Chapter 18
The Barge
Fort Peterbilt
September 12, 1007 CE
The gavel hit the table with a loud thump. “All right, everyone settle down,” Kasni said, loudly but not shouting.
The chamber was full mostly of older women. They were the representatives of their tribes and villages. There were a few young women, and even fewer men. That was less because the women were unwilling to vote for men than because the men were mostly unwilling to try for a job in something called the great women’s council. The Hocha language had a single word for women’s council and it was followed by the word “big.” But men mostly didn’t run.
“You’ve all heard about the proposal?” Hamadi continued.
A woman raised a hand. Bota was the representative from Pelok.
Kasni nodded and waved to Bota, who stood. “I know you are all thinking that I will be in favor of this project, but I’m not. At least, not yet. Yes, we need the Peterbilt on the west side of the Talak, but we need other things too. We need bricks. We need steel knives and axes. We need steam engines. Things that we can build now. And building this giant canoe called a barge won’t get us those things.”
This, Kasni thought, isn’t starting out well.
She was right. The project almost died in the first day. For essentially the reason she wanted it. It would bring a great deal of money to Jabir, if the new government funded this project. People would have to be hired to chop down trees, to split those trees into planks, to shape and dry those planks to put them together into a hull and a framework and a deck strong enough to hold up the Peterbilt. And all those people doing all that work would, one, need to be paid, and two, would be learning valuable skills that could be put to use in other ways.
The representative of every other village and every other clan who had joined the union of clans knew it. And if they were going to be paying for it, they wanted their share.
The Pharisees of Hocha had an advantage. They weren’t answerable to their home villages. For that matter, they weren’t answerable to anyone, if you didn’t count the gods, and by now Hamadi was convinced that the gods of the Pharisees weren’t just evil. They didn’t exist. They were a lie, a lie told to take power.
Still, if the Pharisees had decided they wanted a big barge, they would just order it built. Except they didn’t know how. But how long would that last?
Both sides had spies.
She held up a hand. It didn’t stop the arguing, so she used her gavel again. Once she had something close to quiet, she said, “The Pharisees will hear of this and they don’t need a barge as big as we do, if we are going to move the Peterbilt. Smaller boats than we’re planning but larger than we have, made of wood planks, powered by small steam engines, or even by men with oars, will do. If they get control of the Talak, we are all threatened. What good will our walls do if they burn our fields? We are in a race.”
Main mound, Hocha
September 17, 1007 CE
“Are they going to build it?” Ho-Chag Kotep, the Priest King, asked. He was a short man and a bright one. He was also a skilled political infighter. It had taken all of that to survive after the disaster of the attack on Fort Peterbilt. It was only the fact that he’d been in charge of the assaults on the cross god worshippers in Hocha that had let him and his family maintain their high place.
“I don’t know, your worship,” the spy master said.
Almerak had never been to Fort Peterbilt, but he had, over the years, built a decent network of spies in that place. Almerak had sent his daughter to the gods ten years ago, long before the demon Peterbilt had come to them, bringing word of the cross god. He knew that the cross god was a lie meant to anger the true gods to destroy the people, and perhaps destroy the whole world. After having sent his daughter to the god, he had to believe that, and he did.
But he didn’t count on belief to keep his agents honest. He made sure that he had hostages for their continued honor. “My spies say that the ‘great women’s council’ is arguing about it. Each woman insisting that this or that part of it be placed in her village.
“More to the point, should we build a steamboat?”
“Yes! And we should put rockets on it.”
The bang powder was very useful for any number of things, and the priest scholars of the temple had been experimenting with it, based on comments about fireworks that Shane had shared with other children. Hocha now had bang powder rockets that would fly great distances and then blow up. They weren’t all that accurate, but they had them.
In the last three hundred years or so, the priest class of Hocha had been the only place for a young man interested in science to go. Other than that, it was warrior or farmer. They had developed a system of numbers and a very perishable form of recording information. In exchange for the knowledge, the secret knowledge, and the privileges that went with it, they simply had to do their spiritual duty, including the sacrifice of young women to make sure that the next year’s harvest would be good.
The fact that all that learning was located in Hocha meant they had a cadre of people who could understand concepts like buoyancy and equal and opposite reaction on first hearing them. The fact that they’d been steeped in their faith meant that they were less likely to abandon it. All put together, it meant that Hocha was quick to pick up on the technical stuff, but loyal to their faith.
They were already making birchbark canoes and double canoes with platforms between them. They were making iron and steel and using the potter’s wheel and spinning wheel and, on their own, they had developed a pedal-powered paddle wheel to propel their double canoes.
Ho-Chag Kotep was confident that they could make a steam-powered barge if they decided to. The issue was cost. A great deal of their income was based on the “donated” labor of the subject clans and villages. And with the disaster of Fort Peterbilt and the failed insurrection in Hocha itself, they were short on labor and food. The harvest hadn’t been good because the sort of farming they did was very labor intensive. Also, by now the villages were reinforcing their walls, and keeping their food behind the walls.
“Very well, Almerak,” Ho-Chag Kotep said. “Send in Malak on your way out.” Malak was Ho-Chag Kotep’s counselor of the mysteries, effectively the chief engineer for Hocha.
Malak was in favor of the idea, but wondered where they were going to get the food to feed the workers who would build boats.
“We will take it from the villages of the unbelievers and use their bodies to restore the land.”
Fort Peterbilt
September 25, 1007 CE
They were in Etaka’s house, Kasni and three women who had become the leaders of the delegations from Kacla, Lomak, and Purdak. The great women’s council hadn’t developed political parties. Instead they’d stuck to clans, each clan tending to support the villages in their clan and also to control their votes.
Etaka and her daughter Oaka brought out corn cakes and a bean stew thickened with chicken and containing spices. The women sat at table to discuss the ongoing wrangle over whether to build the great barge and what parts of it should be built in what village.
“I just got word from Gada,” Kasni said. “It’s confirmed the Pharisees at Hocha are going to build river barges.”
“And?” asked Prutsa, the representative from Abaka, a village of the Kacla clan.
“From what Gada is hearing from his friends in Hocha, they have some new weapon, some sort of flying bomb. It uses the bang powder to make it fly.”
“Do they really have it?” asked Kochi, a representative from Takiso. “Or is it another lie?” Kochi was a zealous follower of the cross god, having lost one of her daughters to the old gods. She didn’t want to believe that the Pharisees could do anything but steal and kill. Before the Peterbilt’s arrival, she’d been almost as fanatical in her support of the old gods.
“Gada thinks they do,” Kasni said, dipping a corn cake in the stew. “He’s been hearing rumors about some new bang powder weapon for months. But the point is, if we don’t get to work on the great barge, we’ll still be arguing when they come down the Talak on their steam barges.”
“Even if we agree and start building it now,” Prutsa said, tapping a corn cake on the table, “they will still be coming down the river before it’s half finished. The problem with the great barge is that it’s a great barge. It’s too big, it will take too long to make. We need to be building steam engines anyway. They don’t need refined oil like the Peterbilt or gasoline like the pickup. That’s what Jerry Jefferson says.”
“We’re working on it,” Etaka said as she set a pot of herbal tea on the table. “We’ve poured steel cylinders, but they still need to be ground to a smooth finish, so that the piston will move easily, but still hold pressure. That takes a boring machine.”
“And do we have boring machines?” asked Kochi.
“Yes, but they still break down a lot,” Etaka admitted. Her daughter Oaka had been one of the first of the people to go live with the Peterbilt people and was a decent speaker of English, who could read and write. So she was well versed in the various projects going on in Fort Peterbilt and Jabir. She was bringing in a set of cups glazed a bright red. They were made on the potter’s wheel and were light and airy for clay vessels, not quite porcelain but moving in that direction.
“We made a deliberate decision to focus on building the tools to build the tools, rather than hand-making steam engines,” Oaka said. “Once we start making them, we will be able to make a lot of them, very quickly.”
“The Peterbilt people do everything quickly,” Prutsa said, not altogether approvingly.
“Not this quickly. We aren’t building steam engines because we’ve been putting all our effort into building a steam engine factory. Part of that is that we want to use tube boilers rather than pot boilers, because they are safer. We also need relief valves that work consistently, because when a boiler blows up, people die.”
“Your Peterbilt people are too soft,” said Januki, the representative from Akadas, a Lomak village. She was a persuasive speaker in the great women’s council, but was often silent, preferring to listen rather than speak. She was a pragmatic convert to the cross god, not one who had particularly objected to the sacrifices, but rather one who recognized the cross god offered them more. Kasni suspected that, like Jerry Jefferson, she didn’t actually believe in any god. But she attended the Sunday church meetings. “Yes, someone might die now and again, but people die all the time, for all sorts of reasons. And a working steam tractor would feed a lot of children in villages where the angel Peterbilt and the pickup cannot reach.”
“That’s true,” Oaka admitted, “but that would just be a few steam engines. Once we get this going, we’ll have dozens, maybe even hundreds. And they will be safer. No steam engine is completely safe, any more than an internal combustion engine is perfectly safe.”
Januki nodded, then said, “Well, that’s another reason to make smaller barges rather than the big one for the Peterbilt. Smaller barges will take the new steam engine across the river to power steam tractors on the east and south sides of the Talak.”
It was a good point, and for now at least, it was the final nail in the coffin for the Peterbilt barge project.
* * *
Across Fort Peterbilt, in a wattle-and-daub building, there was a hand-built steam engine using a pot boiler. It wasn’t to power a steamboat of any size. Instead it was designed to take wrought steel and pound it into sheets that might then be coiled into tube boilers to run a steam engine. It was designed to be used just long enough to build a tube boiler, which would then replace the pot boiler that provided its steam, and they were just about there.
Ugar was a large man. Not as large as the giant Michael, but he stood five feet eleven as the Peterbilt people measured things and weighed over two hundred pounds. He was bright enough, but not a quick thinker in an emergency, so not a good hunter. He’d spent most of his life in the village of Kallabi and had moved here after he saw the angel Peterbilt plow the fields in Kallabi. He didn’t see all that much future in digging holes to plant corn.
Once the sheet was yellow hot, he pulled it from the forge and ran it through the rollers. Then he repeated the process, decreasing the size on each repeat until he had a sheet less than a quarter-inch thick, then he wrapped it around a dowel to form a tube. It wasn’t a very long tube, about eight inches, but once he’d completed it and welded the edges, he shaped the still hot tube into a half coil and put it aside.
Then he did it again. By now he had over fifty of the short tubes.
Another worker took the tubes and added threading, so that they would fit into a “tube block.” It was a design that had been developed in the twenty-first century, and like the pot boiler it was to replace, it was an intermediary step. Something that they could build, even though they lacked the tools to make long high-carbon steel pipes. It would work, and since the “tube block” was made of much thicker steel, if a break happened, it would happen at the tubes, which were to be in a box so the accident would be contained. Just a steam leak and a no longer working engine, rather than an explosion that killed dozens.
Two days later, they had their first of the compromise tube boilers. Two days after that, they had ten of them.
* * *
In still another building in Fort Peterbilt, they were making the actual engines. They were cylinders of poured steel, and they were just now getting temperatures up high enough for crucible steel. The cylinders were poured into clay molds so that the walls wouldn’t need as much finishing. It was expensive, but there were steam engines waiting for the new boilers.
Outside Fort Peterbilt
October 3, 1007 CE
The steam tractor had large wooden wheels with ridges designed to sink into the ground and grip it. It had one of the new steam engines to run it. Melanie guessed that it produced about six horsepower. Not much compared to the Peterbilt, or even the Ram, but the sucker would pull a six-bladed plow through the grassland, cutting through the heavy roots. It meant that, Peterbilt or not, the river people were no longer tied to the rivers. Not on either side of the river.
Of course, when put together, the tractor was almost as big as the pickup, but they’d made it here. It could be disassembled and shipped across the river in several loads. It would still need some big-ass canoes, but nothing like the size of the barge.
Kasni watched it with joy. At least some joy. Yes, it was a good thing. It would help all the allied clans that had signed the constitution. But it was another reason not to build the barge for the Peterbilt. And Kasni, a politician to the soles of her moccasins, wanted that barge. She wanted it steaming down the Talak, impressing all the people down the river all the way to the great ocean that the Peterbilt people called the Gulf of Mexico. She wanted it to travel up the Talak, and humiliate the Pharisees in Hocha and persuade the villages farther up the Talak that they should abandon the Pharisees of Hocha and join the United Clans of America.
The problem with the steam tractor was that the crafters in Hocha were even now working on making their own. They were using pot boilers and their engine cylinders leaked more than the ones built in Fort Peterbilt, but they worked.
The United Clans needed that barge.