#heiangod

I was sixteen when my family sold me to the palace.

Not with tears. Not with shaking hands. Not even with the sort of apology a girl might later dress into something softer so she could bear remembering it. They sold me, my aunt,  the way men bargain over rice, silk, or a stubborn mule.

It was measured, practical, and with far too much relief once the matter was done.

At the time, I thought I would die there. In that spot.

The escorts were not gentle. Their calloused hands left bruises the size of pears on my skin, some would have mistaken me as a popular courtesan. And No. Before you ask.

They did not defile me. They couldn't.

It was only later, when I was told they were considered palace property too. And since they were young boys and men who trained to become noble eunuch's. They had their genitalia removed.

I never felt so lucky and disgusted in the same breath.

I fought like an Iriomote. I hissed, I clawed and spat at them until my lungs grew course and my fingers ran with blood. Theirs and mine. It wasn't until one of them accidentally toppled onto another, which then toppled onto me, was I knocked out unconscious.

When I eventually arrived to the palace, it was a blur and I was not in a kind state. My head was thrumming with an ache I wished I could blame on warm sake and a decent evening. But when I awoke to my deepening realisation, I had come from a merchant clan with no prospects for my own future, Both my parents left me in this world. Alone.

I also refused to marry. But that is another story.

When I was brought in on the back of a wooden cart, my hands were tied with thick rope. My throat felt like dried herbs in the sun and my eyes stung with rage. The men who had escorted me, watched me with displeased frowns, coddling their faces which I was happy to have marked. I remember one telling another..

'Uneme Yoko will surely have her hands full with this one.'

The second man just grunted, I couldn't tell if it was approval on my behalf of against it.

The moment I saw the gates open, I thought I could feel my soul attempt to leave my body. Heavens I wanted it to. Not from the beating. Not from hunger in the pit of my stomach. From the sheer size of it all. The palace was too large, too polished, too full of rules that lived in people’s mouths and eyes more than on paper. Every corridor seemed to hold a lesson, or danger. Every older maid looked at me as though she could already tell whether I would last a month or be sent back out in disgrace to the pleasure district. I learned quickly that a servant’s body was never truly her own. It belonged to the bell that rang, the hand that pointed, the floor that needed polishing, the sleeve that needed mending, the tray that had to be carried without so much as a clink.

We all were like ants behind the imperial chair. No one mattered. One day you were there, the other you were not. I remember the moment I saw one servant who I worked beside for a time, There had an incident with the guards and I spotted her many moons later in a pleasure house outside of the gates with sunken eyes and bruised knees. I had stolen some dried candied fruits from a distracted street vendor and gave them to her. She looked at me as if I were a stranger. In that moment, I was.

Those guards still laugh about the incident to this day. She did not speak after it. I don't remember the colour of her eyes,  but I do remember the pain in them. To this day. Head Eunuch Surei uses her as a warning to not walk alone at night.

It was daytime for her when it happened. She was left alone for no more than 15 minutes in the washing rooms. Her name was Chiyo.

As for me, I began low. Lower than low. Scum on the city street was cleaner than my work.

I scrubbed chamber pots until I was physically ill. Washing cloths until my hands wrinkled and cracked in the water. Carrying buckets, each time I could hear the pop in my spine. Sweeping corridors no one noticed unless a single leaf or speck of ash dared remain. Folding robes that cost more than my whole childhood home, Sometimes the delicate silk would get caught on my calloused hands. Scrubbing bathing rooms. Emptying braziers. Learning which head maids liked silence, which preferred obedience spoken aloud, and which ones only seemed cruel because they had long forgotten what kindness looked like in a place like this.

I was small then. Not in body, I was considered mature, but perhaps in spirit. Quiet in the wrong way. Too careful. Too frightened of making mistakes, which of course only made me clumsy enough to make more.

If I survived those first months, it was because of Natsuko.

She had started not long after me, she too was another fresh faced girl given over to palace service before life had finished deciding what else to do with her. We were not friends immediately. Friendship in the servants quarters was rarely born from sweetness. It came from shared exhaustion, split punishments, and the slow realization that someone beside you was just as tired, just as hungry, just as determined not to let the palace swallow her whole.

Natsuko had a sharper tongue than I did. Better eyes too. She saw trouble before it arrived and had the good sense to step around it....or, if she could not, at least brace herself properly. Where I was soft around the edges, she was practical. Where I still tried to believe people meant well, she had already learned that most orders were not personal, only inconvenient. She kept me alive in all the little ways that matter most to girls in service. By waking me before I overslept, by correcting my sleeves before a head maid saw them crooked, by splitting food when one of us had been worked too long to eat properly, by telling me plainly when I was being stupid. Which was often.

Years passed like that.

And somehow, without noticing exactly when, I became comfortable. Not lazy. Never that. Comfort in the palace did not mean ease. It meant competence. It meant my hands knew their work before I had to think. It meant I could walk the women’s corridors with my head lowered just the right amount, answer senior maids without stumbling over my tongue, and tell from a single call whether I was wanted for laundry, bathing water, polishing, tea service, or disaster.

By then I was no longer the trembling sixteen yearold who thought every mistake would have her thrown out by sunset. I was a palace maid. A good one, if I may be vain enough to admit it. My feet knew the palace stones. My ears knew its moods. My body had learned how to endure long hours and still remain graceful with a tray in hand. I have been here for eleven years. I've survived the death of one King and now serve another which I have never met. Nor seen the hem of his robes.

Natsuko and I had settled into our places beside one another as if we had always belonged there. We worked different tasks depending on the week, but more often than not we still found our way back into the same corners of the palace, sharing glances over spilled tea, badly folded robes, or the occasional noblewoman with more perfume than sense. As maids we weren't accustomed to concubine quarters, unless you had served one of his majesties women.

Lady Asanami. Lady Kiyo. Lady Yorozu. Lady Hanae.

We slept in something similar to a store room, our cushioned beds were a shy of two inches thick. But Natsuko and I always found our place beside one another. We'd spend the night whispering scandals and business adventures we'd like to do. When we started, we fantasised about being concubines. As of late, in our later years, we both agree a respectable teahouse would be profound. And once morning broke, and one shook the other awake. We'd return to our duties, still sold to the palace and far from free.

That morning had begun no differently, though at twenty seven, My routine was accustomed. My legs were prone to swelling and my back remembered the ache of carrying buckets.

I had expected linens, perhaps, or one of the bathing rooms. Instead, I had scarcely finished one corridor by the east wing with Natsuko, we were in mid conversation about the upcoming servants festival, when Uneme Sera’s voice cut through the air behind me.

"Minpei."

Just that. Sharp enough to straighten my spine like a cane to the bottoms of my heel. Uneme Sera was in her early fifties. She too was sold to the palace, and hardened by it.

I turned at once and bowed, still on the floor. "Uneme Sera."

"There is an ink stain in the imperial library," she said, as though she were informing me of a deceased rodent found in the storerooms. "A fresh one spilt by one of the noblemen from the morning meeting. It is to be cleaned properly before it sets deeper into the floor grains. You will go, Natsuko you are to stay and finish the corridors. When Minpei is finished, she will return to help you."

The imperial library.

I blinked once before lowering my gaze again, slightly glancing to Natsuko who was doing the same.

Not because I had never been near it. Servants passed everywhere, eventually with time. If they survived. But the library was not a place girls like me were sent lightly. It was quieter there. More delicate. More dangerous in its own way. Dust and water were enemies. Ink, apparently, was a crime.

Chiyo. The name sent chills in my spine.

"Yes, Uneme Sera." We bother said in unison.

She looked me over once, likely measuring whether I would disgrace her by breathing too heavily on something ancient and priceless. She just began to turn before stopping herself.

"Take the cloths-" she pointed at the rag in my hand, "Finer ones. Not your usual bucket rags. And mind your step. If a single scroll is damaged because your hands are clumsy, I will have you polishing floorboards with your hair."

"Yes, Uneme Sera."

She swept away before I could say more.

For one suspended moment, I simply sat there with the order in my ears, half irritated and half curious. I turned and found Natsuko already looking at me from the opposite wall of the corridor, one brow raised high enough to ask the question without words. 

"The library." I muttered as I approached the bucket, dropping the darkened rag in it.

Natsuko clicked her tongue at once. "What did you do?"

I clicked my tongue back, almost as if to scold. "Nothing."

"Be quick."