Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  These big old growth trees that stood everywhere would not burn easily. I knew that much. Even if they were very dry, the heavy bark on the edges was not very flammable.

  I had visited Yellowstone with my family as a child a few years after a giant fire had burned down much of the forest there because the natural wildfires had been suppressed whenever they started by the park rangers for decades, allowing a huge buildup of dry combustible brush, and it was only because there was all that unburned detritus everywhere that the fire was able to burn hot enough to light up all of the old growth trees and leave hundreds of square miles of national park bare except for sparse still standing black carbonized trunks.

  Afterwards the park rangers systematically lit small controlled fires to burn away the brush, and also to allow the seeds of certain big trees that had evolved to only pop in the heat of fires to open up. Fire was a part of the evolved ecosystem.

  I decided that before I figured out what technology to focus on, I would set up some automatic orders to have my people focus on some basic forest management, at least in the area near us, of clearing and burning away brush anywhere that we were building platforms for archery in the trees.

  However when I tried to do this, instead of the process simply working the way it had when I ordered the people to not kill the slowest and fattest deer, I instead got a popup:

  Research Ancient Forestry

  Uh-uh.

  Just because you know that you need to burn the brush around the trees, because your civilization was dumb enough to do the obvious thing and try to protect the forest from burning down by stopping fires instead of starting them, doesn’t mean your people already know how to do that. They still are of the ridiculous opinion that setting fires in a forest is a bad idea.

  Weird. Huh.

  However, you can tell your people to study and learn all they can about the forest, thus gaining the mastery over how to use forests and keep them growing, healthy, and how to optimize the provision of food, heat, and sticks that can be sharpened into stabby things from the forest. There is an entire line of technologies associated to this tech tree, and your elves will like contemplating and learning about how to manage their forest, unlike if you had them think about how to stick stones together with mortar.

  Do you choose to research Ancient Forestry? Since you live in a giant forest, seems like a good idea.

  Of course I chose to research it.

  I looked at the pace, it would take probably three years to unlock the first tier of the technology without me assigning extra researchers to work on it, but I doubted a forest fire was going to burn everything down in that time.

  Apparently I was getting, in addition to the base passive research, work being done towards the technology every time my people built the tree platforms, hunted deer, cut down trees for building wood, etc. I assigned the people who had high combinations of intelligence and creativity to focus on thinking about ways to better utilize the forest, except for Arnhelm who was more important as a leader among the soldiers.

  This boosted the morale of the elves, though not as much as worship boosted it. So I got 20% research due to enthusiasm, and the research points were also doubled because the research task fit their nature. In addition the passive research for the tech was also doubled, due to the boost from elves just liking nature, a lot.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I am now going to skim quickly over nine years of my civilization’s story, until the next event that was important to me occurred.

  This period was much like the early stages of a game of Civilization: During every single turn you order your warrior and the scout to move towards the most interesting bit of fog. They perhaps explore a village and hopefully something cool popped.

  Usually you got a bit of useless map.

  The production of your worker or monument still has ten turns. Hit enter to end turn. Repeat for a while.

  Except “repeat for a while” involved years of subjective time for me.

  As the amount of spiritual energy that had been channeled through me grew, the range that I could reach and touch my scouts from slowly increased, but the memory of those five lost scouts ensured that I never sent anyone out into the inky black fog beyond the range where I could give them my blessing.

  It was impossible for me to keep a tight sentry placement all of the way around the edges of the forest, instead I had a half dozen scouts live in high platforms near the plains where Arnhelm had been all those years before when he sighted the entrance of that first big band of barbarians into my territory.

  This was the direction from which most often bands of barbarians came, and because we could see out into the plains from the tops of trees within my zone it was possible to identify armies with much fewer people.

  Otherwise I had several groups of two scouts, often a couple, who patrolled with dogs to see if there was any sign of the scent of an enemy band.

  The huge advantage that I had over historical empires in terms of scouting was that I served as a directing force. As soon as any of my people saw an enemy, I immediately knew, and while that group fled or shadowed the barbarians, as appropriate. I then functioned like a long distance radio, and I could direct all of my other soldiers to converge on where the barbarian band was.

  The same if the dogs caught the scent and trail of some barbarians. I could tell my other groups of scouts to start looking along the likely path of this group. Inevitably they would be found and destroyed, almost always without taking any losses. Over the course of these nine years, I only lost three elves in combat, and in all cases they were particularly unlucky, usually a scout who stumbled head on into a group of barbarians, and who didn’t run fast enough.

  After the second time that happened, I always placed a blessing for alertness on all of the scout groups, and they had orders to hide and then flee if they thought there was any risk.

  Then, despite my best efforts, one time a barbarian randomly went out to pee behind the bush where my scout had (I thought) safely hidden, and while my man killed several of the barbarians once he was seen, he was killed himself.

  War sucked sometimes.

  The patrols that caught the most small groups of barbarians sneaking into my lands were those conducted by the wolves from the temple.

  I’d thought they would become part of my scout teams, much like ordinary dogs. But while they were always friendly, and willing to follow the orders of a few of my people, like Arnhelm, Virtunis or Marcus, they were not tame. They were not domesticated wolves, but a full-blooded giant breed, who stood on their four paws as high as the elves’ shoulders.

  Instead of joining one of the teams, they went out as a wolf pack, patrolling the boundaries of my lands, treating the huge circle in which my power held sway as their pack lands. Then if they detected the scent of a barbarian force coming in, I’d automatically know that they were, as if one of my groups of elves had, and then the wolves would track them down, and if it was a tiny group of barbarians, the pack would kill them themselves, though they did not eat the flesh of humans.

  Otherwise, they trailed the barbarians, howling from the distance to frighten them, while a large group of elves led by Marcus converged on the point where they had entered and attacked them.

  The wolves reached sexual maturity in their sixth year, and in a very animal-like fashion, they started to breed with themselves despite being siblings.

  If anyone has ever had guinea pigs or rabbits, you know exactly of what I speak, when I say that it is only humans who are really, really bothered by sleeping with siblings.

  However, despite going through puberty, they continued growing, only reaching the massive size of the animals that we had fought in their ninth year.

  The pack had twenty young pups, some of whom were beginning to get quite large themselves.

  About two thirds of the barbarians who entered my territory were killed before they were able to escape, and none of them made a successful attack.

&
nbsp; We twice were faced by large bands of barbarians, one of which had two hundred fifty men, but in both cases we led them into ambush after ambush in the middle of the forest that destroyed a large part of their numbers without us taking losses. One of the big groups fled after that, and while the other group headed deeper, they were then whittled down by archery fire from the distance in the woods, until their morale broke, and they scattered trying to escape, and were mostly hunted down and killed.

  Fewer and fewer barbarians even tried entering my territory.

  By this time we had about six hundred fifty children, and most of the women had by now had one child, and many of those who bore children the earliest now had a second child. Despite a much lower fertility than humans per year, elves lived a very long time, and their women were fertile for more than three hundred years. Eventually, I hoped, all of the elves who currently lived in my settlements would have lots and lots of children.

  Cassandra was the oldest child, and a leader amongst the children. Everyone knew she was special, and none of the experiments I’d done since then had created a similar bond with another unborn child — or an already born child.

  Cassandra was raised by Namys, the midwife who I’d forced to flee to keep her from dying while trying to protect Trilia.

  Her status bar of course had the marker for being a potential prophet, but up to this point I’d never been able to directly communicate with her. There was always that bit of distance between us, and that moment of full sensory experience I had when we first connected before she was born had never been replicated in any way.

  She was a blond child, slender and fleetfooted, but taller at every age than most of the other elvish children. All of the children were able to eat some of the fruits from the orchards in the temple, but she was given, as the oldest, rather more than most, and she had a special vibrancy to her.

  She also, always, knew that my camera was there when I looked at her. She sometimes spoke to me, directly, and I could hear what she said as though she spoke English, and not through a translation, though she could not hear my replies. And when she spoke to me, she thanked me for looking out for her, and watching over the safety of the tribe.

  In terms of food, the area under my control could support many times as many people as I did right now with basically a hunter gatherer hunting and collecting based lifestyle. At some point, of course agriculture would become necessary, but not until the population had doubled at least three times and was near ten thousand people.

  There were about five thousand square miles of rich, vibrant forest, and with the bonuses within this land to deer, and to beavers along the streams flowing from the mountains into the great river, and from the densely growing fruit trees in the south, I had far, far more than enough food for these people. And there were the ample stores of fish and clams and crabs in the sea.

  Of course children don’t eat as much as adults, but they do reduce the productivity of those who care for the children. At the point there were a hundred children alive in the community I’d been offered in a popup the choice to develop community traditions around childcare.

  The basic choice was whether to have women stay at home and care for the children themselves, or to have a daycare system that involved caring for the children as a positive task in rotation for citizens to switch who would do it from week to week.

  The advantage of women caring for the children themselves was that the children would grow up with a stronger affinity for the skills of their parents, and they would also be slightly healthier and better fed as they grew. Children raised in daycare would be more connected to the community as a whole, less likely to show identity drift, and they would have better social skills.

  Unfortunately, some children would be very unhappy spending all of their time around other children, just like on Earth, and due to all the communicable illnesses they would be somewhat less healthy.

  I decided in the end to go for the raised communally model, though I wasn’t completely happy with that choice.

  I still needed a lot of people watching the children, more than fifty on any given day were taking care of them.

  But because I had archery and there were still lots and lots of deer available, and the fruit trees provided so much fruit, the productivity of the gatherers was so high that it was no burden to feed the extra mouths, despite the loss of labor. The way that the higher dependency ratio in the population reduced my productivity was that caring for the children slowed the progress of research, which was the main place where I would put extra labor to gain long-term advantages.

  We kept a huge stash of dried, smoked, and salted deer meat available. It remained vaguely edible for up to five years so I kept a supply that would feed everyone for three years in cellars dug deep to stay cool during the summer.

  However, I did not put much labor towards building projects simply because it made the elves so unhappy to do work on such projects, and there was, as yet, no strong reason to do so.

  As children the elves grew at the same rate as human children, despite having a vastly longer total lifespan. This seemed strange to me, and at the same time not very strange at all. After all the elves weren’t more intelligent than ordinary humans, just better at meditation and much, much longer lived.

  Also, of course, the length of their pregnancies was exactly the same as the length of human pregnancies.

  The adult elves in these ten years had not visibly aged at all. The differences were so small that I could not recognize them, even though I could recall how everyone looked the first time I saw them in perfect detail.

  Marcus was clearly much older, and he had mellowed over the years a little. He now was thirty-two and even more muscular than ever before. He was yet in the prime of life, and with the highest and most beautiful of health.

  He was by far the healthiest man I’d ever seen.

  But it terrified me that he was soon going to hit that peak, and then begin that gradual descent towards senescence. Except it would be terrifyingly fast compared to the needs of the village. At the same time, our population of adults — admittedly most of them would be very young and immature adults, would be many times what it was currently when he was sixty. And while none of the elves could match Marcus as warriors or as trainers, or as leaders, we had several good men who’d developed into good commanders.

  Martialus, who had been the military leader during the brief period of our first major battle when Marcus, had been removed from his position as second in command. Now Marcus’s two chief lieutenants were Arnhelm, and the tallest elf in our community at six feet tall, Magas.

  They would be capable and skilled replacements for Marcus, when his time neared an end.

  But what I hated, hated, hated was the loss of his potential.

  Every single weapon we had seen, he knew how to use.

  And he could train the elves to use every weapon, until they were experts with it. The extra training and skills that he offered in terms of mastering the bows saved us literally decades of experiments before we could use those weapons efficiently.

  When we found swords, whether they would be bronze or iron — he would be able to teach how to use swords to a perfect level of skill. I was sure he could ride a horse as well as a Mongol archer and he could joust as well as the greatest knight of the Middle Ages. Of course we probably wouldn’t be able to find a horse that could support his weight, or run as fast as he could, until we’d spent half a millennia breeding them for extra size.

  I did not want to lose Marcus.

  But it was a part of life. Death was. And even though I had become this eerie creature, no longer quite human, I still understood that basic fact. The necessity of death. The way our friends became older, and eventually died, and then we died ourselves.

  Except I would not, I did not believe I ever would.

  I ensured, by giving him orders to do so, that Marcus ate several of the fruits from the temple orchards every day. They gave a strong boost to
health and wellbeing and I thought, though it was not specified, that eating them would, even if it didn’t really slow the aging process as such, it would keep that process from affecting him as quickly as it normally would.

  There was a counter in the system that told me how long I’d been here. It was ten years on the outside, and I’d only spent seven years of subjective time. But seven years with no sleep was like eleven years of a normal human life.

  I was gone a little crazy.

  The first winter we spent had been about average for what I experienced over the next years.

  Most of the population lived in the treehouses nine months of the year, and when it became too cold, they retreated to the bunkhouses for winter survival.

  Strangely, a culture that liked this period of enforced closeness once a year developed, and morale remained high during the winter months, despite the cramped, crowded, and not in a tree, conditions.

  There were other groups of creatures in this world than just elves and humans. Some of the groups of barbarians included orcs, who were much like the orcs in the Elder Scrolls series. Brutish and ugly, but seemingly intelligent and with excellent weapons skills. Those orcs also tended to wear crude armor, and use shields, which made them far more dangerous to my people, because they were far harder to kill from a great distance with arrows, and often they survived even if a stone was dropped on them.

  Fortunately despite their size they were not fast runners, and could never chase down an unwounded elf in the woods, and one on one the orcs were nothing next to Marcus.

  There also had once been a couple of what seemed to be dwarves in a group of barbarians. Short, stocky, and wearing some sort of big metal breastplates for armor, but I did not know what type of metal the armor was. However they left the forest without coming close to any of my outposts.

  After a few years most of the barbarians who entered the forest carried shields with them, and sometimes they wore leather helms or crude wooden breastplates. My archers had the accuracy to shoot them in unprotected areas, but it still worried me for the future.