Naama entered the courtyard, just as the younger classes were letting out. She was beyond class as one of the fully fledged. She smiled at the giggles of the youngest just beginning to take instruction in the arts, the knowing, confident looks of those in the middle class who thought they'd learned everything there was to know and the cool, assured looks of the ones who had learned everything the instructors could teach them in the classroom and who had experienced at least one assignation of their own choosing.
Assignations were always of the girl's choosing. Even when the instructors did not agree with the one chosen, they remained silent unless they believed harm would come from the pairing. The only time assignations weren't up to the girl herself was when she waited too long to make such a choice. It was expected that the first assignation would occur by the time the girl was 18 years old but not before 16 no matter how ready the girl felt nor how impassioned her pleas to be allowed to walk through the outer courtyard where the boys could be found.
These sorts of pleas came at the bidding of fantasy and dreams alone. It could not be that a girl had found a boy she liked and begged for the chance to dally with him specifically. The sexes were kept separate until it was deemed appropriate for a girl to accept her first lover. Only then was she permitted to walk the paths that wound between merchants stalls in the outer courtyard as if she were shopping for a bit of myrrh to sweeten her room or a measure of rose scented rice water with which to rinse her hair so that it gleamed.
Even with the pretense, boys were aware that a girl never before seen on the winding tree shaded pathways that crisscrossed the outer enclosure was there for only one reason -- to find a boy that struck her fancy. And if never before seen, boys knew it would be to find someone for her first time. Although they were not supposed to use it as a bragging point and taught to respect the gift given during the Claret Tentra Ceremony, boys vied to be chosen to take a girls' maidenhead.
Naama had almost been the first in recent years to have had her choice removed for failure to decide upon her first taken, known as the Claret Tantra Ceremony, or Awakening the Dancing Goddess. Though the second name implied something magical, even those of the inner sanctum who were blessed to be fully prepared, returned from this experience with little to say and took to their rooms for two sometimes three dawns. No one uninitiated in the ways of the tantra were permitted to speak of it until the month before their own ceremony when extra individual classes were added to their schedule with one of the priestesses.
Priestesses had once been healing servants of the tantra and, those determined to be of steady hearts, pure intentions and knowledgeable minds, were inducted into the Sacred Order of Instruction of the Inner Sanctum. These classes were a mystery to those who had not yet reached the point of awakening, and keeping it a mystery was a strictly held prohibition that all were required to obey. Those who broke faith were whipped in the farthest reach of the courtyard which was measured off by a high wall and where it was said other ceremonies or punishments took place. One couldn't tell which ones, as the area was encased in a maze and only the priestesses could provide direction to the differing areas when required.
Naama had been there once. It was when an Ayelet Hashachar, or Gazelle of the Dawn, the title for one who was in the month before their Claret Tantra Ceremony, had, out of fear, told the secrets to her closest friend. To make matters worse, this friend was almost a year younger and considered herself nowhere near ready for her own ceremony.
Naama remembered the sound of the lash striking the back of the girl as she cried and struggled not to scream, a struggle she lost before it was all over. The girl had been dressed in a crimson robe so as not to show the blood of the whipping. This was because even after her indiscretion the girl's ceremony had remained scheduled and the High Priestess intended to prevent evoking any thoughts or comparisons to the Claret Tantra.
The girl who had been told the secrets had been ushered into seclusion for three days and was attended at all times by one of the priestesses. It was said she had been ceremonially lashed, just enough to punish but not to make suffer, for listening and not informing a priestess. But it was was also said that her tears were for her friends ordeal which she, too, had been made to witness, not her own pain.
The duration of the three days was set so as to put a moratorium in the girls mind to neutralize her terror over what she had heard. The secrets had been greatly exaggerated or so it was told, colored by the fear of her friend and rendered altered by emotion. The Priestesses had ways of meditation to help calm and restore, as well as the power of ragua or the ability to induce tranquility with a light touch. Some could create a sense of serenity just by being near, though that was a rare skill.
As Naama's Claret Tantra had been held several years previously she was fully aware of the secret instruction of the last month and also why it would create fear. Though after the years of other instruction and reassurance by theHigh Priestess that none of the boys encountered in the outer courtyard would be characteristic of the extremes of which they spoke, she felt the fear should not have overwhelmed the girl so. While the instruction was intended for passing through the ceremony, some of it was also intended as an introduction to possibilites that might be encountered later. Since the time when she'd undergone her own ceremony, Naama was also unclear as to why almost all the girls needed days in their rooms when they returned. She had decided it was just an affectation to get a few days to themselves, a rarity in the inner sanctum, and to receive special attention and delivered delicacies brought by the Priestesses themselves.
When Naama's awakening had occurred she had been freed to wander the outer courtyard in the Springtime. Instead of pretending to browse the wares of each merchant she truly did so, causing raised eyebrows among the Priestesses and girls alike when she returned more excited about her purchases that any of the boys she'd seen. She'd been left to her desires for a month, then called into the head Priestess's sanctum chamber to account for herself. She knew it was rare that a girl went this long without coming back with reddened cheeks and shining eyes to giggle with friends over this boy or that. Almost always if the date of the ceremony hadn't come and gone within the first month, at least the date had been set for shortly after. Naama's cheeks had reddened not at the thought of a boy, but at the necessity of explaining to the Head Priestess that so far there had been no one who had interested her, no one who had enflammer les sens, stirred the blood so to speak. The Head Priestess had simply said, "Tell me," and Naama had. She'd told the Priestess of wanting the ceremony to be if not of little long term consequence, then with no strings other than friendship. But she did want there to indeed be strings of friendship present. She spoke of how she thought that would make it what it was intended to be as opposed to just thrown away or a night that left lasting ties to the boy that often weren't welcomed.
