THE TAX QUESTION · Book 2 of 25

EGYPT, ROME, THE ANDES

THE KING’S GRANARY

Why Did Ancient Governments Want Grain?

“A king can eat one dinner. So why did he want a mountain of barley?”

★ Ages 7+ ★

CHAPTER 1

The Burnt Handful

A river port on a grey morning. Six concrete towers, taller than the church, full of wheat.

A chute opens. Grain pours into the barge for four minutes, and the barge is full.

1A handful of burnt grain

Siri has walked past these towers a hundred times. Today, for no reason, she counts them.

Who needs that much wheat at once?

In the museum, a saucer of small black crumbs. Grain. Burnt. Thirteen centuries old.

Behind it, a photograph: a brick-lined pit deep enough to swallow a house. One of hundreds.

It's burnt cereal. Why is it in a glass case?

2The easy answer

Charlie turns up in the way he always does — just as an easy answer is being accepted.

Why grain, though? Why not gold?

Easy. They hadn't invented money yet.

Rome had coins for seven hundred years.

3The question changes

Two cases along: Roman silver, struck by the million. An empire that could count in coins.

And every summer that empire made Egypt pay its land tax in <b>wheat</b>, shipped across the sea.

And every summer that empire made Egypt pay its land tax in wheat, shipped across the sea.

Then they were just bad at money.

Siri tries the other end of the chain. A bakery. Bread, flour, wheat, a field. Nothing mysterious.

Sacks in the back room. Enough for a week. A bakery does not need a mountain.

A king can only eat one dinner.

So what is a mountain of grain for?

WORTH REMEMBERING

Rome had coined money for centuries and still took Egypt's land tax in wheat, sailing it across the Mediterranean in fleets. So “they had no money yet” cannot be the answer. States kept demanding grain long after they could have demanded silver. Something about grain itself was worth more to a government than metal was.

The notebook comes out on a bench by the water. Page one of a new question.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~They hadn't invented money yet.~~ WRONG — Rome had coins and STILL wanted Egypt's wheat, by the shipload. So: what can a mountain of grain do that a chest of silver can't? Charlie won't say. Obviously.

CHAPTER 2

What a King Cannot Eat

A temple granary in Egypt: a dozen domed silos in a walled yard, each one taller than a house.

Inside one of them, a slope of barley you could sink into. And there are eleven more.

Greed. He was hoarding it. Kings do that.

But look at the palace kitchen. Two ovens, a cook, a stack of baskets. It feeds a household.

1Follow the grain out, not in

A painted wooden model from a tomb: the silos, the scribes, the men with sacks. A whole system in miniature.

The important door is the way <b>out</b>. Grain leaves it, measured, every month, to people.

The important door is the way out. Grain leaves it, measured, every month, to people.

A walled village in the desert with no fields and no canal. Nobody here grows anything at all.

They cut the royal tombs: stone, lamplight, copper chisels. Skilled men, and they were paid.

Every month the donkeys came over the hill with the wages: emmer wheat and barley.

About 1150 BCE the ration was late. The workmen walked off and sat down behind the temple.

WORTH REMEMBERING

A papyrus now in Turin records what happened at Deir el-Medina in about 1150 BCE: the grain ration for the king's tomb builders was late, and the men stopped work and sat down. It is the earliest strike anybody wrote down. You cannot go on strike over food you grew yourself. You strike over a wage — and the wage was grain.

They went on strike? In ancient Egypt?

What does that tell you the grain was?

2A granary is a payroll

A Roman soldier drew a measure of wheat and ground it himself, in his tent group's hand mill.

The quarry gang: hauling stone, drinking from jars carried out to them. Fed.

The weaving shed: flax, looms, folded linen for the temple. Fed.

Dawn at the granary door. Not a pantry. A queue of people whose whole month depends on it.

WHO PAYS · WHO BENEFITS · THE GRANARY

🌾 Who pays?

Farming households, a share of every harvest, measured at the granary door.

🔨 Who benefits?

Everyone the state feeds: soldiers, quarrymen, scribes, weavers, tomb builders.

🔁 What behaviour changed?

Whole villages lived without a field, because the granary paid them.

⚠️ And then what?

A wage the state controls is a wage the state can be late with.

It isn't food. It's a hundred people's days.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~He was hoarding it.~~ A granary is a PAYROLL. Grain out of the door = a month of somebody's life, bought. So the tax isn't really grain at all. It's other people's time. (And when the door doesn't open, they sit down.)

CHAPTER 3

The Crop You Can Count

A river plain: rice and grain to the horizon, one raised road across it, a walled town.

The officials come twice a year, with a cart and a wooden measure. Everyone knows when.

So the hill villages are just too poor to bother with.

Up in the hills, houses scattered in the mist. Nobody has come here to collect anything.

They eat perfectly well. Yams and taro, lifted out of the ground on the day you want them.

Down on the plain the whole village cuts in the same week. It has no choice. Grain ripens together.

1What a collector can see

Then it sits in a heap, on an open floor, in one place, in daylight, for anyone to measure.

PAUSE & THINK

You collect the tax for a river kingdom. The plain grows grain: ripe in one week, heaped in the open, easy to measure. The hills grow roots: lifted any day you like, hidden in the soil, spoiling fast once dug. You have twenty carts and a hundred men. Where do you send them? And what happens to the hills if you never go at all?

A tuber does none of that. It waits underground, keeps for months there, and rots weeks after digging.

So you can't tax a yam.

You can. What would it cost you to try?

Grain divides into equal measures, keeps for years, and one donkey carries a family's whole tax.

The cart track ends where the forest starts. Beyond it, collecting costs more than it collects.

So people who wanted to be left alone farmed uphill, and grew things a measure cannot hold.

And on the plain, the countable crop spread — because that was the crop the rules were built around.

2Two ways out, and they are not the same

The tax picked the crop. Not the soil.

WORTH REMEMBERING

One historian's argument — argued, not settled — is that early states grew up where cereals did: grain ripens on a known date, above ground, in one place, and divides into equal measures. A family that moved uphill and grew roots was outside the rule. That is not the same thing as hiding a counted sack from a collector standing in front of you. Every tax system since has had to tell those two apart, and the line between them is where the arguments live.

Change what the rule can count, and you change what a whole country plants.

CHAPTER 4

The Man Who Sent a Statue

A case in the Egyptian gallery, four shelves deep, packed with small blue-green figures.

Each one holds two little hoes. Each one carries a seed basket on its back.

1Four hundred of them

Toys? Or servants, for the afterlife.

They came by the boxful, standing shoulder to shoulder. A rich burial held three hundred and sixty-five.

One for every day of the year.

A day of what?

The tomb paintings answer it. In the next world, the dead man ploughs, reaps and carries water.

2The spell around the legs

The marks around the figure's legs are a spell. Paraphrased: when the dead man is called to work —

— to farm the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand — the figure answers: <b>here I am</b>.

— to farm the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand — the figure answers: here I am.

Later sets add overseers too, roughly one for every ten workers, with a plain staff.

A worker for every day of the year, and foremen. Egyptians packed a whole labour gang for eternity.

Because in <i>this</i> life a scribe came to the village with a list, and picked men out of the line.

Because in this life a scribe came to the village with a list, and picked men out of the line.

And when the river covered the fields and nobody could farm, the state called in its days.

WORTH REMEMBERING

Spell six of the Book of the Dead is addressed to a small figure buried beside you. Paraphrased, it says: when the dead man is counted off for work in the next world, you shall answer in his place. The work it names is corvée — the labour tax: farming the fields, flooding the banks, carrying sand. Egyptians were so certain the state's list would find them that they packed a substitute for eternity.

So they sent a stand-in. Four hundred of them, in a painted box, beside the coffin.

3The click

They expected the tax to follow them into heaven.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~Little servants.~~ They're SUBSTITUTES — for the LABOUR TAX. One per day, plus foremen. Nobody buries a spare tax collector. They buried a spare TAXPAYER. Which means days were a tax you couldn't store, couldn't hide, and apparently couldn't die out of.

CHAPTER 5

Five Days of Your Life

A canal being cleared by hand: a line of men half a mile long, baskets going up the bank.

In a museum drawer, hundreds of broken pot chips, each with a few brush marks. Receipts.

1Receipts for work

So they were paid. Bread and beer, like the pyramid crews.

In Roman Egypt every man owed about five days a year on the dykes and canals. Every year.

Do them, and the scribe handed you a chip of pottery to prove it. Thousands of them survive.

Han China asked far more: roughly a month a year of work, and a spell of garrison duty.

2Or send somebody else

Frontier walls of rammed earth, tamped layer by layer inside wooden frames, by men who owed a month.

Unpaid work you can't refuse. That's slavery.

Is it? Who owed it, and for how long?

Free households owed it, the days were fixed — and you could pay a man to go instead of you.

Later commentators put the price at three hundred coins for a month of another man's back.

Which meant the households with coins stayed home.

And the households without them went, and left a field short-handed for a month.

PAUSE & THINK

You owe the state a month of work on the frontier wall. You may go yourself, or pay a fixed sum and send a man who needs the money. If everyone who can afford it pays, the wall still gets built and the poorest do all of it. If nobody is allowed to pay, some families lose a harvest. Which rule would you write? And what does your rule do to the price of a substitute?

That's the moment the tax turns into money.

WHO PAYS · WHO BENEFITS · THE LABOUR TAX

🧱 Who pays?

Every free household, in days — unless it can afford to send somebody else.

🌊 Who benefits?

Everyone behind the dyke, and a state with no cash to hire anyone.

🔁 What behaviour changed?

A market in substitutes appeared, and with it a price for a month of a life.

⚖️ And then what?

A tax anyone may buy out of stops landing where the rule aimed it.

The buy-out looks like a small door. There is an enormous room behind it.

Before it, the state owned your days. After it, the state would take your coins instead.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~Unpaid work = slavery.~~ Not the same thing: free households, a fixed number of days, and you could BUY YOUR WAY OUT. And that's the bit. The second a labour tax has a price, it is already money. Five days → three hundred coins → a tax office.

CHAPTER 6

The Storehouse That Bought Peace

A harbour cut into the coast in the shape of a hexagon, ringed with brick warehouses.

Inside: aisles of sacks on raised floors, so air runs under the grain and rats do not.

A port that size has to be a market.

But the ships arrive loaded and leave empty. From Alexandria. Every summer. For centuries.

1Nobody at the counter is paying

Porters run the sacks down the plank. A measurer checks every load into a wooden bucket.

In the city, a queue at a stone counter. Each man leaves with a measure of grain.

And nobody pays. About two hundred thousand citizens were on the list, each one with a token.

Was that kindness, or was it fear?

I won't answer that. Count the ships first.

Charlie's rule: he asks, he does not answer. Siri has started keeping score.

That's twice.

So she counts. It starts in a field: Egyptian farmers loading the land tax, in wheat, onto a barge.

WORTH REMEMBERING

Rome's grain supply — the annona — was a tax paid in wheat, shipped from Egypt and North Africa and handed out free to a fixed list of citizens in the capital. Who paid: farmers a thousand miles away. Who benefited: a city of about a million people, and whoever governed it. Generosity, or insurance against a hungry crowd? Roman writers argued for both, and the ships sailed either way.

Down the river to Alexandria, into the ships, across the sea, into those warehouses.

2Collected here, eaten there

North Africa sent wheat too. One ancient writer claimed Africa fed Rome eight months a year, Egypt four.

In Rome it became bread: donkeys turning stone mills, brick ovens, loaves by the thousand.

A million people in one city, most of them eating from fields they would never see.

It's collected where the wheat is. It's spent where the danger is.

WHO PAYS · WHO BENEFITS · ROME

🌾 Who pays?

Farming provinces — Egypt and North Africa — in wheat, not in coins.

🏛️ Who benefits?

Citizens on the list, the shippers paid to carry it, and a quiet capital.

🔁 What behaviour changed?

People moved to the city. Provinces planted wheat for a market they never saw.

⛵ And then what?

A city fed from overseas is only as safe as its ships and its harbour.

In a winter storm, or after a poor flood, the quay stood empty — and the city noticed in days.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

You govern the capital. The autumn fleet is three weeks late and the warehouses hold nine days of bread. You can (A) cut every ration by a third today; (B) buy grain from private traders at whatever they ask; (C) promise shippers a bonus to sail through the winter storms; (D) say nothing and hope. Which do you choose — and what does each one teach the traders to do next autumn?

CHAPTER 7

The Ox That Eats the Cargo

A wagon of wheat on a Roman road. Four oxen, one drover, and a long empty distance ahead.

At dusk the oxen are unyoked and fed — from the load. Every evening of the journey.

1Cheaper across a sea than across a county

Rome built the best roads in the world. Use the roads.

One ship carried what hundreds of wagons carried, with a crew of twenty and no oxen to feed.

A river was the next best thing: a barge, a towpath, a gang leaning into a rope.

A road over a pass was the worst of all: slow, steep, and a broken wheel a day from anywhere.

2The empire's real map

So roads are for armies. Not for wheat.

Mostly. What does that do to the tax?

Draw the sea, the rivers and the canals. That is where a grain tax can be collected at all.

On a quay, a state can weigh, count and load a whole province's harvest in a week.

Eighty miles inland with one cart track, the same harvest costs more to fetch than it is worth.

So the tax map is really a map of water.

Which is why the great grain harbours were lit, dredged and rebuilt by emperor after emperor.

WORTH REMEMBERING

A price list published across the Roman empire in 301 CE lets historians compare freight rates. Carting wheat a few hundred miles overland could roughly double what it cost; carrying it right across the Mediterranean by ship added only a small fraction. The list gives legal maximum prices rather than real ones — but the gap between land and water is far too large to be an accident. A grain tax could only be collected where water could carry it away.

And on the far side of the world, a state whose water was in the wrong place dug its own.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~Roads win.~~ Water wins, easily. Wheat is heavy and the ox eats the cargo. So an empire's tax reach = coasts + rivers + canals, and everything else is too far to be worth taking. Which raises a horrible thought: what if you MOVE the water?

CHAPTER 8

The Canal That Was a Tax

A waterway straight as a ruled line, running from the rice country north for a thousand miles.

It was dug by hand, in a few years, by conscripted villagers with hoes and shoulder baskets.

For trade. Obviously. Or the emperor's pleasure boat.

Watch what actually moves on it: grain barges, nose to tail, north, every year, under officials.

1A capital where no rice grows

Gates, capstans and two water levels, so a loaded barge could climb a country.

At Luoyang the tax grain went underground: a walled field of brick-lined pits, hundreds of them.

Cut one open — straw, clay, packed grain, a sealed lid. Dry, cool and dark, grain keeps for years.

They buried it? On purpose?

Where else would you put a year's harvest?

The capital sat in the dry north: ramparts, ministries, a garrison. Almost nothing grew near it.

The rice grew nine hundred miles south, in the flooded paddies of the Yangtze.

WORTH REMEMBERING

China's Grand Canal was joined into a single waterway under the Sui emperors between 605 and 609 CE, cut by conscripted labour on a scale the later histories describe in millions — a figure nobody can check. What it carried was the tax grain of the south, moving north to feed a capital that could not feed itself. A canal is what a state digs when its revenue is heavy and its power is somewhere else.

The canal is the tax. It's the tax, made of water.

2Dug by one tax, filled by another

Every barge was stopped, weighed and marked off at a table on the bank.

In 1971 excavators opened the pits. One still held its grain, burnt black, tonnes of it.

Towns grew along the cut, on quays that existed only because the tax grain stopped there.

The labour tax dug the channel. The channel carried the grain tax. Each one paid for the other.

THE STORY IN TIME

c. 486 BCE

A first canal is cut in eastern China to join the Yangtze to the Huai river.

605–609 CE

Sui emperors link the older cuts into one waterway from the rice south to the north.

c. 700 CE

Granaries at Luoyang hold the tax grain of an empire in hundreds of brick-lined pits.

1971

Excavators open those pits. One is still packed with grain, burnt black and centuries old.

CHAPTER 9

The Granary That Set the Price

A huge harvest. Grain heaped in every corner of the market, and hardly a buyer in sight.

Two years later: one small heap, a crowd pressing round it, and a price nobody can reach.

1The state goes shopping

It's cornering the market. Buy cheap, sell dear, keep the difference.

In 54 BCE a Han official proposed it: when grain is cheap, the state buys it and stores it.

State granaries went up in the provinces — raised floors, slotted walls, a guarded door.

People were buried with clay models of them. A full granary was the shape of safety.

PAUSE & THINK

You are the official. The harvest is enormous, the price has collapsed and farmers are letting grain rot because it will not pay to cart it. You can (A) buy the surplus into the state granary, (B) leave it alone, (C) buy only in the poorest districts, (D) lend grain now and take it back after next harvest. Every one of them helps somebody and costs somebody. Who, in each case?

But it is a profit. Buy low, sell high.

Who is on the other side of each trade?

2Two conditions

In the lean year the doors opened, and the state sold at a price it set, not the market's.

It needed clerks, bamboo slips, honest weights and a trustworthy man at every single door.

The farmer with a glut got a buyer. The family in a famine got a price they could pay.

When it worked. Sometimes the granary was empty. Sometimes it was full, two hundred miles from the hunger.

Then the doors opened onto nothing, and people walked.

Which is why the same idea was abolished and rebuilt, again and again, for two thousand years.

WORTH REMEMBERING

The ever-normal granary — buy when grain is cheap, sell when it is dear — was put to the Han court in 54 BCE and revived by dynasty after dynasty. At its best it turned a tax store into a price floor for farmers and a price ceiling for the hungry, and paid for itself. At its worst it was a very large building full of somebody's opportunity. The idea was never the hard part. The officials were.

It's a good idea that only works with good people.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~Cornering the market.~~ It's a PRICE MACHINE. Buy in the glut (farmer wins), sell in the famine (buyer wins). Needs TWO things at once: honest clerks, and the granary near the hunger. Two thousand years of people trying to hold both at the same time.

CHAPTER 10

The Empire With No Coins

A paved stone road along a mountainside high in the Andes, running for thousands of miles.

Above the plaza, five hundred round stone storehouses in ruled rows, like a barracks for food.

No coins, no writing, no market. So: no taxes.

A khipu: one thick cord with dozens hanging from it, each knotted in clusters at counted heights.

1Nobody paid anything

An accountant read it with his fingers. Knots for ones, tens, hundreds. A state's books, in string.

A city on a high plateau built around an enormous plaza — for gathering, not for buying.

But nobody paid anything!

Nobody paid a thing. What did they give?

Households owed the mit'a: a turn. So many days a year, working the state's own fields.

Or weaving. The state handed out the wool, and the household handed back the cloth.

The storehouses filled with folded cloth, maize, dried potatoes and jars: the work, kept as things.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Your household owes the state a turn: so many days a year in the state's fields, and you are fed and given drink on the days you work. There is no money in the empire, so nothing can be paid instead. Would you rather owe days, or owe a fifth of your own harvest? Which is worse in a bad year — and which is worse in a very good one?

Potatoes were frozen at night and trodden by day until they dried, and then they kept for years.

2The tax was the days

The same turn built the roads and the grass bridges — and rewove the bridges every year.

Walk the city and there is no market street at all. There is a plaza, and there are storehouses.

And on the days you worked, the state fed you and poured the maize beer. That was the deal.

The tax was never a thing. It was always the days.

WHO PAYS · WHO BENEFITS · THE ANDES

⛰️ Who pays?

Every household, in days of work and in cloth — never in coin, because there was none.

🏛️ Who benefits?

The state stores, the temples, the armies, and the work parties fed while they work.

🔁 What behaviour changed?

Households organised around their turn; the state organised around counting it.

❓ And then what?

A tax in days needs no money at all. So why did everyone else invent it?

When the Spanish came over the passes they found the storehouses full, and did not understand why.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~No coins = no taxes.~~ The Inca ran roads, armies and cities on a tax of DAYS, counted on knotted string. No money anywhere. So money is not what makes taxation possible. Which leaves the real question: why did every other state end up wanting coins?

CHAPTER 11

The Grain That Rots

The corner nobody opened in time: the grain dark, sprouting, and something living in it.

Under a lens, the same story smaller. Every grain with a neat round hole in it.

Fine. Send the grain to the army. Problem solved.

The army is on a frozen frontier, nine hundred miles from the nearest full granary.

Everything you send takes two months, needs an escort, and feeds its own mules on the way.

So the state does something odd. It melts metal, cuts blank discs and hammers them between dies.

1Pay them, then ask for it back

Payday. A clerk counts coins into each open hand. Light, dense, and they do not rot.

PAUSE & THINK

Your soldiers are a season's march away and you have a granary you cannot move. You can (A) send wagons of grain and lose much of it on the road, (B) buy grain near the frontier with silver, (C) let the soldiers take what they need from local farms, (D) pay them in coin and let them buy. Which keeps the army fed? Which keeps the farmers on your side? They are not the same answer.

Within a season a market grows outside the gate. Farmers arrive wanting those coins.

Pay the soldiers in your coin, then demand the tax back in it, and everybody must get some.

A hoard in a pot, buried and never lifted. Grain could never have been saved like that.

The towers by the water are still full. What has changed is who has to be trusted.

Warren walks this towpath most afternoons. He listens a long while before he says anything.

Coins beat grain. That's the whole story.

How long does a coin have to be trusted?

2Fifty years, not one harvest

Trust is a word. Grain is grain. I'd take the granary.

WORTH REMEMBERING

Grain is heavy, it spoils and rats find it. Metal is dense, it keeps and it divides. But the switch was not only convenience. A state that pays its soldiers in its own coin and then demands its taxes back in that same coin has given everybody a reason to want it — and a market appears wherever the soldiers are. Whether taxes made money or trade did is an old argument and not a settled one. What is clear is that the two grew up side by side.

Grain rots in a year. What rots a coin?

Nothing rots it. Only the people who make it.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

~~Coins beat grain.~~ Coins beat grain at TRAVELLING and at KEEPING. They lose badly at feeding anyone. Warren's question: how long must a coin be trusted? Grain is trusted for a year by anyone hungry. A coin has to be trusted by strangers, for decades. Still think I'd take the granary. Ask me again in Book 3.

Grain, animals, days, cloth, metal, coins, paper, a number on a screen. One ladder.

CHAPTER 12

So Why Grain?

Four objects on a tray: a sheaf of barley, a small blue figure, a knotted cord, a blank coin.

And a granary door at first light, which is where all four of them lead.

Siri lays the whole case out: Egypt, Rome, the hills, the canal, the pits, the mountain storehouses.

Grain, because grain buys days.

And what else is a day good for?

1The answer, and the price of it

A soldier eats. That is the whole reason a state can have one at all.

A canal digger eats. That is the whole reason a country can have canals.

In a famine the doors open, and the same store keeps a whole province alive.

And there are spears at the gate, because a full store is the most valuable thing for a hundred miles.

A mountain of grain is not wealth. It is a promise about other people's next twelve months.

It fed people and it controlled them.

What does fifty years of that build?

WORTH REMEMBERING

Ancient states wanted grain because grain is the one thing almost everybody produces: it ripens on a date, it keeps, it divides into equal measures, and above all it converts into other people's time. A full granary is a payroll for soldiers, builders and clerks. That is why the same store could save a province in a famine and hold it quiet in an ordinary year. It is the same building, and the same door.

She writes the answer she can defend, and then, underneath it, the thing she cannot settle.

SIRI'S NOTEBOOK

WHY GRAIN? Because grain = DAYS. Soldiers, diggers, scribes: they all eat first. Countable, storable, and nearly everyone grows some. WHAT I CAN'T SETTLE: the store that feeds a famine is the store that makes a city obey. Same door, same year. Is that a bargain or a grip? Working on it.

Every case in this book turned the same wheel. Draw it once, then run it backwards.

Back at the water the towers turn gold, and nobody walking past gives them a thought.

But somewhere a column is already on the road at dawn, and it will want breakfast for a year.

THE STORY IN TIME

c. 2500 BCE

Egyptian work gangs are fed from royal granaries while the flood covers their fields.

c. 1150 BCE

The king's tomb builders sit down at Deir el-Medina when the grain ration is late.

54 BCE

A Han official proposes granaries that buy grain when it is cheap and sell when it is dear.

c. 100 CE

Egyptian villagers collect a pottery receipt for five days' work on the dykes.

c. 1500 CE

Inca storehouses hold cloth, maize and dried potatoes — and not one coin.

New question. How much does an army actually eat?

A glimpse of the next book in the series

NEXT: THE PRICE OF AN EMPIRE

Siri found that a granary is a payroll: grain buys days, and days build canals, walls and tombs. Then she counted what a single army eats in a single year, and the mountain of grain looked small.

Book 3 · How Do You Pay for an Army?