Rain pelted the wall of Jorik’s healing hut, while Arn stretched his hands towards his feet and winced as his torso contracted. He didn’t stretch far—he’d been told his broken ribs would take up to three months to heal. He examined the scar on his finger. Unlike his other scars, this one had seized up some of the skin around it, and, although Arn could still move it, a stiff ache stopped his full use of it.
He grabbed the animal hide shirt from nearby and shoved his head through the hole. While he’d been on the side of the suspended sleeping cot, he’d already laced up his sandals. The laces of his tunic tied easily together under each arm, and then he snatched up a woven sack from nearby. With memorized accuracy, he found the bowl of berries and tree fruit on the table, the preserved meat from the cupboard beside that, and two of the several canteens on the top shelf. He slung the pack over his shoulder and grabbed the walking stick from next to the doorway.
After only five steps through the typhoon, Arn heard someone calling to him. He looked over his shoulder, back to the two adjacent huts—Jorik stood in front of his, coincidentally having noticed or heard Arn’s departure. “Where are you going?” the man called. “You’re not stronger to go back to your life in the band!”
Arn wasn’t going back to that life. He’d spent two weeks cooped up in the hut still, after Stone Spear’s charge to him, and he wouldn’t spend another day there. He ignored Jorik, and kept walking as the wind tore at him and drenched him with warm rainwater.
“Your healing isn’t done!” Jorik cried.
Arn waved a hand behind his back and kept walking. He made it up the hill before he slipped once, but he instinctively caught his fall with his off-hand, the one with a gash wound and not the one that had been healing from broken fingers. He crested the hill and spotted the roof of his makeshift craftsman cabin down the next slope, five minutes from Jorik’s town-fringe huts. It took him a lot longer on the shadowed, storm-strewn slope. He got a length of kelp blown against his ankle and couldn’t remove it without starting to lose his balance, so he kept going.
The shack was in the same quality as Arn, when he got there. It was still standing, but it had been through a struggle for its life. He’d need to repair the roof in a few spots, and add some supports to the landward side. Despite this, he quickly got inside, splashing water across the floor as he parted the animal hide and stumbled in. He’d devised a normal entryway for the hut, while another of the walls was designed to be easily removable, when he was ready to move the boat out. He’d also selected this location because it was one of the few where a gentle slope reached almost the whole way to the waterfront, without the enormous cliffs used by the tribe for shelter. Of course, the danger was that the slope would turn to mud if the rain lasted too long. Arn prayed he’d hammered those corner supports deep enough into the earth.
“Food, freshwater…” he muttered, as he stocked his own shelf with the supplies he’d taken from Jorik’s place. He didn’t even look at the cursed watercraft he’d been building. Not yet. The burly raft still required a few days of work, and was primarily a test—what were the problems with taking one of the tribe’s traditional crafts over the Deep? It was the first step, and that overwhelming future of work was crushing to whatever of Arn’s spirits had been raised by the motivational words of his leader or the frustration at his time in Jorik’s hut.
The hammock had loosened and slid down the pole it’d been strung to, so he tied it back in place and checked its security. It’d hold him. Even if the raft wouldn’t, he could sleep easy tonight, at least. He laid back and closed his eyes.