BELLRAM V01 - Ambivalence of Light and Shadow I

BP001-P42 - The Capital

The day after the summer party, Meia stayed in bed. She forced herself to keep sleeping. She did not want to get up again. She did not want to leave her dream world.

She stayed in bed all day and all night. It was not until the following morning that the housemaid finally threw her out of her room. She noticed the cut on her lip and also the wound on her arm and the bloody sheet. When she asked about it, Meia pulled down the sleeve of her pyjamas and lied to her that she had fallen. The housemaid understood that it was a lie and accepted it. Meia knew she did not really want to know the truth.

As Meia went downstairs to the kitchen she met her father. His gaze left the newspaper for a look of disdain, but no longer. He announced to her that she was leaving his house. He would send her away and that he had already found someone interested. The price was zero. The royal court was looking for new maids. It was an honorary job. There was no real payment apart from the prestige. While he told her this in passing, he did not look at her. He no longer wanted her. He had lost all interest in her.

A few months later, Meia was sent away. She packed her things into her two suitcases. A carriage from a transport service picked her up and she left Wiestahl for the last time.

With the first snow, she arrived in the country's capital, Kiras.

Kiras was a huge city. After the outermost settlement, they passed a whole of five city walls. Probably because the city had grown again and again? Despite the season, the streets were full of people. Everything was alive. Every little path was paved. There were gas lanterns everywhere. There were advertisements everywhere. All around there were stalls and shops and crowded shopping passages. Carts and carriages moved in all directions at all times. Everything was constantly being transported somewhere. It was like being in an anthill.

There were no half-timbered houses made of beams and bricks. The houses were built quite different. The stones were yellowish and somehow dirty. The deeper you got into the city, the dirtier it became. The air smelled of fire. The snow was full of soot. Smoking factories stood in the middle of the residential buildings. Rubbish blew across the street through the legs of passers-by. No one picked it up. People just stepped it under the snow. It was not a beautiful place.

The city looked alive, but also somehow dead. Everything was made of stone. The only plants that you could find were the ones sold in the shops.

But in the centre, everything abruptly changed. There were big parks with lots of trees and benches and fountains of all shapes. Artificial rivers separated streets and ornate bridges reconnected them. The buildings were all unique in their design and made of precious raw materials. There were single decorative elements or whole ornaments on every building.

The largest market in the city was in front of the palace walls. There was a dome here with an orange-red roof and identical columns. It was a building like a cylinder. Gigantic trees towered around the dome and led to it like a path from the gate of the palace walls. The orange-red material was more glistening than the snow and looked as transparent as glass. The building was the merchant's house, as Meia had heard. The roof tiles were made of topaz. Strictly speaking, it was a gemstone. The merchant house was so rich that they could cover the whole roof with it. The class difference between the residents of the outer districts and the city center was more than obvious. The merchant's house was exemplary for this.

Meia was dumped in front of the palace. The palace did not necessarily look like one would imagine. From the front, it looked like a large mansion or noble house, if you wanted to call it like that. The building was built in a rectangle with an open lawn in the middle. As a special feature, the palace had a bell tower at all four corners and each of the towers had a clock on all four sides. No matter where you were on the palace grounds, it was hard not to know what time it was. On the ground floor of three sides of the palace were archways on pillars without gates. One could walk through from the front directly to the lawn in the middle and could continue from there in all other directions. On the left side was a pool area. On the right side was a garden area. At the back was just a heavy gate and behind it a steep and long flight of stone steps to get to the harbour. The palace was the highest point in the city and was right on a cliff facing the sea. The whole town was on an incline to a cliff.

Meia did not need to interview for the job. She got the position as a maid without any further ado. The day she arrived, she slept through the night. On the first morning, she was initially given a briefing and shown her workplace, then given a maid's uniform. In her naivety she believed that she would have the rest of the day off, but she was wrong. From that very noon, her first day of work already began. It was only as a helper in the kitchen. It was no hard work.

After work, she wanted to go and admire the garden, but the guards did not agree and sent her away. As it turned out, she was not allowed to go anywhere in the palace except for the places she was explicitly allowed to enter. If she wanted to, she was allowed to leave the palace altogether and look around the city, but she was not allowed to do hardly anything on the grounds. Disheartened, she wanted to go to the harbor, but the stairs were anything but recommendable. The view into the depths was terrifying. The railings were just ropes. Not much more than her foot could fit on the length of the steps. If you were to stumble, it would be a long way down. A fall would have been so fatal that she hadn't dared to descend. She had to see the harbor another day. Instead, she went to the market with the dome. At some point it got dark and all the gas lanterns came on. It was a lovely walk. When it started to get too late, she turned back and had to find out that the palace gate was closed overnight. She had to fully explain to the guards who she was and why she was still outside. From then on, she always kept to her time window. That one time had been embarrassing enough.

Every day she did her work. It was not as bad as she had first feared. In fact, it was quite alright. But once again she had no one to talk to. The other maids tried to avoid her. She always had to clean endless amounts of dishes alone in the kitchen. She never did anything else.

After six months, she was unexpectedly approached by an older man. He told her that from now on she would work personally for the Queen. She was not told why. She had done nothing that would warrant a promotion. She was given a new haircut and her own room. Henceforth, she no longer had to wear the fixed maid's uniform either. A maid of the queen was worth more than a simple servant girl. She was told that from now on she could wear whatever she wanted, as long as it was a dress. The uniform was taken from her. So she was forced to ruin her own clothes at work from now on. That was all she had been told. She was not ordered to do any other work than she had done before.

In the end, she was only the third maid of the queen. She rarely saw her up close. Apparently, as a queen, it was only proper to have at least three personal maids. Her two colleagues did not like her. They saw her as a young blood who could rob them of their position. Meia was essentially superfluous.

.../ End Part