Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (22 page)

You know, my family had always
been very fertile, and in addition to our farms and fishing boats,
we had always had that little monastery in the holy place where the
younger sons that were a bit bookish and didn’t stand to inherit
much were encouraged to go. Seven of us, brothers and cousins, were
sent there when the new wave of aeroplanes came and took pot-shots
at our boats. I was nine at the time.

It was a long, arduous trek
through a war-torn, maddened country that finally brought us there,
under the guidance of my third-eldest brother who’d have been old
enough to fight, but whose eyesight was so poor he’d be a danger to
his own side in any fight without his bottle-bottom glasses. When
we came to the holy place, there weren’t many holy men left,
either. In old monasteries built for hundreds, a few dozen old men
were rattling about. In glorious churches decked with gold the
falling leaves of every year were piling up, nobody being left to
clear them away, or even to care.

Our uncles and cousins,
however, were busier than ever before, being forced to provide for
themselves entirely now no more pilgrims came. Even the
much-disputed logging expeditions into the virgin forests of the
holy wilderness were a thing of the past now, as nobody was left in
the outside world to buy the wood. So, we were welcomed, we were
made novices, given new names and put to work.

I didn’t mind, really. I didn’t
mind baking and fetching and sweeping, getting up early and praying
for hours, mixing the paint for those of my uncles who still
painted holy pictures although they would be bought by no-one. This
was safety, my mother had said. This was the holy place. No evil
could touch us here. This place belonged to our god and his saints
since time out of mind, and our god and his saints would protect
us. No evil did come, but never would we have thought that we’d be
swept away by the good, the holy of another flavour than ours had
been.

You see, there had been rumours
of a new and dangerous cult, utterly heathen, that took the young
men in the lands to the west of the ocean and made them into less
or more than men – depending on where you stood. And then there had
been panicked whispers that the cult was coming over into our own
lands, to the old places that had thought themselves immune to such
folly as was spawned over there from time to time – really, at
first Wraeththu was to us just one more of the many idiocies from
over the sea. But of course, we, being firm in the practice of our
faith, wouldn’t succumb to such silly new beliefs.

While I grew up, news of the
outside world grew scarcer and scarcer. We went through the year as
always, we suffered through each Lent and celebrated each Easter,
while outside humans were dying, and we didn’t know. We were
looking out at a sea that was always the same. And then, after a
few years, my uncles and cousins thought I was old enough to be
made a full monk, and the one who was a priest did a ceremony for
me, and I was given yet another new name, and everyone started
using it right away, only I wasn’t sure who I was any more.

You know, I was in a difficult
age anyway, and what with sex being utterly forbidden on account of
us being monks, and all I ever got to see being scruffy uncles and
cousins and brothers anyway, and a general application of lots of
very cold spring water, I was very much at a loss about what to do
with myself at that time. It was spring, shortly after Easter, and
we were all nervous in the spring each year in any case, and now
being called by another name didn’t help at all. The cold water
didn’t help either, and I was very dissatisfied with myself and the
world around me. The familiarity of the place and the unchanging
sameness of the rituals we did and the pictures we painted (I was
allowed to paint now as well, but I was never very good at it) were
the only things that helped.

Then one day, a fellow monk
arrived from a neighbouring monastery to exchange olives for our
bread. He said that the wall had been torn down and some very
strange strangers had come and were doing things to places. They’d
made themselves at home in one of the largest and most abandoned
holy settlements, and there they practised the most heathen and
utterly unholy rites. There were even women among them, the monk
whispered, although with them you could never tell if they were men
or women. By the Holy Mother, our visitor concluded, you couldn’t
even tell if they had souls at all. We were well off here on our
coast, what with them being far away and certainly not interested
in this rocky wilderness.

Three days later, they
came.

There was a large group of
them, improbably on horseback, sauntering along paths that even our
mules refused to negotiate. They were unarmed, and in a brisk,
working mood. They came with notepads and pencils and measuring
tape and pendulums and looked at our monastery as if they would buy
it.

You really couldn’t tell
whether they were men, women, or human at all, as the old monk had
said. They were clad in shiny metal and gleaming leathers, their
long hair was mostly bleached to shimmering paleness, even if some
of their faces were dark, and they had no beards at all. Their
horses where lithe and more beautiful than anything I’d ever
seen.

They stopped in front of our
home, and we huddled inside, just me and one of my cousins peering
out through the windows. Their ranks opened, and some of them
fanned out with their measuring implements, ordered by those in the
centre. As they spread out, these leaders came to view: deathly
beautiful both of them, one of them with an abundance of tawny
hair, the other one with a flaming red mane. They were discussing
the lay of the land with those around them. I heard one of them
calling: “See if you can get a clear view from the boathouse to the
peak, Vadriel!” And I realised by the clear voice that shouted that
this must be a woman.

I was enraged. Before I could
even think, I threw open our door and pelted down the path towards
them. My uncles and cousins and brothers called for me to stop but
I didn’t react – in my anger, I didn’t recognise the name they
shouted as my own, new monastic name. It didn’t touch me the way
your own name always does.

“Women are strictly
forbidden!”, I shrieked at them, slithering to a halt before their
mighty horses on the loose, dry earth.

The red-headed one smiled at me
with condescension. “Exactly what I’m always saying, little
monklet”, he drawled at me.

“Remember him, Orien”, he said
to his companion. “That one is young enough to incept. Now, what if
we build the stairs to the right of that boulder, and have a ramp
coming down the middle instead?”

I stood there, forgotten, my
fate decided for me once more, although I didn’t have the slightest
idea at the time.

They went away eventually, and
I was severely scolded. And then, nothing happened for quite some
time, apart from some monkish neighbours coming by and telling us
how the Gelaming had started building all over the place. These
strangers, it seemed, called themselves Wraeththu and Hara and
Gelaming, and we didn’t really comprehend what all those names were
supposed to mean. But then, among us names were variable and
manifold, so we didn’t really bother with what those strangers were
calling themselves from one day to the other. We prayed at night,
we worked all day. We were content and safe – yet.

At the height of the summer, on
a day that was so unbearable that we were all hiding inside,
wearing as little as possible (within the monkishly decent, of
course), one of the strangers came back. It was the one called
Vadriel, the one who had been down at the boathouse the last time.
I recognised him by the pale blue streaks he’d dyed into his
silvery hair. His hair was living moonlight, and I felt very ugly,
scruffy and doltish when I went out to greet him with a tray of
coffee, water, and sweets. You see, the general consensus among us
remaining monks by now was to treat the strangers as neighbours or
pilgrims and hope they’d leave us in peace.

Vadriel jumped off his horse,
politely took my offerings, not even flinching at the dubious
sweets, and then told me his name. I hesitated a moment before I
told him mine as I wasn’t sure which one would be right for him –
in the end, it didn’t matter.

“Well, Makari,” he said, “would
you introduce me to your fellow monks here? I’ve got something to
tell you.”

I asked him inside then, and
all my uncles and cousins and brothers came out from their cells,
having made themselves decent with black robes hastily thrown over
sweating, t-shirt-clad bodies. My great-uncle Chrysostom who was
considered leader of our little groups had even bothered to put on
a high ceremonial hat.

Vadriel wasn’t impressed; of
course, he’d seen so much ceremony and power among his fellow
Gelaming, a few hardly dignified monks from a dying, outdated
religion didn’t impress him at all. He looked all over us and then
told us, quite matter-of-factly, that we’d have to leave. The
Gelaming were going to construct the most splendid harbour
here.

“Of course, we’re not throwing
anybody out. We’re not that kind of hara. In fact, we’ve made the
old place you call St. Johns habitable for you. It’s the perfect
size for all you remaining monks to live together and end your days
in peace, quiet and contemplation. We do not wish to harm you.
Although you’re very much a thing of the past, we will protect you
and provide for you, enjoy the diversity of your old-fashioned
faith and respect you as a link to the powerful past of this holy
place, which is now sacred to Wraeththukind as well.”

My great-uncle made to
protest.

“I am called Father Chrysostom,
young man, and I can tell you that it’s impossible…”

“I am not a man”, Vadriel
interrupted coldly. “We have put the age of men behind us.”

My, but he was a sanctimonious
little Gelaming limshit, don’t you think? However, I was very much
taken by him at the time. Vadriel the architect, Vadriel the
planner, Vadriel who made everything new. Oh, my.

“Our way of life is different
from that of our brethren in the next monastery, and theirs…”
Chrysostom began again.

“You’ll find a way, I don’t
doubt that. You’ll work it all out; after all, you’re all men of
God”, Vadriel cut him short. “You have until your feast of
Christmas, which we call the solstice festival, to leave here and
get to St. John’s. Harvest everything, take down everything and
take it with you, there’s enough room at St. John’s for you to put
up your own place of worship and all. But after Festival, we’ll
need to start building here, so you really have to sort everything
out until then; there’ll be no going back afterwards.”

With that, he grabbed another
sweet off the tray, scattering loose sugar all down the front of
his black leathers, winked at me, and was gone.

All our neighbours, we soon
learned, had got the same summons, and when winter approached and
all our harvesting was done, we moved to St. John’s – what else
could we do? However, losing our home wasn’t the most important
problem to Great-Uncle Chrysostom and the other uncles, but losing
our independence, our way of doing things after our own methods,
that would doubtlessly come into question when we’d be forced to
live communally with all the other monks, hermits and holy men left
at the sacred place.

It was not to be my problem,
though. We brought our last mule-load of holy paintings to St.
John’s a week before Christmas, and Vadriel, who was responsible
for building the harbour as we’d learned by now, came by to make
sure we were settled in and had everything we needed. He wouldn’t
mar his great work with the grief and curses of the former
inhabitants, of course. So he brought us whatever we wanted to make
us comfortable, and one day when Chrysostom was arguing with the
other elders at St. John’s (and there were very many elders at St.
John’s, and each of them had a slightly different opinion on how
things should be done), Vadriel actually interfered and told
everyone he and his masters weren’t going to stand for even one
voice in the diversity of our holy practices to be silenced, and he
personally would see to it that the Chrysostom people got to live
according to their own rules. And then he said he was going to take
the seventeen youngest members of the community with him for them
to be incepted into Wraeththu as to provide a bridge, a living link
between the old and the new inhabitants of this very, very holy
place.

Of these seventeen, four came
from the small place of Chrysostom’s people. And of these four, I
was one. My uncles lamented the decision, and Chrysostom himself
went to the church to pray, refusing even to say goodbye to us. But
most of us followed willingly. We were good little monks, and did
what we were told.

We were ordered to get our
stuff together at once and go with Vadriel; we went with him over
the wintry mountain to the old place that was now the Gelaming’s
provisional headquarters, all the ghosts driven out, and music and
strange scents drifting through the old, bare hallways.

We were given cells, we were
sent to the baths and had our hair cut to a uniform length, and we
were issued new clothes – all very monastic, really. Some of the
Gelaming did some ceremony to welcome us, all very heathen but
still strangely familiar, and we got to meet the boss of the whole
endeavour, the har called Orien whom we’d seen that first day at
our monastery. He gave us a speech about how important we would be,
and how he hoped we’d learn quickly and fully understand the
privilege and opportunity we were granted by the wisdom of the
Gelaming.

We were given herbal teas to
drink, we were given thorough lectures about what it would mean for
us to become hara (with the physical part not very well fleshed
out, though; there was an overawing sense of mystery that remained
throughout the lessons), we were made to fast and sent to bed early
for a week. We were monks, so none of this felt very strange to us.
In fact, it was almost as if the Gelaming were just another mystic
order that had taken over the old holy places.