I hated to do it, but I hated more not to send Hannah out with another crew to fetch more copper and tin. The trip went a little more quickly this time than last, but it still took over 2 weeks to gather a full load and return. This time, they ran into some of the invaders, but Hannah took care of them without the people with her even knowing about it. If I had two more Hannahs, I probably wouldn't need anything else!
Ox was now running the foundry and forge, though Stork was keeping a close watch on things from the background. This got the work done with no hassle, since this let Ox preserve his manly dignity by not taking orders from a woman. Vanity can be aggravating at times! Since he was much stronger than Stork, Ox did the pounding while Stork did the pouring to make the spring bronze bows. Yes, I know, we could have made the bows from horn and wood, but I thought that spring bronze would be more consistent from crossbow to crossbow. Anyway, we went with bronze.
Hannah and I worked up a design using a compound lever system that let the user cock the bow in one pump of the lever. This was much faster and easier than the other methods that had been used to cock the bow, so we could easily get off 3 or 4 aimed shots a minute, almost as fast as a trained archer.
There was some resistance to the crossbow, at first, from the men, because a woman could use it as easily as a man. However, I lit up a cigarette and blew smoke until I had them convinced. {I sure was glad that the ETs had cured my tobacco addiction so that I could reserve my smoking for impressing the locals as part of my shaman persona. They also cured the damage I had already done to my lungs and made it impossible to repeat the screw up!}
While we were waiting for the crossbows, I showed a couple of the women how to knap the points we wanted from flint. I also had bird feathers collected for fletching the bolts. The most difficult part of making bolts turned out to be finding suitable wood for the shaft. One of the scouts finally found a stand of recent saplings and harvested enough wood for our bolt needs for a while.
Finally, the first crossbow was finished, and we tried it out. Everything worked as well as I had hoped, Hannah had no doubts. Everybody, and I do mean everybody including the children, was trained to shoot the crossbow. Some of the more reluctant men trained because they were not going to let a woman use a weapon better than they could. I didn't care what the motivation was, I just wanted shooting proficiency. By the time we ran out of bronze for the crossbows, we had 27 of them and 39 people who could shoot well with them.
Between our hand grenades, cannister shot, onagers, atlatls, and crossbows, I started to feel reasonably secure. I still was not ready to take the fight to the invaders, but I knew that we eventually would have to.
I was beginning to wonder if we were going to be attacked before the cold weather ended the campaigning season. If the invaders didn't get here pretty soon, we could write them off for this year. One fine fall day, a group of hunters came running in with the announcement that attack was imminent. I sent Hannah out to call in the other hunters while the rest of us got ready for a fight.
I issued the crossbows to the best shots and sent the onager and cannon crews to their positions. Hand grenades were parceled out and everybody assumed defensive positions. We had trained for this moment, so there was no panic, though there was some nervousness. Everybody was warned to hold their fire until ordered otherwise, so we just settled down to wait for developments.
We didn't have long to wait. The invaders showed up and set up shop in front of our cave. They did a good job of blocking escape routes, so we would have to go through them to get away. Fortunately, we had no intention of trying to get away. Their entire army appeared to consist of archers with simple wooden short bows. This meant that their fighting range was limited to under 200 feet, well within the accurate shooting range of our crossbows, etc.
If they didn't have additional troops somewhere near by, or some other trick up their sleeve, I was sure that we could defeat them by the simple expedient of killing them all. All things being equal, they should win because they had over 200 fighters to our 47, counting the children. Of course, things were not equal—we had overwhelming firepower, and we should win if our general (me) could use it effectively.
A group of men walked a few steps in front of their main force and one shouted, "I WARNED YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU DEFIED US! NOW IS YOUR DAY OF RECKONING!" I couldn't help laughing, it sounded like some cheap movie dialog. My laughter had an effect—the speaker turned around and ordered his army to start the attack.
They launched arrows at us, so we ducked behind our breastworks and let the arrows fall harmlessly against the low wall. They had to get much closer to launch effective plunging fire, so they weren't going to do any damage as long was we did nothing foolish. I ordered, "ONAGERS... ONE ROUND... FIRE!" I had already instructed the onager crews to fire our air-burst bombs into the heaviest troop formations, so they were ready with that when they were ordered to shoot. The two onagers fired, and we watched the two bombs seem to float up into the air and start a stately descent toward the enemy.
We had equipped these bombs with time-delay fuses, but they were not very precise, so one bomb went off at the desired 50-foot altitude, but the other fell to 30 feet before it exploded. Both of these bombs were loaded with rock shards for shrapnel, so the unarmored troops were subjected to a rain of sharp objects. I really did not want to kill so much as I wanted to wound the enemy. Hopefully, most of the wounded would be knocked out of the fight and would give their logistics people a mountain of problems.
We couldn't tell how many were injured from these two bombs, but the screams were enough to tell us that we had scored a major blow. I ordered, "ONAGERS... CONTINUE FIRING... FIRE FOR EFFECT!" The aerial bombs continued to rain down on the enemy for the next few minutes. At first, the enemy stood, frozen in place from surprise, but they broke about the time the third salvo went off overhead. The enemy troops started to run in all directions, some of them toward us. I ordered, "ONAGERS... CEASE FIRE! CROSSBOWS... FIRE AT WILL!"
The crossbows wounded or killed an enemy soldier at the rate of about 1 down for every 4 or 5 shots. This wasn't good enough! Our people were just shooting, they weren't taking the time to aim. I'd have to worry about this later, right now, I had to do something, so I ordered, "CANNON... ONE ROUND... FIRE!"
I had deliberately left a free fire zone in front of the cannon so that I wouldn't have to worry about my people forgetting to duck. It was through this channel that the cannon fired its load of cannister. Many of the enemy were about 75 feet away when the cannon fired, the optimum range. It was like they had run into a meat grinder. It was hard to tell if the enemy skidded to a halt and turned tail to run away because of the noise or because of the mess that was made of their friends. Whatever it was, the battlefield quickly emptied of ambulatory enemy troops. I ordered, "CROSSBOWS... CEASE FIRE!"
The people with the hand grenades were really pissed that I had not let them into the fight, so I called them over and gave them a pep talk about the enemy being out of range when they broke and ran. I assured them that they would get their chance, but I thought to myself that I hoped not.
When it was apparent that the fighting was over for the day, I had Hannah look at the enemy wounded; she knew to bring in those we could help and to cut the throat of those we couldn't help. I hoped to recruit to our side those wounded that could be saved. A check of our troops showed that we had only one casualty—a man had shot himself in the foot with his crossbow when he got careless.
Before it got dark, I sent some people out to retrieve our crossbow bolts. They managed to find about 30% of those that had been fired. I wondered what had happened to the rest of the bolts. Could there be enemy soldiers wandering around with our bolts sticking in them? Maybe our shooting had been more accurate than I had thought at first.
Once it got fully dark, I sent Hannah out to see if the enemy still had a effective fighting force that we would have to face the next day. She came back with the report that the ene
my still had enough troops to fight tomorrow, but their morale was near the breaking point, based on what she could hear of conversations among the men. I figured that a few more aerial bombs would break them on the morrow.
I called everybody together and praised them for their exemplary work during the battle and asked them to keep it up in tomorrow's fighting. I did ask them to be more careful about aiming their crossbows before shooting, since we did not have an unlimited supply of bolts. Our morale was through the roof, what with our only wounded man being the one who shot himself. He begged me for a chance to live that down; I said I would see what I could do.
We picked up 21 walking enemy wounded who wanted to join us. I welcomed them to our side. Most were too badly wounded to help in tomorrow's fighting, but they all looked like they would eventually recover. Once things calmed down from this fight, I planned to question them about why they were fighting and who was leading the fight.
The next morning, the enemy showed up, and arrayed themselves just as they had done the day before. They obviously had not learned anything from their defeat. They were positioned in three tightly packed groups with only enough space between men to use their bows. This did cause a bit of a problem in choosing targets, since we only had 2 onagers. I decided to try an experiment: I'd use the onagers against the two outside groups and the crossbows against the middle group. If and when they came close enough, I'd turn loose the cannon on the center group. The grenadiers were split between attacking the two outer groups, so now everybody had a target. I hoped that this would eliminate the disappointment I'd heard yesterday.
The enemy again set themselves up about 200 feet away, plenty close enough for the crossbows, but still too far away for the hand grenades. Obviously, their tactics were intended for use against people who only used stabbing weapons; they were not equipped or trained to face anything else.
I'd had our people feverishly making more onager bombs, so we had enough now for at least an hour's worth of fighting. I knew that we would never have to throw that many bombs, but I wanted to be ready for anything. The first flight of arrows came just as the day before, and we ducked behind hour breastworks just as the day before. Nobody was hit by an arrow, but I thought my people were a little too cocky in the way they taunted the enemy.
The onagers were protected by high walls which allowed the crews to work without fear of anything but plunging fire, so they were able service their weapons in the most efficient manner. I ordered, "ONAGERS... FIRE AT WILL... FIRE!" This produced a steady rain of bombs on the enemy, about 1 air burst per minute on each of the outer groups. The archers were a bit more stoic this day as they were not caught by surprise by the explosions. They fired a couple of more volleys at us, still without even wounding any of our people, but somebody on their side realized that they had to get closer and use plunging fire.
The center group had not been molested, yet, and had a free rein to shoot their arrows at us. They must have felt magically charmed as they were ignored by the onagers. The whole enemy army advanced toward us, only pausing to fire a volley of arrows, before marching closer. They only moved about a hundred feet, which doesn't sound like much, but was, considering that they were under fire and had a lot of men to move in a disciplined manner.
They didn't know it, but closing only a few more steps would have put them too close for the onagers to be used, but, fortunately, they stopped while the onagers could still be effectively used. Now, they were so close that the crossbows and hand grenades could be used, so I ordered, "CROSSBOWS, GRENADIERS... COMMENCE FIRING!" This new rain of destruction was just too much for the loose discipline of the enemy. However, instead of running away, they charged toward us. I suppose they would have used their personal knives as weapons, either that or whatever they could pick up. In any case, they were hysterical as they charged.
I ordered, "CROSSBOWS, GRENADIERS... CONCENTRATE ON THE OUTER GROUPS! CANNON... FIRE AT WILL!" The crossbows and grenadiers did as ordered; the enemy was now so close that the onagers could no longer be used. The cannon fired its first cannister load when the enemy's first troops were about 50 feet away. That was a bit closer than I was comfortable with, but the result was exactly what I expected. All of the near attackers were chopped into mince meat and those in the rear slowed down, instead of charging as they should have. The cannon fired 4 more shots as fast as the crew could reload and aim, but they simply ran out of targets. All of the troops had run away.
Hannah was standing beside me, and I pointed to a group of men standing to one side shouting at the retreating troops. "Hannah, those are the generals. Can you hit them with a grenade?"
"Yes, I'll throw several." Hannah preceded to lob three grenades about 100 yards to the clump of men. She worked so fast that all three grenades were in the air before the first one landed. She was spectacular! She had used three different trajectories so that all three grenades landed at the same time. The three explosions combined into one and killed every one of the officers and staff who were standing together. This was all the extra incentive the retreating troops needed; the retreat turned into a rout.
The whole battle had lasted for about 30 minutes and was over in time for lunch! While the rest of us were eating our jerky for lunch, Hannah went out to look for wounded who could be saved. She found a few keepers, but most of the wounded were too injured to save; they were grateful for the quick throat cutting which stopped their pain.
After lunch, we began cleaning up the battle field which, after all, was our front yard. We used the horses to drag the bodies to the downwind side of our area and started a fire. It took three days to finish the cremation, and we had to put up with a God-awful stink while it was going on. Meanwhile, the children scoured the battlefield for spent bolts and arrows.
Fortunately, scavengers finished up the job for us at the crematorium. We had no way to bury that many corpses, so we were all thankful for the attention paid by the wolves, bears, etc.
Now I had time to talk to the wounded "prisoners." Most of them were conscripts who were there because their families were being held hostage to force them to fight. They certainly didn't want to fight and hoped that they could stay with us until they got well. Once they could function, again, they wanted to rescue their wives and children and join us permanently. I promised to do what I could to help them attain that dream.
A couple of the wounded were sub-officers who knew a little more of the overall plans of the leadership. As far as they knew, the plan was to control all of the territory comprising what had been France, Belgium, and The Low Countries in my own time. These leaders must be crazy! Even the Romans couldn't do a good job of that! I needed to "reason" with these idiots before they made a mess of the whole world. But none of that could be done until next year; it was too late in the year to do anything but get ready for the coming winter.
With extra mouths to feed, we needed a lot more food. The women went on an all-out blitz of the neighborhood, gathering as many tubers, etc. as they could find. Meanwhile the men were in a hunting frenzy. The crossbows made it even easier to kill any game they found. If I hadn't objected, they would have brought home more than we could possibly consume. We were able to produce enough jerky and pemmican to last us all through the winter and well into next year.
We were doing so well that I asked Hannah to lead expeditions to collect copper, tin, sulfur, and guano before the weather got too bad. I wanted to make as much bronze and gunpowder as we could over the winter. It occurred to me that we needed a close-in defensive weapon, and I couldn't think of anything better than swords, specifically falchions.
With the natural fecundity of horses, our herd had nearly doubled in size over the summer and we now had enough to mount a large expedition to fetch our raw materials. Lefty had done a good job of training the horses, so we were able to pull many travois.
Chapter Nine
My other two wives had their babies in the late fall, so the two boys kept them entertained over the winter. Man, h
ere I was, a multiple father with a regular harem of loving wives! How lucky could I get? At first, I was somewhat pissed at the ETs for getting me into this situation, but no more! I had all the love and sex that I could handle, and I was the boss of a growing, happy community. With Hannah to back me up, I couldn't screw up unless I tried real hard. Life was good!
There were no more attacks on us for that year, so I had time to develop some ideas I was working on. I had been worried about depleting the supply of copper and tin, but I got a very pleasant surprise there. Hannah reported that the ETs had been in such a hurry to shut down that they had failed to shut off what ever it was that had originally generated the deposits of ore. Therefore, though we could run out of ore in the short run if we took too much at one time, the mysterious machines would replace what we had taken over a period of a month or so. As a result, if we were not too greedy, we could have all of the bronze we needed.
I wanted to get a supply of lead as soon as possible, since I could see a lot of possibilities for solder, a tin-lead alloy. I knew I had to be careful with the lead, for health reasons, but I figured that we could get around that by taking the necessary precautions. Fortunately, lead ore was fairly common in France and northern Italy, so I hoped to find some people already extracting lead from the ore, since it was relatively easy to do. Failing that, Hannah and I could teach the people how to do it, and we could trade bronze for lead. I wanted to get trade routes going as soon as I could to promote this sort of thing.
The prospect of commerce raised the question of roads and transportation in general. Two-wheeled carts were better than travois, but there was the question of making the wheels. We could use bronze for tires, even though steel was the traditional material, due to the cost of copper and tin; however, we had the metal to spare, so I decided to go that way. Hannah and I worked up a design for a cart, and I asked some people to begin work on one during the winter when they were looking for ways to fight boredom.
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