Reincarnated to the Past 2 (Patreon)

Thank you to all of my pat-reons in helping me enjoy what I love to do: writing! 

-VB-

Tracking turned out to be easier said than done, especially when the trails left by the fleeing raiders were a week old at that point in time. I got lost at least four times before getting back on track, mostly because one of the fleeing raiders died from some internal fighting. Go figure, right? Murderous raiders be murderous. 

Seeing as they seemed to be following up the river if the bodies were anything to go by, I just opted to travel upriver. It took me a week of walking while keeping a constant eye out for possible enemies and spotters, but I made it. I found the raiders’ towns. 

Hiding in the canopy of a tree, I spied the tribal town in the distance. They were well-defended and entrenched; they had sharpened log wall surrounding the entire tribe, vigilant guards on the makeshift battlements, unlit torches along the walls because it was day right now, and a lot of farmland surrounding it.

It looked like it was developing into a city. 

There was no way I was going to be able to get more information without going inside, but I wasn’t going to be able to go inside without a believable reason. Hell, would I even be able to get in, because I didn’t speak their language. Wouldn’t they be hostile, too?

Too little information to do anything. I guess I was going to have to watch and learn about them…

From the inside.

-VB-

For four weeks I found the homebase(town? City? tribe?) of the raiders, I spent my time making fine fur attire.

The plan was for me to enter their tribe as a foreign merchant, and I would use my time there to learn about their language. With my [Perfect Memory Recall], I would be able to recall constantly all of the scenes of my interaction with the tribe and learn their language and customs. 

And my choice of goods were tanned fur, smoke dried venison, and other similar goods. If I was allowed in, then I would be in competition with the locals. I would be in constant talk with both customers and others trying to sell their own fur goods. I would be, in essence, in constant touch with the locals, giving me more and more of their language and customs for me to decode and learn.

It was also ballsy. I was going to enter their tribe despite being the very person who killed many of their warriors. They didn’t know, but I knew. Kind of scary, really, but I would rather die knowing than live in fear of a possible retaliation.

However, I knew that people in general - regardless of era and age - were very trusting of their vision. They would believe what they see! And I would make myself look like a merchant, or as close as I could mimic for what passed as a merchant in this era. 

First, I gathered the materials necessary for my cover. I hunted down deer, rabbits, and boar (the toughest and the most dangerous of the three). This alone took me a week. 

Second, I skinned each of the animals, preserved their meat by smoking, and tanned their leather and fur. Skinning the boar took a long time, while the rabbit and deer fur hadn’t. I turned that rabbit fur into a pelt hat while the boar was made into a tough leather boots with thin and round iron half dome protecting the toes and the deer hide was laid out flat. 

Third, I gathered vines, made them into ropes, and carried them on my back.

Fourth, I walked up to the tribe’s gate at dawn and waited. 

Yeah, I just walked up, and now, I was staring up at the guards looking down at me confusedly from the top of their battlement. I waved at them with faux cheer, pointing to my bundled up package of leathery goods and making hand gestures of items being swapped. The guards looked at each other before looking back down at me. Most of their faces were shrouded by the leather helmet and the sun above them casting a shadow over the top half of their face and the bottom half of their faces were covered in thick beards, so it was hard to tell what they might be thinking.

I considered it a win on my disguise that I wasn’t being aimed at by bows. 

I stood there, more than a little nervous as one of the guards left the post to talk to someone.

To my surprise, it wasn’t long before the double-doored log gates were opening; I’d come fairly early in the day, so the gates, which were usually open during the day, hadn’t been opened yet. 

As the gates fully pulled open, one of the guards that had been at the battlement stood on the other side, and he stared at me just as I looked at him. He was a short man by 21st century standards, but his muscles told me exactly why I shouldn’t underestimate him. He had brown beard and hair, most of the latter being covered by a leather cap, and wore simple cloth tunic and pants. He wore a simple footwear, which was of too low quality to be called a shoe yet worth more than a simple sandal. He carried with him a short spear and a shield. 

And then he said something. 

“Menzhaikan tu.”

I understood none of that, so I told him. “I don’t understand you.”

His eyes widened before he sighed. “Erusan dusu, menzhaikan tu data,” he said again, repeating the words and shaking his shield. Was he threatening me? It didn’t look like it…

“Uhm, trade?” I said as I slowly reached to my back, which caused him to stiffen. I pulled out a rabbit pelt hat, which caused him to relax. I mimed an empty hand and the hat on the other side, and crossed the arms, moving the empty hand and the hat to the other side of each other. 

He got what I was saying. He pointed at me, pointed at the ground, rubbing his fingers with the same hand, and then pointed at me again, and rubbed his fingers again before tilting his head to the side. 

That was clearly the money gesture followed by a questioning gesture, and the series of gestures before that … he was asking me if I was here to trade, or I hoped so. I nodded hesitatntly. 

His finger rubbing hand stopped and then gestured towards me, palms up. 

That was a “pay up” gesture.

Grumbling, I handed him the rabbit pelt hat. He stepped forward cautiously, took the hat, and nodded before stepping aside. 

I knew that I wasn’t in China (there were Europeans here), Ancient Greece (not enough sea and mountains), Ancient Egypt (no desert), Ancient Mesopotamia (no desert), or Ancient Anatolia (no arid highlands). At 1,000 B.C., outside of those places, there was nowhere else that used any kind of coinage, which meant that bartering was the way to go. 

So I paid up with goods rather than coins, not that I had coins.

He took the hat, inspected it by flipping it around, and then nodded again. 

I took that as a sign that I was allowed to go in, so I walked in, looking around the tribe’s walled town. 

But before I could venture off, the guard stopped me by poking my shoulders. I stopped and turned to face him. He thumped the butt of his spear on the ground and began to draw on the packed dirt. 

He put a circle with two dots and another larger circles with the first circle drawn on top of the edge of the larger circle. Was that the gate? I looked up, pointing at the circle and then up at the large gate. 

“Ne!” he said while nodding. 

That sounded like no, but he was nodding. He began to draw again, so I looked. He drew a line with a 90 degree left turn. The first line from where the two dot was - definitely us, so was ‘ne’ their word for ‘yes’? - was drawn to the center of the circle, and the turn was for a left turn. 

I nodded. “Thank you.”

He nodded gruffly before going back to standing guard. 

I followed his instruction, going to the center of the tribal village - and noting that most of the buildings were mud and thatch with barely any sophisticatedly engineered buildings -, and then took a left turn. Somewhere between the center of the village and the wall, there was a sudden wide opening.

It was the marketplace, and there were already some farmers setting up to sell their goods. 

I didn’t know how the economics of this particular tribe worked, but I knew that trade specialization was rare because there wasn’t enough food to support such a thing. In fact, most of the trade even during Roman Empire’s times was based on food, and let’s not go into detail about just how many megatons of food was shipped every day in the 21st century. 

So I just sat down in the corner, hoping that I wouldn’t piss anyone off by not taking the center stage of such a market, and set up my goods. I laid down the worst leather I had and placed my fur and leather goods on top of that. Then I sat down and waited for someone to come and barter with me. As the sun rose higher and higher into the sky (but still - at best - 10 a.m.), people began to come out and set up their own stalls. Most of them looked at me funny before they went on with their business while giving me a wide breadth of space. 

And then I had my first customer.

It was a man as tall as I was, which put him a foot above everyone else, and he stared at me and my wares. He wore the same kind of linen cloth as most but had the same leather footwear as the guards. Was he a member of the tribe’s warrior class?

He carried with him a sack with some things inside of it. There wasn’t enough sharp contours on the sack for me to guess what it might be. 

I waved at him friendly before gesturing to my goods. 

He grunted and sat down, looking through the goods. He saw something he liked. He pointed to the leather pants, one of the better clothing I made, and opened up his bag. He pulled out … a uncut purple gem. 

“At duros pos?”

That … sounded like Greek. Almost, but not quite. In modern Greek, “poso” roughly translated to “how much” in English as did “afto” into “this.” Duros, I knew shit about, but he was pointing to the pants, so what he had to be asking was how much the pants cost, right?

“Let me inspect the gem,” I said out loud while extending my hand and gesturing for him to give me the stone. He did, warily, and I held it up to the sky. Very transparent for a gem… I hummed before shaking my head. This was an amethyst (at least, to my amateur eyes), which was not a rare gem. I also lacked the tools necessary to turn this uncut gem into something worth far more. “Yeah, not gonna cut it,” I said as I extended the gem back to him. He grumbled as he took the gem by catching it with his palm when I dropped the gem, and then reached into the bag again.

This time, he pulled out a different stone, or rather a handful of them. 

“Garnet, huh?” I said outloud. I took a single garnet and held it up to the sky again. They weren’t as clear as the amethyst he showed me. Again, I didn’t have the necessary tools to cut them. 

He grumbled again… and then pulled out gold nuggets. They were really small, like pebbles, so they couldn’t weigh more than one or two grams each.

I grinned. Now, we were talking. 

“Five,” I said with all of my fingers out, holding the hand to my side rather than towards his face. 

He looked at the hand and then at me. 

He raised three fingers.

I changed my five to four.

He nodded and handed me four gold nuggets. I neatly folded the leather pants, wrapped it up with vine strings, and handed it to him. He took it with a small smile. “Kal empor.”

I nodded with a smile of my own. “Your welcome,” I replied, though I wasn’t sure what he said. As he left, someone else came. 

I supposed that I was a proper merchant now.

-VB-

Over the course of the day, I bartered my goods away and not everyone offered gold. An old woman offered vegetables. A young lady offered linen clothes for a square foot of tanned leather. A warrior offered an axe for the iron-toed boots, which had arched wooden outsole with a layer of leather as the sole. I didn’t have anymore goods after nine exchanges but here was what I got in the end:

8 gold nuggets, a decent quality linen shirt, an okay quality iron axe (I have one that’s better), and a bag full of small vegetables.

People also looked at me funny. I wondered why?

-VB-

I found out why they were staring at me, because less than an hour after I concluded my first trade/interaction with the tribe, I got a friendly looking elderly man come up to me and gently and patiently talk me through the pricings and generally expected things that are part of the “Ketti” tribe.

Like the fact that the garnets were the common “currency” of this tribe. 

Like the fact that the man who tried to trade with me was the chief of this tribe. Yeah, wasn’t that a doozy. My first customer was the very person in charge of the murderous raiders.

-VB-

I spent the entirety of the summer going back and forth from the tribe, making leather goods and trading them for little bits and pieces of food, equipment, and some gems and minerals. I learned a lot about the Ketii tribe. 

The Ketti Tribe was a part of a larger confederation of tribes around Large Plains Beneath the Northern Mountains. Not exactly a name that survived to the modern times, but it was the best I had. There was the Dark Sea to the east and mountains and settled tribes towards the south, over and around the Southern Mountains. 

I also learned that the tribe just went through a war with one of the other tribes close by who was also part of the confederation. The issue was blood feud, apparently, and when the Ketti tribe won, this gave them the right to do whatever they wished with the other tribe. 

Guess what they did?

They enslaved the fuck out of them. Literally. 

Right now, the Ketti tribe was composed roughly of seven thousand people across nine different settlements, but of those nine thousand, two thousand were slaves. 

Yes, a whole twenty percent and more of the population were slaves. And that some of the slaves managed to run away not too long before I started trading with the tribe, despite the fact that the tribe’s chief had sent some of his better warriors to deal with the runaway slaves. When they returned saying that there was a demon warrior who never missed with his arrows, they were executed for their incompetence. 

Yikes. 

But there were also other things that I learned. Like the fact I could be surprised by the fact that deficiency diseases were common, which - in hindsight - made sense. Malnutrition was only a thing that was solved in modern times, and only in certain parts of the world even then. 

When I ran into malnutrition diseases and questioned why they existed because I forgot that I was in the past for a moment, the people of the Ketti tribe looked at me as if I was the idiot.

You’d think that after a year and a half of living in the wilderness, I’d adjust…

But damn, I did not adjust well.

-VB-

“You have pellagra?” I asked while looking at the man who just walked into 

It was slowly becoming fall, and my grasp of the Ketti people’s language was … okay. I wasn’t the greatest learner of language, but my Perfect Memory Recall was helping me crutch my way through learning the “Kettin,” as I was calling it. 

The medicine woman, who I was visiting to trade some of her herbal tea for my leather rug, looked at me quizzically. 

“That you tribe name this disease?” 

Translating the Kettin to English resulted in broken English because they lacked a lot of the aggregated mechanics that English had. A lot of the Ketti words also had single definitions. For example, in English, “call” would be both the act of verbally calling and the act of naming something. In Kettin, call was just verbal action. 

“Yes,” I replied. “Pellagra from no meat.”

The medicine woman and the patient both looked at me with wide eyes.

“You know really?” the medicine woman pressed me, standing up on her wrinkly toes and hands. 

“Yes…?” I replied. “My people name it pellagra. ‘Niacin’-” I spoke the name of the nutrient whose deficiency causes pellagra because they had no other word for it. “- in meat, fish, other things. No niacin, you get pellagra.”

“So it not a demon or poison?” the medicine woman asked, or rather it was how I understood it. 

“No. Pellagra from what you not eat. Need niacin all day. Egg, fish, meat, birds, seeds, and more.”

The medicine woman was a little bit skeptical, but gave the man a look. “You no eat meat?”

The man looked embarrassed. “No. I been hurt and weak.” Not to mention old. Maybe he didn’t have family?

“Here,” the old woman grunted as she handed him a dried fish. It smelled horrible, but it was preserved and thus something he could eat. “If eating is cure, then you must eat.”

Did I mention that the old woman was nice? And that the Kettin language had no determiner like English (the, a, etc)?

-VB-

It took a week for the effect to show, but it did. The old man was cured of pellagra. 

“See?” I told the medicine woman, who I had returned to see - as she had extracted that promise from me - to check on the pellagra patient’s condition, who no longer had pellagra. “Good eating, no weird disease.”

The woman looked at me and hummed.

“Well, tribe chief wants to see you now.”

I looked at her.

“Uh?”

“Tribe chief is my son. I told my son about you knowing disease. If old man is cured, then you go to see him. If not, you would have been exiled for lying.”

Okay. Well.

“Do I … have to?”

She grinned with her wrinkly face. “Very much so.”

Okay, I … got myself into a (forced) meeting with the tribal chief because of my blabber mouth.

The guy who ordered those (run away) women and children to be killed.

… Bloody hell.