Chapter Twenty-Five - Stories of Spirits

  -Summer-

  Of course, even watching rain gets boring after a while. This prompted Belbet to get out her little day counter. Thinking to the moon she’d seen last night, which hadn’t even really been a sliver, she figured tonight was probably the last night before a New Moon on the Blue Moon. With fourteen tallies on the skin already and one to be made tonight, that meant the New Moon would be at 15 days into the lunar cycle. Which, unless there’s something funky about the way this world works (which is an unfortunate possibility for her logic-loving-brain), meant that the lunar cycle of the Blue Moon was a 30 day long cycle. Which would make this time-keeping thing somewhat easier!

  “Alright, so if the Blue moon is indicative of our months, that should be pretty easy to keep track of. Tomorrow will be the last day of this month, and then the day after that will start a new month! Yes. Okay, so then with that, I can kind of extrapolate roughly when things should happen…”

  Belbet mumbled to herself as she sketched out in a corner a rough calendar of ten squares in three rows. Time was incredibly important when it came to planting and harvesting. Sometimes it meant the difference between a destroyed harvest and a successful one. If she could figure out a calendar, they could start making an Almanac, which would, in itself, help with future planning.

  “Ugh, I really need paper.” She sighed, rubbing at her eyes which were a little tired from peering at marks like this in the low light of their little hut.

  The reminder of mold had her mind ticking away, as Dahnei poked at the fire in their hearth with a long stick. She needed more ways to store the meat. But honestly, other than salting it and smoking it, they were very limited to what they could do. She didn’t dare store it in the water in the river, because god only knew what was in that water. If she could make a double-well clay container, that would be used, but right now she was still figuring out the right amount of water to clay and firing it, and that just wasn’t something she could rush.

  What other ways were there to preserve meat for a long time? …Sausages. She could make sausages. But the problem with that was that she didn’t have a way of grinding the meat. Other than a mortar and pestle, which would be… well. She supposes that a mallet would also work… That wouldn’t be too hard to make. She could see if Deenat would be able to find and smooth some wood to make something to pound the food into something usable.

  But the problem became curing the sausage. They needed Salt for that. And with the little amounts of salt she’d been able to extract from the mud they’d brought back, she was beginning to think she was doing it wrong. Belbet sat, staring at the ceiling and pondering back to what Victoria knew of how salt was procured. Salt rocks could be mined, but they didn’t have the technology, nor the knowledge of how to find a salt mine. And they definitely didn’t have the proximity to a salt-water lake or sea.

  See, if they had sea-water, she could just evaporate the water in a pot and then they’d have salt!

  She paused, blinking.

  “Mama?” Dahnei asked, tilting her head to put it in Belbet’s field of vision. “You okay?”

  “Hm? Yeah, baby, just fine. I just realized that I’ve been doing something wrong this whole time, is all.” She admitted, smiling brightly.

  While Dahnei was stunned by this admission, Mohniit pulled on Belbet’s arm, drawing her attention to him. “Mama wrong?”

  “Yep. Mama made a mistake. Adults do that sometimes. They do something wrong, or they say something wrong. You know what to do when you make a mistake?” She asked, hoping that turning this into a teachable moment would help in the future to get these kiddoes to admit when they made mistakes too.

  “Wha?” Mohniit asked.

  “If you hurt someone, you say sorry. But either way, you change the behavior. So since I made a mistake by trying to make salt by boiling mud, I need to find a different way to do it, don’t I? She asked.

  With Dahnei’s nod and Mohniit’s grunt of assent, she smiled, “So I’m thinking since we don’t want a bunch of rocks and dirt in our salt, we need to find a way to sift that stuff out while we’re making the salt. So, we need a Seive. Hey, Eefim, wanna hand your auntie some of the Lamia hair too?”

  The boy looked up from the knots he was working on, the black hair long since dried and stored in a round basket. He nodded, picking up a handful of the knotted stuff and passing it over to his aunt. Belbet made a face, the human hair feeling icky to Victoria’s modern sensibilities. She swallowed down and went to work. First, she needed to unknot it. Taking a comb to it resolved that mess into a lanky line of hair on the floor. Then, with skills honed from recent weaving of wooden fibers, she began twisting the hair into yarn. She was really glad she’d put together a drop spindle, as this would have been a time-consuming and annoying task without it.

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  “What are you doing now?” Kaion’s rumbling voice asked from where he was curled near the entrance of the little hut. Honestly, with all of them in there, it was a bit crowded. Eefin and Deenat were sitting on their own little leaf-pile bed, and Belbet was on hers with her two kiddoes and now Kaion was taking up a quarter of the entry way/walkway with his own bulk. Technically, if he wanted to, he could lay down in the walkway between the two sleeping areas in front of the hearth, but he was working on something too, stone knife cutting away at some wood.

  “I’m going to weave netting from this hair. And then, I’m going to affix that netting to a circle of wood, at which point we’ll use it to remove big debris from things like the salt and grain and other stuff. The practice for it will also be usable as fishing nets and fencing.” She explained.

  “Fishing nets?” Kaion asked, doing that thing he does where he slowly pries more information from her by engaging her willingness to talk about her plans. She felt like maybe she should be annoyed by it, but honestly, it was nice to talk about what she was trying to do.

  “Yeah. Nets can be dragged through the water to catch fish that might otherwise escape us. It can also be used to make a farm in the river where we can raise the fish and make them fatter.” She smiled warmly over at him. “The fatter the fish, the more meat. Plus, it’ll make drying and storing them easier.”

  Thunder growled overhead and Mohniit and Dahnei both flinched, diving for the safety of their mother’s sides, causing her to drop the spindle. “Ah! Kids! Come on…” She mumbled, frowning as her yarn unraveled some. She began again on that section, realizing that if she wanted to be able to have steady hands for this one, she’d need to figure out some way to distract her very scared children.

  “Deenat, didn’t the tribe have stories about what it means when the sky rumbles like that?” Belbet asked, trying to get her quiet sister to engage if only so that Belbet could focus on her work.

  “Hmmm… yes.” Deenat put aside the bones she was carving and the children perked up, all three of them. “Long ago, before people had Spirits, and before words were things said with meaning, the Spirits were bored and had nothing to do. All of them locked up in the heavens, they were tripping over each other and anger was about to explode into a great fight.”

  Belbet blinked, surprised. So there was mythos behind the Spirits? She wondered if maybe that could help her understand how exactly humanity became like this in this world.

  “The Spirits couldn’t be left be, so before things became a bloodbath, Bear Spirit gave a great roar and called all the Spirit’s attentions. Her big, heavy paws raised and she gestured. ‘Look at all of you. You’re so strong, so fast, so smart, and yet none of you have half the voice I do!’ She challenged, lifting her great snout up. Now, Bear Spirit is a humble Spirit, and does not usually have this sort of bravado.

  “The smarter of the spirits understood what she was doing,” Deenat continued, as Eefim’s lips took on a pleased grin. “The more competitive however, didn’t care. Eagle Spirit shrieked out, ‘Not true! My shriek can be heard across the world!’ and then Tiger Spirit snarled, ‘My roar is louder and stronger! It can shake anyone to their bones!’ Of course, Bear Spirit sniffed, and tilted her great shaggy head, ‘Prove it.’”

  Dahnei giggled, wiggling in her seat while her long tail did figure eights of excitement, “She made them fight!”

  “She did,” Deenat agreed, “Soon, all of the louder, more violent spirits were so engaged in roaring and shrieking and crying out, that there was no more fighting. Instead, it was so entertaining that the smarter spirits, the happier spirits were crying with laughter, Bear looked over her works and was quite content to see that the Spirits would no longer be warring with one another, but were instead spending time together as a family.”

  “And that’s why it rains and rumbles.” Belbet finished for her, smiling broadly. “I love that story! It really shows how fighting can be defused with the right words. Thank you, Deenat.”

  “Hm. That’s a different story from ours.” Kaion muttered, smiling. “Our tribe tells a story wh-” He paused, upon realizing that he suddenly had the attention of everyone in the hut. He straightened up and took a deep breath, assuming the mantle of story teller.

  “The Great Elk Spirit is responsible for the safety and well-being of every being, every spirit and every child. And so, it falls to him to remind these charges of his that it is time to run, to hide, to keep moving. In the spirit world, there is morning and night, just like our world. But the timing is different. Their mornings and nights are different, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes so fast you can’t even tell the time between.”

  He smiled, and leaned forward. “But we can always tell when the Great Elk wakes up and begins to drive his herd. For the rumble of his hooves wakens the others and their feet cause more rumbling. Every so often, the Elk would strike a friend, the crack of his horns against theirs a show of their friendship or rivalry. And soon after his hooves wake them, the movement of their herdly meanderings shakes the dew off of the plants in their Spirit world, causing it to drop here in our world as rain.”

  “Huh.” Dahnei blinks, and tilts her head, “I thought Elephant was the leader of all the spirits?”

  “Not at all. There’s no leader of all Spirits.” Deenat corrected, shaking her head. “Each tribe trusts certain spirits more than others, and some tribes trust no spirits at all. Chief Gyos and Chief Pukk before him were the ones who started that ‘Elephant is the leader’ thing. Don’t listen to them.”

  Belbet considered then, and frowned down at her weaving. What sort of Mythos would be women here, in their farm? What sort of stories should she tell that might someday form the basis of a religion, millennia down the road. Was that even something she could consider? Something she should consider? She shook such existential thoughts away from her mind. That way lead to madness, after all. Just focus on the day-to-day. The rest will fall into place.

  Mini Character List

  Victoria/Belbet - Our Main Character, 21 yr old pregnant Mom. - ...am I going to have to start a religion? What is my duty of care in this situation???

  Dahnei - 5 year old paleolithic child. Daughter of Belbet. Jerboa Mouse-Spirited. - Other tribes have different stories... I wonder if anyone knows *all* of them?!

  Mohniit - 2 year old paleolithic child. Son of Belbet. Rabbit Spirited. - TOO LOUD!

  Unborn Baby - I'm fine, just tired.

  Deenat - 25 year old paleolithic gatherer - Ermine Spirited. - Elephants and their stupid territory issues. ugh.

  Eefim - 11 year old paleolithic hunter-in-training - ...I wonder if the Mongoose Spirit is famous for anything...

  Kaion - 26 year old man. Ram Spirited. - Elephants as leaders? ...Wouldn't they be too slow?

  Wolf - It's so wet here. ugh.