"Brown,.Mary.-.Unicorn's.Ring.2.-.1994.-.Pigs.Don't.Fly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Mary)

but even in the cold and snow there were games to play. Slapping-stones,
snowballs, imaginary chases, battles with trees and bushes .. . Away from the
cottage I was anything I chose and could forget the confines of my cumbersome
flesh and flew with the birds, swam with the fish, ran with the deer. Gaze up
into the rocking trees in spring and I was a rook, swaying with the wind till I
felt sick, my beak weaving the rough bundles they called nests. Dangle my
fingers in the water and I was a fish, heading upstream into the current, the
river sliding past my flanks like silk. Given the bright fall of leaves and I
ran along the branches with the squirrels and hid my nuts in secret holes I
would never remember. Winter and I sympathized with the striped badgers,
PIGS DON'T FLY
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leaving the fug of their sets on warmer days to search for the scruncn of beetle
or a forgotten berry or two, blackened into a honey sweetness by the frost.
But the thing I loved most in the world to do was write in my book.
This had grown from my very first attempt at writing my letters, many years ago.
Now it was thick as a kindling log and twice as heavy. At first the clerk had
formed letters for me in the earth outside, or had taught me to mark a flat
stone with another, scratchy one, but as I progressed he had shown me how to
fashion a quill pen ana mix inks, so it was but a short step to putting my
first, tentative words on a scraped piece of vellum.
As parchment or skin was so expensive I sometimes had to wait for weeks for a
fresh piece, but I practiced diligently with my finger on the table to ensure I
should make no mistakes when the time came.
For the Ten Commandments, my first page, the old priest provided me with a fine,
clear page, out by the time I finished it was as rough and scraped as a pig's
bum. My next task was the days of the week, months and seasons of the year,
followed by the principal saint's days and festivals of the Church calendar.
Then came numbers from one to a hundred. This done, the elderly priest dead and
another, less tolerant, in his placeЧhe never visited MamaЧI was free to write
what I wished, whenever I could beg a scrap of vellum from the clerk. Down went
recipes for cakes, horehound candy, poultices, dyes and charms.
I do not remember what occasioned my first essays into proverbs, saws and
sayings. It may have been the mayor, once chiding me for hurrying my tasks.
"Don't remove your shoes till you reach the stream," he had said, and this
conjured up such a vivid picture of stumbling barefoot among stones, thorns and
nettles that down it had to go. Not that it cured me of haste, mind, but it was
an extremely sensible suggestion. Then there were my mother's frequent
strictures on the behavior expected of a lady: "Do not put your chewed bones on
the communal platter; reserve them to be thrown on the
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Mary Brown
fire, returned to the stock pot, or given to the dogs." Or: "A lady does not
wipe her mouth or nose on her sleeve; if there is no napkin available, use the
inner hem of your shift."
She also gave me the benefit of her experience of sex; pet names for the private
parts, methods of exciting passion, of restraining it; how to deal with the
importunate or the reluctant, and various draughts to prevent conception or
procure an abortion. Down these all went in my book, for I was sure they would
one day prove useful, though she had explained that husbands didn't need the