First lessons

by Lina J. Potter

  “I don’t want to!” she complained. “Leave me alone, Nanny!”

  Porridge and spoon fly off the table, but, instead of boxing her ears like Aliya would have been tempted to do, the nanny picks her up and continues to plead with her. “Lily, my dear, my angel…”

  Then the picture changes.

  Grown-up Lilian is watching a dream as if it were a movie on television. She sees the same girl at five, at seven, at ten… She throws tantrums, tries on new dresses, argues, demands something, hits a servant in the face, screams at a tired old man.

  Somehow, Aliya knew that the old man is Lilian’s father. The dream was unpleasant, but Aliya couldn’t turn it off. Then the picture changed, swimming up out of a dark pool of memories.

  “Daughter, the Earl of Earton has asked for your hand in marriage.”

  “The earl?”

  “Yes. I have decided to give my consent.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you to ask my opinion? Is he old and horrible?”

  “The earl is young and very handsome.”

  That doesn’t stop her; she yells and throws something that looks like a vase. Her father holds firm. The picture changed again.

  An engagement party. She saw a handsome young man with long, dark hair, bright blue eyes, and a hard, muscular body… She also saw distaste in his eyes. He bent down to hand her a bouquet of flowers. He said something to her. Her heart is racing so fast she’s afraid he can hear it.

  Is this really my husband? To have and to hold, for better and for worse…

  The young man’s lips touched her plump hand. Her cheeks grew suspiciously warm. But his eyes remained cold and unemotional. He just didn’t care about any of this. He was indifferent, and that scared her.

  She was also scared of the wedding night. When the time came, she blew out all the candles. Her young husband stubbed his toe on a piece of furniture and cursed. Then he lights a candle.

  “Please don’t,” she begged him.

  “Why? Do you think being in the dark will give me feelings for you?”

  She froze. Her husband went on, his tone lethal. “I’m not attracted to you in the least, but I have to have an heir. Your job is to lie still and keep your mouth shut. Maybe that way, I won’t feel so nauseous.”

  She couldn’t remember what came next. She just remembered the humiliation… and the sharp pain between her legs that she felt after each visit from her husband.

  She was like a second-rate purebred mare—not a person, not a lover, not even a wife.

  She was just a vessel he would use to obtain an heir.

  Icy, black despair rolled over her.

  At first, Aliya didn’t understand what the dreams were. Then it hit her. Her mind was her own, but she still had Lilian’s memories, knowledge, habits, reflexes… Two people had merged into one. Aliya was the stronger of the two, and she was used to assimilating large amounts of information, so she simply assimilated Lilian Earton’s memory.

  It was the memory of an unhappy young woman who simply wanted a family and children and to be loved by her husband, but was met with cold contempt instead.

  On the tenth night, Aliya dreamed about her accident in shocking clarity. She heard the crunch and saw the column of flames rising into the sky from the wreckage. Then, she saw her parents. Her father was wearing his dress uniform, and her mother was young and beautiful. They looked at her with reproach, displeased with her. Aliya was upset, wondering what she had done.

  Then she understood. They hadn’t raised her to just give up and die; they wanted more for her. They were dead, but she was alive.

  She was finally truly convinced that she could do this. The woman who had gotten in bed the night before had been confused, trying to figure out what had happened to her and where she was, but the woman who woke up in the morning was decisive. She put her feet firmly on the floor and launched a mission to change her life.

  ***

  Aliya began by studying her new world. At night, she wandered through the house to discover where everything was, hiding whenever she heard servants near. In the early morning, she slept and watched Lilian Earton’s dreams. She had fewer of them now, and they had lost their bright colors and drifted away from her, just like Lilian was drifting away. In the evening, Aliya listened to her nanny, Martha, tell stories.

  Through her wanderings, Aliya learned that Earton Castle was built in the shape of a letter H lying on its back. The center bar of the H was the largest part of the castle. The first floor had an enormous hall, a ballroom, a smaller hall and a dining room. The upper right end of the castle held a library, the earl’s study, a music room for the ladies, and a game room for when the weather was bad. This part of the castle was obviously for guests and had a door that led to a porch overlooking the garden.

  The kitchen was on the lower right end of the castle. On the first floor were the rooms where the servants did their work, as well as the entrance to the cellar and storerooms, where valuables, such as fabric and furniture, were kept. The servants’ bedrooms were on the second floor.

  The lower left arm was divided into a portrait gallery, a knight’s hall and armory on the first floor, and rooms for guests on the first and second floors. The upper left arm of the castle belonged entirely to the family. The castle’s four arms were only connected through its center, with gorgeous, massive wooden staircases leading to the second floor of each arm.

  The whole place needed a good cleaning, in her opinion. The curtains hadn’t been washed in ages, there was dust everywhere, and spiders had taken over all the quiet corners. So what if the ceilings are fifteen feet high? Haven’t they invented ladders yet? She would have to see about that.

  Several centuries’ worth of soot had accumulated on those high ceilings, and there were rooms in the castle where the corners smelled suspiciously of urine. Do they not make it to the toilet in time, or do they just not care? What an aristocratic pigsty!

  When Aliya finally found the actual privy, she almost vomited. She located it by following the smell, which was strong enough to knock out a fly. She opened the door and saw a room with a hole in the floor. No running water, no nothing. Whatever went into the hole ran through a stone pipe into a ditch outside. Aliya decided she would have to do something about that, too.

  She noticed that most of the doors in the castle were unlocked and that the few locks being used were primitive. The lock on the door leading to the storerooms was an ancient hunk of metal, but after studying it, Aliya figured any ten-year-old with the nerve could open it using a pen. The only danger was the lock’s weight; if you dropped it on your foot, you’d need crutches the rest of your life.

  She wasn’t interested in the storerooms behind the locked door; she wanted to find the library. Aliya had always valued a good education, and she would need to know how to write and count according to local custom in order to avoid being taken advantage of. She had things to accomplish, so she was relieved when she finally found what she sought.

  Her relief didn’t last long. She reached for a book and gasped in horror. She reached for a second book, and then a third. They were all manuscripts written on parchment. She opened as many books as she could; first on one shelf, then the next, as far up as she could reach. A stash of unused parchment got her hopes up, but they fell again when she found a goose feather dipped in ink. One more item hit her to-do list: find a blacksmith and get some pens made.

  The best thing she discovered in the library was that she could read the local language. She was as slow as a first-grader, but she could read. That was important.

  The next book she laid her hands on had an intriguing title: “A Detailed Description of the Lands, People and Customs of the World, Made by the Humble Kalerius of Ativerna.” That sounds useful. She hoped the book wasn’t a work of fiction, like Gulliver’s Travels. And she hoped Lilian’s brain was capable of reading a whole book.

  Aliya could tell that her host didn’t like to study. Lilian preferred embroidering with gold thread
. Taking a deep breath, Aliya set the geography book aside. She would read it later. She also slipped a few pieces of parchment into the book, but not too many, so that no one would notice.

  Further digging on the same shelf failed to turn up anything else useful, but Aliya decided she had enough for now. The book would teach her things she couldn’t find out from her nanny’s stories. She would make this new brain of hers work harder than it ever had before. After spending so much time in close study of Lilian Earton’s lazy, half-empty mind, Aliya decided that she couldn’t really blame the woman’s husband for staying away.

  There was no sign that the woman had ever read anything—books, newspapers, or even letters. She knew some prayers by heart, but that was it. I wonder how her husband stays awake when she talks to him.

  She stopped. The unfairness of the situation was obvious. Lilian never had a chance to get even a basic education. Family and custom kept her at home working on her embroidery, so it was no surprise if people found her boring. From her nanny’s conversation, Aliya knew that the Earl felt that way; he stayed well away from his ancestral home and his wife. Aliya felt her hands clench into fists. She didn’t care if that Earl husband of hers held all the titles in the kingdom; he’d need a dentist after she got in a room with him. And then she’d divorce him.

  But for the time being, she had work to do.

  The stove in Aliya’s room was always fired up, keeping the room hot as a greenhouse. She decided that pieces of coal would make better writing tools than feathers that always needed sharpening. Note to self: invent pencil.

  ***

  Aliya lived like that for two weeks. The book she had found turned out to be a treasure chest of information. Good old Kalerius gave a thorough run-down of all the countries in her new world and described the people who lived in them. Some of it was probably lies, but she was grateful to at least have the geography under her belt.

  It became clear that her fears were justified; this world was stuck in the Middle Ages. They hadn’t even invented gunpowder. Aliya knew that gunpowder was made of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate. She also knew how to prepare nitroglycerine, but she decided to keep that information to herself. A little less civilization would mean a much healthier planet; that’s a fact. In her previous life, Aliya had read somewhere that technology should never be allowed to outrun morality. Otherwise, the clock will strike Armageddon, and both God and the Devil will turn tail and run.

  Reading further in her new geography book, Aliya realized that glass was so expensive that no one had ever tried making mirrors out of it. They didn’t even have tools for cutting glass properly. She smiled to herself. Not all progress led to war and destruction, and not all inventions could be used for murder. She would have to be careful what she shared with this world. She couldn’t do everything for them, but she did have medicine on her side. They didn’t have surgeons in her new world, and without her help, it might be another five hundred (or more) years before they learned how to operate on the human body.

  She read on. Wars were fought the old-fashioned way, with bows and arrows and catapults. Soldiers were wounded by the cartload, and most of them died, even if their wounds could have been treated easily on Earth. That was sad, but it meant that a good doctor would always be popular. Aliya didn’t plan to stick with the Earl of Earton long, so it was nice to know that she could earn money treating patients.

  Industry was non-existent, and most people were subsistence farmers. She liked that because it meant that there were no factories or pollution. When people traveled by sea, they used sailboats. When they traveled by land, they rode horses. They had wagons and carriages, judging by the drawings in her book, but Aliya thought they looked like coffins on wheels. Shock absorbers? Not invented yet. There wasn’t much she could do about that. Medical school was great for learning how to stitch people up, but Aliya wasn’t even sure what shock absorbers should look like.

  Backwardness wasn’t always a good thing. There were no factories, but there were also no schools. Most people were illiterate. Aliya decided to work on opening schools for the children of Earton—or at least preschools that would teach them to read and count. Her schools would run in the winter since the farm families would need their children to help in the fields in the summer. Those same farm families, she read, had to spend two out of every ten days working in their lord’s fields.

  House servants were a different caste. Aliya’s castle had eight of them. Martha was both her nanny and her servant, and apparently, she had served Lilian since she was born. Martha loved her like a daughter, and Aliya appreciated her for it. The three housemaids, Mary, Sara, and Ilona, bustled around cleaning all day, but the castle never seemed to get any cleaner. There were three manservants, Jean, Peter, and Alex, and three grooms who lived in the stables. One of them—Jacques—was a brother of Jean. The other two were Claus and Rene.

  Then, there was the cook, Tara. She was the estate Comptroller’s wife, and she made awful food. Her husband’s name was Etor. It seemed like a small crew for such a big castle and estate. Aliya would reform how the estate was run once she got her bearings. For the time being, she stuck to her reading.

  Kalerius, the geographer, hadn’t thought to put a map in his book, but Aliya was able to deduce some important facts from the text. The mainland (of which there was only one because this particular world was flat) was made up of eight nations.

  Ativerna was where Aliya now lived. She felt almost patriotic about it. Her nearest neighbors were Wellster and Ivernea. Avesterra was next to Ivernea, and Elvana shared borders with Wellster and Avesterra. There were no elves in Elvana, as far as she could tell. Darcom bordered on Avesterra and Elvana. Not far from the shores of Ativerna, was the island nation of Virma. Aliya thought the people of Virma sounded like Vikings from back home. The local climate was interesting. Virma bore the brunt of the cold, but even in Ativerna, they had a long, four-month winter and a short summer. Wellster and Ivernea had slightly better weather. Elvana and Avesterra were the warmest countries. Aliya wondered why. The weather left the soil poor.

  At the far end of the large continent, was the Vari Desert, which was governed by the Vari Khanganat. The Vari people were nomads since nothing grew in the desert.

  Kalerius had never visited the eighth nation, which was on the other side of a steep mountain range. He simply stated that Elvana was bordered to its west by high mountains. There were rumors, he wrote, of people living beyond the mountains, but most rumors were lies Kalerius would know. He also hinted that there might be a large island somewhere past the Vari Desert, but the details were sketchy. Aliya longed for some satellite images.

  ***

  Once she finished the book on geography, Aliya visited the library again and chose some religious literature. I need to know what these people believe. The huge book, bound in a red velvet cover and entitled, The Book of Radiance, turned out to be very much like the Bible. Aliya wondered at that for a while but then decided that people who don’t want to believe that their fate is in their own hands come up with tales of a kind, heavenly father who hands out candy and spankings, depending on what you’ve done. That’s no surprise. Nobody wants to admit to their own mistakes, so they say that they’ve been punished by God for their sins. The tales in the Book of Radiance reminded Aliya of the Old Testament, with an avenging God and his eternal antagonist. The god was called Aldonai, and his opponent was Maldonaya. Maldonaya happened to be female. Of course. Women are always the source of evil, right?

  In this world, women held a position somewhere between horses and cows. Aristocratic women were slightly better off. They were still treated like property, but they were allowed to handle their own lands and servants. That suited Aliya just fine.

  There were just four things a woman could be (five at most): daughter, wife, mother, widow, and slut. That was it. There were no other roles for them—no free and independent women, no feminism, no self-sufficiency. If you didn’t like it, you could be brande
d a witch and executed. Witches existed, but they weren’t respected. Aliya ran across a couple of stories about how people dealt with witches, who were thought to be servants of Maldonaya and were summarily drowned or burned at the stake.

  She particularly enjoyed the story about how women were ruled to be humans. One prophet was having a trouble with his wife, so he complained to Aldonai about her stupidity and evil temper. He asked Aldonai if it would be possible to categorize women as animals. Rats, perhaps? Aldonai thought for a while and answered, “Have patience, my son. If we categorize women as animals, then you and all the other men will be guilty of bestiality. You would be born from animals and live in sin with animals, and there would be chaos and disorder in the world.” The prophet shut his mouth, and women were allowed to remain human. Aliya rolled her eyes. What a mental asylum.[7]

  Aliya felt she had mastered the fundamentals of their religion. She now knew not to make the sign of the cross, but to trace a circle—the sign of the Sun—in front of her face and then touch her lips and forehead. She memorized the local prayers and read all the biographies of saints that she could find in the library.

  Knowledge was the best weapon in any fight, Aliya knew, and she knew herself. There was no way she would sit at home and work on embroidery. She wanted to bring new inventions to this world, if only for her own convenience. Doing so would put her on the wrong side of accepted female behavior, so she had to be prepared.

  If the priest said, “My child, women do not do these things. Are you perchance a witch?” she could reply, “Father, have you forgotten that Saint Marilda healed people with laying on of hands? Saint Yevgrastia traveled. Saint Ridalina preached in brothels. So, refrain from your rebukes, for I have been touched by the Holy Spirit. If you don’t believe me, I can call down the heaviest of the spirits to fall on your head. Then you’ll really see radiance!”

  There was one other thing Aliya loved about the stories of the saints’ lives—they were written on weighty parchment scrolls. She could easily use the reverse side to practice writing. She knew that it would be a while before she was ready to go out into the world, and she wanted to copy down what she already knew about medicine before she began forgetting things.