I knew this day was coming. I had shaken up the status quo too much, and now that it was paying off, the new tribe chief was simply defending the position he had finally stabilized.
It had started much like any other Uli’s story, at least one who reached adulthood. I reached the necessary Blood to become a tribesman, and though it was delayed due to our exile from our new home until we settled much further up the coast—in a significantly worse region for unclaimed tide pools—soon enough I was joining my first mirulu hunt.
The first living mirulu I saw was awe-inspiring. Though I had vague memories of animals like elephants from Earth, I hadn’t ever got up close and personal with one. The mammoth mirulu wasn’t like an elephant or woolly mammoth from Earth, exactly; it was more like a giant boar. It was a huge six-legged nomadic omnivore that cut through all the low-growing scrub as it traveled, but there wasn’t enough of that to sustain its size, so it would also happily charge down and eat other animals, too. It had the massive tusks which we prized for the ivory, which it would use to gore prey, and something we had to be incredibly cognizant of during a hunt.
Upon finding one, hunting it as a group involved hassling it into giving chase back towards camp, since carrying the large animal in full was impossible. It was a delicate balance, since we couldn’t allow it to reach camp, but the closer we got it, the less back and forth travel we needed to do. Once it was close enough, we would swarm it while it was still tired. Uli mostly used Blood techniques to kill, which resulted in a bit of waste since a lot of meat and hide was ruined in the process, but the mirulu was so large that it wasn’t deemed a problem. We could only preserve the raw meat for so long.
The meat was for the tribe, and there was no concept of earning your keep when it came to food. Everyone was fed. The tusks and hide, on the other hand, was generally split based on contribution, with the Uli who landed the killing blow getting priority. That led to some larger attacks than were, strictly speaking, necessary, but that was balanced out by the Uli who was trying to get the kill not wanting to ruin the hide or ivory he was trying to get a claim on, usually.
It took a while before I got my own first kill, but soon I was collecting hide and ivory of my own. The bones, sinew, and other parts of the mirulu were also communal, used to build infrastructure and for the grandmothers to sew with, but there was generally so much of it that it wasn’t in as high demand.
Most tribesmen would be laying claim to mates and need hide and other resources to build out their creche and establish themselves in the tribe, but I was entirely uninterested in that. By not concerning myself with that, I freed up a lot of my time for projects, while also effectively removing myself from consideration as a rival by most of the other Uli. Without laying claims, I avoided pretty much all challenges, and soon had a bit of a reputation for being a weirdo. Most people seemed to think it had to do with my father, who himself was a bit of an outlier in the tribe, and that I was just an even more extreme case of weird, without thinking much else about it.
The resources I banked went towards experimentation.
My first project was one I probably could have done to some degree before I was a tribesman, just with resources I got by way of my father, but I had been avoiding drawing attention to myself at the time.
Once I was able to lay claim to a full femur, I split it lengthwise several times, carving down one of the lengths into a pole. Just holding that in my hands and feeling [Spearmanship] flare up was hugely satisfying.
So many things which I had taken for granted required a length of solid material to work with. In both my previous worlds, that had been trivial. Trees were abundant, and wood was the perfect material for most cases. When I needed something sturdier, there was metal. The Uli only had access to stone and bone, basically, and stone was a terrible material for almost everything I wanted to do.
Bone wasn’t much better, admittedly. It wasn’t as flexible as wood, and it would have been hard to work, if not for my [Blood Control] and [Carving].
This pole was going to be used as a spear. The Uli did understand the concept of spears—they used lengths of bone in building, and sharpening one end was hardly revolutionary—but because they were prone to breaking, and mirulu femurs were fairly useful for creche construction, the tool was generally considered less practical than the use of Blood skills, which was true.
Of course, it was only true if they spent their entire adolescence killing other adolescents to gain Blood in the first place. A spear was a spear in any hands.
Rather than sharpen the end of the bone pole, I notched it to accept a spear head, which I carved from ivory. I was able to get the ivory finer and sharper at the tip without it breaking off in use, like bone sometimes would. Then, with a small bone peg and a length of sinew, I attached the two. With that, at least if the bone pole splintered and broke, I could simply reuse the ivory point with a new pole.
Ideally, I would have glued in the spear tip before binding it with sinew, since it risked coming loose being only tied on. Unfortunately, that was a major limitation I was facing.
As Tovar, I had seen plenty of instances of hunters making animal glue, but it required quality pottery to simmer down, and the Uli didn’t use clay. Or fire. Likewise, as lord of Nialdan, I had been witness to the making of tree pitch for roofing, but the Uli’s world didn’t have trees, hence the lack of fire. There might be some resin in the shrubs that I could have extracted, but I would have still needed pottery to contain it; I could have maybe carved a stone bowl with my Blood, but the heat could still crack it, and I’d likely have needed to burn so much shrub just to try and render down the resin that there was no way to do it at a large scale.
Instead, I started asking around about tar. If there were naturally occurring tar pits, that would work as glue, as well as superior waterproofing. In Nialdan, pitch or tar had been used for roofing, but I was thinking about something else in this life.
The reason I wanted a both tar and a spear was for spear fishing. With the other lengths of femur, and more I would need to acquire, I started building the frame of a boat.
One of the things I had hated the most about being a noble as Tovar was dealing with other nobles. I had been stuck on more than one occasion in conversation with nobles while attending events, or worse, needing to entertain them in Nialdan. At the time, listening to those stuck up nobles talking about their wealth-signaling hobbies had been irritating, but it was paying off now.
A very common hobby of the rich nobility was boating, especially sailing. Nialdan had been landlocked, so I hadn’t cared very much at the time beyond some of the trading routes as it pertained to our dungeon’s output, but with my high Mind I remembered a lot of the details that had been overshared with me.
The most basic boat would have been a raft, a bunch of logs bound together, with or without a sail. A raft only worked because the logs already floated, though, and the binding of the logs was to create a surface for the passenger more so than flotation. Mirulu femurs did not float, so I couldn’t simply bind them and ride that out to sea.
Material aside, flotation had to do with relative buoyancy, which was determined by the weight of the fluid displaced by the downward force of the object. A bone didn’t float, and even a bunch of bones bound together wouldn’t float very well, but a bone boat skeleton with a hide stretched over it would be light enough and large enough to displace enough water to float.
The boat also needed to be large enough that the addition of my weight didn’t sink it, but only just large enough to do that, because I had limited resources. I ended up settling on a single-person design akin to a kayak. I also framed out a paddle which could be attached to the back of my spear. From there, all I needed was the hide to stretch over the frame, then seal it up.
After another hunt in which I could claim the hide, I went to the grandmothers. They were the ones who knew how to stitch and treat our tents to keep them from leaking when it rained, and I knew better than to try and fully reinvent the wheel.
The old Uli female I had helped with the move was still alive despite the difficult of our second migration, so I went to her.
“Grandmother, I need help with a project.”
The old Uli glared up at me, scowling. “We’re busy, boy.”
I frowned. “I’m actually a tribesman now.”
One of the other grandmothers nearby, who had been eavesdropping—they all were, actually, since knowing all the goings-on of the camp and gossiping about it was their main form of entertainment—spoke up. “Are you building a creche, then?”
“No,” I said. “I need help sewing hide for a different purpose.”
I began explaining what I needed for the boat skin, and one of the grandmothers interrupted asking what it was for, so I ended up explaining the principles of the boat itself.
“It won’t work,” one of them said, shaking her head.
“If you can stitch the hides tight enough and use enough fat to waterproof them right, it will,” I insisted. “And it could open up another food source for us, since the tide pools are lacking.”
That caused a bit of a murmur among the older women.
“Pah, why not,” the grandmother I had come over to speak to in the first place said. “It’ll take less time than a creche tent, and when this boy goes off and drowns, he won’t need one. We’ll be saving us work in the long run,” she cackled.
“Thank you, grandmother,” I said with a half-grin. I wasn’t worried about drowning, since I knew how to swim from my past lives, but I should probably test that out with my Uli body in shallow water first just to make sure the same principles all applied. “Remember, it’ll need a lot of fat rubbed on so that it doesn’t leak water, especially the seams.”
Unfortunately, asking around about tar had been fruitless, since the surviving males had short memories—they were mostly younger, and didn’t even know this region, anyway, since we had migrated—and so I decided to try it with oiled hide, which I hoped would be sufficient.
“Actually,” I said, realizing that I was now speaking to the Uli with the longest memories. “Have any of you ever heard of a black, sticky liquid?”
“We’re too old to talk to you about your ‘sticky liquid’, boy,” the grandmother cackled. “But if it’s black, you’re probably not long for this world.”
“You’re awful, Qora,” one of the grandmothers said, shaking her head.
I just rolled my eyes. “It would probably bubble up out of the ground. Animals might get stuck in it.”
Most of the grandmothers said no, but one looked at me curiously. “What about it?”
“Oh, Bimi. Something you knew from your wandering days?” one of the other grandmothers said. I glanced over at her, and she clarified. “Bimi came to us from a roving tribe, long before your time.”
I looked back at the grandmother who had spoken up. “I was thinking it could be used as better waterproofing. You know of it?”
She nodded. “My original tribe knew of black pools that had to be avoided in our migration. We lost children who would wander too close and sink into it, and even hunters would sometimes succumb to it.”
“That’s it,” I said, trying not to look too excited while she talked about kids drowning to death in tar. “Where was that?”
She frowned. “My original tribe migrated far down-coast of our previous settlement, so all the way back the way we came and then some.”
I deflated slightly. At least I knew there were tar pits that were theoretically accessible, but it wouldn’t help in the short term.
In the days that followed, the grandmothers helped me stretch the skins they sewed over the boat frame, then we rubbed mirulu fat into the hide, especially at the seams. After that, it was time for the first flotation test.
Only a few grandmothers bothered to watch, since most of them just saw it as another task and went back to their usual work once it was done, not thinking any further about it. I had spoken enough with the old Uli I had helped during the migration, Qora, and the Uli who spent her youth with the roving tribe, Bimi, that they had grown invested in my little project.
“You owe me a new set of ivory needles if it sinks,” Qora reminded me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “And if it floats, you’ll help me with improvements on the next one.”
“You shouldn’t have made that bet,” Bimi said to Qora. “You don’t even need the new needles.”
I ignored the rest of the grandmothers’ bickering and waded out with the kayak held over my head, then, holding my breath, gently placed it down on the water. It bobbed in place, as I knew it would, and I carefully studied the insides to see if any water was leaking through.
“Well, it works,” I said, grinning back at Bimi and Qora, the latter of which scowled. “Now I just have to see if it’ll hold my weight.”
I straddled the kayak, slowly giving it my full weight, and when it held, I hoisted myself and slid my legs into the seat. It wobbled slightly, as it had no fin keel or rudder, but I stilled and waited for it to stabilize before easing the rest of the way down.
Hoisting my spear-turned-paddle, I delicately paddled once, propelling myself slightly forward.
It had worked, and it was only the beginning.
Simply being able to move around in the water more efficiently didn’t change anything, but the novelty attracted the attention of the adolescent Uli. People only really started to notice when I started hauling in large fish I had speared further out to sea, making up for the shortfall of the tide pools between mirulu hunts.
Fish wasn’t a part of an Uli’s regular diet, aside from the tiny, bony fish of the tide pools, but actual sashimi was a lot more palatable to me than raw meat, and it seemed that some of the other Uli agreed. After that, some of the boys started asking to try the kayak, and then begging me and the grandmothers for their own.
I wanted to iterate on the boats anyway, so I started building more, and handing off the hand-me-down vessels to the boys who showed the most promise at spear fishing. After kayaks, I started working on larger, multi-person canoes, and then started to experiment with sails. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the boats too large, since the hides weren’t perfect and would sometimes leak, and the fewer seams the better. After a couple of years, we had a decent vessel for going further out and bringing back a few fish at a time.
In that time, the tribe had started to change. The big Uli that was Uqar-il Roru’s father and Nadi’s mate had solidified himself as the new Roba, and while he hadn’t spoken out about the boats and the fishing, it was clear he was uncomfortable with it. The boys still had to go through First Blood to graduate their creches, but after that, the tribe was starting to see fewer challenges between them. They still happened, but the rate was reduced, in part because the boys were already contributing by heading out in a kayak or as a pair in a canoe and spear fishing. There was less pressure to kill each other for Blood in order to get strong enough to hunt; the amount of fish coming in wasn’t insignificant.
At first, the new Roba was glad for the extra food, but he had started expressing concerns about the strength of the tribe and our ability to defend ourselves. I didn’t actually disagree with that, as we had lost a lot to the mantises and the other tribe of Uli, and no amount of fishing would protect us from that, but I also didn’t want to encourage the boys to kill each other, either.
It came to a head when Roba told me to stop making the boats. I was still trying to figure out ways to improve them, because I was looking beyond the horizon now, and there was no chance I was going to give it up.
I was still a contributing member of the tribe, going on mirulu hunts and doing all my duties, and while I still hadn’t taken a mate or had children, there wasn’t much Roba could do. The only thing he could do to get the tribe back fully under his control was deliver a personal challenge.
And so he did.
“Mali-iq Rumi,” he said to me. “I challenge you.”
“No,” I responded.
“No?” Roba asked me, confused. “You can’t say no. I challenge you.”
I shrugged. “No. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to kill you and become Roba.”
An Uli’s honor didn’t allow one to deny a challenge, but there actually was a policy about it, since it had to be agreed by both parties. If not, it was murder, which I found darkly amusing given all the acceptable murder in this culture.
“But then… you’ll have to leave. You’ll be exiled.” The Roba furrowed his brows, unable to even consider that as an alternative.
It wasn’t an option often used. Exile was basically suicide, since most of the wildlife would kill a single Uli, and dying to an animal attack was a travesty, since it denied the tribe Blood. Usually, an Uli like myself would have a creche, and so feel the need to contribute to the tribe, even in death.
While my Blood hadn’t developed any since I became a tribesman, having avoided any challenges by keeping to myself and my projects, I had enough Will from my past life to be in consideration as chief, technically. And while a chief wouldn’t go solo either, I had improved my Blood skills quite a bit, and was willing to risk it. Besides, I had my boat, which was technically a personal possession, which meant I could take it with me in exile. I wouldn’t be overlanding in my journey, anyway.
“Then… Mali-iq Rumi, as Roba, for declining a rightful challenge, I hereby banish you from our tribe,” the Roba said, loud enough to be heard by those around us.
I would miss Nadi, though I had barely seen her over the past years since settling at our new camp. I would miss the grandmothers I had come to know, and the teen boys who had taken to the fishing, too. But it was time for me to move on from this tribe and this way of life, and carve out a new way of living for myself in this world.
“Understood,” I said, turning to go collect my things.
I had some tar pits to find.
---
AN: It shouldn't come as a surprise that, like Tovar's life, it took longer than expected to get to the actual plot of this life. When I started writing Tovar, I actually only expected 20-40k words total, and yet it ended up taking on a... life of its own, heh. Instead, after thirteen chapters/by ~33k words (less ~3k if you don't count the first chapter which wasn't in Tovar's world) we were only just getting out of his establishment/childhood, and on to the academy, which was the bulk of Tovar's story. When it took like 120k words to finish Tovar's life (and it could have been way more, if I was less aggressive with time-skips at the end) I said to myself that his next life, as Mali, should probably be half that.
Well, here we are, only finally getting to the meat of Mali's life after, you guessed it, another ~30k words. Whoops. And we're still not even all the way there! I'm not totally happy with these establishment chapters, to be honest; I was able to do a lot of revisions on Tovar's establishment chapters which I haven't been able to do with Mali's as they were basically posted straight to Patreon upon completion. They'll likely have to go up on RR as-is, unless I can find some extra time to revise. The other thing to consider is that almost everyone who read EoR got to read those first chapters in a single sitting, since they were all posted within a few days of launching the story on RR, whereas for this life, you were forced to read the establishment chapters at a 3/wk pace, taking basically an entire month to get to this point. So if it's felt slow or less interesting to you... I get it! That probably would have been the case if you spent a month slowly getting drip-fed Tovar's life as well. I'm bad at writing things paced quickly (even when I've actively trying to!) hence calling this a slice-of-life story. Since that's what it is, when I take so long to develop any plot.
I have more to say, but I'll save it for the next blog post. It's been a weird few weeks for me, so apologies to my Heroes since I haven't posted a blog recently, but I'll definitely get one out this weekend. As we'll be able to see more of the direction of the rest of Mali's life by then, we can talk a bit more detailed about these establishment chapters, what I'd like to possibly revise, and where it's going from here! Thanks! Appreciate you :)