Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king

Chapter 368: The money of the land(1)

Chapter 368: The money of the land(1)

While, hundreds of kilometers away, men toiled in grim silence, stacking bodies into mass pyres—a monument to the night's bloody harvest—the man for whom they fought, bled, and would, at least for many, willingly die engaged in a pursuit far removed from the grim realities of war. 

Alpheo, the prince they revered, a man perched at the pinnacle of feudal hierarchy, was knelt upon the ground as if he were no different from a humble peasant. His fine garments bore the smudges of earth, his fingers caked with soil as he worked with an unusual focus. It was a strange sight —a man who commanded armies and carried the weight of a princedom upon his shoulders, crouching low and utterly absorbed, at looking while sniffing at the dirt upon his hand, checking to see how deep the worms were and how brown it was.

Among the members of the court, Alpheo was the most knowledgeable about agriculture—a strange claim to fame for a prince, perhaps, but one rooted in the peculiar circumstances of his origins.

He had spent the first fourteen years of his life in a remote small town nestled deep in the mountains of southern Italy. It was a place as far removed from grandeur as one could imagine, where life revolved around the relentless grind of tilling rocky soil, raising livestock, and agriculture.