The Age of the Sword
It was truly a shame, but supporting the Avignon peasant rebellion with everything I had was simply impossible.
The previous Count of Avignon, that wicked heretic, and his son who ordered the tax hikes were bastards who absolutely deserved to die by pitchfork. But me joining that rebellion myself would just be suicide.
This was the age of knights, and Avignon could never become the heart of a revolution.
Even if I declared the revival of the Vesta faith and threw every scrap of my modern knowledge into supporting the rebels, the only result would be that the chaos in Avignon dragged on a little longer.
I also had no idea how our taciturn goddess would take her Saintess joining a rebellion.
Therefore, the full-intervention card was off the table.
Stepping into that mess and trying to steer the war in the direction I wanted would be not only excessively difficult, but dangerous as well.
The greatest favor I could grant them was minimizing the number of people who would die in the postwar cleanup.
"...Saintess? Didn't you say you would only intervene to the extent that it wouldn't be dangerous...?"
"Yes. I did, didn't I?"
"Then what about that sack of gold coins you're holding..."
But what on earth was this sister talking about?
Political maneuvering to adjust the balance of power was far safer than the Vesta Order throwing itself into full-scale war, wasn't it?
This way, only I put myself at risk. The latter would require all five of us to stake our lives.
No matter how reckless I was, I wasn't enough of a scumbag to gamble with other people's lives, so I had planned to settle for this much. If even this was too much, then what the hell was I supposed to do?
Did they think rescuing people in a civil war would be easy? To save even one more person, of course you had to run around on your own two feet.
"Bribes are meant to be used for times like this, aren't they?"
The detestable memories of my past life stirred me awake.
The will of my annoying senior moved me.
Her trajectory, more brilliant than anything I had ever seen, became a milestone guiding my steps toward the ideal.
...Well, I didn't have the courage to burn my life for complete strangers the way that crazy philanthropist had.
But this kind of behind-the-scenes work was my specialty, so I had no choice but to do my best and show what I could do.
"First, let's bribe Count Montpellier. We have plenty of military funds, so no need to worry."
I grinned, holding a pouch containing thirty gold coins.
The first target was our emperor-wannabe uncle.
It was obvious what he wanted, so shall I shake him up a bit?
Our greedy Count had only one goal.
The throne of France.
To drag the most noble person in this country down to the bottom, and snatch the crown from his head.
And to achieve that purpose, military force was needed.
Overwhelming force to crush the royal guards who would defend the royal family to the death, and to make even the local lords accept a dynastic change.
But Count Montpellier did not have that kind of power.
This was not a matter of ability, but of weight class.
He was not some duke or the king of another country. How could a mere count possibly possess the military strength to overwhelm an entire kingdom?
Therefore the Count needed reliable allies, but... unfortunately, the Avignon Peasant Republic could never be a candidate.
How could the rioters who had harvested the necks of nobles and declared the founding of a republic become founding contributors of a Montpellier dynasty?
If anything, if Count Montpellier joined hands with the royal family to suppress the rebellion in Avignon, that might be one thing. But a setup where nobles and rioters joined hands to strike the royal family was hard to come by no matter how you looked at it.
And with a peasant republic having sprung up right next door, he could not simply focus solely on plotting rebellion either.
Therefore, the Peasant Republic had to be suppressed.
Even if Count Montpellier maintained neutrality, those people had no way to survive.
How the hell was I supposed to save idiots who had drawn aggro like revolutionary France without even being revolutionary France?
If at least the Italian peninsula had been unified, there might have been a way to scrape by as a buffer state. But unfortunately those pasta-inhalers were content lying around at the city-state level.
Serfs could not defeat knights.
The Count of Avignon had gotten his neck taken because he was the biggest idiot among idiots. If a lord seriously organized a suppression force, the peasant rebels of this era would be swept away without so much as a squeak.
Even if I goaded Count Montpellier into taking the side of the Peasant Republic, it would only mean the neighboring lords got one more count's territory to divide among themselves instead of one.
"The disturbance in the neighboring territory has finally gone too far."
So we would suppress it.
I would push Count Montpellier's back to destroy the Peasant Republic, and feed him its remains to increase his weight class.
The land the Count did not take, we would distribute to neighboring lords to pull them into alliance.
How many feudal nobles would sincerely swear loyalty to a king who had neither Paris nor the protection of the Order?
If we tore apart an entire count's territory and divided it up, we could pull them into the usurpation without any problem.
"It is an undeniable sin of the Avignon count's house that they ruined the farming that is the lifeline of the common people and failed even to look after their suffering. But even so, if they go around stirring up a bloodbath like that, how are they any different from a band of bandits? We must correct that terrible chaos as soon as possible and look after the lives of the innocent people."
But I was the Saintess of the Vesta Order, who had to check the nobles and serve as the guardian of the people.
Even if it was a private setting, I could not openly recommend scheming to others.
So the justification I had squeezed out was the rebels' indiscriminate slaughter.
And the necessity of maintaining public order through full intervention.
Honestly, even thinking about it myself, it was a nauseating excuse.
If a lord went around salting the fields, shouldn't he have nothing to say even if he got dismembered beyond merely having his neck cut?
Of course the rebels who rose up against noble tyranny running around committing atrocities against civilians was something that had to be stopped... but whether our noble lords had the right to say such things was another matter entirely.
Weren't these the same men who, until the Count of Avignon died, had been blinded by nothing but land greed?
Even now they were clearly only interested in protecting their own necks rather than the suffering of innocent people, so giving these bastards the justification of restoring order made my stomach turn.
If at least the situation in Avignon had been obviously the worst, I could have consoled myself that this method, if not the best, was the least bad. But Avignon was not that much of a mess right now, was it?
It was only natural that rebels who had risen up sporadically without a proper leadership could not be controlled.
Once the military force was unified and the founding declared, public order would gradually recover even if left alone. So if we charged in now under the pretext of restoring order, wouldn't it just end up impoverishing the people's livelihood instead?
"...Saintess, surely you don't mean—"
"Yes. I hope Your Lordship will step forward personally and take in the pitiful people."
But it had to be cut off.
Getting caught up in useless compassion and staking lives on an impossible gamble would only increase the victims.
Right now, focusing on reducing the number of victims even by using dirty methods was the right thing to do.
"The Avignon count's house has lost the qualification to rule that land. The nobles who are just drooling over it are the same. The rioters calling themselves a republic never had the qualification from the start."
"Then."
"Yes. In the end, only Your Lordship. Only Your Lordship can suppress those greedy pigs and starving rioters and bring peace and stability to Avignon."
I sang his praises without even wetting my lips.
That Avignon no longer had a future, and Count Montpellier intervening personally was the only hope.
Of course the Count had already been thinking something similar to me.
There was no way a feudal noble greedy enough to aim for the throne would simply sit and watch a peasant rebellion that had broken out in the neighboring territory.
He would have been preparing to march out even before I brought up the topic, and would already have planned how to dispose of the Avignon count's territory after destroying the Peasant Republic.
And that method of disposal would, with very high probability, be similar to what I had thought.
"So please march out for the great cause. End the terrible chaos of Avignon, and seize the loyal soldiers and fertile lands that will help your great enterprise."
Then what meaning did this conversation even have?
This was groundwork.
Groundwork to exercise influence in the postwar cleanup after the rebellion was suppressed.
I had no intention of directly participating in Count Montpellier's suppression of the rebels, nor of providing any great support for his war.
I did not even have the capacity for that in the first place.
How could a pauper with just two bodyguards claim a share of the credit in a noble lord's war?
But if I recommended marching out while giving him a plausible justification like this, after suppressing the rebels I could exercise influence under the pretext of giving advice in the postwar cleanup.
Influence obtained with a three-inch tongue was not that great, but I did not plan to make unreasonable demands either.
There was only one thing I wanted to demand of him.
Mercy.
Since the Count of Avignon had been a heinous criminal who ruined the people's lives by immersing himself in heresy, wouldn't it be good to show mercy to the lambs who had joined the rebellion without knowing better? That was what I planned to propose.
Anyway, when preparing to usurp the throne, emphasizing the sanctity of the social order would just be self-contradiction, wouldn't it?
I had already laid the groundwork with talk of the people's will being heaven's will and so on, so if I insisted that to secure manpower for the rebellion we had to cover up the past and move on, Count Montpellier would at least pretend to listen.
"And here, this is a token of sincerity that the city's influential people entrusted to me. They said to be sure to deliver it to Your Lordship."
Then wasn't the bribe unnecessary?
That was right.
But strictly speaking, this was not a bribe.
It was evidence that forces in the city of Montpellier who rejected the Count's influence had approached me.
Now Count Montpellier would hold a departure ceremony right in front of the city walls.
And he would do it dressed in gleaming armor, splendidly.
That was right.
With a mere three thousand florins, providing the citizens with an amazing spectacle!
As expected, the goddess choosing me as Saintess had been the right choice a hundred times, a thousand times over.
In this boring era where the only entertainment was idle chatter, attracting a large-scale event for the citizens — what a wonderful good deed this was!
It was absolutely not about instigating a show of force aimed at the spinners' guild and the loan shark king.
Even the loan shark uncle who would bear the full brunt of the Count's checks would smile contentedly if he learned that his money had been used for something like this.