Chapter 12
Not Enough Knowledge
Jefferson house, Fort Peterbilt
February 26, 1006 CE
Alyssa looked out the window to see snow falling on the ground. The window was the rear window from her Honda Civic, seated unopenable in one wattle-and-daub wall of her house. It was cold in the house, but not that cold. The hood—part of the hood—of the Civic was now a stove top, oven and fireplace with a chimney of clay and stone that allowed the fire to heat the house, at least the front room of the house, without smoking up the interior. The same process was now being used in Jabir and the village of Kallabi, though much of Kallabi’s priesthood disapproved.
The people who had fireplaces with flues and dampers were happy they had them, feeling that they were a great innovation in winter. Also for cooking in rainy weather.
Nature called and Alyssa went to use the chamber pot. It was clay turned on a potter’s wheel and glazed in a purple so dark it was almost black. It also had a lid. It wasn’t that they couldn’t make the pipes for a proper toilet, it was just that they couldn’t make the plumbing for a lot of toilets. Not with everything else they had to do. So most of the houses in Fort Peterbilt used chamber pots that were emptied into a large wheeled barrel that was then taken out to a pit about a hundred yards outside the walls and far from the river to minimize runoff.
Having finished her business, Alyssa went to the fireplace and added some sticks to the fire. Then she poured hot water into a pot and added ground corn and dried berries, and some dried wild turkey meat. This formed a porridge that was the standard breakfast in Fort Peterbilt. The kids would be up soon.
* * *
Four hours later, Alyssa was working in her laboratory when there was a disturbance at the gate. More curious than concerned, Alyssa left the house and looked at the gate.
The gate was two heavy wooden doors held in place by handmade steel hinges. It was kept open during the day, but closed and barred at night. The steel hinges had been forged from a part of the frame of her Honda Civic.
Steel could be deformed well below its melting point. Besides, over the winter, Michael had built a bellows for a smithy to provide forced air to make the fire hotter, allowing them to shape iron and to melt copper, which the locals already had. And apparently had had for centuries. Copies of the bellows Michael built were now being used to make stoneware and they were working on making glass.
But right now, the delegation in fancy robes and headgear, including a face mask, were pushing their way toward the Peterbilt. Along with them was Priyak.
There were also some warriors, also dressed a bit differently than the folks from Jabir. Alyssa was pretty sure they were the priesthood from Hocha. The ones her kids and the native kids had taken to calling the Pharisees.
Michael was climbing down from the truck and he had the Glock in its holster on his belt. Shane was running hell-for-leather toward the Peterbilt from the outdoor communal kitchen.
Shane got to the Peterbilt before Michael met the delegation and Melanie was on her way when Alyssa saw Zara in the cab of the Peterbilt, unlocking the door to let Shane in.
Alyssa looked back at the delegation, who’d apparently seen Zara through the Peterbilt’s windows.
They stopped and started having an argument among themselves. Priyak was more familiar with window glass. Several of the houses in Fort Peterbilt had at least some glass inset into their walls. There’d been a lot in the remains of the store, and even a small piece let some light in and let someone look out.
But the Peterbilt, with its front windshield and its side windows, was impressive. Especially to someone who’d never seen glass before they arrived in Fort Peterbilt.
They were still arguing when Michael reached them, followed shortly by Gada, Achanu and Hamadi.
Then the priests started talking. Alyssa could understand them, barely. There was apparently a difference in accent between the people who lived in Hocha and the people who lived in the villages.
“You will bring us the girl, Zara!” said the guy in the face mask. “The gods demand it.”
Achanu said, “They want you to give them Zara. They say the gods demand it.”
“My god doesn’t,” Michael said. He didn’t speak loudly, but he did speak firmly and he spoke in Kadlok.
Fazel arrived in time to hear that, and nodded.
“The gods will destroy you if you deny them,” the priest in the mask said. “It’s happened before.”
Alyssa knew that the Kadlo had legends of earlier peoples who were destroyed because they refused to provide proper sacrifice to the gods. Crops failing, people starving, cannibalism, all because the tribe had failed to provide proper sacrifice to the gods. So the threat wasn’t an idle one.
That was, she realized, one of the great differences between the modern religions and the ancient ones that existed earlier. Those earlier faiths had almost universally offered retribution for failing to show the gods proper respect in this world, not in the next. Fail to make sacrifices, and next year’s crop will fail, and you and your family will starve. Nothing, or at least very little, along the lines of reward or punishment in the hereafter. What Joe Hill called “Pie in the sky by and by.”
“The crops will fail if the land is overused,” Alyssa said. “It has nothing to do with the sacrifices you make. It’s a matter of chemistry and biology.” Some of that was said in Kadlo, but some words were in English. There weren’t words for the concepts in Kadlo. No terms for sciences or nonspecific learning. It wasn’t that they didn’t use chemistry and biology. They did and in some cases quite effectively, but there was no field of study of the bodies of knowledge. There were coppersmiths, potters, flint knappers, farmers, fishermen, hunters, and so on, but no chemists or biologists. Not outside of Fort Peterbilt and the village of Jabir, anyway.
“You don’t know anything, woman,” Facemask said.
“They know what the far side of the moon looks like,” said Gada. “Which means they know more than you do.”
By now there were quite a few people gathered around. The village of Jabir had a population of around seven hundred people and perhaps two hundred of them had moved to Fort Peterbilt over the fall and winter. Partly to learn from the Peterbilt people, but partly for things like the chimneys and the window glass. That migration was mostly the crafters of Jabir, potters, coppersmiths, flint knappers and the like. What Benjamin Franklin had called the middle people. They’d come for the pottery, wheels, and the bellows for the forges, and so on.
And now they stood around and watched as the Peterbilt people stood their ground and refused to yield to the priests of Hocha. Jesus may have let the Pharisees take him, but the people of Fort Peterbilt wouldn’t be Peter to deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed, or Judas selling him out for thirty pieces of silver.
“Give her to us!” bellowed Facemask.
“No!” said Michael, not shouting, but not whispering either.
The delegation from Hocha looked around and realized that there was virtually no one on their side.
Then, with their tails firmly, if figuratively, between their legs, they left.
“There is going to be trouble over this,” Gada said.
“You think—” Michael started, but Gada shook his head and said, “No. You did the right thing, but they won’t let it stand. If Fort Peterbilt is a place safe from them, they are weakened badly. They can’t let it stand. And I suspect that they are even more terrified of Alyssa than of you. For, if it’s fertilizer and crop rotation that prevent famine, then who needs the gods and who needs them?”
“What will they do?” Alyssa asked.
“That’s the thing that bothers me. I don’t know what they can do.”
“What about a straight-up attack like the one last spring, but bigger?” asked Shane, who at thirteen was a bloody-minded girl.
“That might be their only option,” Gada agreed, “or at least it might seem that way to them.”
“In that case, we need to get ready,” Michael said.
“Catapults and claymores,” said Alyssa. “We have a good stock of black powder.” Over the last year since their arrival, Alyssa had made hundreds of pounds of black powder. Most of that had been used in construction. Fill a large crockery pot full of black powder, bury it in a hole, then use a copper wire to send it a spark, and you have a much bigger hole. Or you’ve removed a tree trunk, or a large rock.
And as she thought about it, the same thing could be done with the same pot and chunks of rock to make a poor man’s claymore. They didn’t have much of her Honda Civic left. Every bit of the steel in that car was in use, either in its original form, like the two wheels of which each were part of a one-wheeled cart now, or the passenger seats that were now in the Jefferson house. Or like what was left of the engine block. It was hammered into plows, and the blade for a wooden bulldozer attachment for the pickup truck.
Meanwhile, since the priesthood in Hocha knew about her, Zara was released from the Peterbilt. By now, with nothing to do but read Shane’s sixth grade textbooks and practice English, she was well versed in a sixth grader’s knowledge of math, geography, general science, and English.
She, with relief, moved out of the Peterbilt and into the Jefferson house with Alyssa and her children.
* * *
For the next several months, the Pharisees of Hocha took no action.
The spring crops were planted, more goods were made, iron and steel was made from bog iron, pots and ornaments were made from clay and fired in a brick kiln. Wood was carved using steel blades and, in general, the village of Jabir and Fort Peterbilt got richer.
Forge, Fort Peterbilt
March 27, 1006 CE
Bajak pulled the bloom of iron from the forge using the tongs, then used the hammer to whack it, collecting a burn on his arm as a bit of hot flux flew off the iron bloom. It stung, but he didn’t lose his hold on the bloom of iron.
Bajak wasn’t nearly as tall as Michael Anderle, but for his people, he was a big man. He stood five feet nine inches tall and weighed close to two hundred pounds, mostly muscle. He was thirty-five years old and a poor hunter, but an excellent flint knapper and carver.
Now he was trying to add the skill of blacksmithing to his repertoire. He hammered the bloom several more times until the red glow had faded, then put it back in the forge. The Peterbilt people were doing what they could, but increasingly, Bajak was coming to the conclusion that they themselves didn’t understand what they were trying to teach the people.
Even the Peterbilt people didn’t know enough. As he thought about it, Bajak realized that he rather liked it like that. They had given him the start. He would figure out the rest.
The bloom was glowing red again. He pulled it out and went back to hammering.
* * *
Three hours later, Bajak had a chunk of iron. He put it back in the fire and once it was red hot again, he started hammering it into a sheet, but not a thin sheet. It would be roughly half an inch thick when he was done. But it would be four inches long and six wide and he’d be able to attach it to a log and have his own anvil.
Jefferson house, Fort Peterbilt
March 27, 1006 CE
Alyssa sat in her house in the light of a lamp with paper and pen. The paper was locally made, as was the ink. The pen was a sharpened turkey feather. And Alyssa was trying to remember the processes for creating or refining vitamin C. It wasn’t all that urgent. Corn provides some vitamin C, but cornmeal provides none. For that matter, the same process that made niacin available for preventing pellagra also removed the vitamin C, causing scurvy, assuming that you didn’t get the vitamin C somewhere else like fruits or vegetables.
She sighed and got back to work. In spite of Michael’s claims that she was a “know-it-all,” she didn’t know nearly enough.
Fort Peterbilt
July 4, 1006 CE
Alyssa lit the fuse and the string of firecrackers went off with a crack, crack, crack, crack! This was the second Fourth of July in this time. The locals had had a bit over a year to learn what it was about. The United States of America. As it happened, Shane’s sixth grade textbook was on world history, not American history. So no one had a copy of the United States Constitution. On the other hand, the Anderles were reasonably well read and Alyssa Jefferson was a darn know-it-all. Between them, they’d cobbled together a fairly decent approximation of what was in it.
Three branches of government: legislature, executive and courts. Executive and Legislature elected by the citizens. The locals found elections an interesting concept and not altogether foreign to what they did.
Protection of individual rights. That one had raised some eyebrows. They were a tribal people and the village, the clan, came first.
Everyone is equal before the law. Again, some raised eyebrows. Different people in the clan held different status. The notion that that wasn’t fair had come as a bit of a shock.
You have the right to speak your mind and to follow your own beliefs. Sure. Within reason. But some of the stuff that people believe is pretty stupid.
Really? Even the stupid and offensive stuff? You can’t be serious.
You can’t be forced to give evidence against yourself? But how do you prove someone did something if they won’t admit it?
The right to keep and bear arms? But considering most arms in the here and now were clubs or bows and arrows, that wasn’t all that much of an issue. After all, you could make your own and most people did.
Though, considering the Peterbilt people’s weapons, the locals could see how it might become one over time.
Slowly, the notion of a nation made up of states was starting to take hold.
Shane’s sixth grade textbook did discuss city states which were close enough to the villages like Jabir for a comparison.
Jabir decided to experiment with elections to the women’s council.
Jefferson house, Fort Peterbilt
July 17, 1006 CE
Melanie almost didn’t make it outside before she threw up. And, for a moment, Michael was concerned about something in the food. But then he remembered. He’d been through this before with Shane.
Michael had been just back from the Stan and still in the army when Melanie had started puking last time. Seven months later, Shane had arrived. Things had been tough for a while after that, with Michael just out of the army, having to take any job he could to make rent. He’d learned to drive a big rig in the army, so he had the skills to find good-paying work, but not work that would let him help with the baby. All those memories came rushing back as Melanie was puking her guts out next to the Peterbilt. It hadn’t been an easy time. But they’d had modern medicine and healthcare. In the here and now, making a baby was a lot more dangerous.
Michael started to worry.
* * *
A couple of hours later as they discussed the issue with Alyssa, they got even more worried. Alyssa was a chemist and a chemistry professor with a good but not infinite knowledge of chemistry. She could make dietary recommendations, but the first one was useless. “If we had domestic animals, I would recommend milk and cheese. But we don’t.” She scratched her head. “Eggs, probably turkey eggs, since we don’t have chickens. Also cruciferous vegetables, but we don’t have those either. Spinach is native to Asia. These people have to get calcium somewhere.
“Some of that’s growing in the gardens,” Shane said. “We have tomatoes and there was cabbage and brussels sprouts in the seed rack at the general store. And they already have berries.”
“Good point. Beans, maybe. Yes, probably beans and fish. There are a host of other vitamins and minerals that we are going to need to work on. We need to talk to the local women, and then I’m going to have to do some chemistry.”