Chapter 15
Hocha
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
September 5, 1006 CE
The news from the battle reached Fazel thirdhand. The attack was a disaster. Men had left Fort Peterbilt running for their lives, and from the stories, hundreds of them had died there.
There was no coherent account, and since none of the Kadlo had taken part in the attack, none had come to the Kadlo Mound to tell what had happened. What they got was rumor and wild tales.
There was a local corn-based beer. It was low in alcohol content, but enough of it could get you drunk. And after the failed attack on Fort Peterbilt, the returning young men—they weren’t an army anymore—had drunk all of it in Hocha. They had also smoked marijuana and taken mushrooms. That last had backfired. There were several very bad trips and a few deaths.
But slowly, over the fourth and fifth of September, a picture had emerged. It was cloudy and incomplete, but what it came down to was that in the field of warfare, it was cross god two, old gods none. Both attacks on Fort Peterbilt had been unmitigated disasters.
And the crops from Jabir and the added fields using the corn from the country store had all produced well. The country store corn best of all.
The cross god was winning.
Roshan was insistent. For months, he’d been wearing the cross openly here in Hocha. “It’s time, Fazel. We should put up the cross.”
“I don’t think the Pharisees on the temple mound would let that stand, my friend.”
“What are they going to do about it?” Roshan demanded. “Their army has been shattered at Fort Peterbilt, and to get at us, they have to come down from the temple mound and come up our mound.”
Each mound in Hocha had a curtain wall of wooden stakes around the top. It wasn’t always a high wall, but between going uphill to reach it and the wall itself, the defenders of a mound were mostly safe from any sort of attack another mound could launch. At least, if they didn’t have overwhelming force. Fazel knew that, even though he wasn’t a warrior. Roshan had explained it often enough over the years.
Fazel had a bad feeling, but the truth was he didn’t know much of warfare. He’d been focused on other things his whole life. He was a shaman. He knew herbs and healing. He was an initiate of the mysteries, could call the spirits of animals and rivers, and with the Peterbilt people, he could calculate the number of days until the longest day of the year or the shortest. He could tell when to plant and when to reap, so that the crops were mature and harvested before the fall rains ruined them. He was skilled in many things, but war wasn’t one of them. It never had been.
On the other hand, Roshan was skilled at war. He’d been a war leader for thirty years, been on hundreds of raids, and was still alive. There was no one among the Kadlo who knew more.
So, finally, Fazel nodded. Unwillingly, but he consented, and the cross went up on the top of their mound to be followed within hours by crosses on other mounds, the greater mounds of the clans and the lesser village mounds. In fact, they went up on a majority of the mounds.
Roshan was pleased. Fazel was nervous.
“Why don’t you go visit Fort Peterbilt?” Roshan suggested, and Fazel left on the sixth.
Temple mound, Hocha
September 5, 1006 CE
The Priest King wasn’t having a good day. In another history, his great-grandson, who would be called a God King, would be buried with many strangled young women to accompany him into the afterlife and serve him for all eternity.
But, according to the Peterbilt people, in less than a thousand years, he and his people, all of Hocha, would be forgotten and scholars would dig up their bones and argue over what they meant.
His name was Ho-Chag Kotep. He was the high priest and, in his view, Paramount Priest of all of the peoples represented in Hocha. A year and a half ago, evil demons had invaded his world and threatened his people. He’d been slow to recognize the danger. Why would such a threat appear in some little village out in the back of nowhere? Jabir wasn’t actually on the edge of Hocha territory, but it was a place of no importance.
At first, he’d ignored it, then used Pasire Village to try to slap it like a mosquito. But it wasn’t a mosquito. Eighteen Pasire warriors had died in the attack and two more had died from infected wounds later. The Gruda clan had been furious and it had taken him months to convince them that the losses were the fault of the demon Peterbilt and the cross devil it served.
But he learned. He’d placed spies in Fort Peterbilt and learned not just that they were holding one of the sacrifices that were owed to the corn god, but also of their secrets the bang powder and the trebuchet. They had also learned of the cleaning of wounds, of improved querns for grinding corn, all manner of devices by which the Peterbilt people were trying to lure the clans into abandoning the true gods.
A trebuchet isn’t complicated, after all. Fairly simple, when you think of it. And like a bow, the person on the highest ground has the advantage. And the temple mound was the highest in Hocha. He couldn’t reach Fort Peterbilt, but he could reach the Kadlo Mound. It was only a mound over.
It was while he was working all this out that the first of the crosses went up. Then more, and finally dozens, mostly from village mounds, but also clan mounds.
Well. . . . Now he knew where to aim the trebuchets.
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
September 8, 1006 CE
Roshan was glad that Fazel was on his way to Fort Peterbilt. He was a good man, but he worried too much. It wasn’t just the height or the walls. The Kadlo had the best bang powder as well. It was made in Fort Peterbilt and they had steel arrowheads and knives. The knowledge of how to build a bellows had started in Fort Peterbilt, but now every Kadlo village had its own blacksmith turning bog iron into wrought iron and steel, even cast steel. After some discussion, and with Alyssa Jefferson’s full agreement, they had decided to avoid the Peterbilt people silliness of calling iron with even more carbon in it cast iron. It was cast steel. He liked that about the Peterbilt people. They admitted it when they were silly.
He was eating his breakfast when one of his aides brought him word that a delegation from the Pharisees was below the gate. He got up and went to see what was going on. The clan mound was sixty feet high and the flat top was forty feet across. surrounded by a curtain wall. There were steps up to a gate and the delegation was on those steps. It was headed by Kaplack, a particularly officious and odious little man, whose goal in life seemed to be putting people, especially women, in the subservient role that the gods wanted them in.
The gods had a hierarchy that was to be reflected by the humans with the priests at the top, the warriors below them, then the crafters and the field workers at the bottom. And a half step down from each group were that group’s women, whose proper role was not to decide, but to support. The thing was, the man was an effective public speaker who could persuade a congregation to his view. And he was in oration mode now.
“You have abandoned the true gods for this false god, Jesus, a weak and puling thing that let itself be tortured and killed like a woman. And the true gods, who control the coming of spring and fight winter back into its hole, are offended. If it were only you and your clan who your false god endangered, I would not care! You aren’t worth my trouble.
“But it isn’t only you and your clan who abandon your duty to the gods. You and the devices of the Peterbilt people tempt others to abandon their duty to the gods and to life itself, and if enough of you do so, then being abandoned by us, the gods will in turn abandon us and winter will not be forced back by spring and the cold time will return. And that we cannot allow, so I now give you one last chance to return in humility to the service of the gods lest you be destroyed utterly.”
Roshan had had enough of this crap. Besides, Kaplack had drawn a crowd. And, worse, people in the compound were starting to listen to him. “Well, thank Jesus that it’s the last chance!” he shouted down at Kaplack. “Maybe now you’ll shut up!”
Kaplack just stared for a moment. Normally, his sermons weren’t interrupted. They were choreographed things with the audience not responding except at specific times with rote responses. Having someone answer back must have come as something of a shock. But it was only for a moment, then he shouted, “So be it.”
He lifted both arms straight up then brought them down to his sides. Then he turned and moved quickly down the steps.
Roshan was busy trying to figure out what that gesture meant, and a trebuchet, while not silent, also isn’t anywhere near as loud as a cannon or a rifle. The weight drops, the arm rises, and the projectile is flung. The first Roshan knew of the attack was when a clay jar smashed into the top of the clan mound. That first one didn’t hit the top of the mound, but the side nearest the temple mound. Their aim was a little off. It shattered, spraying a liquid all over the side of the mound, but didn’t do more than that.
It took them three more shots to get the range and on the second of those, Roshan learned what the liquid was. The Peterbilt people, among many other things, had introduced distillation. They, mostly Alyssa Jefferson, had also refined the fermentation of mashes into alcoholic liquids. And like most of what the Peterbilt people introduced, it spread first to Jabir, then to the rest of the Kadlo clan, then to the rest of the clans. Distilled alcohol as a disinfectant, as a drink, and as a fuel for lamps had spread more quickly than most things. Especially the drinking part.
Roshan didn’t know what was in the clay pots, but he suspected some blending of alcohol and lard, or maybe some sort of seed oil.
Roshan hadn’t seen the battle at Fort Peterbilt, but he was increasingly coming to believe that whatever one person could think of, someone else could copy or come up with another way of doing. All these thoughts were running through his mind as he tried to rally his increasingly panicked forces. They only had about fifty men in the compound, and as many women. Plenty to fight off an army climbing up the mound in the face of their arrows, but of no use at all against pots of fire thrown from the temple mound.
The clan mound was surrounded. There were temple warriors all around the mound, staying out of bow range, but there, blocking any retreat. Then one of the jars hit the clan house and it started to burn.
Soon there was smoke and fire everywhere, and if Roshan had been able to, he would have surrendered. But there was no surrender now. Even if they did, they would all be killed. Desperate, and with very little hope, he organized the surviving men and women into a forlorn hope of a charge down the mound. If they could break through the temple warriors, they might retreat to another mound. Or, failing that, get out of Hocha to Fort Peterbilt or another village of the Kadlo.
They were fifty by the time they reached the streets surrounding the mound. Twenty by the time they broke through. Then ten. Then five. And finally, three women with stone knives and nothing else, when the mob took them down. Roshan didn’t see it. He’d been killed by the third arrow to hit him before they reached the bottom of the mound.
Fort Peterbilt
September 9, 1006 CE
Fazel arrived on the evening of the ninth from Hocha, looked at the whitewashed wall of Jefferson house and the movie that was playing there and just stared, mouth opened, for several minutes.
It was the first hour of a lesson on how to make a steam engine. The overview before they got into the detailed lessons on how to build the tools to build the tools.
Then a few minutes later when Hamadi touched him on the shoulder, he came to himself and Hamadi led him to the Jefferson house, where he was introduced to Jerry Jefferson.
“How did you get here?” Fazel asked. His accent was not good. Fazel was an accomplished linguist, but he’d spent little time in Jabir or Fort Peterbilt. As the senior shaman of the Kadlo, he spent most of his time in Hocha.
“That’s a long story, and perhaps one that can wait till later, when we speak each other’s language better,” Jerry suggested. “I am more interested in what’s been happening in Hocha?” Jerry didn’t speak Kadlok at all, so his answer had to be translated by Shane.
Giving up his attempt at speaking English for now, Fazel told his story in Kadlok, trusting the children to translate. “When the first of the army filtered back to Hocha, several tribes who had been slowly converting to worship of the cross god decided it was time to abandon secrecy. We didn’t know about Jerry, or the new knowledge he brought. And I am starting to think we moved too soon.”
“Because of Jerry?” Alyssa asked.
“No. In spite of Jerry. It worked well for the first two days. We held most of the mounds, though the Pharisees owned the largest and the Gruda clan the second largest. They and the Lomak clan were not told. We didn’t trust them and we were right not to. We put up crosses, as did the Kacla and the Purdak. But the Purdak took theirs down the day I left. Meanwhile, the Pharisees have declared that if we refuse sacrifice, not only our crops, but the crops of the loyal clans, will fail. And they are insisting that even if only the crops of the loyal clans fail, it will be our fault for offending the gods.
“There were raids between mounds as I left, and they weren’t going our way.”
“How can anyone believe that?” Alyssa asked.
Jerry snorted. “I’m a salesman, hon. I know how people get convinced. The most effective way is to convince them to convince themselves. And to do that, you give them someone to blame. That way, no matter the evidence, they will still find a way to blame it on the other guys.”
Fazel wanted to know what a salesman was, and after it was explained, he agreed with Jerry. As a pastor and a former Pharisee himself, he knew the techniques as well as Jerry did.
Fazel pointed in the direction of Hocha. “We can hold our part of the city for a while, but we may not hold it for more than a few months, and if there is a crop failure anywhere, the Pharisees of Hocha will declare that it was our fault for stealing the gods’ magic for our crops.”
“We need to expand Fort Peterbilt,” Michael said. “Now I wish we’d gone south to the convergence of the Talak and the Agla rivers.”
“Why?” Melanie asked.
“Because we need access to the Talak River for transport. I love the Peterbilt, but it really needs roads, and until we build a nation that can build those roads, our transport is going to be on rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri and their main tributaries. We need some way of getting around Hocha.”
“There is a reason the city was placed there,” Fazel confirmed. “It controls the trade from the great northern oceans.”
At Jerry’s blank look, Alyssa clarified. “He’s talking about the Great Lakes. Salt matters less than size in their names for bodies of water.”
The Talak and its tributaries formed a slow-moving trade network that went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, and to the far northwest. The Pharisees of Hocha didn’t control that trade, but they did have a stopper right in the middle of it and could make it much more difficult for anyone who wanted to trade past them.
“It sounds like we need steamboats,” Jerry said.
“Except the creek is only a couple of feet deep in a lot of places,” Michael said. “Which is why I wish we were farther south, closer to the Talak.”
“So why did you guys decide to start your revolution now?” Jerry asked.
“We were acting first out of a resentment of the Pharisees,” Fazel said. “That resentment was only held in check by fear. That fear was not the straightforward fear that the Pharisees would punish us for disobedience, whether by sacrificing our daughters or by having us executed as heretics. The fear of death, either our children’s or ours, was the least of it. The real core of our fear was the fear that the priests’ secret knowledge did, in fact, come from the gods and therefore represented proof that the gods were on their side and would punish any who opposed them. That an attack on the priesthood, even if successful, would be followed by retribution by the gods. To put it simply, while the chiefs would be willing to fight the Pharisees, they weren’t willing to fight the gods.
“Almost from the moment of the Peterbilt’s arrival and without trying to, you Peterbilt people have been eroding that fear. Letting us see that the gods weren’t necessarily on the side of the Pharisees. But it takes time and proof, then more proof for that belief to fade.”
“And sometimes all the time and proof in the world isn’t enough,” Jerry muttered. Jerry was an atheist; he figured it was unlikely any god existed and the next best thing to impossible that it cared about prayers at all. However, he was enough of a salesman to keep his mouth shut about that.
“First by demonstrating that much of the secret knowledge of the priests was readily available to the Peterbilt people,” Fazel continued without appearing to notice Jerry’s comment, “and second by introducing a new god that the Peterbilt people followed, a god who didn’t require human sacrifice, but instead had come to Earth and made himself human so that all the human sacrifice could be done by him, not the humans.”
“Why do they call the Peterbilt a demon?” Jerry asked.
“They don’t,” Shane said. “The word that Mom and Dad keep insisting is ‘demon’ actually translates as readily to ‘angel’ as to ‘demon.’ It just means a supernatural being that answers to a higher supernatural being. What it should be translated as is the ‘Angel named Peterbilt.’ Even though they know that it’s a thing, not an angel, by now.”
“We are not going to be called the angel people,” Michael said. “It’s sacrilegious, not to mention incredibly arrogant.”
Fazel laughed, then continued to speak to Jerry with Shane translating. “I have heard the argument before, and I tend to agree with Shane’s translation. Though I understand and respect Michael’s humility.
“Anyway, in secret at first, the chiefs abandoned their belief in the old gods and replaced them with our versions of Christianity. It is a version that honors and sanctifies questioning, since it is based on Jesus Christ Superstar as much as the recorded gospels. We use ceremonies from the Book of Common Prayer, but we have modified them somewhat under the influence of the rock opera.
“When the Pharisees lost the battle of Fort Peterbilt, it was the final nail in the belief of power and infallibility of the Pharisees. Moreover, it was proof that the cross god of the Peterbilt people would protect them even against the old gods. And if the cross god would protect the Peterbilt people and the villagers of Jabir, then the cross god would protect us from the Pharisees of Hocha. Or so we thought. But fewer of the people of Hocha agreed with us than we were expecting.
“Each clan has its own version of the cross god. Or perhaps its own interpretation, but you have spoken of the freedom of religion mentioned in your constitution and we have taken that to heart, though it weakens us in our conflict with the Pharisees.”