The price of honor

1

All I knew until I was 13 years old was the castle of my ancestors, and the lush green land around it.

My mother often took me to the countryside to check the state of the buildings, to make an inventory of the year. This is what the women of the crown were supposed to do at the end of the great heats.

I remember those days very well. I remember those days that lasted twelve nights. Seven of them were spent walking around and five of them were spent in the women's house recording everything we saw. And it was my mother, the Queen, who was supposed to report it to the King.  Sometimes, some villagers took the opportunity to make some requests.

We were a small kingdom among others, surrounded by rivals and allies.

I was the fifth and last child, even though I was the only girl , that didn't make me special. My four older brothers were the pivotal centre of my family, mainly the first, Gan, who would inherit from my father and become the next King of Anda.

While he was at the castle and following my father around, the other three were in the provinces with cousins. I saw them so rarely that I couldn't remember the sound of their voices. 

And it was from Gan that I felt closer, closer than my own father, who had more pressing matters to attend than a little girl he had not yet found any use for.

He was the one I went to see when I was bored. I stayed quiet in his room while he read or talked with his friends. At first his friends were embarrassed because I was a little girl who just stood there. I wasn't in the right place in that room. But as the years went by, they saw that I was silent and that I knew how to keep secrets. After a while they hardly noticed me, I had become like part of the furniture in Gan's room.

But one day a young man drew my attention by asking my opinion on a question, but I didn't know what to answer because I wasn't really listening.

- Are you going to tell us Gia, that all these years you don't listen to anything we talk about? he asked me.

He made me very uncomfortable, and my brother looked at me with his forehead bent.

- Hearing and understanding are two different things. I said.

And Gan smiled, he was proud of me, he didn't want me to be an ordinary girl.

But I think it was that sentence that made his friend take an interest in me.

Once again, my housekeeper came to call me, she always looked down in front of my brother, such an exaggeration that it made me laugh.

Once out of the room she hit me on the head and asked me why I liked being with men so much.

- He's my brother! I answered with a smile.

But Tanti Fa didn't see things my way. For her a woman had to be with women and men with men.

-Specially now that you're a full-fledged woman! It is the custom and order of your mother, that you stop this! You are forbidden to go into your brother's room! To see a man outside of a formal setting. Do you understand that Gia?! Answer me! Answer me!

- Yes...

But I couldn't help but secretly see Dume, my brother's friend. In fact, he was our cousin by my mother, who herself was his mother's cousin.

Dume was a member of the King's army, one of the most romantic and charming. He sent me love letters, and I wrote him back with passion. These were months when he would pick me up from my balcony, and we would sit under the massive trees and talk about our lives, about everything and nothing at the same time. It was the first time a boy was interested in me, and really talked to me. Dume saw things in me that I didn't even suspect.

But my cousin was not required to keep the secret and told her mother and her mother told mine.

It was very hard, being separated from Dume, he was sent away to my other brother in the province.

And it was during the ceremony of passage that they announced my marriage to Fafa. He was there during the ceremony, and he came to see me and brought me a gift that I was not allowed to open, because it was not really mine. Well, it was my mother who was going to stay with it.

I was sitting in my shrine veiled with fabrics so light that nothing had been hidden from me and I couldn't hide anything either.

I saw a shadow of a tall man come in, and it was my aunt who whispered in my ear as it was announced to the whole court, my engagement...

Tall, dark with very short hair, almost bald. I was scared, I thought, "I'm going to marry that! "I thought he was an old man, I mean... he must have been 17 years old or even younger, after all I was only 12 years old.

But he knelt down in front of me and I saw funny little eyes and a permanent smile. His clothes were so beautiful, he talked to me about formal things, about his Kingdom which was 10 nights away from my home.  It was far away indeed, and it was there that duty called me.

Everybody was rejoicing except me. This declaration in front of the whole kingdom that I was promised to Fafa prince of Zimbo meant that Dume's request had been refused.

- Fafa of Zimbo is much richer than your Dume. If he was there with the King it was by the good will of your mother, nothing more. Said Tanti Fa to me the next day.

The fact that Dume was our cousin meant absolutely nothing. To my family he belonged to a backward branch, which had the proper function of providing guardsmen for the close army. I shed tears that night... alone in my room, all the tears of my body. And while my sheets had once been a cocoon, they became hard straw for my skin.

I was ready to do something crazy, I was so in love... Normally he was supposed to come and get me, and we were going to run away to his land, I was going to do it. But he began to doubt my love for him, and said I was happy about my future marriage. He started talking about atrocities, atrocities that hurt me deeply and that had the power to make his head fall off even before nightfall.  So I burned them... the letters, and with them I burned the love I felt for him.