Chapter 12

(Late Spring through the Late Summer of Year Three)

A dozen men working in the river bed, digging out dried clays can carry up a fifty pound hide sack about every ten minutes or so. They would dig and carry nearly three hundred pounds an hour. Twelve men working produced three thousand six hundred pounds an hour of clay. Since they're cavemen, I couldn't get more than four hours a day of work out of them. That works out to seven tons of mined clay a day. That clay got walked over to the drying area where a couple more men would spread it out to bake in the sun.

Once the clay was baked dry in the sun, it was powdered and mixed and wetted by a crew of four. Then it was poured and pounded into molds. Each mold was two feet long, one foot wide, and four inches thick. When pulled from the mold, each tile weighed sixty six pounds wet, and closer to sixty pounds dry. At seven tons of production a day, we could make about two hundred and ten tiles a day.

Two hundred ten tiles stacked for firing in the kilns made a pile that was just about ten feet long, ten feet wide, and four feet high. We had to make new giant kilns to fire those. We made them out of the same tiles, of course. Each kiln firing required two days and a lot of wood, tended by two men and fed by two lumberjacks.

Meanwhile, another dozen workers were mining and cooking limestone, making the cement clinker, and then working it up into our mortar powder. Once the tiles were fired, they would be carried to the site of the wall. At the wall site, another crew of four was busy digging out the soil, digging down at least three feet to avoid as much frost heave as possible.

For the protection of the flocks to come and the crops, I'd decided that the wall would need to be between seven and eight feet high, built in a double row of interlocked tiles. While a wall like that would not keep a determined cave lion or smilodon out, it would discourage them. It would almost certainly stop wolves and most bears. It would not hamper the mammoths much at all if they decided to knock it down, but that was a risk we would have to face. At two hundred new tiles a day (accounting for losses in the firing processs), using an interlocking pattern, the wall building crew could mortar up 2' by 2' by 1' for every six tiles. That worked out to be forty eight tiles for every two new feet of wall, or just over eight feet of new wall per crew per day. In order to be able to build five miles of tiled walls, it would take one work crew of thirty workers just over ten years of time, working all year round to build the wall. With ten crews of thirty, we would be able to build the wall in under two years. If I had five or six hundred people working, we could build projects like that in a year.

After the meeting with SacredBear and his family, we had close to thirty adults from the original cave and my compound, and another sixty adults from the new cave. Some of those folks needed to not be working on the wall, but instead needed to cook, clean, care for babies, and other similar chores. Of the two camps, I had two working crews. Sixteen feet of wall per day. I needed more.

Every night in camp, I'd tell myself that I was crazy. I'd tell myself that there had to be an easier way to approach all this. Every night I'd think it through again and again. I'd come up with nothing. So, the next morning I'd go back to building houses for the new people that we expected to come, or the wall project, or the kilns. Five miles of wall ... Over twenty six thousand linear feet of wall. All of it for fields and crops and grazing land. And later on, we'd need more.

As the time went by, I spent a lot of effort with the puppies. I made sure that they were sleeping with the lambs, that they played with them, and that they ran with them. I had DumbAsRocks learn most of what was needed to be a shepherd, and to work with the lambs. He took to it right off. He was a gentle man by nature, and playing with the dogs and shooing lambs about fit him well. He liked it and did well at it. I was happy to see him finally have a place where he fit in well.

SacredBear and SeeksWisdom and DeadAndBack spent a lot of time with each other. DeadAndBack taught them my strange ways, and had them learn the rules of personal hygiene. It was weird, it was like the ten commandments or something. "The laws of hygiene." Later on, when someone was dirty, sweaty, or filthy, they'd be shunned until they got cleaned up. Some of the women made tooth care an absolute fetish. I certainly didn't mind. My wives taught the cave women the secrets of shaving and plucking. I didn't mind that at all either. It's funny how fast men get religion when their women refuse to have sex.

We made three more trips out with the GodMobile that spring. Each time we brought home new people. One cave had ten adult men, and we had to kill four of them before the wisdom of our way became clear. The next cave had closer to a hundred new adults in it, and they welcomed us with open arms after I shot their shaman and their clan leader. The last trip that spring, we came back with thirty new adults, and they came peacefully.

By the beginning of summer we were up to nearly two hundred and twenty adults, probably thirty teens and adolescents, and at least fifty kids under ten. I was beginning to spend the morning each day working on simple medical work with Julie. The cave folks were always grateful and surprised when someone who'd been cut or got infected ended up healing up okay. It was magic. One of the lumberjacks from the third tribe killed himself on accident by dropping his own tree on himself, and another man got crushed under a falling pile of hot tile. Other than that though, Julie and I were mostly able to help people out. By summer, we had seven crews working, and that worked out to be 56 feet of wall a day, or well over three hundred feet a week. It still wasn't enough.

As we added people, the word spread around us. We became famous. For miles and miles our fame spread. Word passed from family group to group like wildfire. As summer came high, we'd find people walking toward our camp across the plains, carrying offering platters on their heads and singing. After a while, we were getting ten or twenty new folks a week, just walking in looking for us. One time an entire tribe came in, well over a hundred adults. By mid-summer we had an encampment of over six hundred people, all of them working the way of the sacred water. That was almost twenty crews. One hundred and fifty to two hundred feet of wall a day, a thousand feet on a good week, or more likely six hundred on a bad one. Of course, every once in a while I'd have to shoot or exile some cave moron who had a better way of doing things, but between the 'god mobile', the lights, the ThunderStick, and my other props, it was a rare occurrence.

I took to leading sermons on our 'Sunday'. We built a big platform outside the main wall, raised up on oak timbers and visible from a hundred yards away. At the end of the work day on Saturdays, we'd roast several pigs and some moo over a giant spit trench. We'd serve up some veggies and some booze, and I'd preach to them. Julie had the great idea of making drums, so we experimented until they made decent hide drums over round oak drum shafts. As I preached about the way of sacred water, they'd drum, eat, and drink. Later on there'd be a lot of fucking.

Now look, I don't know about you, but my Presbyterian church was one hell of a lot less fun than eating good barbeque, drinking nice sacramental vodka, and then fucking the living daylights out of a couple of cute cro-magnon women. That was one Sunday sermon I could get behind. The preaching was simple, and not all that ethics oriented. It was stuff like 'keep your ass clean', and 'wash your hands', and 'don't try to fuck women who don't want to fuck'. Simple stuff. I didn't get into that whole love-your-neighbor stuff. That was for someone else. All my preaching was about survival and basic prosperity.

In the end though, that was what mattered. We added lots of archers we could trust, using the simpler bows, and as people got promoted to our 'inner circle', the original family group from the old cave became very protective of me and mine. The other thing I set aside for Sundays was judgment day. I hated that part. Even from the beginning, people brought me their disputes. Arguments over women, over men, over possessions, over shirking work, over not being clean.

The laws of the camp were simple. If you were a man, and you hurt a child or a woman, you got one warning. On the second offense, you got killed down in the granite quarry and dumped in the river for the animals to eat. If you stole things, I tried to figure out why ... because there was plenty to go around. If I couldn't figure it out, and you were just a thief, you got banished. If you came back, you got shot and dumped in the river for the animals to eat. If you were caught fighting, you got a warning, and a second offense was a banishment from camp for a month. A third offense led to the river. All the rest of the justice was dispensed by the Shamans, and I was damned glad of that.

A couple of evenings a week, I would teach the Shamans the 'secret wisdom' contained in 'Hooked on Phonics' and the mystery of letter sounds. Let me tell you, those guys were so happy to have their own secret language. It was funny actually.

After we'd been working most of the summer, Julie came up to me one day, as I was supervising the wall building. She had an odd look on her face. I was immediately concerned.

"What's wrong, sweetie?" I asked. We sat down on the logs nearby.

"Josh..."

"Yeah baby?"

"Josh, I don't feel well."

"Do you have a fever?" I was close to panic.

"Josh ... you know how your hair has turned dark again?"

"Yes, so?"

"You know how your body is in good shape?"

I was starting to get frustrated.

"Julie! What's wrong?"

"Josh, I think I'm pregnant!"

"What, how is that possible?"

"I think I'm like you. I think my body is healing."

"Holy shit, are you sure?"

"No, but my periods have stopped, and I'm nauseated in the mornings."

"How long has this been going on, Julie?"

"Over a month. I think I got pregnant in late May or early June."

"So you'd be due in February?"

"I think so."

She burst out into tears. "Josh, I'm afraid. I'm really scared."

I hugged her close and she cried on my chest.

"What if I have complications? What if the baby is breech? What if..."

I shushed her and held her close to me.

"I don't know Julie. We'll face it when it comes."

"Josh ... no. I'm scared. I'm really scared. You need me, the babies need me. The women need me. Josh..."

I could tell she was leading up to something.

"Josh. Josh, what if I want to not have the baby?"

"What are you talking about, Julie?"

"I'm talking about an abortion, Josh. I can find the herbs easily enough to force contractions to come early. I could do it."

I was stunned, and I looked in her eyes, searching.

"Julie. I love you." I paused a long moment. "I don't have any answers. I don't know what will happen. Neither do you."

"Josh! You're not listening! Look around you!" She waved her arms. "This is all ... this whole ... Josh! Everything here, all of it ... women DIE Josh. There's no doctor Josh! There's no civilization, no help! We DIE here Josh. We die young. Men usually die fighting or hunting, but not now, you're solving that!"

She took a breath. "But! You're not solving OUR problem, the women. There's no medicine, no midwives, no doctors. There's no new penicillin, no new surgeons. BOUNTIFUL DIED, JOSH!"

All I could do was try to hold her, but she shook her head, tears streaming down her face. "I don't know what to say, Julie."

"I know, Josh."

"I'm afraid all the time too, Julie. What if the harvest fails? What if typhoid or something else breaks out? What if we lose the flock, what if the winter is too cold? We could ALL die, Julie. I'm afraid all the time too."

Then she came to me, and we hugged fiercely. I stroked her hair. Under her breath, where only I could hear her, she said. "It'll be all right, be okay."

I nodded and said. "Promise."

That was all we had, promises and our love. In the end, isn't that all any of us have?

...

Late summer was distinguished by more of the same. More people approached us to join our camp as fall drew nearer. This brought with it a need for a lot more water, bathing facilities, buildings, hunting, and all the routine things we'd been working on all year. I found that I was spending more and more time teaching and guiding than working. We had to dig and place a new sewer pipe, and set up several latrines off of it.

One of the projects that I had gotten under way during the summer was around our need for iron. This would turn out to be a major project, and over time would consume an enormous amount of effort and resources. As time had passed, much of the spare iron that I had arrived with was being used up, and good steel was far too precious to use for anything but critical projects. Over time, we were becoming critically short of nails. I'd brought a couple of hundred pounds of various nails, but build a few buildings and they go fast. Out of all the things I'd thought I'd be in need of, I'd never considered nails to be that critical. Now, it was like the nursery rhyme. Iron and steel making is a huge project, and unless you control every variable, your results will vary so widely as to be unpredictable. The history of steel making in my world went back thousands of years, and passed through dozens of various incarnations. The entire process can be broken into three eras of steel and iron making. The earliest versions of iron making are simple variations on heating iron ore over charcoal and taking what you got. Sometimes you got wrought iron, sometimes you got nothing but slag, and sometimes you got cast iron. To the early iron workers, cast iron was mostly useless because it couldn't be hammered. It fractured. Only rarely would you get steel out of the process. Why? Because the carbon content is critical. Low carbon and you get wrought iron, high carbon gives you cast iron. Only in between is steel. How precise do you have to be? Two parts to eight parts of carbon per ten thousand is wrought iron. Thirty to forty five parts per ten thousand is cast iron. In between is steel.