Once Were Men

by Marin Landis

  “Povimus, I need your attention.” He said as clearly and loudly as he could without shouting.

  The bald head of Povimus shook briefly and then he looked up, “Ahh, Melvekior, when did you come in?”

  “Not more than a few minutes ago. You should be careful Povimus, anyone could sneak up on you with your nose that far in a book. Or you might even go blind.”

  "Yes, I heard that Bhav had returned.” He responded not giving any indication of having caught the jibe. “I do miss her when she’s away. If she's told you about that day, it was astonishing. I remember being blind you know and still get the urge to feel things with my hands rather than look directly at them. I think my love of numbers and abstracts is because my imagination is still based on my experience of the world before my sight was restored."

  "Did you know she was my mother?"

  "Yes, of course I did. What I didn't realize is that you didn't know her history or what had happened with her. Your father was a complex man and was often difficult to understand. His thought processes were extremely advanced. Your mother will be able to explain better than I." He looked up into space as though listening for something. "Is that what you came here for? To discuss your parents?"

  "No, actually not at all. I need to speak with Hestallr."

  "Bhav has more chance of knowing where he is than I do. I rarely see him and only on his schedule? Can I not be of assistance?"

  Melvekior remembered what his mother had said and knew he couldn't discuss anything with anyone but Hestallr. Or Ushatr. Should he return to the seminary and seek the Silver Bear's help? No, Hestallr only would have the ability to negotiate with Sehar. If such a thing was even possible. He wanted to ask Her not to take his mother and in return he would discover the missing Anaurim so that Mithras could finish his mysterious quest. What could a God need? What would He quest for? He meant to find out.

  Then it struck him. Tiriel. He already had met and secured the gratitude of one of the Anaurim. Could he somehow reach him?

  "No," he mumbled distracted, "thank you, Povimus. If you should see Hestallr please send for me." He walked from the room.

  Povimus went straight back to work, not having the emotional intelligence to recognize a man in turmoil.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Excommunicato

  “When you live forever, the feelings of the short-lived fade into inconsequentiality.” - Calre Alpre

  King Calra Alpre was irritated. Irritated with his brothers, though one be dead, he still annoyed and the other had pushed him too far. And he was irritated with Ortense who now occupied the same bedspace as he.

  “I am dissatisfied,” he shouted and threw the covers from himself, standing. He stood nude, his curly black hair, hanging to his shoulders, his only covering.

  His mistress jumped to her feet, also nude and even in his state of utmost frustration he had to look. She was truly one of the most beautiful women he had seen in his life. All three hundred plus years of life. Her hair was green, which was astonishing, but some chemical or other that was popular with the vain in Magnar made it so. She wore it short, he thought to accent her features. The rest of her was like a painting of a Goddess. He must not be tempted, he had anger to express.

  “Ortense, what is it I am missing?” He sat on the edge of the bed, slightly deflated.

  “Is it something I have done, Lord?” she wailed softly. He despised her weak attitude, forever fearful.

  “No, no my dear,” but he did love her. Unlike his Queen, Purditia, she was attentive to his desires and respected him. She was kind and also functioned as his secretary, much to Purdy’s horror. He didn’t care though, if she didn’t like it, she could always go live at the convent with the brides of Mithras. He suspected that once a man had fathered children and supplied a woman with enough money and jewelry to suit their own individual needs, their usefulness to him would wear thin. He didn’t object to that. It was the way of the world. Romantics and poets would say not, but let them live live for three and a half centuries and then come back with their ridiculous ideas of love. One of his siblings had just been executed and the other turned into a monstrosity. He felt nothing like the levels of grief he thought he might.

  “My Lord, you need to rejuvenate yourself. Why don’t I arrange a hunt with the new Prince?” she offered hopefully.

  He was touched. She genuinely cared and she was right. He needed a challenge. “No, not a hunt, though I do need rejuvenation.” When was the last time he felt alive. Calra thought back to when he heard the news of Sunar’s death. The first thing he felt wasn’t sorrow it was a thrill of fear. We can die, he thought. He didn’t fear it like Critus did, but welcomed a chance to defeat it yet again. Let other men fear, I will fight. Sunar is dead, what can I blame on him? The Aelvar. Those freaks. How he hated them. They had superior strength to the Three Kingdoms, superior intelligence and some mastery of sorcery, and yet they didn’t conquer a thing. They just lived in their ridiculous forest, praying to their atrocious Gods.

  Sunar nearly caused the ruination of them all, not for the first or the last time, with his ill-fated war on them. Thank Mithras for Martelle. He waged war as well as he brokered peace. He never did reveal how he came to an accord with their King or indeed how he stopped that lunatic Skollmak without more bloodshed. Now his son sat the throne of Maresh-Kar. Maybe there was something there, something he could turn to his advantage. Why Three Kingdoms? Why not Two Kingdoms? Why Aelvar? Why not King Calra Alpre’s Hunting Forest. He felt something stir within him. That old marauder spirit. And something else.

  “Back into bed you gorgeous thing!” he laughed and leapt on Ortense.

  He was having dinner, his appetite well and truly revived when Hestallr arrived. Just walked into his dining hall like it was his own and stood on the other side of his table.

  King Alpre ate alone most of the time, preferring his own company. Sometimes his wife would be there, sometimes one or more of his children, but mostly he ate alone. This night he had a boar and a fowl on his table. Servants waited in the wings ready for him to look finished or signal for another drink or more of a particular item. They all shrank back into their respective cubby-holes when they heard the approaching rumbling and then saw its cause.

  Hestallr was a giant. Calra had seen many big men, his original form was considerably larger than average, but Hestallr was on a different level altogether. He was so big he couldn’t ride a horse and merely walked everywhere. Nobody would dare follow to substantiate the rumor but it was said that he didn’t sleep just walked through the night, heedless of danger.

  Calra’s confidence came from his authority and he always struggled when Hestallr visited him which was never for a positive reason. The last time he came, the Martelle brat came out the winner. Why was he constantly being visited by these people?

  “What is it you want, Hestallr, I’m busy.” He was sick of pandering to people, especially this oaf. He was barely better than a barbarian. Nobody had even seen him overthrow a God, it was a legend. Quite likely he was merely taking advantage of his freakish size and popular religion to gather an army about him.

  Hestallr’s reactions were always the same. Nothing. Calra was starting to doubt his demi-God status. He was just a big man. Nothing more. A big, wily man.

  “Tiriel. Does that name mean anything to you?” the big, wily man rumbled.

  Calra felt like he’d taken a blow to the gut. How did he know that name? Unless it were true that he had the ear of Mithras himself. Had they truly damned themselves that night all those years ago?

  “It does not, High Priest, I am well versed in the Mithraic Scripts and your writings as well.” This was true, Calra was a voracious reader and felt that knowledge was power.

  “Tiriel is not mentioned in those as well you know. Allow me to remind you. Tiriel is the Blessèd of Mithras that you and your cursed brothers maimed and imprisoned in your foul mine. That Prince Melvekior recently released.” Hestallr loomed above him.
<
br />   “Now look here,” Calra stood, he wouldn’t be spoken to like that in his own dining hall, “I have no idea what you’re talking about and I won’t have you coming in here ranting and raving. I rule here!”

  So fast did Hestallr move that King Alpre hardly had a chance to shield his face. The giant Chosen of Mithras slammed his mighty fist into the King’s table, smashing it to splinters, sending food and plates in all directions.

  “Mithras rules here!” he bellowed, his deep voice coarse, his chest rising and falling with his deep breaths. “I suggest you remember that, Calra. I will not hesitate to cast you from the Church. Make amends.” He turned and stormed out, the guards that had been summoned by the noise falling back in dismay at his passing.

  Calra was surprised by himself. Instead of being angry or worried about his encounter with Hestallr, he was excited. Martelle, the Aelvar, Critus and now the Church. This should keep him going for at least another century.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Interrogation

  “Any you take, you must kill.” - Surakoita

  “I demand you tell me where I am,” said Luchis trying to sound more brave than he actually felt. He had woken up here after going to bed in Llanifre, his hometown and found himself, blind due to something taped about his face, bound to a chair, arms uncomfortably stretched behind his back, his wrists roped together. His legs were fastened together at the ankles and he had a strange taste in his mouth. Drugged no doubt. Why would someone take him, a scholar? Then he panicked. The Reliquarians. He had made a deal with them and he couldn’t carry it through to its agreed end and now they were coming for him. The barely veiled threats at their first meeting didn’t seem realistic, delivered as they were by a woman who didn’t look capable of harming anyone. On the other hand, she was carrying a copy of a book unavailable in most ‘civilized’ societies. The Unspeakable Rites of Rotting. It was an unwieldy title but many translations were forbidden and held secrets he felt the world should know. Luchis fancied himself a crusader of truth and knowledge. He didn’t believe that there should be any knowledge or topic forbidden or taboo. The society in which he lived was quite proscriptive, only books from approved sciences were widely read or taught. Religion and anything related to the Gods was utterly off limits. For a group of people so devoted to advancing themselves they were paranoid about people stepping outside their limited parameters.

  He himself was paranoid after spending time with the pink skinned humans and their church. He’d never imagined that a project could be so haphazard and a group of people so disorganized. They slept half of the day and worked only half of the time they were awake. They became intoxicated with alcohol and found it amusing to tell stories with no didactic element. They ate flesh! Ugh, he almost retched at the memory of being offered an actual living being, dead of course, to consume. Almost every aspect of their lives was revolting. In addition to this, they were terrifying. They all carried weapons, fought for pleasure and one of them was so big Luchis was sure that he could have crushed both him and Lissa to death with one fist. Nonetheless, they were nothing if not prolific and irreverent. The woman from the Reliquarians had put him in touch with them and they had needed the expertise of people greater than themselves so the Talvar were the obvious choice. In return, their pick of the literature from their Monasteries library, which they were assured was vast.

  It was a risky proposition. Consorting with humans, while not outlawed, was not encouraged. Speaking of religious subjects also was not forbidden though not encouraged and he became convinced that had they been discovered they would have been placed on some sort of watchlist. People disappeared from the Talvar habitats sometimes and were never seen again. Sometime people became superfluous and were discarded. This was part of Talvar life, what would be the point of keeping someone alive who could not contribute to society? This was pure logic. Sometimes thought, it was other people. Those who questioned once too often, those who had the wrong interests or wanted to pursue paths best left in the past. Nothing could be proven and none would speak of it.

  Was he now in the grasp of the Surakoita, the old crone who took away dead children and punished apostasy? Almost definitely he was.

  He knew someone was there. He could hear them moving about and he could hear their breathing. Once he had felt their breath on his face. He nearly pissed himself at this stage. He expected torture and then death. Nobody had ever returned after being taken, although none could actually prove anyone had been taken, but he expected it anyway.

  “You are in the Underworld,” was the response. The voice was a male’s which was a slight relief. The Surakoita was a woman. The ‘Underworld’ didn’t sound promising.

  “What is the Underworld? Pray tell me why I have been brought here and what you intend for me.” He knew he was begging but he didn’t care. He wanted to go.

  “It is the realm between life and death. As a man so interested in the realms of the Gods and their worship, I’m surprised you haven’t learned more about it.”

  That was the confirmation. He was here because he had studied forbidden texts and become involved with those filthy humans and their simplistic fetish worship. A Goddess that looks after the Sun as it wheels across the Sky! How infantile. The Sun was a heavenly body many times the size of their home and we wheel about it. When he espoused this to the monks they laughed as though he were telling a fantastical story.

  “I beg of you, release me, we meant no harm, merely the sourcing of information.”

  “’We’ meant no harm? There is more than one of you involved in this ‘blasphemy’?” The voice spat this last word.

  The panic grew. Lissa, he would not implicate her. “I meant to say that ‘I meant no harm,’ but you have me at a disadvantage and I mis-spoke.”

  He could see all of a sudden, the sticky material over his eyes ripped away with a shock of pain. He barely had time to register the figure before him when he felt a blow to his face. It was hard and it stung. It would bruise certainly. Luchis had never been struck before and it was a brutal initiation into the world of violence. He almost cried , screwed his eyes shut and kept his head turned.

  “Lie to me again and I will destroy Lissa in the most barbaric fashion imaginable,” the voice said cruelly, then shouted into his ear. “We have her in the next room, she will suffer unless you start telling the truth.”

  Luchis did cry then and it took another strong blow to the face for him to stop weeping and begin his story.

  “I am a very fine chef,” he said wiping the snot from his face, “my specialty being a spicy blossom dish, made with a particular type of mushroom that only I know. This is how you know I’m telling the truth, because I have never revealed this to another living being. Even Lissa, who has cajoled and threatened often.” He looked into Sjarcu’s eyes at this stage hoping for some engagement, but there was none.

  “Continue,” was all his captor said.

  “Um, yes, I, anyway this mushroom I harvest from the graves of the humans buried at Soripile and the enriched earth provides the most wonderful flavors.” Neither Talvar found anything particularly disturbing about eating food nourished by the remains of the dead. “As I keep the origin of the mushrooms a closely guarded secret, it is only ever at night that I venture out to collect them and some months ago there were a group of humans in the graveyard. It is not terrifically unusual to see humans in the graveyard but I have started to go only at the dark of the moon rather than at the height of its luminance due to those people’s predilection for the light. I have been seen before by mourners and they immediately assume I am sort sort of devil which puts a dampener on my mushroom picking.”

  Sjarcu had to suppress a sneer. Scholarly pursuits had reduced his people to feeble effettes.

  “This night was dark, extremely dark and there was a light in the cemetery. I investigated thinking it might be some sort of luminous spirit, unlikely though that is, but it was not. Humans, in a large group and dressed in a manner unusual for t
hem; dark robes and hoods. They were involved in some sort of ritual to praise the Death Mother. I was shocked and, in keeping with the all round tendency to honesty being exhibited here, I felt a thrill of the taboo and a deep stirring. This I have not told Lissa either. Her involvement is more related to her outrage at certain forms of study being, if not forbidden, then discouraged. She doesn’t really know anything about the Reliquarians. That aside, I was fascinated and observed their entire ritual and I witnessed something, a visitation. It was a lich, brother, an undead wizard, who came as a representative of Ain-Ordra. He said little but his instructions were clear: revive the worship of the Dark Goddess. He then mentioned that I was hiding behind a particularly ornate tombstone. I intended to make my escape but they did not fear me like others had done, instead treating me reverentially as though also a sending from Her Dark Majesty.”

  Luchis was lost in the telling of his story because he didn’t notice the evident fury that was mounting in Sjarcu. Years and years of repression meant that Luchis didn’t often look to people’s faces for clues as to their mental state.