Chapter 8 Storm on the Isle of the Moon

First one body, then another. Cybele, Chosen One of the Isle of the Moon, knew that both had been murder, despite having no evidence to prove this.

She had gone with her two most trusted Priests to show them a body washed up on the rocks of the northern bay. Instead of the body of Ioin which she had taken them to see, they had found the body of a small child dashed on the rocks. There was no sign of the Priest's bloated corpse, and they knew it must have been dragged back into the heaving sea, probably weighted more carefully this second time. The girl whose body had replaced that of the Priest was Arithea, a young Novice. It was she who had first discovered the man washed up by the wild sea from the north, and clearly the discovery had been fatal for her. Very few visited this most inhospitable bay, and none would visit it by chance in such a pelting northern squall. Who would have come here to know that their victim had been discovered?

Attis, the youngest of the three, scooped the girl's tiny broken body up in his arms. The rain lashed at their faces and drenched their robes.

'What should we do?' Cybele cried over the sound of the sea.

'Walk straight through the village and lay her body on the altar of the Temple to show all the evil which has been done,' Attis pronounced.

Cabirius disagreed. 'Surely there is some other way, that may flush out the murderer?'

'I can think of it not,' Cybele stated, 'and I doubt that one who can kill a child with such impunity is likely to quake in their sandals and confess when we make demand in the Temple.'

'They know not that we know of their crimes. Both were made to appear as accident, and now, we do not even have the body of the first. Perhaps we would best flush them out by playing along with their deception,' Cabirius suggested. Cybele was shocked. 'Leave her body tossed here on the rocks and creep back to the village as though this had never been?' But it was the best way, she knew despite her own horror.

Attis bent to place the small twisted body back on the rocks at their feet. 'She can no longer feel the rain, Cybele,' he said gently. Cybele fell to her knees among the rocks and cried, with huge heaving sobs which were swallowed by the storm around them. Cabirius fell down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. Even Attis followed suit.

She was vaguely aware that Attis had spoken her name for the first time, rather than addressing her by title. Perhaps his resentment for her was waning. Perhaps he knew now that they had to work together to fight the evil which had taken hold of their precious island. She struggled to her feet, tangled in her wet and heavy robe. 'Well then, leave her we shall. At least we should be able to return to the village unseen in this unholy weather.'

The three of them had indeed returned unseen. They had slipped into her own private hut by means of a door which opened directly in the stone wall which encircled the village. There, she had heaped several logs onto the fire in the centre of the hut and quickly the flames licked hungrily upward. After bolting both doors, she pulled her sodden robe over her head and threw it on a stool. Her body was covered with patterns, crescents and other designs in now-fading blue woad, a leftover from the last Full Moon's ceremonies where she had coupled with the Consort in the Great Marriage. Attis looked coyly away, but Cabirius readily slipped off his own cold wet cassock.

Cybele tossed him a warm dry robe, a shapeless grey one worn during daily toil when rank was of no significance. She slipped an identical one on herself. She then offered one to Attis. He continued to look away, and shook his head.

'Come, Attis, you are being foolish. We have both seen your nakedness before, and you ours. Do you want to catch a death of cold for the sake of some false modesty?' Attis sulkily took the gown from her and turned his back to them to change robe. She noticed that from behind, he looked no more than a child. Such an unlikely Consort, but then the Goddess had chosen him for reasons for her own, and Cybele could have proposed no better candidate. At least he was for the Goddess, which was more than she could say for most of the Priests. And this meant that as Ceres' Chosen One, she could trust him as loyal, even if he personally detested her.

Cybele ladled some water from a pot over the fire into a bowl of herbs and dried fruits. Even just the smell of this tea was comforting after the blustering cold of the bay. She shook her long pale hair and pulled a stool closer to the fire. Cabirius came up behind her and timidly slipped his hands around her waist, gauging to see if she would pull away from him. She did not, and put her own hands on his.

They had not spoken since she had caught him with Attis on the night of the Full Moon, and he had thought that she would never forgive him. If only he could draw her very thoughts through these cold wet hands. He loved her still, beyond all the stars in a Summer night's sky.

Attis saw their affection and sat in sullen silence at a table on the other side of the hut, turning his back to them. Cabirius knew that Attis loved him as more than a friend, but it was a simple fact that Attis must accept - he loved another, and that one was Cybele. He had once put this love in jeopardy by giving in to Attis's seduction, and he would not make the same error again. If Cybele forgave him enough to give him a second chance, he would not waste it so foolishly.

'Think you that our murderer is one, Attis, or more than one?' Cybele asked, trying to draw the sulking one into conversation.

'I know not, but I would guess that to drag a man's weighted body back into the sea would take more than one,' he scowled.

'Certainly more than one cripple, then,' Cybele said, referring to Attis's earlier hypothesis that Jenna the Healer may have killed Ioin.

Attis turned to face her, determined to ignore Cabirius's tender touch on her hands. 'But I still believe that she had some part in it. The cold murder of a child would suit her more than any other I know.'

Cybele was still a little disbelieving of Attis's assessment of the Healer. Cybele had known her as a warm and caring woman, who carried her handicap with a noble grace. Her withered arm seemed no barrier to her in her mixing of ointments and medicines, but most certainly prevented her from serving in the Temple of Ceres of which Cybele was leader. But she doubted that this sleight would cause a bitterness that would lead Jenna to murder.

'Well our other likely candidate has the same alibi for this as for the first killing - ourselves,' said Cabirius.

'Who do you mean?' she asked, turning her head toward him.

'Thomias' Attis answered for him. 'He was in the classroom beside us giving lessons this morning as surely as he was at service in the Temple when Ioin disappeared.'

'Most surely. Even such that he could not have given instruction to have another carry out the foul deed for him,' Cabirius added.

'There must then be something then which we have overlooked. I was sure that in Thomias we had identified he who has been leading the departure from the path of the Goddess' said Cybele.

'That may still be true. Perhaps these killings have nothing to do with the battle that is looming between the Priests and the Goddess they claim to serve,' Attis offered.

'Then it makes no sense. Neither the gentle Ioin nor such a young girl could have had personal enemies willing to consider murder. And the second death was surely related to the first. No, there is some other force at work.'

'A curse, like that which killed my mother's mother without a hand touching her?' Attis suggested.

'But why then would there be need to have disposed of the corpse in the sea? There would have been no mark, and it would simply have been thought that Ioin dropped dead through the strain of shame. Younger men than he have fallen dead for no reason, and no-one would have questioned it,' said Cabirius.

'What of the other Priests?' Cybele asked. 'Thomias conferred with others in the Temple at the Full Moon when the Consort had fled. One of them or more could have easily slipped away during the Trial to have revenge on their representative who had failed.'

'It is possible,' said Attis. 'I had been watching them to know what intrigue they would plan when their Consort failed. But then as the Trial began, I knew nothing, so I know not if the Priests followed Ioin.'

Cybele slyly smiled. 'No, I guess your mind was on other things. At that time, I recall Kelle was suckling you with some fervour.'

'I knew nothing. My eyes saw nothing, and my mind was blank,' Attis could not resist the opportunity to hurt Cybele as she now hurt him by holding Cabirius's favour.

'The first I remember was being suckled by another.' Meaning Cabirius, as she well knew. 'If anyone saw a Priest leave after Ioin, I did not.' Cybele was angered by Attis's cruel mention of his tryst with Cabirius, but she thought vaguely that it could be a sign that the two were not now lovers as she had supposed. She felt Cabirius squeeze her hand tightly in support.

'Attis, this matter of the deaths is far too important to fall under the shadow of our personal griefs. We three are all in pain, but it is little Arithea who lies broken in the storm,' she said.

'Then she is the lucky one, to no longer have feeling,' Attis said morbidly.

Cabirius protested. 'If you had wanted truly to die, Attis, you could have done so before I reached the sword that night. You know that you are needed by the Goddess Ceres, and you would not waste your own life when she is in such danger.'

'I know of no sword,' Attis sulked, but did not protest that he had never made such a threat. Perhaps truly he had been unaware of his actions that night, or perhaps he had cleared the memories with some potion to heal the pain.

'Are we to leave the deaths then as the accident they were intended to appear? To continue with our own petty jealousies until we tear Cabirius in two? Attis, you are man now and must act as one,' she demanded.

Attis turned to her angrily with black fire in his eyes. 'Is it you who made me man? Is it done so easily, by the thrust of my phallus into a woman's body?'

Cabirius could take the feud no longer. 'It is I who am cause of all this, and it is too much to bear! Am I to forswear you both to solve it? Would that make happiness for any of us?' He rushed to the door and fumbled with the lock. Neither made move to prevent his leaving, but sat in bitter silence as he took flight. Cybele and Attis glared at each other across the clamouring fire. They circled in spirit like spitting cats.

'You must release him, Attis. It is me he loves.'

'Think you he loves me not?' Attis replied. 'He has loved me longer by far, and just as deeply.'

'As a friend.'

'Did he look my friend only, on the night of the Full Moon?'

'That is cruel and unfair Attis. We were all in a trance that night, not just you.'

'And think you that was the only time? We have shared a bed for four years.'

'With a dozen others in your hut of the Hall of Priests.'

'But we were closer than any other.'

'Attis, I know not if you have coupled with Cabirius once, or nine times nine. I have not spoken with him since that night, and you have been with him that whole time. But I would not ask him, and I do not wish to know. What I would ask him is if he loves me best, for if it is so, I would gladly have him back.' Attis could hold the pretence no longer, and broke their gaze.

He stared low into the fire. 'He is not mine to give,' he admitted.

'Then you are not lovers after all?'

'Not in the way that I would wish. He fears losing my friendship, but he wants me not as his bed-fellow. In all, he has been reluctant and told me of his love for you. If he had never set eyes upon you, perhaps we could have been lovers. It had been looming close these past months as I reached manhood and sought his caress. But there was no undoing what had been done when he met you.'

'I was his sometime pupil for over a year before I took him to my bed,' Cybele protested.

'But you were not woman then. The Choosing changed you as surely as being Consort has changed me.'

'Are you so much changed? I knew you not before, but from Cabirius's writings you seem much the same.'

'I know you think of me still as a boy, Cybele,' he started. She warmed to his use of her name. 'But I have felt not a boy since my mother's death, even though I was still in the body of a child. I believe that she gave me her spirit when she died, along with this.' He picked up his sodden wet gown from the floor and turned it to the inside out. There was pinned a brooch, the silver sickle of a Priestess, identical to her own. 'And I believe that her own mother gave her her spirit when she died in desperate flight from the Isle.'

Cybele came around the fire to look more closely at the brooch, and kneeled at Attis's side. She took both of Attis's hands in her own, and looked up into his dark liquid eyes. Yes, she could well believe that his mother had given him those as well. The eyes of an Isle-born, even though he was not. And the eyes of a woman. 'You think me your enemy, Attis. I am your rival for Cabirius, it is true, but that battle is within him, not between us. We could not draw a stick and choose between ourselves whom he should love the more.' She raised her hands to his shoulders. 'I need you as ally. The Goddess and your mother and your mother's mother need you. Do not hate me.'

To her shock, Attis raised his own hands to her breasts. 'I do not hate you. It would be so much easier if I did.' Attis squeezed her gently through her gown. 'I know well why Cabirius loves you, for you are the Goddess on earth.' Cybele was confused and felt like she was floating loose from her body like one of the Old Ones. 'I want you myself, and it is an agony for me to watch you as much as to watch Cabirius,' he rasped, rubbing her hardening nipples through the cloth. She pulled away slightly, but did not resist when he pulled her back against him.

'I thought you liked not to touch female flesh?' she asked in a daze.

'Have I not touched you before, as Consort?' he hoarsely whispered.

'And got no pleasure from it, I thought.'

'It would give me more pleasure to touch you now as a woman, not a Goddess,' he whispered into her soft light hair. Her head was swimming and she could feel the hardness of his member pressing into her breasts as he kissed her forehead. What of Cabirius? she thought, but did not speak it. It was a question that neither could answer. Her body felt like it did not belong to her, like she was made of dough to be moulded by his soft young hands.

So unlike Cabirius, she thought vaguely as he explored her body with an eager gentleness. But then his friend was several years older than them both, with the rough chin of a man, and strong broad hands. She loved Cabirius, it was true, but in her mind she could not distinguish where Cabirius ended and Attis began, as though they were just two parts of the same person. Attis had pulled her to her feet and taken her across the room to lay her on her bed. Time moved slowly, like a trance. Without removing their gowns, he had entered her. Perhaps he did not want to see the marks of the ceremony on her body, lest she appear as the Goddess with whom he had last coupled rather than as the woman Cybele. His erection swelled large within her and she felt she would surely burst, or tear again like when he had entered her as a God on the Full Moon. But a maiden could only be broken once, and the burning sensation was now the flame of passion, not pain.

He thrust into her with a quiet urgency, then pulled out and sank down beside the bed to bury his face in her moistness. The gentleness was disappearing, replaced by an engulfing hunger that licked as sharply at their bodies as the flames of the fire in the middle of the room. She let out a deep moan as he bit hard into her swollen lips and slid his tongue within her. Such pleasure could not be borne, she thought, but just as she was about to beg him to stop, he rolled her body over and sunk his phallus into her hard from behind, like a stag rutting a deer in the wood.

He moaned himself, and plunged deep within her, his thighs slapping against her buttocks. She thought he would surely spill, but then he slowed slightly and kissed her tenderly on the back, as though collecting his passion to make it last all the more. He reached around her body and cupped her breasts in his hands, squeezing her nipples, murmuring her name. He withdrew and turned her over to lay once again on her back. Her caresses with Cabirius had been nothing to this, she thought, shocked at her own disloyalty. But then, she remembered that he too had had this boy's body in his own.

'May I take you in my mouth?' she asked with a deep intensity. He shook his head. Perhaps he too had been crowded by the image of Cabirius sucking on him, and wanted this experience to be their own, without the shadow of the other.

He pulled her legs up and held them apart high in the air, like the position taken on the altar during the Great Marriage when two Priestesses had supported her as he had torn into her virgin cave. He now held her ankles in each hand as his huge pulsating phallus stood poised at her entrance. It glistened with her own juices, and she was entranced by its power. It seemed to follow his will as easily as his hands, and she thought again to Cabirius, spilling quickly each time that she had touched and suckled him.

Attis seemed to sense each time her thoughts went to Cabirius, and pulled her back to the present with a sharp thrust. She had lost all time. He pulled her around on the bed, entering her in every way known to man and to beast. Each time, just as her passion was about to peak, he would slow, preventing her release. It was an exquisite agony. And each time she rubbed raw from his entering her so long and hard, he would fall down to her lap and soothe her burning with his tongue.

He sucked hard now on the flesh of her entrance, on that most tender of places which swelled to the touch. She groaned and threw her head back. Were it not for the squalling storm outside, the whole village could have heard her cries. He would not let her take him in her mouth, but she stroked his raw red phallus. He winced a little at her touch.

'Have you some oil?' he asked.

'Yes, by the shrine there,' she indicated. Attis slipped off his gown as he got up from the bed. The body of a boy still, perhaps, but a phallus any man or god would envy. He knelt at the small shrine beside the door, and said a silent prayer to the Goddess. He opened several small pots and tested the contents of each with a finger. He selected two, one of sweet almond oil, which he smeared on his throbbing erection, and the other of ceremonial woad. She could not see what he was doing, but then he stood and turned to face her. He had painted himself roughly in the designs of the Goddess.

Only Priestesses wore the blue marks of Ceres, but somehow they looked fitting on his androgenous young frame. In his hand was the Herm of her shrine, a small ceramic figure of the god Priapus, with his life-sized phallus as large as his body. The Herm was also smeared with the thick blue woad. She gasped. So they were to have a ceremony of their own, then.

'I wish you to be Consort,' Attis said in a deep and controlled voice.

'Would Cabirius not be a better candidate?' she asked roughly and in rising bitterness. He did not answer, and his erection stood firm and unflagging.

'What do you wish me to do, take you to the High Temple and rut you with the Herm?' she asked harshly.

'Here will do,' he coldly replied.

'I do not think I am able,' she stated with the same chilly tone.

'Then try. I am Chosen One as much as you, Cybele, and I have earned my own Initiation.' She noticed for the first time the mark on his chest. A crescent birthmark, smaller but similar to the one she bore on her thigh.

'Do you wish to usurp me, Attis?' she asked.

'No. I know not why the Goddess has Chosen two instead of one, but I think that we were meant to act together in her name. I have no wish to depose you.'

Cybele's mind was filled with a hundred images, and her own passion had died. Could the Goddess choose a man as her servant? And why would she send two together after three generations of none being Chosen? Attis approached her with his phallus still pointed to his belly and held the Herm to her with the jar of oil. She sat dumb. Then, without knowing why, she complied and took the Herm from him. She had for some reason expected that he would bend with his back to her. Perhaps it was merely the girlish gossip of Novices that boy-loving Priests did it in such a way. But Attis lay on his back on the bed with his legs wide apart, in the position of the Goddess. His erection lay on his stomach, as hard as the Herm's.

As the fury of the storm lashed the roof of the hut, Cybele thrust the oiled Herm hard into his body. He gasped, arched his back and closed his eyes as it entered. He slowly stroked his own phallus as she thrust the thing in and out of him. He started to recite the words of the Great Marriage, the Office of the Sword and Scabbard. Somehow it did not seem to be blasphemy.

'Hebe, Hera, Hecate. I am one but I am three. Virgin was and Mother be, but in the third then Death is me. Stain my altar, drink my blood, I bring you feast, I bring you flood, I bring you life, deny me not, guard well the child that I begot, for birth is earth on which you dwell, and without me all is Hel.'

As he chanted the sacred words, Cybele felt a stirring within her. She had recited this herself twice now, with Ioin's aborted Marriage and then with Attis as Consort. But to hear it from the lips of another, the words seemed more than just an ancient ritual, they sounded like the voice of the Goddess giving them direct instruction.

She pulled the Herm from him and tossed it aside on the bed. He reached up and pulled her forward onto his chest, kissing her lips with a raging passion. She felt his erection sticking uncomfortably into her belly. She kneeled up from him and pulled her robe off over her head. They were both painted in the same designs, the crescents of Ceres, and apart from her breasts and his phallus, their bodies were remarkably similar. She pushed down his legs and straddled him, guiding him into her. He reached up at her breasts and thrust upward into her.

He gave a deep moan, and she wondered if he were about to spill. She was not ready, as her own passion had only just been relit. He sensed her frustration, and spun her over onto her back, then rubbed her tender swelling with his hand as her entered her from above supporting himself with the other arm. She wondered how he, with no knowledge of women that she was aware, knew of such secret pleasures. Quickly, her passion was as ready as his to burst.

'Tell me when..,' he whispered, rubbing and thrusting ever harder.

'Almost.,' she cried, then 'Yes. Now! By the Goddess, now!' Her back arched as she sunk her nails into him and their gasping groans merged as he spilled into her. He then leaned forward and showered hot wet kisses over her face and throat. His phallus still throbbed angrily within her and she focussed on the intense heat slowly washing through her body in waves. Her muscles twitched unconsciously and grabbed at his softening member. She rolled him aside, and he slithered from her. They lay on their backs beside each other, staring at the roof of the hut where the smoke from the fire escaped into the sky through small vents.

'By Ceres, that was good,' she said finally, and he laughed gently.

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