The Book of the Blue House

Nialla had heard a singing in her ear that, once she could assemble her thoughts to remember the night before, she attributed to Sara who had been sleeping, poorly, on the twin bed with her. But no sooner had she murmured, “Saaaara,” then the black girl said, “It’s not me.”

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” Cal sang over them, and Gabriel was laughing. The two priests were in their blue robes and chuckling in the darkness of the room.

“Time to make the world a beautiful place for those whose lives are less beautiful.”

“Out of all the mornings,” Nialla said, stumbling out of bed.

“Out of all the mornings indeed,” Sara agreed.

“Now go wash your faces in the first bathroom and come on. We’re going to give breakfast to those we’re here to serve.”

They were in such a good mood, Nialla thought, and she wondered if Gabriel, who was always sweet tempered, but more jovial than usual, had stayed the night with Cal. She ruefully though that staying the night with Jon wouldn’t have been so bad, then she wouldn’t be here, washing her face before sunlight. But the White Monks at Purplekirk might not approve.

And why wasn’t Conn up, or Derek? Nialla thought as she washed her face in the sink and then rubbed a towel over her cheeks. And what of Lorne? Well, maybe they were already downstairs. It would have been a Conn thing to have gotten first to all chores.

But downstairs she did not find Conn, though Lorne, she was told, was doing morning duty in the Sanctuary. What she found were all the guests who had stayed last night. No one said homeless, because if you were here you had a home, and besides, there were pilgrims along with the indigent who came to the Temple, and they were all treated alike. This morning Nialla ladled porridge as she yawned because she said that was all she was willing to do if Gabriel was going to ask her to be up so early.

Gabriel laid out towels and attended the shower rooms for the guests while Cal attended to the clothing room for those who had none. The lobby of the Temple at the White Door was large and well made. A great stair with low long steps in a wide staircase led up to the Sanctuary, a place Nialla had never been. She had come as a guest herself, but guests had two options, though they were not strongly enforced, to stay and then go and perhaps occaisionally come back, or to attach themselves to the house and take some sort of work. Cal remembered that when Nialla came she came with no fear to a place few women save Sara and Obala and some others came snd said, flatly, “I’m here to stay. Show me where I can lay my head and what needs doing.”

That’s what he reminded as they drank coffee and chewed on bacon after serving the guests, and Sara said, “I think I don’t feel like bed again. I think I want to go around the city.”

“At this time of morning?” Nialla said.

“This time is the perfect time. The city is hardly up. I think I’ll visit my cousins. Come with me?”

Reluctantly, Nialla agreed.

As she and Sara were leaving, they noticed, or rather Nialla noticed for the second time a boy, a young man maybe a little older than Conn, who was hanging in the lobby. His clothes were decently made but a little threadbare, and he had a rough face, not bad, but sharp boned and wide eyed under a heavy brow. Nialla’s friend came forward.

“Hello, I’m Sara. Do you need some help. All you need do is ask.”

“I,” the boy’s throat must have been dry, and Nialla thought he was one of those who no one would ever just call pretty. His eyes were too wide apart, his cheekbones too sharp. His brow was sloping and a little heavy so that he appeared to be frowning. There was no prettiness in him.

“I was looking for a Blue.”

“Oh…” Sara said.

“Oh, well, if you are looking to be with a Blue then you would actually go through the Black Door on the other side of the Temple, but there is Cal right over here, and he could talk to you and—”

“No,” the boy said with a force that she could tell was not anger so much as nerves.

“I am not looking for a Blue to… be with one. I am looking so I can…perhaps…”

“Oh,” Nialla interrupted, not making him say another word.

She offered her hand to him, and he took it shyly, still looking at the ground. He was tall, Nialla realized now, and she led him to Cal.

“What’s this?” the young priest asked.

“Someone to talk to you,” Nialla said, simply.

Ladylike, she curtseyed, and so did Sara, and then the two girls caught hands and headed down the lobby and out of the White Door.

They went east, toward the bazaars that were just setting up, and then beyond them to the pasturelands. Here, one who did not know the city would have been surprised as houses and even fair grounds gave way to the green hills and sloping banks that ran the eastside of the river and looked across its wide breadth to the higher banks where the wealthy houses of King’s Gather looked down through the bare trees. In this almost wild strip of land, merchants and businessmen, bakers with carts of cakes and stacks of bread balanced on their heads, gave way to the tents and sheds of dark skinned herders, and now Sara and Nialla made their way through large, silent, but friendly groups of people who were minding, in their careful way, herds of sheep, or herds of cattle or, in the case of Sara’s people, flocks of black necked, brown bodied cackling geese. The land was broad, not crowded, and even though it would be some time before she saw a tent or a shed with a cookfire, if Nialla was not careful she could very easily walk into a sqwawking huddle of geese. They stopped where grass was going brown, and on their right the bank dropped to a lower terrace and a family of ducks was plodding by, ignoring them. If she looked along the ground, Nialla could forget she was in the city, but if she looked up in either direction, she saw the towers and houses, the minster spires of Kingsboro. On the other side of the river, on the high bank beyond the houses, she saw the rose colored towers of the very King’s palace for which the whole city was named.

The girls walked along the bank until they saw Tayan, Sara’s younger sister squatting by a small, swirling pool shaped like an ear of the river.

“It’s good to see both of you. Father will be pleased, but I don’t dare look up until—yes—”

Her hand darted down, and she pulled up a struggling trout and laid him on the bank with the others. With equal precision, while the muscular fish leapt about, the girl picked up a bloody rock and brained it quickly, and it was dead along with the pile of similary disposed fish.

“That’s enough,” Tayan said, pragmatically. Her hair was an elabroate matter of braids hung with beads, and her skin was darker than Sara’s, almost brown black like the earth, and smooth, shining even on this near winter morning.

“Sara. Nialla, Help me carry these back. It’s almost time to start breakfast.

“I cannot believe we are staying here this year,” Tayan said. “Or rather, this is the first time I have endured a winter in Kingsboro. I hear it is much colder up north,” Tayan said, to Nialla.

“Oh, yes. What you think of as winter here, is something we only dream of in the north.”

The house was more or less permanent, and though Tayan and Sara’s family were not always the ones to inhabit it, someone from their their clan generally did. It had a cook room and a smoke room, one more smoky and more shadowy than the other, and then, with windows open even in the winter, to keep it aired out, there was the tent room, named because it mirrored the tents the Marnen people traveled in though this house was wood. Here, curtains hanging from slides made separate rooms and privacy when needed, and Nialla marveled over the elaborate tapestries.

“Does Nialla still want to travel with us and see the world one day,” Tayan and Sara’s brother, Theo, asked, teasing.

“I still haven’t given up that dream,” said Sara from where she sat, feet folded under her on the thick carpet.

“Mama is gone into town today. You may see her. She’s at the market place near Purplekirk, where the Everdeen Road cuts into the road to the Wedding Country.”

There were two pasturelands to the north and to the south of the Great Bazaar, making a T and always bordered by the meandering rivcr, then south of the pastures toward the end of the city were the Yards, the extensive cattle and pig yards as well as the graineries. Everything the city would ever need in case of a siege was here, but then, this was the capital and it had been many years since there had been a siege. Originally Kingsboro had simply been the great red stone Boro then, in time, it had overflowed, expanding to the King’s Garth. But the city’s boundaries had overflowed its original walls many times over, and the Yards extended to the Ram’s Gate. The very road the girls had crossed to come to the pasture was called the Ram’s Road, and all though any other street in Kingsboro might be filled with traveling carriages, sedans and the motor bikes and few gas cars of the very wealthy, only herders and walkers and the occasional boy on a bicycle or an old fashioned walking horse traveled the Ram’s Road. The Ram’s Road led out of the city, and through the pasturing country, and it was by this road that herders from other lands came.

The Marnen were a people from far off Marnen Ro, but for centuries they’d traveled the Great Route from their land to this so that the road was their home.

“The journey takes a season. Maybe even half a year,” Sara had told Nialla once.

“One day you celebrate because your uncle has returned from the West, and then you know that after some celebration your father and his brothers will make the trek out. Or maybe your brothers. And then the next year you and your mother and the rest of your group will go. You are usually with everyone you know. Your village. As villages go among our people. Now and again some people stay. Some people settle in cities along the way. Kingsboro is the last of the cities on the Route. You’ve seen them here, Marnens, though they are hard to tell from Royanas. They give up the tenting life, but they still are part of the business, still our relatives. But, then I suppose I gave it up to. That’s how I came to the Temple.”

Early morning was turning to mid morning, and Nialla wrapped a piece of fish in flat bread and bit into its hot flaky goodness.

“Do you think you would ever take the road again?” she asked her friend.

Sara shook her head. “Not now. Not any time soon.”

“Here are some bathtowels and some shirts and some nice pairs of pants,” Cal said as he entered the room where the young man was.

“And, hey, you don’t have to do that. I was about to.”

“Well,” the young man said, “it is my bed, so I should make it. I want to be useful.”

He was deep voiced, almost he had the voice of a wolf, Cal thought. He looked raw, as if life had had honed all of his edges, and he was more likely to cut than seduce.

“You are our guest,” Cal said, as he sat down in the chair in the little room. “And whatever happens, always our family.”

Then Cal said, gesturing for the young man to sit on the bed under the narrow window, “I don’t know what you’ve been through before you came to our door. But I know what I’ve been through. I want you to know I am sincere.

The young man nodded.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Matteo. Matt.”

Cal nodded and said, “Calon. Cal.”

Then he said, “Matt, I must ask you: why have you come to us? Why do you want to be a Blue?”

The rawboned boy said, “Because I once saw one of your priests walking down the street, and I saw the awe people had for him. The respect. A few men said things, but not to his face and not in his hearing. They were in terror of him, and I thought, the same people who call me a punk because I got turned on the streets to service men—they see that priest and they are in awe. And I was in awe of him, and I thought, the hardest thing they do, the thing that a lot of men would bawk at, I’ve been doing it since I was eleven. I could do that.”

“But do you like to do it?,” Cal said. “Because if you don’t… if you prefer women, there is the Red Priesthood. We will not ask you to do things you would not choose to do. We are not prostitutes. We are not doing this to keep a roof over our head and a nice life. You have to, at heart, want to be with other men and be with them the way we are. You have to see your sexuality as a divine call the way the White Priests see their virginity as a call though, in truth, I never saw the use of that. The sex is one part of what we do, but it is a major part and gives pleasure, yes. But you must feel pleasure as well. Do you know what I’m saying?”

Matteo hung his head, looking at his knuckles. His mouth was a little open and he shook his head. “Not exactly, sir.”

“When I came here I was not like you at all. I had been through a lot, but the way I handled it was by being cocky, by smiling and looking like nothing touched me. I was not like you, who seem good and pure and clean. I was damaged, Matteo. And I thought the same things as you. Let me be respected instead of being reviled for doing what I do every day. And then our Abbot asked me, ‘Can you love every man you’re with? Can you give them your love?’ And… I got angry. I got so angry I almost threw something at him. I didn’t know what was coming over me because, you see, and I do not say this lightly, I leanred to have sex from my father when I was seven. He made me do things with him and with others a child should never do, and I acted like it didn’t matter, like it made me stronger. But in that moment when I sat in the Abbot’s office, I realize I hated men. I hated them all. I hated everyone I’d been with. If I could have I would have killed them I was so full of rage.”

Matteo looked up at Cal. His eyes were still a little downcast, but his hands were balled into fists.

“They tell you, I think that one of the ways a Blue trains is by having a lot of sex,” Cal continued. “That is part of the training. And maybe they even say it helps you to face your fears and your demons. But they didn’t tell you that you don’t come to a single person until you’ve made love for the first time, until the moment that the sex that you used for money, or to live, or not make someone beat you or kill you, until the thing that humilitated you is sweet. And sometimes we’re not ready for that right away. Sometimes, Matt, you need for no one to touch you. And that’s how I started.

“The training for the priesthood is hard because you don’t get away from any of the things that sex brings up in you, and some people walk away and don’t finish it, but at the end and at the beginning is love and… Self discovery and…” Cal laughed, trying to resume his old casual face again, “that was deeper than I meant to go for now.”

Cal stood up, “Matt, can I come and get you for lunch? You can join me and my friends if you’d like.”

Matteo nodded, but did not speak.

Quickly Cal swept down and hugged him, and then turning around, he left the room, shutting the door behind him.