TranscriptI will not offer myself to you as a seer. I will offer myself as a liar, and a person who has thought of lies and studied lies, believed them and then saw the truths beneath.I will begin by telling you: I was tired of life. I think it is easy for the young to be weary in this way. We do not know the space of time, only the furious pace of the inexperienced. I always expected to be courted by the powerful. I believed that I could foretell an assassination, even the whispering of such a thing in the darkest corners of the city. A face glimpsed by me would be seized upon. But after a time, though I had been told that I was gifted, I already suspected that it was not the case. My faith in myself and the world as it was taught to me gave way in an average morning, in the face of a forgettable event.I rose early with the other students and we sat on a veranda, beneath the citrus trees. The temple was kept fastidiously clean by attendants who I couldn’t have been bothered to spit upon, but in the high heat of summer cleanliness did little to discourage the hornets. They fed on the fruit before it fell. As the heat rose it became frightening to sit below their droning and I wondered why we, who were gifted with foresight, would return to this place daily, knowing the risk of being stung. As anyone could have foreseen, prophetic dreams or not, I was stung. I knew it would happen, not out of foresight, but common sense. The insect was large, threatening in its oranges, reds and blacks. This was our usual point of departure, the time at which all of us would rush from the courtyard. It hurt horribly, and to slap it and wheel my arms would draw more of them down, but I did just this, as happened so many mornings in the summer. We all rushed indoors. As we ran, I paused for a moment and remembered my dream from the night prior. There were birds in the trees above us, with curved bills and red eyes. They lived among the hornets and through some gift of their nature the insects were unconcerned with them. In my dream one of these birds snatched a hornet from the air. I knew they did this, a routine part of their lives, in fact I had seen it happen many times before. And on this morning, looking over my shoulder for just a moment, I saw this commonplace thing happen again. If I wanted to, I could have dressed this dream in metaphor and convinced myself that it spoke of a growing season, or a war, or a marriage, but the most likely interpretation was that the dream said absolutely nothing about the future, or, if it did, it argued that the world would happen as it always did. Faith is not as strong as people would like you to believe. From that point on I doubted my gift, and though I would not say this aloud, it colored my life from that point forward. I had questions that I could not ask for fear of losing my station or having a severe punishment visited upon me. I wished that one of the other students would betray some evidence of doubt, not enough to be punished, just enough that I would see. This did not happen. I became lackluster.The prefects saw this. They were used to meting out discipline and they were hated, as those with authority will always be hated, so they had learned to detect it even when it was hidden. They seized on me, just as that daring bird seized upon the hornet. They orbited me. There were many disciplines that we young seers were faced with, rarely severe, which made it sting even more. I lost most of my belief and though not formally, a great deal of status. I would still sit in that very courtyard in the heat of the day, eyes closed, sketching the content of my dreams upon paper with sweat from my brow. I knew that this would mean bad things for certain people and great fortune for others. For all the suspicion I felt cast upon me, I was still utilized. Acknowledging that there was doubt among the acolytes would be quite bad for our order, and I think it is the case that there needed to be a critical mass of belief within the temple, just as much as this belief needed to exist in the city outside of our walls. When I was not sleeping, and dreaming, I was assigned to work that only the lowest in the order could be given. I waited on those who had served long enough to earn themselves a dotage of custodial care and relegation to uselessness. The sleep of the old is not the sleep of the young and so the seniors of our caste were cared for and tolerated by the youngest of us. Many were feeble, either of mind or of body and often both. Some were sweet, some were angry, and all required care. To be served by attendants was beneath them, and so the passed over, such as myself, comforted them. Our city was one of architectural marvels, where bridges of braided wire spanned the sacred river, and temples such as ours, with immense and sloping arches, looked down upon it. I would bring one of my elderly charges to the promenade and we would watch the water pass below. ...
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