Unto the Ages

The Wives’ POV

 

While Grud was away at war, life back on the Mainland, carried on more or less as usual, the only difference being a sharp drop in the number of young fighting men due to the call to war.

 

This left the women, children, and older folk to run things back home, and in Grud’s household, the day started as most days do, in a tangle of naked bodies and limbs.

 

Nita woke to the beam of morning light hitting her and yawned awake. When she blinked the sleep out of her eyes, she found herself cuddling face to face with Mita, and as she looked down to where their gigantic breast was smushed against each other, Nita could appreciate the alluring contrast between her smooth olive tits smushed against Mita’s creamy white.

 

As she looked around, she saw the rest of her sister-wives either paired up cuddling like she was, or tangled in a pile. The only two women who were missing from the room were Sonu and Oso who were on on duty last night to sleep in the baby room to take care of the babies that were still breastfeeding.

 

In Grud’s absence, Nita, as the first wife, took it upon herself to bring the wives together and continue the intimacy and bonding they had shared with their husband all these years, and in the absence of their husband’s massive swinging dick, they made do by fisting each other elbow deep, their mutating agent altered bodies allowing unnatural elasticity in order to accommodate their husband’s gigantic tool. Besides being able to take massive objects and loads in their bodies, this also made childbirth a breeze for them.

 

When Nita gently untangled herself from Mita’s embrace this triggered a chain reaction of the rest of her sister-wives stirring awake. When they were all awake, all of them gave each other deep good-morning kisses to start the day.

 

After getting dressed, the wives would head over to the baby's room, relieve the wives on duty, and do the morning feeding. 

 

From there, they gathered with the rest of the tribe for a communal breakfast and went about their day.

 

For Nita, that meant assisting Ida in managing the barterer market district, because while Ida did most of the work, there were always some traders who tried to play hardball to get a better deal, and while the smart ones took Ida’s word as final in decisions, sometimes there were new or stupid ones who would not take no for an answer. And if anyone was to get the final word on anything in the Rock Claw tribe, short of Grud himself, it would be the first wife Nita.

 

At the end of the day after dinner, Nita remembered a task she forgot to start after her Grud left for the Newlands, ‘Almost forgot. Tala said that in their culture, the women of conquered villages are taken as slaves and I told them to bring back some even if husband did not want any. That means more women, which means we need to renovate the house to accommodate again.’

 

The next day, Nita went about to commission a new home.

 

***

 

As for how the other wives keep busy, besides raising the children and their occasional shaman/medicine women duties, they had taken up hobbies.

 

Mita, who had currently stuck with her corporeal body due to her pregnancy, missed the freedom of flying around in her Wisp form and exploring as she once did before getting a corporeal body, but holding her own child in her arms and having another growing inside of her, she did not regret it one bit.

 

To make up for this lack of freedom, she would do what she did that made her renowned as a Great Seer, she reached out to passing Spirit Wisps on the wind to communicate.

 

Some of the Wisps she had known for many years, while others were new to her, but the one thing that was common with their interaction was the excitement of the Spirit Wisps when they finally realized that she was one of them.

 

It was something never done before, and when she let them see her first child, Vara, they got even more excited. To the Wisps, Mita was still one of them, a Wisp, but Vara, she was something new, born of flesh and mana.

 

Soon, word of Mita and Vara spread among the Wisps and many came to see them for themselves, some of them having nothing better to do, decided to stay around to watch the development of Vara.

 

This unexpectedly made the Rock Claw tribe a hotbed for shamans who wanted to commune with the Wisps/Spirits, thus lightening the burden on Grud’s wives as shamans.

 

***

 

As for Ida, while she picked up on managing the barterer market district, she also picked up an interest in trading and bartering. Eventually, she decided to try it out for herself.

 

On her off hours while Nita was handling the management, Ida would pull an old cart that was sitting idle beside their home to a corner of the barterer’s market to setup shop.

 

The first thing she started out with, was some pelts, fangs, and claws that she checked with her sister-wives no one was using.

 

On the first day of her trying her hand at bartering, besides some people taking a glance at her wares, she had no luck.

 

For the next few days, she did not open shop again. Instead, she just made her rounds inside the barterer market district, observing. As she observed, she quickly noticed that she had been very passive compared to the others. 

 

While she was waiting for business to come to her, others were shouting, promoting, and hawking their wares to passersby. She also noticed that aesthetics were also important, those barterers who had more customers browsing their wares had decorative and eye-catching carts or stalls, and the last thing she noticed was that she needed to get to a more visible and centralized location.

 

So over the next few days, Ida called in a favor to get some woodwork done to spruce up her cart, after her cart was in good repair and did not look like it had been left out to the elements, she got to decorating.

 

She traded some of the stock she was going to barter to get a nice woven and dyed patterned fabric from the Newlands to drape over the cart, she also got the chance to get some of her older children something to do by making small trinkets to hang around her cart.

 

The morning after her preparations were done, she untangled herself from the usual pile of sweaty limbs extra early in the morning and pulled her cart to one of the “first come first serve” slots in the central area of the barterer market.

 

As the tribe started to wake up and more people started making their way around, for the first time, she had people browsing her wares and bargaining with her.

 

By the end of the day, her pelts, fangs, and claws turned into a couple of pounds of honeycomb, some copper ore, and tools, along with an old bow.

 

At the end of her first day of bartering, she was satisfied, and it also helped that she had some insider knowledge of who to barter with to get other things wanted. It was good to be the manager.

 

***

 

As to the other wives, Reta, Uchi, Silne, Sonu & Oso, like most things in their life before marriage, they did things together, so when the new professions and ideas came over from the Newlands, they were all interested in what their new neighbors brought.

 

Over the years, they tried it all, farming, making textiles, making jewelry with copper, and many other ideas.

 

After they sampled the new skills their new neighbors brought they slowly started going toward what they liked doing. 

 

Reta and Oso discovered they had a green thumb and gravitated toward farming, but instead of grains and vegetables that were usually planted, they combined the new knowledge of farming and their current knowledge as medicine women to harvest herbs and spices instead.

 

They plotted out a small field, collected their herbs and spices from the wild with their roots intact, and planted them in their field.

 

But despite their optimism, they were mostly met with disappointment as the majority of what they transplanted wilted and died within a week. But this did not deter them. 

 

They tried again but to the same poor results. When they asked the farmers what the issue was, they were told that they do not farm herbs and spices for this exact reason, unlike the hardy grains and vegetables they harvest, herbs and spices were usually more delicate and not worth the time and effort invested.

 

But hearing the farmer’s comments about the fragility of herbs and spices, Oso had an idea. What if they try to replicate the environment they found the herbs and spices in?

 

So once again, they set out to look for more herbs and spices, but this time, not to harvest any, no, the only thing they would be harvesting this time was data. The data they were looking for was in the surroundings.

 

Where did the plant like to grow? Did it like bright or shaded areas? What kind of soil did it grow in? Did it grow in dry or wet environments, and a multitude of other questions.

 

After many trials and errors and many dead plants. Reta and Oso finally found success. They had relocated their small field near a stream.

 

Through their trials and errors, they found out that the majority of the herbs and spices that they planted naturally grew in the shade of trees in the woods, because while the plants did like light, they did not like heat, so to solve this issue, they erected a simple scaffolding over the section of the field that needed it and loosely laid coconut leaves over the scaffolding to simulate the shelter of trees.

 

Other than that, the other herbs that needed special care were those that grew in rocky environments with running water. So they had to call in some favors to help with a project.

 

First, they got some of the men to dig out a shallow area next to the stream, next they got the tribe kids to bring them any small stones they found, once those were accomplished, the stones were spread out in the shallow dug-out and a part of the stream was diverted through the now rocky area. This was where they planted plants that liked fresh flowing water.

 

It currently has been a month since everything was planted, and besides one or two plants dying, all their new transplants seem to be thriving, and if they make it to a full harvest, they considered expanding their operation along the stream.

 

As for Uchi, she found her calling to make textiles. She liked the interesting patterns that could be woven and picked up the skill as she worked for the wife of one of the Newlanders who migrated to their tribe, and as Ida’s bartering cart picked up business, Uchi convinced the lady she was working for to barter their textiles through Ida, which turned out to be rather profitable.

 

As for Silne, she found her calling in jewelry making, which was not a surprise to those who had known her for a long time, she loved jewelry, the only difference now, was that instead of bones, claws, and teeth, she moved on to copper and colorful stones.

 

Like Uchi, she apprenticed under an old couple who migrated to their tribe and picked up the skill from the old man. While the old man did all the steps himself, from flattening the copper into a workable sheet to cutting the sheets into its proper shapes, Silne, with the help of Ida, struck a deal with the local blacksmith to provide sheets of copper for Sline to ply her craft, and after much practice came up with her own design that mixed Mainland and Newland styles.

 

Naturally, all the jewelry she crafted went to Ida to be bartered, and soon, Grud’s household had to commission a small warehouse to store all the items Ida’s bartering earned the family.

 

Lastly was Sonu, after trying her hand at the crafts, she felt comfortable just continuing her job as a shaman. That was until a month after Grud left for the Newlands.

 

One day, a group of hunters came to the tribe on the back of animals nobody had seen before. When the men were invited in to join them for a meal and tell their story of these animals, the men said they were from one of the newest tribes that expanded east.

 

And far in the east, they found what they call the Great Plains, nothing but grasslands and rolling hills as far as the eye could see, and in those plains were these animals they named Plains Striders, or what modern people call horses.

 

At first, they hunted these horses for meat, but then, some of their young men dared each other to ride upon the back of one of these horses, and after sneaking up on one and jumping on its back, the man had to hold on for dear life as the horse bucked and tried to throw the man off. 

 

But eventually, it got tired and relented. Soon more young men tried doing the same thing and later found out they could ride these horses. When the elders of the tribe learned of this and thought of the applications as beasts of burden, their Chieften sent out every available hunter to capture as many as they could, and while the tribe kept a good portion of the horses, the chieftain sent men along with the horses to see if any tribe would want to barter for the horses.

 

When Sonu went to see the horses at the temporarily erected fence, she was advised by the hunter who brought them to come with some grass or vegetables as a treat for the horses.

 

When she came back with some vegetables and reached out to feed one of the horses, it gently ate out of her hand, and when she moved to stroke its head, the majestic beast affectionately leaned into her hand.

 

That day, Sonu did not know it, but she became a horse girl.

 

That night, she gathered her sister-wives and said, “I want to try raising Plains Striders for the tribe.” She looked at Nita and Ida, “Can we afford to barter for some to start breeding them for the tribe?” not knowing the financial status of their house Sonu did not know what to think when Nita and Ida gave her kind smiles

 

The next day, the Rock Claw tribe was the owner of 32 horses.