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Unto the Ages: Chapter 136
🕑 Added 2024-11-18 15:56:21 +0000 UTCGrud and his wives had tucked their children into bed and were now in their room, but instead of having sweaty womb-stretching sex, they were all fully clothed, and in a rather serious mood.
Mita had shared her findings with Grud, and after a bit of contemplation, decided to keep the information on the pending crisis between Mita and himself until he gathered his harem for a plan of action, which led to Grud and his harem sitting in a circle on their bed.
“Tell the rest of what you saw.” Grud said to Mita, and after she was done narrating what the ancient wisp had shown her, Grud asked, “So this will happen this winter?”
Mita shook her head, “That is not certain, from my experience, our perception of time can be a little warped, the best estimate is one to two years margin or error.”
Grud stroked his beard as he was thinking, “If that is the case, we will take it as it will happen this winter, anything more is just a bonus for us. But the most important thing is how are we going to get food for ten years or more of winter? Storage can only go so far, Reta, Oso, any ideas? I heard that we have a few options for crops we can grow in winter.”
“We do, but it is mainly three types of root vegetables, and if the winter is as harsh as Mita says it is going to be, I doubt even those root vegetables can grow properly.” Oso replied.
“But we stand a better chance than most due to being by the coast, our winters are less harsh compared to further inland. Ida, can you buy seeds for other winter crops, it will be better if we have more variety.” Reta added, and Ida nodded her head.
“Emm, I think we can rely on the sea for most of our food. Recently, some of our sons got together and built a couple of rafts so they could venture further out into the waters to catch fish, and so far, their yields have been excellent. A few of us and our daughters joined them to help repair the nets and sort the catch.” one of his wives, Ziri, chipped in.
“How many of them?” Grud asked.
“Six” Ziri answered.
“What about the big sea monster? Do they not fear them?” Grud asked worriedly.
“From what our sons say, those big monsters live further out into the sea, they do not go that far.” she answered.
“It is still worrying. How big are their rafts?” Grud asked, and she gestured them out to be slightly bigger than a normal bed. It was a little better than a glorified dinghy, and with the things he had seen breach the water’s surface every now and then, Grud was not okay with his sons riding in something those big sea creatures could easily capsize.
Grud turned to Ida and said, “Please hire some builders to make something bigger for our boys to fish in, it will be safer for them, and if they manage to have a big haul they would not need to keep going back to shore to unload.”
By now, Ida was scribbling down a to-do list on a plank of wood, “Ok, we will start with one and test to see how it goes before we make more.”
Grud nodded, then turned to Uchi, “Uchi, we are going to need a lot of warm clothes, which means starting production now.”
Uchi nodded, “I will get my girls on it.”
Sonu then spoke up, “What about my horses? If it is going to be ten years, things are going to be harsh.”
Grud could only shake his head as he knew that she was not going to like the answer, “We can stockpile hay, but when the time comes, we are not going to have enough to feed all of them. We have over two hundred horses, we are going to need to get that number down to fifty. If the signs of the long winter are imminent, it would be best to sell them.”
Sonu sulked but nodded in understanding, she then turned to Uchi, “Can you make some blankets for my horses?”
Uchi reached over and gave Sonu’s hand a reassuring squeeze, “Of course, sister.”
“Ok, is there anything else we need to prepare for? Any suggestions?” Grud asked, and the harem spent the next few hours brainstorming what else they could do to prepare the tribe for the coming hard times.
When everyone was out of ideas and Ida added a few planks of wood to her to-do list pile, Mita asked a question in regards to the here and now, “So, how do we break the news to everyone else? Because the moment we do so, it will cause a lot of unrest.”
After a while of thinking, Grud asked, “Is the old wisp that showed you the vision still around?”
Mita closed her eyes and after a few seconds, opened them again, “It is, it finds this place interesting and will stay for a while.”
“Good. we are going to need some time for me to get our hunters ready for any trouble and send word to our children in other tribes to prepare themselves and their families. When we are ready, Mita will let the shamans know of the vision. Are there any chances the old wisp will let the other shamans know about the coming long winter?” Grud asked Mita.
Mita shook her head, “I highly doubt it, like all wisps I have met so far and even myself in the beginning, they are indifferent to the plight of mortals, in their view, it is just nature taking its course. The only reason it warned me was because it considers me and our children as kin. So unless the shamans ask specific questions, they will not get the same warning I got.”
Grud nodded, “Ok, that saves us a lot of problems. Come on, let's have a quick fuck before we turn in for the night, we have a busy day tomorrow.”
The moment he said that, clothes went flying as Grud grabbed the first of his wives who got naked.
***
The next two weeks were a flurry of activity in the Rock Claw Chiefdom. Hunters were taken off their normal patrols and set to other tasks, hunt schedules were reworked, and Grud sent runners to all of his children who married out of the tribe, he was going to tell them the news in person, as he did not trust the news not to leak if he sent a message with the runner.
As for Ida, she was spending gold coines like water as she checked off one thing at a time on her many to-do lists, she was effectively the linchpin for the rest of the family and tribe to get the materials and supplies they needed to prepare themselves for the long winter, because as much as Grud’s chiefdom could produce, they needed a lot more raw materials than what they could naturally get on their own.
Some of those materials were the materials needed to further weatherproof their houses. Nita gathered some of their older and grown children to weatherproof the outside of the main house, followed by the houses of their children. The walls were thickened and the roof was redone with a layered roof to better trap heat, and seeing that they were going to need to store a lot more supplies, the underground cellar was expended.
Ida’s supply line also supplied Uchi with the material she needed to start pumping out winter wear, but all that mindless production could be handled by her workers, Uchi instead decided to start experimenting with different materials, and layering techniques to keep warm. This was when she came across some tribe women plucking feathers from some waterfowl their husbands hunted.
When she asked for the feathers, the women gave them freely as it saved them the trouble of cleaning up. After a couple of prototypes, she ended up with a quilted pattern with feathers stuffed in each quilt square. This turned out to be a cheap and effective method of making blankets and winter wear.
Uchi brought her new product to show off to the rest of the harem, and the next day, Ida made a puzzling request to the traveling traders about buying feathers. They were confused about why she wanted feathers in bulk, but money was money, and who were they to turn down a customer’s request for such a thing as feathers, it was useless unless for decoration purposes.
A week later, the builders were done with their project for Grud’s sons who were fishing further into the shallows, and when the family went to see the final product, it was the weirdest raft they had ever seen, it looked like a ten meter long and two meter wide shallow bowl. The builder who designed it named his creation a Boat.
At first, Grud and his family were a little skeptical of how safe this ‘boat’ was, but the real question was, would it float and stay floating when fully loaded?
One by one, six of his sons boarded the boat with their nets, peddles, and freshwater before Gurd pushed them out to sea, but Grud did not let go, instead, he hopped on to join his sons on the boat’s maiden voyage.
With their bigger watercraft, Grud’s sons immediately noticed that they were not so beholden to the currents and waves as they were in their rafts, and with the confidence of their mighty father onboard, they pushed out into the sea until the water turned dark.
Curious to see why the water changed its shade, Grud used a mutation he gained from eating some lizard that he very rarely used, his nictitating membrane, more commonly referred to as a “third eyelid”.
When the transparent membrane covered his eyes, Grud dunked his head in the water and observed a whole new world, schools of fishes of every color that Grud knew of and some he didn't were swimming around, some of them were no bigger than his pinky, and some of the larger ones gliding above the coral reefs were as big as his boat was wide.
But when he was finished marveling at the underwater world, he saw the reason why the color of the sea changed. It was because the beautiful, multicolored coral reef, dropped off into a deep dark abyss, where he could only see the outlines of creatures as large or larger than his boat, lazily swimming.
When Grud got his head out of the water, he turned to his boys and said, “Never go beyond this point, there are monsters in the deep.”
After a few hours of casting nets with the help of Grud dunking his head in the water to see how populated with fish the spot was, they returned to shore with a boat so full of fish, that the lip of the boat was almost at the waterline.
Everything considered, this boat test was a success! The only thing they needed to amend was raising the lip of the boat so that it did not take on water when the boat was fully loaded. Other than that, the boat was an instant hit with Grud’s sons, so Grud ordered five more and instructed his sons to captain a boat each when they were complete, and bring on more people to help them because the fishing industry was going to be a major lifeline in the coming long winter.
