The Sword of Jupiter (Imperium #1) - Chapter 22

While the commanders went back to their camps to rest and prepare for the meeting that evening, Ky’s work continued. That afternoon he was meeting with the head tax collectors, who assigned tax districts to the workers who did the actual collection.

The Emperor wasn’t needed to add weight to what he said, since generally, the tax collectors were favorable to the man who appointed them to their position. Instead, he met up with Lurio, the man responsible for Roman finances. Ky headed across the imperial campus, as he was beginning to think of the complex of buildings holding the Emperor’s residence and the centers of governance for the Roman Empire, to the treasury building.

He found Lurio already there, with ten men gathered around. They all had slates where they were working on something, talking in hushed tones.

“Ky,” Lurio, said, standing and greeting him with the Roman style of forearm shake. “I have been teaching them the new numbers you showed me. I’ll say they were pretty skeptical at first, but once I walked them through what you showed me, how easy it is to add and subtract numbers and perform various functions, they were amazed. The idea of a number that stands for no value was particularly shocking, and it took some time for them to figure out its value.”

“Does anyone have any issues with them?”

“No,” one of the gathered men said. “It seemed so strange and useless when he first explained this system, but once we started using it, it’s amazing how easy this is to work with.”

“Yes. I expect it will be a big step in keeping better track of the empire’s finances. That’s the main reason I wanted to meet with you today. As of right now, you are all out of a job.”

Ky waited while the ten men erupted into shouts. He’d spent some time with the Emperor early that day strategizing how he would deal with the empire’s army of tax collectors. The biggest problem for Rome’s finances, besides the constant squeezing of taxable land by the Carthaginians, was the corruption among its civil servants. Nearly a third of every sestertius collected went into their pockets and not to the empire. As the government had weakened that corruption had only gotten worse. If Ky was going to build up and modernize the empire, he needed to fix its finance system.

“Enough!” Ky said, his voice cutting over the rest of the men. “Rome is hemorrhaging money, and much of it is finding its way into your pockets. This has to end. The old system will be no more. You might still find a way to serve the empire, and even enrich yourself, but it will be on our terms. Anyone who wants to stay and find out how their job may be earned back can stay. Anyone who is too offended at having their thievery pointed out may leave … now.”

Two of the men stormed out in a huff. Ky knew they would be problems down the road, but he needed to cut the bad apples quickly if he was going to turn the finances of Rome around in time.

“Good. All of you have your jobs back, but there are new rules. There will be no more pocketing of taxes, either through bribes paid to you to accept lower taxes or by marking owed taxes as lower and pocketing the difference, or any other scheme you can think of. We will be checking on you, and we will hang any man found to be stealing from the empire. There will be no bartering, no pardons, and no second chances.”

The assembled men all squirmed in their seats, but none spoke. Ky knew they were all guilty of lining their own pockets with tax revenues. In this time, that was almost expected and was unofficially counted as part of the collectors’ pay, making it the desired job to have. That didn’t mean that he was willing to put up with it, however.

Rome needed to transfer from being an ancient civilization, where corruption and graft were the norms, to a post-industrial revolution society where the graft wasn’t institutionalized and was generally frowned upon by the public. This would normally take a long time and be a slow process, but Ky didn’t have time to wait. That meant taking a more forceful approach.

“That is the stick, but … ” Ky paused, realizing that he had’t seen a carrot since coming to this time. A quick query of the AI’s database told him that carrots hadn’t made it to this part of the world yet, or at least not in his timeline.

“We also offer them a treat, instead,” Ky said, altering the age old addidge. “I know your wages were based on a percentage of what you brought in, which created infighting over who got more lucrative territories, and sometimes the urge to cross boundaries and poach on others’ territory. We will be changing the structure of how you are paid. You will each be paid a wage from the treasury itself, with bonuses set by how close you get to collecting a hundred percent of the taxes in your area, instead of pay being based on the amount of taxes collected. Once the new patent law is passed, this will include collecting taxes on the new government patents, which means areas that were previously lucrative, such as inside Devnum itself, will become more active. The new payment structure, however, will not change the amount of taxes you collect, so this shouldn’t matter. An important addition to this is that you will be required to keep detailed records. If your agents do not turn in the proper records for a territory, you will not be paid. We will still send out someone else to check the areas unreported, and I don’t think I need to explain what happens if we find the taxes were collected, but were not reported, do I?”

He looked at each man in turn, to make sure they understood that he was serious.

“I know you have questions, so now that my threats are out of the way, we can get down to details. What questions do you have?”

Ky spent the next several hours answering their questions. The majority seemed to revolve around how they would be paid, which was only natural. Once they found out more details of the new structure, however, they relaxed. Their previous system was a cutthroat business, literally. It wasn’t uncommon to find a tax collector in the gutter with their throat slit. The hard part was figuring out who did the cutting. Sometimes it was taxpayers upset about how much they paid or trying to avoid paying their taxes and other times it was another tax collector, trying to move in on a more lucrative territory.

The new system wasn’t perfect, and there was still going to be conflict. It did, however, eliminate the need for having a better-landed region as the main way to make money. It was also based on how much of the predicted taxes were turned in, which should motivate the tax collectors to be as thorough as possible while pocketing as little as possible.

There were still going to be times when a business or person would owe more in taxes than predicted, which will lead some collectors to attempt to pocket some of that difference, since it was over what they were expected to turn into the tax office. That is why Ky made them all understand there would be random audits by clerks, verifying what taxes were paid and looking at businesses’ records. He knew they wouldn’t catch all offenders, but after the first couple were hanged, it would keep the rest of the graft to at least a tolerable minimum.

The meeting with the collectors went much longer than Ky had expected, making him the last one to make it to his next meeting. They were gathered in the Emperor’s audience hall, with stools set out for each of the men to sit on, and the Emperor upon his dais, looking down on them.

Ky was certain none of the assembled men were oblivious to the Emperor’s not too subtle message with the arrangement.

“As Velius said, the situation is dire,” the Emperor was saying when Ky walked into the room. “Ahh, our Consul is here. Ky, Legates Velius and Aelius were just giving the newly arrived Legates an update on the current situation and everything that has happened since the last message they received. Ramirez also updated us on what we currently know about Carthaginian preparations, when we think they will attack, and what their forces will be. Ky has, of course, been receiving this information as it comes in. Now that he is here and everyone is up to speed, Ky will explain the changes he is preparing to make to the legions to expand our forces quickly and prepare us for the battle ahead of us. I want to make it clear; the Consul and I have discussed these decisions in length, and he has my full support on these measures. I’m sure you gentlemen will have some issues with this proposal, but I agree with him that this might be the only chance we have to survive the conflict ahead of us. Ky?”

“Thank you, Emperor,” Ky said, moving to stand in front of the dais, diagonal from the Emperor, so he could look at the assembled commanders. “Like the Emperor said, I’m sure some of what we’ve been planning has leaked out, and hopefully I can put your concerns to rest. We’ve spent the days since the battle looking at the situation and what we can do to prepare for what the Carthaginians will be sending towards us in the spring. Even with the additions of your legions, the number one problem we see is manpower, specifically, a lack of it. Losing Globulus’s legion was a blow, but even with them, we would be woefully outnumbered by the horde the Carthaginians are preparing. We need to find a way to increase our forces, and we have to do it in an incredibly short amount of time.”

“This is where you’re going to tell us you need to bring slaves and enemy soldiers into our ranks?” Pius, Legate of the second legion, said. “Swords at our backs, ready to stab us as soon as we turn to face the Carthaginians. We don’t need them. We’ve successfully had conscriptions in the past. Your plan is suicide.”

“How have those conscripts worked for you in the past? You’ve thrown them in as fodder, to be chewed up and spat out by your enemies, to gain position, or time, or tire your enemy. None of those will work against an army this size. No position or time will stop them, and a horde that size can roll over poorly armed conscripts with little trouble. You’d have to use almost all of the local population, including slaves, to even slow them down a little bit. If you win, where would that leave Devnum or the rest of Rome?”

“We’ve talked with him about his plans, and we think they can work,” Aelius said.

“You shouldn’t even be here. Had your Legate not caught a bad break, we’d have another senior man here,” Eborius, the Legate of the first legion, said.

“Eborius,” the Emperor said in a warning tone. “Aelius acquitted himself well during the battle of Devnum and has earned the thanks of the entire empire.”

“As you say, Emperor,” Eborius said, not looking sincere in the least.

“All that aside,” Ky said, trying to get through the meeting without it devolving into useless antagonism. “We will be offering incentives to both the imprisoned soldiers and slaves to hopefully ensure their loyalty. We aren’t fools, however. We will spread them out amongst the existing legions, to make it harder to organize any kind of trouble. Every century will get at most twenty new men, a combination of local slaves and conscripted prisoners. We will have several months to train with them if we start now, hopefully getting them ready enough to be effective when standing with experienced soldiers and officers.”

“Won’t all those extra men bloat our current logistics for each of our legions?” Auspex, the Legate of the third legion, asked.

“It would if that’s all we are going to do, but we plan to do more. We will be reforming the Fifth legion and adding at least one additional legion. Those twenty men will not be in addition to your existing soldiers, they will replace twenty trained men, who will move over to the new legions, along with a larger influx of slaves and conscripted soldiers.”

The three legates exploded in protest, each yelling over the other about the stupidity of the plan.

“Enough,” Ky yelled, his voice cutting over the rest of the assembled men like a thunderclap. “I understand your concerns. You’ve trained these men and they have served with your legions for a while now. They are, however, not your personal fiefdoms. If we are going to survive the coming battle, Rome’s armies will need to change. We are going to need new men, new arms, and new tactics if we are going to survive past the spring.”

“Rome has stood for hundreds of years and our armies are the best-trained soldiers in the world. We need nothing,” Eborius said.

“Rome’s armies have been defeated in the seven hills, defeated on the plains of Iberia, defeated on the sands of Egypt, and forced onto a small island that was only one corner of its former empire. What does Rome have now that makes you better able to withstand the Carthaginians than what you had then? Meanwhile, your enemies have defeated the Gauls, defeated the Persians, and defeated the Germanic tribes. They’ve incorporated their defeated enemies into their own armies while your own forces are a shadow of their former power. How do you propose defeating their horde when you couldn’t defeat Hannibal and his armies? Speeches and declarations of the power of Rome are fine and well, but they won’t win you victories.”

Eborius shook with rage and was about to launch into another explosion when Auspex interjected, his voice calm and even.

“You said there were other changes as well. Beyond the recruiting of captive soldiers and slaves, what else do you have planned?”

Ky held Eborius’s gaze even as he began answering Auspex. Ky had thought about this moment since he’d started planning the changes to the legions. While he had the support of the people around him now, he knew the new arrivals would find all of this hard to swallow. He’d hoped he could keep the only palatable change until later, but considering Eborius’s response, he decided to go with it for now.

“I want to make it clear that I’m not saying we don’t bring in conscripts. We’re going to need every able-bodied man we can on the field.”

“I thought you said those men would be wasted? Why change your mind so quickly?” Auspex asked.

“I haven’t changed my mind and I do think that putting conscripted soldiers on the front lines to absorb the shock of the enemy’s first blow is a waste of manpower. What I’m proposing is that the conscripts be used differently, specifically as archers. The Carthaginians have always believed in a heavier weight of arrows than what our legions normally employ.”

“It takes years to train a man to be effective with the bow. It’s why we’ve always used so few archers of our own, aside from the occasional mercenary band. Now you purpose to put them in the hands of bakers and cobblers? You will put more arrows into the backs of our own men than you will the Carthaginians,” Pius said.

“With the weapons you currently use, that is true, but one of the weapons I will be introducing will be a new form of arcuballista called a crossbow.”

“Arcuballista are temperamental and do not have the weight to punch through Carthaginian shields.”

“The ones you currently have, yes. That isn’t true of the new crossbows. They will have significantly more range than what you use now with a large increase in power. The first prototypes should be ready in a few weeks, and hopefully, once you see them you will see their merit. Above everything else, though, they are easy to learn to use. We can train conscripts in batches and make them at least passably proficient in just a few weeks. They won’t be ideal, but the majority of the conscripts should get to the point where they can fire without harming the soldiers in front of them.”

“Fine, so you will be using conscripts after all. What other changes are you planning on forcing on us?” Pius asked.

“Promotion and leadership will no longer be handed out by the Legate to his favorites or men whose family wields some kind of political favor. I’ve read the records of all of Rome’s battles for the last hundred years, and while you have won some stunning victories, poor leadership has led to humiliating defeats on more than one occasion. Rome no longer has the option to throw away a victory because the wrong man was in power. From now on, promotions will be submitted by a commander to a group appointed by the Emperor, who will look at a soldier’s record and why his commander believes he should be promoted. If they agree, only then will that soldier move up in the ranks. Promotions will be based on merit and ability, not on politics.”

“Does that include legates?” Auspex asked.

“Yes. I know your concern. Right now, a legate is responsible for the bulk of outfitting his legion, either from spoils or out of his own pocket. That has ended up in a system with legions equipment solely based on the financial stability of its Legate. That also will not stand. The empire will take over the responsibility of outfitting and equipping all legions. We will have clerks who keep track of the equipment to ensure any enterprising individual doesn’t decide to make some money on the side selling the empire’s property. This also means there will be no more need to take spoils. Sacking towns that you plan on conquering and controlling is self-defeating. You are simply abusing and leaving destitute people who you want to then rule. All you’re doing is setting up future partisans, ready to overthrow you as soon as an alternative becomes available. Roman legions will no longer be allowed to sack towns and steal from civilians. Harsh penalties will be given out to any legionnaire caught abusing civilians, Roman or otherwise. Any leaders found allowing this behavior will be harshly dealt with, up to the point of arrest and execution if the infractions are widespread enough.”

“Rome was built to rule, not coddle barbarians. You would turn us into Greeks, asking the permission of those we would dominate. You say you want to make us strong enough to stand up to the Carthaginians, and then you bring out the gelding knife to turn us into geldings. You may have been sent by the gods, but they were the gods of the Carthaginians, not Roman gods.”

Eborius and Pius, the legates of the first and second legions, along with their officers, stormed out of the meeting. Ky had expected things to go badly, but he had hoped the presence of the Emperor would keep them in line. So far, at least, he had held onto Auspex and his third legion, which was something. This was beginning to look like the situation with Globulus all over again, where he’d essentially lose two full legions in the coming battle, their legates refusing to coordinate with the rest of Rome’s forces.

Ky sighed and closed his eyes.

“I understand change is hard,” he said. “It is, however, necessary. The Carthaginians are a machine that eats civilizations to survive. If it stands still for even a moment, their whole civilization will collapse under their own weight. They rule through pain and fear, crushing anyone who doesn’t submit, and bleeding dry those who do. Is that what you would want for Rome? A small Roman elite standing upon the corpses of your defeated, ruling over hordes of slaves and vassals, constantly waiting on the watch for those who would fight back? How does that end?”

He turned away from the assembled men, looking at the Roman eagle on a stand behind the Emperor.

“In my peoples’ history, we’ve seen civilizations like that. None of them last. They are all pulled down in the end. Through internal corruption when they become too large to keep the wheels of government turning. Through internal conflict as conquered people try and regain their freedom. Through endless wars as those who are about to be conquered or just fear they might join together and fight back. It always ends in blood and ruin. You fight now for your very lives against a people just like that. Would you become them?”

He turned back to the assembled men, his voice hard.

“I’m not just trying to help you survive. I want to help Rome become what it could be, and what it almost once was. You could all be an example for the rest of the world, a beacon to all other civilizations, an example of a people aware of their great trust and responsibilities. That is what I am trying to help you build. I’ll have it known now, however, that I’ll have no part of Rome becoming a new Carthage. If that is the Rome you are all determined to have, I will move on and find another civilization to live with and help.”

All of the men were silent, looking at their hands, or feet, or each other.

“I’m sure the rest of our legates understand the great charge you have given them Ky. I for one, share your vision of what Rome could be, and any man who doesn’t has no place at the head of Rome’s legions. Please, continue with your description of the changes you’ve begun putting in place. We will deal with the others later.”

Ky turned and gave a slight bow of his head to the Emperor before continuing.

“Instead of men being paid through sacks and conquered land, or through payments out of their legate’s pocket, soldiers will be paid by the empire directly. Pay will be determined by rank and standardized across all legions. Slaves handed over to the legions will receive a much smaller pay, but after ten years of service they will receive their freedom. A price will be set for the cost of the slave, and the difference between the soldiers’ earnings and what the slave is paid will be set aside until the owner is paid that full price. Any money left over will be given to the slave upon their freedom, which they can then use, along with their pension, which will be the same as any other soldier, to begin a life without the need to build up new debts. This will only apply to slaves held in bondage at the time the new law is passed, since we wouldn’t want it to somehow encourage the new taking of slaves.”

“What do we do about people taking new slaves?” Aelius asked.

“Taking of slaves, new slaves will also be outlawed. There will be a series of laws about the taking of debt and how someone can get that back, but it will be limited. I’ve looked over numerous documented cases where someone is loaned money that the lender knew would never be able to be paid off, simply to allow them to take that person to court and have them placed in debt bondage. That stops. If a lender makes the poor decision to lend money to someone unlikely to pay it back, then they simply lose that money. I know that’s more a conversation I need to have with the Senate and not military commanders, but I want to make it clear there will be laws put in place that make the taking of new slaves impossible.”

“What about men taken in combat?”

“They will have a choice. They can either be held in captivity until such time as hostilities between our peoples have ended or be allowed to join the military under similar restrictions as slaves, although they would be allowed a full soldiers wage. After ten years, they can become Roman citizens or return to their homeland. Those who chose captivity will be fed and housed by the empire in safe, sanitary conditions. I don’t want a repeat of what I saw at the current internment camp.”

“That will become expensive,” Auspex said.

“I know. They will work for the empire to make up that cost, either on civil projects or in labor battalions for the army under guard. That, of course, only lasts until they can be returned to their homeland. It’s not a permanent condition.”

Ky paused again, looking at Auspex. He could see the Legate mulling over all the changes, at least considering them. The questions he’d asked so far suggested he’d keep an open mind, at least for now.

“I know these changes are all extreme, and I can appreciate how hard this is going to be for you and your compatriots to accept. I want to make it clear I’m not suggesting these just because of the forces currently mounted against us, although some of the changes are to help face that threat. The real goal is to bring the legions up to strength and ready to go beyond the current threat. If things go right, which is a long shot, I know, I hope we will be able to push the Carthaginians off Britannica all together. For that to happen there will be more changes. I don’t want to lie to you and make you think this is all the new ideas you will have to face. Rome is a long way from being ready to face the Carthaginian hordes it will surely face once we’ve defeated this latest army. I can promise you that I am only suggesting changes that I think are necessary, and I understand the strain it will put on every Roman.”

“I hope you’re right, because there are a lot more men out there like Eborius and Pius who will fight tooth and nail to maintain their power.”

“Then that will be one more challenge we must deal with,” Ky said.