We told them of how people thought it repugnant to have their loved ones burn, and they asked if it was less repugnant to have them decay.

They were inconveniently reasonable, those women.
Well--that original bunch of girls set to work to clean up the place and make their living as best they could.

Some of the remaining slave women rendered invaluable service, teaching such trades as they knew.

They had such records as were then kept, all the tools and implements of the time, and a most fertile land to work in.
There were a handful of the younger matrons who had escaped slaughter, and a few babies were born after the cataclysm--but only two boys, and they both died.
For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened--one of these young women bore a child.

Of course they all thought there must be a man somewhere, but none was found.