Chapter 1.14

Ax

The next morning, Karson took Xene, Lacedaemon, and two other myrmidons with the wagon full of trade goods, as well as a substantial amount of money. With any luck, they would return with more food and goods that we needed badly. But in the meantime, it was up to me to make this hill livable, defensible and a solid respite while we determined our next steps.

I organized several work parties to get things moving. The first work party I sent down to the woods to cut down saplings for fencing, so that the oxen could graze and stop eating up valuable grain. I had to shape a few axe heads and shovel heads for them before they went off. Another work crew was sent out to haul rock. The hill was covered in medium and large sized rocks, which interfered with the wagons and could be used for construction.

The third crew was tasked with emptying the wagon into the mud shack. The roof didn’t look too promising, but I’d have a better shelter for us soon. This freed up the wagon so that we could temporarily repurpose the thick canvas covering that was stretched over the wagon Conestoga-style. The crew was tasked to get some branches to make an awning for the convalescing prisoners. They needed food and rest. The sun and fresh air would help, too.

Meanwhile, Antiope and Xia Fang got to work on the myrmidons, drilling basics on the field next to the shack, not far from where the awning would go. They were starting with very bare basics, including stance, how best to hold a spear, and how to walk with a spear in formation without dropping it or smacking their neighbor with it. From the looks of it, they’d be working hard for awhile.

Now that everyone was working, I was freed up to do some of the big things I’d been thinking about. First, I took a large ball of copper, and stretched it out as wide and thin as I possibly could. I put the heat conversion spell on it and linked it to my mana ring, then placed it on the southeast corner of the shack. I wasn’t nearly as good at enchanting as Karson, but we’d done this one together enough times now that I had it down. Unlike the ones on the bracers, however, this spell was cranked up to pull every erg of heat from nearby, so that every bit of hot sunlight got turned into mana.

This gave me an immediate boost to mana. Seeing as my mana batteries were a bit low, this was a good thing. I put that new power to work. Next to the shack, I placed my hand on the ground, feeling downward as far as I could go. Almost all dirt and rock beneath us as best I could sense, so I began to banish a hole in the ground. This hole was only three inches wide, and went straight down. The earth and rock weren’t being excavated, it was simply being banished from existence. I went slowly, letting my new feed of mana to dictate the speed. There was no rush.

I was banishing about a foot per second, so by the time two hours had passed, I’d gone down about 7200 feet. Then I began conjuring a long, thin copper tube. At about an inch wide, but hollow, I enchanted it with reinforcement spells and the heat conversion spell. Then I widened it out at the top so that it was six inches around, and dropped it over the hole. I then began to stretch the pipe, conjuring more copper into the end so that the enchanted rod grew downward. This actually went a lot faster, since I was conjuring a small amount of copper rather than banishing a lot of earth and rock. Thirty minutes later, I could tell that the pipe had reached the bottom. I linked the heat conversion spell to my mana ring, and promptly fell on my ass. Apparently, geothermal energy could produce crazy amounts of mana.

First order of business was to build a shelter. I walked out an area roughly fifty feet on a side, with three large rooms around a central courtyard. I summoned a piece of green slate four inches wide, eight inches long, and six inches tall, with four one-inch holes going all the way through. It was a natural stone version of a large brick. I stared at it for a few minutes, before nodding to myself. This would work perfectly.

I commandeered several stones from the growing stone pile, and shaped them. The first I made into a simple hopper where about two dozen slate bricks. Then I fashioned a shallow ramp, with an arch over the top of the ramp. Then I set about enchanting the arch to summon identical slate bricks, and linked it to geothermal mana pump. Finally, I added a simple stone toggle switch to turn it on and off. I turned it on, and it began to crank out a brick every ten seconds or so. Once the hopper was half full, I turned it back off.

Then I repeated my steps to make a new hopper, only this one produced one-inch nickel-iron rods that were twelve inches long. I produced a rod and tested it on the bricks. It was a tight fit, but with a little hammering, it’d go right in. I turned on the bar machine and let it start filling the hopper. This one took about fifteen seconds, so I left it running.

I then went and began to manually conjure columns on each corner, leaving a four-inch channel for the walls. I sank the columns deep into the ground for stability. That made me realize we’d need long iron bars for spiking the bottom row into the ground, and some way to compact the earth so that the bricks wouldn’t just sink in the first rain. I walked the length of each wall, manually sinking footers the whole length. It took a bit of figuring out, I figured out a way to compress the ground magically.

By this time, the work crew that had been assisting the former prisoners was free once again, and they came over to see what I was working on. The head of that group, Crathis, was a wiry old man with ropey muscles gained from a lifetime of hard work. As I explained, Crathis understood immediately what I was after.

“Are we putting in any windows, milord?” he asked.

“Yes, we should have windows, but wide and narrow. We don’t want anyone climbing in. Also, keep the doors no wider than your shoulders, to make them easier to barricade.”

“What about the wagons? Are they going in one of the rooms?”

“No, we’ll park them in the courtyard for now. We can add a gate once the roof is up.”

“Very good, milord.”

I picked up one of the bricks and one of the pegs, and demonstrated how to alternate the layers, and use the holes to bind the bricks together. I had made a few iron hammers with wide heads, and used one to tap the iron bar into place. Before long Crathis had the group working hard, and the brickmaking machine was running nonstop.

“Hey, what you guys doing up here?” asked Antiope from behind me. She had a wide, mischievous grin on her face. Behind her I saw a very exhausted group of myrmidons.

“We’re building a house,” I said.

“Those bricks look heavy. Are they heavy?” Her question was perky and overly friendly.

I smiled, catching on to her game. “Indeed they are. About perfect for strength and endurance training, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why, I would say! In fact, that looks like just the thing to help these poor, out-of-shape sorry excuses for real soldiers to become slightly less pathetic!” Her tone was bright and cheerful as she delivered the string of insults.

“Sadly, it looks as though Crathis and his men can keep up with this machine quite well,” I said mournfully, but with a sly wink to Antiope.

“That is sad news,” she said, and I could see the tired myrmidons behind her brighten up at the news.

“Oh! But I did manage to get my mana enchantments in place, so I could easily throw together a few more brickmakers for you! I could get, what, three or four times more bricks going?” Every myrmidon face fell at the news.

“What a wonderful idea!” she said. “In fact, I’m sure Crathis and his men would be happy to handle hammering everything together, if they only had someone to carry all those bricks.”

“Indeed they could. In fact, the house would go up much faster with all that help. We could catch two birds with one stone! I’ll get to work right away. Give me an hour.”

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Myrmidons, you get a short rest.”

As one, all eleven men and women collapsed to sit or lay on the ground. I spotted Latona giving me the evil eye, but I ignored it. Strong soldiers didn’t always make good soldiers, but all good soldiers were strong. That bit of extra strength might be the difference between life and death some day.

I went to work on enchanting more brickmakers, and added another peg maker while I was at it. The amount of raw mana I had to work with was amazing compared to what I was used to. Every mana battery I had was brimming with power. The additional conjuring machines drew heavily on the feed, however, so it wasn’t quite as heady as it had been when I first tapped it.

By the time all of that was up and running, about forty minutes had gone by and I was starting to get hungry. I spotted Karson walking next to a very loaded wagon as it rolled up the hill. The three myrmidons with him walked over to the rest of their exhausted comrades with confused expressions on their faces. We were going to need to let the rest of them head into town over the next few days, to prevent resentment in the ranks.

“We had a good morning,” said Karson.

“It looks like it,” I said. And indeed it did. I saw many bolts of colored wool, a box piled with leather sandals, and wooden crates filled with dried food, fresh vegetables, and fruit. Then I spotted the armor. Ax had landed a full breastplate, helmet, bracers and greaves, as well as a shield. Now this I could work with.

“I see you spotted the big prize,” said Karson. “And I picked this up for you. An engagement gift to give to Latona.”

He held a small bag out to me. I looked inside to see a pretty necklace made of silver wire and roughly cut sapphires.

“I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” I grumbled. I had confronted him last night, but he had only laughed at me and told me to go for it.

“You only live once, and that girl is everything you’ve ever looked for. She’s capable, pretty, and seems pretty hardcore about the warrior thing,” he had said before we went to sleep. Well, he had slept. I had mostly mulled over the proposal.

Now he was laughing at me again.

“Seriously, do it,” said Karson. “Marriage for love is a very modern, western notion. In this time and place, it’s very much an alliance. Hell, you lucked out that fidelity isn’t even a big thing. If you get wealthy enough, she may even pick out a second or third wife for you.”

“The fuck?” I said in English. He switched to English as well.

“It’s a status and prestige thing. Most stick with one, because you have to have wealth to have more. And you’ll be getting a concubine out of the deal, too.”

I must have blanked for a minute.

“Xene? You remember? Balled your brains out at least twice that I know of. Who knows how often really.”

“Oh, right. But wouldn’t that end with the marriage?”

“You really don’t listen,” said Karson. “Fidelity isn’t expected. Providing, protecting, procreating, and prestige. Until the classical period, this is a very feudal society. The philosophers and strong city-states change things, and all of this starts to go away as city-state democracies replace kings. But we are just entering the dark ages. Power and prestige are everything.”

“And you’re saying, just take advantage, enjoy it.”

“I’m saying, that is the culture here, and nothing you say can change hundreds of years of status quo. I’m saying that we can govern our own people by what standards feel right to us. But don’t go expecting the Greeks to have your values, or to understand them.”

“Well, I’m not going to turn into some misogynistic asshole just because that’s what everyone is doing,” I retorted.

“Good! I’m not going to, either. I plan to treat women as equals like I always have, and I plan on buying and freeing slaves as soon as we can, too. We can make essentially endless wealth. So long as we don’t crash the market with too much silver or gold, we can become quite influential. Maybe we can help end the dark ages sooner, and bring some modern enlightenment to the world. Or maybe we can be a bright spot in the dark.”

“So, be good, do good, and don’t stress about things I cannot control.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“So any other surprises in the pile?”

“Plenty of cloth for clothing, leather for Xene to work, and a few sets of finished clothing for us. When we have some workers free, we can get them to work on clothing themselves. We’ll look a lot less like refugees if we’re not dressed like them. Also, a good week or two’s worth of clothing. Also, I noticed a big lack of good tools in the market. If you find time to crank out a few shovel heads and axes, that’d be great.”

“Oh crap, that reminds me,” I said. I led him over to my new geothermal mana pump. “Link yourself to that.”

“What is it converting from… holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Jeez that’s a ton of mana.”

“And that’s shared between me, you, and five conjuring machines running full tilt,” I said.

“How does it work? I mean, I see the enchantments, they’re basically what we’ve been running off of for days. Where is the heat source?”

“I ran a pipe deep underground. It’s converting geothermal heat.”

“That is fucking brilliant! Alright, do you need me for anything? I need a place to set up shop and get to work. I’ve got shit to figure out.” I shook my head, so Karson headed off to the mud shack where our supplies were, leaving me to find someone to empty the full wagon.

The afternoon kept me busy running the work crews. My wood crew was bringing up lengths of wood to split into rails. I made a simple metal platform with an axle and two wheels underneath, allowing them to tie an ox to a large log or a pile of logs. The wheeled contraption would co under the back, turning the entire tree into a temporary wagon to bring up the hill.

My stone gathering crew was supplemented by myrmidons as it turned out you could have too much help for building a building. But I lost a few men and women from each of those crews to go back and start sewing, swapping out who was watching the children, and beginning cooking. For once, we’d have a hot, comfortable meal.

I spotted Zahra riding around the woods periodically, her bodyguards in tow. Xia Fang had stayed back with Antiope to help in training. Watching an old woman easily outperform the myrmidons made me wonder how old she really was. She seemed able to match Antiope’s vigor without any issues at all.

But my own running around kept me from the armor that I so very much wanted to work on. It was going to have to be my project for the next day. I also had a number of ideas about how to rebuild the wagons to be stronger, lighter, and better organized. If we could get a few more wagons, and more oxen, our next destination would be easier to get to. That is, if we could figure out where it was going to be.