Swiss Arms 58 (Patreon)

Swiss Arms

Chapter 58

-VB-

When we got back to Fluelaberg, I rummaged through the loot we gained to get some hint about who might have done sent mercenaries to raid my little mountain confederation.

Well, we found one.

“This is the sigil of the House of Wolfratshausen,” Henry said as he showed me a coat of arms that had a black wolf with long limbs and a long red tongue sticking out from a wolf’s head on top of a white background.

“I haven’t heard of that place at all,” I hummed while staring at the sigil.

“Well, there was a scandal a few years back where an innocent pilgrim was burnt at the stake,” he replied. “The pope heard about it and made the man a saint.”

I blinked as did a few others.

Isabella, who’d been by my right, clapped her hands once with a look of realization. “Oh, I heard about that! Wolfratshausen is that town?”

“Yes,” Henry muttered. “The town is under the rule of the House of Sallern, who as barons are pledged to the Duke of Upper Bavaria.”

“... This seems more and more like that the pesky dukes up there are trying to force the Compact under their thumb,” I hummed. “But they are going about it in a horrible way.”

Henry and Isabella looked at me with obvious confusion and with cues asking me to elaborate.

I shrugged. “Let’s say that you, Henry, wanted my lands.”

“Okay…?”

“How would you go about it?”

He frowned and closed his eyes. Obviously, he had seen much more of my land than some random duke over a hundred miles away. He’s personally been here before, he mentioned that, and was applying what he learned during his stay in my court and our brief bandit extermination excursion.

And then I just asked him how he would go about usurping me. It was a bold move, one that can be taken as an offense. He might not want to respond as well, because if he was truly thinking about attacking me, then answering my question would reveal things that I might improve to defend myself.

He took a deep breath in and turned to me but didn’t say anything for a moment.

I wondered what he was thinking about. Would he think that I would look down on him for thinking of contingencies?

… Maybe. Probably not, depending on what he was thinking about.

“You care for your people.”

“Yes.”

“Then since you are the biggest threat when it comes to the Compact, I will go out of my way to hurt you when you can’t hurt me back. It’ll be in peace times. I’ll cut off trade in and out of the valleys. That only will do significant damage to the point where you might not be able to keep enough of your people fed.”

I nodded. “That was one of the first things I thought up.”

Trade was important to the people here because as much as I helped the people, I couldn’t overcome the simple fact that we lived in a resource-poor and arable land-poor Alps. A lot of what people traded here was wool for food with coins involved in the middle. If trade were to be cut off…

At the lowest estimate, I might see a tenth of the people starve and half of them die. Another tenth might immigrate to find their livelihood elsewhere. Our major food import was from none other than Werdenberg, one of our enemies from the Unruly Year. It wouldn’t take too much poking for them to stop trading. Henry was also my neighbor to the west, who could direct any trade coming through Fluela Pass to Innsbruck instead, and merchants would go directly to Munich.

Trade from the south would pass by Chur, but why pass by there when they could go a little further west and reach Zurich instead?

In essence, the trade route I held was, at best, an accessory. It was important, yes, but it was neither the primary nor even the second choice.

But.

There was a but.

“No one would go for it,” I smiled.

He smiled back. “No. Unless I directly controlled all of the lands surrounding your Compact, everyone would come to trade for the porcelain, fine jewelry, and sugar.”

I had managed to make the Compact just that much important to trade, and a lot of the merchants that used to ignore our little corner of the Alps redirected their focus in hopes of getting themselves a tidy profit. Oh, I also made it well known that our supplies were limited, and thus the merchants were always on each other’s necks, instead of hounding me and my people to sell more.

More than that, I had gifted quite a number of lords to the west, northwest, and south. Henry was simply the latest lord to have received a gift from me.

That’s what I have been doing silently over the last half year. I have been training volunteer militia into elite rangers, making connections with lords beyond the Alps, especially in the Po Valley, and luring the other local powers to join the Compact. Three such powers were the Lordship of Belmont, the Lord of Misox, and the Abbey of Disentis. If those three joined me, then I would have secured a passage to one of the more well-traveled trade routes between Swabia and Northern Italy. Critically speaking, Disentis and Belmont were very keen on joining after being told that they would be given special trade rights to purchase my goods at low cost. If they joined the Compact, then the Compact would be right up against Uri and my birth town of Erstfeld.

(I wondered how mother would look like once she learns that the new up and coming regional power was headed by me of all people.)

All of it had been done on the down low after I got that letter from the chancellor of Upper Bavaria. I’ve been distracted a little bit lately, especially since nothing came out of that letter exchange (I assumed that the chancellor got the hint that perhaps he shouldn’t poke the bear that was the current emperor).

I, of course, wasn’t about to reveal that to Henry, though.

“The point,” I began. “Is that this kind of attack seems to be too … rough. Too straightforward. All it would take is half a dozen coat of arms stripped from the dead, and I would have the evidence necessary to ask the emperor to act against him. I don’t even need to be successful to have the duke isolated. He isn’t, after all, the only ruler of Upper Bavaria.”

Isabella hummed as she looked out of the glass window. The glass window in question wasn’t perfectly clear or consistent like the ones I had in my previous life, but it served to keep the heat in and give a clear view of the outside.

“Regardless, you now have the means to pursue something if you want to,” she added.

“And what could I pursue?” I asked. “Because honestly, I don’t think I can do anything that won’t backfire horribly not against me but the people of the Compact.”

“In my opinion,” Henry snorted. “You need to start caring less about the peasants. You think too much like a peasant. Worry about your position, family, and land before anything else, because without those, you are nothing.”

It was the same thing Isabella kept saying, and if I was just a regular joe with no power, I would have agreed and acted as such.

But… I wasn’t a regular joe, was I?

Or was it a regular Schmidt?

I looked at the two of them and smiled. It was obvious to them what caring meant but they didn’t know how to use it against someone. Perhaps they simply hadn’t thought of it. Or was it because it was a sin, one of the Ten Commandments?

“No, for someone like me, you turn my friends and family against me.”

The two of them looked at me in surprise that I was even sharing this. I was sharing this, though, because I was confident in my place in the hearts and minds of the Compact’s people. After all, what were the words of weary and dirty travelers compared to that of the local bishops, priests, town mayors, village chiefs, and the very man who fought by your side?

I didn’t elaborate further.

“Well, for now, it seems that I have a letter to write.”

“To whom?” Isabella asked as she and her cousin watched me rise up.

“Who but the emperor? Would he want to know who broke his peace? After all, he should have received my gift by now, so he would have me firmly in his memory.”

What was a jar of porcelain to me, aside from the cost of production and transportation, when I could have the ears of the emperor whose eyes would be blinded by the rare “Far East” porcelain?

‘I haven’t been silent these past months, merely quiet, for inevitabilities like these,’ I thought to myself while wondering just how badly I could paint the Dukes of Upper Bavaria without outright condemning their actions.

Because I’m mad.

I’m fucking pissed.

It’s one to hear about bandits hitting merchants passing through, it’s another when my people gets hit.

And if worst comes to worst, it wouldn’t be too hard for me to … silence some nobles.