A half mile away from the village, we were met by a delegation who took over the transport of the gir. A young woman who was still wearing a loincloth and a top ran up to Jan and let him know she was glad he was back. Most of the others turned away so they weren’t forced to watch the impropriety of a girl who was not yet old enough for marriage kissing a man in broad daylight.
Jan looked embarrassed when she finally released him and he introduced her to me as his intended, Eva. She thanked me for keeping her man safe in much the same way she’d welcomed Jan back home. She was young by Earth standards but there was no doubt she was all woman. I knew she had two more months to simmer before she and Jan could marry and I had a pretty good idea that Jan would be the one walking funny the day after their wedding.
Three young women came up to me and thanked me for killing the beast that had killed their husbands. None were as demonstrative as Eva, but there is a lot a woman can communicate with a touch. Each made it plain that I would be welcome in her bed. All three had straps around their arms to show that they were available for marriage. They were quite an assortment: a blond, a redhead and a brunette.
They promised they would take care of the skin and would make sure I got the tokens. I knew that the tokens were the fangs and claws. This particular species had two long fangs at the top of his mouth and two smaller ones at the bottom, five claws on each front paw and four each in the back, not as large or as sharp. They were normally put on a thong and worn around the neck of the hunter who had killed the animal. Most times the animal was smaller, like a wolf or a bobcat but there had been times when people had grouped together and taken down a large cat. In that case, the tokens were split amongst the group. Giving one of your tokens to a female was comparable to getting down on one knee and giving your woman an engagement ring on Earth.
“I will show you some plants to rub into the dried skin tomorrow that will make it supple like this,” I said, holding out the sling that I’d used to kill the gir. They took turns feeling it and gushing about how soft it was and how they’d never felt anything like it, each of them making sure to look me in the eyes and caress my arm while talking to me. Like I said, the thing was a chick magnet.
Chapter Six
The first thing I did was to check on Gon. He was resting comfortably in his tent, his head in May’s lap. She told me he had awakened a few times but tired quickly and went back to sleep. I checked the leg and there was no bleeding, the stitches looked good with no sign of infection and the leg was held securely by the splint. His forehead was cool, with no sign of fever. I noticed that there was a bowl of water with a piece of rabbit skin in it, their equivalent of a washcloth. He was still lying on the skin he’d been on when I did the surgery.
“He looks good. You’re doing a good job, May.”
“Thank you. I washed him off earlier and have been wiping him down to keep him cool.”
“That’s good. How did you get him in here?”
“I had six men pick up the skin he’s on while my sister and I made sure he didn’t move.”
“That’s good. I’d like to figure out a way to replace that bloody skin with a clean one without hurting his leg. I’ll get with his brother and see if he has any ideas.”
“There are clean skins over there,” she said, pointing to a pile of them.”
“Has he eaten anything?”
“No, he hasn’t been hungry. He has had a few sips of water each time he awoke.”
“That’s fine. If he wants food or water, let him have it. Just make sure he takes it easy. What about relieving himself? At some point, that’s going to come up and he can’t be moved for a week.”
“We can roll him over on his side and keep the leg still if he needs to give water. For the other, we can do the same but it won’t be as neat. I have a bowl ready if we need it.”
“Just make sure you get some help. I’ll see if we can come up with something that will make it easier for him to get rid of the solid waste.”
Jan and Eva were sitting outside the tent. She was leaning against him with her arm wrapped around him and there was no room between them. For a female who hadn’t reached fourteen to act like this wasn’t quite scandalous, but it was definitely inappropriate. Both Eva and May knew they had come close to losing their men before they had a chance to consummate their relationships and instinct was taking precedence over convention. Each in her own way would do everything she could do to protect her man and to show him that she loved him.
I was fairly sure that May would be sleeping in the tent with her intended, a definite no-no. Eva would probably try the same thing, and if anybody could get away with it, it would be her.
As with any society, these people had their rules and rituals about sex. Upon initial examination, they didn’t seem to be repressive the way they were on Earth. Rather than something dirty, it was cherished. Sex between adults wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t done in the middle of the village square, but every child had seen his parents together many times. Communication about it was open and there was no need for a youngster to find out about it from someone with even less experience.
Adultery was rare. If caught, both guilty parties were banished from the village. However, if two married couples decided to share, that was acceptable. When Jan told me about their upcoming double marriage, I had a pretty good idea it was going to be a marriage of four people rather than two couples getting married.
First marriage was considered sacred. The newly married couple would break away at some point of the celebration and make love for the first time, then come back outside and proudly display the combination of blood and semen running down her legs. It was harder to tell if a male was no longer virgin but it would usually come out at some point. While not being banned for having sex before marriage, there would be some major shunning going on if it was discovered that either or both were not virgin.
Blatant displays of affection between a female who was not yet a woman (14 years old) and a male who was were frowned upon. Eva’s extreme kissing of Jan and me was really pushing the line, especially me. I imagine quite a few adults were cringing after seeing how close the two of them were now, sitting in front of the tent.
Once that first marriage was over, either because of the death of one partner or, very rarely, by banishment, there were no real restrictions. Nobody would bat an eyelash if I spent a night with any of the widows and any man in the village who declared himself eligible could go to one of their tents or invite one of them to his. It wasn’t a chance for a married man to get a free shot at something strange. If a married man said he was looking, that meant he and his wife were looking and it would be very unusual for her not to be in the bed with them. It was a free trial, but if everything worked as advertised, you were expected to buy.
I told Jan that I wanted to get a clean skin underneath Gon but I wasn’t sure how to lift him up without moving the leg. Eva came up with a solution that was so simple, it made me wonder how I could have missed it.
Two pieces about the size of the standard bath towels where I came from would be cut from a sturdy skin. One of these would be worked underneath his legs, the other so that it supported his shoulders and part of his back. A smaller piece a foot wide would be worked under the small of his back and his buttocks. Jan was dispatched to get six more men while Eva and her sister cut and set the skins in place.
I went with Jan and was introduced to the men and their wives. By the time we got back, Gon was almost ready to be moved. He was awake and had helped out by resting on his elbows long enough for them to get the two upper skins in place. As soon as he saw me, he thanked me for saving his life. The two women carefully raised his splinted leg while two of the men held the good one up so Jan and I could slide the last skin underneath.
May and Eva had a clean skin, probably from a deer, and some pelts. They said the ground was too hard and they wanted me and Jan to pull out the dirty skin, pile up the pelts and put the clean skin on top while the six m
en were lifting Gon up. The two women were going to direct everyone and make sure the damaged leg didn’t move while all this was going on.
Gon said he felt better and he thanked me again for saving his life. I told him I was glad to do it and wanted to get to know him if I stayed in the village. The idea that I might not seemed to cause some concern and I just said nothing had been decided yet. The men who had helped took off but they told me not to leave without saying goodbye.
Lifting and holding Gon up, then lowering him back down onto his new bed put a lot of strain on him. There were beads of sweat on his brow and he was panting when we were done. May dipped her washcloth in the bowl and wiped off his forehead, then kissed it gently. She gave him a sip of water, he smiled weakly at her, then went back to sleep.
“I was thinking about how we could make things easier on Gon,” I said. “Where I come from, we have tubes of different sizes. They are round and long and are usually flexible.” I made a circle with my finger and thumb and held my hands apart to show what I meant. “If we could find something that would fit around his penis and was long enough to reach the bowl, he would be able to pee without having to be lifted up.”
The sisters huddled together, then Eva took off. She was back a few minutes later with several lengths of large intestine, taken from the pile of remnants from the two bara I had killed earlier. They experimented with them until they found a piece that was the right fit and they considered long enough. They decided to leave it in place for the time being.
I took Jan outside and we sat down.
“I’ve got some ideas for making it easy for him to take a shit but I don’t have the skills to make what I need. Is there anyone here who works with wood?”
“Old Jara is always carving something for the kids. He carved me a bear out of wood when I was a child. I still have it.”
“Can we go see him?”
“Sure.”
We walked to another part of the village and came across a man in his early fifties sitting on a stump in the sun, carving a piece of wood. He had the skin from a goat over his lap and his legs and there were wood shavings all over it.
“Jara, this is Jeff. He comes from a village a long way from here,” Jan told him.
Jara reached up and clasped my arm with both hands. “Excuse me for not standing to greet you. I think everyone in the village has heard about the young god who carried in enough food to feed ten villages, brought Jan’s brother back from the dead and killed a handful of gers with his bare hands.”
“It’s amazing how people tell stories,” I told him, clasping his arm as he had mine. “I am certainly no god, and I just did some things I’d learned that kept Gon from dying. The other things you have heard are the produce of those who like to tell tales, as well.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Jan said. “I brought my brother back to say goodbye to his mate before he died and this man did some strange things and now he’s not dead. He was awake and talking before we came here. That’s bringing him back from the dead as far as I’m concerned.”
“It won’t do you any good to argue about it,” Jara told me as he shook his head. “By the time you finish telling one person what really happened, someone else will have been told how you brought whole villages back from the dead.”
“OK, I’ll live with it for awhile. What is that you were working on, my friend?”
He handed me the wooden animal he had been carving when we walked up. It was a buf, an animal resembling the buffalo that used to run wild all over the great plains. I had never seen a more realistic carving.
“Just a little something for the children,” he said. “The children who are happy to take what I give them but never seem to be able to visit me when they grow up,” glaring at Jan.
“You’re right, Jara. I keep the bear you made me in a place of honor with my other treasures but it wouldn’t hurt me to take some time to see you once in a while.”
“You’re lucky you brought your friend with you or I might have been too busy to see the likes of you today,” he answered. “See how you’d like that,” he mumbled, just loud enough to hear him.
“Well I have need of your skill to help my formerly dead patient, and this miscreant says that you are the one person I should talk to,” I told him.
He brightened up. “What can I do?”
I got a small branch and started drawing in the dirt, explaining as I went along. I told him that in my village we had machines that cut pieces of wood into slats and how we fastened them together and then explained what I wanted to construct.
It was similar to a chaise lounge. We would make two open ended rectangles out of wood. One would be just wide enough so the open end would fit outside the other’s open end. We would drill holes near the ends, then attach them by driving a piece of wood or bone through each pair. This would act as a hinge so we could raise and lower the top piece. The whole thing would be supported by legs and the back part would raise up with some way to use long sticks to support it when upright. It would be covered with a skin but there would be a reinforced hole big enough for his ass to fit in. Gon could sit up without damaging his leg and he could take a crap into a bowl underneath without having to be rolled over or carried somewhere.
Jara got excited about it and Jan invited him to come back with us to share the evening meal. We would talk to some of the women about getting the right size skin and I’d train one or more on how to make the reinforced stitches I had on my leather items for attaching it to the frame.
Jara picked up a staff and used it to help himself stand up. As he pushed his goat skin to the ground, I saw that his right leg was misshapen and withered. He saw me looking at it and said, “That happened when there wasn’t anyone like you around to fix it for me. I got chased by a ger. Never ran that fast before or after. I jumped off a cliff, thinking I could make it to the river. I didn’t jump far enough and landed on this leg. I was able to crawl back to the village but we had no way to do anything about it and this is how it healed.”
He stumbled along with us, holding onto the staff with both hands, placing the staff in the ground, swinging his good leg forward, planting it, swiveling his body, then repeating the whole thing. It made his going both slow and tedious. When we got back to the twins’ tent, I helped him sit on a log that was near the fire pit, then sat down beside him. I drew another picture in the dirt. “This is a crutch, something my people who don’t have the use of both legs use,” I told Jara. “You use two of them and once you get used to them, you can move quite fast with relative ease. This part goes under the arm and you put the body’s weight on it. You could either get a piece wide enough to support your arm and trim the rest down to size or figure out some way to attach two pieces in a T. Whatever you do, you need to soften the top piece so it doesn’t irritate your underarm. A thick piece of rabbit fur or something similar should work.”
Jara said, “You have me excited. I wish there were two of me. I want to make your invention for our recovering friend but I also wish I could start making these crutch things for myself. What do you call this one for Gon to lie on?”
“I guess you would call it a sick bed. A bed is something we sleep on where I come from. Most are bigger than this and they don’t usually bend. They have lots of padding to make them soft. There are also chairs so you can sit and have support for your back and even your arms if you want. And we used to sit in chairs and eat off a large, flat piece of wood we call a table. All of it together is called furniture. I guarantee you, if you make yourself a comfortable chair and sit in it and carve in front of your tent, you’ll soon have enough work to keep you and a handful of helpers busy full time. You won’t have to worry about begging for food.”
“You could even support a wife or two,” said Jan.
“Who would I get to help?” Jara asked.
“I would help and so would my brother,” Jan told him. “I have never been the best hunter and I realized how dangerous it can be out in the wild today.
Jeff says he’s done all he can for Gon. I’m happy that my brother will live but I don’t think his leg will ever be as good as it was before today. He’ll be lucky if he can get around with a stick like you do, Jara.”
“I’m afraid he’s right,” I said. “I don’t have the skill to put him back together the way he was.”
“Well, you two are welcome and if we get more work than we can handle, there are always young people who want to do something productive.”
I wondered if I had just started an industrial revolution on this world. This society had been one of hunters and gatherers and within less than a day, I had introduced primitive surgery and manufacturing and sooner or later, the couch potato. While I was sure it would make good vid, would it be good for these people? I hoped it would because it was too late to put the stopper back on the bottle. Don’t cry for Pandora’s box after you left the barn door open and all the horses are gone. Let them put that on my gravestone.
I heard some women giggling and then felt someone kneel down behind me. She pressed her breasts into my back as she leaned towards me, bringing her hands over my shoulders. I felt a weight on my chest as the hands slid back and did something behind my neck. I looked down and saw that it was my necklace of tokens from the ger. Four good size fangs and 18 claws of various sizes added up to a considerable amount of weight.
Whoever was behind me finished what she was doing and three women came around from behind me. They were the three widows I had briefly met earlier. Don’t let that word ‘widows’ fool you. These women had been married to three young men who had been inexperienced enough to get themselves killed. They all looked to be between 18 and 20.
“We pulled the claws and fangs from the ger you killed and made you a necklace,” said one, a beautiful redhead.
“We also stripped off the pelt and scraped it and it’s now hanging up to dry. But you were going to show us which plants to use so that we can get it soft like your sling. All of us are anxious to see how it feels to lie on after it’s ready,” said the blond, who tilted her head and battered her eyelashes.
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