am denied the sacred; what can I know of the profane?
Tom sat in the water, watching Aremu. It would’ve been hard to say what was on his face; he couldn’t’ve said what he was feeling. He’d felt Aremu’s hand tense, the lines of the bones sharply-defined underneath his fingertips, the tendons taut. He’d felt it tremble; he’d felt it go rigid; he’d felt it relax, and he’d stroked it gently with his thumb.
“It was never that you –” The words came out before Tom was ready for them, before he’d got done chewing them and rearranging them in his head; he broke off when they toppled over the edge, when he realized that what was going to drop from his lips couldn’t do anything but hurt.
What might he’ve said? It had cut him to the bone in Vienda, that question, was I ever a man to you, and still he’d thought the same of Aremu, without realizing it. His lips twitched, bitter. He looked down into the water, scattered with bits of orange, clouded enough all he could see were vague shapes.
What happens to me, Aremu had said. Then: what I did to you. He remembered, once, a very long time ago, learning of it for the first time. He’d felt no revulsion, then. He tried to think how he felt about it now. It’d given him a scare, and he thought he’d been angry, for a time – quiet-angry; private-angry – that someone, that anyone, had seen into that space in his mind. But that anger had come from embarrassment and fear, and it hadn’t been for Aremu, not really.
To hear him say he shouldn’t’ve asked, now, to hear him decline to apologize, like he was expected to apologize in the first place – Tom felt a flare of irritation, and it must’ve twitched across his face; he couldn’t help it.
What I did to you, he thought. Do you get to decide what’s been done to me, he wanted to demand. Do you get to decide what’s profane to me?
He was aware of the hypocrisy, then; not even he could sustain that anger. He patted Aremu’s hand, then used the edge of the tub nearby to lever himself to a sitting position. In spite of all the steam, the air was chill against his bare shoulders. For a little while, he wasn’t sure what to say. He lay his hand on Aremu’s again and held there, through his silence, through his thinking.
Plots to contain backlash, Aremu had said. A chill went through Tom, body and soul. He wondered if the imbala remembered him, stepping gingerly around the broken plot in the refinery. I knew less than you, then, he wanted to say.
He looked back up at the imbala where he sat. “I did not take the question lightly,” he said softly. “It was precious to me. For you to listen to me. For us to share it.”
He stroked Aremu’s hand again, a light, rhythmic motion; he traced the same line over the back of his hand, over the bones, over the flickering tendons, over the scars – traced a line of damp over the dry skin.
What had he meant, forbidden? He knew it was forbidden, legally; just about everywhere you went, it was illegal for anybody but a galdor to own a grimoire, so it made sense. Once, it’d been forbidden for Tom to read without a writ, and he’d done it anyway, because he’d had to. In Anaxas, it was forbidden for the two of them to share a bed, and he didn’t think it’d’ve been smiled upon in Mugroba, either.
This was a different kind of forbidden. Forbidden to Aremu, or to him? Which was he apologizing for? For which of us, thought Tom, shouldn’t you have asked?
He turned over the words in his head; he’d never spoken them aloud to anyone, and they felt alien, they felt like another man’s words. They felt like a step into becoming somebody else; he didn’t feel that soft Deftung word in them, so much as Estuan galdor, Mugrobi arata, and all the things those words carried on their silk hems.
“What I have with the mona is mine. It’s – sacred to me.” He shifted a little more out of the water; the chill prickled his skin, and he shivered. “The plots, the monite, the incense, it’s all – it’s all sacred to me. And it’s not very tekaa, no. I know what I am, now.”
A flicker: a wistful smile, or a grimace.
He folded both his hands atop Aremu’s. “There’s not much I can hide from the mona,” he said. “If they were troubled by my love for you, I’d know. You can’t come to the mona with doubt in your heart. I knew you were there, and I reached out to you through them. It didn’t feel forbidden. To me.”