Hendden’s turn to sigh arrived, “I wish my father could see this, but I don’t know if even seeing it would change his mind. When I lead though, then will you teach me these things?” He waved his hand at the castle, village, and all the assorted industries.
Dag smiled sadly, “I’ve been trying to help teach things to everyone. I can’t get most of them to understand simple things like trade.” He made a disgusted sound, “Hell, I can help you learn all about building, mechanics, and even a bit of chemistry, but none of it matters until you can feed, clothe, and house everyone. Until you have partners who produce more than they need to survive, so that they can trade with you for the things you make.” Dag threw his hands up in the air in frustration, “Until I can change the mindset of at least a few of the clans...” He caught himself mid rant and took a deep breath, “No one group can make everything that they need or want, so I do need help. The problem is that it is damn hard to work with people who just work until they have a full belly and then stop, with no concern as to how they will fill their belly tomorrow, or next week, or next month. To say nothing of those with the mindset that they can just take from you any excess that you have produced, because it is more than you ‘need’. Or I suppose, maybe they just think that they can get away with it. Well, not with my clan they can’t. Try to take from us, without offering something of equal value in trade, and the only thing you’ll get is my arrows.”
Hendden nodded slowly, his mind working through Dag’s words. “Make more than you need, so you can trade the extra for what you want... If we learn to do this, then we can live like this too?”
Dag chuckled, “A little more to it than that, but that is the first step. Hell, if I could get enough of the clans doing it, we could all end up living a whole lot better.”
Hendden didn’t say anything more for a long time, just sat there deep in thought. Dag hoped that he had gotten through to the man, because it had to start somewhere.
Dag had an idea strike, and he got Hendden’s attention, “There is one more thing. You can find what we call a natural resource. Kind of like the salt we bring to trade. Something that is found in your area, that can’t be gotten elsewhere. Then you just collect it, and trade it off to others for some of the things you can’t get where you live.”
Hendden looked up sharply at that, it was an idea he could see being an easy way to transition his father into this mindset. “Like what?”
Dag sighed, “There in lies the problem. You have to find what is available in your area.” The conversation quickly devolved into a repeat of the conversation he had with Jack about what to look for, and what would be useful.
◆◆◆
Power Tools
After Handden and his party left, having traded for most of what they needed, Dag went back to work on the water wheel. In the time while he was building the wheel, he had crews up working to widen the original waterline he had run to the castle, into a genuine second canal. More transportation was always a good thing, as was the eventual use for more irrigation, but Dag’s main concern was that the wheel have enough flow to get at least some useful work from it after all of the effort that went in to building it.
By the time everything was ready for its first test, it was the height of summer, and Dag’s patience was at an end. For everyone else, they were progressing at an unprecedented break neck speed. Yet for Dag, the progress felt like a snail’s pace. Only he really had any understanding of how far they had to go, before he was too old to help them any more.
His one bright spot was that Jill had mastered reading and writing, and taken over instructing the little ones in the evening. She had made a game out of it, and rewarded the best students with extra food and occasionally new clothes. It made it fun and competitive, and as malleable as their minds were at that age, the youngest children soaked it up first.
When he finally had water flowing over the water wheel, the whole clan stared in amazement as the wheel turned under the weight of the falling water. Dag, however, wasn’t happy. The leather belts that he had intended to use to come off the main drive shaft would get wet and stretch after only a short time in use. The power loss of hand turned wooden pulleys without bearings and stretched out belts made this first attempt little more than a proof of concept. He could get some real work out of it, but found that he was needing to constantly tinker with the mechanism to keep it running.
To him, this was a failure of the system. To his people, it was a godlike demonstration of power. The truth was somewhere in between. Increased production from the water wheel allowed him to iterate and improve the production of pulleys and oiled leather bushings in the pulleys gave a giant leap in the reliability and power transfer.
This still left them with the problem of the belts stretching, but Dag knew what he needed. He just wasn’t sure if he had the wood working skills with the primitive tools at hand to make it work. A spoked wagon wheel is a complex piece of machinery to build using stone tools. Adding teeth to the outer wheel in such a way that they could act as gears reliably, and at speed was a whole other issue. It took months to achieve. Even then it was almost as much running between them until they wore each other down enough to fit as it was precision craftsmanship on his part.
The important thing was that it worked. The gearbox with the wooden gears would be wet from the splash off the wheel most of the time, but it allowed the power transfer from the drive shaft to be strong and smooth, with none of the slipping of before. Able to be kept dry at last, the leather belts became much more efficient. There was still stretching over time, but it was over a week or two of work, rather than only a few minutes. When they did start to slip, Dag had built in adjustments to tighten them back up. Eventually, he wanted to add a roller tensioner, but exactly how to give it the needed flexibility and spring eluded him, and he resigned himself to even more experimentation. At least now he had functioning tools to make it all go much quicker.
The big unveil of the first pottery wheels caught everyone off guard. Up until this point, they had fashioned everything by hand, and honestly had fairly crude results. However, after taking the time to refine the mud to remove what wasn’t clay, and add back in some of the local beach sand, and like magic, the clay would flow easily under his hands on the rotating work surface.
Dag’s first attempts at thin pottery shattered after firing. He found this frustrating, and tried to add some Roman concrete to the mix, and the results didn’t improve. Then he tried adding in a little ash and kept the pots hot longer during a longer cool-down phase, and it worked. Suddenly, they were able to produce relatively sturdy vessels at half the weight of earlier efforts.
When Dag had refined the process, he brought in the some of the women, and taught them. Their greater patience and more dexterous hands allowed even more impressive pieces to be created.
Between the lathes that allowed him to produce better pulleys, crude gears, and even rudimentary ball bearings, and the advanced pottery possible with the pottery wheels, Dag was finally beginning to feel like he was making some progress.
Fortunately, this was all accomplished just before storm season hit, and Dag was able to spend the days of rough weather inside planning and building his next improvements. Not the least of which was a functional drill press. Well, it wasn’t a drill press in the terms that Dag was used to, and more like a horizontal boring machine, but with the clever use of a few pulleys and a whole lot of rope, he was able to effectively drill through even large timbers in a reasonable time scale.
Dag’s first real project was the construction of an actual bed. Lavern had never experienced the joys of not sleeping on the ground, and for Dag it had been so long that he worried that he might have lost the knack for it. He had heard stories of soldiers returning that ended up sleeping on the floor at home because the beds were too soft. Lucky for Dag, he wasn’t able to accomplish even a tenth of the comfort of a memory foam mattress, so had no trouble adjusting. What he did create though, was such an improvement over what had been state-of-the art sleeping arrangements, that the crick in his back completely went away, and he actually began to sleep through the night again.
Life Goes On
Oobla De Ooblah Da
John had started walking. Dag found he had a shadow everywhere he went outside of the shop all during storm season. He also had baby talk in his ears day and night. While the boy only had the very start of a vocabulary, he made-up words all his own, and gave a running commentary on life. Dag had thought it very cute for the first month, but as time wore on, he found himself wishing the boy were older so that there was more they could do together. At this age, his mother was more appropriate for him to be with. Far less there to injure himself on.
He was happy being a father. It wasn’t something that he had really given much thought to before, but found that it did bring meaning to life on levels just a career or even founding civilization hadn’t been able to touch. Of course, when Lavern told him to be expecting another in the late summer or early fall, he realized that the time he thought he had to build was shrinking. As his children got older, they would absorb more of his time. It wasn’t like he would be as tied to them in the early years as their mother would, after all in a land before bottles, he couldn’t really feed them. Still, if he wanted to explore this world beyond a couple of days’ journey, it would be better to get it out of the way before he had a gaggle of children wanting to follow him.
This thought altered some of his priorities. He sent out men to scour the coastline for three days in each direction. When they returned at the end of the week, he found their reports disappointing. There was no whale washed up on the beach this year. The only gift from the sea being that the salt pans up the coast were starting to fill with a harvestable layer of salt. Glad for the increase of production given their increasing numbers, Dag determined to send a party up there to clean it all out, just as soon as they had fired enough pots to store it all in.
Speaking of increasing numbers, he noticed that Lavern wasn’t the only one starting to swell around the middle. Not just the women with mates, either, but the new women he had absorbed after the battle of the three clans. This was only mildly problematic as their tribal lifestyle assured that the children would get cared for no matter what, but it did cause concern that the women might be getting coerced into something that they were ill prepared for. He decided that he would investigate. He wasn’t a prude, and knew that the women he took in had been used to having their own desires fulfilled regularly, so that they may be seeking out lovers among his men didn’t surprise him, or more likely trading sexual favors for better treatment or living conditions. He generally wasn’t opposed to this either, but he wanted to be certain none were being actively abused since they had no mate to look out for their interests. Dag was conflicted enough about their fate to tolerate any out right abuse.
◆◆◆
New Critters
Dag had stayed behind during the next hunt. He had projects he was in the middle of completing, and Ajax was wanting to take the lead. So, he decided to sit one out and see how the young man did. He was inside working on polishing stone axes when he heard the conch shell sound. He set aside his work and reached for his bow.
He hoped it was the hunters returning and not some unknown threat, but wasn’t willing to leave without the bow just in case. As he topped the wall, he saw Jill waving at him. He joined her and looked out to the area of beach she indicated.
“I can’t see who it is, but I want to say it is our hunters returning. They have animals traveling with them, and none of the clans capture live animals yet,” Jill said, but her face was still all screwed up as she squinted hard in an attempt to make out faces.
Dag grunted, “Probably, but I’ll go out to meet them. Send you up a couple more archers while I’m at it. Cover me, if they are another clan, and advanced enough to have domesticated animals, we don’t want to be caught napping.”
When Dag finally was in sight of the group, he realized that it was Ajax, but that he wasn’t alone. It was a whole clan coming with him. Frustrated that the boy would bring strangers without any warning, he closed in on him. “I see we have guests?” he asked, and could barely keep the irritation out of his voice.
Ajax nodded and grinned at him. “Dag, this is Bren. He and his clan have had a run of bad luck, and were chasing down the same herd we were. We joined forces for the hunt. Their people have helped to process much of the meat. It let us go back out, and I have a surprise for you.”
Dag forced a smile on his face as he greeted Bren. “Welcome to our home.” He shot a look at Ajax, “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” Ajax flushed but didn’t say anything in reply. As Dag’s eyes roamed over the ragged group of people, he thought he could see the reason that Ajax was so excited to bring them home. There was a young blonde woman in the mix, that Dag later learned was Bren’s younger half sister. The blonde hair being so incredibly uncommon in this area, that Dag knew even dirt covered as she was, she had caught Ajax’s attention. Probably that of every man on the hunt as well.
When they made it back to the castle, Dag stopped everyone outside. “Ajax, take the new animals to the paddock that we built, and take our guests to the bath. They look like they could use a chance to get some rest. Then, I want you to hightail it back up this way. I’ll need someone who speaks the local language like a native.” Ajax ducked his head in obedience and ran off to carry out his orders.
Dag turned to Bren, and motioned with his hand, “This way, please.”
