Fourth Sunday of Spring

I wish that Sunday could be more like it is in the stories Teacher read us last week about the history of ancient worlds, where people thought it was sinful to work. Mother thinks it is sinful not to work, at any time, for any reason. If she could find a way for us to work in our sleep, I think she would. I know why she does it—she does not like being poor, and neither do I—but I still wish I had a little more time to myself. Oh well, I must be content with what I have. That is all anyone can do.

My name is Katia Manton and this is my book. I am brown all over, hair and eyes and skin, and I live with my mother Ella in the village of Renth in the land of Stomal on the world of Trycanta. Though I am tall and strong and fool many people who do not know me, I am only in my seventeenth year. My birthday of that number is coming in two more Sundays.

Teacher read us a different story two years ago, when we were studying all the different ways people have thought about magic through history. In it, a seventeenth birthday was very special, the difference between being a child and being an adult. A boy who turned seventeen most often received a small clock to carry in his pocket. The story did not mention what a girl usually got. If she had a mother like mine, it was extra chores, so that she did not start thinking she was special just because it was the day she happened to be born.

Mother does love me, I know. It is only what I mean that she hates. My father did not want children at all, and said if he had to have one it had better be a boy. He went away the day I was born. We have never seen him since. All I have from him is his name and his eyes, or so Mother says. The eyes are not very useful, being far-seeing and not good for indoor work, and the name only makes me sad and Mother angry.

In school I am best at anything to do with stories. I love stories because their endings are either happy or sad but beautiful. A few stories have sad and ugly endings, but they do not get told very much. People have too much of that in their own lives to want it in their stories too.

Outside of school I do what I am told, usually the outdoor chores that a father or a brother would do if I had either. I care for the goats, so we will have milk, and the chickens, so we will have eggs, and the rabbits, so Mother will have the soft, soft wool to spin into the yarn she sells to rich women in places far away. Other women in other villages make yarn like my mother’s, but it is not as fine and even, so the rich women come back to us again and again.

I should not say “us,” for I have nothing to do with the yarn. Mother has tried and tried to teach me to spin, but my hands are clumsy at that as they are at any other task involving cloth. I can cook and clean and weed a garden, I can fix a damaged chair and fetch a chicken out of a tree, but like the girl in the tale of the Three Aunties, I cannot sew nor weave nor spin. Mother makes all our clothing.

With my far-seeing eyes and my long legs, I prefer being outside to being in. Even in the wintertime, I must go out every day, if it is only to stick my nose between the shutters and smell the fresh air. Mother huddles by the fire and vows I will catch my death, but that is silly. Sickness comes from tiny things that live in the air or the water, not from being too cold, unless you count frostbite and that is not a sickness exactly, just a thing that happens.

Teacher says if I love stories so much, I must learn to tell them neatly, and looking back on my page, I do not think I have made a good beginning. I ramble from one thought to the next, going on and on about my very commonplace life and what I like and do not like, what I know and do not know. If someone from a faraway place or another time picked up my book, she might find it interesting to see how we live in Renth in this year 498 After Settlement (the great celebration for two years from now is already being planned) but no one else would think it worth noticing. How can I change that? I must think more on it.

Mother is calling. I will write again later.

Fourth Monday of Spring

I hurried this morning and finished my chores so that I would have some time after school to keep writing in this book. It is exciting to see the words on the page, as if I were a character in my own story and could shape my own destiny by what I wrote.

Some stories say that the wild greatcats who live in the grasslands can do exactly that, that they are magicians with words and can change the world by speaking or singing just one phrase, but greatcats are only animals and animals cannot speak. I do not believe they are monsters, though, as many of my schoolmates do. Animals live according to their natures, and the nature of greatcats is carnivorous. That is a long word which means greatcats eat only the flesh of other creatures.

If a taste for flesh makes a creature a monster, most of Renth qualifies. Most families keep rabbits, not for their fur like my mother’s but for their meat. Old chickens who no longer lay go into the pot every night, and pigs fatten up yearly for butchering in the fall. Of course, we eat grains and vegetables as well in Renth, but humans are different from greatcats and our bodies need different things. The dragons who live in the forests of the east go to the other extreme and cannot eat meat at all. The long word for this is herbivorous.

I fear the long word for this entry in my book is uninteresting, but I must write these things down to keep them straight in my mind before I record the true reason my neighbors think that greatcats are monsters. It is not that greatcats eat flesh, but that they eat human flesh. At least, that is what everyone says in Renth. But everyone in Renth also says that my mother was a bad woman and that she was not truly married to my father. By everyone I mean the adults. The children have not said it since I got big enough to fight.

Because of what the children and their parents think about my mother, and because I can beat even the older boys in throwing stones and running races and leaping fences and rocks, I have no real friends. I had one once, a girl just my age named Martha. We were friends from the time we were seven years old until the time we were twelve, and I miss her even today. Writing in this book is the closest I have ever come to talking with her again, and the book cannot answer my questions or ask me questions of its own. I almost wish it could, except that might frighten me if it happened, so I will not wish.

Though Martha has been gone for a long time, I remember her very well. With her long soft black hair and her bright clear eyes that were blue or gray or no color at all depending on the time of day and the mood she was in, she was much more beautiful than I am, though she claimed she wished for my height (I was tall even at twelve). Her father was a shepherd, and her mother wove good cloth along with caring for the house. Martha was their only child and they let her do things many mothers in Renth would not let their daughters do, such as be friends with me. Such as walk out in the grasslands alone in the early morning. And one morning Martha went walking and did not come home.

Everyone searched for days, but there was no trace of my friend. One boy claimed he had seen a greatcat the day before she vanished, and soon people were saying she had been taken by the greatcats. That changed to eaten by the greatcats with the passing of the weeks, and today Martha Collins is nothing but a scare-story that mothers and big sisters use to warn the littlest ones to stay nearby.

Martha’s parents did not stay in Renth. They said it was because there was better work in places they could not have taken a child, but I think they were too sad to stay here, where Martha had lived and where she disappeared. They said they would write me a letter when they found a new home, but I never received one. It may have been lost, or perhaps it was never sent. These things happen.

I was sorry to see Martha’s parents go away. Mrs. Collins taught me most of what I know about cooking and guided me through the only creditable weaving I have ever done, a small blanket for my mother’s bed. Mr. Collins told me the meanings of the things the boys shouted at me and taught me where and how to hit them to make them stop shouting. Both of them called me their second daughter and said I had been their only comfort through losing Martha, and the day they left they told me they loved me. I nodded my head, and they knew that meant I felt the same way, though I could not say it for fear of crying.

I did love the Collinses, and I still do, wherever they are in this world, but I must stay with my mother. She loves me too, and I love her. It may not be the same kind of love the other women in Renth give their children and the children give back, but it is the kind we have and we will do what we can with it.

I sometimes daydream about a great change in my life, or any sort of change at all. Most often it is going away from Mother, going to the big city to make my fortune. But the daydream stops right there, because what can I do that would be any use in a big city? I am sure there are hundreds of people already there who can cook and clean and mend furniture just as well as I can, and there are no chickens or goats to tend in a city. Nor will there be gardens to weed, unless they are small backyard gardens, and the women of the city can care for those themselves.

There was some thought in my mind, when Teacher gave me this blank book as a prize for writing the best story of any of the older students, that I could use it to practice my handwriting. I have heard people with clear handwriting are needed in cities. Still, I will need to know a great deal more than that before I go running off to an unknown future. What I have here in Renth with Mother is not always pleasant, but it is safe and secure, and my needs are provided for. I will not risk it unless I must.

But oh, how I wish something would change for me!

Fourth Wednesday of Spring

Something is changing. I have no more time to write. I am needed to tend one of the fires at the edge of town and I dare not take my book for fear of sparks. I will write more when I return if Mother will let me burn a candle so late—