Edge: retribution [a Neolithic serial]

Not loudly said but always known:  in hungry times, when fish and corn and meat are scarce, new-borns are let to die, more so girl babies than the males.

Not widely known, and said to me but once by my then-mourning father, my survival tributed my mother, his first and favoured woman.   She died birthing what would have been his second son.   Similarly a second woman within the year but this third is stronger, sweeter-natured and has two moons still to go.    

Yet Yarl speaks less to her than me, watches more anxiously my brother, and consults most frequently the son my mother bore to a grey-haired man of lower rank ere Yarl came to this place. 

I’d fifteen darkest celebration times and never bled, but my rank, if such it could be said, was high for the holding in my head of family names and happenings, and what important and what known by my mother’s ancestors.   

 This began life as a to-be-entry for an Orcadian crime story competition,, for which I ran out of words, and time.   I am now converting it into six sentence episodes and posting it on 6S;  it is the fourth in a series which began two years ago on MuDJoB and subsequently became an illlustrated book.   The first past can be read at http://sandra-linesofcommunication.blogspot.co.uk/p/curve-of-early-learning.html