The Book of the Blessed

Austin

“How could you do this to me? How could you violate me! How could you shame me?”

A part of him watched, detached, as Audrey went about their shared rooms in the palace of Kingboro, pulling out drawers, scattering clothes on the floor, knocking over clothes horses and emptying change pots and jewelry on the floor.

“How,” she demanded, her face red, “could you lay with men, lay with prostitutes, common whores? How could you….” She dug for her deepest word, “fuck them?”

Austin watched, dispassionate, aware that his dispassion was a defense, remembering the first time his mother had found him in one of her dresses and shaken him by the shoulders so violently his teeth rattled, so hard that his rouged lips had bumped against her bosom, painting her breasts red.

“What kind of man does these things?”

The man you married, he thought. The man you joyfully dressed like a woman, and with whom you shared your clothing. How in the world could you be surprised?

“This is not what we are about!” she cried. “This is not what our God is about.”

To say the first sentence was to say the second. Austin knew this. He remembered when his parents had sent him across the mountains into Zahem, and his mother had said, “My hope is that you become the man you should be, that you become the Zahem you were supposed to be, that in the land God gave us, this thing which has gone so wrong in you will be corrected.”

They traveled south for days, and then crossed the mountains over the southern border of Westrial into the land of Zahem. Zahem looked like the end of the world. This far south the sky was a burning blue in the day and cold as death at night. Verdant green covered low hills and valleys, and beneath the green was sand, and then there were stretches of desert and high rock formations, eyes of stone, carved by the wind, and always the ancient ruins of the people who had lived here long before. There were the Utes and the Arizon, the remaining ancient tribes, skins reddened by the sun, who lived in the cliffs where their towns, high above, had been cut from the rock. Here Austin and his party journeyed further and further from Westrial and from the normal lives of many of the Hale, and the history he knew gave way to the history of the Zahem.

A thousand years ago, when the Sendics had abandoned their old gods and settled in what had once been called Locrys, and to the north went to Hale and North Hale, when the priests and the bishops had first come with their religion, the son of a chieftain, Joses, had gone into the woods reserved for worship of the old gods, asking if their way was true or the way of the New God. But a wholly different God had shown himself to Joses and declared neither way was true.

“I will show you the Truth. Walk ye in it.”

It was said that at that very moment, an angel, a spirit of the God, had seized Joses, and squeezed him, and out from him had come the first words of the Book of Life. In southern Hale, for years, Joses had gathered disciples around him and composed his Book of Life until his followers had grown too numerous. His father, believing Joses to be a prophet, renounced leadership of his tribe to follow his son. But this meant another came to power over that tribe and he cast out the Zahem, as Joses’ followers were called. They settled first in Inglad, but there was no home for them there. They were welcomed into Chyr and there dwelt, learning from the mages. But the Zahem would not worship the Gods of Chyr and the Chyr would not believe in the word of Joses, and so they had come into Westrial and then Sussail, where the prophet Zahem suffered martyrdom.

All these stories were told by a young man, fair of face, golden at first, then red under the sun, a bead of sweat forming on his upper lip as the sun bleached his golden hair white.

“The Zahem fell into disunity. They split in two, but the larger share followed Joses’s disciple, Othar Yahn, and so Yahn led them into the deserts of what was then Northern Solahn, debated land which the Solahn would not live in and, after an exodus of seventy days, he settled by Lake Nawata, the Ice Lake, and there they build our great city, Nava, and our High Temple, the first of many. Long had we desired to build a Temple, to restore proper worship long gone, and finally, here it was…”

“ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?” she demanded. “Are you listening to me? Damn you. Sometimes I hate you.”

It really wasn’t the first time she had said this. Austin, not very glamourous at all now in ill fitting denims and a baggy jumper, hair undone, got up and, his back to the stream of abuse, left his sceaming wife, and drifted into the corridor. He remembered all those years ago, being a boy of thirteen, for that first time filled with the powerful energy of the desert, a desert that seemed to be pulsing with life. He sat at the campfire of a circled wagon train while Erik Skabelund told him stories.

“For years we had prophets and priest and lived scattered. After Yahn came Ehan, them Gidyon, and they say all the prophets did not rule over all of us. And then came the other Zahem, those who had remained in Sussail. But at last there came the rule of the High Priest Heli, and his sons were corrupt, and at this time we fought with the Solahni, for we no longer wished to be part of their land or pay them taxes, and the Utes and the Arizon stood with us. After Heli died, his adopted son, Phineas, came to power and was crowned High Priest in the Great Temple, and then he crowned Hahm our first King. Priest, Prophet and King. We need all three though now we only have two, for the days of the kings are done. King Hahm led us to freeing ourselves and established Zahem forever, and as long as his seed in the Great City we are secure, and you are of his seed, and I of this seed…”

If Skabelund said anything else, Austin did not remember. He remembered the firmness of the young man’s lips, the earnest set of his face, and over and over again, those lips as they pronounced the word seed.

It was, remembering this many years later, in saying the word seed that Austin stumbled and bumped and blinked, and found himself looking into the beautiful face and kohl rimmed eyes of Pol.`

“Tomorrow I leave with Prince Anson,” Pol whispered. “But this is today. Come with me.”

Pol fucked him hard. Austin cried out like one punched. He groaned over and over again, hit like he wanted to be hit, accompanying the gentle moaning of Pol who moved inside and above him, sweat glossing his lean body.

“That’s it! That’s it. That’s—” Austin groaned.

His hands ran up and down Pol’s back, holding his shoulders, ran down again to caress his thighs as the other man pushed into him. Pol felt so good. He filled him so completely.

Pol had been silent a while, but now moans escaped his lips. He moved rapidly and then stopped himself. But Austin drew him in and said, “It’s alright. It’s okay. Do it like you need to. Let yourself go.”

In staggered rhythm to Austin’s shouts, Pol groaned, “Oh—my—G—”

While Pol reached his orgasm, Austin pulled on his own cock faster and faster. They came together, shouting with surprise, staggering, straining springs of the bed until, with a great sigh, Pol pulled out of Austin’s body and lay on his back, trembling.

“Goddamn,” Austin whispered. His legs were still in the air; his knees still drawn to his chest. He let them down slowly. Pol, mouth parted, looked to the ceiling while Austin watched him. He looked on the gentle landscape of Pol’s torso, his well made chest, his coral nipples, his flat belly, the V at his hips descending to his rising cock, red tipped from the cloud of sandy brown hair. Austin touched the shaft, running his hand up and down it and Pol turned his head and saw white semen all up Austin’s stomach and chest.

“Is there a cloth in the restroom?” he said. “Let me clean you.”

Without waiting for an answer, Pol got up, and Austin looked at the other young man’s body. He was fit and lean like velvet over steel, his buttocks full and round. He moved like a dancer. Pol returned with a cloth that was hot and moist, and wiped Austin down. He turned the cloth over and wiped his own body, and then sat on the edge of the bed.

“Wait a moment,” Pol told him.

Austin sat up.

“I like the way you look,” Pol told him. “Unguarded.”

“Well-fucked some would say.”

“I will settle on unguarded.”

Pol frowned.

“What do you think this was?”

“I do not entirely know,” Austin confessed, looking confused and boylike for once.

“I do not blame you,” Pol said.

They were both quiet. Pol sat on the edge of the bed, and Austin admired his thighs and the line of his thigh to his stomach, the smooth beauty of his naked body.

“I think,” Pol said, deliberately, his hazel eyes turning to Austin, “that you should come with us when we leave, that your life with your wife is done. I cannot promise you anything in Ondres or in the north, but I promise you life will not be the same.”

Austin remembered his ancestors who had left Hale and crossed over the desert to find a truth he could not share. What if he was to make his own pilgrimage to find he knew not what?

After thinking, Pol’s kiss on his skin, and Erik Skabelund’s face in his mind, Austin decided.

“I will stay with you this night, Pol,” he said. “And leave with you in the morning.”