We'd received our instruction by
torchlight in the Longhouse, one night a month from dusk till dawn, since before most of us had had his first
seedflow. Our classmasters always started a lesson by asking what we knew. Only
later would they gently correct what we'd often gotten comically wrong from
swapping inaccuracies and half-truths with playmates as our bodies and those of
our sisters changed, catching glimpses of adults coupling through doors left
ajar, experimenting among ourselves.
One simple lesson a night always
became a game we'd play till exhaustion got the better of boyish excitement and
we'd all collapse like a pile of puppies on the cushions spread around the Lingam
on the dais. Soon after the start of our instruction, the classmasters began by
turning the simple fact of our hard stands into a game: who rose fastest and
highest --taking the sting of possible defeat out of the exercise by almost
always coming in behind us themselves; seeing who could hold the weight of an
apple hung from a cord. Later on, we learned to breathe deeply when touching
ourselves; the varied subtleties of shaft and foreskin, ridge and head, balls
and sac; the experience of waking up in a puddle of seed when they set us the
challenge of not milking it out of ourselves for a week; what it was like to
touch our bungholes and work a finger into them; how to bring ourselves almost to
the point we couldn't hold back from seedflow, then stop and feel the flow of
heat up our spines.
A grown man knows his own body,
our masters told us. Between your legs lies the exposed tip of your heart. When
you sleep with a woman for the first time, you'll never give her pleasure
wholeheartedly if you don't understand the pleasure you can feel within yourself,
by your own hand. Don't try to fly before you can walk. The wonders of women's
bodies and how to touch them came mostly in our last months of instruction. Then ways for men and women to
feel pleasure together and still not make a child before they wanted one. In
between the lessons of the body, we learned the chants for the births, weddings
and deaths of sons and brothers and fathers and friends. We learned the circle
dances for Equinox and Solstice, the Cross Quarters and Full Moons.
The House of Refuge story was one
of our last lessons. It wasn't the classmasters who taught us that night, just a
month before our Coming-of-Age, but Firesong, the oldest man living in Refuge.
He was my mother's mother's uncle; my father named me to honor him. He came down
from the House to teach us leaning on the arm of the younger man who shared his
table and sometimes, I knew, his bed.
He settled himself into a chair in front of
the Lingam and looked around the half circle we formed seated around him. His
white hair was gathered back taut from his temples, bound at the back of his
head with a scarlet ribbon. Gold bangles glinted on his left wrist in the
candlelight, and a gold ring in his ear. He accepted a cup of water from his
companion, set it down on a low table at his side, and began the tale.
“In the First Days, when Killian,
his brother Cernunnos, and their sister Rhiannon rose out of the earth, and Rashni, her sister Shekinah, and their
brother Gil descended from the peak of the mountain, they met by the River.
Rashni saw Killian and loved him at once, and the Six made their home together.
“Flowers sprang forth where
Rashni walked along the banks. Wheat shot up overnight from the soil where Killian
had crossed the fields. Their joy in one another made the land fertile. They
built a house with room for them all, and for sixteen months, the Six lived
their life in common.
“But as time passed, Killian and Rashni’s joy in one another made
theheart of Cernunnos unquiet. He had lost the companionship of his brother to
Rashni--just as Shekinah had lost the companionship of Rashni. He lay awake,
tormented by the sound of Killian’s lovemaking that nightly opened the wound of
his loss. He rose, and by the light of the Full Moon he crossed the ford of the
river and walked up the slope toward the hills.
“As he passed, trees burst into flower, and flowers turned
to fruit hanging from the branches in a single night, but he had eyes for none
of this. His face downcast, he glanced neither to right nor left, and imagined
himself alone in his grief. He saw neither his sister Rhiannon, nor Rashni’s
brother Gil and sister Shekinah at a distance, each making their way by an
isolated, winding path across the same rising terrain, unknown to the others.
In the midst of a meadow, he sat down, huddled into himself, and wept. As his
tears fell to the earth, fragrant herbs sprouted around his feet.
“He made his way again to the
house in the first light of dawn. But as he crossed back over the river, the
grief in his heart turned to stone, and crossing the threshold, the love he
felt for Killian lay cloaked in resentment toward him and toward the woman who
had stolen him away. So also, the bitterness of Shekinah for the loss of her
sister Rashni, and the loneliness of Rhiannon and of Gil, crept into the house
like a smoke that curls across the threshold and poisons the air inside. So
too, Killian and Rashni grew impatient with the others, only half-comprehending
the causes for the discord that had come into their life together.
“Nine months passed, and Rashni
gave birth to the twins from whom in turn all the People spring by first
begetting and first birth. As Killian and Rashni turned further inward toward one another, and toward the
children, their sisters and brothers wandered further afield. And in the light
of yet another Full Moon, crossing the river and going up country once again,
his heart aching for Killian, Cernunnos found Gil. Seeing one another anew in
that light, their passion for each other was kindled, and their souls entwined
to become one. The heart of Cernunnos softened once again, and the heart of Gil
was came back to life.
“From the fire of their hearts
and loins sprang all the pleasure that a man may feel within himself, and that
men may feel with one another. Settling onto the grass, they embraced each
other in the position of Not-One-and-Not-Two: Cernunnos sat with his right leg
over Gil’s left, and Gil sat with his right leg over Cernunnos’ left. Pressed
together from cock to forehead, they shared their seedflow for the first
time. From midnight until dawn, it ran
in rivulets from where they sat, belonging to them singly no longer, but
indistinguishably to both, and from it as it mingled and flowed, all around
them sprang up a garden. Vines grew up the trunks of the trees and hung with
sweet grapes. As they went on rutting for each other, from their foreheads grew
the horns of stags.”
Firesong fell silent and looked slowly
and deliberately around our gathering. Some of us looked down, unwilling to
meet his eyes. Some returned his gaze with neither embarassment nor particular
attention. Two boys smirked at each other and snickered, until they fell silent
under his glare. And then his eyes met mine, and softened with a recognition
surpassing the kinship that bound us together as family. Mercifully, he seemed
not to notice that I had to lean forward and pull the fold of my lunghi up to
conceal the stand I’d sprouted while listening to the tale.
At last, he went on.
“Of Shekinah and Rhiannon, our
tale tells no more. Just as the tale of Women’s Haven tells nothing of the garden
that sprang from the first great seedflow of Cernunnos and Gil. By the light of
day, they fed on the fruits of their garden and began to build for themselves a
hut from stone and branch. By the waning moonlight of each night, the joy
surging from their bodies sustained the garden they had created. As the walls of
that first House of Refuge rose, vines thickened over the stones, fixing them
in place without mortar, and strengthening the roof.
“Descending at last once again to
the house across the river, they saw in the eyes of Killian and Rashni alarm at
their appearance. As they entered the
house, their staghorns knocked against the lintel. When they tried to put on
fresh shirts, they snagged on the sharp tips. So they took to going naked from
the waist up, until winter came on, when they wrapped themselves in loose
shawls from shoulder to waist. By the next summer, the twins as they grew began
reaching out to grasp their uncles by the horns, and squealing in delight to
rise into the air as they held on while the two men spun around the room.
“But every Full Moon, Cernunnos
and Gil would return to the House of Refuge they had built for themselves and
one another, and to the garden that their passion had made, to nurture it again
from dusk to dawn with the seed their joy in each other brought forth.
“And this was their undoing. For under the Full Moon nearest Autumn
Equinox, as they made their way along the winding trails that led up country,
Killian had set out as well across the river with his bow in search of game.
And as they approached the garden by their separate paths, Killian, mistaking
Gil for a stag, pierced him through the breast with his arrow. Gil’s life ebbed
away as Cernunnos held him in his arms, but not before he asked his beloved to
bury him in the place where they had found their joy in one another.
“As Killian approached and saw
what he had done, he threw down his bow and fell at the feet of his brother.
Together they wept over Gil’s body until
it grew cold with the rising of the sun, and together they carried it to the
midst of the garden, dug a grave with their bare hands, and as the sun sank
again toward the west covered the body of Gil, who had descended from the peak
of the mountains, with the earth from which Killian and Cernunnos had arisen.
And from that day on, Cernunnos refused to return to the house where Killian
and Rhiannon dwelt, though Killian came up country, and gradually the hearts of
the two brothers opened to one another again, yet never again as they had
before the slaying of Gil, before the love between Killian and Rasni had
flourished.
“In this way many years passed,
and still Killian came up country, and still Cernunnos declined to return,
until at last his brother persuaded him to make a visit to the river house. As
they set out to descend to the river, Killian was first to turn his face toward
the trail down country. But sensing after a hundred paces that his brother had
not followed, he turned again,to see that Cernunnos’ feet had taken root into
the earth above the body of his beloved. By the time Killian ran back to
embrace him, the white hair across his bare chest was thickening into bark, and
leaves had sprouted from his stag horns, which now began to branch and
lengthen. His human face remained. As
Killian gazed into his eyes, he saw that it was become at once the face of his
brother, made young again, and the face of Gil whom he had slain, until the
bark closed over it as well, and he planted a last kiss on what had been the
lips of his brother and of Gil.
“From that day to our own, men
who have felt the call of Cernunnos and Gil have gone up country at the Full Moon,
to gather around the Great Tree, then going down again to the life of Killian
and Rhiannon, or else to take Refuge and make their lives with the men who become
their brothers in the Staghorn Lord of the Dance.”
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