Herald of Steel

Chapter 180 Entering Zanzan

The next day, the entire population of the city almost crashed into Alexander's camp.

They came hearing the announcement- seeking food, medicine and to meet their loved ones who had been conscripted by Amenheraft.

But although a bit overwhelmed, fortunately, the population of the entire city seemed rather small, less than forty thousand, and so Alexander's armed men had no problem keeping order.

They had gained rich experience hosting the temple feast twice and were very adept at making mobs follow instructions.

And under their directions, the mob was made to line up in queues and the hungry were given food, the sick were quarantined in a separate part of the camp and the slaves were allowed to meet their loved ones.

An interesting thing of note was that the crowd was almost entirely devoid of any strong males, consisting only of women, children, and the infirm.

Amenheraft and Muazz had bled the city and the province dry.

During the food service, for several days a huge propaganda drive, headed by Alexander and overseen by Camius was launched targeting the locals, as they were informed of their new lord, his exploits, and generosity and a few even managed to catch a glimpse of him walking around the camp.

The food servers all shouted 'All hail to Pasha Alexander.' every time they served the gruel and the locals were told that the lord's wife was personally caring for the sick.

Then a few days later Alexander gave a stirring speech in front of the crowd, promising them two meals a day till the spring harvest, medicine and healthcare, relief from the cold, and a vow that their enslaved loved ones will be set free after five years of faithful service.

This produced a huge cheer from the thirty to forty thousand city dwellers along with the twenty thousand enslaved along, while the sour moods that many people had toward the nobility over their many transgressions, the drought being just the latest among them, largely subsided.

This was in part due to the proclamations and particularly because Alexander had backed up his claims with actions.

He had given them free food, while the other nobles greedily hoarded the last morsel of grain, provided them free medical care when they came to him being the plague, while other nobles would have kicked them away if they were lucky or beaten them to death if not, and even let them meet their loved ones.

And best of all, during all this time no soldier harassed or bullied them.

This made the people see Alexander in a favorable light and although they were still a bit weary and skeptical of their new boss, they were not outright hostile to him.

After about a week, new plague victims started to drastically decrease, while the infected, treated with warm food, rest and medicinal herbs showed signs of getting better.

In the meantime, Alexander ordered a massive cleanup of the city where all the overflowing filth was collected and then buried in the nearby fields to act as fertilizers.

The streets were then thoroughly scrubbed by the thousands of women who came to get food, using water mixed with crushed limestone which acted as a mild antiseptic to try and kill whatever germs possible.

The people were also instructed to wash their hands after restroom breaks, particularly using lye which was just wood ash mixed with water, and advised to drink boiled water and generally keep themselves clean.

And the most important order was not to throw garbage out in the open streets so as to prevent the resurgence of the plague, with the punishment being not allowed food that day if they did.

With the recent deadly epidemic still fresh in the people's minds, and a few made example of by being denied food, even the unruly peasants decided to strictly follow their lord's instructions.

Instead of just throwing out the filth into the streets, they would give their garbage to a sanitation unit set up by Alexander, consisting of a few hundred men, who would go into the city every day at dawn to collect all the waste produced, load them into huge horse-drawn carts and then bury it in a field several kilometers away from the city.

With all these done, finally, after ten days since making land, with the admission of new plague victims finally stopping, and the city relatively clean and tidy, Alexander called back the ship carrying the royals and then, with his entourage in tow officially made his way into the city of Zanzan.

As Alexander snaked his made through the narrow, winding streets on his way to his new home, the staggering amount of work that needed to be done started to dawn on him.

To Alexander, the city looked entirely dead, the drought, war, and plague having turned it into a rotting, festering carcass.

It was dirty and congested, with narrow, muddy, pothole-ridden roads, crumbling infrastructure such as dirty and contaminated wells and ramshackled marketplaces, and the ever-present dingy, dilapidated slums strewn all over the city.

These half-ruined structures of wood and straw could barely hold back the elements, with leaky roofs and cracked walls allowing free passage of the freezing winds and glacial waters through them, much to the dismay of their inhabitants.

Such exposure, coupled with little thick clothing and almost no heating in place caused sicknesses such as cold, fever, and hypothermia to be a constant companion of the citizens, reaping many lives and crippling many more.

The administration of the city had also collapsed completely, as anyone and everyone who had the means and method to leave the city had already done so, including all the nobles and their servants. who had left the city either with Amenheraft or when the plague hit, leaving the poor, weak, and defenseless to fend for themselves.

And so now chaos and disorder ruled the streets, with gangs and underground mercenaries fighting over the putrid corpse called Zanzan, as they clashed over territory, food, and water.

Lawlessness was endemic throughout the city as strongmen took whatever they could and if Alexander had come a few months later, the city called Zanzan might have been already turned into a ghost town.

Alexander had already sensed the existence of these gangs and other unsavory elements in the harbor, their prying eyes scanning him like rats, who would scurry off the moment Alexander would place his gaze on them, like cockroaches put under fire.

And although they had not taken any actions against him yet, Alexander had no illusion that they wouldn't.

They were probably weary of confronting the armed, veteran soldiers in an open ground like the harbor which wasn't their turf, and because Alexander hadn't yet expressed any hostility toward them.

Pasha Muazz had employed them as city guards to keep the people in check and they were likely hoping to land that cushy job with Alexander as well.

This wasn't anything uncommon as this was the same case in Adhan too and Alexander had even managed to form a great network there.

But the problem would occur when they would find out that Alexander had no intention of doing such things, when they would find out they were out of their job of exhorting and blackmailing the poor people, replaced by uniformed men called police officers, who did no such things.

It would be then that things were bound to get ugly.

'Camius and Cambyses will have their job cut out for them,' Alexander commented as he rode through the streets, sensing curious and even slightly hostile gazes from some of the surrounding crowd.

But although these rats were annoying, in Alexander's eyes they were really just small fries, as among the close to eighty thousand people in the city, forty belonged to him, and forty were harmless women and children and only a few hundred to at best a thousand were problematic men.

Alexander didn't know how they managed to escape conscription, but since almost every able-bodied man worked for him, anyone who didn't was a hostile entity.

Instead of these scum who had no idea who they were picking a fight with, Alexander was more worried about the amount of work he would have to do to revive the city.

From infrastructure projects such as roads sewage works, aqueducts, public baths, public schools, and million other things, to inventions like cement, blast furnace, paper, printing press, etc, to better agricultural techniques and new code of laws.

Alexander felt dizzy just thinking about it and these were just things he came up with off the top of his head.

And even just these were making it hard for Alexander to determine what to prioritize and what to hold off on.

It was at this moment he cursed his manpower shortage and even more cursed the agrarian society he was in which took ninety percent of his labor force as farmers just to feed the other ten percent.

'*Sigh*, I wish a day was forty-eight hours long,' Alexander lampooned, wishing his worker could work twice as hard, as he finally made it to his destination.