Chapter 13
Attack
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
August 10, 1006 CE
Months had passed and the fall sacrifice was only a month and a half away. Lomhar was under increasing pressure to bring his daughter back from Jabir.
“They say that because you hid your daughter away, showing disrespect to the gods, the rest of the sacrifice will have to be doubled.” Jakun’s face was red as he leaned over the table to hiss in Lomhar’s face.
“Then send your children home to your village,” Lomhar said.
There were eighteen villages among the Kadlo. But the Kacla had twenty-two, the Purdak twenty-five, the Gruda twenty-one, and the Lomak seventeen. Altogether, it was one hundred and three villages that looked to Hocha to one extent or another. The villages averaged out to something like six hundred people per village. That was sixty-one thousand people and there were fifteen thousand people in Hocha itself.
But the clans weren’t all enamored of the rule by the priests in Hocha. What had held them in line was the fear that if the priests were defied, the gods would take revenge and the crops would fail.
Neolithic farmers were never far from starvation, so the promises of someone who could, or claimed to be able to prevent crop failure, were powerful. That was true no matter where or when you lived, if you lived close to the edge.
But Jesus didn’t demand sacrifices to make the crops come in. Instead, he had sacrificed himself to save his followers, asking only that they be good to one another. And his angel, Peterbilt, had brought teachers to protect the harvest without the need of sacrifices.
By now Lomhar was utterly convinced of that. Since he’d refused to give his daughter to the priests, he pretty much had to be convinced of that just to be able to live with himself. “The priests can’t prevent or cause crop failures. It’s beyond their power and always has been. So collect your daughters and take them out of Hocha. Take them home to your village and use compost.”
“Compost” was a Kadlok word. The Kadlo, all the clans, had been using compost to some extent for hundreds of years. But it was just something some of the women did and the priests insisted that it didn’t make much difference. The floods both fertilized and made the ground easier to hoe. That was part of the reason that their culture was centered around the Mississippi River system. That, and the fact that with canoes the river system made trade practical from the headwaters of the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. What Alyssa Jefferson had done over the summer and fall was provide a coherent explanation for how it all worked. One that didn’t involve the pleasure or anger of gods. Alyssa Jefferson had used her knowledge of chemistry combined with the knowledge of Gada, the shaman, and of the women’s council to come up with a better mix of leaves, fish guts, poop and other things to provide the corn, beans, squash and other crops really good food.
Then add in the fact that the Ram truck having made it possible for the village of Jabir to plant almost twice the land it had the year before meant that as this last fall’s crop came in, the villagers of Jabir had more than twice the food they’d had the year before. And with the freezers, they had even more. Then there was the pickling and preserving that they’d introduced.
And visitors from Jabir were bragging about it all up and down the river.
And there was the writing. The priests and shamans had already had tools to record specific things. How you knotted a pouch to tell you which herb was in it, that sort of thing. But writing was flexible. It could record anything. And the mathematics of Shane’s textbooks was spreading first from Jabir to the other villages of the Kadlo clan, then from those villages to the villages of the other clans.
All that knowledge, especially the math, was making things very tense in Hocha.
Kadlo Mound, Hocha
August 17, 1006 CE
The knock at the door of Lomhar’s hut was quiet. It wouldn’t have woken Lomhar where he slept. However, Lomhar’s servant Akvan, the son of his cousin, slept in the front room. Akvan was friends with an under-priest of the temple. As it happened, they were very close friends and Akvan wasn’t all that pleased with Lomhar’s actions. Not that he didn’t like Zara, but the gods’ displeasure could destroy everyone. And that sort of defiance of the priesthood could bring retribution on the whole Kadlo clan.
“Ho-Chag Kotep has issued an order for Lomhar’s arrest,” Akvan’s friend said.
“I was afraid of that,” Akvan whispered back. He hated the idea of his clan leader being sacrificed, but Lomhar had brought it on himself.
His friend reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder. “You don’t understand. It’s for the whole family. They will take you too if you’re here. You have to come away.”
“But I’ve always been loyal to Hocha and the priesthood.”
“It’s gone beyond that, Akvan. The council is going to crush Jabir and destroy the demon Peterbilt. All the Peterbilt people are to go under the knife. You have to get away.”
Akvan looked at his friend in shock. Then said, “All right. I’ll collect my gear and go back to Kallabi.”
“Good. I have to go. I wasn’t supposed to warn you.” No one knew about their relationship.
Akvan started to collect his things, then he stopped. Why had his friend warned him? If it would really offend the gods, was warning him any different than taking Zara off to the Peterbilt people at Fort Peterbilt?
Every day the Peterbilt people of Fort Peterbilt offered more things that brought the priesthood’s power to influence the gods further into question. And everyone around him seemed willing to put aside the will of the gods for no more than what they wanted.
In all his life, he’d never really doubted the gods or the idea that they could be persuaded to leave people alone, even protect people, if they were just paid off.
And Akvan had accepted that. Accepted even that if the gods required it, he would go under the knife. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few.
But not, apparently, if the few included people you cared about. And as angry with his father’s cousin as he’d been for these last months, he did care about Lomhar and his wife, Zanni. They had welcomed him and treated him well, much better than some of the servants in Hocha.
Hating himself as a coward and a traitor to the gods, he went to wake his father’s cousin.
* * *
An hour later, Lomhar was talking to Roshan. “They are coming for my family. We have to leave.”
“Yes, you do,” Roshan agreed.
“You’re from Jabir. You should leave too.”
“No. That’s part of the reason you need to leave. They’re counting on me reacting when they come to take you. If you’re not here, I won’t be forced to defend you and defy them. Without that, they have no cause to take action against me or any of the other Kadlo chiefs. If they do, that will cause the other clans to rebel, at least some of them.”
Roshan was a convert to the cross god. He even wore the cross openly. But he had not actually defied the priests in any way that would let them take action against him. “No, Lomhar. Take your wife and that nephew of yours and warn the Peterbilt people. I will stay here and watch. We need to keep watch on what the Pharisees are doing.”
Talak River
August 18, 1006 CE
The Talak River tied Mississippian culture together. Goods and ideas flowed up and down it. Its fish and the wildlife that surrounded it and its tributaries fed the people of the Mississippian culture. This far upriver it was traveling at less than two miles an hour, but a canoe added about two and a half to that, so they were traveling at a solid four miles an hour down the Talak, taking turns at the paddles. Lomhar, Zanni, and Akvan managed about fifty miles before they stopped for the night. This morning, they’d all woken with sore muscles from yesterday’s trip. None of them were as used to this sort of effort as they thought they were. Life in Hocha had softened them.
Two hours later they were at the mouth of the Agla river, what the Peterbilt people knew as the Kaskaskia. Then things got harder. Now they were traveling upstream and the flow that had helped them now slowed them. Where they could, they pulled the canoe close into the shore and got out and walked, pulling the canoe along behind them. It was faster and less work to walk pulling the canoe.
Still, it was well past noon when they reached Bashk Creek that Fort Peterbilt was next to, and another hour before they reached the fort. The big gates of the fort were closed, but the small one next to the creek was open.
They tied the canoe to a log and squished up to the gate.
Almost immediately runners were sent to Jabir. The runners made excellent time. By now there was a wide road of packed earth and gravel from Fort Peterbilt to Jabir. It went along the creek to the Agla River, then along the Agla to Jabir.
Fifteen minutes later, now in dry slippers, Lomhar met with Hamadi and the other clan chiefs of Jabir along with Michael Anderle. Shortly after they started talking, Michael sent for Alyssa Jefferson. She was, after all, the one who had built most of their defenses, at least the burning-and-blowing-up part of them. Michael was the main designer of the catapults, but the napalm to go in them was all Alyssa’s.
“Why arrest you?” Hamadi demanded. “They must know it’s going to enrage the other clan chiefs, and not just the Kadlo clan chiefs, but the chiefs of all the clans. It was a stupid move.”
“They didn’t want him telling us what they had planned,” Michael said. “How long will it take them to raise a force?”
“It depends on the size of the force; the priest guards are over seven hundred men. But they can’t send them all or there might be a revolt in Hocha. But if they leave a hundred in Hocha, that will let them send around six hundred men armed with bows and gunpowder bombs.”
There had never been any way of preventing the knowledge of how to make black powder from getting out. The apothecaries of the Kadlo were familiar with all the components of black powder. They just didn’t know about mixing them to make an explosive. Knowing that, Alyssa hadn’t even tried. She’d shown Gada how to make it and use it, and anyone else who wanted to know and had something that sounded like a good reason. She’d been a lot more reticent about the napalm she made from fuel oil and Styrofoam.
“That’s not nearly enough,” Alyssa said. “And they darn well ought to know it.”
“I’ve been thinking of that the whole way here,” Lomhar said. “I think that Michael is right. The reason they decided to arrest me when they did was because they’d sent for levies from the other clans. Not for labor, but to make an army. That’s also why they waited till the crops were in. Between the preservation from last year’s harvest and the huge size of this year’s, there is a fortune in maize and beans in the storehouses.”
“So what does that mean in terms of time and the size of the army?” Alyssa asked.
“A few weeks, maybe a month.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Hamadi said. “They know you escaped. They don’t know how much of their plans you know. If all you knew was that you were to be arrested, that would be one thing. Not all that important. But what if you knew their plans in detail? What if whatever spy you have in their ranks told you everything? That would be a different matter. I think they will be afraid of what you can tell us, and they will rush things, not take time to train their forces together. Instead, move as fast as they can.”
“In that case, sooner. A few days to two weeks,” Lomhar said.
“We need to put out scouts, and in the meantime, we need to move all our people to Fort Peterbilt,” Hamadi said.
“If we’re moving everyone from Jabir to Fort Peterbilt,” Alyssa said, “we also need to move the food. All the corn, the beans, the squash. Also the dried meat and fish. We may be facing a siege.”
Then they ran into a translation problem. Sieges take supply trains. Starving out a town takes time and a large force, but you have to feed that large force, and feeding such a large force was difficult in the Mississippian culture. Though things like sieges had happened, they weren’t common. They weren’t a standard part of warfare with their own name. So Alyssa had to explain the word. The Kadlo chiefs got it, but didn’t think much of it as a plan for winning a war. Especially in these circumstances. But they agreed that bringing all the food to be stored in Fort Peterbilt was a good idea. More to deny it to the attackers than because they thought they would need it.
Fort Peterbilt was pretty big. It had a ten-foot-high curtain wall, but that wall was on top of a five-foot-tall mound that was behind a five-foot-deep ditch, so to get over the wall you needed a twenty-foot ladder. Or you needed to place your ladder on top of the five-foot mound. That was not an easy thing to do.
The walls had hard points. Towers that held catapults that could throw rocks several hundred feet. And there had been enough visitors to Fort Peterbilt that it was a safe bet that they knew the layout. But they didn’t know everything.
Mississippian culture was familiar with copper. They used it for tools and ornaments. They knew how to find it and refine it. Add in the Peterbilt people and their knowledge, and the Mississippians now knew how to stretch it into copper wire. And after a year of experimentation, they had insulation too. It was poor insulation, but it worked well enough. Well enough for Alyssa and several of the women of Fort Peterbilt to make and install claymore mines about halfway up the inside of the ditch outside the wall and wire all those claymores into a switch box. They didn’t have metal balls. Metal was much too expensive for that. It was in the words of Jesus Christ Superstar: “The rocks and stones themselves” were going to sing.
It took them eight days to get everyone out of Jabir.
Then they waited.
Fort Peterbilt
August 29, 1006 CE
Zara was standing on the wall of Fort Peterbilt, crying. “It’s all my fault,” she blubbered as she watched the army of Hocha invest Fort Peterbilt.
Shane had had about enough of that. She knew that Zara had grown up believing in the gods of Hocha. And she knew that she was supposed to respect other people’s religion, even if she wasn’t all that clear on why. But this was just silly. Then suddenly, where Zara was standing struck her, and she started laughing.
Zara turned to look at her, shocked and angry.
“You’re Helen of Troy!” Shane pointed.
“Who?”
So, still giggling, Shane explained about Helen of Troy, at least what she knew, which honestly wasn’t much.
Then she said, “No, you’re right. You can’t be Helen of Troy. You’re not pretty enough. If Peter or Paris, or whoever it was, was going to kidnap someone, it would have been me.”
The argument got rather heated then, with Shane talking about the girl who launched a thousand canoes. Which was, in its way, pretty accurate. The force had come by way of the river in canoes. In fact, a fair chunk of the force had bypassed the fort, and gone to Jabir to burn the village to the ground.
Outside Fort Peterbilt
August 30, 1006 CE
“There was no food at all?” the commander asked.
“None. They took everything.”
It was bad news. The new wealth of Jabir was part of what brought the army together. People expected to get food, textiles, copper, all sorts of things. Instead, the village had been stripped of everything of value. It also meant that his just over three thousand men were going to run out of food in about a day and a half. “Well, that decides it. We attack tomorrow before dawn.”
“I’d like more time to get them to work together.”
“We don’t have more time.”
Walls, Fort Peterbilt
August 31, 1006 CE
The watchers on the towers shouted warning, and Alyssa pulled a switch. The lights came on. They were the same set of bright LED lights that they had used to scare Achanu and his friends the first night after they got here. They swept around on a preprogrammed course.
It had a similar effect, at least at first. But after screaming commands, the army came ahead.
Hocha’s army, whose official name was the Paramount Priest’s Guard, didn’t have enough men to attack en masse all around the fort. They concentrated the attack pretty much where it was expected, the one place where the walls didn’t have a ditch in front of them, the main gate. The one that was designed to let the Peterbilt out.
Michael and Melanie still slept in the Peterbilt, though Shane was spending the night with the Jeffersons and Zara more often than not these days. So Michael’s duty station was next to his bed. He was in the driver’s seat, starting the engine in moments. He pulled the air horn, and Melanie opened the passenger door and ran for her duty station. The air horn woke everyone in camp. People started rushing to their assigned places.
Alyssa’s station was on the tower to the left of Peterbilt’s gate. It let her see what was going on, and it had her switches to signal the positions on the wall. She also had her phone so she could talk to Shane, Melanie, and Michael at need, using the Peterbilt’s Wi-Fi. It was also Hamadi’s station for the same reason. He was in charge of the defense of Fort Peterbilt.
At Hamadi’s direction, she moved the lights around to spot the enemy formation, and about then a rain of arrows started falling. It was more of a drizzle. They were decent bows, but their range was closer to fifty yards than a hundred.
The attackers were firing at a target above them, right at the edge of their range. And the outer wall of the curtain wall covered most of the defenders’ bodies. That was the good news.
The bad news was that Hocha’s army was spreading out as they approached the wall. Fort Peterbilt was strong. Its weakness was in the number of people available to defend the walls. A village of seven hundred had fewer than two hundred men of combat age. A lot of the women of Jabir were also on the walls, but as a rule they weren’t as good with bows and arrows as the men, and not nearly as good with the war clubs.
What they could do was appear on the walls wearing men’s hats so that it looked like there were more defenders than there actually were, and if necessary, drop rocks, gunpowder bombs, and napalm-filled Molotov cocktails over the walls on the heads of the attackers.
The women were in charge of the catapults.
It still wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that they were being attacked by a force that was closer to three thousand than two thousand.
The defenders couldn’t be strong everywhere, so they had to force the enemy to concentrate where they wanted them. Hamadi gave the order and hating herself for it, Alyssa called Melanie and Shane.
* * *
Shane was stationed at the left-side catapult; she wasn’t in charge of it. That was a member of the women’s council. It had been determined that the heavy weapons didn’t need to be fired by men, and they needed the men shooting arrows. Shane reported, “Hamadi wants them herded to the Peterbilt’s gate.”
The type of catapult that Alyssa and Michael had agreed on, in consultation with the villagers, were trebuchets. That’s basically a seesaw with a short arm, with a heavy weight throwing a much lighter weight with the long arm. A big advantage of a trebuchet is it can be cocked and left cocked without being ruined. That’s not true of the stress-based catapults.
The trebuchet could also be aimed with a crank. Two women cranked them around to where the commander wanted them, and then one of the women pulled the cord. A clay vessel containing twenty-five gallons of napalm and a lit fuse flew through the sky and landed on the left side of the attacking force. The ceramic container shattered and the whole area was covered in fire. So were over a dozen of the attackers.
Men covered in burning gunk are not rational. They run around madly, trying anything to put the fire out, grabbing other people in the hopes of help. They put on quite a show, and the enemy bunched up toward the Peterbilt gate.
* * *
Melanie relayed the order to Kasni, who was in charge of the right catapult and the process and results were about the same. Melanie wanted to throw up. The other women on the wall looked rather pleased.
* * *
Back at the Peterbilt gate, Hamadi was watching the battle and nodding. Things, so far, were going surprisingly well.
People were starting to die, but that had become inevitable when Hocha decided to attack. More importantly, the attackers were bunching together and the demon weapons worked best against bunched attackers.
* * *
The commander across the field felt very much the same way. He too wanted his force concentrated. He too wanted them in front of that huge gate. And he too had gunpowder bombs. The villagers of Jabir and Kallabi had been using the bang powder for over six months. And the priesthood of Hocha had had spies in Fort Peterbilt since before the new fort had been constructed. By now, not just the formula for what Alyssa Jefferson called corned powder, but the entire process of its production, was well known. And the army had hand bombs filled with the stuff. Heavy fired clay pots filled with corned powder and rocks with fuses that had been tested so they had a consistent burn rate.
But he also had two large bags of the corned powder each with fuses and he needed to get those bags up against the Peterbilt gate. Once the gate was blown, it was all over but the mopping up.
The heretics were doing just what he wanted them to. He shouted his orders, and the army surged forward.
* * *
The enemy was charging now and Hamadi stood there watching them calmly. Then he turned to Alyssa. “Call Michael.”
* * *
Michael got his orders and revved the Peterbilt’s engine to get the attention of the people at the gate. He blew the horn, one long and two shorts, and men lifted the bar from the gate, then pulled it open, and the attackers started to pour through. The gate was wide enough for the Peterbilt with a foot on either side, and the gates had stops so that they only opened so far. Just far enough to let the Peterbilt through. Not far enough to let anyone get out of the way.
Michael stomped on the gas and the Peterbilt surged forward into the mass of men pouring in the open gate. Ten tons of steel ran into the crowd, and it was already going fifteen miles an hour when it hit. It didn’t slow, but it did bump as it rolled over the broken bodies of men who’d thought that they had gotten inside Fort Peterbilt.
He kept going. As soon as he was out the gate, the warriors jumped off the road into the ditches to either side of the gate. Ten feet later, Michael made a sharp right and proceeded along the flattened plain that circled Fort Peterbilt on his way to Jabir. As he drove, men jumped into the only safe place they could find, the ditch between the road and the walls of Fort Peterbilt.
Michael kept going. He needed to get the Peterbilt out of the way for the next round.
* * *
Achanu was with the group that had opened the gate. As the Peterbilt passed, it left a wake of destruction. Masses of men crushed and broken in the space between the doors of the Peterbilt gate. Then he saw something else. Two heavy cloth bags and each of them had strings running from them, and the strings were burning.
Achanu had been with the work crews using gunpowder to remove tree stumps or break rocks. He recognized what he was looking at. He ran forward over the mangled bodies, tripping and falling on a crushed rib cage to reach the two bags. He got to them. He reached and pulled the fuse from the first one, then the other. Then he grabbed the bags and, struggling a bit because each bag weighed more than thirty pounds, he brought them inside, where they wouldn’t be set off by accident.
He was covered in blood and gore from tripping on the bodies, but he barely noticed that.
* * *
The enemy commander didn’t see the failure of his plans. He’d been near the front and when the gates opened he, like everyone with him, had thought it was the gods smiling on them. He was dead under the wheels of the Peterbilt.
* * *
Alyssa watched the Peterbilt as it ran over people. It didn’t get all that many. These were hunters. They knew what to do when faced with a buffalo stampede. Get out of the way.
The easiest way out of the way was the ditch.
In the ditch there were hollowed-out logs and ceramic pots buried in the wall side. No one noticed. They were too happy to be out of the way of the demon Peterbilt.
“Do it!” Hamadi commanded.
Hating herself, Alyssa pulled a switch. It was an alligator switch, two copper plates that fit into four plates. When the switch closed, the circuit was completed, and electricity from one of the generators went down the wires to hair-thin copper wires so thin that they couldn’t carry the current. And resistance heated those wires to the melting point of copper in an instant. Way hotter than you needed to set off black powder.
Fifteen improvised explosive devices went off. The rocks and stones that were in front of the black powder “sang.”
It was not a happy song.
But it was quite effective at conversion. They converted hundreds of men into hamburger, and sent body parts as much as fifty yards downrange.
At that point, the battle was over. The enemy didn’t retreat. They just ran. And they kept running until exhaustion stopped them. Then, when they got their breath back, they walked.
They walked back to their villages. Some walked back toward Hocha, but they walked away. Away from Fort Peterbilt and the people who could call such power to them.