Chapter 6

Still unquenched in his bones, Borner insisted on a foray to the local tavern. His new-found friend was hesitant, claiming that his belly was already full of tea, but Borner was not of a mind to listen yet. He marched down to the end of the avenue and stood in the center of the square, wondering which of the three streets would be most fruitful.

Kanner plucked at the arm of Borner’s robe as the Sojourner priest passed him and headed towards an alleyway. “See the pot swinging on the arm above the door?” Kanner asked. “The Black Pot is as good as any in the immediate area although that is not saying much.”

“A good ale might just calm these agitations that are reverberating around my skull,” Borner said, as he grasped for the door.

Kanner laid an arm across the door before Borner could open it. “While barging around temples may be child’s play to you, this is not a place for such impetuousness. Men with arms spend their days here and they have little patience for the likes of you and me,” Kanner said.

“I will be circumspect,” Borner said with hand over his heart.

Shaking his head with a look of disbelief, Kanner moved his arm and opened the door. The interior was somewhat dim with only one lantern lit over the bar. Borner followed behind the priest as they crossed the sawdust strewn floor. The fireplace on the right was cold and empty. Above the mantle was the mounted head of a stuffed mountain deer with a spread of antlers.

Borner counted four long tables in the room, of which three of them held patrons. Only the back table was empty. A barmaid sat at stool pulled up at end of the bar who looked as if she could chew metal barbs off a fence.

Kanner ordered two mugs of ale from the barkeep and paid in coin without asking the price. Borner noticed the coins that had suddenly appeared, shaking his head at the white lie. No one in the room seemed to give them much notice until they started towards the last table with their mugs.

“Why does my drink have to be sullied with the stench of priests?” A man with long grey hair and thick arms announced to his crowd at the third table. His leather jerkin was old and cracked while his undershirt looked coarse and grey.

Borner stopped and turned to the man. Deliberately he brought the mug to his lips and downed several gulps of the bitter. His eyes never left his accuser. The seated man broke eye contact first, returning to his own drink. Borner gave a slight nod of his head to the seated companions and left to sit with his friend with his back to the other tables.

They sat in peace as they drained their cups. Borner had much to think upon and little to say at the moment. He was curious enough to think of asking about “the hospitality room” at the last temple but he thought shop talk would not be appropriate. Those temples had a reek of familiarity to them, even the nice parts, which raised Borner’s inner alarm. Piety could not be trusted and its opposite, cynicism, was also treacherous. With Borner’s new experiences, belief in a god or a pantheon was a wavering judgment somewhere between brain-addled dementia and an overwhelming fear of death. What did these temples sell and were their answers legitimate? Before he realized it, his mug was empty. Not sure that he had had his fill or that the ale was strong enough to rein in his wandering thoughts, he offered to purchase the second round.

As he rose to walk to the bar, the same grey-haired man announced, “There is that terrible stench again.”

The bones in Borners legs and arms began to burn again. Locking eyes with Kanner, Borner saw the man’s eyes go wide and his head shake minutely from side to side as if to say, “don’t do this.”

Like a ghoul shrieking at the top of a storm, the Void cried out to Borner, tearing into the newly gained moment of calm. He could be done with the ignorant, shortsighted, willful belligerents of the world who never listen and never learn. They strike their women in anger and hate themselves even more in unrelenting cycles of violence. Leave them for peace.

He was forced to put down the mugs to steady himself. Before he recognized what he was doing, his staff was in his hand and he was no longer looking at his friend. He was standing at the end of the long table facing his new tormentor. With a flick of his wrist, Borner brought up his juntu staff and brought it slamming down on the table in front of the impudent man. Everyone jumped in their seat. The metal edge left a deep scar in the wood.

“I am not a priest,” Borner said in a slow, even tone. “What matters at this moment is not me but you and your worrisome nose. Are you a man who would rather kill a soul, or save a soul?”

“Wha ... what kind of question is that?” the man said, sputtering.

“Kill or save - it is very simple.”

“Save, I suppose,” the man said, regaining some composure and starting to look about warily.

“Then by your own words is your destiny written,” Borner announced to the entire room, leaving his staff where it lay.

“In the days that come, swords will be drawn in the streets. Women will cry out and men shall bellow
Their fear and their madness and their sorrow;
The streets shall be bloated with the carcasses of dead pleas,
The gates shall fail
And the House on the Hill will convulse.
The gods shall turn their backs on the poisoned swords,
Ignoring the pious laments of the fattened lambs
As their priests bleat and squeal their sacraments.
Who will save the broken and the weary,
Protecting them from the senseless onslaught
Of power and earthly greed that is not their fight?{br}

“You, who suckle in your deep bitter cups, Must choose how to wield the weapons in your hands,
To save or to slay.{br}

“Yet one and only one declares his destiny before the time of choosingAnd upon him rests the hope of unknowing faces.

“Mark this moment, O man:Your word is your bond;
Your sword arm is your truth.{br}

“The call is coming within the walls of Gemma;Now, you already know its’ coming.
One man, one sword, one destiny.”{br}

“Let’s go,” Kanner said, pulling his friend by the arm. “I think we have done enough for today.”

Outside, Kanner let his anger show, “If they don’t burn us at the stake up there, they are going to run us through down here!”

“I think you should be happy that another pitiful soul has been redeemed. I could use a nap, now,” Borner said as he closed the door behind him. “I think the barkeep waters down his ale, but that is just my opinion.” His friend urged him to hasten his step.

Borner felt refreshed after a long nap; for once, the Void was silent. He welcomed the anonymity of the cloudy night and the promise that it held. The ale may have been a bit watery, but its soporific properties had worked.

He watched the eventide breeze across the Garden of Repose shake the changing leaves on the shade trees. The falling of the leaves failed to distract him and his disbelief, though. He was a fresh and formidable heretic, a god doubter, and he had just offered up a poetically structured oracle replete with religious references. He had stormed into the offices of a high priest of a major god without a whit of propriety. Borner, before the descent under the mountain, was a careful, deliberate man. Today, he was a fool running around and poking dangerous, violent people with his staff as if he had no sense of place.

They stoned people who spoke truth to power. Generals ran their swords through the messengers of ill tidings on the battlefield. Was this an unconscious attempt to commit suicide by forcing others to do him in because he himself could not? Nothing he had done or said this day was pure provocation, but his deeds had been remarkably close to the boundary. Was he going mad or was he a man with a mission?

He pounded his fist softly against the window frame, sounding out a rhythm with the flesh of his hand. The ancients called it a geas, an unbreakable vow or task placed upon a believer. He may have traded more than his goods to Arimas’s Mystery in that marble room. The water he slurped down may not have been freely given after all. Looking back, the Teacher offered the first cup but not the subsequent ones. He could have traded thirst for thirst and never been aware until now. Whatever it was, this geas was etched on his bones and inscribed on the folds of his brain. He was not in control of himself as in times past.

Perhaps his childhood nemesis returned to protect him, to give him an exit from the holy task. “Pfah,” he sputtered, throwing beads of spit on the panes. He knew better – there was no “holy this” or “sacred that” in this world under the sun.

The love goddess priestess was correct; he was a tortured soul. Andamathea was slaughtered. He could not save them, and he only saved himself. His childhood horror returned because he, the ‘master of masters’ as Kanner put it, should have died with the temple. There was a young girl with bright brown eyes and a withered leg who would sit at her mother’s booth sewing lace and brocade every day. She always smiled and stopped her stitching to wave at him when he passed. He would smile and wave in return as he continued to walk. Her body was a tragedy, yet she smiled every time. He never stopped to ask her name, leaving her to die nameless.

He watched a Sojourner acolyte run through the garden towards the alley entrance. Borner scrutinized the boy until the figure disappeared around the corner. The last light was fading away. Whatever Borner had done this day, messages were flying to and fro. Although he was a little curious, he had no compelling desire to know what words and secrets were being traded. People on the Avenue of the Gods were talking again, if only under the cover of night.

The Temple in Andamathea had a courtyard that was laid in granite blocks. In the middle of the yard was a white stone fountain that piped water to the top of a spindle. The water cascaded down a series of bowls to collect in the pool at the bottom of the spindle. A bench encircled the pool. Pilgrims and visitors would sit and rest on the benches. They would quench their thirst and wash their feet day after day, and year after year. Children frolicked in the pool until their parents would pull them out while chastising them for misbehavior. Some tossed coins in the water for the temple or for the poor. Borner had no clue how old the fountain was but he knew the earliest records of the Temple mentioned it. The most popular seats of the stone benches were worn down by generations of people resting there. Few, if any, realized how holy that courtyard was, inviting thousands upon thousands to sit and live the Mystery. He had not seen any public courtyards on this avenue and the Sojourner’s garden did not count. The Sojourner always had a garden.

No longer content to examine the darkened garden from above, Borner began to pace. When the pacing could not squelch his thoughts, he grabbed his staff and went downstairs. In one room, Kanner was engrossed with something on his desk illuminated in the focused glare of a lens attached to a suspended oil lamp. Quietly Borner turned away, walking quickly through the reception room to the front door. The acolyte keeping watch on the door nodded lazily while Borner let himself out.

Out on the main thoroughfare, only a few of the temples had a lamp lit, illuminating a front entrance. The rest of the buildings were dark, which made Borner uneasy. Drunken laughter filtered up the street from the taverns below in muted bursts. Looking both ways Borner saw no one walking on the avenue or standing before the open buildings.

The eerie stillness in the middle of the city crystalized Borner’s immediate plans. He turned left and started walking up the avenue, keeping to the shadows. He passed two temples without trouble, but the third was going to be an issue. The Temple of the Love Goddess was open for business with four alert guards standing edgy. He pressed his back against the side of the steps, deep in the shadow of the second temple, and squatted. Glancing over his shoulder to the symbol above the doorway, he almost snorted aloud at the skull of the God of the Underworld. Someone must have had a sense of humor to place Love and Death next to one another.