Chương 208: 205. Finances - Part I

"What about Feroy?" Gorsazo suggested.

"He had already gone with Pydaso to Cinran so he does know about the current prices of various things, and it's not easy for someone to fool him anyway."

"I was thinking about him as well," Kivamus agreed, "but I wanted to keep both him and Hudan at the manor, so that at least one of them would be here t o organise our defence even if the other one was out. But in this case Hudan would have to stay back at the manor even if I wanted to go to visit coal mines again. Is there any other guard who can be trusted with this?" Duvas thought for a moment.

"Kerel is the only other guard with enough experience to lead the caravan, but he is a warrior through and through. He simply wouldn't know how to negotiate with a merchant, but he can certainly be trusted to organise the defence in case you want to take Hudan with you to the coal mines again."

"This should work." Kivamus nodded.

"We can fully trust Feroy, and he might very well be able to extract a better price for us than any other guard anyway." He gazed at the windows for a moment.

"It's already late afternoon today, but let's plan to send him tomorrow morning."

"I will talk with the servants to load up two wagons with coal today," Duvas replied, "and with Madam Nerida to make some extra bread and hard tack for them. Although it won't be a very long trip, with it needing nearly a day and a half of journey on one side, that still means they would reach Kirnos the day after tomorrow in the evening. Give them two or three days to negotiate, especially if the Baron of Kirnos asks for too high of custom duties or border taxes.

That will mean they will need nearly another two days to return, for a total of a week." Kivamus nodded.

"It's better for them to pack for a ten day journey, just in case it takes longer. Unlike Cinran, we don't have a regular trade relationship with Kirnos, so it's not going to be easy to do this." He was thinking that this much preparation should be enough for a successful trip, but remembering the recently constructed smokehouse in the village, he asked, "Would Kirnos even have enough smoked fish there to sell to us? Do they even have a smokehouse there?"

"Of course," Duvas explained, "being located on the coast, they do have a smokehouse to sell some smoked fish to any visiting merchant ships. Although I don't think they would have enough ready for us to fill two wagons. Not at a reasonable price anyway."

"Let's just ask Feroy to buy the most he can on the first trip," Kivamus suggested.

"If it goes well, we can send him on more trips in the future - assuming there is enough of a demand for coal in Kirnos. Otherwise we just can't afford it until we start selling coal after winter." Once Duvas gave a nod in acceptance, Kivamus asked curiously, "How much tax do we need to pay in the spring, anyway?" He added after a moment of thought, "That reminds me, how much revenue did you earn from selling coal in the usual months?"

"It's good that you asked, I wanted to talk about this with you at some point. Give me a moment," the majordomo requested before he stood up and walked to an inner door, and exited the hall for a few minutes. Soon, he came back with what could only be termed as a ledger. Surprisingly, this was made of paper, instead of the parchment they normally used.

Noticing his gaze, Duvas explained, "The previous baron was very careful that his finances were kept well - that was the main reason he hired me in the first place - so we had bought a thick paper ledger from Cinran for this, despite its cost. Anyway, back to the topic." The majordomo took his seat again and tilted the ledger towards the light from the fireplace, and turned its pages one by one, until he seemingly reached where we wanted.

He began after looking through it for a moment, "I can give you our revenue and expense report from a summer month - before the untimely demise of the previous baron - when we were selling coal as usual, since after he was murdered by mercenaries, merchants stopped coming here and all my calculations became irrelevant."

"That's okay," Kivamus nodded.

"Just tell me about the numbers from an average month." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. The majordomo gave a nod and while moving a wrinkled finger over a column of numbers on the ledger, he began, "For this particular month in late summer, which was the seventh month of the year, we got around 491 gold as revenue." Duvas gazed at him for a moment.

"I am rounding up the numbers here, since you probably don't want to hear the exact number of silver and copper pieces we get for something." Once Kivamus gave a nod, he continued, "Obviously, most of it was from selling coal to the visiting merchants. Hmm..." He trailed a finger over the ledger again, until he seemed to find what he was looking for.

"It was 468 gold for this month, to be exact, which we had gained from selling 39 wagon loads of coal, which was a little lower than our usual sale of 40 wagon loads per month. The remaining 23 gold came from the custom duties the previous baron imposed on any merchants coming or going from Tiranat."

"Alright, so just under 500 gold was the average monthly revenue," Kivamus repeated.

"What about the manor's expenses in those months?"

"As you can guess," Duvas replied, "our biggest expense was paying the wages for the coal miners. At the previous baron's order, I used to pay 8 to 10 coppers a day to each male miner - depending on their daily output - and a few coppers lower to any women or children helping out there, since they did a lesser amount of physical work than the men." Kivamus didn't disturb him despite whatever expletives he wanted to say to the previous baron for so, so many things.

Gorsazo also seemed to be listening silently to the report. Duvas continued, "On average, each miner got around 25 days of work every month and after doing all the calculations, it had totalled out to around 221 gold as their wages for this month. Then there were the wages we paid to the manor servants, our maids, the grooms and the guards. That ranged from 8 coppers to 14 coppers a day depending on a person's duties.

However, we do provide food and lodging to all of them, so after deducting the share of that, we had paid 59 gold as their wages for this month." He added, while scratching his small white beard with one hand, "Apart from that, there were the much higher wages of up to 30 coppers a day for the previous guard captain, the head cook for the baron, Madam Nerida - who is the head maid, as well as myself, which totalled out to around 30 gold for this month, after deducting the expenses of food and lodging."

"Alright," Kivamus nodded.

"So it was 221 gold for the miners' wages, 59 gold for the servants, and 30 for the supervisors. That's a total of... 310 gold. Anything else to add in it?" Duvas nodded.

"For the forty people who lived in the manor at that time, we needed around six sacks of grain to feed all of us every month, which totalled to around 25 gold for this particular month, at the former rate of 4 gold and 2 silvers for each sack of wheat. Another 5 gold was used to buy other miscellaneous things like salt, tools, clothing etc, while we also paid around 5 gold to the carpenter and the blacksmith for any specialised repairing we needed them to do."

Kivamus nodded, recalling that the previous baron used to import all the grain and nearly every tool from Cinran so he could extract more custom duties from the merchants - supposedly to keep his costs low for buying new tools - as much of a circular logic as it was.

"So that's another 35 gold you spent for living expenses of the manor residents. So that's a total of 345 gold as the usual monthly expenses."

"That's accurate," the majordomo agreed.

"That only leaves the yearly taxes, which we have to give in a lump sum every autumn. In the last few years Count Cinran took 20% of the revenue generated by each baron under his domain as the taxes. It used to be lower in the past, but after a small raid on Cinran from some Binpaazi knights a couple of years ago, he raised it to the current rate."

Gorsazo spoke from his past knowledge, "Of course, a share of those taxes is passed upwards to the Duke of Ulriga - your father - who would be passing a smaller share of it further upwards to our old king in the capital Dorastiz. However, you know very well that these days your brothers are taking care of all the revenue and expenditure in the duchy instead of your father." Kivamus snorted.

"I am quite sure that my brothers aren't using any of that revenue for the well-being of the local people in Ulriga, that's for certain." He added, "By the way, why did you say the tax collector will come to Tiranat himself, when the previous baron always had to go to Cinran to pay the taxes there." Duvas shook his head.

"The previous baron certainly didn't have to go there. The Count always sends his tax collector to every baron under him - he is gaining a lot of gold from it after all - but our previous baron preferred spending more time in Cinran than he did here. So he took it as a good opportunity to travel to Cinran every autumn."

"That makes sense," Kivamus muttered. Suddenly, his mind clicked at the implications of that huge percentage, and he exclaimed, "Wait, that means we have to pay around 100 gold per month as the taxes?"