Bonus Scene – Stranded

Liv

The hut stands at the edge of the village, a little way from the main living area, but not outside of the guard perimeter. It’s older, less well cared for. I get the sense that it hasn’t been lived in. Ever.

Gregar unhooks the latch – a simple carved wooden mechanism. They don’t have metals, just flint and bone and clay. Before he opens the door, he stands still a moment, his head bowed. Reverence? Hesitation? It’s another of those moments I wish I could just bloody talk to him already. I add it to my mental list of things to go through in the dreamspace tonight. Increasingly, we are not using the dreamspace for fun times, but to just speak to each other. Now that I’m pregnant – although that’s only an assumption, I don’t look or feel any different yet – Gregar has many things he wants to discuss. Whether he needs to build us a bigger hut, whether he should have his hunters bringing home extras and smoking the meat for storage. I tell him he’s being a little previous – it’s going to be months yet before we have our baby if I’m actually pregnant on our first attempt.

Sally is pretty sure I will be – it never failed with her yet. And she carried Jassal for a full nine months, Ahnjas for eight and a half and the current one is on eight. So it’s looking likely it will be a regular, human length pregnancy, ergo no need to worry about cribs and home extensions yet.

“I would rather think about clothes,” I told him.

“For our youngling?” he said, and I rolled my eyes. The man is crazy excited. And it’s not that I’m not excited, but one of us has to be practical.

“No, for me and the girls. I think I can speak for all of them when I say we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives wearing those Mercenia jump suits.”

I told him about Carrie being a seamstress, but how her skills were probably largely limited to mending, not making.

“She would probably pick the skill up really fast, but she’ll need some help figuring it out. I know my sister can make clothes, but she’s got other things to worry about than dressing the whole group.”

“You do not need to worry, my Liv,” Gregar said. “We have what you need.”

And so he’s brought me here, to this hut. He finishes whatever moment he was having and pulls the door open, gesturing for me to step inside.

It’s dark, the air dry. I don’t know how they build their huts, but they somehow manage to keep the rain and humidity out. I think it’s something to do with the vine plant that they encourage to grow over the outside walls – perhaps it sucks all the water out of the surrounding soil. Though this hut looked shabbier from the outside, the integrity of the walls and roof hasn’t been compromised. It’s bone dry inside – and a good thing, too, because it’s clearly being used for storage. Crates made from interlocking pieces of wood are stacked two or three high against the walls, with bags made from skins placed atop them. I go to the nearest crate and try to figure out how to open it. Gregar chuckles, then comes over and shows me the release mechanism.

Inside, a pile of pottery – plates and utensils. Gregar has a similar set in his hut. These must be the spares. Leftovers from the last time someone had a crafting session, ready to replace any broken pieces.

Or, I think, a new and terrible thought coming to my mind, spares from seventeen years ago, when illness swept through the tribe and devastated the population. Did these pots and plates belong to a family that passed?

Am I about to be given the clothes of a dead raskarran woman?

Gregar moves to one of the bags, opening it. He takes out some material, presses it to his face and breathes in. He nods, then hands it to me.

It feels strangely like I’m messing with the dead when I bring the material to my nose. It smells slightly floral, not musty like I was expecting. Gregar reaches into the bag again and pulls out a small bouquet of dried flowers. They crumble in his hands, obviously very old, but still possessed of enough scent to keep the material around it smelling nice. Clever.

There are so many things I’m going to have to learn about life here, and how to make it good. I know I’m not as stupid as Mercenia would have liked me to believe. I learned to read, after all. But still, it’s an overwhelming thought. Especially as I have only nine months before I’m going to have to learn a whole load more new things.

I am unbelievably grateful that poor Sally’s already had to go through all of this, and I can benefit from her experience, even if I would give anything for her to have not gone through all she did alone.

I turn my attention back to the material Gregar has handed me, unfolding it and opening it out to find it’s a rather enormous shirt. I can’t help it, I giggle a little as I hold it up against my much smaller frame. I wonder if I’ve just been horribly disrespectful, but then Gregar laughs, too, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” I say, drawing the material in a little at the waist. “Maybe if I had a belt it wouldn’t be so bad.”

But Gregar takes the top back, folding it back in to the bag it came from. He moves the bag from its place to the front of the storage hut, then moves on to another.

Methodically, we search through the bags. Most of the garments are feminine looking – left behind by the female raskarrans. I think they would have been far taller than me, broader, too, as most of the clothes are big when I hold them up against myself. But not quite so big as the first top we looked at. With the women’s garments, I can imagine how with a few stitches nipping the material in at the right places, they could be adapted for our needs. I think Carrie will be more than capable of doing this with very little additional support, and it probably won’t take all that long, either. 

I turn to Gregar to tell him – probably unsuccessfully – that I think we’ve gathered enough for us to start with, but he’s holding a garment in his hands, looking down at it, a distance in his expression. Gently, I go to him, touching my hand to his arm. He turns to me, deep sadness in his eyes that I don’t need words to understand.

“This belonged to someone special to you,” I say. “Your mother?”

I point to him, then mime rocking a baby in my arms, then point to the garment. He nods. I look at the garment in his hands. It’s a dress, intricately embroidered with flowers and vines. It’s beautiful, a work of art. I can’t imagine how many hours must have gone in to its creation – it’s an outfit fit for a queen.

Or a chieftess. Gregar’s father was chief of the tribe before him, his mother would have had her own power as his linasha, just as I do now as Gregar’s.

“Do you want me to have this?” I ask, pointing at the dress and then to me. “Or would that be too weird?”

I can’t decide myself. On the one hand, they’ve kept all this stuff – but stored away so it’s useable, not as some sort of monument to the dead. I think above all, the raskarrans are practical, not inclined to waste labour or resources. But it’s different when it’s some pots, versus your dead mother’s dress.

But then Gregar taps me on the shoulder, pointing to the zip of my jumpsuit. I undo it, wriggling out of it until it’s around my ankles. I remove my top, too, then Gregar lifts the dress over my head, guiding it over my hands when I raise them, drawing it down over my body.

It’s actually not a bad fit. I wonder if maybe raskarran women were not as busty as humans, for my breasts fill out what my shoulders do not, and when Gregar draws the ties in tight at the back, it wraps mostly snuggly around my torso. Except at the front beneath my breasts, where it tents out as if to accommodate a large-

Oh. It’s a maternity dress. I smooth my hands down the front, tracing the flat planes of my stomach. Try not to think too hard about the fact that if Gregar remembers her wearing this dress then when the illness hit she must have been…

Gregar places a hand over my own, the other caressing my hair as he draws me against him, pressing his face to my neck and breathing deeply. I feel the weight of his grief without the need for him to have the words to express it.

And I might not be a good warrior, or someone with any survival skills, but I can understand this. I know grief and loss and helplessness. There isn’t a person on the bottom tier who doesn’t. I can help him with his emotional burdens, be the one to take care of him when he’s busy taking care of everything else.

I turn in his arms and press a gentle kiss to his lips, stroking his cheek with the backs of my fingers.

“I love you, my big, sweet brute,” I say. “And I know you don’t understand a word I’m saying, but we are going to make so many happy memories. I hope all my girls mate to guys in your tribe, that ours is just the first of many babies. So many, that you’ll have to empty out this old storage hut to make space for the growing families. I hope that there will be so much happiness for everyone that this sadness doesn’t have to be a weight around your necks anymore.”

I press my forehead to his, wrapping my arms around his neck, holding us close together. I wish my thoughts and feelings could travel through my skin to him, I wish that I had the words I need to speak with him. He smiles, closing his eyes as his arms tighten round me, and for a long moment we just stand together. 

When we draw apart, I take his hand, giving him a tug towards the door of the hut. We have enough things, and I know the girls will be excited to start sorting through them. My head is full of things that will need doing – deciding what roles the girls can play in the village, how we are going to contribute, figuring out where everyone is going to live. It’s a lot, but it makes me smile. For the first time in my life I have a future.

For the first time in Gregar’s life, he has a future, too.

I touch my hand to my stomach again.

The future is looking good.