Here's another chunk of Parliament of Fowls. It doesn't advance the plot, but it does provide some back-story for Tuuri and her family. (Which I'm sure will eventually be contradicted by Word of God...)
Goodness, writing proper fiction is hard, even when working from another creator's characters and world! Or, as Chaucer put it in the original
"Parliament of Fowls":The life so short, the craft so long to learn,
The assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The fearful joy that slips away in turn...
Anyway, further developments as I flesh them out.
PART 2
The little skald went to her desk and pulled out the almanac. Day 42, Old Reckoning, worked out to the date of February 11. She leafed ahead a few pages. Sure enough, February 14 was listed as St. Valentine’s Day.
Tuuri thought back to the stories her mother used to tell about Valentine’s Day – how it was a love-festival for the Old Timers, and how the birds would pick their mates that morning for the year ahead.
“And chickie, anyone who sees the birds’ assembly can ask for a sight of their future husband or wife,” her mother would say as she braided Tuuri’s hair. “Remember the song? Lennä, lennä, leppätiira, Miss' päi miu morsiammei, Onks Sivossa vai Savossa, Vai oma pello pientareella?” ("Fly, fly, tern. Where is my loved one, Is she/he in Sivo or Savo, or in my field’s ground?")
Tuuri pulled out her stash of birchbark sheets, which she used for personal writings she didn’t want to be accountable for. (She’d been lectured more than enough at Keuruu about how expensive typewriter ribbons are and how many man-hours of fishing and lumbering they cost.) She doodled absently with a carbon pencil as memories overwhelmed her.
How her father, coming home from the sawmill in the evening, would call, “Where’s my little princess?” and swing her up off the ground with a kiss. Then, “Where’s my strong warrior?” and lastly, “Where’s the queen of the castle?” At which her mother would hurry over, even smudged with garden soil, paint, or flour, and he’d swing her up in his arms as if she weighed no more than Tuuri.
She remembered that the neighbors always said her parents were a real love match, just like in the old stories. Her father had had a proper bride arranged for him in the village, but he broke the engagement, signed on with a crew of timber brokers, and spent four years trading all around Lake Saimaa.
And when at last the scandal had died down, her father showed up with a bride he’d picked out all on his own – a stranger, an orphan, an Old Believer, with no family ties to share, no land-rights or business-shares to bestow, no livestock, machines, or furniture in her dowry -- just a box of clothes and a paint-kit.
“She’s not even all that pretty, with that dark foreign hair,” Tuuri had heard one old woman say to another. “And yet Jussi dotes over her like a rooster with one hen.”
“Well, women have their ways,” the other one had replied. And then their voices had sunk too low for Tuuri, up on the watch platform, to hear them.
Ways, Tuuri pondered. Delightful ideas began bubbling up, and she giggled a little as she put the pages back in the drawer.
