Derek
“We should meet them by the end of the day, or tomorrow,” Derek predicted.
“How do you figure?” Cal asked. “We should have seen them days ago.”
“They rode at breakneck speed,” Derek argued, and I’m sure they continued to. And we have trotted along for the last few days. There is no reason we should have caught up with them until now.”
“And now,” Cal, said, “We have not caught up with them.”
Derek understood that on one level, Cal was afraid that they were lost from Conn and Ohean and Anson. He had wondered as well, but it was Matteo who said. “They will be waiting for us in Ollagoth. It was agreed. We will all meet in Ollagoth. And as you see, we are still far ahead of Sara and Nialla and Obala. We’ve already discussed this. Ohean and the others had to ride as far as possible to the West, and as soon as possible too.”
“Is it true that in the West Country they will be out of danger from Cedd?” Quinton wondered.
“The King cannot openly say he is opposed to his brother or admit that his youngest sister has fled,” Derek said, “and as yet, he doesn’t have the intelligentsia to hunt for them secretly. The West Country is independent from the rest of the land in all but name. He would never venture as far as Ollagoth.”.
“It is possible,” Gabriel spoke for the first time, “that even this far northwest is beyond Cedd.”
“It’s beyond something,” Quinton said, looking down from the rise the road lay along to the great brown expanse of the river Westyl. It was so side that marshy islands the size of small towns rose from it, and near the rocky banks were freshets and rivulets. The late morning sun that warmed their heads through the hazy day cast light on the wooded hills across the water. At Langenford they would cross the river and enter into the Far West.
“It would be good to bathe in that river,” Matteo said.
“It would be cold and mucky and opposite of good,” Quinton, always a southerner, protested.
“Still,” Matteo said, “I feel the need to a bath.”
“I know what you mean,” Derek said.
They were all Blues and Derek fully understood that often, regardless of how they personally felt about who came to them, they were vowed to give pleasure to men. Even on the nights of orgy, where the spirit of lust possessed them and they went to their work with abandon, it was still an offering, and when it was done there was exhaustion. Men were not meant for these things, not really, and there was a magic that passed through them. Dressing and washing the morning after they had left the houseboats, Derek had felt an exhaustion, a loss of personal space and boundary after his nights of riding and being ridden, and this morning he felt that same loss over their whole group. Together they were part of a Ogdoad, Matteo vowed to Quinton, Cal vowed to Gabriel, all of them vowed to each other, but in these last days they had not known each other, only known other men they were would never see again, only been the bodies through which shock and mercy and magic and orgasm had passed through.
“Perhaps we will find a village tonight,” Derek said. “When we do we will wash and purify again. We will keep harum for a while and not be open to others until we can be ourselves again. We will be for ourselves for a while. How is that?”
No one said anything, but this seemed to be agreeable to all and so they rode on.
For a long time it did not look like they would find any town, let alone a bathing house. They did, now and again, find clumps of Marnen with their herds and now and again see stretches of them riding north and south. Once they ran into a troupe of Red Priests and passed a camp of brightly colored vardos belonging to the Traveling Folk. The days were longer now, and as this one came to an end they reached Langenford, a city strtching out on both sides of the river and found no great inn, but a quiet hotel whose mistress assured them was fresh up on hot bread and hot water.
From a distance, Derek imagined himself exploring Langenford. He was not sure if the town was actually two towns, dock houses and little houses, red tiled spreading out from the shore, not very many tall buildings but most of them charming, and all the city radiating out to little farmsteads. Here there wre clumps of Travelers raising camps as well as herders, Marnen, Thadden and Westrial. After traveling so long seeing no one, now they saw, in addition to the Travelers and herders, the small villages of the Elundi, with their round white houses.
All of these jostled together in the wall less town, and now Derek knew as he yawned that he would not be going anywhere. They had taken three rooms and he one alone. They shared a bathroom between them, one with a great shower and hot water that reminded him of something in the Blue Temple, and in that room was a large tub as well and a commode. Derek sank into the bath and there was a candle lit by the window that shone on the city he would not be visiting. He yawned and Cal, walking in reached down and flicked him.
“Don’t you fall asleep and drown in that tub, Mr. Annakar,” he said.
And Derek only laughed a little, barely conscious of Cal, laying his clothes on the flagstone of the bathing room and then sitting on the commode to relieve himself. Derek hated bath houses and bathrooms where the commode was close to the tub and this was not one of them. There was a sink between them and he heard Cal singing:
The wind doth blow
Today my love
A few small drops of rain
Never have I had
But one true love
In cold clay she is laid
I'll do as much
For my true love
As any young man may
I'll sit and mourn
All on her grave
At twelve months and a day
Derek had also jumped at this journey because the last time he had left the city was to return to the east where his family lived and care for his father. This was not the way it was supposed to be, he’d said. At not quite thirty, he was not supposed to have a dead mother, and what was more, with other siblings, he was not supposed to be the one caring for his father. He had been away from the temple and away from his life for three months before he was sternly called back, a call he barely obeyed, and when he had returned, Hryum lectured him sternly.
“You are trying to gain a love you never had,” Hyrum said. “It is like guilt, but it isn’t guilt. What it is is hopeless, and you will spend your whole life on someone who has already taken up so much energy it took your mother’s life.”
The twelve months and the day being gone
A voice spoke from the deep
Who is it sits
All on my grave
And will not let me sleep
'Tis I, 'tis I,
Thine own true love
Who sits upon your grave
For I crave one kiss
From your sweet lips
And that is all I seek
Derek was surprised the words of the song had come from his lips. There was a gentle flushing from the commode, or had the flushing happened a while ago? The running of water, Cal cleaning himself before entering the showers.
But Cal did not enter the shower. Derek felt the displacement of water. Heard the splash, felt the sole of Cal’s foot press against his own and then felt Cal settle into the bath with him.
“When I was a little boy, my old man would pass me around to be fucked by whoever,” Cal said. “He once took me out on the corner of Queen’s Park and told me to sing to attract men. I said I couldn’t sing and he hit me in the back of my head till I did, and then he gave me to two men so he could buy liquor and watched them use me.
“I have always been proud to be a Blue Priest,” Cal said, sinking deeper into the water so that his thighs touched Derek’s and only his curly hair was visible above the suds, “But sometimes I feel like that little boy again, and that means I will probably have to stop this soon.”
Derek remembered leaving his ailing father. His sister had called him, telling him how heartless he was and how she and her husband should not be left to care for their father. She had said more, about them being pillars of the One Faith, well known in their community and respected and how everyone pittied them for being saddled with such an old man, but also such a strange brother.
“I will go,” Derek had said. “I will go long enough to put things aright.”
Cal sang:
You crave one kiss
From my clay cold lips
But my breath is earthy strong
Had you one kiss
From my clay cold lips
Your time would not be long
My time be long,
My time be short
Tomorrow or today
May God in heaven
Have all my soul
But I'll kiss your lips of clay
Now the others entered, chatting but too tired to be loud, Derek blinked. They were already naked as they turned on the shower and did not bother with the curtain. They had known each other so long nakedness was not eroticism. The gentle loving touch that happened under covers was eroticism. Derek was not sure if Cal was going to ask to sleep with him tonight, and Derek wasn’t sure if he was going to say no. Right now he was thinking of Conn and how many days they had been apart, and how Conn had traveled with him to the east, and it had been Conn who found his father splayed on the floor and brought him back to Kingsboro, to place him under the care of the White Father’s, in the home of the Aged at Purplekirk.
It was Conn who had said, “You did all you could. You did all you could.”
Gabriel was singing, with his flawless voice, as he passed the shower head over his flawless body:
See down in yonder garden green
Love where we used to walk
The sweetest flower
That ever grew
Is withered to the stalk
They must have all heard him and Calon singing, Calon who had known much he no longer discussed, who had been on the battlefield two years ago and given himself to men in the night who had been killed the next morning.
The stalk is withered dry my love
So will our hearts decay
So make yourself
Content my love
Till death calls you away
The song, a warning against being obsessed with what one could not have again or return to, the way in quiet moments Derek thought of his dead mother and dead father. No, Derek thought, no matter what you did, and how you gave, no matter what you gave, it never really did seem to be enough.
They were weary after their travels and went to bed quickly and, Derek suspected, weary of not being with each other. They all belonged to each other, and always would. But Gabriel belonged to Cal and Matt to Quint and Derek belonged to Conn who was not here and had not been with them. Long after Gabriel and Cal had gone to their room and Matteo and Quinton had gone to theirs, he where the sloping roof of the hotel came to a flat surface and watched the little nightlife of a friendly town far from enemy borders. Lovers out on the main street and friends, having a late evening stroll. A couple of people sober enough coming out of the taverns, crying good night. The stars were a high bright tangle overhead that shone down on the broad blue river and now he could see the shallow runnels of the ford they would cross in the morning. They were, he measured, only a day from Ollagoth.
Derek stretched and yawned and felt almost too tired to move. In the plain blue denim and blue tee shirt, he stood up and made his way, through a window, back into his suddenly lonely room. He crossed the hall, to turn the door and look in on Cal and Gabriel, but when he did, he was surprised, by his night vision, to see that Matt and Quint were there. Gabriel lay in the bed half asleep and naked under a sheet, but Matt and Cal were chatting and the slight Quinton, naked, his troubled leg angled, lay on his back sleeping on the sofa.
As Derek undressed and climbed into bed beside Gabriel, he heard his old friend, thrusting some blanket toward him murmur, “We were wondering when you’d get here.”
