Herald of Steel

Alexander came here to see how the preparation for the great 'feast' that was about to take place and was quite satisfied by what he saw.

All the people seemed to walk with purpose and determination and although there was some chaos, overall the situation seemed orderly and organized, albeit a bit noisy.

Carts full of grains and firewood were being transported to each cooking station by donkeys and then dumped right on the floor.

Buckets full of water were being taken out of the jacuzzi-type pools to fill the pots, while some had run out of their pool water and were now being serviced with barrels of water drawn by donkey carts.

After each batch was done, the earthen pot would be replaced by a similar-sized one, while the former would be covered with a piece of cloth, Alexander suspected them to be curtains, and then put on carts to be stored in the temple.

'Looks like Cam is doing well,' Alexander praised, as although he believed others might have done everything he was seeing right now, that covering the food was something only people close to Alexander whom he had taught them to do, would have followed.

After all, personal and dietary hygienes were very low among all strata of society in this time period.

Alexander, after looking around a bit, finally found his mark- Cambyses and went to greet her.

"So, how's it all going?" Alexander asked the woman who was talking to a servant about some water shortage.

"Alex, finished with the meeting?" Cambyses greeted him with a smile, while off-handedly gesturing to the servant to make himself scarce.

"It was good. I will tell you later," Alexander played down his victory with a flat tine and pursed lips.

And then asked about the preparation, "So, any problem with anything?"

Here Cambyses let out a tired sigh, "You dumped us with so much work without any warning. Honestly, it's overwhelming."

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have overslept," Alexander apologized while at the same time taking a dig at Cambyses, for which he was rewarded with s stinging pain on his foot as Cambyses stepped on it, sending a menacing look at Alexander.

She did not appreciate the fact that Alexander, after thoroughly enjoying himself with her and Ophenia, was now blaming them for his blunder.

"Easy tiger," Alexander only chuckled.

And then asked, "How much are you cooking?"

"When Menicus came to me, saying I was to lead the servants to cook enough food to feed four hundred thousand people in less than twenty-four hours, I thought it was a joke," Cambyses informed Alexander.

Then continued, "But other doing a bit of math, I figured it wasn't that bad. Well, it was bad but not THAT bad." She emphasized.

Cambyses afterward showed her working, "Four hundred thousand people will each eat around, talking generously, two hundred grams of grain. That's eighty tons. And since grain to water in porridge is around one is to two, that makes each serving six hundred grams or two hundred forty tons in total."

Cambyses further added, "We have ten thousand people working here, five thousand of our own, and an extra five thousand Menicus snatched from the slave dealers in the city. So that comes to twenty-four kilograms of food to be cooked per servant. Granted not all of them are cooking but still, this number is doable."

Alexander was very impressed with Menicus, for his quick thinking, as getting so much help within a few hours was no small task.

It required cunning, decisiveness, guts, and most of all experience.

Right after exiting the hallway, Meniscus understood the mammothness of the task, and so sent a phalanx unit into the city to get all the slave dealers to 'donate' their slaves to the palace for three days.

Some agreed immediately, and some needed some steel, pointy encouragement, but in the end, they all complied and within three hours, the palace had five thousand extra pairs of hands.

Alexander was also impressed by his pupil's mental math capacity, "Your math skills have not gotten rusty. Good,"

And this praise made Cambyses smile a bit.

Alexander then asked, "What are you cooking? And how much can you make in an hour?"

Cambyses gave the menu, "We decided to keep it real simple, Just water, grain, and salt. Thankfully, due to Adhan being literally next to a sea, the palace warehouse that mountains of the white stuff."

"As for how much in an hour, we are limited by how many pots we have to store the food. You see those pots?" Cambyses pointed to the huge cooking pots and said, "Each of those can feed a phalanx of around three hundred, So around a hundred kilograms. We have a total of sixty cooking stations and those pots are quickly filling up. If Heliptos did not send more from the nobles, we would have been in trouble." Cambyses revealed her bottleneck.

Alexander calculated that around two and a half thousand pots of similar size would be needed to store all the food, though, in reality, it would not be that much as the cooking would continue along with the service, meaning many pots will become free later on.

But still, that was a lot of lots.

Cambyses at last finished her speech by claiming, "The majority of the cooking time is taken just boiling water. So a batch takes around half an hour, so that's twelve tons an hour and thus we will be done in around twenty."

Alexander nodded approvingly at this speed as it meant that they would be done before dusk tomorrow, which was the deadline for the service to end.

So Alexander first praised Cambyses for a job well done while in his heart he thanked himself that he had such competent people working under him.

At first, he was quite afraid of the immense task he had undertaken, doubting if he had bitten more than he could chew, but due to Menicus's quick thinking, Cambyses's organizational power, and the servants' willingness to quickly obey orders, the apparently insurmountable task had become manageable.

'*Sigh*, no matter how able the king is, he can't do anything without an army of competent advisors,' Alexnader reminded themselves.

After praising Cambyse for her hard work, he instructed, "Cam, these servants will have to cook throughout the night and then till dusk tomorrow. There's no way any human being can work for so long. Feed half of them and get them to sleep. They will switch with the remaining at midnight."

"Half! We might not finish if we let so many men rest," Cambyses seemed reluctant to follow the orders.

But Alexander insisted, saying he will try to find some soldiers to pick up the slack.

And so Cambyses gave the order and soon some of the cooked porridge was being served as lunch to the servants.

But here, Alexander ran into an unexpected problem, where there were not enough bowls to serve the porridge on!

'*Sigh*, some problems are not apparent before one starts doing a job,' Akexnader lampooned, as, like any normal person, for this kind of event. he was more worried about cooking the food than serving it.

Then he quickly ordered them to get all the pottery in the palace and use them.

Alexander also thought of the problem if some of the people tomorrow are so poor that they don't even have a bowl to bring them with them.

And so he ordered all the extra pottery to be given to the temple to be used tomorrow in case of emergency.

This would, later on, bring an enraged Ptolomy to Alexander demanding to know why he was just giving away priceless china to filthy peasants, to which Alexander would respond with the convoluted reply of, "Your Majesty, this is to reduce the chance of revolts. These people are unlikely to riot knowing if Amenhearft wins and enters the city, all this precious stuff will be taken away."

Then Ptolomy would simply turn away and leave, leaving Alexander to wonder whether the former bought the lie or was just exasperated.

After Alexander had done all these, and dusk was being to approach, he asked a question that had slipped out of his mind, "By the way, Cam, how did you find this place?"

"It was the queen mother that told me about here," Cambyses revealed with a smile.

"Queen mother?" Alexander was first a bit surprised and then found it natural that that shrewd woman would intervene.

"Yeah, her. At first, we were going to do it in the courtyard in front of the palace." Cambyses revealed.

"But who knows where she heard it from, but after hearing of our plan, the queen mother sought me out and told me of this location, saying it was much closer to the temple due to an emergency backdoor between the palace and the temple, and that the place had a roof, so rain won't be a problem." Cambyses had a cheerful tone to her voice as she recalled this happy encounter.

"And then you found that the place also had drinkable water inside!" Alexander finished her sentence on her stead and got a nod of affirmation.

"Great, well, keep up the good work," Alexander praised Cambyses again, and then excused himself by claiming, "I will have to thank the queen mother myself."

With this done, he went to find the four women to tell them about their new habitat location.

'I wonder how each of the four will react? I'm particularly interested in seeing those twins' reactions,' Alexander whistled in his heart as he made his way up the stairway toward their room.