Vadriel jumped off his horse, politely took my offerings, not even flinching at the dubious sweets, and then told me his name. I hesitated a moment before I told him mine as I wasn’t sure which one would be right for him – in the end, it didn’t matter.
“Well, Makari,” he said, “would you introduce me to your fellow monks here? I’ve got something to tell you.”
I asked him inside then, and all my uncles and cousins and brothers came out from their cells, having made themselves decent with black robes hastily thrown over sweating, t-shirt-clad bodies. My great-uncle Chrysostom who was considered leader of our little groups had even bothered to put on a high ceremonial hat.
Vadriel wasn’t impressed; of course, he’d seen so much ceremony and power among his fellow Gelaming, a few hardly dignified monks from a dying, outdated religion didn’t impress him at all. He looked all over us and then told us, quite matter-of-factly, that we’d have to leave. The Gelaming were going to construct the most splendid harbour here.
“Of course, we’re not throwing anybody out. We’re not that kind of hara. In fact, we’ve made the old place you call St. Johns habitable for you. It’s the perfect size for all you remaining monks to live together and end your days in peace, quiet and contemplation. We do not wish to harm you. Although you’re very much a thing of the past, we will protect you and provide for you, enjoy the diversity of your old-fashioned faith and respect you as a link to the powerful past of this holy place, which is now sacred to Wraeththukind as well.”
My great-uncle made to protest.
“I am called Father Chrysostom, young man, and I can tell you that it’s impossible…”
“I am not a man”, Vadriel interrupted coldly. “We have put the age of men behind us.”
My, but he was a sanctimonious little Gelaming limshit, don’t you think? However, I was very much taken by him at the time. Vadriel the architect, Vadriel the planner, Vadriel who made everything new. Oh, my.
“Our way of life is different from that of our brethren in the next monastery, and theirs…” Chrysostom began again.
“You’ll find a way, I don’t doubt that. You’ll work it all out; after all, you’re all men of God”, Vadriel cut him short. “You have until your feast of Christmas, which we call the solstice festival, to leave here and get to St. John’s. Harvest everything, take down everything and take it with you, there’s enough room at St. John’s for you to put up your own place of worship and all. But after Festival, we’ll need to start building here, so you really have to sort everything out until then; there’ll be no going back afterwards.”
With that, he grabbed another sweet off the tray, scattering loose sugar all down the front of his black leathers, winked at me, and was gone.
All our neighbours, we soon learned, had got the same summons, and when winter approached and all our harvesting was done, we moved to St. John’s – what else could we do? However, losing our home wasn’t the most important problem to Great-Uncle Chrysostom and the other uncles, but losing our independence, our way of doing things after our own methods, that would doubtlessly come into question when we’d be forced to live communally with all the other monks, hermits and holy men left at the sacred place.
It was not to be my problem, though. We brought our last mule-load of holy paintings to St. John’s a week before Christmas, and Vadriel, who was responsible for building the harbour as we’d learned by now, came by to make sure we were settled in and had everything we needed. He wouldn’t mar his great work with the grief and curses of the former inhabitants, of course. So he brought us whatever we wanted to make us comfortable, and one day when Chrysostom was arguing with the other elders at St. John’s (and there were very many elders at St. John’s, and each of them had a slightly different opinion on how things should be done), Vadriel actually interfered and told everyone he and his masters weren’t going to stand for even one voice in the diversity of our holy practices to be silenced, and he personally would see to it that the Chrysostom people got to live according to their own rules. And then he said he was going to take the seventeen youngest members of the community with him for them to be incepted into Wraeththu as to provide a bridge, a living link between the old and the new inhabitants of this very, very holy place.
Of these seventeen, four came from the small place of Chrysostom’s people. And of these four, I was one. My uncles lamented the decision, and Chrysostom himself went to the church to pray, refusing even to say goodbye to us. But most of us followed willingly. We were good little monks, and did what we were told.
We were ordered to get our stuff together at once and go with Vadriel; we went with him over the wintry mountain to the old place that was now the Gelaming’s provisional headquarters, all the ghosts driven out, and music and strange scents drifting through the old, bare hallways.
We were given cells, we were sent to the baths and had our hair cut to a uniform length, and we were issued new clothes – all very monastic, really. Some of the Gelaming did some ceremony to welcome us, all very heathen but still strangely familiar, and we got to meet the boss of the whole endeavour, the har called Orien whom we’d seen that first day at our monastery. He gave us a speech about how important we would be, and how he hoped we’d learn quickly and fully understand the privilege and opportunity we were granted by the wisdom of the Gelaming.
We were given herbal teas to drink, we were given thorough lectures about what it would mean for us to become hara (with the physical part not very well fleshed out, though; there was an overawing sense of mystery that remained throughout the lessons), we were made to fast and sent to bed early for a week. We were monks, so none of this felt very strange to us. In fact, it was almost as if the Gelaming were just another mystic order that had taken over the old holy places.
With one immense difference. Well, never mind the music and the alcohol, the scents and the vanity among these refined and stylish beings; in their heart of hearts they were an order charged with a holy mission. But as I discovered the third night I was there, the place was awash with sex when we didn’t look.
We were kept apart in an annex that had bare and clean cells, and the Gelaming had sprawled to live and work everywhere else, but on that night curiosity got the better of me, and I went to investigate, and I found them at it everywhere, even in the church, where three of them were doing something that involved a stream of clear light that looked holy beyond doubt. I was extremely repulsed and incredibly aroused at the same time, and I settled down to do some thorough peeping, my hand between my legs, when Vadriel grabbed me from behind and turned me around.
“This is not yet for you, little monklet Makari,” he said, using the silly moniker his boss had coined for me that first day.
“You wait just a few more nights, and then it shall all be yours. You just wait.”
His eyes that I knew to be as pale blue as the streaks in his hair by day bored into mine, now shining silver in the eerie light from the ceremony. He took me by my chin, and then he kissed me, deeply, on the mouth.
I had never been kissed before, but it seemed to me that beyond the kiss I could taste something more, something holy, Gelaming-style. Vadriel was cool and clear, his taste inexplicably sweet – I wanted to sink into his arms there and then. I collapsed against him, and delicious, unknown shudders wracked my whole body.
I regained my senses, burrowed against Vadriel’s hard chest, and felt thoroughly ashamed of myself – I knew what I’d just done, although only by hearsay. Vadriel seemed amused. He kissed me again, sweetly, and showed me a pale amber light that had, inexplicably, formed into a perfect little ball on the palm of his hand. Tenderly, he blew it away to join the gigantic stream of light those three hara in the church were raising. All the holy pictures, I could see now, were gone, and all the walls and vaulted ceilings were painted a brilliant silver.
At the end of this week, we were incepted. Orien did it, the boss, who seemed to be their top priest as well, some sort of a harish bisho
p or metropolitan. Everyone was gathered in the former church; it was midnight, and there were seventeen of us, purged and scrubbed, in white robes. We were made to kneel down, we were given some holy substance to drink. Hara came and shaved off our hair at the sides of our heads. Hara sang and shouted ecstatically, and then Orien came forth from nowhere. He went to the first of us, my youngest brother; he had a knife suddenly, and he cut his own arm, and then my brother’s arm. He pressed them together, the blood mingling, and then my brother collapsed into the arms of the hara hovering around him, and was carried away over the heads of the assembly, with the utmost reverence, like a holy object. So Orien went down the line of us.
I was last, and I was growing nervous as one after the other of my companions was carried away to his new destiny. I looked around the church for Vadriel, but he was nowhere to be found among those throngs of ecstatically chanting Gelaming. Then it was finally my turn, and I knew no more.
Of the seventeen of us, four didn’t make it. They’d all been physically young enough, Orien explained to us survivors later, but they’d probably been too set in their monkish ways already for their minds to submit to the change. All four from my family made it, though.
I don’t want to bore you with another Althaia-and-Feybraiha-story; you all know what happened to me in those nights. And you probably guessed that it was Vadriel who came for me after the pains had stopped, and how he took me all the way now, and how he was sweet beyond words.
We were taught many things, and some of them even by Orien himself, and some of them we’d already learned as monks, but we listened politely. The thing about the sex, which they called aruna, of course, was utterly different; we were encouraged to participate in anything that took our fancy. The only thing that took my fancy was Vadriel, but he gently discouraged me. The way of the Wraeththu, he told me sweetly when I came back for more on the second night, was not the way of humankind; we weren’t clinging or possessive, and I was to get as much experience as I could. Did I tell you he was sanctimonious? So I turned away from him, disappointed but determined to acquit myself as was expected of me, and I went after anyone who wasn’t on the trees by the count of three, so I could return to Vadriel and brag about it, and he’d take me back into his bed after I’d assured him what a worldly har I’d become. It worked every time, and there were many, many times during that winter.
And of course we were given new names; this was the fourth one in my young life, and I can hardly remember it nowadays. It was something long and convoluted, ending on “–iel”, of course, Arconiel or Arcadiel, I honestly don’t remember which. I was shortened to Arc soon enough, and Vadriel secretly still called me Makari in bed, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that even that hadn’t been my name for long.
In the spring, all thirteen of us had our caste raised to Neoma, and we were put to work. We were to return to St. John’s and tell our former brethren there of what the hara really were, and get them to tell us as much about the land around the holy places, of rocks and waters and groves, as they possibly knew; their traditions, Vadriel told me, would be invaluable for building the new city of the Gelaming, but they probably wouldn’t tell outsiders, hence us with a foot in both worlds.
When I came to St. John’s, I learned that Chrysostom had died during the winter, and the others from my family monastery had been absorbed into the communal life. Only my extremely myopic brother was still painting icons full-time, and he did it with incredible diligence and love, tiny icons with the most precise details he couldn’t possibly see, but incredibly did.
Our uncles and cousins and brothers took us back, only marvelling in passing what had become of us; we were of the Chrysostom people first and foremost, and then we were hara, which to them was just another passing state. We lived on our own at the fringes of the community, falling in with our relatives when we had questions to ask or new knowledge to contribute, but for most of the others, things weren’t so easy. Mind you, nobody ever asked for the four that were lost; monkish lives had been ephemeral and fleeting since time out of mind. But these nine ex-monks had become something alien and slightly repulsive to their former brethren; the Gelaming were just heathens, but these were renegades, and as time told on them, they were told nothing more, and one after the other drifted back to Phaonica, as the headquarters were known by now. Only the four of us were still wandering back and forth, singing and praying with the monks, and taking aruna with the Gelaming, as we wended our way between the two worlds.
But we were only hara, after all, and one night my myopic brother caught Vadriel and me making love.
We were really making love by then, all experience-gathering pretext almost forgotten, tenderly, trustingly, with deep feeling. We never dared call it love aloud, but it was.
My brother knew I’d changed beyond his imagination, but the moonlight concealed nothing, and he did wear his glasses, the poor silly thing, and he was honestly disgusted. He couldn’t believe that I’d changed so much with just a little prodding from a drop of Orien’s powerful blood, he believed the Gelaming had cut and sliced me and added bits, and he was sick on the spot, and wouldn’t talk to any of us afterwards.
All thirteen of us were given new things to do now, and we’d mostly become Gelaming fair and square now.
Not I, and the reason for that was as follows.
Vadriel was building a harbour, right? At the site of our former monastery, remember? And I was at it with him, witnessing the destruction of my own home day to day, and it hurt me, but I kept quiet for Vadriel’s sake. And he needed me for his work, too, relying on my knowledge of the place that was extensive, young as I was. I knew where the rock was brittle and where it was stable; I knew my way around and I could tell when the shortest way wasn’t the fastest. So we built into the living rocks of my former home the beautiful harbour of Immanion, as those of you who have been there know it today.
Well, almost.
When the summer was over and autumn came, Orien came to inspect our work, and he brought with him the red-headed har who’d been there that first day, and that august individual was not content. He was sketching into the air with his long fingers, showing Orien and Vadriel how he wanted things straighter, more sweeping, less clinging to the land, more leading to the sky. I couldn’t hear them; I hung back with all the others who’d worked at the project, looking worriedly at the hara sitting on their horses in the centre. He criticised for the better part of an hour, and then, while Orien and he passed on to inspect the next project, we builders sat dejectedly at the trestle tables we’d set up for the feast, unable to take even a single bite.
And then we went away to the former monk farm where we’d made our temporary home while we were working at the harbour, and there we slouched about, and got drunk, and fell into bed at some stage with nobody in particular.
So I missed my last night with Vadriel.
Because, the next morning when we returned to our building site to try and find out how we could rectify the faults our masters had found with our work, it was all done. Overnight, the rock had hardened in places where there’d only ever been shale, and stairs that had been curved and humble had become sweeping and grand, and quays that had been sturdy and natural had become straight and jutting. There was nothing left for us to do. Nothing at all, it was all finished and over with.
Vadriel, far from taking exception at this, was humbled. Those mighty Nahir-Nuri had done in a night what he couldn’t accomplish in a summer, and they’d showed him how small his faith had been and how far he’d strayed from the path of the Gelaming – he stealthily looked at me when he said that. And then he rode off, without even kissing me goodbye, to go and beg those masters to permit him to learn at their feet.
I did tell you he had a streak of extreme sanctimony to him, didn’t I?
He later built temples and towers for the Gelaming all over the world, but I never saw him again.
For the first time in my life, I was totally at loose ends, with no
body to tell me what to do, and nobody needing me for anything. The monks lived their secluded lives at St. Johns, and they actually do so still for all that I hear: a few confused elders and some sturdy middle-aged brothers, in a secret and forbidden park somewhere in shining Immanion, hidden from all eyes, hidden from a world that has changed beyond their recognition. I have never been back.
And the Gelaming were no longer interested in me; I was totally welcome to work and play with them, take aruna with whoever and contribute my share, build myself a home and perhaps find a partner, raise my caste and have some pearls as the years went by. I could have trained for the military, if I had wanted to; I could have trained in the new disciplines of Grissecon or made beautiful things by hand. But I was just a builder, hanging on to see the former wilderness of my home transform to shining Immanion as we know it today, and feeling thoroughly cheated.
I had sacrificed all that had been asked of me, like the good little monk I still was at heart. I had sacrificed myself first and foremost, then my home, destroying it with my own hands to build something new and infinitely more splendid, but that had been found lacking and summarily corrected. I had first sacrificed my family to be with my chesnari, and then I had to give him up so he was able to grow to his full potential (as he saw it, the sanctimonious little sod), and I was sacrificing myself every day to the new city, and every night my body to the ideals of the Gelaming community; every night my body was a holy vessel for the power of Wraeththukind, but my heart was empty and ashes, and shortly before the shimmering city was completed, the night before the inauguration of the building called Hegalion, when everyone was celebrating and taking aruna all over the place, I slunk away, a tiny blot of unhappiness removing himself from its brilliant face.
Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu Page 17