Earthdaughter
By
L D Gerry
Copyright
1992
All Rights
Reserved
Chapter
Three
Interlude
Merann
lay awake for a time, thinking about everything that had happened that day.
They had traversed the Tanglethorn and then added two companions to
their number. She considered Dr.
Fitzhugh.
He
appeared to be someone who had seen a lot of misery in his short years.
She judged him to be no more than ten years older than herself, though
mentally aged beyond his years. Life
had treated him hard, indeed. No
one should have so much of an “education" so soon.
How
must it have been to know you had the wizard's gift, but could not utilize it
properly? How did life go at a
wizard's school? She had heard of
wizard's school's, but had never had the opportunity to enter one on business.
Wizards tended to stay away from women during their formative years.
They believed that a woman would only lend distraction to their
studies, and so females were banned in a ten-mile radius of such schools.
Or so Merann had heard. Female
practitioners of the Art were required to find their own way.
What
had it been like to be thrown out of school?
Merann had never truly been to school.
She had merely sat in on the lessons provided the men children at
Sweetstream. Such lessons only
concerned such things as the care of livestock, planting and harvesting of
crops and other useful agricultural knowledge.
Most people in her village were unable to read, or could only sound
things out, which was how Merann read. Anna
Treewarden had taught her daughter the little she knew, in the hope that
Merann would have a better life for herself with such magical knowledge as
that.
She
surmised that Dr. Fitzhugh's knowledge had been as equally hard-won.
She had only known a few people like him.
Merann
had been found at the gateway to her village by her adoptive mother, Anna
Treewarden, early one morning on the eve of Amara's Day, lying in a wool-lined
rush basket, swathed in soft blankets. Anna
had known in an instant that the child was special, as only one in every
thousand infants had red hair, and due to the high infant mortality of most
rural villages, those numbers were reduced even more.
Anna
and Seagal Treewarden had been childless for all of their twenty-year
marriage, and had given up on children of their own.
Seagal Treewarden blamed their childlessness on himself, thinking that
his hard work had in some way made him infertile.
He never blamed their lack on Anna, whom he loved to distraction.
There
had been no question of who would raise the unusually red-haired babe when the
time came. Anna had instantly
fallen in love with the child and Seagal considered her the gift of Amara, the
Sun. So it was only natural that
the child be named Merann, the Mer being a form of the second syllable of
Amara, and Ann from her mother, as most firstborn children bore a name
indicative of his or her parentage.