Civilization- Barbarians Read online

  Then they examined, led by Marcus this time, the tall gate built into the mountainside that protected the entrance into the valley. Here we found, rusted away, ancient bands of iron and fragments of decayed wood left where the mechanism of the gate had been. It was impossible for our arts to repair such a structure at this time, and the elves had no knowledge of defensive fortifications, so they did not know how to create their own gate.

  The entrance to the valley needed to remain open for the time being, but Marcus made a plan for the elves who stayed behind to cut down small trees from the forest along the mountainside pass. They would drag the logs to form a crude barrier at the entrance that could be easily clambered over by the elves, but which would slow a barbarian and stop most wild animals.

  Marcus and Virtunis decided to leave fifteen of the soldiers in the temple — enough that they might, maybe, hopefully be sort of safe (and anyway, we had killed the wolves). This group would protect the temple, and tend to the wolf cubs and the orchards, while the rest of the soldiers would return with Marcus and Virtunis to our home settlement.

  I could make some decisions immediately, but Marcus and Virtunis planned to argue about what we should do to use the temple in a council meeting in front of my glowy rock.

  As the elves who were returning to my settlement — and I decided then that I should order them to make a name for the town, maybe Cuddletopia — left their friends in the temple, I studied the valley that was now to be my second settlement.

  I had, of course, this entire time kept an eye on the home settlement, and I had resolved any matters that required my attention, of which there had not in fact been many.

  We’d properly repair the gate one day, and there were so many ways I could shape this valley to make it a proper refuge and a source of strength for my people.

  I could terrace part of the valley, and grow fruit trees that would probably benefit in some way from proximity to the blessed trees of the orchard. We could have more buildings built along the walls of the valley, and there was ample space for a small training ground and shooting range.

  And the whole area would be a death trap once properly prepared for an invading army.

  And the inner temple wasn’t complete. I felt that suddenly, it should be expanded, and made into a more perfect, and more powerful temple. Suddenly I had a vision of how to expand the main altar room, making it much larger with nooks for extra worshippers surrounding it. The picture in my mind felt right.

  Build a great temple

  If you expand the gardens, and carve deeper into the mountains, and put an additional set of secondary altars in the pattern of power around your first, then you will gain great benefits, and the place of power will be able to store vastly more spiritual energy, and the worshippers in this location will produce twice as much spiritual energy, and there will be twice as many places for them.

  As though you could ever build something so awesome with hippie elves.

  It doesn’t matter how many of them you have, they’d rebel before trying to hack their way through the granite of the mountainside with stone axes and picks. They’d probably even rebel if you gave them power tools to do it with…

  You’d better find some people from a less picky group to join your civilization if you want to ever build a temple like that.

  Ha! This popup proved that even though my one attempt to recruit a barbarian had been a complete disaster (like Marcus had predicted, of course), I had been on the right track when I wanted to do so.

  Chapter Eleven

  I wanted to follow Virtunis’s recommendation and send a large colony to the temple.

  I really did.

  Mainly because in my initial place of power there were just twenty specialist slots for worshippers. Just twenty — not nearly enough to use the spiritual energy as much as I wanted to.

  The most capable and spiritually sensitive elves worshipped before the glowy rock in three shifts, therefore the specialist slots were filled day and night with my praises — a matter which I still thought was one which the less I thought about it, the better.

  Fifty slots in the new temple, if I sent at least a hundred fifty monks, we could fully utilize the worship slots, and another twenty or thirty men could be sent to the temple as soldiers to protect them, and as craftsmen and specialists to support the worshippers.

  I would triple the rate at which I gained spiritual energy, and then when they trained or researched it would go faster and easier because they learned and thought faster. And when the elves worked on building or shaping stones, I’d be able to feed them my blessing so they complained less.

  Which would make them do it faster.

  Unfortunately, Marcus was absolutely opposed.

  He wanted to keep all our military power close to the home settlement. The temple was about a day’s walk for an elf away from the home settlement — though Marcus could run the distance in a matter of hours.

  Way too distant for the elves in the temple to be rescued if they were attacked by a group big enough to destroy them, and they could not support the main settlement if it was attacked. In a big battle the absence of a hundred fifty men, more than 15% of my people, might be the difference between a narrow victory and a narrow defeat, or the difference between an easy and low casualty victory, and a terrible victory in which many, many of my people died.

  Marcus was right. I could not send a hundred fifty, or a hundred eighty elves into the mountains.

  Virtunis ignored the second part of Marcus’s argument, and he heatedly and irritatedly explained at great length to Marcus how he was quite sure the elves in the mountains would be able to defend themselves, and since they each would only spend a third of the hours of the day meditating and another third sleeping, they would have lots of time to practice using pointy sticks, and they would be safe and fine, and no one would find them, or attack them in the mountains anyway.

  Marcus replied that none of the elves except for the fifty he had as permanent soldiers were capable of functioning without him to tell them when to blow their noses and which foot to put forward first while walking.

  I supported Marcus in this argument in the end, as much as I really wanted to fill all the worshipper slots. We chose to keep a small group in the mountain temple, because I needed the temple to be constantly occupied so I could maintain my claim on it.

  I also needed the orchard to be tended to so it would start producing fruit, and the wolf pups needed to be cared for.

  Basically, it was important to have someone there.

  If I had 300,000 units of spiritual energy, then I would be able to fight a long battle while keeping my elves fully supplied with my blessing, instead of needing to bet everything on a single fast fight when I could boost everyone at once.

  In the end a compromise was decided upon. One of the expert flint knappers, fifteen monks, who would be enough to fully claim the place of power and allow it to be used to store spiritual energy, and a group of five soldiers who would keep away wild animals, train, and hunt for meat would be stationed there. Twenty men was a small enough number that Marcus was not worried that their loss would cripple us.

  Partly Marcus wasn’t concerned because the monks who were sent to the temple were masters of meditation who conversely were not particularly skilled, even by the limited standards of the elves, at combat. They were older men who had mastered meditation over centuries of training, and who were underfed ascetics, and whose fitness statistic was not particularly high.

  In other words no great loss to our fighting capacity, even if they died or were unavailable to fight.

  The five soldiers who would guard them were of course more valuable from a purely military perspective, but everyone agreed that some guard should be kept over the temple.

  Even with this small group, I would be able to use the temple to around 15% of its capacity, since the fifteen monks planned to meditate in the place of power for around twelve hours a day, every day. The remaining time in t
he day would be enough time for them to tend to the gardens, feed themselves and the puppies and do an hour or two of military drilling twice a week.

  I disliked the necessity of allowing the monks there to be exempt from stoneworking duties, and other unpleasant tasks, but the group of monks would be rotated three times a year, and once they returned home, the monks would be required to do extra manual labor to keep the system fair for everyone.

  The elves who were chosen to go to the mountains were nonetheless delighted because they really wanted to spend time in the temple. Once they actually arrived there, their morale boosted from the “happy” level that most of my people stayed at to joyful, which was the second to highest level, the highest level possible, according to the help files, was blissful.

  The extremely high morale and happiness they had there meant there was no problem with them sticking to the “duty” of meditating for such long periods.

  All in all the new temple increased my generation of spiritual energy by more than 60 units an hour when the monks were meditating, which would almost allow me to put a full combat blessing that doubled the speed of cognition on one warrior during a battle.

  Not a huge combat benefit as such, but this and the passive bonuses meant that I could ensure that no matter what happened, Marcus at least would be able to access a substantial blessing for as long as a battle continued.

  That temple itself was on brilliant defensive ground. The only way up to its entrance was a steep pathway that could be easily defended by rolling stones or shooting down at enemies, or by having a small group of men stand in the middle of the pass, unable to be flanked by a larger army.

  Unfortunately that advantage went both ways: A small band of barbarian warriors could settle themselves in one of the spots in the pass where the terrain would make it difficult to roll stones onto them, and then it would become impossible for the elves to surround them, while they would be man for man vastly more deadly.

  This was something Marcus had pointed out when Virtunis suggested repeatedly that we move the entire tribe to the temple, and only leave a few elves in the current settlement to keep gathering deer and crabs.

  It would be easy to be trapped there, and there wasn’t enough food in the valley to support all of the people, and then we would be starved out by an enemy, even though they would have very little chance of directly attacking us. On the other hand the giant forest we lived in currently gave us ample opportunities to ambush our enemies, and to run and hide from them if they beat our army.

  However, no matter what Marcus said, once we had archery, I would send a large group to the temple, so that the spots for worship could be used at all times.

  Virtunis was bitterly disappointed that I would not send a full group of monks to occupy the temple. He also was bitterly disappointed that I decreed he personally was to stay in the settlement, instead of enjoying life in a mountain orchard once more. But he accepted my choice without a very big ding to his morale level.

  To my disappointment, Marcus’s opinion of me did not improve when I accepted his recommendations.

  Chapter Twelve

  Once my people went a bit more than a fifty kilometers away from the gem that was the center of my power it required more and more spiritual energy for me to project my blessing onto them, and then if they went far enough, and then if they went much further, I could not see them at all. I could not know if they were alive, dead or wounded. And could give no further orders. They were on their own, outside of my influence.

  However, at first we kept sending out scouts into the fog beyond my line of vision. Marcus wanted to know everything about possible enemies and military resources, and I supported him in this because I was hoping they would find a ruin which would teach them archery.

  The scouts went on several week-long missions into the darkness, while I waited and worried. Inevitably when they came back, they had found something valuable. For example a group sent south directly along the coast found examples of canoes from which we learned to build boats and start properly exploiting the rich shoals of fish along the coastline.

  But then, about eight months after I’d come to this world, one team simply disappeared. We presumed them dead, and the mates of those lost mourned for weeks.

  After this I refused to allow Marcus to send out anymore scouting expeditions.

  He lost yet more trust in me.

  And I, in truth, I lost a little trust in myself.

  I did not have something, the backbone, the indifference, the hardness and coldness necessary to rule properly.

  A standard way of thinking about risks, or a Bayesian analysis suggests that when something goes wrong you should not overreact. If you always knew there was a chance things could go badly, when they do go badly, you should still keep trying because the odds are on your side and what you were getting for the risk was worth it.

  I couldn’t.

  Marcus wanted to send more scouts out because each time they came back with something valuable, and it was worth it, even if we lost several other groups because one major military technology — bronze working, or archery, or horseback riding, for example. Perhaps in this world there was something super useful that wasn’t in the Civ tech list. One major technology would do more to increase our military power than the losses we might sustain.

  You didn’t stop sending scouts out in Civilization just because a barbarian or, in Civ 4, a wild animal, ate one of your scout units. You kept the other one out there wandering around until you ran out of fog that you could reach.

  But I could not do that.

  Four men and one woman. Aien, Hatheral, Venali, and two brothers, Fylson and Fennan.

  I made a point to recall their names every week, when I looked at Hamali’s grave, and wept inside, that these other brave comrades of his were lost far from home, and could not be brought to lie next to him.

  Instead of distant expeditions to far places, the scouts instead patrolled the borders of the forty kilometer circle round about the settlement, and the twenty kilometer circle round about the temple that intersected with that circle around the settlement, so I’d hopefully have a warning if any barbarians attacked.

  It bothered me a great deal, I knew I was making the technically wrong decision. But I just couldn’t do it.

  This in truth rather surprised me. I had proven myself while still alive perfectly capable of happily ignoring stock market crashes and buying additional shares when everyone else was panicked. I sometimes was too good at that, and bought more shares rather before everything was done crashing. But in this, sending men out, some of whom I knew would die, I could not do it, not easily, not yet

  Chapter Thirteen

  Over the following months, Marcus gradually became unhappy with my rule. I believe the primary motive for his disaffection was that I did not allow him to drill everyone continuously, but instead spent the labor that could have been used in that way on the contemplation of archery.

  But maybe it was something else. I knew what he thought of me, but he did not tell me why, beyond of course his regular complaints about wanting four half days per week instead of two.

  The drilling would help if we were attacked right now, but archery would provide a far bigger defensive advantage in the long run.

  Marcus’s unhappiness worried me enormously. The settlement needed him, and I did not understand him, despite having studied everything in his bio sheet dozens of times.

  Trained in Tantalus — wherever or whatever that was. Incredible physical abilities and potential, a perfect knowledge of the primitive weapons, any weapon he could get his hands on he could use brilliantly. He had an enormous amount of hidden abilities that did not have the conditions yet met for them to trigger.

  He spent all of his time, morning to night, drilling men, talking to soldiers, training them, and keeping himself exercised with them. Marcus was monomaniacal. His sheet claimed he had iron discipline, unlimited determination, and passionate vision.


  However there were rare moments of peacefulness, which I saw when I stalked him with my viewfield.

  He’d take five minutes sometimes to sit and look out at the breaking greenish blue foamy surf on the beach, and he’d watch the elves who were tasked to gather the crabs near the shore as they ranged up and down the sea coast happily running and splashing in the salty water, and checking the lures they had set out deeper in the water to see if any of the poor lobsters had wandered in.

  The sea breeze ruffled his beard and short cropped hair, and Marcus leaned back completely relaxed, with a soft smile on his face.

  At those times Marcus looked like a young man instead of a terrifying creature of destruction. A man younger than I was.

  I thought that at a deep level Marcus had no loyalty to me personally. I think most of the elves thought of me by then as the guide they followed, like they had followed and worshipped my lizard friend Amzlat before.

  Not Marcus.

  His loyalty was either to a cause, or to Amzlat. But it was not to me.

  What would happen when he changed from unhappy at my leadership, to angry?

  I was not happy either, neither with my leadership, nor with my life here.

  I struggled to make the best choice every time a situation required me to think, but I still constantly realized things I could have done a little better, ways I might have optimized the tribe’s activities better, and then ways that my attempts to optimize things caused bigger problems elsewhere.

  But that was not the fundamental source of my unhappiness.

  You must understand: I was alone. Completely alone.

  I could watch and look at my people, but none of them could become my friends. None of them could hear my voice, and I could not understand without translation the words from their voices.