Boys and girls are playing in the courtyard around a dry fountain, which presently is serving as a makeshift rampart in an imaginary war. Tiny heads appear over the fountain-pulpit as they surreptitiously scan the other side, aha a target: another head. Dirt clods, fly. The whiplash action of arms releasing their less-than-deadly cargoes hangs only for a moment in the shimmering heat before the head and the arms retreat back to cover. The first casualty lies in no-mans land, some distance from the fountain, surrounded by errant clods, which now by virtue of their position lie just out of reach of the warring parties.
Her face is young and delicate, mulberry eyes framed by dense grey streaked curls, otherworldliness dragged back to earth with a conventional, if somewhat aquiline nose. She isnt paying attention. A long elegant finger traces delicate mathematical forms, newly learnt, in the sand strewn over worn white pavers, cracked corners and the gap between the grout, proof of poor workmanship. She is oblivious to this. Her tongue sticks out just a smidgeon past peach pale lip, now beginning to crack. Shes been lying there for some time, you can tell, when she turns on her side to rub out a distant part of her calculation, the sand has imprinted upon it an impression of her diminutive form smaller than her playmates.
Her lying there makes the children uneasy. Eyes roll. They know she strayed from the safety of the fountain deliberately. She wanted to be hit. Nobody would walk that far away and expect anything else. The archaic forms now being traced in the sand only confirm that suspicion. They dont care. Theyre doing it for themselves and not for the strange girl dressed in robes of a long dead order, now lost in calculations a thousand-years-older than this courtyard and a thousand-and-five-hundred-years older than any of the children present. They are not of course aware of any of these details and they could forgive them, like they had for some of other exiles but she was stranger than strange and they knew it.
She didnt care. She didnt care to answer their questions. She didnt think they could understand, even if she had wanted to explain. The parents in the balcony some meters above, sitting in shade created by reams of cloth weaved haphazardly between timber colonnades, once painted gaily red in the now fading guts of some Opulensi snail: wouldnt have understood either. That didnt bother her, she was used to not being understood. The occasional near-miss or hit only caused her nose to crinkle ever so slightly and a quick brush of her hair escaping over her shoulders was enough to restore her poise and concentration.
She was waiting for her mother who was presently ensconced somewhere in the balcony above, discussing something she wasnt allowed to hear. She rather hoped it wasnt anything to do with marriage, she wasnt ready for it and at age eleven didnt really want it, yet. But, if it was, she was resigned to the fact that she would have to kill herself. She wouldnt do it in the local manner that was unnecessarily bloody and did not recommend itself to a lady. She would instead request an early lunch from the kitchen, fresh bread, not the end cuts, dried salted herring, heads removed, a measure of strawberry preserve, without the seeds, and two sun-dried tomatoes, flesh only. She would then take the strawberry preserve and generously lather it onto the bread, add the herring on-top of that, before finely dicing the sun-dried tomatoes which would go on-top of the herring, of course. This she would then eat as she drew a warm bath for herself. Taking care to sharpen the knife that she used to cut the tomatoes, cook always provided a sharp one for those but one could never be sure, she would then open her wrists running the blade across the point at which the veins were most visible. She wasnt sure how long it would take but estimated that she would probably pass out long before she could observe the result.
That would be fitting if not timely, she was still yet to finish the Book of Common Prayer and it had nearly reached the foundation of the First Republic (and most importantly her Father!) That would have to wait unfortunately. She was quite sure her ancestors wouldnt begrudge her finishing their histories and she could even ask them about it afterwards. But that was merely idle conjecture on her part. She still didnt know what her mother was up to.