"You men are not being proper guests. I must ask you to leave right now." I knew that they wouldn't leave quietly, but I wanted to preserve the forms.
One of the men said, "You take the bitch; I'll handle this fool."
This was enough to cause Hannah to explode into action. Almost too fast to see, she pirouetted around to pick up momentum. She raised her foot high enough to catch her man in the sternum with her heel. Hannah drove her foot into his chest hard enough to crush his chest and drive broken ribs into his lungs and heart. He was dead before he crashed against the wall.
The other man fared no better. Hannah slashed her forearm across his throat and broke his neck, crushing his windpipe in the process. He, too, was dead; it just took a few seconds for him to find that out. Hannah turned to me and said, "You certainly handled that club skillfully. I will be delighted to describe your fight to your other wives."
Chapter Seven
I was embarrassed by Hannah's description of "my" fight with the two fools who had tried to harm us. I was also amazed at my family's reaction to the whole thing: that was what they expected of me! Oh, they were suitably impressed with Hannah's description of the fight (I think she cribbed a part of the story from Homer's battle between Achilles and Hector), but they were now used to my "miracles," so they expected nothing less. Shit! How was I going to live up to all that? Strong Arm and Sharp Eye now wanted "Daddy" to teach them all about how to fight; I stalled them until after breakfast.
Actually, I wasn't as helpless as I might have just implied. The ETs had given me a lot of knowledge on fighting with clubs, spears, knives, and "empty handed," so I was well equipped to instruct the boys in self defense. Hannah was just a hell of a lot better at it because of her robotic nature. But Hannah was a "woman," and such training had be done by a male. Oh, well, it was something to do during the worst of the weather.
All three of us improved our fighting skills that winter, and we were in good shape when spring finally came. We didn't have any more visitors that winter, so we were left to our own devices. Green Leaf had done an excellent job of stocking our larder during the previous summer and fall, so we never lacked for adequate nourishing food. I was proud of her, and she blushed every time I told her so (at least once a day).
Gentle Rain was working on her own project very diligently: her baby was due in a few weeks. By now, she could barely waddle around in the cave. The other women were busy preparing for the blessed event. I knew that I shouldn't be worried because I knew that Hannah was as competent a midwife and doctor as could be found, but I couldn't help those feelings that every expectant father has. Gentle Rain presented her child on the appointed day with no problems and very little pain. To everybody's delight, it was a boy which she wanted to name Gift Of The Gods. I agreed, provided that we could call him "Gift" for short.
By this time, Green Leaf and Moon Glow were also pregnant. I knew that I had been busy, but I really had not planned on having my own population explosion. However, neither one was due until late summer, and I hoped that we would be in Fabton by then.
With this in mind, I sent Hannah to Fabton to see if Big Foot was ready for us to join his group. She returned with a horror story. Fabton had been attacked by the invaders just the week before she arrived and the situation was a hideous mess. Over half the residents of Fabton had been killed during the attack, including Big Foot. Many of those who were not killed had been wounded and not expected to live. She had done what she could for the survivors, but most of them had internal infections from the arrows that she could do nothing for.
The atlatls had been effective in the defense until they had used up all their spears, then they were helpless to defend themselves. This was a bitter lesson for me, I had not wanted to believe the Army doctrine that there was no defense against a determined offense, all other things being equal. The defenders had fought hand-to-hand and had been able to keep the invaders out of the cave, but this had been the only consolation in their defeat.
Hannah said that Fabton needed our help, the sooner the better. The horses had survived because they had been stabled within the cave during the cold weather. Lefty and a few of his helpers had survived uninjured, because they had been ordered to protect the horses, so I sent Hannah back to bring all of the horses so that we could move all our people and supplies to Fabton.
It was nearly a week later before she returned with Lefty, 4 helpers, and 14 horses. These were enough horses to enable us to move all of our people and supplies in one trip. With every horse pulling a travois, we had no problem getting everything packed up, including our gunpowder and hand grenades. We abandoned my unsuccessful weapon experiments, but we did knock down the onager and take it with us. I was proud of the way Strong Arm and Sharp Eye acted as our flanker scouts and Hannah worked as point.
By cutting straight cross country, we made the trip in 4 days. I was shocked when I saw the disarray at Fabton. The people seemed to have abandoned all hope and were just listlessly going through the motions of living. If the invaders had come back now, they could have taken over without any resistance. No one was in charge; the people were desperate for some direction. I had hoped that I wouldn't have to do it, but I had to take over and give orders, or the people would soon starve.
The first thing I did upon arrival was to organize a full hot meal for everybody. This took 3 or 4 times longer than it would have under normal circumstances, but we finally got hot food inside every man, woman, and child in the community. That night, the last of the infected wounded died, and I held a funeral service the next morning. Now, like it or not, I was the political leader (king) and religious leader (priest) combined into one for the cave community known as Fabton. I would separate state and religion as soon as I could, but now was not the time to quibble.
Counting Strong Arm and Sharp Eye, we now had 7 men, 22 women, and 16 children. I wished that we had some automatic rifles! My thought was that we needed gobs of gunpowder. Fifty hand grenades were simply not enough. Hannah would have to lead an expedition to get more guano, and women would have to be trained in extracting the saltpeter (potassium nitrate) and the other tasks in making gunpowder and hand grenades. Meanwhile, we'd make hand grenades from the gunpowder we had on hand.
Once we had the hand grenades, she would have to lead other expeditions for sulfur, copper, and tin. Damn, I wished that the ETs would get their budget woes straightened out, because I sure could use all the help I could get.
Luckily, the invaders had overlooked the foundry and forge in the adjacent cave. Boar had not survived, but Stork had. She was not a full blacksmith, but she had picked up a lot of the skills by working with her husband. I asked Stork to survey the cave and see what we had to work with. I was determined to cast some cannon for firing canister shot. I knew that it would be a while before we could machine cannon barrels, but I hoped to cast barrels good enough for charges wrapped in leather. If I had a chance to work on it, I also planned to try for grape shot, but I would settle for canister.
I got a few volunteers and we started making hand grenades. The first thing we needed was a new kiln to make the pottery pots for the grenade charge. I told my volunteers that what we needed was a combination kiln to cure the pottery and to make charcoal for gunpowder and for the foundry. I described what I wanted and left it to them to build it. They had a workable kiln inside of 4 days, so we got to work on the next steps.
I put Cool Breeze back on duty "making" lighter flints. Before long, we had nearly a thousand of the little flints. I didn't want to waste them, so I asked Cool Breeze to stop for a while.
As soon as the pottery bottles were ready, I showed the women how to make the hand grenades. They learned quickly and seemed to enjoy the work. I wondered if it was the work, itself, they enjoyed, or if it was the thought of blowing up their enemies. I didn't care as long as they made good hand grenades.
While the women were making new hand grenades, I had the men who were going with Hannah practice throwing the dum
my grenades. My first task was breaking them of the habit of trying to hit the target with a direct throw instead of lobbing the grenade so that it fell more or less straight down onto the fuse striker rod. When I finally got through to them that the fuse striker rod had to hit the ground at the proper angle, we started making progress. With some practice, they were able to throw accurately a consistent 75-100 feet. I figured that this was plenty good enough, because it was the range the invading bowmen had generally used. The grenades had a killing radius of 12-15 feet, but the fragments could wound beyond that.
Hannah took 4 men and all the horses to get as much guano as they could carry. I expected that they would get back with around 1500 pounds of guano, which, hopefully, would eventually yield at least 200 pounds of gunpowder. We were going to need a lot more than that, but it was a start.
Meanwhile, I still hadn't given up on my idea of a recoil dampener for the onager, so Stork and I cast 3 leaf springs from the bronze we had on hand. We took turns pounding on the springs until I thought that we had done all the hardening we could. We assembled the onager and constructed the recoil absorber for it. We practiced by hurling some large rocks and the contraption worked plenty well enough. Now, I had my mortar!
Hannah and her crew were gone for 3 weeks and returned with over 3000 pounds of guano. The women started the extraction process the next day. I expected to have our first saltpeter crystals within a week. Hannah rested her crew for 1 day and left for sulfur. This trip only took a week, but both the men and the women were complaining about the lack of sex.
With so few men, the women agreed to share what there were, so we wound up with 3 or 4 women per man. Strong Arm got his share, but I had to explain to Sharp Eye why he wasn't issued any wives. I promised that as soon as he could demonstrate to me that he could do a woman any good, I would see that he, too, got some wives. I figured that a few of the older girls would be ready by the time he was, so he agreed to go along when I told him that. He wasn't happy, but he quit complaining where I could hear him.
I gave them a week for the women to be serviced and the men to be worn out before I sent them off for copper and tin. The women weren't all that happy, but you would think that the men were escaping from something! I didn't think that the women felt that deprived of sex, so much as they were just more comfortable with their men around where they could see and touch them when they wanted to.
While the men were gone, we had a visit by a delegation from the invaders who had previously attacked. Their message was that we could peacefully join their "alliance," or we could expect another visit from their army. They didn't want our cave or territory, they just didn't want non-allied people living near them.
When asked why they had attacked earlier without giving us a chance to talk to them, their spokesman answered that it was their practice to show people how powerful they were before allowing the new people to join the alliance. This was to establish the desired pecking order, since some members of the alliance were more equal than others.
I told them that their policy of sneak attacks was not going to be tolerated. If they showed themselves in our neighborhood, again, they would be attacked by us. Now that we knew they were around, we would be prepared to fight them and would not be defeated next time. With that, I threw them out and ordered them never to return.
They would be back, of that I was sure. They couldn't afford to have us around now that we knew about them and could tell others of the danger. As soon as she got back, I planned to consult with Hannah about finding other small groups and asking them to join us. We really needed more people, anyway, so this looked like a good excuse to recruit them.
Hannah anticipated me by bringing home with her a small group, 4 men and 1 woman with no children, who had been hiding from the invaders since their home had been attacked. This group was perfect for our needs, since wives could be allocated to the men, taking some of the pressure off the other men already in our community.
One of the men, a burly specimen named Ox, expressed an interest in Stork and learning to be a blacksmith, if that would be attractive to her. This seemed to be the ideal opportunity to test him, so I put him to work assisting Stork in processing the new ore and converting it to bronze. I did make sure that he understood that SHE was in charge of the foundry and forge and he had to take orders from her when working there. Ox was dubious and some of the other men laughed at him for taking orders from a woman, but he soon found out that Stork was highly competent and never took advantage of him. This was the beginning of a very pleasant and productive relationship (they eventually had 7 children, all but 1 were boys).
Stork and Ox made a second set of recoil springs for another onager and 100 spear points for the atlatl. I figured that this was enough practice and set them to work on casting our first cannon. I knew how this was supposed to be done, but I was not sure that we could do it right the first time. I was right—we couldn't! It took three tries, but we finally got a barrel that looked promising.
For manufacturing convenience, more than anything else, I went for a bore of 3 inches. By now, we only had enough bronze for one barrel, so this had to be our prototype, combined with our first production model, if it worked at all. I was glad we didn't have to repeat all the steps in cannon development that had been necessary in my home time-line. Hannah came up with a design based on her AI memory, so we were able to bypass a lot of false steps that had plagued those other people.
I had a brainstorm, and we adapted the spring recoil dampener to the cannon. I was surprised, but elated, when the thing worked. It wasn't perfect, but it would do the job. The cannon bore was not good enough for solid shot, but it did handle cannister well enough. I was able to make up a striker from the cigarette lighter flints that would fit in the touch-hole, so we had a surefire firing mechanism.
By the time we finished our development work, we had a reliable weapon that would spray rock shards with killing force at 25 to 100 feet. Beyond 100 feet, we'd get more wounds than kills, and closer than 25 feet, the cannister might not break open, so it acted more like solid shot. We still thought that it would be an effective weapon, even though we would be hard-pressed to get off one shot per minute in the heat of battle.
After comparing the performance of the onager and the cannon, Hannah and I came to the conclusion that we needed the second onager. Therefore, she agreed to mount another expedition to get more copper and tin. She took plenty of hand grenades when they left for the mines, just in case they ran into more invaders. They made the second trip out and back without meeting any invaders, but we expected them at any time, since it was getting toward the end of the summer campaigning season. She gathered up a few more refugees on this trip, 3 men, 3 women, and 5 children.
It was time to start laying by the smoked meat we would need for winter, so I sent out two hunting parties to see what they could find. Strong Arm came back with his 3 travois fully loaded with elk, but the other party was overdue. Hannah went looking for them and found them under attack by a group of invaders.
The hunting party from Fabton was about to be over run by 14 invaders because the defenders were close to running out of atlatl spears. They had been able to put up a good defense and had wounded 3 of the attackers, but they had not gone out expecting to be in a battle, so they did not have enough ammunition with them. Hannah moved to attack as soon as she saw the situation.
Hannah crept in behind the attackers, which was easy, since they did not expect that anyone would be dumb enough to attack singlehandedly that many armed warriors. She killed 3 of the attackers with kicks to the back of the neck before any of them even knew of her presence. The 3 previously wounded attackers were out of action, anyway, so there were now only 8 men left to face her.
Her next victim had come to investigate the strange noise made by a breaking neck and was eliminated by a forearm to the windpipe. He made enough noise when he fell that another attacker exposed himself too much and was hit by an atlatl spear when he stood up out
of cover to see what was going on.
The next man was killed when Hannah threw a rock which hit him in the head. The remaining 5 men now tumbled to the fact that they were under attack from the rear, so they, very intelligently, took off to escape. Hannah eliminated one of these with an atlatl spear in the middle of his back.
Hannah made a sweep around the besieged hunters to be sure there were no more attackers in the vicinity before she called to the men that it was now safe to leave their strong point. The men reported that they had not had much luck hunting, but they did have one elk for the larder, and they had been able to protect their horses.
The hunters were happy to get home in one piece. They regaled their wives and anyone else who would listen with tales of the great battle they had fought, and, by the way, Hannah had shown up at the end of the fight!
Chapter Eight
Hannah told me what really happened, and it quickly became apparent to me that we needed more firepower for people who had to leave the safety of the cave. There was a practical limit, around 6, to the number of atlatl spears one person could carry, so I had to come up with something more portable.
It looked like our best bet was the crossbow. One person could carry 20-25 bolts, which seemed to be the number of arrows carried by the enemy archers. We could use either flint or bronze points for the bolts, so we could easily produce the bolts in large quantities if we had to.
The crossbow had the advantage of being relatively easy to learn, compared to the long practice required to become skilled with the bow. We could use a wooden stock and a spring bronze bow. We could start out with a sinew bowstring, and switch over to a cable as soon as I could work out a good way to draw bronze wire.
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