Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  Dust was thick on the pathway, but not around the roots of the trees that glowed softly. There were tiny immature fruits beginning to grow on the trees, fruits that looked like apples, but not quite.

  The pathway ended on the far side of the valley with another temple built into the opposite mountainside. I knew that was where my new place of power would be. The details of the temple could not be seen due to a wet misty fog that filled the valley.

  There were four square plots of the trees, surrounded on all sides by stone pathways. And where the paths intersected in the middle, there was a circle of dirt, with a single tree that had only rich green leaves, but no fruit. This tree was smaller than the fruit trees, but in my view it looked somehow more dense.

  The scouting party slowly walked forward over the dusty paths, looking around at the trees and the high mountainside walls. The place looked calm and peaceful, as though it had been abandoned and untouched for centuries, or maybe millennia. The green growth along the sides of the valley walls was beautiful, and I felt a sort of happiness and calmness, simply from having my consciousness focus on this place.

  Bark! Bark! Bark!

  The three dogs with the scouting party started barking loudly and they stared out into the mist around them, straining with all their ears forward.

  And then a monstrous wolf howled, a long loud baying howl that echoed up and down the secluded mountain valley. And this howl was answered by other wolves, their baying eerily piercing any calm or sense of safety we may have had. In the distant fog I could make out the pacing animal forms of at least a dozen wolves, except against the background of the trees and stones they looked huge, perhaps as big as lions instead of wolves.

  Did fear make me perceive them as bigger than they were or were they truly that big?

  The five scouts looked to each other for reassurance, and they gripped their spears tightly. Their status as a unit showed that group morale had plummeted and they were under the effect of the frightening howls.

  I ordered them immediately to pull back and travel away.

  I would need a bigger group of fighters led by Marcus to kill these wolves and fully explore the temple.

  As they retreated I opened my blessing to the team of elvish scouts. These men were not so skilled as Marcus at precisely judging the amount of power from me they needed, and I had found that if given an unlimited flow of power, my elves sometimes lost track of what they were doing and seemingly became lost in endless mental loops that caused them to forget entirely what they were doing.

  I gave them each enough of a flow of spiritual energy so they had four times the cognitive speed they normally would, and they would be far more likely to notice and respond to a wolf leaping out of the mists while they yet had the time to strike and kill the beast.

  Due to being spiritually sensitive and due to their racial bonuses, the elves only needed a third of the amount of spiritual energy that Marcus required to gain the same boost in speed and thought. As a result the five elves were using 27 units of energy a minute, but this did not worry me because by now I had accumulated nearly the maximum 100,000 units stored, and I was regularly giving a minor blessing to elves as they trained and to the elves contemplating archery so that they could learn faster.

  The party had almost reached the gate leading out of the mountain temple, and back to the thin mountain path the scouts had followed to reach this dangerous place.

  Another wolf howl, from terribly close. The fog did not let me see where the wolf was either. I could only know where an enemy was if my people did as well. The minimap function blazed red behind the elves, as two of the elves looked to the side and saw a giant lean form with dark grey fur leaping at them.

  The wolf was twice the size of any of the elves, and he crashed contemptuously through the spears raised in defense, leaping upon Arnhelm, who was the youngest of the group.

  The giant wolf pinned him with his paws. The spear that he’d held had snapped against the wolf’s flank. The sharpened stone had only scratched the thick furry hide.

  The other elves ineffectually tried to stab the wolf. They didn’t have the force in their muscles to seriously hurt the giant wolf.

  The wolf howled once more. The massive animal lowered its spittle-dripping fangs towards Arnhelm’s neck.

  Hamali leapt to the front of the wolf, and gripping the spear at the middle of the shaft to make it much shorter, so he could control it more easily, he stabbed the wolf in the eye.

  The animal reared its head and howled in pain.

  A terrible sound.

  The spear was still stuck in the wolf’s eye, and as he lifted his huge muscular head he had pulled it out of Hamali’s hands.

  The wolf shook his giant shaggy grey head violently side to side, and the spear was thrown from his eye, clattering on the stones to the left side. The weapon was covered in thick dripping red blood, and a torrent of blood gushed from the wolf’s ruined eye.

  The animal leapt forward. It batted one claw at Hamali, catching him in the head as he tried to leap aside and smashing him with a titanic force onto the cobblestones. And then the wolf leapt away and ran.

  I immediately focused on Hamali, to see if there was anything I could do.

  But he was dead.

  Cause of death, according to his status screen: A severe blow to the head.

  Chapter Nine

  The elvish scouts dragged Hamali’s body behind them as they ran from the ancient temple, and when they reached the mountainside path, one of them picked him up in his arms, and the four survivors ran down the mountains back into the thicker woods in the foothills. Then they used two of their spears to form a stretcher and carried him back towards our settlement.

  Arnhelm walked behind them, crying as the blood dripped down his arms from the wounds the giant wolf had inflicted on him. Despite that he was one of the two left to guard the back of the group.

  The group had paused to bind the wounds on his arms, and while the scratches were deep, and would certainly leave scars, according to his status sheet he was not bleeding excessively, and his health was marked as recovering.

  Arnhelm still gripped the snapped off end of his spear in his hands, and his eyes hunted through the woods, searching for any wolf about to jump on him.

  The dogs happily ran around the feet of the returning scouts. They had no concern about being attacked right now from their cheery manner.

  I trusted that confidence far more than I trusted the rattled scouts unawareness of danger.

  I was worried though, what if Arnhelm received an infection from his wounds?

  However, I realized as I watched over the elves that none of my people had experienced an illness in the three months since I’d become their guiding spirit. Never once had “flu” or “cold” been marked as a status condition, and none of the times a craftsman had cut themselves, often quite deeply, had the cut become infected.

  Was this good luck, or something else?

  The scouts arrived home the next morning — they had travelled through much of the night, taking advantage of the full moon — bearing their fallen hero. A hero he was, for he had driven off the beast and saved Arnhelm’s life at the cost of his own — upon his stretcher of two spears, everyone in the village came out with weepy eyes as they saw what had happened.

  The first death.

  Good fortune had been with us when the barbarians attacked, and there had been no fatal work accidents, no drownings, no permanent losses yet. But now this inevitable fate had come, and it hurt.

  I hurt, for I felt as though I knew Hamali, I had followed and paid attention to all of the scouting expeditions, and I had come to know him.

  And I hurt because he was one of my people, and because I was sworn to protect them. It ached deep in a place that could ache without any bodily sensation. A place deeper and profounder than any ache in a stomach or a chest. It ached in the soul.

  The people gathered around him, sadly looking on in a restrained manner
that yet showed the depth of feeling. And of a sudden a woman ran forward and threw herself on Hamali’s body, sobbing and sobbing.

  I felt like shit.

  Shitty, shitty, shitty.

  He was dead. Hamali was a real person, my voyeuristic studying of my people had shown that they all were individuals who were just as human as I was. More human than I was now.

  And now Hamali was dead, because I’d sent him to look for the cool thing I’d felt certain was in the mountains.

  Dead. And gone.

  And now his sobbing wife hunched over his corpse, kissing the crushed back of his skull, and weeping.

  I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to apologize. But I could not.

  When I looked at her status screen it showed her as completely distraught and pregnant.

  Shit.

  This woman had not only lost her husband and lover, but now I’d robbed a child of being able to ever know her father.

  I tried to push some sort of comfort into the woman. To will her to feel something better. But it did not work. She would not listen to normal persuasion, and I knew why. This was the first death here, and according to her status bar, this woman Trilia had lived together with Hamali for more than seventy years, worshipping together in the now lost, and now fallen forever, sky temple of Artoran.

  And then as I tried to comfort her there was a sudden moment of extreme disorientation, and for a moment I could feel a mix of warmth, comfort, and a beating heart. And then that was gone.

  And for an instant I had felt as though I’d been embodied, instead of this eternal disembodiment.

  A child has received your blessing

  You have touched the mind of the unborn daughter of your dead warrior. There is now a connection between the two of you. How shall this develop over the years? Such a child may grow to become a prophet of the great spirit, one whom the spirit can speak to directly, and who can hear the voice of the spirit in her mind. Or the spirit may choose to suppress her mind and use her body as his avatar. But the days when that may occur are not yet present. She must be of much greater age than negative four months before either can actually happen.

  So that was what happened when I got prophet.

  Were there other benefits besides simply being able to talk to someone?

  And then I felt like shit again.

  I was terrible for thinking about this strange benefit I’d gotten from Hamali’s death, and at the same time I wondered if I should find if there were any other pregnant women in the community and try to push my mind into them in that same way.

  I wanted to feel again, like I had for that instant.

  If Trilia was five months pregnant, she had already been pregnant when she was transferred from the sky temple to this world. None of the elves that had made the transition were children, though a few of the older elves remembered themselves as having had children, and there were several families with parents who also had their adult children in the new world.

  But apparently pregnancies had not been terminated by whatever method had rescued these people from the fall of their old everything.

  The elves lived so long 600 – 700 years according to the data. It made me ache for Trilia. I cried for a week after the one long-term girlfriend I had broke up with me, and we’d only been together for a bit more than a year. I could barely imagine what it must feel like for Trilia to lose her husband, suddenly and violently after so much time.

  Trilia eventually calmed, surrounded by other women, who embraced her and pulled her away.

  The entire settlement assembled around Hamali’s body, and Marcus was there, and he listened intently as Arnhelm gave a stammering report of what had happened at the temple.

  Your first death

  Now is the time to decide whether you shall honor or feast upon the dead. This shall not be the last such fatal incident you shall face. Not by any means. And you must prepare to face such events again and again. It is momentous, and it is meaningful, but you must remember and hope. Perhaps the dead shall not die forever, at least not for certain. Perchance one day, in this world, which you know is very different than your own, they may rise again. Their memories, that flash of understanding and character that make a man, they are not gone, deleted, permanently destroyed. You may rediscover your friends who have passed, one day, in a very distant future, many thousands of years from now.

  But that day is hoped for.

  You must today gird yourself to face this present, in which men do die here. And I know you shall not wish to offer anything but the highest honor to a man who died to save a comrade, and who bravely attacked a creature of fangs and muscles twice his size.

  Which burial traditions will your people practice?

  Burning upon a pyre: Allow the spirits of men to be released, and to float upwards, heavenwards. A 5% morale boost to everyone.

  Burial at sea: Place his body upon a boat and allow the seas to take the body upon the last, great voyage. Crews will have 20% higher morale, due to the knowledge that the spirits of their ancestors defend them.

  Burial with his weapons and goods: Allow a monument to be built to the body of the deceased, and let those who have lost him come to him. Combined with his weapons, the spirit shall stand guard, as an extra, invisible protector of those he lived once with: 10% morale bonus during combat near lands where you have a cemetery.

  Despite the joke which the system opened this popup with, I felt for once a kindness to it. A softness in the words. Despite being a dick, the system wanted to comfort me right now, and I was grateful for that.

  From a practical point of view, the best choice might have been to burn Hamali upon the fire. The smallest cost in resources would be wood for the fire, since we lived in the middle of a vast, chirping and buzzing, living forest. Also the morale bonus, because it always applied, was probably more valuable than either of the other two bonuses — the burial at sea bonus was completely useless to me currently, though I suspected it would modify a hidden variable that would make it much easier to develop boats and I’d be able to focus on using the rich sea resources around me.

  However in the end none of those purely practical considerations drove me. I come from a society where burial is the most common practice. My parents were buried together after their accident. I thought of the little girl, growing within her mother’s womb. I wanted her to be able to visit that grave one day, and I wanted there to be a headstone she could touch, and I wanted her father’s mortal remains to rest beneath that headstone.

  Further, it was fitting, and it was appropriate for Hamali to be buried with the spear that he had struck the great wolf in the eye with. Arnhelm had brought it with him, and when I selected the choice for which burial practice we would use, the men of the tribe felt my will, and they nodded approvingly.

  Arnhelm stood with his arms still covered in blood spotted bandages, holding Hamali’s spear, and he went forward, and he knelt next to the body, and he placed the weapon in the cold and stiff hands of Hamali. The men of the settlement dug a hole, hacking at the ground with sandstone axes and hoes, and using spare axe heads that had not been attached to a handle to scoop the clayey dirt from a clearing near the tent where they kept my gem.

  I liked that they would bury him near that part of me.

  Once the grave was six feet deep, deep enough that we would not be able to smell the decay, and so that the grave could not be dug up by wild animals, once the grave had been dug so deep, the elves wrapped their comrade in the tawny leather hide of a deer Hamali had killed, and they lowered him into the ground.

  And each member of the community came up to his grave, for they all had known him at least a little. Such was the nature of a community of less than a thousand made up of people who lived for seven hundred years on average. And each tossed something of small practical value, but with sentimental meaning, into the grave, so that their yet living spirits would in that small way keep his deceased spirit company in the grave. And once all had tossed their
offering into the hole in the ground, the grave was filled in, by only the four members of his scout team.

  Arnhelm sobbed as he shoved the dirt in, but when I looked at his status sheet, his secondary emotional trait, added to bravery, was determination. And the biography note said that he was now determined to become a greater fighter, to discover ways to kill enemies safely, and to be worthy of the sacrifice his leader had made for him.

  I thought this boy would go far, and I also decided to give him a blessing and orders to actually spend all his time thinking about how to kill wolves safely as he recovered from his wounds.

  Bow and arrow. Figure out how to use a bow and arrow.

  And then, once they had buried Hamali, Virtunis planted an acorn for a tree over the gravesite. And then a team of elves dragged a large rock to stand next to where the acorn was planted, on it an artist carved the scene of Hamali stabbing the great wolf through the eye, saving his downed comrade from the mighty beast.

  Chapter Ten

  Marcus and a group of twenty-five warriors the next day marched out to clear the wolves out of the temple.

  Virtunis went with them, bouncing up and down with nervous hyper excitement. “A temple! A real temple in the mountains! Again! To breathe the air! The thin high air, instead of this stuffy lowland stuff. A temple! We should all move there, and provide spiritual energy to our guide. Our prayers are far more effective in a temple.”

  Marcus grunted.

  “Support me, at the next council meeting, if you also argue that we should resettle half our population at the temple, we might. Things will be ever so much safer if we are split up, so one attack cannot get all of us, and—”

  “Any attack that kills one half of our people will then kill the other half.”

  Marcus’s growled voice only paused the enthusiastic elf.

  “Well then a hundred. Or even a hundred fifty. To live like proper monks once more. And we can keep training with your pointy sticks up on the mountainside. Pointy, pointy, points. A hundred would be a good number. And the flow of spiritual energy being increased will allow blessings to be placed on all of us more of the time, so we can do those damned building tasks faster.”