Now Writer, understand that my story is no falsehood. I will credit that you are a good writer, but I want my story told, not just well, but right. Pay attention.
I was born in Iceland, to a Lutheran German man and a dangerously lapsed Catholic Icelander woman. I am not the eldest child, I am fourth down the line. My eldest brother died young. Too young. He was eight when he fell through the lake. My elder sister was crippled young - kicked by a horse from a wagon while walking in the street. My father challenged the man whose wagon it was to an einvegi, a duel to the death, largely outlawed at that point, because he was sure the bastard had made the horse to kick. My father won, but it nearly killed him. My second-eldest brother and I had to help with the fishing on father's ship afterward. People treated children differently back then. In 1535 I was eight years old and treated as an adult. I had responsibility and work and worry. There wasn't idle time for play until the work had been done. For us it lasted into the night, making candles from rushes, sewing by firelight, or mending nets. I had three younger siblings. My twin brother, and two sweet little sisters. My mother died delivering the last girl. Father would have given her and the rest of us up, had it not been for my elder sister. Crippled as she was, she was thirteen and destined to be a spinster because no one wanted a wife that couldn't work. She tended the baby. I was four when my eldest brother died, nine when mother died, and my eldest sister killed herself at fourteen when the baby died during the winter. My two brothers, my sister and I were all that was left. My father was a broken man. He had hardened at the death of his son, and cracked at the death of his wife, and shattered at the death of his eldest daughter - herself broken by the words he had shouted while grieving the child that stole away the love of his life. I have no harsh words for my family, or their descendants. I love them and watch over them. Hard times, those years. Tragedy layered on tragedy with only empty years of lean times will break anyone. Similar life events broke me for a time.
When I was ten I was the eldest girl. Too young to marry, but I had three years experience in fishing Iceland's bountiful coast and my family needed to eat. So I put in the work. I memorized where the hauls would be best. I mastered that coastline by thirteen and had expanded my father's trade so much we had taken on two other fishing ships. We hired the poor kids, and paid them in fish and coin. My father took the hauls to market each week, and we ate, cooked and pickled the rest. We employed a dozen boys by that time, and fed a few families of widows and girls in trade for baskets they wove which we sold with the fish at a small charge. This was during the Reformation, so my father emphasized his Lutheran ties and began to rise in the new church's esteem.
We did well enough for ourselves that men came snooping around when I was seventeen. They all wanted to know why I hadn't married. After all, what good was an unmarried woman? My father had to take credit for the success of his business, to do otherwise would lose him the status we had worked to get. Status enough to let my brothers have their pick of wives. Their inheritance was set. Father had a field that he had used for hay that he inherited, but we lived in a small one-room house on the coast for the fishing. I couldn't inherit his business, so the farm went to one and the fishing to another, but the unspoken thing was this: his status meant my sister I could marry well.
The trouble was that I didn't see a need to marry anyone and had put it off for years by fishing and staying out of sight of the marriageable men. After seeing how my father was, and doing what I did to keep the family from starving, I didn't see men as an integral part of society like these men believed themselves to be. And it wasn't just that I saw them as less, I also saw my own value to be much higher than what the men and women of the village thought me to be. I was a sailor, a fisher, a merchant. I wanted a man that could respect that and me, or I did not want a man. I'm still looking for one...
