Soldier at the Door(38)

“Not making them!” Mahrree was aghast. Catapult Day was a village tradition that was coming up in only two weeks. “Well, how are you going to launch the gourds this year?!”

“We’re not. Remember last year, when one of the girls got hit with a piece of pumpkin and cried and cried and cried?”

“Yeesss.” Mahrree didn’t like the direction this was going. “It didn’t even leave a mark,” she remembered.

Getting hit on Catapult Day was an unwritten tradition. You were truly a member of the village if you caught a bit of vegetative shrapnel. While the event was officially a day for the children from all the schools to come together and put into practice elements of math and science they learned over the year, much of the village would sit alongside the field with their offerings of spoiled gourds and vegetables to be thrown. Picnics were brought by mothers and friendly bets were placed by grandparents.

Often the extensive participation of the fathers revealed that little of the catapults were their children’s designs. But since the purpose was to observe how all kinds of forces worked, including the force of competitiveness, the teachers had long since turned a blind eye to parental involvement.

During the Great War, catapults had been used to throw rocks from one village towards the approaching soldiers of another. At times the fighting became so desperate that villages threw gourds, melons, and even an occasional piece of ugly furniture.

After the war the catapults were destroyed by King Querul, hoping that such weaponry would never again be needed. A couple of decades later some teachers in the northern villages, intrigued by the mathematical properties of the catapults, helped their students create small-scale devices to learn about angles.

Only Edge, Mountseen, Moorland, Quake, and Scrub held Catapult Day, and the Army of Idumea never saw reason to be concerned with a village’s ability to throw an eggplant over one hundred paces.

Three years ago Mahrree was hit by an entire acorn squash when a catapult was prematurely released while she was measuring the distance of a thrown melon. No one took blame—or credit—for the launch. She had an enormous bruise on her thigh for weeks that caused her walk with a noticeable limp. She wore it as a badge of honor.

Two years ago, at Perrin’s first Catapult Day, a few moons after their wedding and shortly after his excursion into the forest, she conspired to have him hit.

He had appeared at the competition astride a horse and looking very official. Since the abandoned fields were adjacent to the fort, he told Mahrree he was there as a goodwill gesture to the village, but she knew he was actually intrigued by the designs, and a bit envious of the fathers manning the catapults.

Despite the efforts of many children and even more adults, he successfully dodged each hastily launched item. By the end of the day the new objective was no longer to send a spent vegetable the farthest, but to find a way to hit the captain.

Last year he showed up halfway through the competition on a horse and brandished his sword to fight off attacking zucchini.

Mahrree didn’t say it to Poe, who was already disappointed, that she couldn’t imagine her children not experiencing Catapult Day. Maybe something could still be done . . .

“So they’re not going to have Catapult Day because a girl was crying?” Mahrree tried to clarify. She noticed Jaytsy experimentally taste a bug. Maybe she’d feel more protective for her children and fret about every little thing as they got older.

But wasn’t life an adventure that should be experienced in every way not certain to end in death?

Jaytsy spat out the bug and next tried a leaf.

“We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Poe explained in the same tone it was probably told to him. “Besides, it takes a lot of time to plan and get stuff together, parents have to help out a lot and that’s a problem because lots are working, so it’s just not that important.”

Helping their children not important? “Who decided this?”

“Some old man. From the department.”

“You mean the Department of Instruction? In Idumea?” Mahrree wondered why their arm reached so far north.

“He said that since we weren’t going to be tested on it, it wasn’t something we had to do. They might bring it back next year, though.”

“So if you’re not to be tested on it, you do not have to learn about it. I understand,” Mahrree lied.

The testing Captain Shin had warned Edge about at their first debate had been, according to the Administrators, such a success in its first year that all children throughout the world were to have the ‘opportunity’ to take it as well.

Mahrree still didn’t understand how the test was deemed successful. Did it improve the students’ learning? Not surprisingly, there hadn’t been any explanation on the notice boards, but a vague and enthusiastic announcement that, Full school and testing were successful!!! And it was spreading to all villages!!! And all children could participate!!!