Chapter 212

Within three days she didn't get a moment's sleep, not because she was unwilling to delegate, but because there were indeed many matters that required her to arrange or supervise.

Her southern army entered the Winter Coming City yesterday afternoon, piling the spoils gained from the south directly onto wagons; the extravagant income attracted crowds of herdsmen and farmers from around the Winter Coming City to watch.

Like the previous batch of soldiers returning to the Winter Coming City, she also needed to arrange a victory feast for them and distribute the spoils. Over the past few days, most of her time has been spent tallying and appraising the spoils, verifying the recipients and the soldiers who died or were wounded.

It's not that she couldn't trust the civil officials; rather, her personal involvement and verification itself could ensure a considerable degree of fairness and clarity in numbers, and also dispel many doubts and suspicions.

Needless to say, among these northerners, her mathematical coordination ability far exceeds their imagination.

But numbers are just numbers; the actual situation is far more complicated than she thought.

The allocation ratios differ among officer groups, between the dead and wounded versus healthy surviving soldiers, and for warriors who participated in multiple combats. Consequently, she must evaluate and calculate the situation of each of the several thousand people who followed her south.

Considering these northerners' loud voices and quarrelsome habits, she will not allow any link to go wrong or appear unfair.

Most of her time is consumed by this.

Besides distributing the spoils, there are also condolence payments that need to be "delivered"; she can only be glad that, this time going south, everyone came from the Shi Ta Ke direct jurisdiction and her loyal retinue.

For those needing condolences, she can only put some on account, because there is literally no next‑of‑kin information (they left none when going south); for the others, she must arrange staff to deliver the condolence information or directly send the condolence money.

She wants the clerks to produce records and ledgers, but there are too few clerks, and the few capable ones are not very capable.

Conducting such "training" for them also took considerable time.

White Harbor sent out a five‑hundred‑strong troop and accounting personnel for these spoils.

The White Harbor army escorted hundreds of wagons, each piled full of silver coins and copper stars, in the name of the "North Bank" to monetize items from the southern spoils that are hard to distribute, including gold.

The accounting personnel strongly guaranteed her ideas and the implementation of the rules set earlier.

Besides troops and service staff, those coming from White Harbor also included a large number of traders who arrived in succession. The traders carried goods to exchange the soldiers' earned cash for the supplies they needed.

Most soldiers chose furs and grain—grain prices were so high that Meiyi had to release Winter Coming City's reserves to apply appropriate pressure.

But the merchants brought not only furs and grain, but also childish toys and shoddy handicrafts; Meiyi didn't know why any soldier would be willing to spend money on these……

Monetizing these spoils is also extremely tedious. Some of the military spoils, such as warhorses, armor, barding, and shields, are reclaimed uniformly by the Winter Coming City—because too many items have already been distributed, they must be traded back and forth, resulting in utter chaos.

She feels that in the next battle, it should be stated in advance that certain specific spoils can belong only to the Winter Coming City or the commanding family.

This battle and the ensuing affairs made Meiyi discover that so‑called fairness can only be maintained within proper limits; otherwise it cannot be carried out at all, and the officials responsible for execution are unwilling to cooperate, causing distribution efficiency to drop as well.

Many soldiers complained that the distribution was too slow.

She feels that, if she is willing to sum up, she could almost discover from it problems that would not fit on ten sheets of parchment—this is practically the kind of issue that only a study of management or archival science could explain and provide a solution for.

Some of these have already been turned into concrete requirements: each squad's officer must compile his unit's roster according to a set rule, record it, and then report upward for aggregation into a master list. This also requires setting up a separate officer register.

The officer register is kept by her personally, while the squad registers can only be handled by her subordinate clerks, because most squad officers are illiterate.

To encourage soldiers to study, she announced that those who can write will be given priority for promotion and ennoblement, but it seems to have attracted no attention or discussion—this is the most discouraging point.

Some detailed requirements in the military construction have already annoyed the participating Earl Glover, so Meiyi can only demand that the Winter Coming City troops comply.

Chaplains and scholars from the Scholar City have provided her with much help in drafting the rules.

In short, through this busy practice she gradually realized the fundamental reason soldiers need tribalization: the presumed higher‑level management style and its corresponding management foundation cannot support a more efficient organizational form, so she can only rely on the existing feudal system.

This is a problem of organizational form, and also of goals.

She already knows that she cannot make every soldier understand why they fight, but she feels that at least she can let them know that even if they sacrifice, they will not be forgotten, and distributing spoils to the heirs of the living and the dead is the best way to express that.

Dividing the wealth is troublesome but at least makes everyone happy; however, managing the surrounding markets and soldiers' camps leaves only trouble.

The soldiers recruited from the Winter Coming City and the auxiliary troops were stationed in four large camps surrounding the Winter Coming City; the camps' outer perimeter was built of rough stone, with anti‑cavalry obstacles and ditches piled up; inside the camps were set up horse sheds and tents, and to guard against wind and snow and for watch‑keeping, stone walls and platforms were erected—it was practically like building a small town.

Outside the two large camps, they dug the frozen soil and, imitating a mole‑rat village, constructed a small underground dwelling facility, mainly inhabited by the soldiers recruited from the banks of the White Blade River.

During the day, she spends most of her time inspecting these camps, supplying appropriate materials according to the soldiers' feedback, and preparing in advance for blizzards—if the snow were as high as the experienced northerners say, taller than the Winter Coming City's walls, she feels no one could survive such a "weight" except in earthen caves; obviously, most of the Winter Coming City's usable area has no underground space, so this possibility hardly needs consideration.

The trouble here is that, before they voice their opinions, you never know which are sensible and which are deliberately disruptive or aimed at guarding against extremely low‑probability extreme events.

As the troops settled in and the camps were pre‑emptively relocated, her grain stores dwindled day by day. She and part of the accounting staff spent much time tallying the remaining food and other supplies; the final result is not yet in, but judging by the present situation it cannot exceed one year.

A graver situation is that the Winter Coming City now has about sixty‑three hundred warhorses; to maintain the horses' combat effectiveness, human rations must be diverted to the horses…… This is equivalent to adding fifty‑to‑sixty thousand mouths to feed, while their stores can sustain only as long as provisions for forty thousand people would last.

White Harbor continues to purchase grain from overseas, but the war drags on worldwide, grain prices remain high, and she feels that if the war lasts just one year, not only will the Winter Coming City's grain reserves be exhausted, but all of her gold and treasures will be consumed as well.

Grain almost decides that a long‑term defensive strategy against Bo Dun is utterly infeasible; she must defeat Bo Dun in a relatively short time and seize his grain…… But what good would that do? The opponent's required provisions for people and horses are no less than hers, and he cannot have any other grain income; even if Lu Si Bo Dun were fully prepared, he could not feed the entire North.

Once winter lasts more than a year, she cannot imagine what consequences would arise.

She cannot help but think of the Bu La Fu Si people's saying that their warehouses are piled full of grain.

She also has to calm the emotionally overwrought Great Qiongen Anbo, Harryangka Shi Ta Ke, and the other liberated prisoners, and explain the current strategy to him. But that was useless; yesterday afternoon on the drill ground she harshly reprimanded Great Qiongen, hoping that being beaten by a woman's wooden stick would calm him a little.

Among the prisoners she rescued from the south were also many nobles of the Fei Lin Te, Lai Si Wei Er, Da Si Ding, and Shi Tao families; some returned to their fiefdoms, but others voluntarily came back to the Winter Coming City.

Perhaps you would think that the prisoners who voluntarily returned to the Winter Coming City would be high‑spirited, remaining loyal and diligent—Meiyi thought so—but evidently, the hostile situation between the Winter Coming City and their families affected their performance; it is not that they regretted their choice, but rather that, staying in the Winter Coming City, they constantly encountered discrimination and ridicule.

She had no good remedy, only to constantly rebuke troublemaking officers and console these "wounded" defectors.

There were also some good things; in the Winter Coming City she awaited the delivery of the "prisoners", remains, and ice promised by the Son of Heaven.

Zhen Ni Pu Er had grown taller but also thinner; after returning to the Winter Coming City she had been crying almost nonstop—Rui Ka Pu Er kept blaming her for why she wouldn't stop crying—as a close friend of her sister Shan Sha, Meiyi also had to set aside time to grudgingly hug her, offer a little comfort, and treat it as a preferential benefit for the orphans of the Winter Coming City's fallen.

Ice remained just Ice; Meiyi felt that this Valyrian two‑handed greatsword might be the only one of its kind in the whole world—it is almost twice as wide as passion and one and a half times as long. Perhaps only passion and heat together could match its weight……

As an executioner's sword it is truly a waste, but for the time being she cannot think of any use for this huge blade, so she tossed it into her bedroom and hung it on the wall as decoration.