Chapter 8

(Late Summer to Harvest of Year Two)

By that time, mid to late summer had arrived. The first version of the water mill was completed. I had almost an acre and a half under the protection of walls. I had the shell for the main house up. We'd built a kiln. We'd put in basic water piping and a small reservoir. We had a water and vermin tight granary. I had a nice still and hot tub up and running. All in all, the year to date had been very productive. The vegetable garden was coming along nicely, and I was looking forward to lots of good food over the winter. All three girls were knocked up. Ashes and Shining were due in early winter, and Bountiful would deliver in the spring.

A few items remained in my big to-do list before the leaves fell, and although most of them were in the 'nice to have' column, they would be very damned nice to have. The first one was inside the main compound itself. There were enough people walking around every day that the grass didn't get a chance to recover, and in the shade of the walls, it tended to wither back. So, we had created a muddy mess. I set all of us to making bricks. Now, brick making is simple enough when you have a decent supply of good clay. All you do is make up some basic wooden molds, screen and clean the clay, mix it up well, put it in the molds, let it dry for a couple of days, flip it over, let it dry again, paint it with an iron oxide wash, and then fire it in the kiln. The work is hot and dry work, it's fairly intense physical labor, at least mixing the clay is, but it's slow and steady work. When I made up the molds, I made one set of 'regular' style bricks that would be familiar to any American, and another set that were larger and thinner. The latter set of bricks were designed to interlock, and would work as pavers for the common areas.

It took a while, most of two weeks, but we got all the bricks and pavers fired. We lost about 10% to wastage, but I had allowed for up to 20% loss. We used hoes and shovels to pare back the turf in the main areas and then we all loose-set the pavers. Doing that, loosely setting them, was a huge mistake. By mid-winter, the pavers were a mess, with some areas still set well, but others got pressed down into the mud making a mess. Regardless, it left us with some clean and dry walkways, and that was most of what I wanted to accomplish. So, all in all the paving project had a mixed result at best. But, at the time, I thought it was all Jim-Dandy.

Following the paving, I finally got around to the dirty damned job I had been avoiding all summer long. We needed to do something about the latrine. We needed basic sewer facilities, and I needed to get rid of the old latrine. For most of the last year, what I'd done about the toilet facility was to sprinkle the shit hole with sintered lime and lye ash, and then cover it with fresh dirt. When it got to a certain degree of 'fullness', I back filled it and packed it down again, then dug a new spot. I'd done that five times so far, and it was a lot of work. Also, eventually I knew that the lye and lime in the ground soil would be a problem for everyone, so it had to stop.

What I built for the sewer piping was a rectangular clay mold with an overlapping lip. The 'pipe' would be a square box three feet on a side. The two sides, left and right were simple rectangles five feet long and two feet across, with a 'tongue' on one end and a 'groove' on the other. The top and bottom pieces were made with the same tongue and groove at the ends, but the sides overlapped to lock the side pieces in place, like a dado. The pipe pieces were big and heavy, and we broke more than one moving them and setting them in place.

The 'sewer line' was dug down six feet deep, and the pipe was then buried in place. I used some of the water pipe pieces we'd fired to dump waste into the pipe, and I made sure that the pipe ran down hill and out of the compound to dump into the river just where it exited the walls. If you think about what I just wrote, you'll realize that we built well over a hundred and fifty feet of sewer line. Let me tell you, that was so much grunt labor that I don't even want to think about it. Luckily, I could call upon the willing work, even if it was idle, lazy work ... of about ten people at a time. Let me tell you, cave men have very little in the way of a Protestant Work Ethic. In the end, I personally did as much digging as any five of them. But still, help is help.

At the high spot in the sewer line, I built in a storm drain and cap so we could drain the winter rains from the camp down the sewer line. Although I didn't give that a lot of thought at the time, it came in damned handy. More about that later.

Once the sewer line was in, I built a simple pottery shitter next to the lean-to and tents that the other women and Dead called home. When that was done, I built an indoor crapper with a better design in a closet in the house. In both cases I designed a 'trap' into the crapper so that smells and gasses wouldn't come back into the house. The way that the toilets worked was simple, but it worked. I'd designed a simple limestone 'coating' for the pottery that gave it a light glaze. This glaze wasn't anywhere as nice as porcelain, but it let the shit get washed off of it with a brush. After you were done shitting, you poured a bucket of water down the toilet, and then replaced the heavy pottery lid. The water pour ensured that the trap stayed clean, and the lid kept the smells out of the house. It may sound primitive, but I was damned happy, and so were the people in my camp.

Toward the end of the summer, the whole gang and I went to work on building out the lean-to and tents into a real 'bunk-house'. We used the same timber framing and shake roofing as the main house. The floor was made up of alternating layers of wide oak planking that I'd run through the sanding belts on the mill. I used the hide glue in a weak solution to make a simple floor varnish, and although it wasn't real effective, it did seal the boards from warping that winter. I did a better job on the flooring in the main house later on. The women did a bang-up job of making the walls out of wattle and daub, as I described above. By late summer, probably approaching mid-August, we were pretty set for winter.

This brings me to something I've been avoiding writing down for a while, because you're not likely to believe it when you read it. But, anyway ... here goes. One of my smaller projects over the spring and summer had been to build and take measurements from a sundial to begin to determine closer to 'real' dates, and to try to use the stars to get a better idea of my location. Makes sense, right? When you've got time, locate Polaris, measure the number of spring days, calculate the rising and setting sun, and thus get a sense of the rough "where you are".

There was no Polaris. Instead, there were a cluster of four stars arranged in a pretty trapezoid up where Polaris should have been. No north star. None. What does that mean? It meant I was not on Earth. Oh sure, at first I guessed that I was in the southern hemisphere, and that those stars must have been the Southern Cross. Wrong. When I read up on the southern hemisphere, the four-star trapezoid was in completely the wrong place. The southern cross doesn't actually circle true-south, it's off to the side. These four stars actually circled the pole. And, of course, they circled the NORTH pole. I spent a lot of time making up reasons that I couldn't see Polaris. It was all crap. I wasn't on Earth. It was that simple.

Once I knew I was someplace else, I spent some time staring at the moon. Yeah, after a while I could see that it was different. It was odd that I'd never noticed it before. The color was slightly off, and the dispersion pattern of ejecta on the surface looked different. I guess I had just never really looked. When was the last time you really looked at the moon?

Once I figured that much out, I got to work on a sundial and an observatory. The observatory was simple as all fuck to make. I used some empty #10 cans to make some clay molds and fired some simple pottery tubes. These tubes were built with wide skirts around their middle, and then I mounted them on iron rods on top of the walls. By carefully sighting through the pottery tubes each day at sunset and sunrise, I was able to time the length of the day, and I was able to measure the movement of the sun on the horizon each passing week. I will not bore you with the math or the length of my observations. By rough approximations, I was able to determine that the average day was just over ten minutes longer than an earth day. Not too much. The year appeared to be just under what I was used to. I was later able to correct my conclusions by a decimal point, but I reached the estimate of about 358 days for the year. Three hundred and fifty eight days means eleven months of thirty days and one month with twenty eight. It was a simple enough adjustment, so I made up a couple of basic calendars to track the days. Three hundred and fifty eight days gives you fifty one weeks and one day left over. I put the one day week at new years, and called it a cave man holiday.

For the rest of this story, I'm going to use the months and days you and I are both used to. Just keep in the back of your mind that there's an adjustment that has been made, there are no 31 day months. Now, let me tell you ... When the women and Dead and back saw me performing my 'ritual' of measuring the sunset each day, they were very happy to be able to go back to thinking of me in the neat little box of 'sorcerer' and 'shaman'. Me running around, spouting weird incantations about days and weeks and months was exactly what I should have been doing in their minds. I was glad to be so predictable.

By late August, Shining and Ashes were positively glowing. Their bellies were getting bigger as they approached six months and entered the third trimester. One thing I loved to do was press my ear to their bellies and listen to the babies inside. It made me very happy, and I was getting increasingly excited. I was also scared to death about the birth process. Shining was always embarrassed when I listened to her belly, but Ashes loved it. Bountiful was just beginning to show nicely. I was a happy, happy guy.

Did I mention that Cinnamon is an idiot? No?

As summer waned toward fall, and I started to relax, working fewer hours, spending more time with my wives, I sort of got to feeling bad for Cinnamon. Every few days, I'd visit the old cave, bringing them food or simple treats or presents. The old gang were happy to see me, and I was glad to see that the kids were coming along well. Each time I visited, I looked in on Cinnamon to see how she was doing. After she'd been there a bit more than a month, I started to notice a change in her attitude. In the beginning, she'd throw shit at me, yell a lot, and get run into the back of the cave by WrinkledEvil or SeeksWisdom. A couple of times I noticed that she was sporting a shiner, or a fat lip, and she'd be sullenly quiet at those times. I figured that WrinkledEvil was giving her the business. Now, I didn't like her at all, but hell, I just flat knew it had to be hard on her. She looked a complete mess. Her hair was in straggles, she'd gotten sunburned plenty, and she was as filthy as any of them. She stank too.

If she'd been apologetic, I would have gladly taken her back to camp. Instead, she was just insulting and mean every time I saw her. But, like I said ... about a month in, she started to just let me be when I visited. One time she brought me a plate of food while still managing to be civil to me. I was quietly thrilled to see the change.

"So Cinnamon. How are you doing?" I asked, eating only a little of the disgusting mess that they made here called stew.