Chapter 5

Alice was overjoyed to see the papyrus. Now she would have an easier time replacing the paper she used in her internal printer. She still had to eat the right kind of dirt to produce the colored ink, but now she could just eat the papyrus and it would be reprocessed into paper suitable for her printer. With a ready supply of paper, we could start teaching the people of Ruma to read and write. While we were about it, we were going to teach them a common language that could be used all over the world for trading, and, we hoped, eventually come to replace all of the existing languages. We were sure that a common language would help to reduce strife between countries.

We chose what we called Basic English. No irregular verbs, simple tenses for verbs, only past, present, and future tenses. All pronouns would be simplified to have no cases, and we would get rid of the one thing that I hated the most: subjunctive mode. Essentially, a 300-word vocabulary, other than names of things, would suffice for most trading and general conversation. Eventually, the language would evolve to be much more complicated, but we wanted to start off with a simplified version.

By keeping the language simple, it would be easy to teach reading and writing. We would put pressure on the people to learn the language by making it the official language for the Venus cult. Just think, you could fuck in comfort if you could speak the language! Aquaria announced that language lessons would start immediately, she would teach the men and I would teach the women. We would start on the children as soon as the adults could handle the language; we said it was because it wasn't safe for the children to have a language that their parents couldn't understand. The parents thought about that for a moment and agreed whole heartedly.

In the first classes, we concentrated on teaching English to the trading crews and those who wanted to join them. We wanted these people to be fluent enough to teach the language to their contacts all over the world. We also wanted everybody to speak with as nearly the same accent as possible. (Yes, we worked on breaking my Southern accent, since we did not want the whole world sounding like Buford J. Beauregard! We settled in on what I called a "Middle America" accent, which caused the demise of "y'all," I'm sad to say.)

While all this social upheaval was going on, the temple commissioned the construction of 4 more ships, similar to those we had, but about 75 feet long. They had multiple masts, some of which carried square sail and some the triangular sail of the type more suited for sailing on the Nile. These were going to carry a captain and crew of 20 and be even more heavily armed, just in case we had to fight a real naval battle. These ships were to be dedicated to the Egypt grain and paper trade, so they needed to be as large as could manage the trip upriver from Ostia.

These ships were outfitted with 6 ballistas, so only one could lay waste to any fleet of ships that anyone else could assemble in this era. I hoped that we would never get into the fix where we needed them, but I wanted to have the ships available if we ever did need them.

The ships were also large enough to make decent troop ships, so I was prepared for a war I hoped never to have to fight. But I remembered the problems the USA ran into at the beginning of WW2 because they had not been smart enough to prepare for a war that any sensible person could see coming. Now I needed to look into the question of building an army. That was not going to be so easy, because it required manpower that we just did not have, yet.

When Osus had picked up the last supply of guns from Wolfton, he ordered 200 rifles and 200 pistols for delivery in October. I knew that they would have to work hard or expand their facilities to satisfy that order, and I was curious to see which one they did. They did both! They had 298 pistols and 307 rifles on hand and wanted to know if Osus would take them at the previously agreed upon price. He said yes, but he would have to make a second trip, since he did not have enough flints with him to cover that many guns. Osus took all of the guns he could pay for and dashed for Ruma to drop off the guns he had and return with enough flints to pay for the additional guns.

Oops! I had created a monster! We could not yet absorb guns at the rate that Wolfton was now able to produce them. I sure as hell didn't want Wolfton to sell guns to anybody else, but what could I do to keep from drowning in guns? Alice and I were going to have to give this one a lot of thought! In any case, I needed to get my ass in gear and get an army organized.

I asked for a conference with the Ruman elders for the purpose of discussing the formation of a town militia. We went over the advantages of having such a militia armed with guns, and they agreed to support me in the endeavor. Officers were appointed and, with private coaching from Alice's memory bank, I taught them what to do. We then put out a general call for young men and older boys who wanted to join the militia. As an added incentive, special training in the Venus cult was scheduled for one night a week.

Every male in Ruma wanted to join when word of the special incentive got around, but we had put in upper and lower age limits, so we narrowed the candidates down to 57 people. This wasn't enough, so, with help from Aquaria, I was able to invite females to join our militia, with the same incentive. Essentially, the same thing happened as with the male population, namely, every woman and girl in Ruma wanted to join. We narrowed down the candidates the same way with the age limits and wound up with 54 women as viable candidates. This gave us 111 candidates for the militia, so we were able to start training.

The officers wanted to start out forcing everybody to learn how to march in parade and how to salute. I got so pissed at the officers that I almost shot them, myself. I managed to get myself under control and explained what kind of army I wanted. They couldn't understand the value of a guerrilla army, nor could they understand how to lead them. That did it! I fired the whole crew and decided to be my own general. Sub officers would be selected from the ranks without regard to gender.

I called the recruits together and addressed them. I said that I would be their leader and they would all get the opportunity to be officers and leaders. I was going to divide them into temporary squads of 9 members, each. Some people might be shifted to different squads after we had a little experience with each other, but we would go with this arbitrary arrangement for now. As much as possible, we would keep buddies together, but I couldn't promise anything for the long haul.

I gave them 20 minutes to sort themselves out, then I took over. There were a few groups of 9, but, mostly, they were bunched in groups of 3, 4 or 5. Furthermore, they were divided by gender such that women were together and men were together, but I wanted all the squads to be divided by gender as evenly as possible. I also wanted the ages mixed up, hoping to get a little experience in to season the youthful enthusiasm. It took nearly 2 hours of juggling them around until I had 12 squads of 9 and one "scout" squad of 3.

I told them that they had 15 minutes to pick a squad leader, so they had better get to it. As I expected, every squad that was able to pick a leader chose a male, usually the eldest. I let that go for the time being, figuring that we could sort that out during the course of the training. There were 4 squads that couldn't choose a leader, so I picked the eldest female for the job, just to see what would happen. I was sure that I could find some female leaders once I gave them the chance to show what they could do.

I had also managed to arrange for nearly every squad to be divided into a 5-4 gender ratio, except that the scout squad was temporarily all male. I had a surprise for those guys later on that day: Venus was to be the patron of the scouts.

I had them form up into a reasonably neat array by squads, one behind the other, with the scouts in front. I figured that an important skill for everybody to acquire was the ability to swim, so I picked that for our first training object. I asked for a show of hands of those who already knew how to swim, and there was at least one person in each squad who claimed to be a swimmer. It looked like I had my cadre of swimming instructors, but I needed to test to be sure.