One angry chief in the front, obviously leading the rabble, called out to them, “It is not fair that my son died to provide meat that you gain with magic! You must give us the magic in compensation for my son!”

Jack translated for Dag, who just frowned and replied, “Return to your camp while you still can.”

The man’s face contorted, and he started to move forward. Dag waved a hand, and the man’s chest sprouted three arrows. To Dag’s surprise, he bellowed a war cry and charged forward, anyway. The others followed, but only made it about four steps before they found themselves peppered with arrows. The old man in the lead couldn’t maintain his charge and dropped. Between their leader falling, and their own wounds, the line faltered in a critical moment, and soon they were sprouting more arrows. This broke their will to fight, but Dag allowed parting shots from his archers even as the others ran away. He didn’t really feel good about shooting fleeing men, but he had to make the cost of attacking them so great that no one would be willing to risk it in the future.

It was a tense night, with half the men up on guard at any given time, and shield men doing a foot patrol just inside easy bow shot range. In the morning, Dag sent Hendden out with a message for the clan chiefs. They could come and collect their dead, but if anyone approached the fort for any other reason, including trade, they would be fired on.

◆◆◆

Chief’s Council

When Hendden arrived, the chiefs were already in a council meeting. He strode proudly into their midsts and delivered Dag’s proclamation. This was met with outrage by many there. “Who is this man to say who may come and go upon the land? Will he next tell us where we may hunt, camp, or travel?”

Hendden shrugged, “I’m only the messenger. He has not revealed his mind to me in any other way. I do know that he is serious, and will shoot anyone who approaches who is not there to haul away the bodies.”

This caused another uproar, and one chief who had not been involved at all asked, “They will not trade with us? We did not attack them!”

Hendden shrugged, “They will not trade with my clan either, only with me personally.” He heard murmurs of traitor and decided to ignore them.

The meeting ended with a lot of angry chiefs, Hendden’s own father among them, but no one proposed making a second attempt for either the boats or the fort. The losses from the first fight were still too fresh in their minds. Three clans would now be destroyed, as there were nowhere near enough hunters to keep them fed. No one was willing to see his own clan join their ranks.

The bodies were collected, but that did little to ease tensions. Dag and his people didn’t leave the immediate area of the fort. Food for them wasn’t an issue, and while water might run short in time, it would be quite some time before they were really in a bad way. Though grazing for the animals would be problematic before too long.

The problems were not all one sided. The food ran out rather quickly. Even with the fish and the orex, there were still a lot of mouths to feed. The remnants of the three clans were the first to suffer, as they got little to no portion of the hunt. Their hunters were almost all dead, and none of the other clans felt them worth the expenditure of resources, given their chances for survival. Each clan pulling back to watch after its own.

As this situation continued to drag on, Dag eventually had to send forces down for water. He sent a heavily guarded group down to fill water skins and pots, and haul them back on travois. Even choosing to send them just before dawn as he had, they still encountered people from the other clans, but other than a few shouted insults, no one was ready to fight them.

With his water resupplied, Dag dug in. If the lack of grazing became too great, they would eat well on the animals. He sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he wasn’t about to give the clans the opportunity to take or kill them by posting them out past his own reach.

The water continued to drop, but the flooding was not yet over, nor were the mud flats surrounding them really passable just yet. So, stuck together as they were, they finally decided to see if they could seek peace. A new hunt was needed, and no one wanted to send all of his hunters off and leave his clan unprotected. The chiefs gathered together again, and after much lamenting their situation, they sent for Hendden.

◆◆◆

Peace Talks

Hendden approached the fort cautiously. His fears were for nothing, because Dag himself opened the gate and walked out to greet him. “So, are they coming at us again?” he asked with a shake of his head.

Hendden shook his head, “No, that they will not do unless they have no other choice, and the waters are lowering enough that they can wait it out, but the very old and the very young will probably join the ancestors if they do.”

Dag frowned, “I didn’t want any of this.”

Hendden smiled sadly, “I know. Like you, I did not foray it coming to this. The good news is that they want to talk peace.”

Dag’s face contorted, “I’m just supposed to believe that it is all forgotten now?”

Hendden shrugged, “They really are in a pinch. They need to send out hunters one more time, but no one is willing to leave their clan unprotected. Especially after they saw what happened to the survivors of the three clans that attacked you. No one wants that for their women and children.”

Dag fixed him with an uncomprehending look, “What the other clans didn’t just absorb them?”

Hendden shook his head again, “No. Each clan pulled back to take care of its own. The surviving hunters took their mates and joined forces in a single clan, but any who were not claimed as family by the surviving hunters were left without protection to fend for themselves.”

Dag felt a pang of remorse, but shoved it down. Their example is what is bringing the other chiefs to talk peace... “So, how do they want to do this?”

Hendden held his hands wide and open, “That is what they sent me here to ask.”

Hendden followed Dag into the fort, where food and drink were given to him, as he and Dag sorted out exactly what peace talks would look like. When he left to go back, Hendden was amazed at how reasonable Dag was being considering what had been done to him.

The meeting went surprisingly well. These chiefs might not like Dag or his clan, but they hadn’t been the clans who tried to fight him. They saw the benefits of the trade goods he brought each year, and while they still hadn’t quite grasped the concept and often came out of a trade hurting far more than Dag and his people did, they still understood that they were better off than they would have been. Even fishing the flooded river, which they had all started to do by wading in the shallows and spearing what they could, was a sound idea. The only ‘sticking point’ in the whole negotiation was the chiefs’ insistence that his clan absorb the widows and orphans from the men that were killed. It was a small price for peace, but it put Dag in a bit of a moral quandary.

◆◆◆

Slavery Question

Dag’s clan was soon presented with a gaggle of malnourished war captives. He wasn’t ready to call them slaves. He didn’t come here to introduce that evil to these people. He had little enough doubt that they would learn it all on their own eventually, but he didn’t want to be the one who set the precedent. Unfortunately, he didn’t see that he had much choice.

Dag found himself with new people, which was always a mixed blessing, but among those who only wanted to survive and for their children to survive, was a small handful of those who were likely harboring a grudge. If he just brought them in, they could do a lot of damage from the inside. The women weren’t likely to try to fight, not when their men had failed so spectacularly, but that wouldn’t stop one from setting a fire, or if knowledgeable enough, poisoning a stew pot. It was a risk that he couldn’t take.

He decided to lessen the risks by dividing them up. All the small children would be taken back to be raised communally. The women, however, he decided to leave a few here with the guards he left behind. When he got back to the castle, he would then break them up even further. Maybe put a few in the village, a couple in the castle, and with any left overs... He still hadn’t figured that part out, but maybe a small outpost where the canal joined the river.

The idea of an outpost there concerned him some. It would be useful for protecting that valuable infrastructure point, but it would also run him thin on actual troops, and that was a danger that he wasn’t ready to deal with. Keeping everyone fed was not likely to be a problem. Especially as the olive trees began to produce next year, the amount of seed grain was now sufficient to sow a couple of fields, and of course the domesticated animals were producing a small surplus as well. The manpower to protect it all? That was a question that he was still unable to answer.

Readjustment

Unsteady Peace

True to the peace agreement, life went back as close to normal as was possible. The influx of new people was a difficult thing to adjust to. Oona took over the new women without any direction from Dag. She put the younger ones to useful employment and added the two older crones in the group to her own entourage. The children were not a problem at all, but the younger boys were a concern. While not men large enough to hunt in the traditional ways of the clan, they were large enough to cause problems. Worse, they were likely to want retribution for their fathers. Dag could only see them as a ticking time bomb.

Not wanting to kill them, he approached the other chiefs, and sought other accommodations for them. None were willing. Frustrated, Dag tried to think what other options he had. A few of the boys had already followed the new condensed clan made of the remnants of the three shattered in the attack upon Dag’s clan. What was left was wanted by no one, but still far to volatile to simply keep around.

In the end, he kept them bound until the waters receded a bit more drying the land away from the main river enough for travel. Equipping the boys with tools and supplies, he then had the marched out over the mud flats for four days, unbound and exiled. He marked each one with a scar on his left shoulder, and explained, “You are now marked so that if you return, I will know you, and I will kill you. Travel in any direction you like except back. Other clans in other parts of the land may give you shelter, or you may survive long enough to grow and start your own clans. I have no hate for you, but will assume the next time I see you, that you come seeking revenge for your fathers and I will kill any that I find.”

The boys all ran when given the chance. Dag said a small prayer to any power that may have been listening that they would all find homes, far away from his people. The last thing he wanted was to be responsible for the deaths of young men whose only ‘crime’ was being too dangerous to keep close.

◆◆◆

Saying Good Bye

When finally it was time to depart, Dag’s clan left last as usual. They had the ability to carry far more back this time, as some things would be left as trade goods for the small team they would leave behind, as well as the added carrying capacity of the two boats, and the extra women now available to pull additional travois. This meant that a lot more wood and charcoal would be able to be carried downriver. He loaded all of the children into the boats with his own people. The travois would travel wagon train style, with the animal drawn travois in the front setting the pace, and the human pulled smaller travois following behind.

He kept just enough men to guard this less valuable cargo, and sent the boats on ahead it instructions to pile everyone off at the junction of the canal to the river, and then send a runner to the castle for more hands. For his own part, he was going with the travois. It would take them an extra day or two of travel time, even if all went well, and he didn’t want the boats to slow for that.

The trip back was less eventful than he had feared, though they did lose one of the women to a snake bite. She had been let loose to see to nature’s call, when she wandered off and got bit. Dag had surprised everyone when he called a halt to their travels long enough to let her have family around her as she passed. They buried her along the trail, and Dag piled stones on top of the grave to mark it and to keep scavengers from digging her back up. Dag was having a difficult enough time with the idea of having the war captives with him with no clear path for integrating them into his clan, the thought of leaving them to die alone as he pushed the others on in what could only be described as forced labor, was more than he could stand. Even as it was, he was glad that he had no mirror to look into each morning.

When they finally did reach the junction of the canal and the river, Dag had everyone drop their burdens. “We’ll call a halt here. Jack, go on ahead and send back the canal boat. We’ll take this the last little bit the easy way.”

Jack grinned and ran off in the direction of the castle. Dag set watches and set off to look around. It was mostly all mud flat, and it flooded each year, so he wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly. He just needed to find the most solid place to put a tower. He would have preferred a warehouse, but with the flooding, any building would have to be built high.

Eventually, not more than a couple of dozen paces from the canal, he found a large boulder deeply sunk into the rapidly drying mud. He dug around it for a few minutes and discovered it wasn’t just a normal boulder, but a massive rock sunk deep into the mud. It was deep enough that he hoped that any tower anchored to it wouldn’t be immediately washed away in the floods.