Because they spawn near each other
discover one another’s dog-scouts
Sparta and Gandhi are contemporaries
the Eurotas river and the Ganges
muddying into the Indian Ocean, barbarian
triremes appearing in spontaneous gestation
birds dormant in river beds for winter
to end. You’ve turned on Zombie Mode, Secret
Society mode, the mode that permits you
to bribe, hire or direct barbarians against states
and their historical figures: Sean Bean narrates
Hail Gandhi, and your war elephants, all hail
Gorgo, queen of Sparta, and your gorgons.
You swear your allegiance to the vampire
Illuminati, to recruit a Dracula, scaling damage
with each barbarian slain beside/before him, and
when he inevitably dies, as the zombies scale too
fast, he keeps on respawning, on 0 health points.
Eventually, no one is alive. The barbarians can’t
take capital cities, but the zombies – the game reads
barbarian and zombie as the same form
of life – murder your population counters, spawning
new units for you to kill, until your troops are dead
nothing remains, you can’t die, you trade barbs
and marble + horses with Cleopatra and the black
queen, Catherine de Medici. Eventually the survivors
form independent city states, having transcended
their wilderness. The zombies ignore them, sheep bleat
over a bad pan-pipe soundtrack. All this happens;
the AI galleys continue back and forth, tracing the coast.