Chapter 8

Alice told me what really happened, and it quickly became apparent to me that we needed more firepower for people who had to leave the safety of the cave. There was a practical limit, around 6, to the number of atlatl spears one person could carry, so I had to come up with something more portable.

It looked like our best bet was the crossbow. One person could carry 20-25 bolts, which seemed to be the number of arrows carried by the enemy archers. We could use either flint or bronze points for the bolts, so we could easily produce the bolts in large quantities if we had to.

The crossbow had the advantage of being relatively easy to learn, compared to the long practice required to become skilled with the bow. We could use a wooden stock and a spring bronze bow. We could start out with a sinew bowstring, and switch over to a cable as soon as I could work out a good way to draw bronze wire.

I hated to do it, but I hated more not to send Alice out with another crew to fetch more copper and tin. The trip went a little more quickly this time than last, but it still took over 2 weeks to gather a full load and return. This time, they ran into some of the invaders, but Alice took care of them without the people with her even knowing about it. If I had two more Alices, I probably wouldn't need anything else!

Ox was now running the foundry and forge, though Stork was keeping a close watch on things from the background. This got the work done with no hassle, since this let Ox preserve his manly dignity by not taking orders from a woman. Vanity can be aggravating at times! Since he was much stronger than Stork, Ox did the pounding while Stork did the pouring to make the spring bronze bows. Yes, I know, we could have made the bows from horn and wood, but I thought that spring bronze would be more consistent from crossbow to crossbow. Anyway, we went with bronze.

Alice and I worked up a design using a compound lever system that let the user cock the bow in one pump of the lever. This was much faster and easier than the other methods that had been used to cock the bow, so we could easily get off 3 or 4 aimed shots a minute, almost as fast as a trained archer.

There was some resistance to the crossbow, at first, from the men, because a woman could use it as easily as a man. However, I lit up a cigarette and blew smoke until I had them convinced. {I sure was glad that the ETs had cured my tobacco addiction so that I could reserve my smoking for impressing the locals as part of my shaman persona. They also cured the damage I had already done to my lungs and made it impossible to repeat the screw up!}

While we were waiting for the crossbows, I showed a couple of the women how to knap the points we wanted from flint. I also had bird feathers collected for fletching the bolts. The most difficult part of making bolts turned out to be finding suitable wood for the shaft. One of the scouts finally found a stand of recent saplings and harvested enough wood for our bolt needs for a while.

Finally, the first crossbow was finished, and we tried it out. Everything worked as well as I had hoped, Alice had no doubts. Everybody, and I do mean everybody including the children, was trained to shoot the crossbow. Some of the more reluctant men trained because they were not going to let a woman use a weapon better than they could. I didn't care what the motivation was, I just wanted shooting proficiency. By the time we ran out of bronze for the crossbows, we had 27 of them and 39 people who could shoot well with them.

Between our hand grenades, cannister shot, onagers, atlatls, and crossbows, I started to feel reasonably secure. I still was not ready to take the fight to the invaders, but I knew that we eventually would have to.

I was beginning to wonder if we were going to be attacked before the cold weather ended the campaigning season. If the invaders didn't get here pretty soon, we could write them off for this year. One fine fall day, a group of hunters came running in with the announcement that attack was imminent. I sent Alice out to call in the other hunters while the rest of us got ready for a fight.

I issued the crossbows to the best shots and sent the onager and cannon crews to their positions. Hand grenades were parceled out and everybody assumed defensive positions. We had trained for this moment, so there was no panic, though there was some nervousness. Everybody was warned to hold their fire until ordered otherwise, so we just settled down to wait for developments.

We didn't have long to wait. The invaders showed up and set up shop in front of our cave. They did a good job of blocking escape routes, so we would have to go through them to get away. Fortunately, we had no intention of trying to get away. Their entire army appeared to consist of archers with simple wooden short bows. This meant that their fighting range was limited to under 200 feet, well within the accurate shooting range of our crossbows, etc.

If they didn't have additional troops somewhere near by, or some other trick up their sleeve, I was sure that we could defeat them by the simple expedient of killing them all. All things being equal, they should win because they had over 200 fighters to our 47, counting the children. Of course, things were not equal—we had overwhelming firepower, and we should win if our general (me) could use it effectively.

A group of men walked a few steps in front of their main force and one shouted, "I WARNED YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU DEFIED US! NOW IS YOUR DAY OF RECKONING!" I couldn't help laughing, it sounded like some cheap movie dialog. My laughter had an effect—the speaker turned around and ordered his army to start the attack.

They launched arrows at us, so we ducked behind our breastworks and let the arrows fall harmlessly against the low wall. They had to get much closer to launch effective plunging fire, so they weren't going to do any damage as long was we did nothing foolish. I ordered, "ONAGERS... ONE ROUND... FIRE!" I had already instructed the onager crews to fire our air-burst bombs into the heaviest troop formations, so they were ready with that when they were ordered to shoot. The two onagers fired, and we watched the two bombs seem to float up into the air and start a stately descent toward the enemy.

We had equipped these bombs with time-delay fuses, but they were not very precise, so one bomb went off at the desired 50-foot altitude, but the other fell to 30 feet before it exploded. Both of these bombs were loaded with rock shards for shrapnel, so the unarmored troops were subjected to a rain of sharp objects. I really did not want to kill so much as I wanted to wound the enemy. Hopefully, most of the wounded would be knocked out of the fight and would give their logistics people a mountain of problems.

We couldn't tell how many were injured from these two bombs, but the screams were enough to tell us that we had scored a major blow. I ordered, "ONAGERS... CONTINUE FIRING... FIRE FOR EFFECT!" The aerial bombs continued to rain down on the enemy for the next few minutes. At first, the enemy stood, frozen in place from surprise, but they broke about the time the third salvo went off overhead. The enemy troops started to run in all directions, some of them toward us. I ordered, "ONAGERS... CEASE FIRE! CROSSBOWS... FIRE AT WILL!"

The crossbows wounded or killed an enemy soldier at the rate of about 1 down for every 4 or 5 shots. This wasn't good enough! Our people were just shooting, they weren't taking the time to aim. I'd have to worry about this later, right now, I had to do something, so I ordered, "CANNON... ONE ROUND... FIRE!"

I had deliberately left a free fire zone in front of the cannon so that I wouldn't have to worry about my people forgetting to duck. It was through this channel that the cannon fired its load of cannister. Many of the enemy were about 75 feet away when the cannon fired, the optimum range. It was like they had run into a meat grinder. It was hard to tell if the enemy skidded to a halt and turned tail to run away because of the noise or because of the mess that was made of their friends. Whatever it was, the battlefield quickly emptied of ambulatory enemy troops. I ordered, "CROSSBOWS... CEASE FIRE!"

The people with the hand grenades were really pissed that I had not let them into the fight, so I called them over and gave them a pep talk about the enemy being out of range when they broke and ran. I assured them that they would get their chance, but I thought to myself that I hoped not.

When it was apparent that the fighting was over for the day, I had Alice look at the enemy wounded; she knew to bring in those we could help and to cut the throat of those we couldn't help. I hoped to recruit to our side those wounded that could be saved. A check of our troops showed that we had only one casualty—a man had shot himself in the foot with his crossbow when he got careless.

Before it got dark, I sent some people out to retrieve our crossbow bolts. They managed to find about 30% of those that had been fired. I wondered what had happened to the rest of the bolts. Could there be enemy soldiers wandering around with our bolts sticking in them? Maybe our shooting had been more accurate than I had thought at first.