Village to Town to City
Dag met with each of the clan elders, and as reluctant as he was to see it, they did just seem like desperate people who only wanted to find a place to live. The men agreed to work the tar pits, and digging the new canal, while their women and older children would be put in the gardens and fields to help with weed and pest control. Their willingness to work for what they got he found encouraging in a clan of hunter/gatherers.
To his even greater surprise, they took to the work without complaint. It was hot work from someone used to cooler weather in the north, but they seemed to be happy with their new life, at least for the most part. There were a couple of people who chose to be difficult, but one word to their chief, and the problem improved greatly.
As the language barrier became less of an issue, Dag learned that life had been fairly harsh for them in their previous location. So, while the work here was difficult and unfamiliar, and took them some time to become adept at, the level of work for them was nearly the same as what they were used to. Only with his clan, they didn’t have the starvation and deprivation that they had before. Dag came away relatively certain that they would merge into his little, or not so little anymore, society.
Jack did take the chief’s daughter as a mate, and Bren had finally made it clear that he wanted Jill, if she wanted him. She did, but all parties agreed it would be a promise for the future, rather than a reality for now, as Jill still had much maturing to do. The chiefs kicked in and assisted Dag in keeping things running smoothly, without being asked. Eventually, he was able to send one out to the tar pits, and one he kept in the village, or really it was a city now, having skipped the town stage completely. The new clan members ended up doubling their numbers. That was even after the people Hendden had brought in with him from his last overland exploration.
He noticed that the sun priest had been making inroads with the newcomers, but even so, it was still a minority who avidly followed the religion. Most were respectful, and even on occasion donated to the temple either of their time or goods, but most, more or less ignored them.
Jill had been driven to distraction, trying to teach that many new children. Ajax had suggested not teaching them, but even before Dag could correct his thinking, Bren and Hendden were taking him to task. Dag smirked, the older men didn’t have the education that Ajax took for granted, and they wanted it for the next generation. Dag let them argue it out among themselves, but he was very glad that he hadn’t needed to step in and defend the current policy.
A New Era
A Frustrating Year
Dag had the iron ore rich sand that was a byproduct of Nissa’s people panning for gold shipped directly to the castle. After mixing it with the tar, he filled a home built clay furnace with the resulting sludge and tried to smelt his first iron supply. However, he quickly learned that you can’t force air through solid tar. Then he tried mixing in straw, in the hopes that straw coated with the tar and iron ore mixture would solve the air flow problem, and it did... well, more or less, however because so little of the iron ore could be carried on the straw and tar mixture, he wasn’t able to get a bloom of any size from his small foundry.
By the third month, he had switched to charcoal soaked in the crude oil. This allowed him to consistently get a bloom from the sands. However, there was so much glass and slag in the resulting bloom, the few actual iron pellets he recovered were not even enough to make a nail, much less his first intended project of a functional saw blade.
He decided that the new problem was in the foundry design itself. So, over the next six months, he designed, tested, tore down, and retested dozens of design alternatives. He was heard lamenting on multiple occasions the lack of even a single junkyard to take advantage of. Still, he persevered, and in the end, managed to produce a small ingot of black iron the size of a golf ball.
Months of effort, and he really only had enough iron produced to create a small saw blade. However, he was soon to learn that creating the iron was the easier part. For now, he needed to forge that iron into a functional blade. Days hammering out the blade turned into weeks of starting over every time that the circular blade would crack. The quality of iron was all wrong, being more like cast iron than tool steel.
Three more months were spent tinkering with the fuel source in an attempt to lower the carbon content absorbed by the iron, with very little success. Eventually, Dag resorted to a crude distillation process that could ‘crack’ the crude oil to produce a cleaner burning fuel know as naphtha. This did the trick, lowering the carbon introduced into the iron enough that wrought iron could be produced. Then, by introducing the higher carbon steel to the mix of the more malleable wrought iron, Dag was able to produce his first real saw blades.
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Sawmill Changes Everything
With the recently completed second canal bringing water to the far side of the city, Dag set up a water wheel to take advantage of the falling water. This took even more time, but attached to this wheel was the world’s first sawmill. Far from a fast or powerful tool, it still was able to turn out consistent planks that allowed for new forms of construction.
The most impressive of these new construction projects was a Dakkar style Viking long boat. With iron production still in a fairly primitive state, most of the planks still needed to be drilled and pegged, which slowed the construction considerably over the Viking process of riveting the planks together. Even so, the addition of iron drill bits was a great improvement over the bone, stone, and shell drill bits of the early days of construction.
It was an additional eighteen months until the first longboat was launched. The city had grown by leaps and bounds in that time, allowing for dedicated professionals to smelt and shape iron, to saw lumber, and to build boats and houses with it. Along with the increase in population and specialization, the priests had been working overtime to convert the public, and had embarked on a large scale temple building project. All of this, funded by the sale of gold jewelry and idols. Dag hated to see the rise of superstition in his new civilization, but short of killing off the priests and claiming their temple, there was very little he could do to stop it.
Nissa was happy to see that it had not worked out the way her brother had planned, though. For, while he was still the high priest and the primary seat of the religion was still under his thumb in the traditional seat of his power, there were more of his sun worshipers in Dag’s city than in Breg’s distant temple town.
That isn’t to say that they weren’t beginning to exert their political strength. It started with simple things, like holidays on the solstices and equinox. Then progressed to when and what kind of food was acceptable. The priests seemed to have an opinion on everything, but the people gave them far more credence than was their due, so Dag found that he needed to tiptoe lightly around their various arbitrary decrees.
The ‘miracle’ of an automatic wood cutting machine, followed by a boat that could carry twenty men and supplies on the ocean or the river, went a long way to positioning Dag as a counterbalance to these priests, but since he didn’t couch his ‘miracles’ in the same mysticism or threaten to remove their function for disobedience, he didn’t enjoy quite the same impact as the priests, even if given greater awe and reverence.
The ship’s launch ushered in a whole new era for the people of the city. For the first time, bulk goods could be shipped in from distant lands. Unfortunately for Dag, none of those distant lands had anything beyond raw resources to ship in, at least as far as he could tell.
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City Stands Alone
It was on Dag’s fortieth birthday, when the recently christened S. S. Voyager set sail to investigate and explore the coastline. Provisions packed for a three-month journey. They were expecting to be out to sea for six months. It was Dag’s hope to reach the Indian sub-continent in that time and find another city like theirs. Of course, it wouldn’t be like theirs, as they wouldn’t have a man from the future instructing them in technology, but at least a city of men like those who built Gobekli Tepe. By his best estimations, he didn’t believe himself to be further back in time than two or three hundred years at most beyond the construction of that great site, so the culture that built it should be around. It should be getting started to build up to that level of sophistication, and if he could find them, he would have trading partners.
Despite all protests against it, Dag was captaining the Voyager himself. It was just he and John on this trip, and Lavern, Nissa, and the twins were unhappy about it. The others were mostly too young to be too upset, but the twins had made a real push to come along. Dag only settled them down by threatening to marry them off to far off kings if they insisted on coming. Both of their mothers had to turn away to hide their amusement at the little girl’s reactions. The twins were a precocious pair, and at the age where they had more than half of the castle wrapped around their little fingers. For daddy of all people to threaten to marry them off to someone far away... Dag figured that he would be a week out to sea before his wives could convince his daughters that he was teasing them, and that they were far too young to worry about husbands yet.
John, of course, was all up for it. Dag figured he would change his mind once the waves picked up a little. Dag didn’t get seasick much, but he knew that this little wooden boat was a far different story than the large sea-going vessels he was used to riding. Either way, he wanted this time alone with his heir to help prepare the boy for what was to come. Under ideal conditions, Dag had at most twenty more years to live without modern medicine to support him. In ten years, he realized that he would be slowing down sufficiently that much of the running of the city would fall on young John’s shoulders. He wanted time away from the demands of ‘empire’ to prepare his son the best he could to do well, even under the crushing weight that was going to fall on his shoulders.
Fortunately for John’s education, but not so much for the economic future of the city, there was no sign of any people more sophisticated than small clans dependent on hunting and gathering. They did find a small handful of clans that had domesticated dogs, and even a very small few that had small log rafts that they used for fishing close to the coast. None of these were of sufficient sophistication to provide the city with real trade partners.
After three months of searching, the verdict was in the city stands alone.
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Return to Chaos
Dag returned home more than a little disappointed that they hadn’t managed to find any civilizations to trade with. After storm season passed, he would send Jack up the other way to check the coastline toward Africa, but he had little hope of finding anything. India had been the safer bet, and it came up with snake eyes.
The scene that greeted him on the beach made his blood run cold. The city had been devastated by fire. Recovery efforts stalled long enough to greet their ship as it returned, but only long enough for that. Jack arrived with Lavern and Nissa, all three looked grim. “What happened?” Dag asked concern warring with frustration.
Jack let the man’s wives have a quiet moment with him before answering. “Five of the chiefs of the plains formed an alliance.” He let out a long sigh, “It seems that they figured out bows well enough to dip their arrows in pitch and set them alight. From the crest of the ridge, they fired dozens of flaming arrows down into the city. Enough of the newer roofs are made from palm thatching. They didn’t fare too well. Fortunately, we only lost two people who got cut off by the fire.” He shrugged in impotent frustration at things he couldn’t change, “It could have been much worse.”
Dag’s eyes narrowed, and he could feel the anger rising even as he fought to respond in a calm and rational way. “It could have been much worse, and we’ll do more to secure that ridgeline.” He took a deep breath and let it out, “Do we know who these five clans are?”
Jack nodded, “We managed to put our own arrows in five of their men, but they were over by the city, not by the castle where we expected to fight them.”
Again Dag nodded, “How many chariots can we field now?”
Jack’s face broke into a wicked grin, “Nine. Nine if we don’t count spare teams.”
Dag scratched his chin, “Nine chariots, and thirty shield men as infantry?”
