The Book of the Blue House

Abbot Hyrum was in his chapel room, finishing morning prayers, and rose from his knees perhaps a little less gracefully than he once might have when Cal entered, and wrapped his beads around his brown hand.

“You came all the way up here?” Hyrum said, making the sign of reverence across his chest and shoulders and face to end his prayers, “when we are on our way down.”

Cal nodded. “I thought it was right to come to you. And, besides, I never come up here.”

“You can come up here anytime you wish, Calon,” the saintly man said. “You know this.”

The chapel room and all the rooms of the Abbot’s apartments were low ceilinged and wide, and the morning sun slanted through them as Abbot Hyrum took his mantle and the staff of his office, and left the room ahead of Cal saying, “Don’t forget to shut the door.”

Even as Cal did so, the Abbot shrugged.

“I don’t suppose it matters.”

They came out to the great airy lobby of the seventh floor, walking to the top of the long wide and winding staircase that went through the rest of the building. To their right were the doors to the great chapel, and to the left of them was the railing from which they could look out and down to the sanctuary.

Hyrum yawned.

“It was unwise of me to wake so early. Prior Robinton reminded me of that. On any other day I would just go back to sleep a little, but we must sit before the King and before the other Orders, one of the less savory parts of this office.”

The Abbot went before the King four times a year, but Cal had never accompanied him. They took the lift down to the lobby of the White Door where they meet Brigham and Peter, Kryse and Sian and Lorand, the other Blues who would be traveling to the palace with the Abbot.

In those first months, when Cal was being trained in posture and composure, it was Kryse who had told him, “To those in the world who need our love, we must appear as brothers, but to those who would harm other men and who would loathe us, we must appear as hard as stone and as icy as virgins.”

The Abbot traveled in a great litter born by four wind up metalmen, and to Cal’s surprise, since he had never made this trip, he traveled in the litter with the Abbot. The others rode on great horses on either side of him. Through the curtains of the jostling sedan, Cal occasionally looked at the towers and great houses of the city, the opening markets, the broad stone streets filled with hawkers and herders, the Marnen bringing in their flocks of goats and cattle as if the city streets were village roads or pastures. There were the whores in red low cut voluminous dresses, slowly sweeping the stoops of their brothels, and the omnibuses trundling down the street. The Blue procession moved slowly to great Linden Street with its banks and shops and townhouses bordering the broad River Annlyn, and crossed over on Anthelin Bridge into the broad houses, gardens, parks and evident wealth of King’s Garth. Rising over all of this wealth were the great red walls and rose colored towers of the Kingsboro.

The Kingsboro was the oldest part of the new city. Before it was Kingsboro it had borne another name, but when the Sendic Kings came, they built the great rose walls over the rose stones of the ancient palace, and a boro, unlike most castles, was open to people, a fortified town in itself, and so the procession continued through the People’s Gate in the part of the castle that was always public, and through that they were carried up to the Athel Court where the litter was lowered, and across the court, as Cal rounded the litter to assist the Abbot’s exit, they saw the Bishop Herulian coming out of his palanquin and bowing his head so his acolytes could place on it the great ovular miter of his office. Here, also, the Abbot of Purplekirk was dismounting from his horse accompanied by his attendant monks.

“It appears.” the Abbot of Purplekirk said to Abbot Hyrum, “we are the slowpokes, brother, and everyone else had entered the hall already.”

“How you can call that man brother?” the Archbishop grumbled.

Cal felt a heat rise in him toward the priest, but the old Abbot said, “How you cannot call every man brother already displays too much of your true nature, Herulian.”

Cal liked the Abbot of Purplekirk then, but did not look to Hyrum to see his own Abbot’s expression. Purplekirk and the Archbishop had a long history, for Purplekirk was, by all agreement, the highest minster in the New Faith, and the most important kirk in Westrial, and though the Archbishop used it for his services and was himself a White Priest, it was understood that the chief of Purplekirk was the White Abbot, and that the White Abbot was, in some ways, the Abbot over the Bishop. What was more, because of this, the Bishop’s palace was south of them on Varayan Hill, and the newer and less important Kirk of Varayan was his church. Cal was not a part of the New Faith, but he knew those who practiced it stood in factions between Purplekirk and New Kirk and he knew, like it or not, that it was this faith that was the chief one of Westrial, and its priests and bishops who had the ears of the lords, princes and, ultimately, of the King. It was not the Blue Priests who put a crown on the head of a prince and made him a monarch. It was the Archbishop of New Kirk.

Honored as he was to accompany the Abbot, Cal had forgotten the possibility of meeting the King. He told himself now that it hardly mattered. He would not actually meet the King. He would accompany the man who was meeting the King and do it silently and unknown.

When King Anthal came in, accompanied by Prince Caedmon, Cal noted a stooped and ancient man who must have been taller and imposing in his youth and still bore signs of this in his age. He was accompanied by a handsome but arrogant black haired son who had no love for the Blue Priesthood or need for any of the Orders outside of the New Faith. When they entered the small, sunlit hall, all bowed bowed their heads, but none rose, indicating the dignity of the priests and the holy orders.

“All are here,” Prince Caedmon said.

“All are not here, your grace,” The Abbot of Purplekirk corrected the Prince, and a frown flashed across Caedmon’s face, but he smiled.

“Let us say, venerable one, that all are here that matter.”

It was the White Monks who had brought the New Faith to Westrial a century and a half before the coming of the Sendics, when only the Royan people and the Tribes had lived here, and it was with the help of the White Monks and later the White Priests, that the Sendics had been accepted as kings and peace had been made between the warring people of the land that would become Westrial, so ever was the role of the White Abbot in esteem.

“But how can we say that?” the White Abbot continued, “I am here. The Archbishop Herulian is here. Great Brother Antony of the Brown Order is here, and General Benedict of the Black, but where are the Women of the Crystal Isle, or the Ladies of the Grey Islands?”

“Witches?” Prince Caedmon raised an eyebrow.

“Or the men of the White Tower?”

“Pagan sorcerers.”

“Or Ekkrebeth himself.”

“Ekkrebeth,” Cademon said, his voice changing, “is not welcome in this council.”

“Surely your father the King may speak for himself,” the White Abbot said.

“Ekkrebeth is still abroad in the eastern Kingdoms—”

“And there he can stay,” Bishop Herulian said, “He and all of his witchcrafts.”

The Abbot ignored this and said, “All that we have left to us of the ancient orders, and this is merely because they are housed in this city, is Abbot Hyrum of the Blue Temples.”

“Yes,” the Archbishop noted, his face flat, “the chief pimp of all the blue whores.”

At this, quick as lighting, with the rage that so often filled him by surprise, Cal leapt up and seized Herulian by the throat, taking his dagger out and pointing it at the Bishop’s neck. While the old man’s eyes bulged, and he licked his lips, none of his attendants came forward, and Prince Caedmon cried, “This is unseemly!”

“Calon,” Hyrum said in a flat voice as if he were speaking to a little boy fidgeting too much in his seat, “put the knife down.”

“Apologize?” Cal demanded of the Archbishop.

Hryum said nothing this time, nor did the King, and Cal said to the Archbishop again, “Apologize. Or I will kill you.”

“F…forgive me,” the Archbishop whispered, and Cal released him, the red fading from his eyes, his body almost dizzy with spent rage. He felt himself heating with shame now at his loss of control, but Hyrum merely held out his hand for Cal to come sit by him.

The rest of the meeting was lost on Cal. No one, not even the King, seemed bothered by the fact that a Blue Priest had threatened to murder the Archbishop, and the White Abbot even seemed mildly amused. Cal thought it was a shame he wasn’t the fly on the wall he should have been, for now he was hearing about all sorts of things, the wherabouts of Prince Anson, the younger son of King Anthal, how the people of the southeast wanted him for king after his father died, even though Caedmon was the oldest, how the Southern Daumans looked as if they were preparing for war even though Prince Anson had defeated them at the Battle of Polliae, and he learned of how up North, in the Ancient Wood, the bandits were stirring.

“Your prior up there in Kirklees? Is he still involved with them?” the King had asked Brother Antony.

“He never was, and we never were,” the Brown Monk protested.

“This is not what I heard,” Archbishop Heruilain said “My Bishop in Hereford notes that your monks have once again given quarter to the Bandits of the Green Wood and….”

Now Cal understood why no one had minded him putting a knife to Herulian.

On their way out, Cal felt his hand grasped warmly, and was surprised to see it was the saintly old Abbot who had done it with a wink in his eyes. And when he returned to the outer court where the other Blues were waiting with the litter, and he climbed into the litter next to the silent Hyrum, as the metalmen lifted the litter, he instantly began

“Master, I am so sorry. I was so foolish. It’s just that I couldn’t bear to hear him speak ill of you.”

Hyrum said nothing as the litter was lifted, and Cal did not have the heart to look out of the curtains at the towers and walls of the Kingsboro.

“I was just... Sometimes the rage comes up in me, and I behave like a fool, and I dishonored you. I dishonored us, and fell beneath my station and the breeding you have—”

But just then he saw Hyrum’s face moving, and he wondered, was his master weeping? Was his master disappointed at his poor conduct? And then, suddenly, Hyrum threw back his head and laughed.

Calon looked at him in shock.

“If you could have… if you could have seen those tiresome White Priests! If you could have seen Herulian’s face! Oh, that pompous son of a bitch! If only you could have…”

Hryum chortled and shook his head, smiling. Now he turned and embraced Cal, kissing him on both cheeks. He looked on Cal lovingly and smoothed his hair.

“Oh, Calon, Oh, my dear son, and only son I’m ever likely to have.”

He sat back after patting him on the knee.

“Still,” Hyrum said, “I wonder if your rage was not as much for your wounded honor as mine. I know the anger still flies up in you. I know men did horrible things to you before you came to us, but I am so afraid for you when your anger comes, and not for my sake but for yours. I do not ever want it to master you or put you in the hands of dangerous men. Do you understand me, my son?”

Cal nodded, relieved that he had not angered his abbot but ashamed of his own anger.

“Yes, Father.”

They were riding out into the great street, and Cal had recovered himself. If men could see him, he would be the haughty, copper haired beauty of the Blue Temple, and a far off look was in his narrowed, hazel eyes before he spoke.

“Part of me wishes I had killed him.”

“Yes,” the abbot nodded, still grinning. “Part of me does too.”