The Book of the Broken

Conn

Conn felt inexhaustible that morning. He woke to the laughing face of Thano and the warm embrace of his arms.

“You gave as good as you got little one,” the old man said, “though I should not call you little one. There is not much that is little about you.”

Conn blushed in the grey light of morning, but even as he thought of parting from Thano, those thoughts which made sense in the outer world made no sense here, and in the space of the woods, they began laughingly, to turn back into the positions of last night and repeat the pleasures they had known, Exhaustion mattered little and orgasm was everything. Even the fear that they would be seen, laughed at, caught, made little sense as the sun began to shine through the green leaves and Conn, his balls and muscles sore, hit his last orgasm, crying out on his hands and knees from thrusting between Thano’s legs.

As the sun rose he tottered early in the morning toward the river, naked as the day he was born. Others were there and none was ashamed and he saw the lovely form of his brother in law. John’s usually shaven hair was a bronze thatch and he stood up to his knees in the water washing himself with soap rocks and a cloth. Some clothes were lain out on a rock which he must have washed earlier.

“Conn,” Jon began.

Here at the river, where they both stood naked, Jon said, “Conn, I am sorry. For everything. We haven’t spoken. We have been strange.”

They had been strange for years, since the time when Jon, before marrying Conn’s sister, had seized on Conn’s budding sexuality and seduced him. Their relationship, largely non existent, had become fucking in corners and quiet places, but in the last year, since his nephew had been born, Jon had stayed away from Conn and neither had spoken to the other.

Conn said nothing. He stood looking at Jon and now Jon realized whatever Conn had been, this was a tall, well made man the color of dark ivory with an ironic but gentle expression on his handsome face, his dark bronze hair tousled. In his robes, Conn looked noble, but now he looked like a young god, and like a god, he seemed wise.

“There are things to be amended,” Conn said, “And I think I am more capable of amending them than you.”

He took the soap rocks and waded deep into the water, Jon watching his calves, then thighs, then rounded buttocks disappear beneath the water. When Conn came up from the water like the Lord baptized, he held his hand out to Jon.

“Come,” he said.

Jon looked at him, lips trembling.

“Yes.”

Conn took him like a priest, took him with a firmness and confidence he had not felt, laying Jon down in the grasses and knowing where to touch him, how he longed to be known. That was the secret of sex. Men moaned, wept, came because they were touched in the places they had longed to be touched and loved where they thought no one would love them. So in the early morning, as the sun turned to full day, Conn loved him, and when they were through, they looked at each other with tears in their eyes, and Conn kissed Jon gently on his mouth.

When Conn saw Derek they embraced not because they were lovers, but because they were perfect, perfect brothers, both priests. How strange Conn thought as he kept clinging to the love of his life. They were not united by the love they had made to each other, but by the love they had made to others.

They gripped each other’s shoulders and looked into one another’s eyes.

“Together?” Conn asked.

Blinking back tears and never wanting to let Conn go, Derek nodded firmly.

“Where do we go?” they asked Connleth for the first time. All of them were in their blue robes, hoods up in a circle.

“We go where we were always going. We go west, into Rheged and then into Chyr. But we go directly. We go to establish ourselves there.”

“We follow Ohean and Anson?” Quinton said.

“No,” Connleth said. “They have their own path, and it is roundabout. In the end it will lead to us and we will lead to them, but now you follow me.”

No one protested. Downbelow, Sara and Jon and Nialla were with the wagons. They could make their own choice.

Matteo pushed back his hood, revealing his large wrinkled brow and in his deep, froglike voice, he said, “When do we leave?”

Connleth said: “We leave now.”

Ohean

That last night in the New Forest, as they were coming to the border of Rheged, they slept so late it was nearly morning, and birds could be heard, stirring in the heights of the trees. Red firelight flagged in and out on the trees great shadows while, beside them, the last of the logs gave faint explosions.

“So all those years ago,” Anson began, “after I had been returned to Kingsboro, when you almost came back for me, when you left the Rootless Isle, where did you go?”

“My mother Senaye was born of the Rootless Isle. Her mother was Messanyn the great priestess, but her father was Math King of Rheged whose Queen had been a daughter of Ifandell Modet. So, I went to Rheged and then Chyr, the very lands where we shall go..”

“What happened there? Will you tell me?”

“Not all of it. Not this night. But some of it, yes…”

I traveled through these very woods, and what I found then is a tale for later. But, at long last, after many days, as the sun set I was out of the woods, I could see the high upward sloping plains of Rheged, long and flat and green before the sunset. I followed the sun, headed northwest, and slept in a thicket by the side of the road.

This was how I met the Traveling People. I hailed them and asked where they were going, and the leader, large bellied with a rag tied about his head, said that they were headed to Rheged, to the city of Cosmontond, and so I joined them.

“I can read cards,” I said. “But I imagine you can as well.”

The Travelers are related to the Tribes, and swarthier than the Ayl, but not as dark as most Royan, and the thin, tall brother of their leader said, “Well, I never heard of a Royan that read the cards, not for all your magicks. I would like to see what you can do.”

And whatever I had done, it must have been enough, because the tall thin one, who was called Gabriel, laughed, and told their leader: “This one has put you to shame. He will make a pretty penny for us, if he don’t scare the folks off. Uncanny, him!”

So through the towns of southern Rheged, winding up and down the villages of the hill country, I read fates and was entranced by the green land, the high steep hills and hidden valleys. In that company was a tall Royan named Ralph. He was handsome and dragon eyed, and I wondered if he might be the one I had seen in the card spread. Still, I had spent most of my life alone, and so when I saw that whenever I sat up late at night, looking up at the stars, rehearsing the songs I had learned in the woods, or practicing my magic, he was coming near, and sitting by me I said, “Friend, Ralph. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing at all,” he smiled at me almost foolishly, foolishly, but like a dragon all the same. “I just like to be around you.”

I nodded my head.

“I have had very little of people being around me in my life,” I said.

“Could you bear it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said at last. “I think I could.”

At last I parted from the Travelers, when they were going north and I toward the sea. I was surprised when Ralph came with me and he said, “You don’t have the tongue of Rheged and you are not from the Young Kingdoms. You do not know this land at all, I do not think, or how to get to Cair Daronwy.”

I did not deny him, but we traveled under the stars and under the high sun through cities which were growing larger, hanging off of the sea cliffs like dangerous grey acrobats, and beneath us the sea slowly rolled into coves and crashed upon rocks and cliffs. Sea birds winged, and the smell of salt was in the cool air. We could make it to Cair Daronwy before the Year’s End Dance.

So, through the towns of southern Rheged, winding up and down the villages of the hill country, I read fates and was entranced by the green land, the high steep hills and hidden valleys.

One morning we stayed in a cave, for a storm was coming, and we did not feel much like going to the inn and the town below, and I cursed Ralph for not buying a horse, but he said, “Could you afford two?” And then I simply shrugged. This, he said, was the last day of our journey anyway.

As we came past midday, the sky in the distance was grey and heavy, and then, as we came closer to our goal, I saw this was smoke. Ralph put a protective hand to my chest.

“Tread carefully.”

Whatever I was, he had something of the soldier and tracker in him, and so I followed his lead and let him protect me. We were behind a wall of hills that shielded us from the city, and as we came toward it, before we could see the glory of the city of Cair Daronwy, that which should have greeted us, we saw, in the descending plain to the sea, smoke and fire and dead men, and there was a burning Dayne ship in the bay that had been put down.

I ran before Ralph could stop me for, after all, these were my father’s people, and there was power in me. I did not know what I was planning to do, but at the first man I stopped to see if he lived. He was coughing, and blood was coming up from his mouth like a dark red fountain. I sat by him and held his head and sang him a song of death. I was doing this for several, and in time had Ralph to bring me water for those who could drink, and so my entrance into the world of Cair Daronwy was as nurse and deathmaster.

` It was like this that a tall and handsome man, princely, looked down upon me and asked my name, adding his thanks. He was in beaten down armor and I said plainly “I am Ash of the Rootless Isle, and I have come, at long last to the court of Cair Daronwy, to my grandfather King Math.”

At this the man’s eyes changed and he took me by the wrist.

“Come now,” he said.

I asked no questions, though Ralph did.

“He is my friend,” I said simply,” and the man nodded for him to follow.

We came into a tent where a man lay nearly dying, well in need of my aid, and I came to him.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“You are the son of Senaye?”

“Yes.”

“This is your uncle, Prince Geranhir,” the tall man said. Beside him was a boy, a little younger than me, but I paid no attention to this, only went to my knees.

Blood was on his lips, and he coughed up blood.

“I am Ash,” I told him. “I finally came. I am here.”

The man looked at me in wonder, and then he gripped my hand very hard. He tried to smile. I did not cry. It wasn’t in me.

“You look just like her,” he said.

“Your uncle,” my Geranhir said, pointing to the man who had brought me here, but he coughed up a whole spurt of blood.

“Other uncle,” he corrected.

“Enough,” I said, nodding. “We will all be family now. Just be still.”

I placed my hand lightly on his chest and a pool of blood flowed through my fingers as he sighed.

“Let me sing to you.”

"Levantaré os ollos nos outeiros,

De onde virá o meu helven.

A miña axuda que provén do Señor,

Quen fixo o ceo e a terra.

Non sufrirá o movemento do teu pé:

O ninguén será Non estarás alí

Si, quen o garda

Ossaryad dorme e non dorme.

O señor é o teu guardián:

O Señor é a túa sombra

A túa man dereita. "

And when I had done, I looked down upon him. He could not have been even forty. He was a beautiful man, dark like the princes of Rheged, as if crafted from ebony, with fine black wooly curls, firm lips, a straight nose. I closed the eyes which stared up and were beginning to frost over.

I rose from my knees and gathered my black cloak about me, pulling my hood over my head and turning from mourning the kinsman I had never known. How would mother feel to know her brother was gone even as her sister and Essily? As I walked slowly out of the tent, a hand reached out and touched mine. I looked to the boy beside my other uncle, Prince Amr. This was young Prince Idris.

“Welcome home, Cousin,” he said.