"Mahmud!" cried the Archbishop of Tibet, Norzang Sonam, on yakback, as his voice echoed throughout the snow-laden mountains of Koch. "Oh, Mahmud!"
"What?" growled the former and very short-reigned King of Bengal, Mahmud II, as he crawled out of the snow trench that was now his home. His vestments, once regal, were long tattered. His sword, once leading and inspiring rebel armies, was now rusted and brittle. And he himself didn't look so good either.
"Oh I just wanted to talk, Mahmud. Well not really talk. More like demand, maybe a little threaten, you know?"
By now Mahmud II was out of the trench and flanked by three of his soldiers, who were in the same terrible shape that he was, if not worse.
"Look," he said with a distinct tiredness. "Can't you just ignore us? Like you did a year ago?"
"Ah, but I ignored you because the other option was to lower taxes, and such a proposition is so absurd that it is to laugh!"
And Norzang did so, for a good five minutes.
"Ah, that was a good laugh. But it turns out that by allowing your rebel forces to besiege Koch, it made it so that our taxmen from what was once Bengal couldn't travel through Koch to deliver their receipts to Lhasa!"
"Look, I explained this last time, that's not my fault-"
"Oh Great and Might Rebel King Mahmud the Second!" cried a third man, interrupting Mahmud. He had the look of a Tibetan official, and was leading a pack-yak laden with many treasures. "I, a humble Tibetan tax collector, submit my takings to you, lord of this province!"
"I
told you already!" shouted Mahmud, turning to this man. "I can't take your money! And your dumb Archbishop is
right here! Just give it to him instead!"
"But I cannot do that Just and Wise Rebel Lord Mahmud!" responded the tax collector. "You are besieging this province, thus I am not allowed to take my receipts to Lhasa!"
"Wait, dumb Archbishop?" said an insulted Norzang. "I'll have you know, I recently received a message that I was once more welcomed at foreign courts with full courtesy! And I'm pretty sure being called a 'dumb Archbishop' isn't a courtesy!"
"Well I'm not a foreign court anymore, Norzang. I haven't been one since you annexed my kingdom four years ago. I'm just a rebel leader now."
"Oh, so that's why you can't take the money and use it to replenish your regiments like I can. But wait." Archbishop Norzang turned to the tax collector. "If Mahmud cannot take your money, and you cannot take your money to me, then where does the money go?"
The taxman shrugged. "I do not know, Archbishop, I never thought about it before. I guess I will just have to take these taxes back to the provinces and give them back to the people."
"The
people!?" Norzang choked. "That's
terrible! Mahmud, we have to do something about this terrible situation!"
"While I agree that money being in the hands of the peasants instead of in the hands of their rightful absolute rulers is terrible, I must say that you
have been doing something about it."
"Oh right. Oh
now I remember what I came here to talk to you about! Could you get the rest of your army together again so that we can do battle one more time?"
"That's the thing, Norzang." Mahmud indicated the three soldiers behind him. "This
is my army."
"Oh. Well then there's nothing stopping me from defeating you single-handedly is there?"
"No, I suppose not-"
Before Mahmud could get out the words, Norzang had already charged forward and impaled him through the heart with his lance, grinning all the while. Mahmud died instantly, and the force of the blow was so strong that the end of the lance erupted from his back and into the stomach of the soldier behind him. The soldier would manage to push himself off of the spear only to die the slow and agonizing death that was death by a stomach wound in the cold snow below. Not bothering to extract his lance, Norzang dropped it, pulled out his sword, and swung at the soldier to the right. The soldier tried to react by lifting up his own sword, but months of malnutrition left him too weak to even hold it aloft, and Norzang's blade quickly dug into his neck, severing the spinal cord. The last soldier, seeing all of this, threw away his weapons and knelt, praying feverishly to Allah. Norzang only smiled and ordered his yak to rear up, to trample the last surviving man. And it did so, knocking the man down, breaking his ribs, crushing his throat, and finally caving in his skull even as the man supplicated his deity to protect his surviving family, who he loved very much, who would have to live without him, with his last breath.
Norzang paused to survey the results of his work. The once-pure, driven snow crimson with blood, the low wail of an impaled man dying in agony, and the powerful stench of the collective voided bowels of the dead and dying men, the smell of death. But to him it was the smell of money, of finally receiving the taxes of the oppressed Bengali peasantry. He smiled.