The smoke of the attempted sabotage had barely faded, yet Tafari's mind was already elsewhere. Rifles and roads meant nothing if the stomachs of his people remained empty.
"Armies do not march on iron alone," he told Abebe as they rode through the countryside. "They march on bread."
They stopped at a village where cracked earth stretched in every direction. The rains had been late. Cattle ribs showed through thin hides. Mothers ground what little grain remained, their faces tight with worry.
Tafari dismounted, walking among them. A boy no older than ten clutched a handful of dried sorghum, staring at him with hollow eyes. Tafari bent down and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder.
"This will not do," he murmured.
Within weeks, new orders spread across Harar and its hinterlands.
First came the granaries — round, towering structures built of stone and mudbrick, sealed against rats and rain. Tafari ordered them raised in every major village, overseen by loyal stewards. Grain collected after harvest would no longer rot in thatched huts or vanish into a noble's coffers. It would be stored, measured, and guarded.
Second, he commissioned water mills along the river. The old hand-grinding stones, slow and exhausting, were replaced with water-driven wheels that turned millstones day and night. Flour poured forth in sacks, faster than any village had ever seen.
Third came irrigation. With Gebre organizing laborers and Abebe drafting simple maps, canals were dug from the river to nearby fields. Dry land began to drink, and barren soil sprouted green shoots.
"See it as you would blood in the veins," Tafari explained to his circle one evening, sketching lines on parchment. "A nation without food is like a body without blood. Starvation makes men weak. Hunger makes men desperate. But grain… grain makes them loyal."
Resistance came, of course. Some local nobles balked when Tafari demanded a portion of their harvests for the communal granaries. One sneered,
"What gives you the right to take from my fields?"
Tafari's answer was cold.
"The same right that will feed your people when famine strikes. If your pride is worth more than their lives, then perhaps you do not deserve your lands."
The noble backed down, cowed by Tafari's growing reputation.
In time, word spread. Harar, once a struggling city on Ethiopia's edge, now had full storehouses and mills that ground day and night. Roads carried flour to hungry villages. For the first time, peasants began to whisper Tafari's name not only as a noble's son but as the boy who fed them.
One evening, as the granary fires flickered in the distance, Abebe spoke softly:
"Master, today I heard a farmer call you 'Abba Dabo' — Father of Bread."
Tafari looked toward the horizon, his face unreadable.
"Better they call me that than 'warlord.' Bread wins hearts faster than swords. And one day… it may win thrones."
The forge hammers continued in Harar, but now they beat alongside the steady grind of millstones and the rushing sound of water in new canals. Tafari's empire was not only of iron and powder — it was of bread, stone, and trust.
And in that foundation lay something stronger than rifles.