Chapter 7
Wealth and Money
Jabir
April 17, 1005 CE
That evening Achanu showed his uncle and the women’s council a handful of the corn collected and explained, “Michael took me and five others to the place where they came into the world, and collected up this. He pointed at our fields and indicated he wanted to plant this corn if it wasn’t too late.”
“It’s not,” Etaka said. “We have planted later than this in other years. It doesn’t hurt the harvest much.”
“Which is why the priests are upset with you,” Hamadi said. “You are supposed to leave such knowledge to the priesthood and not interfere.”
“Then don’t tell them. The demon people want to plant their corn. There is no reason not to help them.”
Over the next few days the people of Jabir started preparing a field for the demon people seeds. Meanwhile Alyssa wanted to nixtamalize corn, which needed lye.
Camp Peterbilt
April 18, 1005 CE
Alyssa gathered up the sack from the general store and headed out. They were all busy, but Alyssa wasn’t going to wait. She needed to persuade the local shaman, Gada, and that older one, Priyak, that they needed to nixtamalize their corn to prevent pellagra. She had no clue how she was going to explain it to them, but the first step was to get lye. And for that, she needed wood ashes and a pot. She left the kids in the care of Shane and headed off to Jabir to collect as much campfire ash as she could get and as large an earthenware pot as she could, so that she could make lye.
“Where are you going?” Melanie Anderle asked.
“I have to make lye,” Alyssa told her.
“I’d like soap too, but is it that much of a priority?” Melanie asked.
“Not that I would object to soap, but no. This is to nixtamalize corn.”
“Nixtamalize?”
“It’s a way of treating corn that the Aztecs, heck, most of the South and Central American cultures had before the Spanish arrived . . . ” Alyssa explained about niacin and pellagra and the little girl, ending with, “I have to figure out some way of convincing the locals to nixtamalize their corn or there are going to be a lot of sick kids as corn becomes a bigger part of their diet.
“And you need lye for this?”
Alyssa nodded. “Calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide will work, but we have more wood ash available than seashells, so yes, lye.”
“Back in the pioneer days, what you did to get lye was to make a V-shaped box with a hole in the bottom of the V. You put ashes in the bottom of the box then poured water through the ash, catching the lye in a metal pan. You don’t want to use earthenware because the lye is caustic and will definitely score the glaze on the earthenware pot,” Melanie said.
Alyssa looked a question at her.
“I think that comes from one of the Little House stories, the books, not the TV show,” Melanie explained.
“Okay,” Alyssa agreed. “Do we have metal pots?”
“There were some at the general store.”
Again Alyssa nodded, then went off to Jabir to collect wood ash from the fire pits that were located outside the huts of the villagers.
Gada joined her as she collected the ash from the stone-surrounded campfires that were located in several places in the village of Jabir. Not every house had a fireplace next to it, but there were several which were shared by two or three huts. They had roofs, but no walls, so people could cook even when it rained.
Alyssa was thinking. First, that these people really needed bricks for brick fireplaces and chimneys, and second, that money wasn’t the root of all evil.
These people didn’t have money, at least not full money, but they did have poverty and class. The little girl with pellagra was also generally undernourished, and there were clear distinctions in wealth even within the village. Poverty, class and want didn’t require money. But if this society was to survive, it darn well did need money.
* * *
Gada followed the demon woman around the village and as soon as she started collecting ash, he set several of the people of Jabir to collecting more of the ashes from the fire pits around the village. He knew from her gestures that it had something to do with Kaliba’s illness, and Kaliba wasn’t the only person in Jabir who was starting to have the symptoms. She was just the worst so far, and that meant that even if the cure was meat, people were going to keep getting sick with it because meat was hard to come by, especially for the poorer families.
If there was some other magic that the demon people had that would stave off the illness, he wanted to know about it.
* * *
Three hours later, carrying sacks and baskets full of wood ash, they walked back to the demons’ camp to find that under the other demon woman’s instruction, the giant had constructed a strange wooden pot with a hole in the bottom. The ash was placed in the wooden pot, and hot water was poured over the ash. It drained through the ash and into one of the strange not-copper containers that they’d found at the magic place where the demon people had come into the world.
The liquid that poured out the bottom of the wooden pot smelled bad. He stuck a finger in it, and it was slippery. The demon woman immediately grabbed his hand and pulled him over to a water container and washed his hand with water.
Gada felt foolish, realizing that the demon woman was protecting him. He knew better than to stick his fingers in another’s magic, but he wanted to know how this worked.
He had to know. He’d known people to die of the rash that Kaliba suffered.
Then she put corn in a pot, added water and a little of the slippery liquid. Then, using gestures, she indicated that they would boil it for a time, long enough for the sun to move so far. He guessed about an hour, maybe two. Then it would be allowed to steep in hot water for a full day.
And suddenly he understood. It was a stroke out of the blue. Like the gods slapping him on the head. There was a process that was sometimes used. It made the corn easier to grind and it changed the flavor, made it taste better, Gada thought. That was what she was doing here. Not exactly the way they did it back in Jabir and in the other villages and clans who farmed the river basin. That was to simply boil the corn in a pot with some wood ash in the pot as well.
The reason it had fallen out of favor was that it required extra wood and the wood was getting harder to find as the trees were used up from the land right around the villages. And now that he thought about it, he realized that when the corn was more commonly treated that way, there had been less of the rash.
Camp Peterbilt
April 20, 1005 CE
“It’s going to take a lot of experience and experimentation before we start producing good-quality parchment,” said Alyssa, “but I’m pretty confident that even the first crude versions of it will make an adequate surface to write on.”
Melanie’s mouth was tight with distaste. “Sounds yucky, though. I mean, scraping off blood and flesh and fat. Not to mention a lot of work. You’re sure we can’t make paper?”
Alyssa shook her head. “Not any time soon, no. It’s another case of we need the tools first to make the tools to make the tools. In this case, the tool we need most is a screen. To make paper, you make a mush out of fibers, plant or animal fibers, and spread them on a screen to let the water out. The screens are made of fine steel wires very close together, but not quite as close as the strings in a fabric shirt. We can’t make the wires yet. Not in the quantity we need, anyway.”
“What about that stuff the Egyptians used?” asked Michael. “I can’t remember the name but it was something close to ‘paper.’”
“You’re talking about papyrus. The problem there is that so far as I know the plant they made it from doesn’t exist in North America in this time. Even if it did, you’d have to import it from places like Florida and Louisiana. No, folks, I think it’s either parchment or clay tablets like the ancient Sumerians used. And those are bulky and awkward.”
There was silence for perhaps half a minute, as Michael and Melanie pondered the problem. Then Melanie got a crooked smile on her face and said: “Look on the bright side. We’ve now got teenagers, boys and girls both, who think that working on anything the weird people who live in the dragon want them to work on is an exciting adventure.” She was referring to the dragon paint job on the Peterbilt.
Michael’s expression was skeptical. “Even if it means hours scraping a stretched deer hide with an obsidian knife?”
“How is that any worse than a lot of the labor these people do?” said Alyssa. “How long do women spend grinding maize using a mortar and pestle? Or making thread with those little twisting things that they hang down and spin?”
“Let’s raise it with Etaka and see what she thinks,” said Melanie.
Achanu’s mother had become, along with Hamadi, their main liaison when it came to practical projects the Americans wanted to propose. She didn’t speak more than a word or two of English, but she was very good at making herself clear through gestures and examples. It helped that she had her son and Oaka to help her through the rough patches. Those were the two teenagers who were at least starting to get a feel for how the new language worked—and about the only ones other than small children able and willing to help Americans improve their Kadlok.
Field near Jabir
April 22, 1005 CE
Men and women, boys and girls, were all in the field of grass and brush, chopping and pulling up the brush and chopping holes in the grass, apparently preparing the field for the seeds. They had apologized about the field. It was a “tired field,” they explained, one that had been planted for three years and by now was offering yields that were not so good. The locals were preparing the field, but they weren’t plowing the field. They were hoeing the field using stone hoes. The labor was intense.
Alyssa had an idea. They had quite a few two-by-fours and a lot of nails. She took one of the two-by-fours about eight feet long, and hammered eight-inch nails through it, one every foot or so. Then she attached two I-bolts to it, one on either end, and tied ropes to the bolts, then to the back of the pickup. Then she had Melanie drive the pickup out to the field that was being prepared for planting. She dumped her creation out of the back of the pickup, then placed it with the nails sticking down into the earth, and had Melanie put the pickup in gear, at which point the two-by-four came right out of the ground. Next, she tried standing on it. That made no difference, except she fell on her butt.
She discussed it with Melanie and they went back to camp and attached another two-by-four to the first, making a T. They tried it again. It worked, sort of, if someone stood on the bar of the T, which wasn’t easy to do. More experiments, and they could use it to rip out most of the bushes.
Then Shane suggested replacing the nails with sharpened bits from the body of the Civic. That took a bit of work, but by the eighth of May they had a plow that had eight cutting heads about a foot apart, and then they cleared the field for planting in a day.
At that point, the villagers of Jabir pointed out that there was, near the field they’d just cleared, another field. It was one that didn’t flood and it was covered in a mat of thick prairie grass, which in turn was supported by roots that held the land together and made hoeing it into a usable field way more work than it was worth. At the villagers’ direction, Melanie and Shane plowed that field too.
It wasn’t the back forty that a tractor would have done in an afternoon. It was about ten acres of land. But the truck had a hundred and forty horses under its hood. And the plowed field was one that the village of Jabir had never before been able to use.
Camp Peterbilt
May 5, 1005 CE
Alyssa grabbed a hammer from the tool kit in the Peterbilt and went over to the stack of walls and started to pound on bent nails. The stuff from the country store had been brought but the bringing had done some damage—nails being pulled loose and bent as the walls were pulled apart to be piled into the bed of the truck. So now Alyssa was sitting on the ground, taking nails that had been pulled out of two-by-fours and using a hammer to pound them straight, then putting the straightened nails in a basket provided by the women of Jabir.
Meanwhile, the pickup, still acting as a tractor, was plowing up the ground where the new houses of Camp Peterbilt were to be built.
Alyssa, Melanie, and Michael were learning a lot. The natives dug out the earth to a depth of two feet, give or take. Not just the posts. The whole floor space. Then they stuck posts even deeper into the earth, another six inches or so. They added the wattle and then added the daub over that. And once they had the walls in, they took some of that earth from inside and raised a mound about six inches high around the outside of the building, presumably to keep the rain from draining into the house. A “door,” usually a leather flap, was attached. Then they put on a roof of rushes.
All that was standard, the way these people did it most of the time. But there were some additions this time: pieces of glass were placed in wood frames which were woven into the wattle, and the daub was carefully applied to leave the windows clear. And some of the two-by-fours from the country store were added to make window frames for windows that would have leather flaps that could be closed on cold days and opened in warm weather.
The pickup plow was used for building the houses, to loosen the earth so that the men and women of Jabir could simply shift the loose earth to the baskets for removal, rather than actually digging up the hard ground. It was still a lot of work, but these people were used to work. They were always working. Even sitting around, they were peeling tubers or working hides or shaping clay for vessels.
Which was part of the reason that Alyssa was sitting on the ground, pounding bent nails flat. With everyone working, she felt guilty just sitting around.
But it was only part of the reason. The nails were galvanized steel and valuable.
After the trip to the arrival point, the floodgates were open and the people of Jabir, in cooperation with the demon folk, traveled the just over eleven miles to the arrival point and brought back everything, down to but not including the concrete slab the country store was built on. But the roof, from shingles to beams, was carefully removed and transported to Camp Peterbilt.
Now that they were building the houses, and starting to get to know each other, the villagers were offering them payment for the stuff from the country store and for the work done by the Peterbilt and the pickup.
It came as a surprise to Michael, Melanie, and Alyssa that the locals had money of a sort. The archaeologists seemed to think that it was a barter system. That wasn’t completely accurate. They had found themselves in a culture that was making the transition from a barter to a monied economy. They had pennies in the form of dried beans. They used a base-twenty counting system; a cob of corn was worth twenty of the dried beans and they had stone ax heads that were worth four thousand beans, and other tools and tokens that were worth other specific amounts. The problem with the money was the same as the problem with using cigarettes as money in prison. Cigarettes got smoked, and beans and corn got eaten. Even ax heads got used and broken. For archaeologists, the problem was that unless there happened to be natives to tell you about it or a written record, there was no way to tell that an ax head was money. Or, for that matter, beans. So there was “no archaeological evidence that the Mississippian culture had money.”
But they did, and they were insisting on paying the demon people for everything they provided. It was, in fact, a matter of pride for them to pay their own way. There was still enough of the gifting economy in the mix so that the giver gained status and the accepter lost status. And while they liked the demon people, the people of Jabir had no desire at all to be their supplicants.
Alyssa dropped a nail in the basket, picked up another bent one, and started straightening it. They needed a better money, but Alyssa didn’t know jack about how to create money. She knew that there was crypto currency and all sorts of stuff, but when it came right down to it, about all she knew about money was how to balance a checkbook, or keep track of how much she spent using her debit card.
Well, there’s another thing I don’t know about for Michael’s list. After her comment about not knowing about cars, Michael had started keeping a list of things she didn’t know about. It had grown fairly long by now, but things fell off the list as she learned about them.
Shane came over. “Alyssa, how do you make a spinning wheel?”
“I don’t know,” Alyssa admitted. “It pretty much has to do what the locals are doing with their . . . what do they call those things again?”
“Fasriw,” Shane said. It was a word in the local language for the device. Alyssa didn’t know the name for it in English. She thought it might be spindle but wasn’t sure. “And that’s why I’m here. I’ve been trying to use the fasriw, but my thread sucks and it’s a lot of work. We need something better.”
So for now Alyssa left the nails to be straightened later, and went off with Shane to watch Jogida make thread using pounded hemp fiber and a fasriw and try to figure out what she was doing with it, so that she could come up with a tool to do the same thing faster and easier.
It turned out that the fasriw spun the fibers into a thread, then the thread was wrapped around the stick and you couldn’t do both at once. You spun, then wound, then spun, then wound, and it took skill and practice to keep the width of the yarn consistent.
From that, Alyssa guessed the function of a spinning wheel, but had no clue of how one might be made. This wasn’t chemistry, it was mechanical engineering. Not her field at all.
“Here’s what you do. Go tell your dad that you have found something else I don’t know anything about and it’s his job to tell you how to make a spinning wheel.”
Shane grinned and said, “Dad said you’d say that. He doesn’t know how either. He wants to know if you can draw a spinning wheel.”
“I’ll try.” Alyssa could draw. She was no Rembrandt, but she’d taken art classes in college and knew how to sketch.
By now they were writing on parchment.
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
May 12, 1005 CE
Rogasi’s black hair was cut off short using scissors from the country store. It was neatly done, but Roshan wished it hadn’t been. It was too noticeable, too different. Most young men wore their hair at shoulder length, cut with stone tools, so this shorter haircut was noticeable even under his peaked cap.
Rogasi opened a pouch and pulled out several sheets of cured hide that was scraped thin. On the scraped hide were pictures of the demon houses which didn’t look much like snails after all. Their bottoms weren’t flat, but had wheels. There were also images of other things that they found at the place where the strangers had come into the world.
Then, quite enthusiastically, Rogasi started to explain about windows and glass and plows and steel pots, which were like clay pots but much harder to break than pots made out of copper. “But it’s not copper, uncle. It’s different. And their wise woman . . . she seems to know everything. She has skin that’s very dark, almost black, and her hair is strange and very curly.”
Roshan listened to it all and started to worry because the priests of Hocha weren’t going to let this stand. It was a threat to their power. He wasn’t sure what they’d do, but they would do something. He sent Rogasi back to Jabir with a warning for Hamadi.
Jabir
June 25, 1005 CE
Carefully, Tudis whittled the hub. Making a round hub flat on both ends wasn’t easy with stone tools. It could be done, but that wasn’t how he was doing it. He had bought a steel knife from the demon people. It was a “box cutter” that had been in the back of the “pickup truck,” in one of the “toolboxes,” and it had cost a deer. He carved another sliver off the piece of wood, making one side a little flatter.
Four hours later, he had the part the demon people called a hub. It had two rods sticking out and eight holes around the outer edge.
He’d made the rim over the last three days. It was a straight piece of wood that he’d bent into a circle by soaking and steaming and careful shaping. It also had holes. Now, using thick sinew from an elk, he strung the rim onto the hub, tightening the cords until the wheel was balanced. His wheel was three feet tall when he was done. And then he started working on the wheelbarrow.
It was a lot of work, but the “pickup” couldn’t be everywhere, and the corn crop was looking especially good this year. Being able to use a large wheelbarrow to collect the corn would save a lot of time when the crops were ready for harvest.
Finished with this project, he gathered up the wood shavings to use as starters for future fires. Then he went to the new stove to collect his dinner.
The demon people didn’t think of it as a stove. It was made of bricks, about three feet tall, with a hole in one end where you could stick in a shovel to pull out ash, and it had places to hold earthenware pots and plates over the fire. Dinner was corn and bean stew flavored with squash, berries, and venison cooked tender.
The bowl he was eating from had been thrown on a potter’s wheel and it used a glaze that the wizard Alyssa had come up with.
Camp Peterbilt
June 30, 1005 CE
Alyssa sifted the powdered shells into the clay. It would act as a modifying agent, keeping the clay from cracking during drying and firing. “Sorry, Shane. I know the process and you’re right about the Pilgrims doing it, but I can’t make glass yet.”
“Why not?” asked a clearly frustrated Shane.
Alyssa looked over at the girl. “Heat! Heat is the key to all of it, making bog iron into steel, making really good pottery, making glass, everything hinges on really hot fires. Over three thousand degrees Fahrenheit for steel, about the same for glass, and between twenty-two hundred and twenty-eight hundred degrees for stoneware. What our hosts have are pit kilns which max out at around two thousand. Even just working bog iron takes temperatures in the same range as stoneware, around twenty-two hundred degrees. To get that sort of heat, you need a blast furnace. That means a bellows and something other than a person to power it. We have to have bellows and we have to have bricks, or at least earthenware pipes to control the flow of air into the fire in a way that will produce a lot of heat, while, at the same time, controlling the types of gasses that the material we’re melting are exposed to.
“That goes for all of it, iron, steel, stoneware, glass, all of it.”