642 - This Laurel Defense I Must Win

Mella has the power to cleanse the obvious to mortal eyes.  I shall cleanse deeper. Risae reached down and my loincloth crumbled, fell away and She seized my organs in a Divine hand.  

I froze as She weighed and judge my stones; grasped my upstanding penis in Her hand and my blood pulsed through my whole body suddenly centred entirely on my groin.  I was afraid that she would stretch them out and snip them off my body, like a lock of hair, to keep.  I was lightheaded with fear and my bloodflow away from my head.

“I... I... give myself.”  I stammered.  My own voice, my own prayer against fear.  I was sweating in terror and burning with shame that I wanted a Goddess, before all Arko. “I am yours and have been from the beginning.”   She did not answer me but ran Her thumb over the head of my penis, that was wet and I jerked to rigid attention, my whole body quivering. She brought the drop of moisture to Her lips.

“I cleanse what is offered to me.  Sometimes I destroy the host.”  I was spun to face Mikas.  “It is enough.  Ask My Husband for other sorts of cleansing.”

The tiles between the Goddess and the God were gold but a different shade of gold embossed them, with thousands of images of what fessas did and what fessas still do.  Mikas’s Ten were stances from some of the jobs said to be His favoured ones, some that were now unknown.  I placed my feet carefully but my fading erection slowed me down.  It was as if the drummers were matching my heartbeat.  I swear I could feel the smile on Mikas’s face.

It was the perfect joke.  That I should come to honour him, still pointing up at him with the erection His wife had made in me and suddenly I could see it.  There was no such thing as mortal propriety before the Gods who made us.  Any more than a grown man should be ashamed that his mother once cleaned baby shen off his bottom.  I started laughing, my face still wet from the tears I’d showed to Risae.  Naked, I danced Mikas’s Ten, laughing, and the last step, the last tile I stepped upon gave just a little under my weight.

All around me the white hot strands of glass began to flow, caging me in before the God, who gazed down at me as though I were a specimen of His. Mikas was surrounded by the symbols of His supplicants’, a pen in His hand, a white house-donkey peered out from behind His apron.  A pressman’s apron and a pressman’s glass and brass goggles were shown pushed up off the perfect and Divine forehead.  An ancient gitar leaned against His leg.

He is dressed as a professor before me, His foxy face is unsmiling as He stares at me over steepled fingers, like Ailadas in a cynical and ungenerous mood, the eyebrow He lifts is sardonic, dangerous.

I find I am sitting in the lower than normal chair of the scholar supplicant to the University Laurels. This defense... I swallowed hard and suddenly I was as frightened of the God as I had been of His wife.  This defense I had to win.

Outside I could faintly hear, as if the glass muffled noise, the drums and the water instruments and the choir.  I refused to think of the statue of a man apparently dying in agony, stuffed into the back of one of the deepest store-rooms of the Palace.  

My father told me it was some artist’s rendition of a pretender who made it through the ritual as far as Mikas... and was encased in glass as he tried to walk through the wall.  Ailadas said that the rumour, of course, was that it was actual remains. It had looked like real, scorched and mummified remains to me.

“Sing!”  Mikas commanded me and I rose so that I might do my best, singing the ancient hymn.  If I fail this defense, I will never walk out of this liquid glass cage alive.