Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  Most maps would be finished before that mattered though.

  There were a large number of people in the community who knew how to use ancient technologies, and how to survive in this context. Much more than you would expect from a group of meditators from a society that was, as far as I could tell, much more technologically advanced than any on Earth.

  For example, our midwife.

  We had a woman who was an expert at medical skills necessary for ancient medicine, and for delivering children outside of a hospital context. But just one woman with these skills. We had just one elf who was mathematically inclined. There was one elf who was an expert swimmer and diver, who taught other elves who were interested in collecting lobsters and clams for more variety in our diet how to swim, despite the fact that apparently there had been no swimming pool in those great sky temples.

  Usually when a need arose to find an elf with a particular rare skill that wouldn’t have been stripped to keep us in line with the tech level, I would always find that I had one such elf.

  So I placed the most valuable elves, with rare and special skills, in a reserve that I hoped would not be used to fight, though they of course all were armed and ready to fight.

  As soon as I knew what was happening and saw the enemy army wandering in, I called a council meeting in the settlement, and I gave orders to the squad of soldiers defending the temple to return to the settlement, carrying all of the flint blades that had been made by the master flint knapper who lived there, working on the stones from the limestone walls of the valley. However the flint knapper and the monks stayed behind in the temple.

  I thought the odds were good that the spiritual energy I got from the monks meditating during the course of the battle might be worth more than having an extra fifteen men of low fighting quality available to fight. As for the stoneworker, having access to the best flint supplies in my area, he had grown in skill to being an expert knapper by now, and even if we won, I did not want to lose him, or the extremely good blades he produced. Also he was a spiritually sensitive elf, so he would be able to also meditate during the battle in the temple with the monks, and give me just a little bit more spiritual energy that might allow me to save just one extra person during the fight.

  But then the disagreement between me and Marcus started again.

  Marcus’s plan for the battle was simple: Keep everyone together in the relatively open ground in front of the settlement, and when the barbarians arrived, he would have half the men charge forward to throw their javelins at them, while the other half of the men stayed in position so that the skirmishers could flee back behind them. We’d repeat this tactic until either the barbarians broke, or charged too close for it to work, at which point it would be close range spearwork.

  This plan would ensure that our morale stayed high since everyone would be able to see everyone else. It would ensure we all knew we were backed into a corner, and must stick together to survive, so that no groups would break. And, most importantly it meant that we would provide a huge imposing force that would convince the barbarians to not directly charge us.

  We’d already collected in the village enough food to easily live through the winter, and he did not think it likely that the barbarians would hang around more than a month or two in the area before deciding to leave if they could not beat us directly and gain the slaves and meals that were no doubt their key goal.

  The days were becoming colder, and we would soon be having substantial snow, and other causes for unpleasantness, and the barbarians would not enjoy camping out unprepared during that weather. Also the difficulty of foraging in the winter would force them to spread out more and give opportunities for Marcus, supported by a squad of his best soldiers, to hunt and kill their smaller foraging groups, which would encourage them to flee.

  The biggest danger of Marcus’s plan would be an attack at night. If attacked while they were asleep, but all the barbarians were ready and awake, Marcus would be unable to organize the force into a coherent line, and the javelins in the darkness, even with the excellent eyes of the elves, would be far less accurate, and without being part of a big coherent army, the small groups of elves would break, fragment, and flee, while the barbarians could run amongst them, grabbing and killing as they wished.

  Beyond having a third of the tribe sleep during the day so they could stand out, waving their spears all night in the cold, Marcus did not have a good solution to this problem, since after all we had no real fortifications.

  But he thought that with a third of the elves always up all night, they probably would not attack at night. Probably.

  I was anxious. I confess it.

  This plan simply didn’t seem like it would actually meet what we needed. The absolute best case outcome of Marcus’s plan was that we would lose several months of all productivity, while morale fell and everyone spent their time cold — since we would run low on firewood very quickly, eating half frozen salted deer meat.

  The worst case was we would be attacked at night, broken into pieces, and wiped out.

  Marcus, despite being an excellent warrior, an excellent leader, and an excellent trainer, was, in the end, not giving me the plan I needed to win.

  I dismissed the council, and allowed Marcus to draw up his plans to organize everyone, and to have them do an extra day of drilling, with the entire army drawn up like he planned, and to practice the attack of having one half of the force run forward and throw their javelins and then run back to the safety of the other half.

  I really didn’t like this part of the plan.

  Arnhelm still watched the barbarians slowly crossing my forest, so I could see exactly what weapons they were carrying.

  They had their own throwing javelins, and they were stronger, and would outrange my elves.

  When we rushed close to them, we would lose lots of men, especially as we had nothing that served as good armor at present.

  The elves did wear thick ponchos for protection made from the layered hides of several deer we had killed over the preceding year.

  This actually worked better than it sounds like it would.

  Throughout history the first layer of armor, especially for poorer peasant sorts, would be thick padded gambesons. Basically a coat stuffed with lots and lots of fabric. It takes force to cut through thick fabric, even with a sharp weapon. Well aimed thrusts would go through such a defense as easily as they went through skin, but a glancing swing would likely cut up the cloth, but not penetrate deeply enough to mangle an important body part, and the bruising energy would also be diffused over a larger area.

  Marcus and I both knew this.

  The problem is the same as there always was with armor: Wearing twenty pounds of deer hide over your chest and shoulders would lead to exhaustion faster while running, and if it protected the arms, it would make motions more awkward and less smooth.

  This was of course why the barbarian armies which faced the Romans would fight bare chested.

  They weren’t stupid.

  But if you didn’t have the resources to make good armor, sometimes it was best to maximize mobility and the ability to freely use your weapons. Of course, the Romans won those wars.

  It was better to have good equipment.

  The hides that Marcus had designed for the elves to wear as armor balanced these concerns. They were very thick and heavy, but only designed to cover the torso, and they were all made to be sleeveless, like Roman tunics, allowing the arms to be free, so they wouldn’t interfere with the man as he threw or thrusted his spears.

  But I saw the big barbarian men, carrying their big spears, with those heavy flint heads. They’d be thrown from beyond the range of our javelin throwers, and fall among them at a great speed, and those heavy weapons would punch right through the armor most of the time, and even if the hides would save some of the men from death, dozens of elves would be killed if we had an open battle like Marcus planned.

  At least dozens.

  Arnhelm continued
to follow their army, carefully shadowing the barbarians from high in the trees. I gave him the order to be cautious and preserve himself, rather than to focus upon keeping track of the barbarians.

  But one of his attributes was reckless bravery, which meant that he still got too close, despite that order. It was a useful trait in some ways, he was immune to personal fear and he always succeeded at morale checks to run away, or flinch away from a frightening task. This of course didn’t mean that he wouldn’t flinch away, like everyone else, from being ordered to spend three hours chopping branches off a tree with a sandstone axe.

  That took a different, rarer, sort of bravery.

  This reckless bravery was why he had responded to the call to prepare to fight the first group of barbarians that had come without having any spiritual power infused into the command. But it also meant that I had to infuse spiritual power now into the command that he be cautious.

  He did begin to stay far enough out from the barbarians that I was fairly sure that even if he was seen, he could easily run away through the forests he was familiar with and happy in, with there being very little chance of his getting caught, especially since I, again infusing the order with spiritual power, ordered him to not turn back and try to ambush any barbarians while alone.

  The whole thing left Arnhelm a little disgruntled with me, but there would be plenty chance for him to fight and kill when the time came, and I was willing to wager that one of the barbarians who we would kill would be a death landed by Arnhelm.

  His careful shadowing of the barbarian force let me count everything about them, including how many shorter spears designed for throwing they carried, in addition to the bigger ones for their primary weapons. There were about two hundred fifty throwing spears. Even if less than half of them struck one of my people, it would be more than a hundred dead.

  Most attempts to kill someone failed. During modern wars thousands of bullets are fired for every bullet that hit someone, largely because modern armies use machine gun fire more to control space than to actually cause injuries.

  So perhaps only a tenth of the javelins would kill one of my people, and enough of our javelins would hit in turn that we would only lose men to javelin throws since most of the unarmored barbarians would be dead to our throws.

  That would still be twenty-five elves who I lost.

  I flinched away from a plan that would cause me to lose so many irreplaceable people if everything went very well. Especially since the battle plan in fact would not go very, very well. Battles never did.

  I kept subjective time running very slowly for myself.

  I needed a better plan than the one Marcus had given me.

  This was again one of those times where I desperately wished I could pace back and forth while cradling a cup of coffee.

  My mind stayed blank, as a full minute passed for me for each second in the world outside. And then another full minute for me, and another. And then once more another minute.

  I went back to where Arnhelm, softly running through the thick carpet of leaves on the forest floor, tracked the marching barbarians, and I set my camera to follow, as closely as it could, the asshole who’d led the barbarians here. That young man who we’d captured during the first battle. He marched through the woods close to the leader of the barbarians.

  Perhaps I should simply allow Marcus to have complete military command. The time I’d forced him to listen to me, the time I’d trusted my instincts and not allowed this man to be killed, that had caused this.

  The barbarians did not have any sort of clear line. They were strung out over more than three hundred feet, clumped together in small groups, laughing with each other, and talking. Once I saw a couple of them stop to sit on the ground and have a picnic.

  This was typical I knew for bands like this. They weren’t a disciplined army with officers whose job was to make sure all of the men were doing their jobs, they were a random collection of warriors drawn by the lure of loot, and who respected their leader for his personal brutality and his success in battle.

  No officers, no staff, no organization.

  The band didn’t send out scouts in front of themselves. They just marched forward with the leader and our eunuch friend in the front. They also did not in fact move very quickly. They stumbled over roots, they needed to hack away vines and trees. They fell in the soft ground.

  And they sometimes laughingly stopped to throw leaves at each other.

  This band was begging to be ambushed.

  Marcus’s plan was completely wrong.

  Our elves spent all day every day in the forests. They loved being in the woods, they understood the woods, and they could run far faster than the barbarians could chase safely through the forests, even though on open ground the barbarians, due to their longer strides, would be faster.

  Marcus wanted to place everyone in one place because he was sure they would break and fragment if they could not all function as a cohesive unit. He was thinking of the elves as a mediocre militia, whose physical skills were far below those of their enemies, whose morale needed to be protected.

  They were a weak militia, but the more I watched the barbarians amongst the trees, the more I became certain that just as the barbarians were stronger and faster, we could navigate within the forests far more easily, and that it was insane to try to fight them in a single big battle, especially when Marcus himself had no good answer for what would happen if they attacked us at night.

  I did not immediately call the council together to give new orders, I wanted to work over my plan to ambush the barbarians as thoroughly as I could.

  The thing was that there was no need for a single big fight at all.

  We should fight them like woodland guerillas. Hide somewhere, toss a few javelins, and then run.

  Show them a group who looked easy to capture, get a group of them to chase our people into an ambush, and wipe out the smaller group.

  Hide people in the treetops, too high for them to throw their spears, and drop a bunch of heavy stones on their heads when they passed underneath.

  An image popped into my mind of two big tree trunks swinging on thick woven ropes to smash an imperial scout walker during Return of the Jedi.

  That plan wouldn’t work well, since we didn’t have the construction technology to raise a bunch of big tree trunks for traps, but there were a lot of other traps that we could seed the area near the village with. Pits with spikes on the bottom hidden by the thick leaves, falling rock traps, etc.

  Also, these barbarians were not familiar with the forest. They were confident, but how soon could that be turned into terror?

  We should develop a proper yell, like the rebel yell. The elves could shout out howling screams every time they attacked, and often when they didn’t. Eerie ululating calls coming from the unseeable depths of the forest. Make them fear us and be prepared to break and flee when the fight went the slightest wrong.

  I studied the area near the settlement, looking for places we could ambush the barbarians, and so I could figure out how the elves would escape after each attack, and where they could regroup. I wanted to shatter them before they got close enough to burn the village down.

  Even though the winter was coming, I thought that we could fashion good enough huts to survive if everything was burnt down. We had huge stores of hides, plenty of wood and I was far more scared of losing too many men now than I was of losing the town itself, which we could always take back.

  Still, I didn’t want them to get to the village at all. That would be bad.

  And then, only twenty minutes after I dismissed the first council meeting in the external world, I sped up my subjective time once more and called another meeting to tell them the new plan.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It did not go well.

  I gave them my orders: Set up ambushes instead of fighting a big battle.

  And as soon as the order was understood, Marcus stood high, from his seat in the room around my glowing gem, a
nd he snarled.

  “No.”

  For a minute the sharp sound of that word was the only sound in the room. Marcus crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the gem.

  God damnit. I should have assumed this would happen.

  I gave Marcus the urge to explain himself.

  “This is like with the man you refused to kill. He now leads this new army towards us. If you had allowed me to kill him, we would not be in such a dangerous situation now. We would be safe, the women and men would be yet free to train and to work. And again, had you allowed me the right to train the men continuously, once we knew that he had escaped, and would inevitably bring his tribe with him to rape and burn and eat us, had you not wasted months of precious time having the people stare at sticks and strings in hopes that the idea you hunt for would come to them, had you not done that our force would be better disciplined. Better trained. Perhaps they would then be ready to fight and face this enemy in the way you wish for them to be fought. But none of that did happen. This time I say enough is enough. I will not acquiesce to your latest mistake. Our ancient guide Amzlat gave me the duty to protect this people, and what you choose is reckless and will destroy them.”

  Your orders are disobeyed

  So you finally did it.

  You were dreaming of fighting off these barbarians like the Ewoks fought the stormtroopers at Endor. And in the middle of this dream you forgot that your chief warrior, your minister of defense has decided that he no longer trusts your rulership.

  Marcus is challenging you, and if you do not agree to do as he wishes, the elves will have very low morale in the next battle as their greatest warrior and their guide are opposed.

  What shall you do?

  Are you going to give up like a chicken, and just let Marcus run the whole show? Even though you, in your great wisdom, oh great Cuddles, are sure he is making a mistake, since you know so much more about planning battles than he does?

  Do you wish to inflict great mental suffering upon Marcus, until he breaks his connection with you as one of your people?