by Laura Taylor
Meanwhile, Willow sat down on the end of the bed, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Just two tallow candles were lit at the moment, set on the sturdy wooden table in the centre of the room, and they cast warm shadows, muted reds and yellows flickering over her skin. When Whisper was finished his preparations, he came and sat beside her, leaving enough space that their knees didn’t quite touch.
“Children are amazing,” Willow said, not quite meeting his eyes. “Mikey will be out like a light in under ten minutes. I envy the way they can sleep anywhere.” She forced a smile and glanced up at him for a moment. Then she looked down at her shirt, a neatly sewn buckskin blouse she’d chosen that afternoon, laced together with sinew down the front. Deliberately, she tugged at one strand of the lacing, letting the bow slip loose. Then, looking Whisper steadily in the eye, she pulled the lacing out of the first set of holes.
In Aidan’s cabin, he and Dusk sat side by side on the bench, both of them staring at the pile of ash in the fireplace.
“Women have always got the short end of the stick,” Dusk said, calmer now than she had been before. “Every time there’s a war, or a new political movement, or a fit of religious fervour, we’re always the ones who have to pay the price. A century of progress has been wiped out in a few short years, and now we’re back to being sex slaves and trophies.”
“We’re doing the best we can,” Aidan told her, not sure what else he could say. The arrangements they’d made for the women, though far from ideal, were still the best they could offer. The truth of that would be proven in the next few days, as the rest of the men reacted to Rochelle’s presence as an unattached woman. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the fallout of Whisper’s hasty decision to let her stay, with her refusal to abide by the conditions the others had accepted. “Given the way the world’s turned lately, this tribe still has the short end of the stick. A slightly different stick, maybe, but still the short end of it.”
Dusk opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated. “For what it’s worth, I do admire what you’ve done here,” she said finally. “Arranged marriage is not ideal, but it’s a hell of a lot better than what a lot of other tribes are doing at the moment. So, kudos to you for making the effort.”
Deliberately, but cautiously, Aidan reached out and put his hand on her knee. He really wasn’t sure how she was going to react. He risked meeting her eyes. She stared back impassively. “I’m not going to rip your balls off,” she informed him quietly. “I agreed to this.”
She had. And yet she hadn’t, not really. “I’m not just looking for a warm body. I want a wife, not a living doll.” She didn’t look up from where his hand was resting on her knee. “I will be gentle,” Aidan promised her. “If you let me, I can make it good for you…”
Dusk turned to face him, eyes roaming over his face as she sought out the truth of his words. “You dispense violence and rage with one hand, and now claim to give pleasure and comfort with the other. Do you even know who you are, behind all that ideology?”
“I’m far from perfect,” Aidan replied easily. He’d already spent far too many nights debating the morality of killing one group of people, to keep another group alive. “But every human being is capable of both love and hate. You must have seen that in yourself by now.”
Unexpectedly, she leaned in to kiss him. It was awkward, neither of them quite sure what to expect. The second time went a bit smoother, and Aidan felt his self-control slip a fraction. Christ, it had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Her lips were warm and firm, her scent divine. Keep it slow, he warned himself, feeling his groin throb. And then, as if that wasn’t enough to test his resolve, she suddenly reached down and stripped off her shirt. Small, high breasts were encased in a plain white bra, and for a moment, he was unable to look away.
“How about we take this over to the bed,” she suggested, and if he was paying attention, he would have realised that her tone was neither sensual nor inviting. She stood up and took his hand.
Helpless to resist, he followed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Standing naked in the middle of the bathhouse, Dusk poured a jug of lukewarm water over Mei-Lien’s hair, making an issue of rubbing all the soap out. It wasn’t out of concern for her cleanliness, but rather as a ruse to avoid answering the question Willow had just asked her.
“It was fine,” she said in the end, reaching for the bucket of herbal rinse, made from boiled burdock root and yarrow leaves. Dusk had been thrilled to discover that Nicholas’s skills in herbalism didn’t just cover medicinal uses. He’d pulled all four women aside that morning, offering them recipes for skin tonics, hair conditioners and, far more importantly, herbal contraceptives. Even in this broken world, he’d said, women should have some control over their own reproduction. He grew pennyroyal in pots and had deliberately seeded bunches of thistles in out of the way places around the village for that express purpose. It was a bold and selfless act of foresight, given the tribe’s long-running lack of women. Nothing was going to be one hundred per cent effective, he’d warned them, but he was eager to let them have whatever autonomy nature could provide.
After the rushed and stressful events of the day before, the group of women hadn’t had the chance to chat, either to get to know each other better, or to bolster each other’s courage in the face of daunting changes in circumstance, so they’d all congregated here, a newly installed latch on the door making sure they wouldn’t be interrupted during their bath. They’d exchanged histories, shared what knowledge they had about the surrounding landscape, and then, in the middle of massaging soap into Rochelle’s hair, Willow had dropped her bombshell of a question, just when Dusk was starting to feel comfortable.
“He was… It was fine,” she said again, still startled by Willow’s occasional bluntness, when the rest of the time she came across as meek and easy-going.
“Did he harm you in any way?” she pressed, not satisfied with Dusk’s vague prevaricating.
“No, he was fine,” she repeated, wishing she could find another way of answering the question. ‘How was your first night with your new husband?’ didn’t just break the ice, it took a sledgehammer to it and smashed it to smithereens. But aside from the awkwardness, Dusk knew that the question was asked with good intentions. As they’d already learned back in the forest, the four of them were going to have to stick together if they wanted to pull any weight around fifty men.
“Come on,” Rochelle said, leaning back on the stool she sat on so Willow could rinse her hair. “Do I have to go and geld this guy, or what?”
Dusk snorted out a laugh, remembering her own threat to do the same thing when she’d first met Aidan. “No,” she said, more firmly this time. “It was…” Oh, fuck it, she decided in the end. If she managed to be brutally blunt with the men of this tribe, there was no point beating around the bush with the women. “It was actually… pretty good.” Then, feeling mischievous, she added, “He’s very athletic.”
Willow and Rochelle didn’t seem to know what to make of that, but Mei-Lien let out a snort, then a giggle. “He is rather easy on the eyes.”
“So, what about Torrent?” Rochelle asked next, and on reflection, Dusk was rather relieved they were having this conversation. It not only made sure that each of the women was being treated with respect, but it also paved the way for future conversations on a whole range of what could otherwise have been awkward topics – menstrual issues, health problems, or how to respond if one of the men did step out of line.
“He was very considerate,” Mei-Lien answered, reaching for a towel to dry her hair. She’d already washed and rinsed Dusk’s hair, and Rochelle was the last one to finish up. “He was gentle and patient, and… well, it sounds stupid, really,” she rambled on. “I mean, ‘it wasn’t awful’ is hardly a shining recommendation, but… we talked first, and then…”
“‘It wasn’t awful’ is a pretty good starting point, given what’s going on in the world at the moment,” Dusk said honestly.
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br /> “I agree,” Rochelle said.
“What about Whisper?” Dusk asked, bracing herself for the answer. There was something dark and violent about the man, and she was still in two minds about him. And yet, both Aidan and Nicholas had agreed to give him custody of the two most vulnerable members of their tribe, and Willow had left the children in his care while she came for her bath. Did other people somehow see something in him that she didn’t?
But now it was Willow’s turn to blush and stammer awkwardly. “Well, after the children went to bed… It wasn’t… I mean…” She shrugged helplessly, and Dusk was gearing herself up to go and give Whisper a right dressing down. Whatever he’d done, Willow was clearly far from happy about it. But what Willow said next nearly bowled her over. “He… I… He didn’t.”
All three women were silent as they gaped at her. Mei-Lien stopped rubbing her hair and peered at her friend from beneath her towel. Rochelle wore an expression of baffled consternation, while Dusk simply wondered if she’d misunderstood.
“What do you mean, he didn’t?” she asked bluntly.
“We didn’t have sex,” Willow replied, sounding equally baffled. “He said I’d been through enough lately and I should just get some sleep.”
Rochelle muttered her approval, while Mei-Lien made some comment about it being nice to get a reprieve for a while, but Dusk just stood there, seething at the man who was constantly turning her on her head and making her think black was white. Why the fuck couldn’t Whisper just make up his mind and be the good guy, or the bad guy? He was turning out to be both an angel and a devil in a compact, muscular package, and this latest revelation did nothing to help her regain her sense of equilibrium.
The rest of the day passed in quiet fits and starts. Aidan had made it clear that for the next few days, the women wouldn’t be required to do any hard physical labour, to give them time to recover from both their physical injuries and their general exhaustion, and so they were free to explore. The first port of call was Hawk, showing them the tribe’s four beehives. Honey was their only real source of sugar, and was a vital component of both their travel rations and the beer that the tribe made. Aside from collecting the honey, he opened the hives five or six times a year to check on the queen and inspect the bees for parasites, and he explained that so long as you weren’t threatening their hive, honey bees were actually very relaxed and friendly creatures.
Next, they visited Tom in his workshop. As well as his talent as an artist, he was also the village’s carpenter, and he was currently working on a set of chairs for one of the lodges. By using steam to bend the wood, and with an impressive set of hand tools, he was able to make just about any item of furniture the tribe desired.
Jamal was down with the sheep, as usual. The flock was impressive, fifty ewes of various breeds, most of them with lambs at foot, and two rams that were kept in a separate paddock with last year’s wethers. Come winter, they’d slaughter most of the males, and then in June, he’d put the rams in with the ewes to get next year’s batch of lambs started.
Going about the village, there were plenty of signs of diligent work being done. Dave was chopping firewood, sweat plastering his hair to his head. Nicholas was gathering bundles of herbs for drying, muttering to himself as he went. In the heat of the afternoon, half a dozen men gathered in the main lodge to shuck corn or cut up fruit for drying. Wanting to be helpful, the women volunteered to join in, and the time proved useful not just for the sake of getting work done, but also to get to know the men better.
They’d come from a wide variety of backgrounds; farmers, tradesmen, office workers of various descriptions. One had been a high school teacher, another had worked in a tourist park, a third had been a hairdresser. But aside from the professional skills they all had, their hobbies had brought far more value to the tribe. Sailors, fishermen, potters and wood-turners had all turned idle pastimes into skills that had kept the tribe functioning on a daily basis. The man who’d had a backyard coop of five or six hens now oversaw the seventy-strong flock that roamed the village. An amateur beer-maker now malted his own barley and brewed the suds that kept the men from breaking under the pressure when things got too tough.
Along with the wide range of skills, the men also had a variety of religions and racial heritages, and Dusk reflected that old prejudices still existed, as much as they’d ever done, but now the lines that divided ‘them’ and ‘us’ had been redrawn on tribal grounds, rather than creed or skin colour.
The menial tasks of a post-industrial world were slow and methodical, and the days trickled by faster than might have been expected. Crops were harvested, eggs were collected, the excess roosters from the last batch of chicks were slaughtered to supplement the tribe’s protein intake, and all the while Mario kept careful notes of each activity. Food was distributed on a pseudo-rationing system – any fruits or vegetables in season and available in abundance were left for everyone to help themselves, while more limited items, eggs and milk, for example, were shared out equally, with Mario writing down how much of each item had been produced.
One afternoon, three days after the women had arrived at the village, a dozen or so people were again gathered in the main lodge. Root vegetables were stored in sand-filled crates for the winter, and everyone was working together to sort the harvest, pack the crates and move them to the village’s spacious root cellar. Midway through sorting the boxes of carrots, a flash of light split the sky, and Dusk looked out the window, not having realised how dark it had become. A moment later, a crack of thunder shook the building, and every man in the room abandoned his work to peer worriedly out the window. Torrent opened the door, and a blast of cold air came in. Following his lead, the rest of the men filed outside, gazing anxiously at the sky, with Dusk and Rochelle at their heels.
Dusk could well understand their apprehension. If the lightning came with a downpour, it was the answer to three months’ worth of prayers, no serious rain having fallen all summer. But if this turned out to be a dry storm, the lightning could easily start a dozen bushfires, which could spell disaster even for a tribe as well-prepared as this one.
In the past few days, Aidan had shown all the women what to do in case of a fire. The tribe had dug several large rooms, entirely underground and as fire-proof as it was possible to make them. The survival plan would be enacted if there was even a hint of smoke in the air – something that the sentries kept an eye on from their vantage points in the trees. Each man had set responsibilities that were based not so much on defending the village, as on making sure they would be able to rebuild afterwards. There were stores of seeds kept safely in root cellars, replaced every year with fresh stock. For those plants that were difficult to propagate from seed, they kept a few specimens in pots kept just outside the bunkers, which could be moved inside at a moment’s notice. Breeding pairs of all of their livestock were tagged and trained to come when called and had been accustomed to the underground shelters. Rabbits, ducks and chickens would all be put in cages, while three ewes and a ram, and the two jersey cows, along with a bull that Dusk had yet to lay eyes on, would be led into one of the bunkers and fed hay until the danger had passed. The entire tribe carried out full fire-drills twice a year, and the livestock were taken through the motions at least once a month – a vital necessity, especially for the bull, as having an angry and upset animal of that size and strength in a confined space would be a disaster. All their planning didn’t give any guarantees, of course, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances.
As Dusk watched, another fork of lightning lit the sky, and the cloud seemed to blacken even as she stood there, the light suddenly as dim as if it had been eight o’clock at night. The peal of thunder was ominous, booming right over their heads, rolling out across the hills, and then seeming to turn back on itself to echo overhead again.
One thick, fat drop of water landed on Dusk’s face. She reached up to wipe it away, holding her breath…
PLOP, PLOP, PLOP… the dim
patter of drops splattering on the dirt formed an irregular rhythm, but even now, no one was willing to take anything for granted. They’d had brief showers of rain before, that dried almost before they hit the ground and left everything muggy and uncomfortable…
And then, as they all stood there gaping at the sky, the heavens finally opened. The patter became a rumble, then a drumming, then a thunderous applause as the storm let loose. But a few moments later, the rain could hardly be heard over the whooping and cheering as every man in the village ran outside, arms spread wide, face turned skyward to welcome this most desperately needed offering of nature. Dusk herself was spinning in circles, trying to catch the drops on her tongue, and she laughed as she saw the others running in zig-zigs, chest-bumping each other, a couple of men taking their shirts off to feel the cold water on their skin. “Rain, rain, rain, rain,” sang Nicholas from nearby. “Beautiful rain!”
Mei-Lien and Willow came running up from Whisper’s cabin, Julia in Willow’s arms, Mikey running behind. Mei-Lien grabbed Rochelle by the shoulders and spun her around, jumping up and down in glee. And on the other side of the clearing, Dusk saw Aidan and Whisper arrive from down by the river. There was no cheering or dancing about from either man. They both simply watched the reactions of their tribe with looks of stoic contemplation. Then Whisper put his arm around Aidan’s shoulder and murmured something in his ear. Aidan visibly sagged where he stood, a slow smile creeping over his face. It was a look of pure relief. The two cornerstones of this village had weathered one more drought, and somehow brought their tribe safely out the other end.
