“ Erkovan and Eskovan were lords of the sky and always they were making love, moving back in forth, keeping it all going. So this is what we do. We make love, we share ourselves constantly. We explode in and over each other and cause joy and shock and keep the world going.”
-Connleth Aragareth, The Notebooks
Chyr
“The Blue One saw his reflection, and in loving it, he became the Twins; Erkovan and Eskovan. They made love in every position and when Eskovan came, all of his seed spilled out to make the stars and the planets. It made Elial, Goddess of the Stars and of the Dark night sky. That is the oldest creation story.
“Erkovan’s seed exploded inside of Eskovan, and there it became an egg. For thousands upon thousands of years the egg was in him and one day it came from his mouth. When the egg cracked it became the endless waters, deep and abysmal and in those waters was Aiuryn, the Woman of the Abyss and Rhan, Queen of the Deep. From Aiuryn came Ulle, King of the Deep, and Vara the Mother of Waters. But the cracked shell made the earth itself, Mama Selu. Elial was mother to Sineah the Sun and Olea the Moon, and in time, when she sang, some of those stars sang back to her and they became the Kuaelar, the race of living stars. But Erkovan and Eskovan were lords of the sky and always they were making love, moving back and forth, keeping it all going. So this is what we do. We make love, we share ourselves constantly. We explode in and over each other and cause joy. We cause shock. We help keep the world going.”
They blinked in and out of half sleep. Conn thought, “We should get a bed. We should go into the showers and dress and go to a proper bed. This was not what we came for?”
No, when Conn woke this morning, heading for Niakkaran, he did not imagine that it would lead to he and Derek curled together on the floor, running a hand over his sleeping form. Conn treasured him like that very first time they had met, when he was seventeen and Derek was a strange and beautiful young man he looked up to.
“What did you say?” Derek murmured, turning to him.
“You are still as strange and beautiful as the first time I looked at you.”
Derek kisses him as if they are alone. The room is dark, the music has stopped, but all around them are the sounds, sometimes rough, sometimes gentle, now and again, ecstatic, of sex. The boy who had brought them food now he lay slumped against the wall, his trousers down while Cal, head snaking, knelt before him, sucking.
Many of the lovers lay against the walls, half asleep, still kissing, and now Conn turned his lazy eyes to see why the music had stopped, only to see the old musician lay spread eagle on the floor, pressed under Matteo while, buttocks flexing and unflexing, he slammed into the old man who cried out with entirely new music. Even the gentle old Keeper of the house had come into the ecstasy, the robe thrown from his old brown body while kneeling on Quinton, and riding the little Blue Priest into elation.
“And what comes after all this?” Conn wondered. “What comes after the fucking?”
“Creation,” the ancient story Derek had told said.
“And… what comes after creation?”
Derek, smiling drunkenly at him, caressed his cheek and whispered:
“Love.”
They walked all that morning with a black skinned boy called Polliaran, who may or may not have been at the orgy the night before, and was staying in the inn above the House of Learning. Matteo said that now that they were at their destination, he wasn’t going to move a muscle, and Gabriel had said that he doubted very much that they were in their final destination, but he wasn;t leaving either. They slept in their rooms on the top floor of the inn, far from the love that had occurred the night before.
But Derek and Conn were awake, and they wanted to see Niakkaran. The city rose up high as if it was on hills, but the hills it was on, Conn realized, were older parts of the city. They came into a neighborhood called The Ridge, full of simple houses on small hills behind deep green trees, but where the parapeted street stopped, they looked down a cliff made not of natural rock, but of the generations of old buildings.
“Look,” Polliarran said, “There is it, the Old Temple.”
“It looks old in a Westrian kind of way,” Conn said. “But no older than a kirk in Kingsboro. Which, for this place, can’t be that old.”
“Look closer,” Polliaran said.
Conn looked down in the district called the Metrain, or the Belly, for he knew his languages. Rising above the swarming life of the city, Conn saw what looked like an old kirk, the traditional rose window, the walls, the stain glass windows and steeples he was used to, which belonged to the New Faith. But the two towers that would have been bell towers back home were topped with brass domes, and the roof was flat.
“Say…” Derek began, and Conn followed his finger.
What Conn had taken to be a flat roof, when he actually bothered to stretch and look, was no roof at all. The walls of the immense rose colored kirk definitely encased a blue stone temple, and what was more, that great temple was nearly roofless, and inside and around it could clearly be seen, amongst worshippers and altars, houses. Conn squinted and saw shops even, amongst the temple rubble.
“Is it a kirk, a temple or a neighborhood?” Conn wondered.
“It is all,” Polliaran said. “For every time it stopped being one thing it became another.”
This gentle decay of a city, coupled with its instant repair continued to give Conn the vertigo he’d felt before. Back at the inn, Conn said he felt as if he would never be in a proper city again until he was again in one where the direction was toward progress and away from living amongst ruins.
“You would have to go south for that. The true power is in the south,” Gabriel said later on.
“Then how did we end up here?” Matt demanded.
“Because we followed Ohean, and Ohean was heading for Rheged.”
“Besides,” the elfin faced Derek continued, “We needed to be here. Conn felt it. Conn led us here.”
This was quiet land, flat land once they’d crossed the river. Along the Two Rivers, stretching into Rheged was the land of Marnen Ro, no state but a nation within in nations of the Marnen people of whom Sara and Obola were. They were the herders who traveled the Great Road in a journey of two years to return here, and as soon as they returned, other members of the family set out on the road to take their place. The Marnen were, of course, herders of geese and other fowl as well as herders of cows and sheep.
But here, Conn and his companions had met the people they’d only heard of, the men of Thadden Ro, which included the great valley in which they now lived, and the land on the other side of the mountains. The Thad, like their cousins the Marnen, were a tenting people, nomads as well, but they traded in horses and rarely took the Great Road. All through their travels between towns, Derek and Conn had seen the settlements of these nomadic people. The land was full, Cal and Quint and Matt judged, but not full of civilization.
“We’re in the northern valley,” Gabriel said, “in truth, not far from the great city of Immrachyr, but also isolated by the mountains from the great coastal lands and the north and the far south. This is a good place for us to be, to learn, to become ourselves.”
“You really believe we’re going to be a new Blue Temple?” Matt said.
Conn and Quint had said nothing. Neither had Cal.
“We’re going to be something that hasn’t existed before. That’s why we’re here,” Derek continued. “I don’t know if it’s going to matter soon or in a century, but that’s why we’re here. Before, the Blues came from the West into the East and now we are returning to the Root.”
“Well,” Quint said, when he stopped playing with his foot. Matt lifted his lover’s twisted leg and began to massage it, “are we going to visit an old Blue Temple or something, visit another House of Wisdom?”
“We can do both,” Conn finally spoke, “but neither is our purpose. What we are about to do is build a Temple. From now on, we will be the House. We will be the Temple.”
