Untitled NaNoWriMo Novel Part 2

Sorry guys it gets a bit shitty and rushed from now on. I’ve started panicking

Part 2

Tarianna lived in her circular room now. She had a window that looked over the sea. It couldn’t be opened by Tarianna. It has stone walls that ran round and round. On the wall above her iron cot hung a rug that her mother had made for her. All of the other girls in all of the other towers had their rugs made by their sisters, taught by their mothers, rugs upon rugs, covering the walls, the floors, the ceilings. It was forbidden to depict women, so the rugs showed men: men walking, fishing, sailing, farming, learning, reading, and – most popularly – turning metal into gold. They showed animals and plants and the sun and the moon and – most popularly – the sea. Tarianna had just one, a rug her mother made her showing a man standing in a field of the yellowest wheat. Tarianna had no sisters, had no brothers. She was an only child. Her mother cried for five days and five nights with relief when Tarianna was not an ugly girl. Her mother cried for a further five days and five nights when Tarianna started getting older, her hair golder, her face prettier. At 13, when Tarianna awoke in her bed at home with sticky brown mess on her sheets and the inside of her legs, her mother cried for a final five days and five nights. Tarianna was not just pretty, she was the prettiest girl in the Top. Her hair, waist-length and thick and as gold as her father’s wheat, made her mother cry for one of the days, her eyes, another, her lips, one more, her pretty little nose, yet another, and her figure, her perfectly proportioned figure (long legs, straight back, slender bones) the final day and night. Tarianna was perfect. Tarianna was her father’s only livelihood, with no more daughters to rely upon and no sons to marry well and keep the farm. Her beauty could secure her the best suitor with the strongest arms and the broadest back and the eyes that smiled the most, and her mother cried for five days and five nights that, thankfully, the prettiness of all the daughters she should have had (for it was not her that couldn’t have children, her husband – the wheat farmer – never waited until he was inside her before he came) was concentrated in the slender bones and the golden hair of one girl. One girl in one room in one tower.

 

Tarianna lived in her circular room now. As well as her iron bed, her cuffs, her harp and her mother’s rug, she had a bedpan, a wash basin, a pair of heavy curtains, a wardrobe full of heavy dresses and heavy shoes and heavy hats, a rocking chair in which she was able to sit and think, and in which visitors sat, and a door without a key. Only her visitors, her mother and Tutorette M, had a key. It was a heavy door, and it closed with a heavy thud and left the air in the room heavy. Even the harp sounded heavy in a circular room made of heavy stone filled with heavy things. Tarianna felt heavy.

At the age of 18, her mother came to visit and to change the bedpan and to uncuff Tarianna from her iron cot. Her mother looked heavy, heavy with clothing and with fat and with sadness.

“Tarianna, a suitor came over the sea for you.”

Tarianna felt an electric jump in the bottom of her stomach. A suitor came over the sea for her. A suitor. She imagined him golden haired and golden clothed, standing like an angel or a hero in a field of golden wheat, like the man in the rug above her bed that walked her dreams at night. A suitor that would save her from a life in a circular room and a life chained to a bed. A new life with a suitor in a square room, tied to a bed, with daughters and food and the weaving of new rugs.

“Tarianna, your suitor died.”

–

In the town at the Top, the law is as follows:

At birth, a female is betrothed to a male offspring of a neighbour, after all appropriate lineage checks are undertaken by clerk assigned to said neighbourhood. If lineage checks are suitable, female and male are legally betrothed.

When young female comes of age, she is installed in her adolescent holding room until her training for womanhood is complete, and she has learnt all necessary tools for being a successful wife and daughter-bearer, inc. some but not all of these skills: music, craft, art (watercolour not oil, domestic scenes not history), calligraphy, song, beauty (the proper and virtuous application of make up, clothing, hair design, footwear, appropriate dress for appropriate occasion), poise, dance, etiquette.

During adolescent training, the male remains situated in the town at the Top, and undergoes similar vocational and practical training administered by his father and/or appropriate male members of the town establishment, depending on proposed career and by law including basic male training including personal fitness, strength, building and sailing. When this is complete, he sails along the Top Shore from Bay A to Bay B (the bay situated nearest to the adolescent holding room site) and becomes an official suitor. He may then make a formal plea to the mother of the female, and the window of the holding room will be opened, enabling official suitor to enter the room and end terms of initial betrothal.

By law, the female adolescent is not to be informed of these details, whereas the male adolescent is to be minutely briefed and required to sign a copy of the betrothal contract and appropriate legal documents at age 18.

If either betrothed dies before betrothal is complete, the remaining surviving partner must be assigned to a new betrothed (can include spare offspring – same or different family depending on lineage checks – widowed betrothed, widowed married) as soon as possible, following appropriate lineage checks. If no new betrothed is to be found, remaining surviving partner must be considered for new career. If no new career is to be found, remaining surviving partner must be considered for exile.

The terms in this document are official and legally binding.

Signed,

The Chief of the Top

X

–

The Chief was not a lawyer. He was not even a politician. He didn’t seem to realise only doctors and apprentices of doctors and those who remembered before could read. He didn’t seem to realise that his pages and pages of ‘legal binding contract documents’ written in words he thought contracts were written in, with phrases he thought lawyers would use, with a quill pen he felt like a lawyer using, were read by no-one except himself and the men he kept around him in his mansion laboratory, nodding head yes men who had to remind him to wash and eat and dress. The Chief didn’t realise anything aside from the fact he didn’t believe turning metal into gold was possible, he knew it. With a brain addled through long exposure to mercury, it is amazing his invented rules and traditions and laws managed to pass into society at the Top. But pass they did, and the people obeyed. Tarianna’s suitor had died, and her parents needed to find her a new one as soon as possible. The only alternative career for a single woman of 18 was at the Bottom.