The men in the mardanas told him he was blessed. Boys who survived to puberty were restricted from brute physical labor. They did not cook, did not clean, and were not to be engaged in any strenuous education beyond the sexual. Men led a life of leisure, never to worry about money, subsistence. The fact that he still breathed proclaimed Anavha’s importance to the world. Yes, young boys coveted what Anavha and the other men were. They envied the endless preparation: the dressing, the washing, the oiling, the styling, because it meant they were alive.

Anavha learned his purpose in the mardanas. He began at fourteen, awkward and unsure, encouraged to learn from poor women seeking children or pleasure who paid the temple eight dhorins for the privilege. He couldn’t become erect. He was introduced early to a philter drunk with wine that kept him hard for hours; he would lie in bed at night, still in pain from three hours of copulation and an induced erection that could not be fulfilled, merely worn off. His body was not his, they reminded him. It belonged to Rhea.

It was in the mardanas, his first year, that he began to cut himself. Small cuts on the insides of his arms. Just enough to release a thread of blood, leave no scar. He would sit in his room in the mardana listening to the sounds of pants and cries coming through the walls. He sat naked in front of the mirror, studying his every pore, the angles of his body. The blood would come, and he’d dab at it with a little kerchief he kept in a drawer. When the kerchiefs got too stained, he burned them.

At fifteen, he was wed to a woman whose name he knew by reputation: Syre Zezili Hasaria, the most passionate and devastating of the Empress’s commanders.

He did not meet Zezili Hasaria until the day of the wedding in Rhea’s temple in Daorian. He felt very small in the immense temple, cloaked in white, coat and hood, tunic, belled trousers. Zezili’s four sisters were also there, eyeing him over; though there was some resemblance among them, he did not mistake any of them for her.

Zezili dressed in Rhea’s purple – purple trousers, tunic, lavender short coat. She wore a black leather belt and ornamental sword, a jeweled dagger. She was, indeed, handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, boldly feminine, with a spill of straight dark hair knotted with purple ribbons. She was a little dark, being half dajian, and her brows nearly met over large, dark eyes. Zezili held herself defensively, as if she expected a fight to break out at any moment. When Anavha stood next to her, he found he was a hand shorter than she. He liked the solid bulk of her, the steadiness.

She will take care of me, he thought. She will protect me.