Looking back, I blame my disgraceful behaviour in part on my hunger to make sense of the lives of Prince Hamlet and his family. If we're to stay sane, our world must make sense, and to my thirteen-year-old self there was too much in the lives of the queen and king that made no sense at all. In part I blame my bad behaviour on my boredom. Yes, it was glorious to live as a lady in the castle, but I hadn't realised how tedious such a life would be. Servants did all the work, and except for a few hours schooling each day, I had nothing but sleeping and eating and grooming myself to fill my time. The gentle-born boys of my age had hawking and hunting and riding and training in the arts of war, but girls were expected to wait patiently until they were given in marriage as brood mares for their husbands. [...] At about thirteen the blood begins to boil and a dark sap in us begins to rise. I suspect even the most chaste among us begin to be haunted with lewd thought and dreams. I do know that in the beginning, my fantasies of Prince Hamlet centred around acting in plays together, but now I began to have fantasies of a baser nature
She shouldn't complain. Her three children were in good health and growing: Tahir now sixteen, Aishel twelve, and Kimya, her youngest, just turned seven, whom, she must admit, she worried about. Oh, she was a lovely child, but so different from her other two! Tahir and Aishel had fallen and cried, spilled their food, rolled in the dust, and messed up their clothes: in short, they had behaved like children and they still did. But Kimya! She was like no other child. She hardly ever cried when she hurt herself. And from time to time she fell into those strange moments when life seemed to spill out of her. She would stand still as though listening to some faraway sound or voice, apparently unaware of her surroundings, and her friends complained that she was no fun to play with.
Not that Evdokia didn't love her daughter. Kimya was so sweet and so pretty with her large, dark eyes, her pale complexion and a way of carrying herself that made the women of the village remark that, one day, she would be a beauty. But that was no reassurance to Evdokia.
The small boys came early to the hanging.
It was still dark when the first three or four of them sidled out of the hovels, quiet as cats in their felt boots. A thin layer of fresh snow covered the little town like a new coat of paint, and theirs were the first footprints to blemish its perfect surface. They picked their way through the huddled wooden huts and along the streets of frozen mud to the silent market-place, where the gallows stood waiting.
The boys despised everything their elders valued. They scorned beauty and mocked goodness. They would hoot with laughter at the sight of a cripple, and if they saw a wounded animal they would stone it to death. They boasted of injuries and wore their scars with pride, and they reserved their special admiration for mutilation: a boy with a finger missing could be their king. They loved violence; they would run miles to see bloodshed; and they never missed a hanging.
