Civilization- Barbarians Read online

  He looked unhappily at his callused hands. “So smooth. They used to be so smooth.”

  Marcus rolled his eyes, but I thought the edge of his mouth was smiling.

  “And,” Virtunis continued, “if we moved everyone to this temple, we would be able to bed in there, and no longer need to worry with building huts, and fashioning more and more axes and everything. Don’t you think that would be entirely better?”

  “How would we eat.” Marcus’s tone of voice made it a statement, not a question. He had suggested that the elf stay home, but Virtunis had desperately wanted to see the temple. Seeing his enthusiasm I understood why, but I got the impression that Marcus wanted to mentally prepare for the upcoming battle with the wolves. “The deer, fruit and crabs are all down there.”

  Virtunis laughed and shrugged. “The orchard. Arnhelm said there were fruit trees growing in the temple. Or something. Our guide will feed us.”

  “Our guide” — I knew he referred to Amzlat — “placed us exactly where we are. That is for a purpose. I will not support our moving.”

  Virtunis laughed. “Amzlat is wise. But we could not have been transferred to a place so near a temple of this sort without any purpose. We are definitely intended, by both guides to use it.”

  Marcus grunted.

  “At least fifty of us should live here. Better a hundred. Oh, I dearly would love to worship in a proper temple.”

  “We do not know yet if it is a proper temple.”

  “Phaw. Of course it is. Hamali could not have died without good reason. And since he couldn’t have—”

  “Death often is meaningless. That is the warrior’s first lesson.”

  “Marcus, my young friend.” Virtunis was suddenly serious. He looked at Marcus with those strangely intense eyes that religious men who prayed or meditated often gained over the years. “Everything has meaning. That is the true lesson of all the nested universes. Everything has meaning, and every death points to hope. I see, though, you would prefer to be left in your morbid temper. But do not forget, there is meaning in every happening, whether you see it or not.”

  Virtunis fell back, gripping his own spear with the half-competence that over the last months had been drilled into every one of the elves.

  After the death of Hamali the fight with the wolves in the temple was anticlimactic.

  We never found any sign of the one-eyed wolf. And I do not mean this to be a foreshadowing.

  I never discovered what happened to him, and I think it likely that the wounded creature died of his wounds and was then feasted upon by other animals, but perhaps he left the area around the temple, and found a new home deep in the woods.

  Though a mankiller, he had been a magnificent beast, and the image I have of the giant grey wolf, unable to hunt properly with only one eye and defeated in dominance challenges by younger, less scarred and less worthy wolves saddens me.

  Most of the pack of wolves was still in the temple grounds, though they did not come out to challenge the party at first.

  When this much larger group of elves arrived in the temple grounds everyone, including Virtunis, remained quiet, following Marcus’s gestured orders. It was a clear day, with none of the mist that was there the morning the party had first visited it.

  Marcus stalked forward, holding his eleven foot spear lightly in his long thick arms. The other elves stayed in two rows with their spears out, watching the sides.

  There were large fresh spoors on the dusty stonework, though none in the mystically clean plots of the orchards. I’d learned enough of forest lore in the months of watching over my people by now to be able to recognize the indigestible remains of prey animals in them, and to know that these leavings had been left by large predators who feared no simple animal.

  The group steadily worked their way forward through the orchard towards the entrance to the temple in the back of the tiny narrow valley.

  My nerves tightened step by step, and I kept my subjective speed at ¼ of normal, and I put a blessing that doubled their speed of cognition on all of the elves, and allowed Marcus to draw what he wished of my spiritual energy.

  He took none of it.

  At this rate I’d use 1400 units of spiritual energy an hour. This was no problem with this small of a group, but it again showed me why I needed to keep the available amount close to the limit at all times, because if all thousand elves were given this relatively weak blessing I would use all of my stored spiritual energy in less than an hour and a half. In experiments I ran while Marcus had small units of elves fight wargames against each other, I’d found that the elves became substantially better fighters with up to a 4x bonus from blessing, but if I empowered my entire army with that great of a blessing, I’d drain all of my spiritual power in just twenty minutes.

  It made me feel less anxious for the elves in this party that Marcus did not even consider it necessary to use my power. Though part of that was also that he could in an instant’s time pull the blessing into himself when I allowed him that choice.

  The temple on the far side of the valley looked much the same as the first. Another building built into a mountainside that looked much like the treasury at Petra where Indiana Jones had been filmed. A set of marble columns, and mantled windows set into a mountainside.

  I really hoped that when I took and occupied a new place of power, that would allow me to store a bigger supply of spiritual power.

  Then there was the baying howl.

  The party had nearly gone the entire distance to the opening of the temple when the wolves came out, howling and growling menacingly. They’d made their den right there in the building.

  There were five wolves not quite twice as big as the wolves in our world, and the blinded one was not there.

  Marcus coldly looked at the wolves, without changing his flat expression. He held his eleven foot long spear lightly in his hands, waving the distant point from side to side.

  I saw the bulge in his arm muscles as he did this, and though the weapon had been carved so the wood near the back was a little thicker than that near the blade, the weapon still must be ridiculously heavy to wield with all the weight near the front. The tip of the weapon swung back and forth, moving so fast that even with slowed time I could not track it.

  I doubled the strength of the blessing I was giving the elves, so they could think and react four times as fast, but in so doing I quadrupled the cost in spiritual energy of the blessing.

  Marcus began to pull upon my power.

  And then it happened so fast that even though I’d slowed time down, I could barely see the first move where in a single sudden motion Marcus leapt ten feet forward and swept the sharp stone blade of his spear through the throat of the biggest wolf.

  The flint blade flew out the other side of the wolf’s throat, trailing drops of blood that hung in the sunlight as they rose high before they fell, translucent and catching a gleam of reddish light through them.

  The weapon had been wielded so perfectly that it only sliced through the soft flesh and veins around the neck, dealing a fatal wound without being slowed by the thick tough cartilage of the throat.

  The other wolves cringed backwards, but to no avail.

  Marcus pulled the spear back in a lightning fast motion, and stabbed it forward again, through the eye of the next wolf. He again made a perfect motion, just barely deep enough to rip apart the animal’s brain, but not so deep that his spear became trapped.

  He twisted his strong arms to aim the point, and took a wolf leaping upon him in the throat.

  He stepped aside so the leap of the next wolf missed him, while he swung the thick heavy knobbed back of the spear into the head of the last wolf, striking it out of the air.

  And then without even looking backwards, he struck the last wolf in its flank with the blade of the long spear.

  The blow found the heart, and the animal was dead.

  Like I said, anticlimactic.

  After this brief battle I reduced the strength
of the blessing on the elves to the point where they only could think 50% faster than normal, giving them an extra edge of alertness just in case. The group stayed in its cautious formation as they worked the rest of the way up to the entrance of the temple.

  Marcus approached the entrance first, having put aside his long spear, and he took one of the elves’ shorter spears that would be more functional in relatively constrained quarters. The elves stood in two lines that were two men deep, ten feet from the entrance on either side.

  My senses could pick up the strong smell of animal urine and feces.

  And then I was able to see what Marcus could see.

  In a corner of the large hall was a litter of eight young wolf pups, apparently only born a few weeks before. This room had a vaulting roof forty feet high, like that of a small cathedral. The walls were the stone of the mountains, as if this vast empty space had been carved by hand from the mountainside, which I suspected it had been.

  The edges were lined with nooks that had rough, crudely carved stone statues, some of humanoids, others of lizards and dragons, and one of a creature whose face had a tentacle nose like Zoidberg from Futurama. Some of these stone statues had been smashed, or were eroding apart, and when I looked at all of them, I had a strange desire to order Marcus to smash each and every one into powder.

  Somehow I could tell, somehow I knew, that the carved temple in the mountain was older by far than the statues and altar.

  There were a few rotten and dissolved pieces of wood near the front of the room in rows that suggested there had been benches, but the benches had been there so long ago that the organic matter had almost, but not completely, rotted away in the humid environment.

  On the far side was a gilt-edged marble altarpiece with a gem set upon it, like the gem in the tent that was the center of my power. But this gem was dark and cold, with none of the light flickering from inside. It also was bigger.

  A beam of light through a skylight carved into the ceiling fell upon the gem.

  There was an ancient substance, that I knew without knowing how I knew, was dark dried blood upon the altar, on the gem, and rolling down the floor. In the corners of the hall were chewed over bones that an extra instinct told me for certain were from humanoid bodies. A knife sat on the altar next to the gem, with a gleaming handle of ruby, but the blade was clotted with the decayed ancient blood that had been kept from dissolving completely by the mystical properties of this place.

  So, the guiding spirit that had ordered this temple to be built, or at least occupied, had been willing to use sacrifice.

  Virtunis walked forward, ignoring the wolf cubs in the corner of the room.

  There was sadness and seriousness in his gaze.

  He knelt down in front of the altar and he said in a quiet voice, “I speak to thee, our great leader Cuddles the Destroyer, and to ancient Amzlat, the one who created our kind, the one who protected us and nurtured us over many millennia. I speak in praise to you, to you our great guides. Your wisdom has guided our people, and shall guide us to a renewed and future utopia and hope of eternal happiness. We thank thee, that you do not demand, nor ask, nor even permit such final evil sacrifices from us. That you do not use the death of us, your people, to power yourselves. And in turn I, Virtunis, your humble servant, I commit myself yet further to the eternal pursuit of victory, and of ending the cycle in which these evil spirits destroy those of thought.”

  He laid both hands upon the gem, and he kissed it. “Be clean. Be claimed. Be a better place, and be a further home and heart for my master.”

  Whoa.

  I felt it in my soul, as though I was being expanded. I had always been aware of how my personhood in this world was centered in that gem placed on that shimmering red carpet — though it now had a simple wooden building to house it instead of a tent. But now I was bigger, and I was also centered here at the same time as I was still centered in the gem in our village. And this center was bigger, more than twice the size.

  You have gained a second place of power

  This gem placed in such a powerful temple provides up to fifty specialist slots for worshippers, instead of twenty like the one in your settlement. You must have a community of monks here to fully claim this gem and gain all of the benefits. However, note that the placement of more holy places stretches you thinner, and 10% of the spiritual energy you gain from the gem with fewer worshippers will be lost.

  So long as the orchards of this place are tended they will bear fruits, no matter what time of the year it is. This temple was ordered carved by an evil spirit, but the valley and the orchards, they existed in a primitive form long before sentience was ever seen upon this plane.

  These plants bask happily in the glow from sentient people, like other plants grow from the sun, and when they are cared for by the monks who live here, the fruits they produce will promote good health, and intelligence, and when fed to the young will help them to grow to their full potential.

  And then I had another strange realization.

  I turned my viewfield towards the corner of the room, twenty feet away from the altar, where the litter of tiny wolf pups had all turned towards the altar, and they were staring at the altar with large, almost intelligent eyes.

  And I could feel the wolf cubs. I now guided them.

  They were part of what was mine, just as the elves and Marcus were. And for some reason, perhaps due to the species they were from, or perhaps their presence, born here, perhaps living for many generations in this temple, as the only creatures near to this place of power, they had a form of sentience, and a form of knowledge.

  I knew through this special instinct I had that if they grew to adulthood here in the temple, and if they were fed from the orchards of this place as they grew, they would grow to be intelligent, though not intelligent in the manner of a human, and great allies to the rest of my people, for they would also be amongst my people.

  I gave orders that the tiny cubs be fed by hand from the bags the elves had carried here with food. I gave these orders automatically, as though I had a feel for how this matter should be, and would be. The animals whined, but they were just large enough to be able to tear apart the smoked deer meat that the elves took from their packs, and then they willing played with the elves who sat amongst them. Marcus remained alert, but he smiled at one of the wolves who trotted up and expectantly looked at him. While keeping one hand on his spear, so that he would be ready at an instant if the missing one-eyed wolf returned, Marcus picked the wolf puppy up, who then calmly nipped at his thick black beard.

  The animal who had killed Hamali had been the biggest of the pack, and these young wolf cubs were most likely his children. And I had just now killed their mother, and their aunts and uncles. All of the people of this tribe.

  And in a strange way, to me it seemed right. It seemed fitting that after killing the mother and driving off the father of these cubs that I would raise them to be my friends. And I knew that so long as I placed some of my power and blessing into them, they would grow up tame and powerful.

  Their minds would be beyond those of the dogs my settlement possessed in the same way as the minds of humans were beyond those of chimps.

  After the wolves were fed, the elves decided that they would pull the bodies of the wolf pack away, and bury them in the orchard, which they had in a sense chosen to protect. They all had a certain respect for these wolves as the warriors who had killed Hamali, and they all had a certain sadness due to the new friendship they were developing with the little wolves, though the almost newborn pups were already as large as the smallest dogs the scouts had brought with them.

  It was a sobering thing to look at a cute little animal and know you’d killed its whole family.

  The ground in the orchards was soft, and easy to dig out with the tools kept as supplements in the packs of my men. It took nearly an hour for the men, except the ones who stayed behind with the wolf cubs, to dig out the deep holes for the wolves. Marcus the entire time
stood guard over the diggers, holding his long spear, and watching the men.

  Then they buried the wolves down, each in their separate grave, and brought the young wolf cubs out, to where their parents had been buried. The young animals sadly walked over the tamped earth, and I had a sense that they knew what had happened, but that in their minds, as yet those of wild animals, they accepted that such was the way of things.

  And the trees of the orchard plot where they had been buried began, before my eyes, to sprout greener, and for purple and blue flowers to begin to burst from them.

  Marcus went out that evening with four scouts as backup to search for any sign of the large one-eyed wolf who Hamali had wounded. But except for dribbles of old dried blood leading away from the temple grounds before fading to nothing, they found, as I have already said, neither spoor, nor track, nor other sign of the great beast. And as I have said, no sign ever was found in the years which have passed since.

  When the hunters returned, the entire group camped in the large sheltered space of the temple, taking turns keeping watch.

  The next morning I had the group, principally led by Marcus, as he was the only one with the strength to do so efficiently, beat into crumpled dust the statuary of the ancient spirit that had ruled here. Virtunis directed this operation, as he could tell which objects must be destroyed for me to fully claim the temple as my own, and which could be, whatever their previous use, turned for good.

  The blood covered small dagger with a ruby hilt and an obsidian blade was shattered, and the ruby ground into a powder, and in so doing it released some spiritual power into me. The statues were all destroyed, but the gem and the marble altar were cleaned, softly with water from a hot spring that bubbled out into one corner of the valley.

  Marcus was delighted to find that the limestone walls of the valley sides had an enormous supply of stones that were excellent for flint knapping, and of a far higher quality than any of the other stones my scouts had found so far.