The Nine Oceans

Chapter 8

Opat

Ban thought about the dreams she'd been having again as she stared at her garden. Ha. Her garden. Maybe that description was being too generous; call it the palace garden adjoining her private rooms. No. That description really was too generous. How about the garden which was the dominant feature of the ornately decorated prison she was contained in? That felt close enough to be called accurate.

If any of this actually was hers, she would be allowed to weed the garden and choose what plants to grow. She could give an order to take away the roof of glass windows sealing out the weather and birds, and inside these rooms she could clean when she wanted to and arrange the furniture the way she wanted it to be. If any of this was really hers, she would choose what furniture to have and what clothes to be dressed in.

For the first few years, she'd believed when the Administrators said these were her rooms and garden and she'd tried to do all those things. Those things were, after all, the same tasks she'd done as a child because she was the sixth of her parents' nine children and chores were a part of normal life. The emphasis of those memories, now, was always on the past tense.

After a few years trying to do the things she had always done, and being shunned, shamed and punished for it, she'd tried a few years of obedient behaviour doing all the uncomfortable nothing demanded by the Administrators. During those years, the obedient nothing had been worse than being constantly denied what she chose to do.

Then there had been a few years of outright rebellion. She'd repeatedly broken furniture, torn up the garden, ruined the walls and ripped apart every piece of fine clothing forced on her. But every outburst was followed with careful reconstruction back to the way someone else chose, and she was shunned and shamed and punished into doing nothing about it.

It had been at the end of those rebellious years she'd realized emptiness was the way of things.

The years since her rebellion waned long and silent. The Administrators still told her she was an important part of government but, aside from a few celebrations every year when she was escorted out in the afternoon to be viewed like a jewel in her government's possession and then escorted back at night, this prison was all she saw. Her heart remembered rain, sun, wind and snow, but she'd nearly forgotten the feel of them on her skin.

Except in dreams.

Is that why the dreams had been bothering her and robbing away her sleep again? Was it because her skin missed feeling more than what this prison provided?

She stared at the garden's path outside the largest plate window of her rooms. The paving stones were smooth and the path turnings likely meant to appear delightful by winding in a lazy, switch-backed route to the fountain and decorative pool by the wall opposite these rooms. Smaller paths circled the many beds of blooming flowers and shrubs, each smaller path returning to a point in the center of her cage which pretended to be a charming patio. The tree meant to shade it, and was the only tree in the entire garden, grew from the middle of the stonework circle but never survived long enough to cast a useful shadow onto the pretty table and chair.

Ban sat, reclined on the lounge inside the largest of the rooms. The book at her elbow was untouched for years yet remained without a speck of dust on the cover. A tapping sound lifted her stare from the young tree in the center of her prison until she was watching the first drops of rain explode on the paned dome of glass overhead. The drops ran down the slopes, locked out from reaching the garden. Each drop slid away to a drain that would allow them to reach the ground.

She remembered being a child and wearing only her simple tunic and pants in the fields of her parents' farm, soaked to the skin from planting and tending crops in the rains, yelling to her brothers and sisters; all of them laughing together. She remembered the event, but the feeling of anything but silk and bathwater touching her skin seemed distant and foreign.