CHAPTER 15 — Smekbryll
STEPHANIE
Today marks day three: Smekbryll, the honeymoon period where a new wife shares her husband’s bed ends, and I’m installed in my own room. The bed here is just as big as Roarg’s, and there’s additional storage space for clothes and even shelves for books and trinkets.
“So…” I start, almost at a loss for words as Ulda and Namak?ga put fresh sheets on a mattress that me and Joktepitha spent the morning filling with fresh chicken feathers.
Oh yeah. That was fun.
For two hours after breakfast, we scrubbed bars of homemade soap over every inch of this super-thick twill bag called a tick, building up a waxy layer on the fabric, and when I asked Joktepitha why we were doing this, she told me it was because feathers will travel out, their quills poking through the ticking and eventually working their way out and escaping.
Which is kind of a creepy thought, when you think about it.
I no more than thought that when she added that the soap barrier will also help lock in any feather mites that hadn’t already been killed in their original scalding.
Major yay.
With freshly applied sheets, the bed looks homey and welcoming. I turn to my three sisterwife guides. “How does this work, exactly?”
Namak?ga squints at me. Ulda gives me what I’m going to stop classifying as a glare because she does it all the time. I’m starting to believe she’s got permanent ROF: Resting Orc Face. “How does what work?” Namak?ga asks.
Joktepitha grins and waves to the bed like she’s Vanna White. “You open your skinny thighs—”
I hold up a hand. “Okay, you don’t get to answer anymore.” I point to Ulda and Namak?ga. “Do we get a rotation chart?”
“A what?” Ulda asks in an affronted tone.
I roll my hands in the air. “Like how do we determine who entertains the husband?”
Namak?ga makes a Bah! noise, like this is inconsequential. “Roarg will seek each of us out.”
“Eh. You’ll probably have him keeping you warm most nights,” Joktepitha adds, clearly disregarding my order for her not to help anymore.
And it’s a perfectly acceptable answer, until she adds, “It’s a good thing he did as we asked and started covering your mouth.
You scream like he’s killing you and now you’re closer to our rooms.”
I wrap my hand around my eyes and groan.
“He usually shares his pleasure with each of us once a day,” Ulda informs me.
“Joktepitha is right about the nights. He’s almost certainly going to spend the majority with you while Namak?ga and I are so heavily pregnant, and Joktepitha is too tired to attend to him all night long.
Here.” She pokes me with something. “Quit fooling around. Take this.”
I drop my hand from my eyes to find the round-edged foreign object being pressed into the flesh of my upper arm is an intricately carved ivory mirror. Haltingly, I accept it, raising it up in front of me.
And I see my face tattoos for the first time.
“Whoa…” I utter, awed.
The ink surrounds my eyes, emphasizing them boldly.
Two triangles peak above my eyebrows, and dark lines slide from each of my tear ducts, leaking down my face and following outside of my mouth, ending in a thick black smudge on either side of my chin.
(And of course, a mighty fist clutching a hammer is emblazoned across my cheek. Subtle.)
“I’m a freaking cheetah,” I marvel.
Ulda’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean you’re a cheater?”
I wave at my face. “No, no—a cheetah. A cat. A spotted safari cat who cried off half their mascara.”
Joktepitha frowns thoughtfully, and Namak?ga waves at me. “You were crying and carrying on. Blademan gave you pretty tear-streak designs.”
I let my wrist go limp, which twists the mirror away from my face so I’m not obstructed at all when I give her a dead stare. “Thanks.”
Joktepitha points to my ink. “Does it really matter? Your face looks amazing.”
Feeling a little mollified at how much she sounds like she means this, I allow myself to admit that it does look pretty badass. Never in a million years would I have ever made face markings permanent, but at least they do look cool, like Celtic flavored Valkyrie war paint.
My eyes jump back to the sisterwives. “By the way. Why are some of your words not English?”
“English?”
“What I came here speaking. What you guys speak almost all the time, except for words like tres?s, kwa?ara—”
“Those are leftovers from the Elder tongue. Every kingdom had their own language, but perhaps a century ago, it was decided that every kingdom would speak in a common language.”
“So you chose English?”
“Everyone was forced to speak the language of the Dragonkind,” she says flatly.
“Those guys again, yeesh. What’s with your necklaces?”
She gives me a puzzled look.
“The—” I grimace. “Teeth. Why do you and Namak?ga have part of someone’s mouth around your neck?”
“Oh. A goblin insulted me once. And so our husband made me a gift of his teeth.”
“WOW. When Roarg gives gifts…”
She nods in seeming understanding. “He gives the best, yes.”
“Yep. That was what I was going to say.” Absently, I place my hand on my pelvis.
And maybe I grimace or something, because Ulda asks sharply, “What’s wrong?”
I follow her gaze to my hand, which is now a fist against my lower stomach.
I relax my hand, then my stance. “Oh. A cramp. It’s just about that time of the month.
I’m afraid to ask, but I’ve probably only got a little time to prepare myself so.
.. what do the wonderfully advanced inhabitants of Ogemaw do for bleeding around here? ”
Her eyes widen, and she turns her head so one of her pointed ears is closer to me, like maybe she didn’t hear me correctly. “Bleeding?”
“Yeah. I’m getting my period.” When her expression doesn’t change, my gaze jumps to Namak?ga, who looks equally at a loss, and then Joktepitha, who’s staring at me like I’m an alien.
I frown at them all and I roll my hand in the air. “It’s my time of the month, where part of my uterus escapes my body in a bloody tide. We call it womanly woes. Monthly bleeding. Down Under buffet time for Vampires—”
Ulda stalks forward and claps her hand over my mouth, staring at me like I’m the weirdest thing she’s ever encountered. “You mean… you shed blood once a moon cycle? Like a bat?”
Affronted, I gape at her. “Like a what?”
“Bats. Flying rodents. They bleed on cycles.” She eyes me like I could bust out in tiny wings and flap away at any second. “As do shrews.”
“Shrews? You mean those creepy mouse things?”
“And I think dire wolves…” she adds thoughtfully.
“Yes!” Namak?ga agrees. “That’s right. Dire Wolf bitches bleed.”
“Wowwww,” I say, then catch my tongue between my teeth as I stare at the ceiling. “I’m being compared to bats and bitches. I’m trying not to be offended.”
“Why be offended?” Joktepitha asks. “Surely the bats and bitches aren’t.” She winks at me. “You little menstrual mouse-shrew, you.”
I point at her. “No more from you. Your helping privileges are revoked, remember?”
She smiles at me. “You think so?”
Ulda’s face is pinched, and she’s giving me a pitying look. “I’ll fetch you some rags.”
I grimace. “Rags? Really?”
“Well, what else would you use? The only reason a woman has blood issuing from between her legs here in the Orcian kingdom is because she’s recently given birth. And for soaking up that, we use rags.”
“I meant thank you,” I tell her glumly. Then I peer at the three of them. “How the heck do your bodies work if you don’t menstruate?”
“We’re induced ovulators,” Namak?ga shares.
I make a face. “What is that?”
Her lips quirk, showing off her tusks. “We only ovulate if we’re plowed.”
I blink at her. “Say again?”
Namak?ga pats my arm. “It’s the same for many living things. Camels, cats, wolverines, rabbits… and Orcs. Orc women need only to receive stimulation and seed in order to prepare for fertilization.”
“Huh,” I say, mouth hanging open. “You just… have sex and boom, you’re pregnant every time, any time?”
“Any time,” Joktepitha confirms with a crooked smile, looking me up and down. “When brats come of age, we call this talk we’re having koekjes and kúkrs.”
I can’t help but smile wryly. “Humans in my corner of the world call our coming-of-age talk ‘the birds and the bees.’ But cookies and cocks, my, that’s downright wholesome.”
Joktepitha’s smile widens to a full-out grin. “Perhaps next time we have a talk, it will come about because you have seed that’s taken root.”
I sputter.
Ulda presses a stack of fabric scraps into my hands. I was so busy with my penis and cookies lesson that I didn’t notice that she left. “Here.”
“Thanks,” I manage woodenly, staring down at what I’m going to be forced to stuff my panties with for the next five to seven days.
“I guess I’m about to do as the Orcians do,” I say with a sigh.
Sure, they use these after babies and not in between, but same result: I’m going to be soaking up flow with rags. How quaint.
There’s a metallic thunk.
We all swivel our heads to find a shining golden ZULDANA coin on the floorboards.
I look at each of the sisterwives. “When this game said it wanted me to learn your ways, it wasn’t messing around.”
***
My period hits before lunch. P.S., stuffing rags in your underwear is just… strange. Sigh.
After a long day where I washed clothes in a tub—
Using something called a washing dolly: basically a set of wooden handles pegged into a mop stick jammed into a small wooden stool. The stool acts as a multi-legged agitator, and I had to twirl it and jerk it up and down and basically complete a workout routine just to get all our clothes clean.
Then I turned a crank while feeding the rinsed clothes through a set of fat wooden rollers that squeezed the water out of them.
(Newly learned pro tip? If you accidentally feed your fingers between the rollers while you’re shoving clothes in, you damn near break your fingers. Washing clothes should never, never be called women’s work—it should heretofore be known as WARRIOR WORK.)