Reincarnated to the Past 29: Thracian Overture (4) (Patreon)

Reincarnated to the Past
Chapter 29: Thracian Overture (4)

-VB-

City.

Cities.

Metropolis.

While the idea of cities was not young by any means, the idea on how to govern and maintain them had always been contested, changed, and cheated due to natural human behaviors, politics, environmental circumstances, and more.

Towards the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Iron Age, this had been worse for cities because what few cities that did survive the Bronze Age Collapse were not those with the best of sanitation or knowledge in such.

How many cities had sewage in this time and era?

This lack of sanitation in cities was one of the prime reasons as to why I chose to poison the city rather than assassinate its leaders.

Cities before the Sanitation Revolution existed because more people came into it than people in it died from illness and other sources. By poisoning the city’s wells, I was jeopardizing the city’s source of water.

Now, that may not mean much but Istria was a city right next to the sea and not next to any major freshwater bodies. If they wanted to get water, then they would have to drill new wells (timely and doesn’t solve the problem in the short term) or send people to get water from the two lakes outside of their city walls.

The lakes, Lake Nuntasi and Lake Histria, were freshwater lakes south and east of the city, respectively. They were, unfortunately for me, half a kilometer away at the closest point.

But I wasn’t intending on dehydrating the city to death. No, the manpower required to transport that vast quantities of water necessary to keep the city of Istria’s size running was impractical. An intra-city water-run was already taxing for most families and houses, and this was actually why I invested my time and effort to reduce the power that my tribe had to spend each day drawing water.

It was all a plan devised to - as Sun Tzu would say - defeat the enemy without engaging them once in battle.

The problem was what to do if Istria truly did begin to collapse under the weight of its own people, but that was a happy problem for me to solve once the city actually fell to me and my tribe.

For now, my hunters and I watched, waiting for any targets of opportunity that we could attack and scatter to make life in Istria hard.

“We’re setting fire to the forest around the lakes,” I declared imperiously before setting off.

-VB-

Deneclae threw up.

It was unbefitting of a ruler of Istria, but he could not help himself nor his body.

It’s been days since the water had been fouled, and his retinues still could not find the perpetrator behind this travesty!  He knew it had been a willful action, because it wasn’t just one well that had been fouled with sickness but all wells within the city and a few outside of it.

Their only source of water was now the lakes outside the city, but those were not safe by any means. One did not just drink lake water; they had to be boiled to cleanse the foul miasma and essence. Even then, one could never be too sure about lake water’s safety compared to that of a well.

The city only learned about the fouling days ago just as he did when elderly, men, women, and children all grew sick from drinking. While the city held vast supplies of diluted wine for safe drinking, it wouldn’t ever match the sheer quantity that the city needed on a daily basis.

He threw up again as his stomach rebelled against the foulness.

It’s been days since he first drank from the supposedly clean water of the well.

He was just relieved that he hadn’t been relieving himself to the point of death like some of the citizens had.

He threw up.

But he would not stop throwing up.

‘What did I and my city do to deserve this?!’ he thought vehemently. ‘What god did we anger?!’

“FIRE!”

His head snapped up, undignified with spittles and dribbles of his half-digested lunch on his chin and lips. “W-What?” he uttered as he stood up shakily. He pushed his way out of the urn room and -.

Smoke.

He smelled smoke.

“No,” he uttered in horror. “No no no no …!”

Despite his stomach screaming in pain, he hobbled out of the halls and sighed in relief; the city wasn’t on fire like he first thought.

But then his eyes caught sight of the fires that did burn, away from his walls… to the south … and east.

His eyes widened.

The fires were directly between his city and the lakes where they now drew their water.

“Tyrant!”

His guards came up. He paid them little attention as his mind churned away, trying to come up with a solution for this crisis. He turned to the guards after a minute. “Tell them to cut down all wheats close to the city! Everything must go!”

The guards grimaced. He and they all knew that it was so close to harvest. If the fire hit the farm fields…

But the city had to survive first for starvation to be an issue.

They saluted him with their left over their right shoulder and sped away to gather more men for the rush job to come.

Deneclae’s eyes turned back to the fire and the columns of black smoke that almost looked like a curtain covering a third of the sky he could see.

He threw up again.

-VB-

It took a week for the fire to die down, but by then, the fires had done the job I wanted them to do.

The ash from the fire had polluted the two lakes, and so they would be undrinkable for months to come.

The fire had also burned away at the unharvested crops, reducing Istria’s surrounding farmland by a fifth.

I watched in silence with my ever increasingly tense hunters as people left the city in a slow trickle. I ignored the wails of families crying over their ruined lives, the wails of mothers crying over the family members who’d died from the poison and sickness I spread, and what few specialized city dwellers that were here began to leave for other cities.

I turned to the hunters, who looked away from me.

“Intercept the artisans. Make sure they come with us as we head back to the tribe.”

My job here was done.

I would go back home, regroup with Johaken and the warriors he gathered, and come back to force a surrender from the city.

-VB-

A/N:
Only after I finished writing this story did I realize that what I had written in this chapter was more or less what happened in California, which is where I live. Fire and disease (COVID) are no joke here with hundreds of thousands of acres burned this year alone and thousands of new COVID cases popping up each day.
I guess I just channeled the frustration of your average Californian for this chapter, huh?