Savages

9: Comfort and Joy

Judit was still feeling dog-tired and listless, but she forced herself to go out. Well, more accurately, circumstances forced her to go out. She needed to empty the toilet bucket, and asking Sannah to do it when it was her mess was a step too far.

She pulled on a big jumper and put her jeans over her woollen tights. She still couldn't fasten them up. She'd been constipated for ages—she sometimes wondered if her aversion to the bucket-toilet was making her subconsciously hold it all in—and her period was making her even more bloated.

Ugh. She was so unattractive out here. She hadn't been naked for so long that her body felt like a foreign country. She suddenly had a flashback of getting dressed up, putting on earrings and doing her hair for a night out in the Silver Bar, and she wanted all that. Music and makeup and sugary alcohol. Drinking and dancing and flirting. That pre-night-out feeling of infinite possibilities. She wanted it all.

She didn't have it, though. Instead she had to put on her bulky boots and coat, both still damp from yesterday's rain, and go out in the frozen mud with a bucketful of dag.

At least it's not raining any more, Judit thought as she carefully manoeuvred the bucket out of the blackhouse door.

It was a clear, cold day—the kind of day where the sky seems kilometres away, leaving a big empty hollow space above you. All the water had frozen solid, the ground a series of glassy lakes broken up by miniature mountain ranges of lumpy, rock-hard frozen mud. Long icicles glinted from the overhang of the roof.

Judit picked her way slowly along the sheer surfaces of the creaking puddles, terrified of slipping and dropping her bucket and its grim contents. She watched her feet carefully, the big milky bubbles sliding hypnotically under the ice as it moved beneath her weight.

She let out a sigh of relief when she reached the dag-pit without incident, her breath clouding, warming her nose. The empty bucket meant she could move faster on her way back, but the frozen, pitted mud and slippery ice still made it hard going.

"Judit!"

Judit looked up from her feet. Merle, Lintie and Hegri were standing in the little crop field by the polytunnel, looking at the cabbages. Lintie had shouted her, her gloved hand raised in greeting. Judit dumped her bucket and changed course, making her way across the crunchy white-crusted grass to see them.

"Hey," Lintie said warmly. "How're you doing? Thank God it's not raining any more, eh?" She smiled sunnily, her eyes glistening, little nose pink. "We were just talking,"—she gestured to Merle and Hegri at either side of her—"and I wanted to tell you. Me and Brock are going to have a party tonight at ours. We've decided. Like a midwinter thing. Hollymas. For the solstice."

"Is it the solstice?" Judit came to a stop by them.

"Who knows?" Merle said. "Who knows what day it is? It feels like skitting midwinter." She hunched her shoulders and shivered.

"Although I don't think the Natives celebrated the solstice so much," Hegri said, shrugging. "The really big party would be in February, for Imbolc."

"Alright, Rama," Merle growled at him. "Who cares what the Natives did? If we want a party, we have a party."

It was weird to think of dates and days. Everything except the weather just blurred into one out here. The only units of time that made sense to Judit were night and day, the changing of the seasons and her menstrual cycle.

"Do you think that means it's like, Hollymass?" Judit said. "Today?" That was even weirder, thinking of the biggest party of the year, back in Albia. The day that was ostensibly a religious festival, but seeing as no-one believed in God any more, was actually just about eating too much, getting drunk and spending crude digits on dag.