Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 14 — Stealth?     You ask me about the times of the lingering death. Nobody else talks about this, isn`t it? They are wrong, we must pass the horror onward lest our city forgets. The plague that destroyed half the city it is called. A lie.

I believe that there were very, very few survivors.

Certainly not half the city survived.

Imagine a disease that comes from the water that we drink or the meat that we eat. If you are infected you will start to be eaten alive from the inside, becoming more and more emaciated. Until you die of starvation, no matter how much food you eat.

But it does not stop with your death. Your corpse will rise hungry for more food, eating anything, even leather and attacking any living being around. Spreading the disease.

Now you know why we cremate our dead here in Thebes.

They say that it started with the body of a dead God, buried deep in the caves of the northern mountains …

 

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The Mountains Ring with Magic

 
 
People, fourteen people speaking mind to mind, making dwellings both in the physical and in the spiritual planes.

The mirth of a Goddess feeling more alive than in any day since the rock fell from the sky.

Deep, deep in the roots of the land a forgotten people start to reawaken. The lizard women slowly regain sentience after millenia of semi intelligent behavior.

There is activity everywhere as beasts are herded and bred to develop new species, minerals are extracted, new weapons forged and knowledge shared as memories in a pool not of this world.

Gifted women as far as the Romanish empire start to feel a call to the south.
 
 
Anora Speaking.

Our little community soon became very lively as people adjusted to life in the mountains.

Most of the girls that we rescued decided to create a settlement in a valley up in the mountains, a nice place with good water and where I had been growing some fruits.

There was plenty of food, many caves leading to our underground complex and the weather tended to stay reasonably stable most of the year.

The place was called waterfall valley due to its myriad waterfalls big and small, many coming from inside the mountains. It seems that millennia of tunneling had led most of the water that fell into the mountains to flow through the caves.

In a few months they turned Waterfall Valey in a little paradise where the rescued children could live free until the day of choosing.

Ane became a sort of leader to this group, working with me a lot in the projects for breeding, sowing and harvesting.

Menja and Freya, together with Rebecca worked for a few months, studying iron making. Rebecca had seen iron been made and had some idea of how it was done while Menja and Freya had seen more than their captors expected as they were “shared” among the garrison of Last Fall.

Bastet was pregnant and was a wild mother. The goddess allowed her to know what was happening to the baby in each moment, which helped to relax and do almost everything that she would do normally. Bastet started to “build a nest”, that is, a large home at a high spot overlooking waterfall valley. Besides working on building their home she and Erica also worked on our defenses.

I believe that they got a little paranoid now that they had a new life to protect. Some of the defenses that they scattered around the valley made even Erynia pale. Looking into the goddess memories of creatures past and present they found a myriad of poisons and weird mechanisms of defense that the Goddess could duplicate since She tended to keep the information about the creatures that she had taken in the past. This, together with altered animals, bottomless pits and even worse fates waited for any enemy strong enough to cross our corrupted forest.

The knowledge of natural substances that the Goddess had together with our own knowledge of the products used to work the ironwood from the grasslands formed an extensive “library” in the Goddess cave in the spiritual plane.

Most nights all of our spiritual bodies met in the Goddess cave in the spiritual world while our bodies slept. There we shared memories, controlled other creatures and enjoyed each other`s company. Each one of us created her own place in the huge cave.

Our memories were shared mostly using the pool, so that we could have some privacy for the memories and thoughts that we didn`t want to share. It soon was considered impolite to pry into memories or thoughts not willingly shared.

A complex system to deal with the information in our collective mind was created. We could access most data left in the pool, but some information was of restricted access being allowed only for those that the sharer wanted to see it and, in very rare cases, there was data the Goddess herself made public independent of what any of us might want. After all, She is the boss.

It was after one year of our rescue of the slaves that Erynia left in her most famous quest.
 
 
Erynia Speaking

In the third year of the Goddess (3 AG) I submitted myself to an ugly transformation.

The knowledge that made it possible came mostly from the book written by Galenus about the wasting disease. For some reason the sage decided to use the first chapters as a compilation of his knowledge of the workings of the human body and how the so called “natural” diseases affect it. Then it goes on to describe the wasting disease and its effects using the moving bodies of dead victims as a way of study.

It was this author that found that both sunlight and fire can damage the fluids that transmit the disease and that the “Zombies” as he calls them created by the disease are weaker in daylight since any wound inflicted on them starts to burn.

Studying his notes I found that the disease comes from a part of the goddess that survived the cataclysm but stayed in a kind of inert state until a group of miners entered its cave. Unfortunately it acted on its instinct of growing and feeding without the intelligence, even the basic animal intelligence, that the main body was capable of keeping.

Galenus, of course, does not have how to know this. He regarded the rumors of “body of a dead God” as superstition and the fact that some women were immune to the disease or, at least, remained reasonably rational when infected to our “more base nature, closer to that of the evil beings of the earth” and concludes that somehow our menstrual blood helped to spread the disease.
In other words, a fool but a fool with great capacity for detailed descriptions of the bodies both of men and women.

Using the knowledge that the goddess already possess I could correct his stupid mistakes (the heart as the home of the soul, for instance) and make a detailed diagram of our bodies in my spiritual cave. Being able to use our collective memories and to draw in a three dimensional space helped a lot.

After all this research, the transformation was anticlimactic.

The goddess sedated my body, thickened my vocal cords, ate the fat in my breasts making them flat (but preserving the mammalian glands), fed me with hormones to change my skin and changed my face. But we couldn`t touch my vagina, or else I risked losing my connection to Her.

After this, I had classes with Rebecca on how to use armor and the short sword typical of the Romanish. With the help of Rebecca`s and Erica`s memories it took about two months of training in that despicably altered body to get proficient enough to pass as a mercenary.

Deciding what point of entry to choose to get into the male dominated world led to interesting debates. In the end, it was decided that a solitary horseman crossing the grasslands would call undue attention, so, going to Last Fall to scout out the city was possible only if I joined a caravan in the Romanish empire. Not practical and would force me to keep that horrid appearance for more than one year, which was unthinkable.

The other frontier town, Resistance, is also wary of strangers coming from the surroundings of the pit, but it was usual for caravans to split before getting there, some travelers going to Vanis or Narsi while the majority went to Antigon and Thebes, only the second group getting to Resistance. Solitary horsemen were unusual in Resistance, but not unheard of.

So it was that at the end of a hot and wet summer, in the third year after goddess, about one year after the attack on the caravan, I rode into the city of Resistance alone, disguised as a male Nordic mercenary of the kind that often worked for the Romanish empire. I had to use a horse free of the goddess influence, and typical male clothing, including hard boiled leather armor that helped to disguise what little remained of my female shape.

Resistance was showing a little improvement, the paint on the buildings was newer and there was now a mage tower located in the hill facing the town, strategically placed between city and grasslands. Fortunately I had come prepared, using a few romanish style magical stones in my armor. This effectively cut my connection to the goddess and destroyed my ability to use magic, but also disguised my magical aura.

SHE had given me control of her parts inside my body so that they would not follow their nature and eat me alive creating a new wasting disease. It was weird, SHE had to change my brain a little and now I was probably thinking a bit more like HER. This made for an interesting and strong desire to go into the bordello. I kept daydreaming: Alone in a bedroom with another woman I was sure that I could convert her to be MY follower, then we could spread it through town and latter join the main body as a valued part.

Like I said, strong temptation but, since the wasting disease, bordellos were very well protected with stones capable of detecting the mindspeak communication between “the infected”. If I took another woman our connection would be detected and the building torched to the ground.
Besides, as I kept reminding myself, this was not the task assigned to me by the main body, that is, by the Goddess.

Still, I was only half paying attention to my surroundings as I rode to the docks and went to the harbor master`s office.

The town lived mostly of ferrying goods up and down the river, so, they had centralized their business almost from the beginning in a kind of Free Traders Corporation and all deals involving transportation by boat were done in the same office.

At the beginning of the season, as we were, the office was mostly empty. There was only a middle aged clerk behind a desk full of shipping schedules. Of course, since they dealt with money in his building, there was also a guard at the door and he was paying a lot of attention to me, after all, I was armed and armored.

I approached the desk and said with a bit of a Nordic accent: “I need passage for Thebes in the first boat available.”

“Name, profession and reason of travel?” Asked the clerk.

“Eric Deepwood, sword for hire, going to Thebes to seek employment in a ship leaving for home.”

“Any relative to contact if something happens?” Believe or not this is a usual question for people getting into a boat. Boats sometimes simply disappear.

“No one around, but send a message to Deepwood cove and my relatives will send a small reward for your report.” Which was sort of the usual response.

“There is a boat leaving the harbor by midday, third boat on the second pier downstream. It will be bringing ikari fruits. Are you going to bring your horse?”

“Yes, I will”

“Then it will be ten Denaros and you must take this piece of paper to captain Dorkisk, he will be supervising the loading of the fruits and must leave open space for your horse. After talking with the captain you may rest in Jaciara`s house, red painted door, up the ladder leading to the city center.”

I paid, taking care to show only a glimpse of the coins in the bag at my belt, said “Thank you.” and left. My bag clearly full of coins indicated a mercenary going home after a successful campaign and everybody knew that the Romanish had been fighting the Small People recently with some success. A fake history made without saying a word.

Jaciara`s house was well known to me from Erica`s memories. I wondered if the clerk got a commission from the bordello, but, with nothing better to do I first went to check on the boat and the captain and then, satisfied that if you see one river barge you saw all, I went to the most tempting place in town, reminding myself over and over that I could not take those girls for the goddess.

I was not surprised to find the red door open and Jaciara herself waiting for me. News travel fast in a small town. What surprised me was a little difficulty to pass the threshold and a sense of warning coming from the altar of Afrodite. Fortunately Jaciara, now wearing a very nice red dress didn`t notice my hesitation at her doorstep, but it was clear that I really had to be careful not to convert anyone to other goddesses while inside of Afrodite`s home.

I bowed a little in the direction of the altar, which had the extra advantage of gaining a nod of approval from Jaciara and then walked to the balcony, noticing that the place looked the same as when Eric had been there, years before.

“A mug of that Narsi beer, please.”

As she went to the barrel to fill a large wooden mug she asked.

“Only beer sir or you have other interests here?”

“Tempting, but I must be in the boat by midday.”

“Going to Thebes?” She asked as she gave me the mug.

I simply nodded and then drank the beer in practically one gulp. It was surprisingly nice and not watered, of course it was also not really made of barley but from another cereal, a mutated plant called beer grass typical of the borders of the grasslands.

Most things commercialized in the region came in one way or the other from the altered species created by the Pit.

Important to me was that the beer was rich in sugars, essential to feed my less human parts. So, I ordered a second, then a third mug and, to the astonishment of the hostess, drank it all fast without getting even a little drunk.

After the second mug I deigned to answer her question.

“Yep, going to Thebes harbor.”

“You are an impressive drinker sir” She said after my third mug.

I only nodded, paid a denaro for the three mugs, said: “Keep the change” and left.

My keen, supernatural hearing got murmurs of “good warrior” and loaded with money all the way to the harbor.

Well, being inconspicuous in such a tiny place was difficult anyway; I just do not understand even today why they associate heavy drinking without getting drunk with ability as a warrior.

I got into the barge and we left for Thebes. The trip was far from calm though, but this is a tale for another day.

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To Be Continued...