Chapter Thirteen
Though it was hours after his… activities, Ethyr couldn’t bear to face Poyut.
He kept his eyes trained on the tile floor when he slipped out of the room and walked beside her through the corridors.
It felt as though the whole temple knew, like the eyes on him as he passed through the halls were sharper and more discerning than usual.
He made it all the way back to the palace and into the wash room before he noticed, as he undressed, that one of his earrings was gone.
It was from his favorite pair, his first pair.
He and Gionan searched the wash room, and sent attendants to search the palace and carriage, but it was nowhere to be found.
“It must be at the temple,” Gionan told him.
“Then send someone to find it,” Ethyr ordered, but Gionan shook his head.
“No one but priests, and you and the King’s Guard, are allowed to enter.”
He sighed. Gionan gestured emphatically, so he finished undressing and slipped into the hot water, resolving to fetch it himself.
He went immediately after the wash, not trusting that one of the gussied up priests wouldn’t find it while he slept and steal it. Poyut was likely already asleep after standing awake all night, and if she wasn’t, she deserved to be, so he convinced another guard to accompany him to the temple.
He offered his hand as Ethyr stepped out of the carriage, same as Poyut, but didn’t follow him like she did. Ethyr stopped after a few steps and turned around. “You aren’t coming?”
“I am not allowed, Your Divinity,” he said solemnly. “Though I trust you have nothing to fear from the priests. I will keep watch out here.”
You didn’t see the way they glared at me, Ethyr thought dubiously, but he didn’t say it. He entered by himself.
It was strange being in the temple alone.
It felt bigger and emptier without Poyut beside him, or Dessin or Klara leading him.
But he knew the way to the room well by then.
Usually he was walking the halls in the evening and early morning, when they were all but empty of life.
But now, at mid-morning, the rooms he passed were filled with young priests all kneeling dutifully at low tables, writing, or listening, or quietly playing instruments.
No one noticed him pass by. Without his little entourage, and all attention on their lessons, he must have blended in better.
The offering room had already been cleared of plates and the cushions reordered.
He should have known it would be efficiently cleaned up as soon as he’d left, and his heart strained in concern.
He searched around the table, desperately lifting up cushions and even running his hands over them in case it had gotten stuck in one. But it was nowhere.
He eyed the hallway as he left the room again, not leaving a single finger of floor unswept.
It must have been picked up. If he found whoever cleaned the rooms, maybe they had it.
He paused in the front hall. He’d never gone anywhere in the temple besides the offering room and his lesson room, and certainly not unattended.
But what was the harm? It seemed to him the temple was supposed to be more his home than the palace—that’s what it was for the other kings.
He slipped down a side corridor he’d never been down and wandered. The temple was enormous, and he’d only seen a small part of it. There were far more corridors than he had imagined, leading deeper into the belly of the building.
For all its austere appearances on the outside, it was brilliantly painted on the inside.
Most of the corridor walls were covered with murals, depicting the end of The Gods’ War—when Kiaro had tricked the god of darkness into killing the last wild god before killing himself—and the era of construction and prosperity that followed.
Showing exactly what it was that they all owed to the gods.
He found three different altar rooms, each dedicated to a different god, with their statue in the middle and various offerings on its pedestal, like beautiful golden stalks of wheat for Ithna. He assumed there were five more altar rooms elsewhere in the temple.
He also found what must have been the priests’ living quarters; the acolyte priests’ rooms with four beds to a room, with two chests that appeared to be shared between them, and minimal personal items. The graduated priests were more privileged: two beds to a room, each boasting two chests of their own, and the room itself was significantly larger and adorned with rugs, murals, instruments, jewelry, and other accessories.
There were even what looked like the cosmetics that Gionan painted onto Ethyr’s face.
He continued on. Down another corridor, around another corner, until he was at another section of the temple.
The first room he passed stopped Ethyr in his tracks, a cold shock jolting up his spine.
The room was a paradise of comfort, filled with rugs and cushions and sofas—and priests in different stages of undress and copulation.
Writhing groups of two, three—up to five people, some of them.
After all that time with the gods, such open and blatant sex shouldn’t have disturbed him, but he hadn’t expected it here. He hadn’t expected humans to show such disregard for propriety. They hadn’t shut the door even a notch—an invitation for any passersby to join in.
He hurried on, fighting the warmth rising up his neck.
He didn’t want to look into any more rooms but he couldn’t help himself, glancing up when he passed an open entrance.
There weren’t any more scenes of debauchery, only priests studying or practicing various other skills like music or calligraphy.
But there was no one in the halls. Mid-morning seemed to be a time of great preoccupation, here.
It felt stupidly obvious, now that it had been shoved in his face.
The book Klara had given him, the gods’ remarks that he was ‘untrained’.
Of course the priests would practice such things, that was what their whole lives were about—learning how to please the gods.
And despite Yorith forcing him to study conversation and poetry and instruments, the gods didn’t seem nearly as interested in any of those.
Bright, open air blinded him. His half-panicked strides stumbled to a halt and he raised his arm to block out the sun and squint at his surroundings. The sight dropped his arm again.
He stood on a courtyard that jutted out over the waterfall.
Its smooth stone was so hot under the sun that he could feel it even through his hard leather sandals.
The canals on either side of the patio sprouted crystal-clear water, rushing from underneath the temple to the end of the courtyard, where it slipped under the railing to cascade in a clear, ceaseless stream into the waterfall below.
The railing at the end was much like the one for his balcony, carved of beautifully decorated marble.
He remembered seeing this courtyard from the boat on the day of his arrival, but what he hadn’t seen from so far away were the troughs of flowers lining its sides. Hundreds of blossoms, their pristine white petals blending together into clouds above their rich brown beds.
Ethyr stepped closer, cupping a flower to separate its head from the others. The five soft petals around its center were exactly the same as the ones Ethyr ate to go into the god realm.
He stood, looking back at the empty entrance to the temple, then out at the city sprawling so far below.
He could even see the curated squares of farmland in the distance, and the rivers that cut through them, their winding forms snaking through multi-colored terrain that looked more like a tapestry scene from so far away than a real landscape.
One of the biggest rivers, the one that had taken him here from so far north, wound down from the left, joining the wider river made by the waterfall and cutting through the city, separating it into the two levels he had experienced with Poyut: the clean upper class section and the much more crowded market section, petering away eventually into farms.
It was breathtakingly beautiful. But it was also swelteringly hot, unsheltered from the sun. There was no one else in the courtyard, and no one in the shaded corridor that had led him here.
He plucked a flower from the dirt, popped its head from the stem, and threw the latter into the stream of water to be carried away. He cradled the head loosely in his palm as he went back into the temple.
He’d gotten a bit lost; the halls were like a maze and he found himself back in the same one three times before he figured out how to escape the bowels of the building and return to the front. From there it was easy to find the offering room.
There was a world outside that room in the god realm. He hadn’t thought too much about it since the realization, more focused on other… distractions… but with nothing to hold it back now, his curiosity was painfully acute.
He slipped into the room and closed the door, sat on the same bench he was well familiar with, and plucked the petals to eat.
He hadn’t slept all night, and it was well past the time he would usually have collapsed into bed. The exhaustion that had nagged at the back of his mind overcame him, and, familiar with that by now, he rested against the wall and let it wash over him.
He woke to the lavish room he knew. It was filled with cushions and seats and draping curtains, but not a god in sight.
It was strange to see all the adornment of splendor without the beautiful forms and faces of the gods to accompany it.
He stood, looking around the room, and a little opal bead caught his eye.
He’d almost forgotten that’s what he had come to the temple for in the first place. So it had been here.