Pilgrimage

by Kim Fielding

  Goran gave him a long, serious look. “He seemed to know you.”

  “No, he seemed to know someone named Meliach. I’m not him.”

  After a pause, Goran nodded. “All right. But it’s only— You have secrets, don’t you?”

  “So do you,” Mike snapped.

  “Not secrets. Just… things I don’t like to talk about.”

  And then Mike felt guilty and miserable. “Sorry. Let’s head back, okay?”

  “I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t pry. I’m only your guide.”

  “Dammit, Gor, you’re a hell of a lot more than that, and you know it.” Fuck. “C’mon, big guy. Let’s go.” He stood and squeezed Goran’s shoulder.

  Goran slowly rose. Neither said another word as they walked back to their shed. They had sex that night, as they did almost every night, and it was as sweet and tender and hot as always. And Mike’s cold heart shattered.

  Chapter 11

  THE STREET leading to the Temple of Four Winds was transformed. Before it had been tidy and peaceful. Now it was a bustling, rowdy place. Every shop was open, and every shop owner loudly touted his or her wares. Finest icons in the south! Prayer scrolls custom-made! Top-quality parchment money here!

  Crowds of shoppers jostled one another, haggling over religious trinkets, munching on skewers of roasted meat from vending carts, catching up on gossip. Goran had already explained that few of these people were pilgrims. The vast majority were locals who were eager to catch up on a month’s worth of favors asked and thanks owed to the gods. The atmosphere reminded Mike of the county fair his family used to attend when he was a kid. No puke-inducing rides, but there was a good variety of street entertainers. The most popular were men and women in gaudy, exaggerated costumes who pretended to engage in various sinful acts and then suffer the wrath of one god or another. There were beggars as well. Goran tossed leekas to several of them, telling Mike it would bring good luck.

  A line stretched in front of the temple, with burly men and women in bright-red tunics trying to keep everyone orderly. “Bouncers?” Mike asked, pointing at two of them.

  “Priests.”

  “It’s like a really hip club that I’m not going to be cool enough to get into.”

  Goran gave him his patient look. “They’ll let us in. We just have to wait.”

  And they did. The line snaked all the way down the temple stairs and onto the street, but it did move. Slowly. “It’s like Disneyland,” Mike muttered, earning him a bewildered look. Some of the street performers concentrated their efforts near the line. They warbled tunes, performed gymnastic feats, and told jokes Mike couldn’t comprehend. A few of them just stood and preached. Mike didn’t understand them, but he got the impression there were a whole lot of gods. He wondered if keeping track of them was like keeping track of a baseball team. Did they have trading cards?

  At very long last, Mike and Goran made it to the front of the line. The bouncer-priest who stood there was even bigger than Goran, and he didn’t look nearly as rested as a guy ought to after a month of retreat. “Whom do you entreat today?” he boomed.

  “Um, Alina,” answered Mike. The people in line behind him murmured. Mike had the impression that Alina wasn’t the most popular god around here.

  The priest didn’t look especially approving either. But he nodded regally and clapped his hands. Another priest came running up—a cute young girl with frizzy brown curls. “Alina,” said the behemoth.

  The girl frowned but nodded. Then she turned to Mike. “This way, please.” She took off at a healthy clip.

  Mike didn’t get a chance to look carefully at the interior of the temple. He noticed it was big and mazelike, with voices, sobs, and chants echoing weirdly off the stone floors and walls. The place smelled odd too—a confusing mixture of incense, food, sweat, and perfume. Statues, scrolls, paintings, and altars lurked everywhere. No wonder those poor priests needed an annual vacation.

  Mike’s small party came to a door of dark wood and iron. It looked heavy and forbidding, like something from a dungeon. Their priest came to a halt. “Alina’s shrine,” she announced. Of course. The door had a weird hook thing instead of a knob; she wiggled it a bit and then pushed the door open. “I will wait here. Knock when you are ready to leave.”

  Were they going to be locked in? Great. Mike started to step inside but stopped. “Excuse me. Can you tell me what kind of offering I’m supposed to make?” He hadn’t thought to bring anything, and he was going to be pissed at himself if he had to go out to buy something, then stand in line again. He also hoped it wasn’t another call for blood.

  She scowled. “Tears.”

  “Tears. Like… crying?”

  “Yes.”

  Fuck.

  Mike entered with Goran close at his heels. The door closed behind them with a boom.

  It was a fucking scary shrine. There were no windows since it was at the center of the building. There was plenty of light, however—cast by dozens and dozens of enormous candles impaled on iron stands. Between the candleholders were bones. Human bones, stacked neatly, with skulls over here and femurs over there. Most had been painted dark red with what he really hoped was not blood. Smack-dab in the center of the room, a large glass bowl balanced atop a low pedestal decorated with scenes of death and mayhem. “This Alina chick is kinda goth,” Mike muttered. “If she lived in California, I bet she’d listen to Marilyn Manson and wear a shitload of black.”

  “Mike?” Goran looked seriously spooked.

  “Sorry. I should be more respectful, I guess.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t know how to give her tears, Gor.”

  “You cry.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But I don’t cry. The last time I did, I was twelve years old and I’d just busted my arm.”

  “But… you’ve had sad things happen to you.”

  Mike twitched a shoulder. “Sure. But I just… I deal. I’m not emotional. Never have been.” Coldhearted.

  Goran crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time with me. Do I strike you as a guy who loses his cool easily?”

  “No….”

  “Well.” Mike kicked out his foot irritably, almost knocking over a pile of rib bones. “So I’m screwed.”

  “I can cry.”

  Mike looked up at Goran. He had a clear mental image of his lover collapsed on his knees, hands covering his face, great sobs wracking his body. Crying over his lost mother, his murdered father, his destroyed home. And then there was the mysterious Pavo. Every time Goran spoke of him, his eyes filled with pain.

  “No,” Mike said. “I think they have to be my tears. It would be cheating if I used someone else’s. Damn. It’d be a lot easier just to cut myself again.”

  “You fear emotional pain more than physical.”

  “I don’t…. It’s not that I fear it, Goran. I don’t feel it. At least, not like other people do.”

  Goran’s arms remained crossed. “I don’t believe that. Things have made you sad.”

  “Yeah, sure, but—”

  “So think about one of those things.”

  Crap. Mike sat down and crossed his legs. The floor was marble, slick and cold. Goran sat opposite him, looking at him expectantly.

  “My father died,” Mike said. “Not… not like yours. I mean, I was grown already and nobody murdered him. He’d been feeling kind of sick for a while, but not sick enough to see a doctor over it. Just heartburn mostly, and he felt tired all the time, and he was losing weight. By the time he felt miserable enough to do something about it, things were too far along. Stomach cancer, but it had metastasized.”

  Goran was listening intently, although much of what Mike was saying must have been unintelligible to him. “Was he sick for a long time?”

  “Over a year. They tried surgery and chemo and radiation, but God, all that shit was so hard on him too. And none of it worked. He just got sicker.

  “Mom was working full-time and
spending all the rest of her time taking care of him, driving him to the doctor, sitting in the hospital with him. I was afraid she was going to get sick too. Marie and I helped out as much as we could, but we were both starting our careers. Mom and Dad wanted us to concentrate on that.”

  “They loved you,” Goran said.

  Mike smiled slightly. “Yeah.” He closed his eyes and pictured his father near the very end, lying gray and shrunken in a hospice bed. Dad had been so weak then, groggy from the heavy doses of pain meds. But he still liked to hear his children talk about what they’d been doing that day. Mike would give him summaries of the latest White Sox game. On days when there hadn’t been a game, Mike would make one up. Lee and Ordóñez played really well today, he’d say. Konerko kind of sucked, though.

  “Mike?” Goran’s hand was on Mike’s knee.

  “He died in the middle of the night. Mom was asleep by his side. It was quiet, no fuss. Dad was like that. By then everyone was thankful it was over, really.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “No. Don’t get me wrong—I loved Dad, and I was really sad to lose him. But I stayed strong for Mom and Marie, you know?”

  Even now, he wasn’t choked up about it. His father had died far too young, but people did. Dad had a good life until he got sick. He was a happy man, and when he left the world, he was all right with himself and everyone else.

  Mike sighed. “This isn’t working. That’s pretty much the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I can’t cry over it.”

  Goran scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “Maybe something more recent. You had to leave your home. I know that makes you sad.”

  “It does.” Mike thought about his orderly little apartment with the electronic gadgets, the well-stocked kitchen, the washer and dryer, the pillowtop mattress. He thought about his job. It could be annoying at times, but mostly he liked it. Liked it a lot. He got tremendous satisfaction out of the work he did, and he felt valued and appreciated for it. He thought about his friends. Jeff and Cleve and several other people he got together with regularly for card games or ball games or sometimes just to hang out. He thought about the bars he visited now and then, where he’d have a few drinks and find someone to fuck. And he thought about his family. His mom, who could be irritating as hell but who always supported him, no matter what. And Marie. She used to boss him around and torment him when they were kids, but by the time they grew up, they discovered they were friends.

  But… what if he’d never been zapped to this place? He was having adventures other people couldn’t even dream of, and at the side of the hottest guy he’d ever met. Mike missed home very much, but he couldn’t regret having been brought here.

  “Still no waterworks,” Mike said, opening his eyes. “I told you. I’m just not built like that. I’m like the Grinch—heart two sizes too small. I don’t let anything really touch me.”

  Goran scooted an inch or two closer so their knees touched. His skin looked golden in the candlelight, his hair like black silk. “Who told you that, Mike? Who made you believe that lie about yourself?”

  “Nobody. I just—” Mike stopped under Goran’s fierce glare. After a long moment, he muttered, “Benny.”

  “What?”

  “That’s his name: Benny. We met in college. We didn’t start dating then because I was too busy and he was seeing someone else, but we were in a study group together. And I lusted over him. He was really handsome. He was like every jock fantasy I ever had in high school, all grown up.” Well, mostly grown up. Benny had an appealing boyish quality well into his twenties.

  Mike wondered if their priest had grown bored and wandered away yet. Poor girl. Did she want to be a priest when she was growing up, or was it something she got stuck with? Did it pay well? Did she have to be celibate?

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. So Benny and I lost touch after we graduated. But about a year later, we ran into each other at the grocery store. We were both comparison pricing breakfast cereals.” He smiled at the memory. “So we met for coffee. Turned out he was single and so was I, and we started seeing each other.”

  “Seeing each other. Does that mean fucking?”

  That caused Mike to laugh. “Yep. But more than that. We dated. Went out to dinners and movies and clubs. Hung out at each other’s apartments. Spent most of our free time together. We even did the meet-the-parents thing.”

  “Did you love him, Mike?”

  After pausing for a moment, Mike nodded. “I did. We were serious about each other. We talked about the future.”

  “Did you plan to get married?”

  “Not exactly. We couldn’t at the time. It wasn’t allowed.”

  Goran’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

  “Because we were both guys.”

  “What difference does that make if you love each other?”

  “None as far as I’m concerned. But a lot of people seem to think it’s important.”

  “That’s stupid!”

  Mike couldn’t help a small grin at Goran’s outrage. He wondered whether all alternate universes favored marriage equality, or if he’d just been lucky to get dumped in one that did. “It is stupid. Things are changing now back home too, but it’s been a battle.”

  Goran nodded. “Good. If you could have married him, would you?”

  “I thought so. I sure as hell wasn’t seeing anyone else, and we talked sometimes about moving in together. Benny was kind of pushing for it, actually. But right about then, my dad got sick, and I was really busy with my new job and… it was too much all at once, I guess.” Benny hadn’t thought so. They’d argued about it, Benny pointing out how much time and money they were wasting with two apartments. But Mike had been gun-shy. Benny was the first man he’d ever fallen in love with, and Mike didn’t want to screw things up by making quick decisions. Yeah, that had worked out really well.

  “You don’t like to be pushed,” Goran said. “You like to be in control.”

  “I… yeah.” He had been called a control freak more than once—often by Benny.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Not for a while. We fought a lot, but in between we had makeup sex, and we had fun together. Maybe I should have known something was seriously wrong, but I didn’t want to deal with it. Whenever Benny tried to have a serious talk, I ducked the subject. I was chickenshit.”

  “You were frightened.”

  Mike remembered the nights he’d spent tossing and turning alone in his bed, worrying about his dad and worrying about whether he was doing okay at work. And yes, scared to death he was losing Benny.

  He cleared his throat. “It was my fault. Benny kept trying to talk to me…. When Dad died, Benny was great. He knew Dad didn’t like him much, but Ben never said a bad thing about him, and he seemed really sorry Dad was gone. It meant a lot to me. Plus Benny never complained about all the time I had to spend at the hospital before that. He said he understood why I was distracted. He eased up on the moving-in thing too.

  “But he started in again maybe six months after Dad died. He was really mad at me. Frustrated. But he told me he loved me anyway. God, he even suggested counseling. I got pissed off and told him we didn’t need it. Last thing I wanted to do was talk about feelings in front of a stranger.”

  Mike’s throat hurt—the smoke from the candles, maybe—and he found it difficult to talk. He wished he had some water, or better yet, ale. He wished Goran wasn’t sitting there with compassion and sadness all over his handsome face. He wished… shit.

  He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. “Benny got sort of distant. We still spent a lot of time together and talked all the time, but not about anything important. We’d discuss work, sports, things like that. He stopped pushing me to move in with him. I was relieved about that. Oh hell, no, I wasn’t. I was terrified. And it got even worse when he started having all these excuses about why we couldn’t get together. Working late. Family stuff. Car troubles.”

  “He was lying.”


  “He was fucking around. Quite a bit, as it turned out. But mostly with one particular guy, and then only with one particular guy. Someone he met at the goddamn gym.”

  Mike laughed at the absurdity of it, at the ridiculous cliché. Except the laugh came out wrong, all twisted and harsh, tearing at his lungs. His jaw felt tight and his eyes burned. And fuck if he wasn’t bawling like a baby.

  Goran moved closer and wrapped his arms tightly around Mike, who promptly sobbed even harder, getting his tears and snot all over Goran’s only tunic. “I l-l-loved him,” Mike cried against Goran’s chest. “I r-really did. But he said I was too c-cold, and he broke my heart. Broke. It.”

  Goran didn’t tell him he was stupid to cry over such a small thing. Didn’t say that Mike had asked for it by refusing to discuss things openly with Benny. Didn’t say it was no big deal. He simply held Mike tightly and smoothed his hair and back.

  “Don’t forget your tears,” Goran whispered after a while.

  Bleary-eyed, Mike pulled away. It took him a moment to figure out what Goran was talking about, and then he managed to laugh and sob at the same time—a weird sort of hiccup that hurt. He used Goran’s shoulders to push himself to his feet, then walked the few feet to the center of the room. He ran two fingers over his wet cheeks, wiped the moisture on the inside of the glass bowl, and snuffled loudly. “I hope that’s enough.”

  Goran came to his side and wound an arm around him. “Benny was wrong, Mike.”

  “No.” Mike shook his head slowly. “I am a cold bastard. Since Ben I haven’t really dated anyone. Haven’t spent more than a few nights with anyone.”

  “Except me.”

  Mike looked up at Goran and almost broke out into fresh sobs. Because he was in love with Goran—as deeply and completely as he had been with Benny. More so. And it wasn’t because Goran was so beautiful, although that wasn’t exactly a hardship. It was Goran’s kindness and loyalty that he loved, his cheerful willingness to do whatever was necessary without complaining. Mike loved how Goran let himself be bossed around and yet managed to care for them both so ably. Mike loved how Goran made him feel safe and smart and interesting.