Chapter 5: The Arithmetic of Empire
The winter of 792 bled into a spring of mud and rumor. Aldric had hoped the Avar crisis—resolved, he insisted, by accident—might earn him the right to disappear back to his vineyards. Instead, Charlemagne had granted him a new title: *Comes Palatii*, Count of the Palace, a position that carried no fixed duties and thus, in the Emperor’s logic, no excuse for absence.
Aldric sat in his appointed chamber within the Aachen palace, staring at a wax tablet upon which the royal steward had scratched a list of petitions requiring the counts’ attention. There were eighty-three items. He had read the first three and then decided that sleep was a more productive use of his time.
The door banged open. Gerold the Saxon filled the frame, dripping rain and looking as though he had personally wrestled the storm and lost.
“The Emperor demands you attend the council,” Gerold said.
“The Emperor demands many things,” Aldric replied, not opening his eyes. “I have found that most of them are optional if one simply waits long enough.”
“He says it concerns the Saxon campaign.”
Aldric opened one eye. “I have been to the Saxon marches. I have seen the blood in the snow. I have no desire to see it again.”
“He also said,” Gerold continued, with the grim satisfaction of a man delivering a death sentence, “that you are to bring your ‘arithmetical tables’.”
Aldric sat up. His arithmetical tables—a half-finished system for calculating crop yields and supply requirements—had been a project born of boredom, not ambition. But the Emperor had seen them, and where Charlemagne saw usefulness, he saw chains.
“Burn them,” Aldric said.
“They are in the council chamber already.”
Aldric closed his eyes once more, and for a moment he allowed himself to imagine a world in which he had never left the Vosges, where his greatest challenge was whether to prune the vines in the second or third week of March. That world dissolved, as it always did, into the sound of boots on stone and the distant bellow of the Emperor’s voice demanding the presence of his most reluctant courtier.
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The council chamber was a study in contrasts: the crude wooden benches of the Frankish war-camp meeting the marble columns of a Roman past. Charlemagne sat at the head of the table, his massive frame dwarfing the silver crucifix that hung above him. His grey beard was trimmed short, his eyes bright and restless. To his right stood Alcuin of York, the scholar-abbot whose mind was as sharp as his tongue. To his left, Hildegard of Metz, who had arrived that morning from her abbey and who greeted Aldric with a smile that promised nothing but trouble.
“Count Aldric,” Charlemagne boomed. “You look well-rested. That is a problem.”
“I have been practicing idleness, Majesty. It is a discipline, like any other.”
“Then you will be pleased to learn that I have found a way for you to practice it more efficiently.” Charlemagne gestured to the wax tablets and parchment sheets spread across the table. “The Saxon campaigns have cost us more than gold. They have cost us men, and the Church has been slow to fill our ranks with prayers. I need a system to calculate how many supplies we require for a campaign of a given length, and how many men we can field without starving the realm.”
Aldric looked at the scattered papers. “You want me to count.”
“I want you to think. Alcuin tells me your tables could be applied to more than grain. To men. To horses. To the very weight of a siege train.”
Alcuin stepped forward, his thin face alight with scholarly enthusiasm. “The Count’s tables are ingenious. By tracking variables—distance, season, number of troops, availability of forage—one could predict supply requirements with remarkable accuracy.”
“One could also,” Hildegard interjected, her voice dry as old parchment, “predict the exact moment a kingdom’s resources will collapse. A useful tool for a conqueror. A dangerous one for a king who wishes to remain beloved.”
Charlemagne laughed, a sound like thunder rolling over hills. “Beloved! I am not beloved in Saxony, and I have ceased to care. I am *feared*, and fear requires logistics. Aldric, you will complete your tables within a fortnight. You will present them to me, and I will use them to plan the autumn campaign.”
Aldric felt the walls closing in. A fortnight. Fourteen days of arithmetic and calculation, of numbers that would translate into arrows and swords and the deaths of men he would never meet. He opened his mouth to refuse, to plead illness, to claim divine revelation that he was called to a life of contemplative silence—
“I have also,” Hildegard said, “arranged for the betrothal of young Princess Rotrude to Prince Beornrad of Mercia to be discussed at this council.”
Aldric’s mouth clicked shut. Rotrude. The princess had taken to visiting his chambers on the pretense of borrowing manuscripts, though she rarely read them. Instead, she would sit and watch him, asking questions about his vines, his books, his carefully cultivated laziness. She was dangerous in a way that Charlemagne was not; she did not demand, she observed. And observation, Aldric had learned, was the first step toward manipulation.
“The betrothal,” Charlemagne said, his voice flattening, “is not yet final. Beornrad is a boy. Rotrude is a woman grown. I have not decided.”
“Then perhaps,” Aldric said, seizing the thread, “your Majesty might spare a thought for the girl’s own wishes. She is clever. She might serve the realm better than a marriage to a distant prince.”
Charlemagne’s eyes narrowed. “You speak of my daughter as if she were a chess piece.”
“She is,” Aldric said. “We all are. I am merely suggesting that you consider moving her to a square that benefits the game.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Alcuin coughed. Hildegard smiled. And from the doorway, a voice like winter wind said, “How refreshing. A courtier who admits I am a piece.”
Rotrude stepped into the chamber, her auburn hair braided beneath a simple wimple, her green eyes missing nothing. She was seventeen, sharp as a new blade, and utterly unafraid of her father.
“Daughter,” Charlemagne said, not unkindly, “you should not be here.”
“I am always here, Father. I am merely less visible than the men who shout.” She looked at Aldric. “The Count speaks truth. I am a piece. But pieces, if played wisely, can win wars. Send me to Mercia, and I will be your eyes in a kingdom that may soon choose between you and the Danes. Keep me here, and I will be nothing but a distraction.”
Aldric watched the Emperor’s face. There was a deep, unreadable calculation there—the mind of a man who had conquered nations and built an empire from blood and faith. And for a fleeting moment, Aldric saw something else: a father who did not want to let go.
“We will speak of this later,” Charlemagne said. “For now, my lord Count, you have your fortnight. Use it wisely.”
The council dissolved into murmurs and shuffling feet. Aldric gathered his papers, feeling the weight of a task he had never wanted. Rotrude brushed past him, her hand grazing his sleeve.
“You spoke for me,” she said, so quietly only he could hear. “Why?”
“Because I know what it is to be trapped by other people’s plans,” Aldric said. “And because I suspect you are better at escaping them than I am.”
She smiled, and for a moment she looked almost dangerous. “I am. But I have decided to stay. For now. I want to see what you do with your numbers, Count Aldric. I suspect they will be more interesting than any war.”
She walked away, leaving Aldric standing alone in the emptying chamber. On the table, his discarded arithmetic had shifted, revealing the blank space where his life had once been.
A fortnight, he thought. Fourteen days to build a machine of calculation that would serve an empire. And then, perhaps, he could finally slip away.
But as he left the hall, he heard Alcuin’s voice behind him, calm and measured: “The Emperor has also asked me to begin drafting a letter to the Pope in Rome. It seems he wishes to discuss a crown.”
Aldric stopped. Rome. The gleaming city on the horizon. The promise—or the threat.
He walked on, but the words followed him like a shadow, and he knew, with a certainty that chilled him, that his fortnight of arithmetic was only the beginning of a much larger sum.