Life Is Good

Harvest

Time seemed to fly by with as busy as everyone had been. Before Dag was really aware that it was time, they were reaping the first large size grain harvest. It was a real job and a half, especially in the first year. Dag would have traded his right arm for a real steel scythe, but instead they each made do with small sickles made from curved branches inset with flint micro-blades. Worse, those dulled after only a few hours of work.

Even once harvested, the labor didn’t stop there. The grain was all run through the sieve to remove the grains designated for next year’s seed crop. It still wasn’t quite enough to use only the improved grains, but a significant portion of next year’s fields would have only the largest of seeds.

Then came the efforts of grinding and baking. Luckily, each of those could be spread out in an as needed basis. Dag got his first real bread in four years. These were not the little flat loaves and rock hard biscuits that he had experimented with before, nor was it a French baguette. He did manage to get something very closely resembling a stone ground multigrain loaf from a hippy commune, but after so long without, it tasted like heaven.

While the sheep milk was more naturally homogenized than cow milk, and so didn’t lend itself to butter, his experiments trying to make butter, left him with a reasonable impersonation of cream cheese, and spread on the bread, with a small spoon full of berry preserves, and to say it was a hit would be an understatement.

A people so used to a protein and fat based diet got their first real introduction to carbohydrates, and they loved it. Dag even indulged himself in an egg sandwich. It was a far cry from the English muffin, egg, cheese, and ham that he used to order in the mornings from that McFood joint each morning, but it was still damn good, and the whole clan really got into the act.

It wasn’t easy using an unglazed tile in place of a frying pan, but Dag found that with enough grease, it could be done. Even the wooden spatula had taken him half a day to make, but it mostly worked. Well enough that later in the week, they even were able to have French toast as well. Syrup wasn’t really an option, but sweet coconut milk and fresh berries seemed to do the trick well enough.

This was also the first year that the olive trees produced in quantity. Which meant building an olive press. This was a bit different from the simple wine and cheese press that he had used before. Olives packed in brine would last for a while when packed away in the cooler underground cellars, but it was still very much a testing process to find out what successfully preserved them.

So rather than risk failed preservation techniques, the clan spent weeks eating olives morning, noon, and night. Even so, enough olive oil was processed to make baking and even lamp oil an abundant resource. Even allowing for Dag to attempt a very foul tasting French fry experiment using the edible reed tubers. Even trying coconut oil when the olive oil started to smoke like a coal plant. None of it worked. French fries needed potatoes, but he did do a little fried bread that was a big hit.

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Baby Boom

They spent the storm season with nearly everyone back at the village. The forest fortress had been reinforced and told to remain until relieved, while everyone else was pulled back in close to home. Space got a little tight with everyone at home, but Dag took advantage of this time to meet with his people. They worked on small projects indoors, and just enjoyed the time with a couple of holidays and a generally more relaxed attitude toward life.

Dag wanted the people to see that it wasn’t all work, that there was time to enjoy that which they had made. Other than the handful of small projects, they really only had shore patrol to do. Dag sent a pair of runners out each day up and down the coast, with the express mission of finding any bounty that the sea washed up for them. After having whole schools of fish stranded ashore and beached whales during this time of year, Dag wasn’t going to miss out on easy food and supplies.

Of course, couples with not much else to do found ways to entertain themselves. By the end of the storm season, one in three of the women in the camp were having a bad time of it in the mornings, and Dag was fairly certain were going to be finding their clothes exceptionally tight fitting soon. Including Lavern, unless he misread the signs. After John and the twins, he was pretty sure he had them down pat by now.

Dag reasoned that this was a good thing. Assuming his leadership was good enough to let most of them survive, he was only about a decade and a half from solving his personnel shortage. Until then, they were going to be a large sink of resources to raise and educate. Dag had never been a fan of formalized education, but realized that everyone needed a minimum base to work from. If they couldn’t read, they couldn’t pull from his knowledge after he was gone, and all the time he was spending writing out the hows and whys of everything he could think of was wasted.

Jill was doing an excellent job, but he thought maybe six years of schooling between the ages of four and ten might be the better way to go. If she focused them only on reading, math, and maybe a few basic scientific principles, they could avoid superstition and maintain the lifestyle he was building for them, even in the generation gap between when he passed on, and this generation was old enough to take the reins.

As long as John was in charge, he felt confident that he could keep a hold of that gap generation with advisors like Jack and Ajax. Still, if they had a group already trained up, they would have less chance of backsliding into barbarism. That was when he decided to expend the resources for a school and library. Alexander took time away from his conquests to do this. Dag should do no less.

◆◆◆

Gathering

Unlike before, where Dag sent a large portion of his people to the Gathering spot, he decided this year to leave most of them where they were. The tar pits flooded each year, so Dag simply sent out a large work party as soon as storm season was over to dig large cisterns lined with the Roman concrete to collect and store the flood waters, and then pulled everyone out of the area and back down river to either the village or the Gathering to wait for the flood waters to go back down.

The chiefs were all concerned about the people who went with him, asking if they had been lost, but Dag assured them that they simply decided to stay in their more comfortable homes than risk the journey. He also included an invitation to visit any of their kin that they missed there once the flooding was over. There was a lot of grumbling about tradition and the importance of the Gathering, but for the most part Dag ignored them.

Political wrangling became the new pastime. Each of the chiefs trying to find a way to put pressure on Dag. One of the chiefs had actually managed to outfit his men with bows, but the arrows that they were trying to use were far from straight and left their range and accuracy woefully inadequate. That didn’t stop their bluster.

Clans as a whole may not have gotten the message on trade, but plenty of individuals did. Dag found that these people showed up with extra goods, and were only too happy to trade. The primary flint knapper of two different tribes had even bribed a couple of his clan members to carry some of his extra load. Dag just gave an inward sigh of relief. The clan chiefs may be too proud to change, but their people weren’t.

By the end of the Gathering, there were plenty of hurt feelings and harsh words spoken, but for the first time, no one had actually tried to fight any members of Dag’s clan. He hoped that meant that respect was starting to develop, no matter how grudgingly. Part of him whispered that he was being naïve and optimistic, and the only reason they weren’t fighting was because they had no way to win. He did his best to ignore that little voice, but decided when he got back to do a little more combat training with his people... just in case.

◆◆◆

Ponies

Floating back home from the Gathering, Dag stumbled upon a sight that sent his pulse racing. Out on the plains, he saw a small herd of ponies. These were far from horses, more like a zebra without stripes, barely bigger than a donkey. While useless for riding, as the go to animal for pulling carts and maybe even a chariot, they seemed perfect. Or at least better than any of his current options he amended to himself.

Once home, he called everyone around and explained the importance of what they had found. He pulled in everyone except the small party at the Gathering site. This was going to end up being his biggest drive yet for livestock. He knew that they would likely end up with far more than just the ponies, but it wasn’t like meat ever went to waste with the size of their growing clan, and he really wanted those ponies.

Dag spent four days hauling lumber out to strengthen and expand the corrals. The drivers he equipped with whips, and his original group that had become proficient with the use of a rope, he sent to capture the ponies before there was any chance of the animals breaking through the corral. With as many as were likely to be pushed through, he wasn’t taking any chances of losing his primary objective.

It was the biggest hunt that Dag’s clan had ever engaged in, and Dag wasn’t taking chances. He had the young ladies out as archers out to protect the drivers, while most of the boys were working the catch ropes on the other side of the drive. When it finally came time to put the plan into action, chaos reigned supreme. Animals were so numerous, that many ended up pushed up the sides of the slopes and missed getting trapped in the corral.

Even so, Dag managed to nab the fifteen ponies in the little herd, plus a over abundance of other animals. Including four full sized water buffalo, which was actually a bit larger an animal than they were really set up to deal with, but Dag rolled the dice and tried to pull them out of the mix too.

It didn’t really work out so well, and they broke one end of the corral enclosure and allowed dozens of animals to escape before the drivers could push them back into the pen. It left Dag with only one buffalo cow, and one dead bull to be butchered, the other two having made a clean getaway in the excitement.

It wasn’t until nightfall that Dag realized the error of trying to do such a large capture. With a shortage of live prey on the open plains in the local area, every predator in the region came to where all of the animals were concentrated.

Dag defended the handful of animals that they absolutely wanted to keep, and of course his own people, but he had to let the majority of the rest flee, just to distract the carnivores who had come to the feast. It left him with some nice pelts, and a little meat, but a lot fewer live animals on day two than he had originally captured. Despite the mistakes, he called getting ponies a win. Of course, he thought, now we just have to train them... I’ve no idea how that is done.

Time Flies

Chariot Race

A lot happened over the next few months. In addition to the normal industries, Dag had men working on breaking the horses while he focused on trying to build a chariot. It was nowhere near as easy as he had hoped it would be. Wood was heavy and hard to shape without metal tools. So, he ended up using wood for only the wheels, axels, and frame. For the rest he relied on formed hardened boiled leather. The process made the chariots lightweight, while still giving them a reasonable level of durability.

Discovering just the right mix of wood and leather was the difficult part, and Dag had three prototypes built over the course of six months. Fortunately, one of the early prototypes, while not quite good enough for the task Dag had in mind, was good enough to allow its use in training the ponies to pull and not fear the chariot behind them. Even so, his final chariot was done for three weeks before the ponies were ready to give it a try.

When the day finally came, everyone was anxious to watch. Dag was nervous as hell when he stepped up onto the woven rawhide platform. He had remembered reading that the Romans used it as a form of suspension, and was glad to find out after the first hundred yards that it did a pretty damn good job in that regard.

Dag took the first tour around the village solo. When there was no problem with it, he added the two bowmen. Even with his best archers, the bouncing of the platform still left the arrows going all over the world, any place but in the target. Ajax growled, “I can’t time it right! I’m always bouncing out of the way!”

Jack was making similar noises from his opposite side. While they were coming close to the target, he saw that they were each thrown off as the chariot moved. Dag tried throwing a small javelin from the driver’s perch. They were a little more accurate than the arrows, but not really a reasonable option for the near continuous rate of fire that Dag was hoping for.

Putting the question of who would actually would give the chariot its teeth, Dag no longer gave much thought as to where the shots were fired, and instead focused in on the rate of fire that was produced. Each pass they got a little faster. Still couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but they could put enough arrows down range to make it a fool’s errand to poke your head up from cover.

He figured that it was mostly a matter of practice, and until his boys could get the practice, they needed to be effective, he could use the chariot for troop transport. Being able to dump an archer and a shield man out behind an enemy was valuable. Not as valuable as having two archers firing from a moving chariot, but Dag figured he should take what he could get.

He didn’t know it at the time, but later found that it did take weeks of practice to properly judge aim when firing from the back of a chariot. So it wasn’t too long before all of his musings became moot and he had what he really wanted. Like much in life, that was still a future success, that needed to be purchased with time, sweat, and maybe a few tears.

After tearing around the village a few times, Dag let others try driving the team of ponies. “Careful now boys, if you don’t have the strength to handle the team, it isn’t a sign of failure. It just means you need to grow more to be able to handle it. This isn’t your one and only try.” He cautioned each of them as they climbed up to give it a shot. Some were able to handle it like a champ, and some were not quite so capable. Dag found that it seemed to be more a matter of confidence than it was about actual strength.

Jack jumped down at the end of his turn, “That was amazing!”

Dag chuckled, “It was a good first step. We need to let the ponies rest a bit, they’ve been pushing it for a while.” In a louder voice, he called out, “Bring them some water!”

As boys and men ran off to bring water, and Dag saw one of them offer a small handful of fruit to each pony, he talked to the others gathered around. “Yeah, this was fun, and it is both a new tool and weapon. It is just the start, though. I know of a place where they have more than just the one chariot...” he eyed the rapt crowd. “In this place, they actually race them.” Eyes went wide at this thought, and Dag could hear the mutters of excitement go through the crowd. “They had a grand building to race in. Bigger by far than even our castle. This building would be like a wall around the whole of the village. Where men could sit on the walls while the chariots raced around the center. They called it the ‘Circus Maximus’ in their language. Sounds grand? It translates roughly to ‘big circle’.” That brought out a laugh from those gathered around.

Dag sighed but smiled so that they knew he wasn’t frustrated with them, “Okay, so they weren’t all that creative with naming things.” Dag laughed with them, and he knew he had their minds reaching for this building so big it could hold all of the village inside. “How about we make a Circus Minimus, or little circle?” He asked to gage their take on it. “After we have more than one or two chariots that is.” This too gathered laugher, but Dag could see that he had sparked inspiration, and the people wanted chariot races as badly as he wanted a culture where the young men would yearn to master the horse, chariot, and bow. Dag knew that once warfare became prevalent, that these skills would give his people the tools they needed to survive, even long after he had gone from them. So, he had planted the seed, and knew that the human starvation for entertainment would water and nourish it.