Chapter 20

(The Spring of Year Six through the late Summer)

Spring came to the new camp gradually, not with the thawing and crackling of the river like at our old home, but with a slow let up in the rains and a blooming of the Northern plains. The days began to warm up, and everyone could feel the change in their bones. The projects took on a new urgency and even if it was just my imagination, people everywhere had a new vigor to them. As soon as I had a solid week of warm weather we poured the footings and foundation for the new mill. The new mill was going to be substantially larger than the old mill, and would actually function as a mill house for both the grain and lumber mills. We were building the mill house out over the river, designed to be directly above a pair of the 'backshot' style water wheels that were set in granite lined chases. They'd have a full river bed flowing over them.

DeadAndBack had his forge humming, and he went to work on the new gears that we'd use in the mill with a will. Replacing the old wooden gearing of the power hub with big and solid wrought iron gearing would give us a lot more power and a lot more torque to use. Once the foundation was poured and set, we poured the wheel footings on the river side and began to build the mill race. The new mill was far more powerful than the old one, and the wheels we built were almost twenty feet tall. We built them much like the last ones, but this time the work went a lot faster as I had far more trained hands to help me. We used every bit of iron and steel that came out of the furnaces and then some. By the time that the two new wheels and the foundations for our buildings were done, we'd seriously cut into our supply of the valuable metals.

I had twenty men and women working on the mill and wheels, and from the very moment that we had the first wheel spinning we were able to gear it in and start up the new lumber milling operation. A crew was logging down south of us, with several of the scouts as guards, using the percherons and modified wagons to haul the logs up to the new sawmill where we began turning them into timber. One of the first buildings we went to work on was a simple framed up drying shed for the lumber. This shed was far larger than the old set up at the original camp. Using the horses, lots of man power and the come-alongs, we were able to tilt up a timber frame made of 10" x 10" beams. We used simple framing to build the shed a little west of the mill. We made it twenty feet tall, ninety five feet long and over thirty wide. We roofed it with wide split planking. I knew we'd have to re-roof it someday because of the green shingles we were using, but it was a small price to pay. Once the drying shed was up I had the men run the saw mill from early morning to late night to try and get in front of our need for dry lumber. The scheme for the drying shed didn't exactly make it a lumber kiln until we did the work necessary to double insulate the walls with straw and clay. We made black paint by pounding charcoal into a fine powder and mixing in some very fine powdered clay and wheat flour, mixing all that down with water and then cooking it into a paste. When the walls and roof got painted with that the inside temperature was almost always ten to twenty degrees higher than the outside temperature.

At the same time that work was progressing on the mill and the drying shed, there was still a lot to be done about housing, plumbing, and sanitation. In the old camp I'd built several small kilns for the pottery and brick work. Not here. Down the river about half a mile was where the best deposits of clay were, and that was where the really big kiln got built. The kiln was built out of mortared field rock that was plastered with a gypsum and lime slurry. The kiln floor was dug down five feet and we built two fire stoking doors down a slope to the floor. We lined the floor with granite and limestone rubble, and then we built a floor for the kiln up above that at seven feet from the floor, giving the stokers plenty of room to work in. Once the brick floor of the kiln was in place we built up the walls and roof over it. It was built as an arched tunnel twenty five feet across and eighty feet deep. We could fire thousands of bricks at a time in it. Why so many goddamned bricks? I wanted to be able to move past lumber and the fires that came with it for our houses. Stinky cave bastards tend to burn things down, I'd discovered. That's probably because caves don't burn. Thus, it made sense to me to start building our houses out of brick to reduce the impact of fires.

Meanwhile Julie pressed me hard to start up the Sunday services again. So we got a new god platform built after a couple of weeks and the crew built me a new throne. After a bit more pushing from Julie, I went back to delivering my sermons. Now here's the weird thing. The cave folks were damned happy to have it start up again. The first time I mounted that stage and turned and looked at them, they went totally silent and all sat down to listen. Sure enough I could see the creepy religious mania stuff in their eyes, and they hung on my every word. Once upon a time back in the old camp, at the peak of the population boom there'd be nearly two thousand people listening. Back then though the crowd would be only two-thirds listening at best, lots of people would come and go as I spoke, and a fair number would listen only out of politeness. That sure as shit wasn't true anymore. These people were all of the real believers. They'd left everything they'd grown up with on my whim and walked with me for a thousand miles. I'd kept them safe and led them to a new land. Hell, for half of them they were damned near convinced I'd walked them straight to heaven. For a good number of them, they'd seen me wage a war against the shamans and come out victorious. Julie had gone to the sky land and returned when I called her. These people believed.

This had its good and bad sides. The good sides were that the hygiene level was very high, there was almost no grumbling at all, people listened to me, and work got done with amazing speed and good craftsmanship. The down side was that a lot of the easy camaraderie I had known in the early days was now gone, replaced with respect, awe and fear. For many of these people, although I cursed, fornicated, bled and made mistakes, I was a walking god incarnate. That's difficult to live with. Because I was so uncomfortable with it, I altered my plans on having a single big walled encampment, and I decided on the medieval model of an inner and outer court. I hated doing it, but I wanted to be able to socialize with DeadAndBack and Fire and the scouts and the surviving shamen and their families away from all the weird adulation.

All spring and summer long we worked hard and made terrific progress. A new pair of windmills went up. Unlike the rickety old log framed windmill, the new windmills were built of lovely square cut oak beams, fitted and pegged in place by decent craftsmen. The towers were over a hundred feet in the air, and the turning arms were eighteen feet long each. They were massive and beautiful. The first night that we had a good breeze and had lights back on there was a real celebration. The Cro-Magnons had gotten used to a little lighting to keep the monsters away, and it reinforced to them that they were living in a magical land. It's funny how much like Disneyland some of this place was to them. When they felt like they wanted some good old thrill ride entertainment, they made the long hike to the river crossing and rode the ferry back and forth. It was magical.

Following the drying shed, big kiln, windmills, and work on the houses, I began to make plans for the predator wall. So far we'd been lucky with the smaller wall we sheltered behind, but what would really make us safe would be a massive engineering effort requiring a lot of caveman power to get built. What I wanted to build was an engineered double sided stone faced wall, backed with timber on each side, and the space between back filled with stone and dirt. And, I wanted that wall to be twenty feet tall and close to two miles long. Let me put that into perspective. Stone blocks a couple of feet on a side weigh about 150 lbs per cubic foot, so each stone would weigh about half a ton each. Each wagon we used would carry between four to six stones per load. A mile of stone facing twenty feet high is ten stones high by two thousand five hundred stones long. That is twenty five thousand stones. Double that for a two mile run of wall, then double it again for the other face of the wall. That's a hundred thousand stones. It's also 20,000 wagon trips.

The timbering would be much less work, merely staggering. By setting a big log about every five feet to act as a back brace for the stones, and tying the logs together at ten feet and again at twenty, we would only need two thousand three hundred logs. A team of aurochs could pull one of the highly modified wagons that we used as a log carrier over relatively flat ground as long as it didn't have more than three logs on it. The log backings would require about eight hundred wagon trips. Luckily for both efforts, we had a lot of spare wagons now. The real back breaking work, the thing that would take years would be the trenching out of the wall footings, and then the work of filling the wall with rubble and dirt. The sheer magnitude of the effort would be massive. I didn't care. It didn't matter. This was our new home, and I was going to make it safe.

We had fairly close to eight hundred people with us, and even the bigger kids worked a little around the camp. That worked out to be close to three hundred and fifty or so able, healthy adult workers. We had a crew of ten at the kiln and pottery, a crew of ten at the blacksmith and smelter, a crew of ten working the lime and making concrete, and a crew of twenty on carpentry and building. Another thirty people worked on the vegetable garden and food duties. We had twenty five fully trained scouts. That left well over two hundred people able to go to work on the wall project and as a ready work force for bigger efforts like raising the drying shed or digging the kiln floor, etc. I figured that we could close in our part of the peninsula in a couple of years of work with a front facing wall, and have it all done in ten to twelve years. Maybe less if we added people to our community. Although that may seem like a long time, and it chafed at me that it would be so long, the reality was that I had a much longer view of the future at this point. As long as we had food and shelter, I could raise my family in peace and relative prosperity. That's really all I cared about, my friends and family. The episode with SeeksWisdom had cast a harsh light on my illusions about the future. It changed me. Hell, the stuff about the shaman skins should have told you that.

I've mentioned above the rough wall work that got started when I first arrived. By mid-summer there was enough wall in place to let our growing flock of sheep graze it with the dogs tending them. God, how I loved watching those dogs with the sheep. It was so ridiculously peaceful and calm. We had a couple of decent shepherds at this point, and they loved the sheep as well. Now mind you sheep are damned stupid animals. When I express my love for them, I am expressing my love for their meat, their coats, and their babies. Otherwise, they're horrid critters. Also, when I express that the shepherds were decent, I mean to imply that they wouldn't just kill one of the sheep when they got hungry, knew enough not to drive them into holes in the ground, and managed to mostly stay awake. That's damned near PhD in sheep for these guys. In the old camp I'd been pretty goofy about the sewage problem. Once I did some reading up on the problem while we were travelling, I realized that a sewage line and river disposal was just nasty and wasteful. It turns out that according to the books, there are plenty of ways to make a good clean composting toilet that you only have to clean out once a year or so, and it's not a nasty job when you do it. You start by digging a big round hole in the dirt, well away from running water and the wells you may have. In this hole you back fill with rock and gravel, then you measure how fast the water percolates away into the soil. As long as it drops an inch or more an hour, you're good to go. Over the top of this rock, dirt, and gravel pit you throw in and mix in some active compost to start a good bacterial brew. Then you build up an earth berm until it's significantly smaller, about the size of the double stall outhouse you're building, then you lay in a few courses of brick, and build your shitter on top of that. If you did it right, the toilet attendance technician can use a rake to pull the solids off to the sides through a slot in the bricks, and let it dry there. When it dries out you rake it into the compost. Supposedly, you can keep the same toilet spot for years and it produces amazing garden fertilizer.

I decided to try this approach in the new camp. I rounded up a team of diggers from the wall work, and we raided the quarry for a wagon load of rubble and rock. Now, I was careful not to say much to Julie and the wives about it, because I wasn't at all certain it would work. We picked an out of the way spot, not too far from the quarry itself, where the workers could use the shitter. The boys and I got to business digging the hole out. We dug it down about six feet deep and close to seven feet across. The books didn't really specify how big to go, so I figured better safe than sorry. We dumped in a wagon load of the rock and mixed it up with some soil. Then while a couple of them loafed off, I took the others over to the vegetable garden and raided the composter. Man, you should have seen the look I got from Ashes. You'd have thought I was stealing gold.

"GreatOne ... what are you doing with the compost?"

"Stealing it, pretty tits."

She blushed a little, but wasn't taken in. "What for?"

"Secret project..."

"Secret?" She frowned. "What's a secret?"

"It's something I know and you don't, and I won't tell you."

She thought that through for a moment as we loaded the compost up into the wagon. We only loaded about half a wagon load, as I didn't want to take too much if the effort was a bust.

"I can make you tell." She said, a gleam in her eyes. "I know how."

"How?" I grinned back.

"I won't tell. It's a Secret" She laughed and blushed.

About then I figured out that I was probably in trouble. So, I laughed a little and we headed out.

Back at the pit, we filled it with compost and mixed it in and then formed a large square of bricks and mortared them up. By the time we were ready to tamp down the earth berm, the light was fading and I could hear the belly rumbles from the men that indicated we'd get no more work out of them that night. So I headed us all back to the main camp.

At camp, the cook squad had prepared a good thick stew. There were carrots grown from our garden in there with onions and some pepper and delicious hunks of moo. Cornbread fresh ground from the mill accompanied the stew, along with a good thick beer. I sat at the long table, out under the evening sky, waving the bugs off and eating the magnificent dinner, drinking the beer and laughing with my friends. When the kids were done, they started running around in a big gang, with all four of mine at the center of the mischief. A couple of the freed girls watched them. A couple of tables away I saw DeadAndBack watching his kid run around and shriek with delight. Off to the left, FireHeaded was running his hands over SmilingFace's big baby bump. That was one fine dinner. For dessert we had fruit with fresh cream. That was great too.

After dinner, a bunch of us spent some time screwing around with setting up where we were going to build the new hot tub, but mostly just drinking beer and laughing at each other. Down the hill at little from the inner camp I could see the folks moving around the outer camp, cleaning up from their dinner and getting ready for bed. It occurred to me then that I didn't have much to apologize for. These people had a good life and they knew it.

In bed that night, as I was dozing off, all of a sudden I felt a warm mouth around the head of my cock, and a warm tongue over my balls. A third set of lips began kissing at my neck and caressing my chest. All three girls had decided to go to work on me at once. It was awesome. Before too long, Ashes had me ready to blast off in her mouth, but she stopped, and Julie took over ... after waiting for me to calm down a little.

"Girls..." I protested a tiny bit.

"Sssh." Said Shining.

When I'd calmed down a little, Julie began sucking on me, and my god can that woman suck a mean dick. Jesus. Within a couple of minutes she had me ready to blow, but then she stopped too. Shining took over. Ashes and Julie both curled up on either side of me, caressing me and licking and kissing. It was damned near agony when Shining stopped just as I was peaking, stroking me softly but not enough for me to cum.

"Aaah" I mumbled.

"Does Great One want to cum?" Asked Ashes with a wicked giggle in her voice.

"Aaah." I agreed.

Shining raised herself up over my really hard dick and placed her amazing pussy right over the tip of it, but didn't let it enter more than a half an inch. When I arched up a little, Julie giggled and pressed down on my belly, keeping me from burying myself in her.

"We want your secret, GreatOne ... and we're prepared to screw you all night to get it." Julie whispered.

"Evil!" I moaned.

They all laughed and agreed.

Shining slid down on my dick a little, but then pulled right back up and off.

Ashes laughed and said. "Secret!"

"Shitter!" I moaned in utter capitulation.

They looked at each other, confused.

"Making new shitter, better. Urgh. Damn."

"That's the secret?" Julie asked. "That's it? No way we should have screwed that secret out of him."

"Please?!" I tried pressing up into Shining. She shrugged and slid down on me. Her eyes were gleaming with more than a little lust on their own.

Ashes and Julie laughed at each other and at us, then Julie looked at Shining and said. "How'd I just know that you'd give in?"

Shining began to screw me in earnest. "You would too."

"True, that."

From then on, I decided to have more secrets.

The next morning we went back to work on the septic pit. We tamped down the earth berm — a thick hump of dirt, really — and made sure that the open backside of the brick ring didn't fill in. Once that was done we started in on building the shitter itself. I'd designed a two stall, each facing a different way separated by an internal wall. Before the wall went in though, we built up the platform and used some burnished oak planking as the seat. Rising up from the back of each stall was a boxed in air pipe to vent the fumes outside. The stall was topped off with a shingled roof that had an air gap just below the eaves. Once it was up and running, I dispersed the work crew and we went back to our normal chores. We'd come back and check it out in a few weeks, but the construction looked solid and the design was very close to what I'd read about. I had a hard time believing that it would be finicky to get set up and running.

I've written some about the old hot tub, and what a hit it was. With a river nearby, and winters that didn't freeze us out, I had made far grander plans for the new camp's hot tub. What I had in mind was closer to a mini swimming pool than a hot tub. I wanted room for ten or more adults and maybe even a few of the older kids. The simplest design was a round one. This time though it wouldn't really be practical to make the tub elevated and out of timber.

I got FireHeaded and his crew of masons interested in the project and dragged them over to the spot I'd picked out. It was a few yards from my house, mostly in the middle of the family compound, but a bit north so we could close it off with a fence and not lose too much of the courtyard area. I took out a string and held the center while FireHeaded pulled the stick around an eight foot radius.