh upbringings couldn't have possibly have tapped into.

There was a growing belief in him, that for all the mines that had been erected across the Stormfront, looking for silver and gold and other rich materials that might further boost the wealth and power of those that owned them, he supposed instead it was that which was overlooked and disregarded that might have had the highest of hidden value. They were as trodden upon as the very mud in which they live. Yet if one reached a hand out, with the most delicate of fingers, that mud could be brushed away, and there was a shine to each and everyone one of them.

When he looked over the villagers, Oliver looked at men in particular, searching for that shine, as he had searched for it in those men that he had trained for the battle with the Emersons. They hadn't miraculously become warriors overnight. It was a tolerance for suffering that they had built up over decades of harshness. It was that physicality that came with their sheer existence. They were creatures that simply needed sharpening more than they needed shaping.

Even as they tossed their words of hatred at him, shooing him away from his wanting, Oliver found himself appreciating them even more. They were the danger, the little twinkling stars in the sky, so many millions of them, threatening to fall down. Just a single one, of a significant enough fire, that was all it would take to set the entire country ablaze.

It would have been difficult for Tavar to miss what Oliver was up to. He and his scouts had seen Oliver and his movements tracked ever since he had parted from the marching column of Tavar's army. They followed his movements all the way to Heath's Edge, and then to the villages beyond it.

Tavar had frowned at first, hearing that, wondering what it was that he would have wished to acquire, but it didn't take much thought, when he put himself in the shoes of the strange Oliver Patrick, to suppose what his intentions might be.

"He's looking for men," Tavar said to King Germanicus. "Amongst the peasantry."

"Hm," Germanicus replied, not seeming the slightest bit surprised.

"It is unconventional," Tavar offered. He found himself teaching Germanicus, at times, when the moment allowed it. It was hard to forget that he had once been a student of his, even if it had only been for a short time. There still seemed to be much of the world that Germanicus did not know, especially since he had spent so much of his time holed up in the forest. "You understand that, yes, King Germancius? We recruit our soldiery from amongst the Serving Class. A class entirely of warriors. That is not a custom that you are familiar with amongst the Treeants, is it?"

"No," Germanicus said. "We don't make that mistake."

Put like that, so bluntly, Tavar felt his eyebrow twitch. "Mistake, you say?"

"You mainlanders are always surprised at the size of our armies," Germanicus said. "But we are more surprised at how small yours are."

"You mean to say we limit ourselves?"

"Don't you?" Germanicus said. "We have only one requirement. Strength. The Goddess Gaia gives those that have the destiny of a warrior the strength to tread that path. If a man is strong enough, he will fight in our armies, and it is our honour to train him, and fight alongside him. It is natural."

"Natural, you say?" Tavar said. "As opposed to a man being forced to become a soldier simply because he is of the Serving Class?"

"Or a peasant being turned away because he is that," Germanicus said. "If I be born here, amongst you mainlanders, I would be a peasant too. My parents were not special. They farmed an orchard in the forest. Berries, and nuts. You would call them peasants."

"And yet here you are, a King," Tavar said thoughtfully.

"For you, that is strange. For us, it is natural," Germanicus said. "I do not want to be King. They made me King, because it is natural."

"You believe that yourself, that it is natural for you to be King?" Tavar asked.

Germanicus looked at him, bearing down with the full weight of that feral expression. Never had a King seemed less civilized than he. "I am the strongest," he said. "I do not want to be King. But if I am the strongest, it is my destiny."