*** Chapter 18 Day 25 The Family ***

The showers were separated for male and female, the boys went to one side and the girls went to the other. Maira entered the male side only to show them how to operate the plumbing for the shower and warned them that it was going to be cold, their later yells told her that the warnings had not been enough to prepare them for the chilling river water. Afterwards she went over the the girls’ side and helped them with the shower as well and stayed to help the older girl wash the kids using some of the makeshift soap aunt Elena had made.

She was one of the older women of the family and had been raised out in the countryside where sometimes things had to be made by hand, especially since she came from a very humble home. Fixing and making things was a common practice, making soap had been something she had to do on more than one occasion and that carried over now as a very important skill. Though simple to make using animal fat as one of the main ingredients, its importance couldn’t be ignored.

The boys were done first and were already dried and changed. They stood around nearby waiting for the girls to be done, when they did come out they found the boys surrounded by some of Santos’ family. They appeared to be talking excitedly and kept touching his tattoos.

“When did you get tats?” Maira asked. walking over to him with the other girls. Maira took in the figure of her cousin, he has always been chubby, but strong, ever since he had disappeared he had lost a lot of weight, his arms and legs were easily more accentuated, revealed by his lack of clothing except for a pair of shorts. He still had a gut, but he looked solid, as if he could break spines with a hug. Like many of the family his hair had grown long and he’d even grown out his beard and mustache a little, giving him a gruff look, but the biggest change was what was on his skin.

He was tatted on his back and pecs.

The artwork made her remember the tribal people of her family’s home country, but it was so well done that they looked like stone embedded into his skin. The ink was grey and rocky, but very faded. To Maira the ink was barely there, but to Solfrid who had seen his tattoos when they first found him, could tell that they had darkened considerably.

“I dunno,” he replied, “they just appeared one day.”

“Uh huh,” it was clear that the answer wasn’t good enough, but she was willing to drop it.

“Come on let’s go inside,” he said. The others who surrounded them started moving towards the house.

To Solfrid the structure of the building was so strange, it was made of some sort of colored stone, but the inside was surprisingly spacious, easily fitting most of Santos’ family as they bustled about.

The men gathered around the main dining table, Solfrid was surprised that no woman sat at that table, instead she was guided over to a secondary smaller table nearer the kitchen where she was sat down with the other members of her people. Only the older men sat at that table with the apparent exception of Santos who appeared to be the youngest by a long shot. They spoke in a language she could not understand.

***

“If what you say is true,” uncle George said,” what chances do we stand against something like that if a settlement much larger was destroyed by just one of them?”

Santos had recounted his adventure to them, of how he had survived and of where he had lived until he had to abandon the place along with what survivors remained. He told them of having to run for days, for countless days of just running, fighting, and living.

“For that I have an Idea,” Santos replied,” but, I am going to need the entire family’s support.”

“For what?” his father, Raphael, asked.

“I can make steel,” Santos replied.

“Steel?” His uncle asked.

“What do you mean?” his father asked.

“The river going up the lake is full of iron sand,” Santos explained. When I was with the people of the north I studied as much as I could with their smith, thankfully they allowed me to work with him for as long as I could. I have an understanding of how to make it, but I need help making the materials and the workshop to do it.”

“What kind of help?” his grandfather asked.

“I need the workshop with a forge to start,” Santos replied. “I can make the furnace on my own, but I am also going to need a lot of wood to make charcoal for the furnace. I need help gathering limestone as well.”

“We are busy with a lot of projects,” uncle Lucio pointed out. “What about those.”

“We can stop the ones that we can leave as they are,” Raphael suggested. “With all of us working on it we can get it done quickly, it didn’t even take us that long to set up the lumbershop.”

“We are lacking so many tools,” Santos pointed out. “I don’t imagine that in the time that I have been gone you guys have managed to make more of them. I can start working on things we need right now, like axes for example. Hammers and nails as well.”

“Are you sure that you can make these things?” uncle George asked.

“I have had some practice and the things I made didn’t turn out too bad,” he replied. “Given practice I can make them better.”

“I think we have come to an agreement,” grandfather said. “Let’s put these issues aside and start eating.”

As he said these words plates started being served.

*** The Family ***

Construction began the very day Santos returned. Plans were made and the borders of the workshop were staked out as work on gathering lumber was boosted. Santos and his uncle, Juan, started working on the furnace as the others worked on the construction. He needed his uncle’s help to build a watermill that could be used to power pumps to feed the furnace oxygen. It took a number of days of trial and error until there was a functioning pump. After its completion Santos began processing the raw iron right away.

During this time the kids and Solfrid helped by gathering the raw iron from the river and helped gather the stones needed for both the furnace and the forge. They tended to stay together as they could not communicate with anyone else aside from Santos.

By the time Santos produced his first globs of smelted iron, the workshop was largely completed, what was left was the warehouse addition and his family was even adding a small room that could be used as housing. There was not enough space in the home for more people to stay inside, so to prevent more crowding they suggested the room for Solfrid and the kids.

At first Santos had learned to blacksmith, because he saw the importance of the role and what it would mean for his family for him to learn the skill. Once his workshop was done he found himself working from the crack of dawn to dusk, resting only to allow the others to sleep, otherwise he would have continued clanging his hammer against steel. Due to this he started sleeping in the workshop’s room with Solfrid and Roald.

Roald, the young warrior, and Solfrid helped with forging the raw iron into useful tools, the kids helped mostly with gathering the needed resources. Solfrid aided more in turning wood into charcoal and feeding the furnace and forge, while Roald became Santos’ assistant in working the steel into something useful.

With a completed wall the nightly raids became easily manageable, rotations of defenders were set up so that not everyone would be tired during the day. The walls kept the creatures from easily climbing over, the task of the defenders was to knock them off the walls if they managed to climb.

In just a couple of weeks since Santos began producing steel the wall became impregnable with spike defenses and sturdy doors. With the production of spears the defenders could kill from a distance, the need to rush across the platform built behind the wall was lessened by the range of the weapon.