Folio Two, Page Eighteen (svegra mos itzkron tal-kot)
Every house needs rags, so I tore the remains of my pajamas into large pieces and placed them in my room’s laundry basket. I was not unhappy to see them go because I hated the rough, heavy fabric. My mother’s breathable silk pajama tops would fit me like nightshirts, anyway.
Salus had loved silk. If you ever have the chance to look at her court costuming (which I donated to the Menarka Museum), it appears in everything. Likewise, every piece of clothing she bought for me contained some of it.
The silk pant cuffs I would wear went from ankle to mid-calf. The underpants—the only part of my outfit that wasn’t silk—had smaller eyelets than the cuffs, so attaching them took some effort.
The overdress still lay in white tissue paper with a small safety-pinned card from the artisan. The luminescent lightning bolts, clouds, and rain shimmered. I pressed my fingers against the stitching. It felt just like every other embroidery I had ever worn.
The artisan’s card read, And she ran through the waters of the primordial Seven each in their turn. Lightning crowned her head, and meteor falls honored her with celestial fire. The words came from the Nashë Geni, a book of sacred poetry archived in the Temple of Sehìnta-Enahari. We had gone on a field trip there the year before.
I placed the overdress on the bed and sat down to tune my ksibja. Domìntar, my music instructor, had given me seven exercises to improve my finger dexterity, along with the ksibja solo from A Night, Winged—a piece so difficult that she could only provide me with recordings and clap note rhythms with me. Sometimes, I made myself stumble on the finger exercises because I knew my progress winded her.
Music calmed the pieces of me that still wondered about Anumë’s retaliation. It raised me up and took me down. It pulled me into crevices and across wide meadows. When the passages escaped, I played them over and over in my head, making sure to add longer and longer sections as I practiced so my fingers would not falter again (at least not today).
By the time Anumë knocked at the door, my fingers felt raw. I let her in with some resignation. She looked around the room, but she did not dispute my choice of outfit. Instead, she commented, “Several members of the Karatha and the nuamua collective will be here tonight. Nikis will want you to greet them in the traditional way. Seven or eight of the senators closest to your bitch of a mother, a few advisers, and our Deimo’s eldest daughters will also attend. Each of the greetings is different. Do you understand?̣”
“I think so.”
She nodded and closed the shades, leaving one threading beam of light. “Nikis and I disagree about you, but she is an old woman and we must humor her fantasies about your position in the household.”
There was nothing to do or say when Anumë criticized me besides fight, and we had already bumped against each other once today. I nodded and tried to remember what I had seen on stage and in the movies about upper class behaviors. Had anyone educated me in manners like a proper member of the social elite, I would already have known how to gesture and speak to everyone, just as Sukua knew that he should be polite and quiet in public.
Of course, mothers and fathers had written education manuals forever detailing how to deal with chlidren like me. My mother recalled in her journals once that the family made her stand in a child-sized bucket for four hours during the monsoons for a trivial breach of etiquette. That the family had child-sized buckets showed that she had not been the first to require the markless punishment. Compared to that, everyone but Anumë treated me tenderly.
Anumë looked into the mirror and adjusted her headdress. “For the nuamua, you will kowtow in a specific way. Press your hands against the floor so that your index fingers and thumbs make a triangle. Touch your forehead to the ground just above your fingers.”
She got down and showed me, but faced the closed drapes so it would not appear deferential. In Narahji culture, gesture precedes sentiment. If you act pious, you will be pious. If you pretend to love your arranged partner, your affection will blossom. If you bow or kowtow to a superior, you will understand the other as a superior. If you call our Deimo the Fadehin, you will sacrifice your sovereignty to a lie.
She raised her head. I lowered my eyes.
“Traditionally, you must ask that they not afflict you or your family with evil. Only get up once they have told you that you may.”
“But what about the Karatha?”
“We will get to them.” She clapped her hands together twice. “Now get down.”
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