There needed to be some institutional memory at the temple, so I only rotated half the temple group at a time, so that all of the soldiers who were new to the mountain would have a companion who had learned where everything was and what all the plans were.
Marcus at last finished his climb, walking alone tall and proud, with his spear held in his hands. His huge bow was strapped to his back in an equally oversized case stitched together from the hides of two deer. His bow stood as tall as any of the elves.
A warbow of such power had little value against opponents without heavy armor or thick shields. But Marcus could draw and shoot arrows just as fast, and just as easily with that bow draw as he could with the lighter forty to fifty pound draw weights that most of the elves were currently using.
With his bow, Marcus could spit two or three enemies with one bowshot from more than a hundred fifty yards, assuming they lined up for him to do so.
The guards at the gate of the temple cheered to see Marcus.
Arnhelm had large quantities of arrows ready and available in the entry gateway. He’d set up in front of the gate two rows of barricades made of thick piled heavy limestone pieces from the valley walls. They came up to the shoulder height of the elves on both sides.
These barricades were completely dwarfed by the opening into the mountain valley, carved by some ancient people, more than thirty feet high, and made of granite and marble. And then above this entryway the mountainside rose jaggedly, and almost straight for several hundred more feet.
There was a wide open field of fire going downwards for three hundred yards in front of the gate, along the trail down, that the archers could rain fire down upon an enemy coming up. And there were several more of the huge piles of stones that could be rolled down.
The walls beyond it in the mountains were extremely steep, and probably couldn’t be surmounted without climbing equipment.
Arnhelm had made himself personally quite unpopular with everyone in the temple but the soldiers under his direct command, by ordering everyone to spend much of the time they weren’t meditating hauling the stones and trees to create the barricades, and preparing all of the traps along the trail.
For many of the monks who’d happily begged to be sent to the temple, they had thought they were going to have a nice period of months completely free of the communal burden of wearing out their hands. Of course they’d have to do even more of the cutting and stoneworking afterwards, but that was then.
And now Arnhelm had kept them from enjoying that.
I sort of understood their complaint, after all the elves meditated for twelve hours a day, six days a week, and they had a right to the time they had left.
Arnhelm was more right: Get ready to stop an attack first, even if we were not likely to be attacked any time soon. And then have fun.
Marcus was met at the barricade by Arnhelm, who pointed out the various features of the defensive system and spoke confidently. There was still an undercurrent of hoping for approval from our great warlord in the young soldier’s manner.
Marcus in the end nodded, clapped Arnhelm on the shoulder, and told him that he had done extremely well.
They entered through the short tunnel into the valley.
The roof of the tunnel was twenty feet up the entire way.
On the far side of the tunnel was another barricades, these built from limestone in front of the orchard. More barricades were spread across the ancient pitted flagstones leading through the middle of the valley to the temple at the far end.
The barricades formed a half circle pointing in at the entrance from the tunnel, with its own thirty foot high gateway. Anyone entering this way would be sprayed with arrow fire.
The plan was if attacked and forced back we have the soldiers with their spears try to hold the thin tunnel, which with its sharp turn in the middle would protect them from bow fire from our enemies, and then once they were forced back out, the enemy would be peppered again by all of the arrows here.
It was an excellent defensive position, and while a civilized army, whenever I should be forced to fight one, could probably besiege the position and build the equipment to take it, after what Arnhelm had done, there was no chance of a barbarian army forcing their way into the temple.
As soon as Marcus walked out into the open air of the valley, strangely warmer and richer than that of the mountain surrounding it, the wolf puppies we’d gained with the temple eagerly bounded out to greet him. They hopped up and down whining around him, and immediately became obedient at a command from Marcus.
He knelt and with a kindly smile that was different from the stoic mask he always showed while acting in command of the elves, gave a long piece of deer meat to each of them, which they eagerly devoured before pushing their snouts into his hands.
The wolf puppies now all lived in a small cave along the limestone walls that had been expanded by the monks.
The wolves were still puppies, but already huge. I’d owned an Australian Shepherd as a boy, and she’d been intelligent and big. We’d gotten her as a puppy, and she had grown so big. The wolf puppies were a little bigger than she’d been as an adult, but they still had the thinner fur and the awkwardness of immature animals. They also were much, much smaller than their gigantesque parents had been.
I knew that wolves in the wild grew much faster than these animals, and so did domesticated dogs, but all of the wolves looked extremely healthy. I thought it would probably be at least three or four more years before they reached their full growth.
Marcus loved dogs, and he always remembered them as individuals, and he usually had treats in his pouches for any that he encountered.
He was more standoffish with the elves.
After a year it was clear to me that Marcus had no close friends amongst those he protected, and that was his choice more than theirs. Most of the elves were intimidated by him, but some of the leaders, such as Virtunis and Sapientus, and in fact most of those who had reached a mastery over meditation, approached him without fear or caution.
But Marcus never enjoyed small talk, and he never spent much time outside of training and planning.
Perhaps that was it, why he still did not trust me very much.
He needed to be able to consider everyone he protected as expendable if that was what it took to win a battle that allowed the population to survive. Or maybe he felt isolated because he was the only one of his almost human race in the tribe — his musculature was not that of an ordinary human — and he felt alone.
No matter what the cause it was sad, and it worried me.
I wanted Marcus to be happy, and he was not.
The orchard trees were now heavy with fruit. They had in fact started loosely sprouting in the months after the temple had been acquired, and while I let the elves eat some of those fruits, more than half that first thin crop had been given to the wolves, as I’d thought from the popup text I got when they became part of my community that it might be important to make sure they were allowed to feed as much as they wished upon them.
But even the few of the golden fruits eaten by the elves in that time had given them bonuses to health, happiness, and to how long they could stay awake and work.
But then over the course of the winter, after the temple became fully occupied, the plants started blossoming and blooming, and during the dead of winter, when the snow fell thick in the mountains, they continued to bloom, and began to provide fruit.
These ample fruits were eaten freely by the monks, and some of them had been packaged in bags and taken down the mountainside to be shared with the elves in their winter bunkhouses.
Nothing could stay permanently amongst the roots of the trees except grasses and fresh dirt. Snow melted almost immediately, as the ground of the orchards was perpetually warm, and slightly damp.
I remembered looking in on the temple after the biggest snow storm of the year, and the ground had been a rich dark brown where the orchards stood while on the pathways between the orcha
rds, snow had stood three or four feet thick.
Arnhelm had found in his attempts to improve the fortifications of the area that if he set rocks, limestone, granite — it did not matter what — in the dirt around the orchards, they would dissolve slowly over a course of a week or two, and be turned into the same dirt as the rest of the orchard.
It was eerie, and quite cool to watch.
In the middle of the orchards was the one dense tree that was of a different species.
This small tree had brilliant, beautiful blue and white and yellow flowers, but it had not borne any fruit the year past, and it did not look likely to bear any fruit in the year next.
Perhaps we needed another plant of its type, a mate, to allow proper pollination to occur, but I thought many trees could pollinate themselves, even though it was in general better if another tree did.
Heavy fat bees lazily floated from flower to flower.
They looked bigger and healthier than any bees I saw in our world, and bigger, heavier, and much less aggressive than the bees that seemingly were everywhere in the low land now that spring had blossomed.
That tree drew my attention, again and again.
There was some spiritual essence that went into it from the worship. It took its part of the worship, just as the trees of the orchard did. But its concentrated essence was more potent, more dense, and I sensed that this smaller tree in the center had been there millennia before any of the other trees, and it was the first user, or perhaps the creator, of the place of power here.
But though I stared at the tree, and searched the help databases with every query I could think of, the mysteries of the tree yet remained hidden to me.
Most likely I would discover some value it gave me when I expanded the temple here, but alas that was not something I could do at present without any population or technology that could work in stone.
That night, when Marcus stayed amongst the sleeping pallets in the valley with all the elves, he and Arnhelm sat together, drinking a bark tea that an elf with an iron stomach and an uncontrollable tendency to try consuming anything had discovered.
While this beverage had no caffeine, it had proven to be popular among my elves for its flavor.
The two talked for a lengthy time, and after a time I realized they talked of the old days, of the Sky Temples of Artoran, and of their former guide, Amzlat, and of how they had loved those old lands, though so much of the knowledge of what made them beautiful was stripped from them, and they spoke together of how they hoped, they hoped that we would flourish, and they would see a goodness in futures to come.
Chapter Eighteen
It was in the spring that my population was finally happy with the housing situation, and ready to start making babies.
The way it happened was simple.
As soon as the weather was warm enough that men could work outside comfortably, I sent out dozens of elves with the primary task of using our newly developed skills at making wooden planks to build lots and lots of little guard tower platforms in the trees around everywhere.
They put camouflaged platforms up high. Then they’d put a pile big rocks and an ample supply of fletched arrows protected from the weather in oiled hide pouches, and then I could send elves to any such place if an enemy came through, and they would have the tools needed to fight.
They were all built with ropes connecting them to nearby trees, it would be possible to either get to them without going anywhere near the ground, or to escape very easily from an enemy below.
The main fear I now had was fire, but for most of the year, it would not be easy to set fire to these trees, since there was ample rain or snow year round, and while moist these huge old growth trees would resist fire.
While building the platforms, the elves building them found they liked sleeping on them, high up in the sky and away from the ground. And they found that these platforms were nice and secluded places where they could invite their partners to — though they needed to take an ample supply of furs and hides, since it was still quite cold at night.
If an elf packed some cooked meats from the communal kitchen, some of the apples from the orchards in the south, some melted fat from the deer’s intestines (a delicacy, it seemed — I do not judge) and a water pouch, he had a romantic meal away from everyone.
Sex was sure to follow.
And then, one of my best carpenters took the notion into his head to build in the trees quite near the camp one of these platforms during his free time, but in the lower branches of the tree, only ten feet above the ground, instead of forty feet up like all of my watchtowers were, to protect them from being seen and from thrown javelins.
He used cured deer hides that were oiled to be water resistant, and sloped so that the rain would shed off of them six feet above the floor to serve as a ceiling. A bunch of hides pinned very tightly to the branches around the perimeter made thin walls, and he had a treehouse.
And his morale immediately improved a lot.
His wife’s morale also went way up.
And she was expecting less than a month later.
Also everyone, I mean literally everyone in the settlement, except Marcus, wanted a treehouse.
I already had enough of the watchtower platforms in place for basic defensive purposes, so I let the people do what they wanted, and over the next three months everyone was busy cutting down trees, shaping the planks, and setting up the floors, the tanners were kept busy preparing the hides, and the stoneworkers were busy grinding sandstone axes and preparing flint axes to carve the wood. We ran out of deer hides midway through this process, since we were only killing deer when we needed the meat for food, and so most of the houses only ended up at this time with roofs pinned on. If they weren’t pinned on carefully, the deer hide could blow away if there was a strong wind.
Fortunately they didn’t blow away very far, since deer hide is pretty dense and heavy.
Even when things like that happened, and a family was woken up from their sleep by a blowy thunderstorm the elves still loved their new treehouses.
No damage to morale from that sort of thing at all. When I dug into the morale reports, “thrill of facing nature” exactly matched “annoyance at needed repairs”.
Once the treehouses were all set up the elves at last were shown as having “settled conditions”, and instead of sneaking around to have sex on rare occasions, I had a baby boom, by the standards of the elves, coming. A sixth of the elven women fell pregnant over the course of our second year here.
Research also moved forward for multiple technologies and ideas at once, based on the research points and knowledge being accumulated simply by my elves living their natural everyday lives.
But still, after archery was discovered, I had to decide what was the next technology to focus upon — even though I didn’t intend to put a huge focus on it like I had archery. Developing the set of skills my elves had in general, and working on building things and improving the economy seemed more important at the moment than having lots of people try to be research specialists when I had no specialist slots for research.
During the initial phase of scouting, we’d discovered the secrets of pick axes and how to mine copper ore and chunks of coal for heat fuel in a little abandoned village set in the slopes of the mountain.
That was not very useful to me.
The elves hated, hated, hated mining, even if it was mining surface deposits of coal. They hated it even more than they hated cutting trees and branches down for firewood.
There were lots and lots of stone quarries in the mountains, and the system regularly reminded me that I could get lots and lots of building material for houses from the rocks everywhere.
Stone building was the next technology that was permitted by mining.
I had a vision of building a tall stone wall around the hill the settlement was based on. Twenty feet tall perhaps, with a wall platform all along for archers to shoot from. I could set up wooden crenellation along the top when b
arbarians started showing up with their own archers. The pregnant women and children could be placed in that area, and be safe while the rest of my force used ambush tactics to whittle down all of the barbarians.
If I had a wall like that, Trilia wouldn’t have been killed, and little Cassie wouldn’t be an orphan.
Unfortunately it would be a waste of time to research stone walls at present.
It would take a long time to research the technology, because working with stones was something the elves hated, and that would affect the enthusiasm for the task and slow it down.
And once we invented stonework, they would need to actually build the stone wall before I had it. That is to say, I would have to assign groups of physically weak elves, who hated working with stone, to build it, as their morale dropped, and their work speed slowed, and it would take around three times as much time for the elves to build it as it would if I had a similar group of humans like Marcus to focus on building the walls.
And I would not be able to build very many stone houses with the technology after I had the wall, because even though stone houses would retain the heat far better than the thin wooden houses being built now, it would again, take three times as long and wreck morale to have the elves building it.
Stonework was a trap technology.
Besides, even without stone walls, I had a great defensive position already due to the forest.
I could have the pregnant women and children be hidden miles away from the battlefield in tree platforms. That would at least prevent any of them from dying in the same way Trilia had.
Instead the barbarians would burn the tree down.
Hmmmm.
So stone walls did have one good advantage over these trees.
This was a thick vibrant forest, and there had been plenty of rain over the past year. But if there was a drought and a barbarian invasion at the same time, could they light up the whole forest with a great fire that would destroy all my defenses and turn the entire land into a giant clearing where we had no advantages, and where our source of food, joy and comfort was destroyed?
Civilization- Barbarians Page 19