Chapter 6: The Circle

The Circle

For three days each week, the bath houses at Cresterfell were strictly off-limits to highborn young men like Sangyer. But most of all on this night — the night before Godsdaeg, when the filth and excrement of the common folk, that had washed off their bodies in the three days since the bath house was open to their sort, formed a thin film of scum and stories on the surface of the warm but murky water. The toil of each life was writ in the stuff washed from its body in the high, mountain bathhouse. It was for such grim reality that Sangyer came, sneaking or bribing his way inside. That and a certain lowborn boy called Philipos. 

Philipos was an ember by trade. Or at least he would be once he had finished under the tutelage of Rastos, the Master Ember. Such tutelage was hot, dirty work that left little time for fraternizing or bathing. But one day a week, many said at the bidding of his wife Alaspha, Rastos allowed his pupils to wash the soot and sweat of the forges off their bodies. Right when the water was thick with the grime and oils of the other trades, the young apprentice embers would add their dirt to the communal effluence. It was in such ways that those who came from the mud were kept forever looking upwards. The waters and the filth they carried would be drained on the evening before Godsdaeg, so the highborn could wash away their sins in fresh water and in service of the five Gods of the Hand and begin the new week afresh. 

Sangyer didn’t want to wash away his sins, he wanted to revel in them. To take each fleshy desire and smear it on his body. To proclaim aloud (if he dared) his passion for those with bodies like his own, not the soft, rounded bodies of the girls his age. To wear the mark of his love — deviance they would call it (if they only knew) — like a livery to the new and dangerous God of Delight. 

“I thought you’d never get here,”

Sangyer cried as he pulled Philipos into the shadowy recesses of the bathhouse prep rooms. 

The reply came in warm and wet kisses, smothering his lips and pushing inside of his mouth. Sangyer let the tall lowborn press his body against his own. Firm and defined, arms thick with the exertion of daily metalwork, body tight with the fetch-and-carry of ore from the ember courtyard up the steep steps to the high furnaces. The outside world was at war now, and the furnaces burned night and day, for there was no steel like Cresterfell steel, and all sides knew it. 

“I couldn’t get away soon enough,” Philipos replied, and fell to kissing Sangyer once again. The lowborn’s rough, valleys accent would be enough for him to be pitched for what they were doing together (for he would surely be blamed the corruptor). Even before the thin light of the goatsfat lamps revealed his skin, so much darker — so much more marked by the black, sunless glow of the forge star — than Sangyer’s own. Sangyer didn’t care. To him life was life. He lived to love as much and as often as he could before the ending of it closed all. 

Sangyer had a little experience in this regard. He had been with two other boys before. Known the affections of their lowborn lust in looking for coin or a patron to uplift them to the high peak. Falsehoods, he named them; there was no rank or title in the act of love, or so he believed. Love in its most physical form was animalistic; between equals. He had let them spend their hopes as they spent themselves when they called him ‘My Lord’ throughout it all. 

But with Philipos it was different. Though he could not yet bring himself to call Sangyer by his name, Philipos would not name him ‘My Lord’, nor would he bend in any doted service of Sangyer. And that made Sangyer want to bend to him. There stirred in Sangyer something more than the growing of his trousers when he was around Philipos. 

The two parted again for air. Sangyer wore his smile like his hidden pride: secret and for Philipos only. Sangyer had learned in the Highhall that secrets remain so by keeping the circle of knowledge small; the fewer who knew, the stronger the secret. And Philipos was his secret. He would not share him with anyone, as to do so would endanger him, and he could not bear the thought of that. 

Sangyer was breathing hard from the kiss; they both were. He felt the lowborn’s hands all over him. On his waist, his own abs, hard from the work he put them through each day. Sangyer might have done nothing as a highborn, might have feasted and read old books and gossiped in the Highhall. But, if the lowborn worked and looked the better for it, then so would he. Each firm undulation of his body was a testament to a weight lifted, a run up the mountain’s inner staircase, a life venerating the labors the low lived daily. 

“Do you want me to do it again?” Philipos asked, his eyes shifting lower to where they both were bulging. 

“I want to do it this time,” Sangyer replied, his hand pushing a little in the dim bathhouse light at Philipos’ chest. The stronger, younger man let himself be pushed even further into darkness as Sangyer descended on him. 

Sangyer had learned from watching Philipos the proper way to touch and hold another man, the right way to move the lips, the tongue, the whole head. It had been an assumption of their class that Philipos would do it for Sangyer; it was something else that Sangyer wanted to do it back.

Sangyer moved on Philipos with transcendent passion. The world was changing — his world most of all — he wanted to leave behind boyish trappings. Honestly, he couldn’t wait the few short months for his boyhood to be over. Sangyer quickened his pace. 

“I’m going to—” the younger boy gasped, his breathing racing. 

“I know,” Sangyer replied between his movements. 

“But it doesn’t taste—”

“I don’t care!” the highborn replied, interrupting again. 

Sangyer let his lowborn lover summit; felt his body grow rigid with the effort of holding on to all of it, then limp with its exalted release. He had wanted to do something meaningful for Philipos, to show his affection — his near-devotion — for his lover. But more than that. He had wanted to do it for himself. To feel in that moment that he was the only person in the other boy’s world that mattered; to feel the way Philipos made him feel. 

“What about you?” Philipos asked when the breath had returned to his lungs. 

“Just hold me and lie with me and stroke my hair a while,” Sangyer returned, and led Philipos away to a small pool in one corner of the bathhouse. 

*

The waters in the bathhouse were heated by the forge star, so they never truly cooled. Sangyer had asked a tendent once why they did not boil completely away and the young man had told him of the many tunnels and ducts running beneath the place that might be sealed off or redirected to control the temperature. Sangyer had on many occasions imagined himself a tendent of those tunnels, so close to the bathers that he could see or hear their every word or deed without himself being seen. He reasoned many boys his age had the same thought, and desired with lecheros eyes to peer into the prep rooms where the bathers changed before immersing themselves in the warm waters. He immersed himself in the warmth of Philipos’ embrace as they lay, waist deep, in one of the side pools. 

“No one has ever done that for me before,” Philipos sighed happily, breaking the comfortable silence between them. 

Sangyer sat up a little.

“What?” he asked. “Never?”

The lowborn shook his head. 

So Sangyer had been his first. That made him happy. But it was more than just the childish completion of being unrivaled, Sangyer had been able to give something to Philipos, an experience that he had never had before. And firsts were powerful verses in the forbidden books of the God of Delight. 

“I wanted to do it,” Sangyer replied, nuzzling his head into the shoulder of his taller lover. 

“I would do it back, you know?” Philipos declared, letting his finger trace the shape of Sangyer’s shoulder. 

“I know,” Sangyer replied. “And I want you to. But not now. It’s not something that should be traded like for like. It’s an act of love. A momentary acceptance that there is no rank or class or favor.”

Philipos remained silent, but squeezed the shoulder of his older lover. Sangyer often wondered what went on behind those dark eyes. What thoughts might take root and grow and what fruit they might bear. He wanted to taste that fruit, he thought. And hoped it tasted better than—

“What a tender moment!”

The words cut out of the darkness like forged steel. Sangyer felt his whole body grow cold, even as Philipos’ body grew taut in his arms. Someone had found them. Someone had seen them, and in the seeing of their love, the circle of secrecy around it had grown. 

“Come out into the light,” the voice commanded, softly. “Let me get a good look at you both.”

The two lovers remained where they were. 

“Very well,” the voice continued. “I’ll come into the darkness with you.”

A figure drew closer. It was a man of perhaps 20 years, perhaps a little older. His hair was slick with wet and unkempt; his face bejeweled with sweat; he wore the colors of a bathhouse tendent. 

“The baths are closing soon,” the tendent went on, coolly. “We have to drain away the filth and grime.” He let the words settle like bone ash on water. 

“You should go,” Sangyer whispered to Philipos. “Be far from here.”

“A highborn?” the tendent mused, tilting his head to listen to Sangyer’s accent. “How fortunate…”

Sangyer could hear the greed injected into those words; knew plainly the insinuation 

“You cannot tell anyone,” Philipos directed at the tendent, before Sangyer had the time to stop him. 

“And an ember, unless I am mistaken,” the tendent closed. “How the mouths will flap in the Highhall, how the tongues will wag.”

Sangyer rose to his feet. 

“Name your price, tendent,” he commanded, though his voice felt small. 

“I know who you are, my Lord,” the tendent informed Sangyer. There had been the briefest hint before of something on his face, before the smile that now twisted into every crooked corner of it. 

“Then you know I can pay,” Sangyer replied. He was thinking on his feet. Adding a third into their circle of secrecy — even a confederate well-paid for his silence — was dangerous. “Name your price,” he repeated. 

“I name you deviant,” the tendent declaimed, then pointed at Philipos and added, “and you will be pitched from the highest peak for such a seduction!”

Philipos made a move towards the tendent, but Sangyer held him back with his arm. 

The tendent, who had seemed to flinch when the taller man came at him, now leaned forwards again. 

“Ten thousand crescents,” he demanded, extending his upturned palm in expectation of the money. 

“Done,” Sangyer replied. This fool loved money and money only, the highborn knew. And greed was such a predictable master. 

“To be paid tonight,” the tendent went on, “and every moon. That is the price of my silence.”

For the safety of Philipos, Sangyer would pay such a price. And go on paying such a price. But the tendent was not done yet. 

“That takes care of my silence for you, my Lord,” he went on. “Who could name the man I saw this ember lying with before he fled so discreetly into the night? But I did see this ember lying with a man. And could easily identify so tall and thick and dark an ember to Master Rastos.”

Greed, Sangyer thought, will never be sated. Greed knows only its own proliferance. But silence speaks in many tongues, Sangyer knew, and one the best of all. He let the tendent go on. 

“Another five thousand each moon for the hammer-rammer,” their blackmailer demanded. 

“I cannot pay,” Philipos replied. 

“There are many ways to pay,” the tendent grinned, and let his lusty eyes travel the length of the tall ember’s body. 

“No!” Sangyer commanded, more forcefully this time. He turned to Philipos, “I will not have you sully your name to defend mine!”

“Your name is worth more than mine,” Philipos returned with reluctant acceptance. 

Sangyer would have given him anything in that moment. Even his name, if it kept the younger lowborn safe. 

In the main baths, they had begun ringing the gong. The pull and wash of water signaled the bathers exiting the baths ahead of their draining this evening. No one wanted to remain submerged when the waters began to drain away. They would find such people at the bottom of the mountain pools, broken and in pieces, if they did. 

Sangyer turned to Philipos. 

“Go,” he ordered, softly. “I will pay this man what he is owed.”

“Sangyer, you mustn’t,” Philipos objected. 

The highborn smiled at the invocation of his name. Love chooses the strangest moments to express itself, the highborn thought. 

“Make yourself seen by many somewhere far from here,” Sangyer ordered his lover, tenderly. “I’ll come to the forge tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”

Philipos looked longingly into the eyes of his older lover. 

“May your fire ever burn,” Philipos replied in parting. 

“May your fire ever burn,” Sangyer repeated, and watched his lowborn lover move away. 

Sangyer watched his would-be blackmailer with cold regard. Outside, the great stoppers had been removed from the baths and the filthy water, dirty with the sins and stories of the mountain folk, began to rush deafeningly down Cresterfell’s inner slopes. It had been a long time since some careless tendent had been washed down with them. The story had worn away over time, like the heavy stones beneath the large, round drains. 

The noise of the cascade blotted out all other sounds. The level of the baths began to shrink. He’d bide his time, Sangyer. Let Philipos get far from here and be seen by many. Then he’d pay this man what he was owed; speak to him in the common language that greed and secrecy demanded. A final language. A silent code. Secrets are best kept, he thought to himself, when the circle is small. 

Sangyer watched the waters circle the drain through the bottom of the baths and knew that in a short while his circle would shrink with them.