Chapter 563: Chapter 547 – Fatal Mismanagement

“When a ruler stopped treating their people as people, so will their people stop treating them as something to be respected. This ended up poorly for said rulers, more often than not, as a crowd that had been riled up to the point of taking up arms against their ruler often had little to nothing to lose.” - Jacobini Sudraig, historian and sociologist from Levain, circa 392 FP.

“And this is what you get when people have nothing left to lose but their lives,” commented Aideen as they walked past several naked rotting corpses left strung up by the sides of the town’s gate.

 

They had left the Khanate and went further north to the Wasir Shahdom, a small nation on the north-western side of the northern region. The Shahdom had been in the throes of a civil conflict itself which only came to an end shortly before the three of them came to visit. It was a matter of fortuitous timing, as being embroiled in another conflict might have stretched their schedule again.

 

As for the conflict itself, the cause stemmed from how several generations of Shahs had been milking the life out of their people, inflicting them with high taxes so that the Shah could live in luxury despite the nation’s relative poorness. The previous generations of Shahs kept the taxes to a tolerable level, if oppressive, but the newest Shah, a spoiled brat who was crowned just three years ago, decided that it wasn’t enough.

 

He had raised the already absurd taxes by half again, which was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

 

That level of taxation was practically one that forced the peasantry to death, and they knew it. Rather than be forced to their deaths by their ruler, they rose up in arms and revolted, which was sparked by an incident where a tax collector got too heavy-handed while collecting taxes two years ago. That incident resulted in the whole village revolting, and their rebellion brought others to their banner in short order.

 

While the Shah held the only functional military in the nation, a good part of said military had family amongst the rebels, and rather than be forced to kill their own family, defected. As a result, the Shah’s military was down to half strength even before any fighting took place. The rebels swiftly gathered momentum and conquered most of the Shahdom within a single year, culminating in a siege of Wasir, the capital city itself.

 

That siege lasted a whole year as the Shah and his loyalists stubbornly refused to give up, whereas the rebels doggedly pressed on the attack as they too refused to stop when they were so close to victory. In the end, however, the food in the city ran out first, compared to the rebels who kept control of the rest of the Shahdom and could send their people to work the fields and harvest freely.

 

The young Shah and his ministers were paraded out of the city by surrendering soldiers to the jeers of the rebels, and were summarily sentenced to death by hanging. It was their very corpses that Aideen’s trio walked past as they entered the city proper, since the hanging was only weeks ago.

 

At present, the former rebels were still occupied by the attempt to decide how the nation – which was pending a rename – should go forward. Fortunately while there were many heated debates amongst themselves, they remained civil to one another and the chances of another war breaking out was minimal at best.

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All that information was given to Kino and Eilonwy by their contact in the Shahdom, who was a landowner that looked normal at a glance, but secretly owned land in many villages where part of her family resided. The woman – the family’s matriarch – had not directly involved herself with the rebellion, though her family donated food to support the rebel cause once they started to gain a footing for themselves.

 

Which left her family one that the rebels owed a debt of gratitude to. While other families who had been wealthy often used their wealth to look down upon others – most of whom also cozied up with the late Shah or some of his ministers – found their homes and belongings ransacked by the rebels in revenge, the matron’s family was left alone.

 

The rebels even sent some troops to keep her place safe during the more riotous parts of the upheaval.

 

Surprisingly enough, for a nation that had been ravaged by civil war just a year ago, most of the Shahdom was in good shape. The same could not be said of the capital, where the walls were gouged and ruined in many places even if it still held together. Given the relatively low resistance that the rebels faced until they reached the capital, most of the fighting in the civil war took place around the city itself.

 

And it showed.

 

When the three passed the capital’s cemetery they noticed how it was full of rather fresh graves, likely ones used to house all the dead that the war had resulted in. Many houses were damaged or showed signs of being ransacked. If her informant’s words were true, then the poorer houses were ransacked by the Shah’s own soldiers during the last stages of the siege, whereas the mansions were ransacked by the rebels after their victory.

 

The fate that the inhabitants met was the same, though. Their belongings were taken away, any who dared resist was killed on the spot, and it was already a blessing if the women and children had been left alone. In more than a few cases they had suffered under the hands of angry and frustrated soldiers, regardless which side those soldiers belonged to.

 

Much like other such cases, the war had brought out the worst in some people to the fore, a fact that just made Aideen sigh in disappointment. Kino and Eilonwy had at least seem similar scenes during the Antemeian campaign, so they weren’t as shocked as someone who faced the reality for the first time, but the fact that such things kept happening was still a disturbing thing for them.

 

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