Nearly toward morning, Matteo wiped sleep from his eyes. Pulling on an under robe, he separated himself from Quinton, whose mouth was open in a half smile. So this is what the Green Priests did or, at least, what the Green Priests could do. His heart was… not light. That was not the word. He was strangely drained and changed. He felt as if he’d been caught up in something. Well, wasn’t that what it was to be a Blue? Yes, but it was different, or maybe it was that the Blue Temple laws his home. He brushed dirt from his hair, reached under his robe and removed a leaf sticking to his thigh. There was something wild about last night and what had happened, not so much a letting go of himself as a being taken over that, frankly, he hoped to never happen again. It was something altogether too frightening for him. As he stumbled through the brush in the grey and early morning, Matt looked for the path to the bath and began to follow the path of low burning torches. In the bushes he saw one of the Merry Men, his trews pulled down, head thrust up, plowing a woman, his lips parted, her eyes unfocused with whatever ecstasy had come upon them. As Matteo’s dry mouth watched in sympathy, his penis rose and before he knew it he was stroking himself. He would have been undressed, naked and joining in had he remained a moment longer. What was this strange power that had not come until the song but was here now, that he was almost falling prey too?
Suddenly he heard something in the bushes that made him remove his hand from his cock, and he turned to see a man—No, but he had been mistaken because it passed so quickly. Not a man but a deer, a stag, many horned, watching solemnly, and then, no. It was, most certainly, a horned man looking at him with the utmost solemnity, and before Matteo could open his mouth or look fully, he was gone.
“That was the Green,” Matteo whispered. “That was the Green God. As Annar is the Blue.”
He knelt and placed his face to the earth, and remained like this for some time, and then went down to the brook. He was preparing to undress when he heard the sounds of struggling in the brush and turned to see, in the middle of it, in the large moss patch.bed, lit by the moonlight, Cal lay on his back, half sitting up, and Gabriel, white and beautiful, knelt on him, fucking himself quickly, his mouth parted, noise escaping his mouth.
“It’s alright baby,” Cal said, in a slow voice that held none of the sarcasm and drawl it often had. “It’s alright. I told you I’d always be here for you...”
Eyes closed, sweet Gabriel panted and pumped himself quickly on Cal whose hands rose up occasionally to touch him while his mouth opened wider until, at last, Cal rose from the bed and the moonlight was white on him when he turned around and began spending himself on Gabriel while Gabriel’s hands went around him. Conn knew he shouldn’t watch, but almost as he said it a new voice said, “Why wouldn’t you?”
He ached he was so hard and he realized that, in some way, he had ached for Quinton again and could nearly cry out for something that was so near to him even as he heard Gabriel moaning like someone being punched while Cal fucked him harder and harder and brought them all both the edge of climax, Matt, stroking himself, nearly fainting while he felt his own faintly sticky seed oozing around his fingertips.
Polly rose from Michael’s side, and she smiled to herself, almost laughed because they were still clothed and that was strange considering what had happened last night. Last night, and the day before, when she had born the full power of the Lady of the Greenwood, she had been Mariamne, and now it was good to be plain Polly again.
In the summertime the Green Lord came, the Green Song was heard and then the power of desire went through the warm wood. But last night this had all been a surprise, who had expected it? Not she. Polly had spent much of the day at the pools, meditating, and she hadn’t foreseen any of this. Alan had begun his song last night, and she had even felt desire in her heart, but it had brushed past her like a breeze.
This is because of the Blue Priests, no doubt, she thought. They have brought their God into this wood.
This wood was the Green Wood of the one of many names, the Hunter, the Lord of Beasts, the Lord of Trees and the God of the Green. Some called him the Witch’s Devil and the Sinercians had called him Pan. Because of her schooling she knew even further back he was called by other names, Aegipan, the Goat Headed One, Khnum the Ram who dwells by the flowing waters.
The Blue Priests usually had their temples in the city, and though Polly wasn’t so silly as to take her thoughts seriously, she thought of the Blue God as a city god. This was not so. He may have been the God who gathered cities to him, Everyone who knew the past knew that before Kingsboro had been called that, it had born an older name, and Kingsboro had spread out from its great palace to eventually encompass villages that were the stunted remains of a once great city. That city’s names were still kept in ancient books in the White Tower, the Grey Tower and in the Black, and it had begun with the Blue Priests establishing their ancient temple, with the red door the white door and the black. Those priests had not come from Chyr across the plains, no they had come all the way from Atle before it was sunken. And Annar had many names and he was the Lord of many things. He was the Lord of men who loved men hence his priests did. But he was the lord of magics, the first of magician. He was the God of thieving, as well as discipline but also called The Light Hearted One, the Dancer. Oldest of Gods and the Young One. The Blue God was the Shepherd and Sacrifice. As a girl, Pollanikar had learned his ancient names, the Lover of Men, Adonis, Adonay, Aidonius Master of the Underworld. It was said, and in the Blue temples it was depicted, that he was the lover of Erkovan and Escovan, the Sky Twins. But it was also said that he was not their lover, but them both, for he had split him self. He held the Blue Flame and the Inner Flame of one Twin and the Outer of the Other. He was the Lover of the Queen of the Dead, but the Lover of all the male gods. He had been born many times in the earth. He was fluid, hence his Sinercian name, Mercury.
But, Polly reflected as she stepped lightly through bodies that lay together abandoned in sleep and the remains of pleasure, the old Sinercian stories said that Mercury was the father of Pan. However some said that this was not so, but that the two gods were close. In her girlhood training, Polly had learned that Gods who were close, who were nearly the same, when brought together made a powerful magic. Adonay held sway over the Blue orgy, and Pan over the Green. No wonder when the Blue priests had entered the wood such things had happened.
She stopped. Polly had been on her way to the pool, but she went walking north toward the sound of the river. In the clearing under the new morning sky, she observed the large flock of wild geese. They had made friendly honking overtures to the geese kept by the woman Obala, but the two groups had not intruded upon each other. They made their way to Polly, stretching their necks and looping them like black serpents. As she walked the bank she saw a round circle of stones enclosing a mound of flowers and trees, Away from it was another such merry mound and Polly kept a thoughtful silence.
The stories told how Robin Wood had died in the abbey not far away, done in by a treacherous nun. But they did not tell that here, under these rich flowers and green blooms he lay. And they did not tell that Marion lay at his side. Nor did they speak of the other mound where a Robin and Marian from before also lay together. It was not true that there was always a Robin and Marion, but it was true that when the two had passed, the wood was guarded by their souls until the new should arrive. And when they did arrive, there was such a meeting with the new souls that the new Marion and the new Robin contained something of the old.
While she stood here thinking this was the place where one day she and Michael would rest, thinking that there was no telling what would happen to them in the end, she turned when she heard footsteps and saw Derek coming, looking flushed and fresh, happy, and full of peace.
“I had not seen you,” he almost laughed. “You blended with the green.”
“Well,” the young woman in the green gown shrugged.
“Did you rest well?” she asked.
“I…” Derek looked for a way to answer this and finally said, “Yes.”
He said, “There is something of the otherworld about you.”
“And about you as well, Derek Annakar of the white skin and black hair, of the eyes that can barely be see behind your thick lashes. I wonder if there is not mageblood in you.”
“I am no mage,” Derek laughed. “And I am almost totally Doman.”
“Almost,” Polly noted, “which does not mean completely.”
“I suppose we all have a little bit of the Old Blood,” Derek shrugged. “But mine is probably Ayl. Look at me. I’m no Royan.”
“All witches are not Royan and all Royan are not witches, as you well know.” Polly said. “I would bet there is Old Blood in you, and I think it must be powerful.”
Derek did not know how to answer this, so he said, “All Royan are not, but you are… Are you not? Or… did the Wood call to you and give you the sight?”
“The Wood called to me, yes,” Polly admitted, but I had the sight before it. My home is in the south, remember. On the Moving Isle.”
Well, yes, she was the kin of Ohean, which, Derek realized, meant Anson as well. She would have been descended from many generations of those holy priestesses.
As evening approached and Derek Annakar sat looking through the trees at the river shooting far below, he said, “I could stay here a while.”
Beside him the fat friar said, “you could.”
“I feel healed, and had no idea of how much healing I needed until I came to this wood.”
“There is much healing in the wood,” Friar Claire said, “And what is more, much healing you and your priests can offer.”
“I never knew,” Derek noted, looking down, looking through the huts going down the slope below, “exactly what all the legends about Robin Hood and his Merry Folk were about. I knew—I heard—there were outlaws, and that this wood was sacred, but…”
“This Wood has been sacred from time out of mind,” Claire said. “It is one of the places of power where the Ildor, the First Folk lived, and where they crossed out of their world and into ours and still do. This place is the meeting of the worlds and Michael and Polly are the Robin and Marion, for always, in this forest there is a Robin Wood, or Hood, and his Maid Marian, King and Queen, Priest and Priestess of the Green.”
“As I am of the Blue.”
“Aye.”
“I thought,” Derek began, “that I saw the Lord of the Green, that he beckoned to us. At first he seemed only like a stag, but as I followed he seemed like a horned man. The closer I came, the harder it was to say. And then he was no more. Or rather, he was everywhere.”
“He welcomes you here,” The Brown Friar said. “Technically the brown monks are of the New Faith, but we came out of the old. We were once the priests and priestesses of the Earth. It is said in old stories that Ilmaro the Trickster was the father of Faunus or Omnus, the old Sinercian name for the Lord of Nature. But there are also older stories that said this very Lord was as old as the Titans, the Elder Gods who set the limits of the earth. The truth, The Trickster and the Lord of the Wood, the Green God and the Blue are One, coming from each other, reflecting upon the earth to men as different things. Think of the most intense moments of the rut when you served as a Blue priests and tell me you did not know the Wild God in them.”
“And the Merry Folk….” Derek murmured.
“Are all the people who come into this wood and make their home here much as… the dependents in the blue Temple. Some have lived here for generations, between Chyr and Westrial, between the world of men and the world beyond.”
Derek thought of the morning, when dense fog rose up from the river bed and the stretch of green he could see beyond him, which was the other side of the river, which was Chyr seemed to rise in black shadow from the white mist.
“I know the look on your face,” the Friar said. “It is a look of sadness.”
“Yes,” Derek said.
“Sadness,” Friar Clare concluded, “because you cannot stay.”
