Devi woke to find Tashni shaking him gently. “I’ve got your breakfast ready, miss,” she said. She couldn’t seem to understand that Devi was a boy... and today, anyway, Devi needed to be a girl for Zindla’s ceremony.
The Mural and the Cabinet
part 8 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sashtun turned away from his project in frustration. He’d been trying to enchant a necklace to compel its wearer to tell the truth. It was a moderately complicated spell, one that wasn’t easy to cast directly on a person, and he was having trouble getting it to combine with the talisman-spell so as to enchant the necklace.
“Are you busy?” Kashpur said, poking his head into Sashtun’s workroom.
“Sort of,” Sashtun said. “I should take a break, I’m not making progress on this.”
“You’ll get it,” Kashpur assured him. “You just need more practice. — Come, I want your help with something.”
They went to the room where Kashpur stored the cabinet that was supposed to open a portal to another world, and some other experiments that he worked on when not busy with paying jobs. The little girl, Devi, was sitting there with her nose in a book. Would she even notice if the portal opened suddenly?
“Devi, I’ll need you to wait in the other room,” Kashpur said. “Come quickly if you hear the bell.”
“Sure,” Devi said, hopping down from the chair and going out, her thumb marking her place.
“I have another theory to test,” Kashpur said as he closed the door behind Devi. “I’ll trace the threads of the enchantment while you cast an amplifying spell.”
So they started doing that. The amplifying spell was pretty basic, and Sashtun had mastered it in his second year at the Academy. He sustained it while Kashpur stared at the cabinet with a frown, moving his fingers in the air, tracing the pattern of the enchantment, which became more visibly obvious while Sashtun kept his spell going.
Then a couple of things happened almost at once. Kashpur said “Aha!” and made a grasping motion. The shelves of the cabinet vanished, and in their place a well-furnished bedrooom appeared. The design of the furniture was unfamiliar, harsh straight lines and flat surfaces rather than the carved ornamentation Sashtun was used to. At the far end of the room, perhaps ten to twelve feet away, was a window showing sunlight.
Without letting go of his amplification spell, Sashtun grabbed the bell from the table and rang it furiously. But a moment later, the bedroom vanished and the shelves reappeared. A moment after that, the door flew open and Devi rushed in.
“Did you get it open...?” she asked, then looked at the cabinet and sighed in disappointment.
“We had it,” Kashpur said, “but it closed again before you arrived.”
“Maybe you should let me hang out in here while you work your spells?” Devi said hopefully. “So next time I can just jump through it before it closes.”
“No,” Kashpur said. “I think if it is closing so quickly and without warning, it is not safe for you to go through. What if it closed while you were halfway through?”
“Oh,” Devi said, aghast. “That would be horrible.”
“Yes. I apologize for the false alarm. Go wait in the other room, and we’ll call you if we can get it to stay open for more than a few seconds.”
But though they worked on it until past time for supper, they couldn’t get it to open again for even a moment.
Devi woke to find Tashni shaking him gently. “I’ve got your breakfast ready, miss,” she said. She couldn’t seem to understand that Devi was a boy... and today, anyway, Devi needed to be a girl for Zindla’s ceremony. “Tyemba said he’d be coming early to escort you to his daughter’s birthday feast, and that’s today.”
“All right,” Devi said, rubbing her eyes. “I’m up.” She followed Tashni to the kitchen and ate — something like oatmeal, with dried fruit in it that was sort of like raisins but bigger. She liked the food Pasyala cooked better, even though it had taken some getting used to at first. After eating, she got dressed in the green gown Syuna had brought her, and her best blue-green shoes.
After dressing up as a girl, Devi had to wait in the vestibule by the elevator for a while before Tyemba arrived. The elevator door opened and Tyemba stepped out.
“Ah, good, you’re ready to go?”
“Yes,” Devi said, hopping up and going to the elevator. They both went in and Tyemba told the elevator operator to go back to the ground floor.
They took a couple of buses to the church. Tyemba led her around the side of the church to an alternate entrance and knocked.
“Who is it?” called a muffled voice.
“It’s Tyemba with little Devi.” Devi bristled at the word “little,” but didn’t complain.
The door opened and Pasyala looked out. “Oh, good. Come on in, Devi. Tyemba, you can wait out front.”
“Of course.”
Devi followed Pasyala inside and she closed the door behind her. They went through a little vestibule into a room beyond it where Zindla was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a group of women. Syuna was sitting directly across from her. Pasyala led Devi over and sat down on a bench along with some other older women, and whispered to Devi that she was to sit on the floor behind Syuna and to her left. Devi did as she was told, and watched and listened.
Unlike the worship services Devi had heard in the church, this coming of age ceremony was almost all in Zyuni, the everyday language that Zindla and her family spoke at home. The priestess, a woman a little younger than Pasyala, sat between Zindla and Syuna and a little to the side, and asked Zindla questions, which she answered. Then, after a couple of dozen questions and answers, the priestess started on a long prayer, which everyone else except Devi joined in on near the end.
Then the priestess rubbed a little oil on Zindla’s cheeks and forehead, and said another, shorter prayer, and they all got up and walked out. Devi followed close after Syuna. Soon the priestess, Zindla, Syuna, Pasyala and Devi were standing up on the raised platform in the front of the church, while the other women who had been been present at the private ceremony went down to the benches and sat with their menfolk, who had already gathered to watch the public part of the ceremony.
This part went on for much longer, and included some parts that were in the church language they used during a large part of the worship services, so Devi wasn’t always sure what was going on. She got tired of standing beside Syuna for so long, but managed to mostly stand still.
Near the end, Tyemba came up and stood beside Syuna, and took part in the end of the ceremony.
Afterward, they all went from the sanctuary to a hall adjoining it, where they ate a big dinner and partied for the rest of the day. There was dancing, and everyone of both sexes wanted to dance with Zindla. She danced once with Devi, too, though Devi didn’t know how to dance.
For a while Devi played with some kids near her apparent age who seemed to be Zindla’s cousins. Later, when she got tired, she sat down near Pasyala and rested, chatting with the old woman.
“When you go home,” Pasyala asked, “how many years is it till your manhood ceremony? Or do your people do coming of age ceremonies for both boys and girls?”
“I don’t think we do this kind of thing at home,” Devi said. “My brother’s older than Zindla, and they never did anything like that ceremony this morning for him.”
“Not for girls either? I know the Stasa have coming of age ceremonies only for boys, for some strange reason, and theirs aren’t as elaborate as ours are for both sexes.”
“I don’t think so.”
“So when are you considered an adult?”
“I think it’s eighteen? Or maybe twenty-one — I know it’s a long way off, anyway.”
“My goodness, that is old.” Devi thought Pasyala was joking with her, but it was hard to tell. “But you don’t have any ceremony to mark turning eighteen or twenty-one?”
“Well, we have birthday parties,” and she told her about her last couple of birthday parties, and Amy and Carson’s birthday parties, and her parents' birthday parties.
“So these parties can be more or less elaborate, and they tend to be more elaborate for children than for adults? I suppose that makes sense. And I suppose important birthdays like eighteen have fancier parties?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do your people — oh, it’s time.”
“Time for what?” Devi asked. She looked around and saw that Tyemba, Syuna, and Zindla were mounting a dais along with two older people and a boy about Carson’s age. She’d seen him dancing with Zindla early on, and again not long ago. The musicians stopped playing.
“My good friends!” Syuna called out. “Temzi and I request your attention. Our children have something to say.” The hubbub of conversation died down and there was near-silence. Then the young man and Zindla turned to face each other, both of them looking nervous.
“Temzi-lan Myanda,” Zindla said, “will you marry me on this day a year from now?”
“Syuna-lan Zindla, I would be honored to become part of your family,” said Myanda. They each clasped both of the other’s hands.
Devi’s jaw dropped as the crowd started cheering. She remembered Syuna and Zindla talking about Zindla marrying a wizard so the family could keep the magic shop going, but she’d had the impression — or perhaps only made the assumption — that it was a distant prospect. Not a mere year away, just after Zindla turned fifteen.
The musicians started playing again as Myanda and Zindla descended from the dais, and the crowd cleared a space for them to dance again. Then others joined in the dance, and when it was over, the party started to break up, first a few people leaving and then more and more.
Devi didn’t get a chance to talk with Zindla until the party was nearly over. When hardly anyone was left except for Zindla and Myanda’s families and a few friends who were helping them put away the folding chairs and mop the floor, Devi went up to Zindla and said: “I didn’t know you were getting married so soon... people don’t get married that young where I’m from.”
“How old are they when they get married?”
Devi shrugged. “My parents were twenty-two when they got married.”
“Wow, that’s pretty old to get married,” said Myanda. “They told me you’re from another world?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of like this one, only there’s no magic, and we’ve got smoother streets, and our cars make a different kind of noise, and —”
“Devi, are you ready to go back to Kashpur’s place?” asked Tyemba.
“I guess,” Devi said, disappointed that she hadn’t had more time to talk with Zindla. “I’d like to visit a little longer, though.”
“You can,” Tyemba said. “But — well, I don’t want you to miss your chance to go home if the cabinet should open a portal suddenly.”
“Yeah... I guess I’d better go. It was nice to see you, Zindla. Nice to meet you, Myanda.”
“You too, squirt,” said Myanda, and Zindla shot him a reproving glance.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
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a brief glimpse of home
but still no answers for is gender change