Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  And for now I let Marcus have whatever Marcus wanted, and Marcus considered it essential for the archers to use the same types of arrows they would use in combat to gain the greatest benefit from training.

  He was completely unmoved by the complaints of the overworked flint knappers, though he did let them have a few days off from training so that they could make even more flint arrowheads for him to destroy with the ceaseless archery practice.

  The most fun part of watching my community of archers develop was to see them figure out how to shoot from treetops. Only a fraction of the trees had branches that curved in the right way to allow my archers to have a stable platform, but our skill in carpentry had increased quickly, and someone discovered the “secret” of how to make an adze by attaching an axe to the handle so that the blade was perpendicular to the handle like a hoe. Someone else discovered how to split wood along the beam, and the combination of those technologies let us make lots of roughly hewn planks of wood to create platforms in the trees to shoot from.

  However as the days became cold, the elves hated spending time working with their bare hands, and I did not have many of these impromptu watchtowers placed around the perimeter at present.

  In the spring I planned to have teams of carpenters place camouflaged platforms everywhere around my lands. I would get very good warning of attacks from the men in the platforms, and then be able to safely pick off and kill lots barbarian warriors who went through my lands, whittling them down without having to fight.

  There were limits to how much safer archery made me.

  Only extremely strong men can fully pull back the most powerful bows, hold the springy wood under tension long enough to line up the target, and then loose the arrow.

  My elves would never be able to have the range and power that English longbowmen had because they simply did not grow muscle as thickly as humans do, and because their frames were even smaller than that of medieval soldiers, giving them less leverage.

  Of course, despite the mythos of the longbow, the fact is that arrows could generally not penetrate plate armor, not even at close range, despite all of that power. The way an arrow could harm a knight was by getting into the joints of the armor, or hitting someone in the face who’d tilted their helmet up — this happened to the future Henry V when he was sixteen, leaving behind a terrible scar. Or by destroying their animals.

  Most of the things archery could do against seriously armored opponents could probably be done almost as well by my warriors once they were fully trained by an English longbowman.

  And none of the barbarians we’d yet seen had the sort of armor that could stop an arrow from up close.

  It would take however a great deal of time for them to reach their point of maximum effectiveness. The help system explained that over the course of three years of training, the muscles of the elves would develop to their maximum size and efficiency, and as they built these muscles elves would be able to progressively use bows with substantially stronger draw weights, giving them more lethal killing power and a longer range — i.e. the range at which elves could hit consistently when given a spiritual energy blessing.

  Of course after that point, if I wanted to keep the bowmen at that level of skill, they would need to train for several hours a week. But I’d expected that, I had all along had military preparedness take up about 20% of my elves’ time, and with bows that 20% of time would make them far more lethal than it had when they were training with spears.

  Marcus also, once the first month of training was complete, approved sending a much larger group to the temple. We would have a hundred and thirty men there, and I would be able to keep the temple operating at full efficiency, which would give me more than 200 units of spiritual energy from the temple an hour, which almost doubled my total spiritual energy income.

  It now would be extremely hard for any group of barbarians to raid the temple with that many monks who were decently skilled at archery, and while the permanent soldiers posted at the temple kept up a series of ambuscades and traps along the mountain trail up to the temple.

  After we had won this battle, Marcus no longer believed that we needed to keep the elves all together in the same location, as though they were a weak militia. Instead if we scattered, and everyone focused on staying alive and finding chances to safely kill one or two of the enemy through ambush, we would not need to fight any desperately close battles where everyone needed to be lined up at once in one place.

  I hoped he was right, because as soon as all of the monks were settled into the temple, nightmares of being defeated in detail now started to blanket me like the thick snow started to blanket the trees.

  The housing situation was still fairly crude, because between hunting enough food for a very long winter (it turned out that was not necessary at all), military training, and contemplating archery, there had not been enough time to make everyone housing with individual family apartments yet.

  What we had was rows of bunk houses, like a giant mountain camp for kids. They were long buildings set right next to each other, to minimize the wind, and all of the bunk beds were wide enough for two people to sleep comfortably, or three if they crowded.

  The elves piled lots of dirt and leaves around the walls of all of these houses for insulation, and on particularly cold days I allowed them to burn fires inside the houses. There wasn’t much of a draft with all of the sod that had been clumped around the buildings, but they were still cold inside.

  I couldn’t feel the cold properly, but I did get to see that morale was bad due to it.

  And I also found a way to overlay my viewfield when I was looking down on the settlement from way up high with the temperatures appropriately color coded.

  At the very start of winter the elves had constantly used fires to heat all the rooms, but I quickly ordered them not to do that. The reason was a matter of health and hygiene, not a fear of them starting fires. We could stuff more beds in a few of the bunkhouses, or have people cuddle up three to a bed if one of the buildings burnt down, and I thought that with my spiritual blessing, and the ways I could use my guiding power to alert the people, everyone would be able to escape in the case of a fire.

  Anyway, you should really only burn fires while you were awake.

  But I could do nothing about the soot and smoke.

  Bad indoor air quality is still in the early twenty-first century one of the greatest causes of premature mortality in the “developing” world. If there is no chimney and you burn a fire inside a room — or burn tallow candles or reeds for light, or anything that doesn’t burn clean and sweet like those cute candles you can buy at a hobby store or Ikea — all of the tar and gunk that doesn’t combust completely will go right into the air and stay there.

  That is, until someone breaths it in.

  I watched the elvish houses fill with smoke on the first really cold night of the year, I checked the status bars, and sure enough, most of the elves had a slight negative affect to health from exposure to the bad air. A few started coughing with asthma attacks.

  Proper chimneys were not an early human invention. Instead buildings historically had a whole in the roof so that the smoke could leave — though a lot of it inevitably circulated in the general air. It was only in the medieval period that they figured out that you could put a cap over that hole so that the air could leave without letting in rain and snow.

  The unfortunate fact is that something like a tepee where you could have a fire sitting open on the floor of a building, and all of the smoke would be channeled up and out without having lots of it sitting in the room is not actually easy to figure out how to build.

  And that still doesn’t work very well.

  Even once chimneys were invented, there still were serious health and safety problems involved with keeping warm in the winter. Chimneys are dangerous, especially the sorts of unsophisticated chimneys that would be the first to be invented.

  When brick chimneys spread over England in the sixteenth
century and seventeenth century, a major cause of death in the winter time was chimneys collapsing and starting fires. The early mortar blends would weaken over decades of being exposed to the high temperatures, but the builders didn’t yet know that they did. And they also didn’t know about how ash would waft up into the chimney’s column and get stuck there, eventually blocking the whole thing, which caused the smoky air to float back into the room and attack the lungs of the people sitting there, and sometimes half burnt sparks would float back out and start a fire.

  And then while the house was on fire, the chimney would collapse on the bucket brigade, killing a half dozen people.

  Eventually laws were passed with suitably harsh punishments that ordered that chimneys be cleaned every year. This was an enormous improvement, except that of course being British, they used poor orphaned children sold as apprentices to the adult chimney sweepers for five quid to do the actual work of cleaning the chimneys.

  You remember reading Charles Dickens in school: The start of Oliver Twist is so depressing because that stuff actually happened.

  Anyway, unsurprisingly cleaning the chimneys was not healthy for the kids. Maybe it was a bit better on the whole than all the fires from blocked chimneys.

  This also is why, though I knew some sort of class society would develop eventually as my population grew, that I really hoped to keep them from entering a particularly hierarchical system with the sort of vicious and extreme dehumanization of the lower classes that is common in human history.

  So to keep from destroying the lungs of my elves, and thus making them as sick as the average person from Victorian London, I had them huddle in the cold and pile more dirt around the small barracks buildings for extra insulation.

  At least we had collected lots and lots of deer skins over the course of the year, and also a lot of bear furs, wolf furs, rabbit furs, and other furry furs, our tanners and leather workers had gotten very good at making excellent quality blankets and clothes from them.

  The floors of rooms — I decided to think of them as being like the rooms in a nice hostel, instead of a barracks. They really were much too homey and friendly for a barracks — were covered thick in bear rugs, and all of the walls had deer skins on the inner walls, and everyone had a thick pile of blankets to cuddle under with their partner, and the few single members of my population also found someone to cuddle with.

  In the sad case of those widowed or widowered in the recent battle, they huddled together in one of the long buildings that they’d selected for themselves.

  Unfortunately these crowded barracks did not qualify as settled conditions, and there was less sex going on than there had been during the summer and autumn, and very few new pregnancies began. I needed better housing, with probably individual apartments, if I wanted my hoped for population explosion to start.

  The windows that had been initially built into the sleeping rooms were stuffed with rabbit furs and thick deer hides were pounded into both sides of the window. These could be removed easily to air the rooms out on warm days.

  There were little entry vestibules to each bunk house, with both sides having a piece of wood and a thick hide covering the entrance to keep the cold air out.

  Most of the time, without any fires, the rooms were cold, but they weren’t very cold because of all the body heat. The fact they were so small and cramped proved to be an advantage. The average human produces about as much heat as a hundred watt light bulb. You stick twenty people into a small space, and that becomes a fair amount of heat (and smell!), which was a big advantage in the winter.

  Still everyone hated being so cramped and cold, and I generally allowed people to mostly just do activities they enjoyed and that required no time outside after their initial training as archers was done.

  We at least had ample food, both fresh and already stored and salted. Everyone ate well, and there were big communal cooking fires which everyone crowded around in the afternoon, sitting so close that the ones closest got mild burns from the heat, as they laughed and talked, and shared food, and loudly complained to each other about how I didn’t allow fires in the buildings, and about how miserably cold it was.

  There was something special about everyone complaining together, and about enduring the cold together.

  On the days when the snow fell, and left everything as far as my viewfield could see covered with several feet of white, they went out, and using rough rabbit fur mittens they had epic snowball fights which Marcus turned into an impromptu training session where everyone laughingly tried to ambush each other, and I let the whole community ignore any other work for three days.

  Morale was low at the start of winter. Very low in fact.

  But after the midpoint of the winter, oddly when it became coldest, and when I permitted some small fires with woods we’d found to burn cleaner than most in the barracks, morale started to rise back up, and then it rose more and more as the winter continued.

  When I looked at the breakdown of morale, cold and terrible conditions continued to accumulate, and day after day there was a stronger longing for warmth. But counterbalancing it, and causing morale to rise despite the terrible conditions, was community feeling.

  Following that winter I usually let the people simply pick what they wanted to do during each winter, but one of the major things that research points automatically accumulated towards from the fact that many of my elves cared about it, was ways to make their buildings warmer — for example, when there was a lot of snow on the ground, that piling snow around the building’s walls actually was an even better insulator than just the dirt, and the apartments which first did that became almost cheery in the aftermath of a snow storm that dumped a half a foot of snow everywhere.

  And then, the weather changed.

  Now the snow rarely sat on the ground, and days with warm pleasant air temperatures were more common. And then the rains came, and the river gushed wild and dangerous, and it reached that season in early spring when if we knew those secrets of agriculture, the time to plant would have been upon us.

  Baby deer frolicked with their mothers in the woods. The game was ample and rich. Green sprouts were everywhere. And spring was here.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Early in the spring, on a day with only a few puffy white clouds floating high in the dome of the clear blue sky, a day when green leaf shoots exploded from every tree, and the heart seemed light and happy, Marcus jogged for the first half of this day to the foot of the mountain pass in which my temple stood, and then he swiftly ascended into the high mountain, examining carefully the guard posts established and hidden in the mountainside, and the trails that the guards would use to bring warning of an invader to the elves who lived within the temple.

  He studied the points where prepared ambushes had been established, piles of round rocks that could be released to fall in an avalanche, thick groups of logs, smoothed to roundness on each side, hidden behind a log with the bark still on that side, ready to roll down the steep hill onto an enemy.

  There were dozens of little hunting blinds with rocks arranged to look normal between the trunks of two big trees. They were nearly invisible from the trail and allowed an archer to kneel and pull his bow to full length unseen, and then unleash a deadly arrow through a loophole in the stones, while then using those stones to protect him from any returning fire. And of course a trail led away from the hunting blinds higher into the mountains, so the shooter could easily flee, protected from sight by the thick woods.

  Higher up into the mountain the line of trees thinned, with only a few trees of a smaller type able to survive. Here the ambushes were mostly in the form of having prepared places for rocks to fall onto the enemies, and lots of prepared positions where the trail below, or the walls of the valley if an enemy attempted to avoid the trails, could be safely raked with arrows.

  Some of these positions were crude almost-walls, with piles of stone going up to waist height on an elf with lines twenty or thirty feet long so
a large part of the community could shoot from them before fleeing over a ridge when the enemy came close.

  Arnhelm had been given command of the defenses of the temple during the winter. Intelligence, creativity, combat experience, and a certain ruthlessness made him perfect for the task.

  Half of the elves in the temple including Arnhelm were going to be rotated away from the temple to return to the settlement in just another week.

  I could have gotten a moderate boost in the efficiency of the elves living in the mountains for many tasks if I had left the same group there permanently instead of switching which group would be there. But that would have come at two costs: The first was the morale of the elves in the settlement. Everyone wanted to spend time in a woody mountain temple worshipping. Especially since the elves at the temple had far fewer stone collecting, tree cutting, and manual crafting tasks to perform.

  There would have been a small negative to the morale in the settlement, though that negative would have gone away eventually, as it became understood as the normal thing that those elves worked in the temple, and the other elves did not.

  By rotating all of the elves, so everyone knew they would have a chance to spend time in the temple, this modestly boosted the morale of everyone, though by much less than my rule that everyone, including the council members, had to take their turn at the unpleasant and unwanted tasks.

  The benefits from the morale were of less value than the value of extra efficiency gained by keeping the same people doing the same things permanently.

  What made me ensure that I rotated people at this time was that there was a modifier for community unity and identity drift. If the same elves lived in the temple permanently, they would come to think of themselves as the temple elves, who were different from the settlement elves. And the settlement elves would come to think of the temple elves as different also.

  I didn’t want that.

  So Arnhelm, now that his duty creating the defenses of the temple was done, was going to come back to the settlement. And half the soldiers under his command would go with him.