Even an Eridu student with only a basic education could calculate this army's daily expenses. Even in feudal Europe, it would have been a figure that left many "dukes" and even "kings" dumbfounded. In this age of low productivity, no one but a centralized monarch like the Emperor could afford such costs.
Transport animals alone required more than three thousand warhorses for two thousand soldiers armed with lever-action rifles. The grain convoys that departed ahead of the army, tasked with delivering food and supplies to stations along the route on schedule—every three to four hundred kilometers, the Emperor had established a marching station responsible for resupplying the army and transporting goods—had brought over four thousand draft horses and oxen, along with more than two thousand carts traveling between the Mesopotamian Plain and the Sinai Peninsula.
The Emperor had mobilized more than ten thousand people for this war, many of whom had received a basic education in Eridu. Some had been children the Emperor bought from villages more than twenty years ago, while others were descendants of those children. They were the pillars supporting the reach of Eridu's power, and drawing them away had left Eridu's entire Administrative System and production system severely short of manpower. Not only that, the temple had produced the profits accumulated over twenty years of organizing traveling merchants and exploration teams. Even the wine sealed in pottery jars with clay within the temple had dwindled to one-tenth of its former stock. This ruby-colored sweet liquid, worth its weight in gold, had been sold to landlords across the Mesopotamian Plain and as far away as Egypt in exchange for the gold needed to purchase grain and copper ore.
Although he was not responsible for leading the army into battle, Captain Miller still felt the crushing weight of