Chapter 10

Economic growth was chugging along like a juggernaut, everywhere our traders went, there was a profit to be made. The Venus cult was becoming obscenely wealthy. Alice and I were struggling to find ways to spend our money in ways which would generate more growth.

Of course, there were some people who claimed that we had gotten prosperous enough and longed for the old days. They conveniently forgot how miserable life had been for most people in the old days. We had already gotten the child mortality rate below 15% and life expectancy up to 40 years old, but they were sure that was far enough. It looked to me like some people just couldn't stand for other people to be happy!

Alice had converted a portion of the temple grounds into a medical school and public sanitation training ground. We were now graduating "doctors" who might have qualified as WW2 corpsmen and nurses who were nearly as knowledgeable. We were concentrating on treating the common ills like broken bones and skin abrasions. No drugs were available for treating diseases, so we were working hard on prevention.

We were busy educating about clean water and how to keep it that way. We were trying to get people to quit pouring their chamber pots into the street. Yes, we had graduated to chamber pots, and we were working on public toilets with running water like the Romans of my time line had used. The more prosperous parts of town had a regular morning pickup of shit and urine in tank wagons, and we were gradually working our way into the less affluent areas. Venus was picking up the tab on this, so we had heard no complaints about how expensive it was, yet.

Public baths were very popular and had become social centers. We were able to save some money by not having to split into gender-specific bathing areas, but we were able to get the sex moved to a more private location within the facilities. We had a rapidly growing population, and pregnant women were seen everywhere, particularly at the baths.

Alice and I had been in Ruma for 22 years and had watched the village grow into a thriving city of nearly 7,000 people. We had long outgrown our early sewage disposal facilities and had graduated into a factory-like operation with the extraction of saltpeter and the conversion of shit into fertilizer. Alice had concocted some ingenious techniques to keep the odor under control, so we were all happy with the result. Saltpeter was still used almost exclusively for gunpowder and blasting powder, but the fertilizer was a big export item.

Egypt had licensed the fertilizer technology and was turning out bumper crops of grain. Ruman ships were hauling this grain all over the Mediterranean area, and this was contributing to the general population growth of the whole region.

Alice and I have been pushing the Rumans along the road to civilization, and they appear to have grasped the idea pretty well in the last 100 years that we have been here. The city has now grown to nearly 60,000 people, more than were on the whole of Italy when we first arrived. The infant mortality rate is now down to about 3% and the life expectancy is up to 61. We have given the matter a lot of thought and have decided to move on. I have always been fascinated by India, so I wanted to head in that direction. We would probably stop off in Mesopotamia for a while, since we were in no real hurry.

Oops! Murphy's Law has raised its head, again. Just as we were about to announce our immanent departure, word had arrived by heliograph that nomads were getting very pushy on the northeastern border of Austria. Alice didn't have a solid data file on just when the nomads started pushing west, so we weren't sure which ethnic group these people fell into, but that was kind of beside the point—they were a threat if they weren't met with a determined force.

I sold the city fathers on "protecting our trade routes" and got them to raise a portion of the militia to look into the situation and push back, if necessary. I hoped that there would not be any fighting, though I wasn't going to bet on it. Alice and I would lead a force of 300 militia armed with guns, pikes, and plenty of artillery ammunition against the invaders.

Actually, we only took pike heads, since we could get wooden poles for the shafts at any time. As usual, the Ruman Army was close to equally divided between men, who carried the pikes and pistols, and women, who carried repeating rifles. The pikes were the ultimate protection against cavalry, since, no matter how dumb a horse might be, he was not going to charge a mass of pointy sticks. The usual fighting formation was the "infantry box," which consisted of kneeling pikemen in a square formation with riflemen standing behind them and shooting over their heads. The pikemen carried pistols for personal protection, but they should only very rarely have to use them.

On the march, only a few people carried rifles, though the pikemen always carried their pistols. This was enough protection for the column, most of the "riflemen," who were women, were responsible for driving the wagons loaded with supplies, etc. The artillerymen, both men and women, drove the wagons full of ammunition. The only people who rode in the wagons were the drivers, the sick, or the injured. Everybody else walked—that kept them in peak physical condition.

We were able to make about 20-25 miles a day; we were limited by what the horses could do. Our troops could easily double that, but there was no point in it at that time. We took a couple of months getting to our destination; this proved that good roads were going to be a necessity very soon. By now, it was late summer, and we needed to make an impression on the nomads before winter set in. Alice was sure that the nomads expected to loot whatever they would need to survive the winter, so we wanted to defeat them in time for them to recover and gather enough to get by until spring without starving, though we didn't care if they went hungry during the bad weather. It would be hard on the children, but we couldn't do much about that at this stage of our relations with the nomads.

We sent out scouts to find the main nomad camps and to provide us enough information to know how to attack them with the minimum number of casualties on both sides. I was reminded of the old joke about how you got the attention of a mule: you hit him between the eyes with a 2x4. Unfortunately, getting the nomads to take us seriously was going to take some sort of equivalent action. Scouts reported the location of a major camp, so it was up to Alice and me to pay them a visit. We dressed in our finest clothes, gathered weapons (no weapons was tantamount to being naked), and rode to the camp on our finest horses. Just in case we were known, as was likely, Alice carried a small flag with our erect penis logo. Our ships were now plying the Danube on a regular basis, so we figured that the logo had been seen and would be recognized.

The nomad camp had dozens of huts made from a wooden frame covered with animal skins. It may be that "hut" was a misnomer, since the huts were usually 30-35 feet in diameter and pretty nearly hemispherical. There was a vent hole it the peak of the roof, so it was possible to have the cooking fire indoors if it rained; otherwise, cooking was done outside.

Horses were everywhere in the camp, and the place reeked of horse shit. The nomads ignored the odor as if it didn't exist, but I wondered how they could ignore the flies, some of which were larger than the largest horseflies I had ever seen back on the farm in Alabama. Everybody, including the children, carried a fly swatter or whisk made of strands of horsetail hair. Alice was able to ignore the flies, since their bites didn't hurt her, but I was bedeviled by the flies as soon as we approached the camp. Fortunately, my fancy clothes covered enough skin that I was only bothered around my face, and I could brush them away, but I acquired a whisk as soon as I could.

Our logo was recognized, and we were met by a delegation of elders also riding horses. It appeared that, once a male was old enough to sit on a horse, he never walked anywhere except to the place where he had left his horse. Women, of course, walked everywhere, as they were not considered important enough to warrant having a horse. Much to our amazement, there was a translator who could speak a very good version of Basic English.