Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  But what the system was not designed to do was let me have an actual conversation.

  The council members got urges and impulses, not words.

  First, the extremely strong and disgusted urge about the idea of eating the prisoner’s brain from a platter placed upon the gem for twenty minutes (this would maximize the bonus my people would get from eating the brains of our prisoners).

  No. Don’t do that.

  The three elves looked at each with deep relief. The skinny mathematician took off his fashionable gutted squirrel cap, and wiped sweat off his forehead before putting it back on.

  Marcus inexpressively grunted.

  My reputation with him did not change — I had his status sheet open when I checked on this, so I could find out immediately.

  The next part was harder. Again, I could not directly speak to them, I needed to find a way to will what I wanted them to understand. There were several ways I discovered that I could communicate that I wanted to turn him into a slave, but none that suggested what I hoped for, turning him eventually into a friend, since we had shown him mercy after capturing him.

  He could be like Wulfgar the barbarian who Drizzt’s dwarf friend raised.

  Eventually I gave them the urge to become an ally with the barbarian warrior.

  The elves blinked and looked at each other in confusion.

  “Allies with barbarians? They come from everywhere and nowhere. They only respect strength, though they will serve wealth. You cannot ally with barbarians.” Marcus’s voice dripped disdain. “They will not respect mercy shown.”

  No. No. No.

  Not all the barbarians. I knew that didn’t make sense. But perhaps we could turn a few into allies. There would be lots of benefits if I could. And it might not be that hard to recruit him. Maybe he liked elf women, and some of the elf women would like him.

  Except Marcus had crushed that chance to influence him.

  I slowed down the speed of the system enormously, so that it almost seemed as if the council members were frozen, their breath rising very, very slowly. The spiritual energy counter ticked down slowly after I did this, though I knew in real time I was losing a substantial amount of the resource every actual second.

  I frantically looked through the lists of actions I could take, trying to figure out how I could express my orders. Eventually I stumbled upon the idea of searching the worldopedia, as I decided to call the help files, for “immigration”.

  That called up a set of usable commands I could give, and I found an order that matched the way Rome recruited barbarian auxiliaries to support their armies.

  I gave them that idea, along with the idea of us being stronger. I ordered the elves to feed him and make friends with him.

  The elves nodded and grinned. They spoke to each other, and Virtunis made a little excited hop, and said that he would send some of their best food to the prisoner.

  Marcus growled and angrily smacked his fist into his palm. He snarled, with his eyebrows drawn together like an angry face in an anime. “It does not work like that. He does not want to be our friend. He will hunt for the first chance to flee to find his tribe, and none of the others can guard him. None of the others can stop him. He will succeed in fleeing. I cannot watch him the whole time. If you untie his bonds, he will break any oath he makes to you, he will lie to us. He will grab a prisoner to drag with him as he flees, and eat one of the people I was dedicated by Amzlat unto the preservation of. And he will find his tribe, and he will tell them that we are weak, and that we cannot defend ourselves against a real raiding party. They will come, they will kill and they will eat the worshipper people. They will enslave those who they do not eat. They will destroy us. And then that small hope that we represent, this fragment of our lost home, of our lost hope for a good future will be lost. Give me the order to kill him. I shall do it quickly and cleanly, and from behind so he has no chance to fear. This is my only advice. This is the only way. This is the only right choice.”

  The damned thing was that Marcus might be right.

  Our barbarian captive looked harmless tied to that tree, tired, weepy, and with a dead look in his eyes. But when he recovered, when his smashed groin stopped hurting, he’d try to escape again. And he might succeed. And we all might die, because I was merciful.

  I spent several hours thinking about what to do with him.

  Not just about him, of course, I kept my subjective speed slow after the meeting was done, so I could familiarize myself with how this world worked so I’d be more ready the next time an emergency arose. I tried to understand the different resources in the world, how I could interact with my citizens, how production and food and population growth functioned — I needed to understand everything I could.

  I constantly read through the help files, and I experimented with giving orders and trying new things.

  However… the prisoner was always in the back of my mind. I conceptualized this world as running on something like video game rules. The question of whether to kill him or not was a quest or a test. I’d get benefits and downsides with any choice I made. Most likely making the nice choice would have benefits to go along with whatever downsides it brought.

  But more importantly, that was the only choice I could make.

  Five times over the next three days I went back to look at the prisoner. I stared at him, imprinting the boyish tattooed features onto my mind.

  Right or wrong, I could not order his murder. So I did not. And Marcus glowered unhappily.

  And the third night after the prisoner was taken he escaped.

  The two elven guards who had been assigned to watch over him had lost focus upon their prisoner. They instead contemplated the wonders of the starry sky, and the beauty of the waving trees, and the love they yet felt for all, though their old world had been destroyed.

  And whilst those two sat and smiled, the prisoner finished tearing off his bonds, having rubbed the rawhide binding against the ground until it snapped free.

  He beat the two guards over the head, which was my first alert that something was amiss. One of them was beaten so hard that his skull fractured and he began to bleed internally, and he nearly died, and it was only through my dedicating a large blessing to him, to protect his mind while his body healed, that he was not left a vegetable due to brain damage.

  And after that act of violence to those who had shown mercy to him, the barbarian warrior sped away on fleet foot, and he was gone some distance before Marcus was roused and had an opportunity to catch him.

  Marcus did not succeed at his goal.

  And I got a simple popup: Marcus now disapproves of your guidance of the tribe.

  Chapter Seven

  So I really wanted archery.

  My little community of slight elves were not strong enough to be truly great archers — this is one of the ways fantasy lied to us: It takes muscles to pull back a giant bow. But the elves did have high dexterity, accuracy and speed. And yes, those were numbers in their character sheets, and I was promised that those numbers meant they were good at fast ranged attacks.

  The elves could put a lot of arrows into the air, and those arrows would land where they wanted them to — if where they wanted them to land was reasonably close by.

  We were surrounded by forests. So that meant no long lines of sight, so being only able to shoot arrows for a hundred yards or so wouldn’t matter. An inability to shoot them hard enough to punch through chainmail would be a problem, but that was an issue for another, much later day.

  We’d invent crossbows, or something, when it mattered.

  My people would be able to ambush marauding barbarians from within the trees, and then flee by running through the treetops, like elves in a fantasy novel. Of course the first guys to try doing that hadn’t been very successful, during the initial barbarian attack, but there were two tricks to actually getting away in the treetops that I’d figured out.

  The first was to go higher up, so that it would be much harder for
a thrown spear to hit them, and so that the spear would probably bounce off a branch anyways — also having thick wrappings of deer leather around the legs, to protect them from a glancing spear that had already lost most of its energy.

  The second trick was simply to prepare the trees for them to be able to move through them. In other words — and we really did this — putting hanging ropes down from the highest parts of the trunks that the elves could swing from.

  It was about as cool to watch as it sounds.

  Once we had archery, the elves could just sit in prepared positions high up in the trees, and shoot arrows down on the barbarians, until a group of them tried cutting the tree down, or setting it on fire, or something. And then they could flee to the next tree top, and go back to shooting arrows down on them. I was confident that the tribe would be enormously safer, and safer for a very long period of time, once we had archery.

  But it also was necessary to be ready for any attacks that might come before we finished researching archery.

  We lived in a rich vibrant area. Deer, and crabs, and fish. The thick forest looked like what I imagined the first Native Americans saw after they crossed the Bering strait and came south into the great temperate rainforest that extends north through California and far into British Columbia. A forest that was vast and untouched by man, and brimming with endless possibilities.

  Archery was the future, but spears were the present.

  To make primitive spears, Marcus had the first day stopped all of the untutored craftsmen and carpenters from working on permanent housing — i.e. huts — like they wanted to and instead he made half the tribe spend the first two days searching for appropriate length branches and tall straight saplings. These were cut off the trees to produce long pieces of wood for spears.

  Other elves were sent along the riverbed to find flint stones that they could splinter and chip into spear points and axe heads. They unfortunately did not find many high-quality stones.

  Marcus wanted to send out scouts for this reason, so that we could make enough sharp stone weapons for everyone. Currently the only quality stone spear points and axe heads we had were those looted from the barbarians.

  Of course some of the elves kept focused on hunting deer. There were plenty of deer, and they were easy to capture, still not being used to startling away from the humanoid hunters. I got from this a sense of the size and emptiness of this vast world I now inhabited. Herds of deer like this should be exploited already.

  I worried about overhunting, and damaging the long-term value of the resource.

  I ordered Numericus to spend a day figuring out how many people could be fed by the deer in this area, accounting for the need for the deer to reproduce safely, and the number he found was more than two thousand, that was twice the current population of the tribe, so the deer made a huge resource of food that would support us indefinitely.

  And we could support many more people with the fruit trees, the fish, and the crabs and clams. I did not need to worry about food for a long time, and hopefully by the time it became important, we’d be well on the way to developing some sort of agriculture.

  Unfortunately, if an enemy army invaded, they would feed themselves from the deer. No need for armies in this world to worry about logistics. Which as that saying repeated in at least two different military sci fi novels I’d read noted: Amateurs worry about strategy, professionals worry about logistics.

  Amateurs could take us down in this world.

  I had read once that one of the big advantages the French armies had under Napoleon was that they were just much better at looting than most other armies of the day, so they could operate without the huge logistics trains and supply depots the professional armies of the Austrians and Prussians required.

  Didn’t work out very well for him in Russia, though.

  The deer herds needed to be managed carefully, even if there were enough of them.

  Humans often trigger unwanted evolutionary changes in the species around us. For example I’d read that the neutering of cats was currently leading to the cuddliest and most human-friendly cats having a personality that was being evolutionarily selected against, compared to traits of fearfulness and avoiding humans in feral cats. Or overfishing often leads to a population of smaller and smaller fish.

  Orders were given through Numericus to the hunters that they were not to hunt the fattest and slowest deer, and that they should consider deer that were particularly hard to catch as particularly delicious.

  I did not know if it would actually matter in this world, but just in case genetics and natural selection were at work, this sort of choice would likely give me some sort of boost in the distant future.

  Or I’d one day get a dickish popup narrated by Leonard Nimoy’s voice again, about having evolved a fat monster deer that could not be killed and wandered everywhere, chewing off everyone’s sleeves.

  Live Long and Prosper.

  The rich apples and pears in the tree groves further to the south of the camp were also plentiful and available, though it was a long walk to collect them, so I mostly just sent enough gatherers out to that area to provide the population a more varied diet than just deer meat. Some of the crabs and fish swam near enough to the coast that the elves could hunt them in waist deep water with just spears with wooden points and no boats. It took only about a fifth of the elves, and they didn’t have to work very hard, to gather all of the food we needed.

  This matched the current academic view of how hunter gatherer tribes lived.

  In those bucolic days people only needed to work for a few hours a week, grabbing the abundant food that the land produced in excess, and then they rested and plotted murder against each other and those in other villages for the rest of the week.

  Of course it being easy to get food only meant you could rest for the rest of the week if you didn’t want anything besides food.

  The elves would have been happy with no other work, actually, since they had not yet discovered weed and ecstasy and were not really convinced that roofs and walls were a good thing.

  Marcus though was completely convinced weapons were a good thing, and he was rather good at convincing the elves to stay busy making them.

  During the first morning after the fight with the barbarians, several dozen elves went along the bank of the river flowing into the ocean, hunting for round flat pieces of sandstone, about twice the size of a human palm. When they collected them they began to fashion them into stone axes.

  All of them after all had been given the knowledge of basic stoneworking at the same time that they had the knowledge of reading and all other high technologies removed from them.

  First a worker would find a sheltered spot along the river bank with a large stone, ideally with a concave surface. They would toss wet sand and gravel onto the big concave stone and proceed to rub what would be the cutting edge of a sandstone axe head against the surface, again and again, stopping every few minutes to wash the stone off, examine their work, and add more grit and water to the rock they were grinding the stone on.

  The process took surprisingly little time, but it quickly exhausted the hands of the workers, who I suspected were not used to much physical labor. So the stoneworkers would find a place near each other to do the work, and take long breaks hanging out and talking to each other instead of working.

  I’d always thought bosses who tried to get 100% efficiency out of their employees were dicks… but we needed to be prepared to defend ourselves, or get eaten, so I used my will to push them to get back to working, and keep them from spending too long resting, even though the more I did this, the worse the morale of the stoneworkers got.

  After the sandstone axe heads were prepared, they were affixed to sturdy sticks with twine woven from the grasses growing everywhere in the clearing that the settlement was built on. Then other men took the axes as they were produced and went out to start chopping branches off the trees for Marcus’s “lots of spears” armament program.
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br />   It was painfully slow work for the elves that drained morale, as they disliked both the physical labor and harming the trees. The sandstone axes were not particularly sharp, and they dulled quickly with use and needed every few days to be reground, and every so often one of the heads would fly off the handle, and make a dangerous spinning whorl that thankfully had not yet killed anyone.

  Yet.

  After just a week, once already half of the men in the village had a hand axe they could use to do daily tasks, I got a popup announcing:

  A Better Stone Axe

  You are really climbing up the tech tree, aren’t you?

  You have given your hippie elves constant, hand shredding, painful and difficult work, just so that you can make pointy spears to protect them from getting eaten, and rude huts for them to live in — you have noticed how the longer they are made to do this manual labor the worse their morale gets? Soon they will hate you and barely do anything. But this work has a benefit: Science! Innovation! Knowledge! The first step on the pathway to splitting the atom and being able to lob radioactive nukeballs at all your former friends.

  For most activities every time one of your people do something, there is a small chance that they will learn how to do it better. Or they will make a fortunate mistake, or just come up with some clever new idea. And if there is a pressing problem, they are more likely to think up some improvement.

  One of your people, who nearly got brained yesterday by a flying axe head, studied the way that your craftsmen (if they deserve that designation — which they don’t) have been binding the axe heads to the handles, and he figured out a way of wrapping them that takes more grasses and fiber and an extra twenty minutes of time, but makes it far less likely for the axe heads to snap off. And because you are a potent spirit guide, you can bring this information instantly to all of your people who are making and using axes, without the need for bothering with letting best practices slowly diffuse from one firm that is trying to protect its trade secrets to another.