Chapter 16

Author’s note: [ and ] delineate mind-to-mind dialog.

[Hippolyte, what are we going to do about the slaves we picked up today?]

[I do not know, Jane. I have not given the matter any thought. I have been too damned busy with trying to win this fight. Do you have any ideas?]

[As a matter of fact, I do. They are about two-thirds men and one-third women, so we could recruit the women into the crossbowmen brigade and make infantrymen from the men. We certainly are going to need more soldiers of both types if we are going to defend Coronis and drive the bandits off the roads.]

[Yes, that is true and an excellent idea. However, I am tired. Can we let it go until tomorrow?]

[Yes, I think that will be soon enough. I have plans for Janos for tonight if you are so inclined. We have time for a bath and supper if we put somebody else in charge of taking care of the slaves tonight.]

[Jane, you are an excellent Executive Officer (XO)! Let us find Agathon and put him in charge of the slaves tonight. Your armor has done such a good job that I doubt that we will need much from him as a surgeon, unless some of the new slaves have need of his services.]

Agathon had already looked at the troops and done what little we needed for them and was already looking after a couple of slaves who had been abused by their former masters. He agreed to the extra duty for tonight, so we found Janos and suggested that he join us for a bath.

As did all of our troops, we had a private apartment. That is, Janos and we had a private apartment. With his usual efficiency, Janos promoted us bathing facilities. We had our usual fun while bathing, and put on enough clothes so that we did not embarrass anybody while we joined the celebration of our victory. Following that, we had our private celebration. Along with everybody else, we slept a little late the next morning.

After breakfast, the regular townspeople were sent home to start working on getting their homes back in order. That was when we gathered up all of our people and Hippolyte explained what we planned to offer the new people—they were no longer being referred to as “slaves.”

All of the new people were stunned by the offer of freedom and employment in our new army, for that was what it would become as soon as we had the new troops integrated into our system. There was 100% enthusiasm for joining us, and even some of the women wanted to be a part of the infantry. If the truth be told, they were looking for revenge against the men who had abused them, and the brigands fell into that population by definition.

Well, the first thing we needed to do was to remove the slave collars. Fortunately, Coronis had a blacksmith who could handle that job, and he received the collars as payment for his efforts. That job wound up taking two days, and it was supervised by Agathon, a man trusted by everybody to look after them.

Meanwhile, I started a project to gather up all of the spoiled milk to be converted into casein plastic. This cost nothing because all of the households were happy to have something to contribute to our common cause. A lot of milk had spoiled as a result of the invasion, so I had a lot to work with, though I was not sure that I had enough to equip all of the recruits. It turned out that the biggest problem was in getting enough vinegar and enough pots to serve as molds for the helmets.

I found a couple of cooks who were eager to learn my “magic” for making armor, but I did scare the shit out of them by warning that Ares, the god of war, would take a very dim view of them sneaking off to make their own armor for illegal sale. Sometimes superstition could be a very useful weapon. The process for making the plastic raw material was simple and easy to learn so I soon had that part of the job farmed out and was able to go on to the actual manufacture of the shields and body armor.

Meanwhile, I had passed the word that I would pay top dollar for longswords in good condition. I was going to have Hippolyte do the judging of the value of each sword, since she had the experience and knowledge for that. Of course, everybody thought that she was doing everything since we shared the same body.

It took almost three weeks to get everybody outfitted in the armor, but there was a lot of training time to be spent on things besides the actual fighting, so we had plenty to keep everybody busy while they were waiting for their armor. The women who wanted to join the infantry were taught the rudiments of fighting with the sword, but most of their training time was spent with learning to use the crossbow. We were going after rapid fire and accuracy at the same time, so there was a lot for the women to learn. None of them had ever handled a lethal weapon before this, so there were psychological as well as physical problems to overcome.

Hippolyte and I worked out a plan that turned out to be something of a copy of the German Army’s organization during World War II. We had squads set up in which there were two women with crossbows and six men with longswords. My idea was to have the women operate as the machine gunners did and the men to emulate the work of the riflemen in those Wehrmacht infantry squads.

In other words, the women provided the fire power and the men provided the protection for the women. I spent a lot of time wracking my brain trying to remember their tactics I had seen described on TV with the modifications required for our current situation. We finally worked out a set of tactics that even impressed Hippolyte, so I was satisfied. All we could do now was to look for situations in which we could practice for real.

Each squad had a squad leader, and a platoon consisted of two squads under an officer responsible for coordinating the fight. That did take a lot of training, but we had plenty of time to work out the details. This also turned out to generate a lot of esprit de corps. We used wooden weapons for the training, and everybody really loved the chance to bang on each other as hard as possible because my crew and I were able to supply a full outfitting of body armor.

The funny thing to me was that once we got fully into the combat training, everybody wanted to join in the training. It was amazing how much fun former slaves had beating on each other when there was no chance of doing any serious injury to their friends. I think that this training let them get rid of a lot of deep resentment over the way that they had been treated. Of course, at least part of that was the realization that they would soon be doing the same sort of thing with real weapons, and doing it against the kind of people who had made slaves of them in the first place.

Well, I certainly did not care why they worked so hard to learn the military skills. All I cared about was that they learned them well enough not to become easy marks themselves. There was considerable pressure on Hippolyte and me, by indirection, to include more women in the ranks as crossbowmen. They did not need long to find out that they were outclassed when it came to fighting hand-to-hand with men, but they could do a lot of mayhem with their crossbows.

As a result, I did reorganize the squads into three women and five men, and that used up the women who wanted to fight very well. I was surprised to find that most of the men liked to have the women along, and there was no problem there. I was curious, though, as to how the chores would be divided if we ever had to operate in camps in the field.

By the time we were ready to deploy along the main roads in the neighborhood, it was already getting late in the year. Most of the major trading caravans were shutting down operations for the winter season, so the brigands were following suit.

Nevertheless, Hippolyte and I wanted to see how well our squads were going to operate next year when we took seriously to keeping the brigands from interfering with the use of the roads. Therefore, we sent out patrols made up of platoons of two squads to cover as much of the infrastructure as was practical. In fact, that was one of the things we wanted to know—did we have enough troops to do a good job of patrolling the roads?