I'm using this time to gather my thoughts while taking a pause between bites of roasted kirim. Or perhaps I should say burned. No, it should be more like charred to within a meter of its postlife. I'm sure the cooking staff meant well by making an attempt to add an exotic item to our humdrum mix of over-the-top dishes we've consumed for centuries. But I can tell they lack the proper experience with rarities from off-world to actually make them edible. Kirim is a small delicacy, only to be found in the Tapani Sector. I’m not sure who was possessed by the idea of importing such a dish here to Deiu. It was probably a sudden whim of the Prestat. He’s been given to so many of them recently...most likely to impress his latest acquisition. He’s taken up another courtesan, a little gilded slipper made of very flimsy substance, and only sixteen years old. The illustrious House leader replaced Niena, who has been the official mistress in his bedchamber for the past ten years. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her, neither in body or spirit. She was quiet, obedient, and always ready to perform her duty in all ways requested by his Lordship. In the end, though, she committed the greatest sin of any courtesan...she was unable to find a way to stop aging. At twenty-eight, Niena is now considered too advanced in years to be of any use to her benefactor, so he’s cast her aside like a careworn tapestry.
I can’t say it’s surprising. But it still saddens me greatly. Niena hasn’t been forced out into the streets, but she has been passed off to one of the Prestat’s uncles, an elderly man who I fear doesn’t have much time left breathing. Once he dies, it’s unknown where she will be tossed next. Perhaps she will be shuttled over to one of the second cousins, if kind fortune shines upon her. If not, then Deity only knows what will become of the poor woman, unless she decides to enter the Sanctuary of Onirona and settle into a cloistered life as a Blessed Sister...
This all reminds me of my present situation. At twenty-five years old, I technically have only five years left before I’m considered undesirable by the established social standards of our twisted society. Either Lord Reunahn shall send to me a lesser male relative of the Di’sallach clan, or Josym will be the one to get rid of me in exchange for a younger companion. Or he might be one of the rare types who sometimes pop up among the heirs of the Prestatures, and he will make an honorable attempt at a proper marriage, one that is in accord with the rules of our state religion. Actually, he might just do that sort of thing; I can tell he would rather be a good husband and stay faithful to his wife. He is decent that way.
It wouldn’t help me, of course. The only thing that could prevent me from being pushed into relative oblivion would be the total obliteration of the cortigio. I suppose that I could bow my head with calm grace and enter the Sanctuary, and spend the rest of my life in shadowy cloisters praying for peace and sanity to The Deity. Another dead institution, like the Lordships, like the cortigio, and like the charade that is called a religion on this planet. It’s not The Old Way, where such figures as the Star and the Maiden were revered. Eons ago, after the resettlement, the ancient practices evolved into another entity with only certain faint traces of what was once alive and shining like the heart of a Corusca stone. Over the centuries, it has become a gaudy edifice both proud and poisonous, weighed down with decay and pompous circumstance.
I haven’t felt inclined to attend services since those required times when I was a child. I do have zien beads wrapped around my waist. I count them during moments when I need to calm my thoughts in the middle of a nervous frenzy, when things in my life are too hectic. This is the only time when I enter into the realm of religion. There simply are no instincts within me for the dogged pursuit of a life that must be lead in seclusion and filled with extreme asceticism. Especially if this lifestyle is mandated by those in charge as the only alternative for my existence after the aristocracy has discarded me.
The words of Suiame on this matter strongly reflect my own feelings: “For it is not recorded on the velvet dark of eternal space that any of us are bound by the names or codes of the old, if the old keeps us in chains. A gardener pulls out the roots no longer alive in order to allow the roots of living plants to flourish. So must we constantly do within our faith.”
Now that I think about it, I no longer have an appetite.