The Birds of the Temple Garden by Huinare

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The Incurious

Mairon has a conversation with the new acolyte, who has failed in a particular task.

In which we also meet a garden.

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 THE INCURIOUS

The obsidian flung fleeting, evasive glints of light back at Mairon as the blade shook, ever so slightly, in the acolyte’s hand. “I couldn’t,” the young man apologized.

“Couldn’t what?”

Thrown by the question, Aksnuzîr attempted to find delicate words for the grotesquely obvious, quickly reduced himself to stammering, and concluded with a sudden interest in the floor, “Kill the woman, your reverence.”

“Well, yes, that is apparent.” Mairon’s voice hung artfully suspended between amusement and annoyance. Aksnuzîr, gazing compulsively back upward, noted the same ambiguity in his face. “What aspect of that process prevented your carrying it out? That the heretic is female?”

“No.”

“Clapped helpless in chains?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you didn’t want to get blood on your new robes?”

“No, reverence. I…” The Adûna’s hand had begun to shake a bit more, tiring of holding up the sheepishly proffered knife. The high priest of Melkor had made no move to accept it, yet to withdraw the hand now would appear cowardly or impolite.

“Don’t tell me it’s pity.” Mairon tilted his head as though looking away into the shadows of the temple, but still watched sidelong out of one dark eye, oddly vulturine.

“No! No pity here for heretics and subverters,” Aksnuzîr replied, honestly enough, too enthusiastically. The decision to back out of the cell and leave its occupant unscathed, which had seemed merely humiliating and career-jeopardizing at the time, had acquired a distinct sense of peril now that he stood here.

“As you say. I have exhausted my guesses.”

“I...I ought to have, your reverence. It was a momentary lapse in resolve. I shall go back at once–” The Adûna made to bow out.

Mairon held a hand up, a quiet and small gesture worth multitudes. “You shall explain.”

Aksnuzîr took a slow breath to steady himself. The habitually cavalier attitude which had cost him friends and lovers here and there, but which had propelled his career effectively, seemed now as far from him as was the sun from this place of shadow and muttering torchlight. “The heretic, your reverence, did not fear–No, that’s not true, it wasn’t that she did not fear to die. But, she did not fear me, if that makes sense. She looked at me square in the eye, she said, ‘If you’re to be the last person I see, I would see you, I would know who you are.’”

Mairon’s attention snagged on the last bit, gaze seeming to focus on something beyond the clammy-handed acolyte. “Such curiosity at the very edge of ruin.”

Grateful for even a momentary respite from the high priest’s scrutiny, Aksnuzîr unthinkingly allowed himself to sag a bit in relief. Having offered the knife back hilt-first, he had suffered an increasingly acute awareness of the sheer blade angled toward his own innards.

The dark eyes snapped back toward him so abruptly that he recoiled, nearly stabbing himself in the process.

A vague smile, a flash of contempt. “What are you curious about, Aksnuzîr?” Mairon said quietly.

“I–Nothing, my lord.”

“I see that. So, you couldn’t dispense with the condemned because you could not bear to look upon her. Or to have her look upon you.”

“Yes.”

Mairon stepped closer with the fire sparking off his eyes in much the same way as it did off the obsidian blade. “Why do a thing if you cannot fully embrace its ramifications? What other way is there?”

Aksnuzîr was certain now that his career in the new religious order was quite finished. Yet it was surely ridiculous to imagine that anything else might be finished as well, that the novice who erred in hubris or naiveté would be dealt with so harshly. There had been nothing in the contract, that was to say, the vows, about such severe sanctions being incurred under any circumstances, had there? Surely he’d have recalled a thing like that. It would be illegal. Yet the light of that stare was enough to make the acolyte attempt finally, compulsively, to draw the knife back out of reach.

Serpent-quick, the high priest’s hand was around his wrist. No, not obsidian, but the seething gold clots of the earth’s blood when Minultârik coughed it up from its unfathomable pits. “You think I am going to stab you?”

“I’m very sorry, my lord, I made a mistake. Respectfully–please allow me to terminate my service. I didn’t know, I didn’t understand it would be like this. I thought it would be like–killing a fish, or–”

“You didn’t think.”

The Adûna sobbed, or laughed, understanding at least that this was the worst possible condemnation. In defiance or despair, he tried to repossess himself of his wrist, making a small tear where the knife’s point barely brushed the front of his robe.

Mairon twitched, briefly, as though tempted to drive the blade in, then his features slid into an impassive smirk. “None of that. You may be a craven braggart with a mind about as deep as a puddle in drought, but all is not lost. Everybody is good for something. You are distraught, and you are tired. Return to your quarters and rest.”

Almost before Aksnuzîr could grasp what had occurred, the knife was no longer in his possession, Mairon was walking away with it, and he himself was left unscathed. “Your reverence, please permit me to–to offer my apologies, and–”

The high priest of Melkor glanced back over his shoulder, serene. “No need. Rest easy. We’ll find something for you to do; watch over the gardens, perhaps…”

. . . . . . .**||** . . . . . . .

INTERLOGUE: The Garden

Aksnuzîr’s window overlooks the garden, or, more accurately, the low storage shed. In times before, the temple compound was a commune of sorts for star-worshipers who craved a simple life that would not crowd their devotion. The commune was disbanded some time ago as those faithful trickled out of Arminalêth, and no one recalls much about it other than the birds. It began with a shelter for wounded or foundling hawks and eagles in a corner of the garden–these having some important association with the consort of the star-worshipers’ goddess–and had come to encompass myriad sorts of birds who had free rein of the place.

The garden, with its vegetable plots and duck ponds farther field, has fallen into disuse save for the ornamental flower and rock gardens near the compound. The birdkeepers stayed on long after the rest of the star-worshipers left, since there is no harm in a sanctuary for injured birds which are seen less and less as the cities grow, and they prudently ceased to talk about the stars. Perhaps, in a generation or two, they ceased also to think about the stars and were content simply to have a place to live quietly with their winged charges as unrest grew outside their walls.

Mairon chose the place from among a list of derelict properties Pharazôn provided for the purpose of establishing a temple. The three remaining birdkeepers, a married couple with a niece, had begun to argue that the sanctuary was not derelict, but had soon perceived that departure was better than argument. They took favorite or exceptionally fragile birds off in their cart and receded into the unflinching green of the countryside. Others of their charges linger in the garden, thriving or dying, unwittingly singing their songs now to Melkor.

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Chapter End Notes

Adûnaic terms were mostly located via this helpful resource: http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/adunaic.htm.
Arminalêth. Armenelos
Minultârik. Meneltarma
Adûna. Númenorean [? Still a little vague on this]

The name of Aksnuzîr is my construction. Presumption is that aksan (Q. Axan, “law, rule”) drops its final vowel before uzîr (Q. -(e)ndil, “friend”) is affixed. [I thought it was appropriate, given that I view the dear fellow as a failed law student in the privacy of my thought.]