The Book of the Burning

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

“Everything began in lust. Lust burns through all and is at the heart of all, and in the end shall all be reborn from it.”

 - The Book of the Burning

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THE NIGHT OF THE ALCOT

The Feast of the Alcot was upon them, and even the rumors of war could not stop it. The Alcot had always been one of the strangest feasts Derek Annakar remembered from his days in the Blue Temple. Only when he had seen it in all of its glory in Immrachyr did he truly understand the Three Days, and now he longed to be in Immrachyr again. Despite his white skin and being in this white land of his birth, since he had returned to Westrial he felt the difference between being a Blue Priest here, and being a Blue Priest in the land of the Old Religion.

“It isn’t that the Blue Temple is not home,” Gabriel had said on their first day back, “but after Chyr…”

“This Temple will always be home,” Derek said. “And it is good for us to remember that our vows are not about our simple pleasure. Here, in this land, where the old ways are forgotten, this Temple is needed more than the many in Chyr.”

He stopped lecturing because he was boring himself, and bccause he knew how Gabriel and Quinton and the others felt. In Chyr they were treated like the priests they were and the Rites of Adaon celebrated by the whole city. Great parades took place at Aulkculwad, which was the ancient name for the holiday, and all taverns were open, as were all temples, Red and Green as well as Blue. The world was a holiday. Here, if you were not a devotee, you knew nothing of the holy day. There were no parades, and even had the people been used to such parades, there was a tension in the land.

“I keep stopping myself from telling people it wasn’t like this in Chyr,” Cal told Abbot Fero. “No one wants to hear that over and over again.”

“I think,” the Abbot said, “you may be forgetting that this large temple, though not as large as some you saw, is certainly far older, and that in it, for people who outside these walls never experienced the rites of Adaon, we offer freedom and a chance to experience all of those wonders.”

“I haven’t forgotten, Lord. I do remember,” Cal said. “And none of us is sad to be in our old home, my refuge. It is only…”

“It happens when you travel.”

“I am so foolish,” Cal realized suddenly. “Surely it must have happened to you when they sent you here! How plebeian we must have seemed. How backward.”

“Not backward,” Fero said. “Different. The path is like water. You spill it and it falls in its own patterns. Rivers, streams, trickles, lakes, each according to where it lands. One is not better than the other. They are what they must be in their place. It is we who make the preferences.”

“Besides,” Lorne pointed out to Derek, “you all were the ones who chose to come back.”

“I kept having the dreams,” Derek explained while they made the bed together. “Not only was I having the dreams that told me to come back, there were the sendings from Conn.”

“And the sendings were not for you go to him?”

“Wherever he is, I could not find him, not at this time. He has well and truly fallen in with Ekkrebeth and Prince Anson in whatever business they are about in the South.”

“You have all been entangled in adventures,” Lorne said. “You were even with that pair who are now the King and Queen up in the North. That is not for me. Here I have been and here I remain.”

“If you hadn’t remained, old friend,” Derek pointed out, “what would be our joy in returning?”

Lorne was never one to live alone, and when his friends had left on their journey, there were others to move into the suite of rooms, and even into his bed. But it wasn’t the same, and with his friends gone, the rest of his days were not the same either. The Abbot had seen this and asked him if he would like to go journeying, stay in another house for a time, and Lorne had gone to some back of beyond place on the border near Senach and Sussail. It had only been a house with four others living in it, two of whom he remembered from their schooling days. Here, there was far more business than he had ever expected, and their rooms had no doors, but only silk curtains dyed with images of the gods. All through the day you could hear the sex on the other side of them, and in the night they gathered in the little living room up front for supper. Lorne had returned a year ago, feeling the same itching need to be back in Kingsboro though, like the friends he had long been parted from, the temple seemed strange to him after so long an absence.

Remembering that under the laws of the temple, after all the turns he had taken in the Blue rooms and the sanctuary, he was never required to lay with anyone again, when the Abbot offered him a quiet room on the seventh floor among the renunciates, he accepted.

The morning Fero had knocked on his door, entered and told Lorne that Derek was coming back with Cal and Gabriel, Matteo and Quinton, the big, broad brown priest reminded himself that he was a thirty something year old man in the priesthood for over a decade and he must contain himself, that the past was the past and they could not recreate what they had before, but perhaps make something new and better. Imagine the morning when there was another knock at the door and, disheveled, tired, but smiling, there were his brothers.

“We just arrived. Come eat with us!” Derek commanded. “We have so much to plan.”

Cal did not disguise his displeasure at losing his old room.

“I know that nothing is ours and all things change,” he intoned, “but I don’t care. I loved that old room.”

“Never fear,” Gabriel squeezed his shoulder. “We’ll find something better, or at least something different.”

“Aye!” said Cal. “The different is what troubles me.”

“Whatever it is,” Quinton said, “let it not be on the sixth or seventh floor.”

But, in the end, what they had found was not on the sixth or seventh floor, but on the very roof in what was called Asiemento House. Few of them had ever visited the gardened roof that overlooked the city, and when they never asked about the few buildings on it amid the gardens. Through the trees were the windows of little buildings they had never paid attention to, but one of these proved to be Asiemento House. Dark blue as the rest of the Blue House, it as built like one very long bungalow with a sloping roof, and there they lived with two other groups of priests in the Fourth Grade.

“It explains why we never met them,” Gabriel said while he and Cal brought in an old table.

Their quarters were much like the old ones with their connected rooms except that in place of Derek’s old bare one was a large wood floored room where the sun rose every morning through the eastern window, and it was connected directly to the main room with its bear rug where Lorne made his home. Following the old pattern, past the kitchen, Gabriel and Cal took up the next room with its bay window overlooking the south of Kingsboro. The bathroom they shared with other borders and on the other side of this apartment, in their own rooms, Quinton and Matteo found a place for themselves. It was in this place, drinking spiced coffee and watching the sky change as the sun began to set that Derek sat thinking of tonight and the feast of the Alcot.

Cal leaned against the wall and watched the sun sinking beneath the rose and earth colored towers of the Kingsboro, which despite being on the other side of the river, appeared much closer than it was.

“Do you think the King knows it’s the Alcot?”

“If he ever did, the King has probably chosen to forget,” Derek said. “And these days with the new Queen, none of the bishops have said a word against the old ways. They don’t dare,”

“You remember around the time we left,” Quinton said, stretching out his sore leg, “when the Witch Blamings began and so many fled south to Ondres, or to the Rootless Isle?”

“Yes, and all that dried out when she came to the throne,” said Lorne. “I’d like to shake the lady’s hand.”

“Blessings on Queen Isobel, and her coming son,” Derek said, piously, “if son it is.”

“They say she is a witch. It is whispered about,” said a blond boy named Tobin, who had taken up with Lorne and sat on the floor trimming his nails.

“And they had better whisper it,” Lorne said. “They’d better not say it out loud, not in this land. Remember how they treated Essily, Anson’s mother, and she was in the holy line of the Rootless Isle.”

“It is whispered because it is true, though,” Derek said. “Anyone who wishes to know can find that Isobel received her education on the Rootless Isle, the same as Myrne of Herreboro.”

“It proves neither of them witches,” Lorne said. “But it certainly means they will have no sympathy for the bishops and what they’ve attempted to do to the old ways.”

“What if the Queen had a daughter?” Matteo wondered in his rough voice.

“What if there was a Queen in Westrial?”

“Has there been a Queen before? A reigning Queen?” Derek wondered.

“No,” said Gabriel, “though some thing Esla, who is recorded as one of the first kings before the days of Aethelstan may have been a woman. Byrnhild would have been queen, but she took her people north and founded Inglad. There has been, in the thousand year history of Westrial, no queen as far as I know.”

“And yet a new age is upon us,” Derek said.

“People are always saying a new age is upon us,” Cal protested.

“But for years now, the Ahnar priests have chanted that the Age of Love is coming and the Age of War nearing an end. Ifandell Modet prophesied it a century ago. In the north the true Wulfstans are restored and Hale marches against Inglad, and in the South there are rumblings of Solahn and Daumany gathering for something, not to mention Anson and Ohean. And Conn, and whatever secret work they are at, and now the people of Ondres and the South clamor for their prince. Remember how Akkrebeth said a thing was coming and drew us all into it.”

“You may be right,” Cal said. “In fact, I do not doubt you are, big brother. But the things you say seem not to portend of a new age and the end of wars, but the same sad age we’ve lived in forever, and the increase of them.”

Rumors of war be damned. All of it be damned, even the prophecies, even the little worries about their new place in the temple and leaving their old home. Visions and promptings were strange. The Gods never told you more than they had to, and while you might worry about the future, they did not. As much as he was glad to be home, Derek longed for Chyr and was embarrassed by how much he had longed for Kingsboro when he had not been here.

He had a lover named Wade who was a white man, but had come to live in Chyr as a merchant, and he told Derek, “On the island of Solea it is never winter and the water is always blue like sapphires. There are oak trees covered in moss, and the palm trees grow high there. In those lands the blood stirs in the heat and the music plays long into the night.”

Late spring in a Westrial facing war could never match this. But now, as the evening approached, the drums began pounding. There was no formal meal in the hall upstairs tonight, for all were dressing and washing, preparing for the Alcot, the one night when all the doors of the temple were open, and dancing moved out into the very street before the sober looking block of a building. In most years, Derek had been one of the drummers, and in the last one he had drummed beside Conn, the both of them in their blue sarongs, sweat pouring down their bare chestsed, and out of their hair as the rhythm carried them away. Or in other times he had been one of the dancers, Gabriel and Cal with him, their feet never missing the pounding beat, their legs leaping, hands clapping in honor of Adaon as they danced before the Blue God.

For the first time in years, all of them were simply participants in the rites, and though often the temple was open to the Grey Order, composed of families, and open to women and children in general, this was not a night for children, and the Alcot was not a night for women or for families, or for the shy or the fearful. There were seven times seven paths to Adaon, and the Alcot was the celebration of Adaon as Lord of Misrule. Even as they gathered in the temple, the drumming and dancing began. It was relaxed, for it would go on throughout the night, and the other members of the household were sitting on cushions, clapping and singing or some gathered in groups in the corners or stretched out on the floor. In lieu of the supper people had missed, small savory and sweet snacks were all around, to be eaten all through the night, and as the evening went on, teas and drinks, even coffee was passed around. Derek lazily drank a pewter cup of cool juice as the great yellow lamps were dimmed and other lamps, blue and red and set on revolvers replaced them, creating a warm maze of shifting colors.

There was a moment when Derek felt his body change, almost as if it had been magically turned into gelatin, and then it recovered. But this was when he knew the drugs were setting in, drugs from the mushrooms and herbs and the chemical juices put in the drinks and in the food, the gifts of Goddess Ossain, Mistress of Herbs and daughter of Holy Amana. He felt warm and expansive and laughed aloud. The crowd was snapping their fingers and embracing warmly, and the music of the drums was rising. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tobin, the new fair haired priest who lived with them, and he was laying against Lorne who wore his blue robe. With no swiftness and no shame, he placed his hand in Lorne’s robe and lifted it, and then put his head in and his shoulders. As Lorne lay back in pleasure, Derek, feeling pleasure rise in his loins, watched Tobin’s form under the robe, his head snaking about.

The Gyre Artists had arrived, and while the dancers and drummers still performed their service before the great image of Adaon, the Artists performed their bawdy plays as they did in the sex houses. The bawdy plays were low on play and high on bawd, often lacking words, erotic fantasies that were excuses for sex acts, and as they began disrobing and making love to each other, at last, in the blue and purple half darkness, those gathered gave themselves to the desire that was the heart of the Alcot. Derek, having no will to only be watching, freed himself from his sarong, and as the music played and he half saw others milling around him, with no shame began masturbating, sticking his hand in an emergency oil of one of the snacks he had left uneaten and rubbing it on the knob of his penis. He was aware of those watching him, aware of his beautiful muscled body, white purple, white blue in the changing lights, as he lay on the floor, knees up, feet planted on the ground, head elevated, stroking himself larger and larger. When he felt hands on his hips, and a greedy mouth descended on him, sucking his cock, Derek did not protest, but lay on the floor looking up at the turning lights. What happened happened, and all of it was offered to Adaon. The oldest sign of Adaon and of his priests was not the humble young man or the philosophical Blue God with fingers raised in blessing, but a phallus, a simple, upright cock. And that was the original sign of the priests and here he was, right now, stripped of station, intellect, respect or even personality. In a circle were men sucking or playing with his nipples, reaching down to kiss him and insert their tongues in his mouth, stroking him as they stroked themselves, but mainly there was this greedy, longing mouth, and all of him had descended into his loins till he was nothing but a swelling cock. And when, at last, this mouth, or someone else’s lifted from his cock and he felt the pressure of someone sitting down on him, pulling him inside another hot tightness, when hands were on his chest and he was being desperately ridden, well then he was still that cock. Under the melting and swirling influence of the drugs and dancing and music, he lay crucified, penis firmly captured and ridden under this anonymous, priest for who new how long. Sometimes he rested from his ride, and then he continued, and the night passed with Derek under him, hearing the remnants of the music.

 

 Asayamo asay petigi asay matato,

enher, omalee,

ossat vasto,

tembe tente asayam satayam

ay petigo

 

Ancient words, perhaps even magical ones, not about the beauty and romance of love, but so crude they had never been translated, the most ancient slang for the most ancient thing that had happened here, that was happening now, as Derek rose up and, the drugs swirling through his head, he placed this boy or this man under him and, in the midst of others who had now turned to their own pleasures, though some were still watching him, he plowed this man, tenderly, sometimes not, and it seemed that the journey toward orgasm wound through the night until it was not about the orgasm, but simply riding this boy—he thought of him as a boy. Someone came by with a bottle of fumes and put them to Derek’s nose, He closed one nostril, inhaled and suddenly, gathering up fuel, hardfucked the boy under him who cried out and then Derek began to ride him slowly. There was a time when Derek was silent and spread himself eagle as, deep inside of the boy he was pounding, he felt someone else enter him, stretching him, and then the three of them were moving together, Derek pounded, pounding this boy into the earth.

The release came when he heard the unmistakable groan of orgasm from someone nearby.  His scrotum tightened and his asshole throbbed and suddenly he rode the priest he was fucking like a jockey headed toward the finish line, screaming silently and gripping his shoulders as he came, cramming himself deep into the boy as he flooded him  with his seed.

Derek lay exhausted, his penis still inside the boy, and generally he would get up and move on, for at the Alcot, though there was no prohibition against knowing whom you were with, anonymity was counted as blessed. But for some reason, he could not stop There had been so much in him and he was still hard, so he continued fucking the boy who whimpered under him, and sometimes they drifted off into sleep and when juices came around again, they drank them, and when fumes came they snorted them, and then Derek began fucking him again until he came a second time, passing out on the cushion of the body of his anonymous lover.