Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 12 — Scary Girls.

Transforming magic can make a big cone of ice.
Transforming magic can make a big fireball.
Transforming magic can launch rocks.
Transforming magic can stop arrows.

Textbook on magical science.
Author: Epidaurus Vacilantus
Magical academy of Thebes.
Written in five hundred and thirty one from the foundation of Tebes, tenth year before goddess (10 BG) by our tribe`s accounts.

I am not the most suited to talk about stalking prey or physical combat. In combat I am only a healing mage, with little ability to do harm.

But both Erica and Bastet state that I am the better person to describe our little ambush that night. They say that I am the one that could follow everything as it happened.

Heh, I can feel them both making love in a beautiful mountain valley right now. As good reason as any to avoid writing a book.

Erynia, on the other hand, is writing that book that she says will “destroy that stupid textbook from Epidaurus, and show the world that he is a pompous fool”. I doubt that anyone will take a book written by “those bitches of the mountains” seriously, except for some priests that will use it to light a bonfire but to each its own obsessions.

I must admit that putting all the amazing events that led to so much death, but also so much development in written form is my obsession.

Well, Erica likes to write about horses and hunting, I am sure that she would start to tell the way that we defeated fifteen armed men, four mages and deceived four experienced merchants used to the grasslands as a nice hunt done with a good horse. She would not be completely wrong.

But since I am writing, let’s start by the subject that I love, that is, logistics.

We had traveled with pack horses, but our ability to live of the land had been really increased by our stay with the goddess. Memories of hundreds of animals helped to understand the prey while our speed and ability to feel life made us very good at finding our quarry. This means that a substantial amount of the water and food didn`t need to be packed. We could travel lightly and fast, loosing little time to hunt and yet, hunting enough to complement our rations.

The merchants though had to feed slaves that were forbidden from hunting. Also, the merchant route was well known by all creatures in the region and they had adapted, large predators had learned to avoid men in this path but prey also disappeared when human voices or the human scent was felt.

This merchant route was the best path to follow; the merchants knew all the water holes, streams and rivers. The path was mapped and the use had improved it to the extent that in some places it could almost be called a road. Of course we also knew it all, including the place where the merchants would sleep that night.

It was a nice location, at the top of a hill close to the northern lake, with a beautiful view of the lake and the mountains north of the grasslands.
As we found out, when preparing our ambush, the lake had dark places and hidden underwater caves where the goddess could thrive, if SHE was careful, since there were dragons, elves and other powerful beings in the lake and the northern mountains. These powerful beings would not like if SHE showed herself there.

Anyway, we left a part of HER in the lake and it started to get material and grow, going to the depths. With this our link to HER strengthened and we got the ability to control more creatures, although we only needed the horses for the current task.

In the future though, I could see having the presence of parts of the goddess at both sides of the grasslands between mountains as quite a nice idea. She felt that it was more important to expand south than north, but control of this important way of commerce was vital.

OK, OK, I will get to the juicy part. We sent a gift to the merchants. A horse came to their camp at the end of the day, looking a bit lost as if it was a domesticated horse gone astray in some battle.

No merchant looses the opportunity to collect a strong and fit mare that would easily fetch a good price in New Rome or Magdan. After the mare followed the caravan a bit, as if she was a puppy wanting to be taken in, the guards were sent with some fruits to attract her. She smelled the fruit offered by the strongest guard, nibbled at it a bit and he used it to tie a rope around her neck. Happy with the catch and with the nice bonus that this horse would bring the guard didn`t mind when the mare snorted in his face and didn`t notice the dark globule entering his nose.

Guided by a link to something much bigger, the little dark particle avoided the guard`s defenses, got into his bloodstream and started to multiply. The Goddess had millennia of experience in doing this intrusion into a body. It worked reasonably well in any animal, with the exception of some dragons and other powerful magical beasts.

But I digress again. As you can imagine, since the guard was male we could not ask him to join us in the goddess or even talk to his mind, but the Goddess could be quiet, become a kind of dormant disease in his bloodstream and wait.

While she was playing inside the guard, the caravan stopped for the night and the horse was led to an improvised corral where it started to take the other horses, the dranacks used to pull the wagons and the merchant`s mules, converting them to the Goddess.

Traditionally the merchants set tents forming a circle around a fire, and built a fire pit around the camp. The trench for the fire pit in the old camp site they were using this night had been improved with the years, being reinforced even by people of the tribes since we used to protect our herds inside it when camping around. This trench already dug in the soil represented an economy of time since they didn`t need to stop earlier and dig, the wood in the area though had already been almost completely used to fuel past fires and this forced the merchants to carry some wood with them.

Lately they had been traveling with heat stones, magical stones that could be set to produce large amounts of heat when any animal approached. They were complicated to use, since a mage was needed to activate and de activate the spells, but the economy in time or carry space was considered worth it.

This caravan, though, had an interesting problem to solve. They had the usual mules and tents but also three of the large wagons used by the tribes. The wagons would not fit into the area surrounded by the old fire pit.

They solved it by making two camps, one was close to the usual tribe stile, the three wagons forming three sides of a square and the herd of pack animals and horses the fourth side. The circle formed by the firepit touched the square at the side where the animals were.

Follows a drawing of what I remember from that night:

______________W2W2W2
____________W1___p___W3_______
____________W1_p___p_W3_______
____________W1___p___W3_______
________________CCCC__________

Where three W form a wagon, W1 contained the goods and was used as sleeping quarters for the guards, W2 contained the slaves, W3 also carried some trading goods but was mostly occupied by the wizards.
CCCC was the cattle enclosure, p the fire pit.

The guards of the caravan where divided in groups of five, with five resting in W1, five in the middle of the pit, close to the merchant`s tents and five patrolling following irregular paths at irregular intervals. Of these last five, one usually went to the roof of W2 to watch the area, since the slope leading to W2 (remember, top of a hill) was the easiest to climb being the one used by the wagons to go up and down the hill.

The merchants left an opening in the fire pit leading to W3, so that the guards stationed inside the pit, close to the tents of the merchants could run and call the mages and also leave to sleep or to patrol in their turn.

There was only grass around the camp site, since the sparse wood of the grasslands around the place had been chopped long ago. The grass in the camp proper was cut to help feed their fire pit and a few fires spread around the place to give clarity, but it was still possible to approach the camp using the cover of darkness and, in some places, the curvature of the hill.

The infected guard helped to set camp, unfortunately he was not one of those assigned to cook and we could not get to the other guards trough him. Most people in the camp were from Thebes or its surroundings and a dark plague a century ago had taught this people to be careful with what they shared with others.

But, after the camp was set, the infected one and four companions went to the wagon (W1) to rest. There, in the darkness, the Goddess quietly ate the brain of the infected guard, substituting it by a version of her own.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Esculapious wrote that what controls the body is the spirit, nested in the heart. Forget, the Goddess has been doing this for a while and she assures us that it is that grey material in our heads.

The infected guard was of course, for all purposes dead. But his body still could move and the goddess would make good use of it. Its first task was moving about and spreading parts of the goddess to the other guards sleeping in the wagon. We left two of them alive though, the one that worked for Urk and the boy that had been forced into servitude as a scout to the caravan.

Right after sunset I approached the camp from the direction of the second wagon while doing my best imitation of the walk of the long legged whore in Erica`s memory of the bordello. I was using only the leather under vests typical of my tribe and tried to appear scared as well as sensual. The guard at the top of the wagon logically signaled the others and, as expected, they alerted the mages.

Why? Why did they send two men plus one junior mage to meet me? Because the tribes had used ploys to attack merchant caravans in the past, I could be a decoy to distract from a raiding party, so, the other three mages were waken and got out of their heavily warded wagon. The senior mage was sent to the merchant`s camp, inside the fire pit, while the woman mage and the other where positioned at strategic places around the camp.

They didn`t wake up the sleeping guards though, these had worked in the last shift of the day, even caught a stray horse, and were certainly not in good conditions for a fight.

The merchants though, woke, left their tents, and got bows and arrows.

Different from any of my misfit sisters I looked like a normal girl from the tribes. Except for my magical aura, but everybody knew that tribesmen did not have mages, much less women mages. So, their mage would not be looking for magic.

Not with my breasts almost poking out of my vests and my bare legs in display. Approaching the men was actually fun, when I got to a speaking distance I said to the amused guards: “Please sirs, take me in, I am alone here in this wilderness and barely escaped with my life from a water snake only yesterday”.

Of course I talked in the language of the tribes, despite knowing Theban quite well. One of the guards spoke in a mix between the two languages: “You ours now, food, water, shelter, come.”

I approached the guards and they escorted me to the compound while the mage followed a little behind. As I hoped they led me to the passage crossing the fire pit leading to the merchant`s tents. When we had just crossed the fire pit I got on my knees in front of the young mage that had followed us, mesmerized by my ass.

“Please sir, take me as your own, you are nice.” I said, mimicking what I could do to him if he took me for himself.

The guards were smirking by now and, since I was obviously really a woman and no tribesman was approaching they started to relax. This is when the taken aurochs broke free of the cattle enclosure, followed by all the other pack animals.

The animals went right for the guards, killing the other two that were on the lookout outside of the fire pit. The guard at the top of one of the wagons had already been killed by an arrow from Erica.

Now, it was my turn. The mage looked at the approaching mad cattle and started to prepare a spell, but I got up and kissed him. A kiss full of goddess. Her dark tendrils entered his mouth and destroyed his brain before he could realize what was happening.

While the body of the mage convulsed on the floor I approached the two, now terrified guards while laughing with my mouth full of blood from the dead mage.

It was really fun. The first guard came at me with raised sword, I sidestepped his clumsy human charge an spit in his face. My dark spit bore a hole through his skin and bones and started to multiply. In seconds he was a mass of dark tendrils on the floor.

The second guard turned and ran. I let him, since I was already walking into the area protected by the fire pit. One of the merchants raised his bow to shoot me, but was transfixed by an arrow to the eye, shot by Erica that had jumped to the top of one of the wagons.

An Aurock had crossed the fire pit and was attacking the senior mage. The man shot a bolt of fire at the huge beast but the Aurock, with open wounds oozing dark tendrils kept advancing until it trampled the mage under its huge mass. Amazingly the mage survived, latter I found that he was using an enchanted stone that gave some protection from physical blows, but the Aurock stood there motionless over him and I think that he got the message since he stopped moving.

I run to the second merchant, avoided his slow sword thrust and broke his arm, then I slowly took his other arm, forced it to bend as easily as if it was the arm of a toddler and whispered sensuously in his ear: stop moving or I will kill you.

The girl mage had a little more success, she had practically disintegrated with extreme heat a horse that had attacked her, but then the door of the wagon W1 opened and one of the guards that had been sleeping there came out. Only it was not a living guard anymore, it was a corpse filled with the goddess essence, with dark bloodshot eyes and an expression of pain.

The girl still had the presence of mind of shooting another stream of heat, but the body kept coming, even with a hole in its center and dark tendrils shot from it, surrounding her and putting her to sleep.

The other mage found Bastet`s bone dagger hilt deep in his neck as she appeared from nowhere in the middle of the camp.

By now two of the five guards that were inside the area protected by the fire pit had been shot dead already by Erica. Bastet jumped the fire pit and dispatched one more guard, the other got on his knees and plead for mercy.

Now the camp was ours.

The survivors in our care were the senior merchant, the senior mage and his mage daughter, Urk`s lackey, the guy that had been forced into servitude by magic and a guard begging for mercy.

We placed all of them in a goddess induced sleep and set some of the cattle to take care of them at the center of the camp. Then we went to the wagon containing the slaves.

I was the first one into the wagon. The smell was abominable, there was excrement and urine everywhere with men, women and children chained all around to rings set on the floor.

They were all awaken, looking at each other with perhaps a glint of hope in their eyes, after all, our battle had not been silent. But, of course a semi naked woman was the last thing that they expected to pass through the door. While they were still looking with astonished expressions I started to open their manacles with keys obtained from the bodies of the merchants.

Finally one of the women broke the astonished silence and asked “Who are you?” “I am Anora formerly from the wolfs tribe, now working for the goddess of the southern mountains”. I answered with pride in my voice.

“Anora, … are you Elrond`s daughter? Asked the elder of the women. “My husband would always speak good things about your father.”

“Yes, I am his daughter” I answered.

“Does it mean that the wolf tribe survived? Why are you naked?” Asked one of the men.

“Nope, the wolf tribe didn`t survive, I serve an old goddess now and she is a goddess of women. Nakedness is not a sin in her creed.” I answered with pride.

Slowly, the former slaves started to recuperate from their lethargy. Many simply left the wagon going outside to stretch their legs and look for food and water. Erica and Bastet helped them.

The elder girl and one of the men though, stayed inside helping me to release the others. In short order all were free and reasonably fed looking afraid at our “possessed” cattle and at the dead men walking here and there.

We were using the dead bodies to check the merchant`s camp and the mages wagon for traps.

“Please Free People form a line here in front of me so that I do not have to strain my voice.” I asked and, more than a little afraid, they did.

And I started what would be called in the future “the discourse”.

“The Free People of the Tribes are no more; all tribes were killed or enslaved. I would be dead also, if not for the goddess whose power you see all around you tonight. She is a goddess of women and she will turn any male that joins in one of us, she will also make you women want other women. But she will give strength, hope and purpose to those that follow her. She will also guide and protect you. She demands service, but she will allow you to control her creatures. Now, who will join us?”

Author`s note: No time to continue this right now, “see you” next week if I can find time amid the holidays.
This time the text was not sent to Sephrena, but she must be thanked for helping me find a written style nonetheless. I hope that she is well.