Raptor Read online

  This time, however, the person who slid a hand under the back of my smock, and caressed my buttocks, and remarked on the shapeliness of my figure, was not a beefy Burgund monk. Sister Deidamia was also a Burgund, true, but she was a pretty and winsome novice nun—only a few years older than myself—whom I had for some while been admiring from afar. I did not mind at all when, as she fondled me, Deidamia pretended accidentally to let her hand move farther, where a dainty finger slipped into the oblong opening Peter had used. And, very like him, she said in delight, “Oo-ooh, were you anxious for affection, little sister? You are noticeably warm and moist and palpitant in that place.”

  We were in the abbey’s byre, whither I had just brought the four cows in from their pasture for milking, and Sister Deidamia was carrying a milk pail. I did not inquire whether she had been sent this day to help me with the milking, because it seemed much more likely that she carried the pail simply to justify her visit and thus enable the accosting of me in private.

  She now came leisurely around in front of me and began tentatively to lift the front of my smock, saying, as if asking permission, “I have never seen another female entirely unclad.”

  I said, and my voice was husky, “Neither have I.”

  She said coyly, lifting my smock a trifle higher, “You show me first.”

  I have related how the attentions of Peter had sometimes caused a disconcerting physical change in myself. I may say now that the intimate touch of Sister Deidamia’s hand had already had the same engorging and erecting effect. I felt a little embarrassed, though I did not know why, to have her see that. However, before I could object, she had raised my smock all the way up.

  “Gudisks Himins!” she breathed, her eyes widening. The Old Language words mean “Great Heavens!” and I told myself that I had rightly been reluctant—now I had shocked the girl. And so I had, but for a reason I could not have known. “Oh vái! I always suspected that I was deficient as a woman. And now I know it.”

  “Eh?” said I.

  “I had hoped that we might… you and I… enjoy ourselves as I have seen Sister Agnes and Sister Thaïs do. At night, I mean. I have spied on them. They kiss their lips together, and run their hands all over one another, and rub their… well, that part of them… against one another, and they moan and laugh and sob as if it gives them great joy. I have long wondered how that pleasured them. But I never could see. They never undress entirely.”

  “Sister Thaïs is much comelier than I am,” I managed to say, through my constricted throat. “Why did you not approach her instead of me?” I was trying mightily to seem in possession of my faculties, but that was difficult. Deidamia was still holding my smock high and staring at me. The ambient air was cool on my bare body, but I felt mostly the pulsing warmth at the focus of her gaze.

  “Oh vái!” she exclaimed. “Be impudent to Sister Thaïs? Ne, I could not! She is older… and she has been granted the veil… and I am but a callow postulant. Anyway, seeing you, I can divine now what it must be that she and Sister Agnes do at night. If all other women have a thing like that…”

  “You do not?” I asked hoarsely.

  “Ni allis,” she said, with much sadness. “Small wonder that I have always felt inferior.”

  “Let me see,” I said.

  Now it was she who was reluctant, but I reminded her, “You said me first, big sister, and I showed you. Now you must, too.”

  So she let go of my smock and, with tremulous fingers, untied her belt rope to let her burlap robe fall open in front. If the physical enlargement of myself could have got any more pronounced, surely it did so then.

  “You perceive,” she said shyly, “I am at least normal enough here. Feel.” And she took my hand and guided it. “Warm and moist and widely opened, as yours is, Sister Thorn. I can even, when I insert a small gourd or a sausage, feel some small pleasure in there. But here I have only this little nub. It stands, much as yours does—you feel it?—and playing with that also gives me pleasure. But it is so insignificant, no bigger than the wart on Nonna Aetherea’s chin. Not at all like yours. It can barely be seen.” And she sniffled.

  “Well,” I said, to console her, “I do not have hair around mine. And I do not have those things.” I indicated her breasts, where there were also nubs standing pert and pink.

  “Akh,” she said dismissively. “That is only because you are still a child, Sister Thorn. I would wager that you have not even had your first menstruum yet. You will commence to sororiare before you are my age.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sororiare? The breasts, to do their first swelling. The menstruum you will recognize, when it comes. But already you have that”—she touched it and I gave a violent start—“which clearly I never will. As I suspected, I am not a complete woman.”

  “I would be glad,” I said, “to rub mine against you, if you think that would make you feel joy, as it does those other sisters.”

  “Would you, dear girl?” she said eagerly. “Perhaps I can take pleasure even if I cannot give it. Here. Here is some clean straw. Let us lie down. That is how Thaïs and Agnes do it.”

  So we lay down and stretched out and, after some awkward essaying of different positions, we at last brought our naked lower bodies into contact, and I began the rubbing of that part of myself against that part of her.

  “Oo-ooh,” she said, panting like Peter. “It—it is most pleasant.”

  “Ja,” I said faintly.

  “Let it… let it go in.”

  “Ja.”

  I did not have to do any manipulation. It found its own way. Deidamia made many incoherent noises, and her body bucked against mine, and her hands groped wildly all over the rest of me. Then there seemed to occur inside her, inside me, inside both of us, a sort of gathering and rushing and then a soft bursting. Deidamia and I gleefully cried aloud when it happened, and the enjoyable sensations subsided into a radiant and happy peacefulness that was almost equally enjoyable. Though my enlargement seemed to have had its urgent yearning satisfied, and it dwindled back to normal size, it did not slip out of Deidamia. The membranes of her grotto went on doing a kind of soft, repeated swallowing movement that held me gripped tight. The same soft convulsions were going on inside me, too, though my grotto had nothing to hold on to.

  Not until everything inside both of us had subsided to tranquillity did Deidamia speak, in a quavering voice. “Ooh… thags. Thags izvis, leitils svistar. It was wonderful beyond belief.”

  “Ne, ne… thags izvis, Svistar Deidamia,” I said. “It was wonderful for me, as well. I am so pleased that you thought of doing it with me.”

  “Liufs Guth!” she suddenly exclaimed, with a small laugh. “I am much wetter here than I was before.” She felt of herself, then of the same place on me. “You are not near so wet as I. What is this, leaking out of me?”

  I said, with some diffidence, “I believe, big sister, you are supposed to think of that fluid as the Eucharist bread, only liquefied. And I have been told that what we did, just now, is merely a more private way of making Holy Communion.”

  “Say you so? But how marvelous! Much nicer than stale bread and sour wine. No wonder the Sisters Thaïs and Agnes do it so often. They are exceedingly devout. And this lovely substance came out of you, little sister?” Her happy face abruptly got less bright. “There, you see? I cannot do that. I am deficient. Why, the pleasure must have been twice as much for you…”

  To prevent her starting again to pity herself for her deficiencies, I changed the subject. “If this way of making Communion gratifies you so, Sister Deidamia, why do you not simply take a man, niu? Men have even more of a—”

  “Akh, ne!” she interrupted. “I may have been ignorant of the female body until now. That was because there were no other girls in our family and my mother died when I was born and I had no female playmates. But brothers I did have, and them I have seen unclad. Ugh! Let me tell you, Sister Thorn, men are ugly. All hairy and bulgy and leathery, like the great wi
ld ox úrus. You are right in saying that they are—in that part—of substantial size. But it is a gross and gruesome thing. And under it they have dangling a hideous, puckered, heavy leather bag. Ugh!”

  “That is so,” I said. “I too have seen it on men, and wondered if I would grow one.”

  “That, never, thags Guth,” she assured me. “Some modest hair down there, ja, and some delectable breasts up here, ja, but not that horrible sack of stones.” She went on, “A eunuch, you know, does not have that sack either, any more than we girls do.”

  “I did not know,” I said. “What is a eunuch?”

  “That is a man who has had his stones cut off, usually in childhood.”

  “Liufs Guth!” I exclaimed. “Cut off? Whatever for?”

  “So that he can no longer function—in that respect—as a man. Some have it deliberately done to themselves, even after they are fully grown men. The great church teacher Origen, it is said, had himself emasculated so that when he taught women or nuns he would not be distracted by their femininity. Many slave men are made eunuchs by their masters, so that they can attend upon the women of the household with no danger to the chastity of those women.”

  “A woman would never lie down with a eunuch?”

  “Of course not. To what purpose? But I—even if I were surrounded with servants who were all real and stalwart men—I would never, never lie with one. Even if I could quell my nausea at the mere thought, I could not do so. Lying with you, little sister, I make Holy Communion. But to lie with a man would pollute my chastity, and that I have dedicated to God alone, so that I may be granted the veil when I reach the age of forty. Ne, I will never lie down with a man.”

  “Then I rejoice that I am a female,” I said. “Otherwise, I would never even have met you.”

  “Not to mention lain with me,” she said, smiling blissfully. “And this we must do often, Sister Thorn.”

  And we did, often and often, and we taught one another many and various ways to do our devotions, and of those occasions there is much more to tell—but that, also, I will save for later. Meanwhile, Deidamia and I were so besotted with one another that we got lamentably careless. One day shortly before the onset of winter, we were in such transports of ecstasy that we failed to notice the near approach of a certain meddlesome Sister Elissa. We did not notice until, presumably after having watched slack-jawed for a while, she departed and returned with the abbess, in time to find us still intertwined.

  “You see, Nonna?” said Sister Elissa’s gloating voice.

  “Liufs Guth!” shrieked Domina Aetherea. “Kalkinassus!” I had learned by now that that word means fornication, which is a mortal sin. I hastily redonned my smock, and I cowered in anguish. But Deidamia calmly wrapped her robe about her and said:

  “Kalkinassus it was not, Nonna Aetherea. Perhaps we were wrong to making Holy Communion during work hours, but—”

  “Holy Communion?!”

  “—but we committed no sin. There is not any hazard to chastity when one female lies with another. I am as virginal as I always was, and so is little Sister Thorn.”

  “Slaváith!” bellowed Domina Aetherea. “How dare you speak so? Virginal, is he?”

  “He?” echoed Deidamia, nonplussed.

  “This is the first time I have seen the impostor’s front,” the abbess said icily. “But you seem well acquainted with it, daughter. Can you deny that this is a he-thing?” And she indicated it—not by touching me with her hand; she picked up a stick and used that to raise the hem of my smock. All three women regarded my privities, with varying expressions on their faces, and only the liufs Guth knows what expression I must have been wearing.

  “A he he is,” said Sister Elissa, with a simper.

  Deidamia stammered, “But… but Thorn has no… er…”

  “He has enough to make him indubitably a he!” barked the abbess. “And to make of you, deluded daughter, a sordid fornicatrix.”

  “Oh vái, worse than that, Nonna Aetherea!” wailed poor Deidamia, in genuine despair. “I am become an anthropophagus! Beguiled by this impostor, I have devoured the flesh of human infants!”

  The other two women stared at her with shocked amazement. However, before Deidamia could elaborate, she swooned dead away on the ground. I knew what those words had meant, but, quaking though I was, I had sense enough not to volunteer any explanation. After a moment, Sister Elissa said:

  “If this—this person—is a he, Nonna Aetherea, how did he come to be here at St. Pelagia’s, niu?”

  “How indeed?” the abbess said grimly.

  So once again I and my bundled few belongings were dragged across the wide valley, back to the Abbey of St. Damian. There the abbess had a monk shut me in an outbuilding, that I should not hear what she said when she confronted the abbot. But the monk had other duties to attend to, and left me alone, so I slipped out, and crouched beneath the window aperture of the abbot’s quarters, and listened. They were conversing very loudly, and not in guarded Latin this time, but in the Old Language.

  “…dare you bring that to me,” the abbess was roaring, “and represent it as a girl-child?”

  “You took it to be a girl-child,” retorted the abbot, not quite so stridently. “You saw all of it that I had seen, and you are a woman. Can I be blamed because I take seriously my vow of celibacy, niu? Because I am one priest who never has fathered any nephews? Because I have seen females unclad only on their sickbed or deathbed?”

  “Well, now we both know what it is, Clement, and what must be done with it. Send a monk to fetch it here.”

  I scurried back to the outbuilding, to be fetched, and in my confusion and consternation only one thought was clear in my head. Over the past year or so, I had been variously described, but this was the first time I had been called “it.”

  Thus it was that I was banished from both abbeys, and commanded to depart from the valley of the Balsan Hrinkhen, and not to show my face in it ever again. I was being banished for my sins, said Dom Clement, when he engaged me in a private colloquy before I left, though he admitted that even he could not put an exact ecclesiastical label to those sins. I was allowed to keep my personal belongings, but the abbot cautioned me against taking with me anything of either abbey’s property—except that he then kindly slipped into my hand a coin, a whole silver solidus.

  He also told me, finally, what I was, and he said he was desolated to have to tell me. I was, he said, the kind of creature called in the Old Language a mannamavi, a “man-maiden”—what is called in Latin an androgynus and in Greek an arsenothélus. I was not a boy-child or a girl-child, but both, and therefore neither: I think, right then and there, I ceased to be any kind of child whatever, and grew up considerably.

  Contrary to the abbot’s admonition, I did take with me when I went away two things that were not strictly my own, and I will tell later what they were. However, I took with me nothing that was to prove of so much enduring value to me as the knowledge—of which I did not at that time realize the value—that in my entire life to come I would never be the victim of love for any other human being. Since I was not a male, I neither could nor would truly love any woman. Since I was not a female, I neither could nor would truly love any man. I would be forever free of the entangling ties, the enfeebling tendernesses, the degrading tyrannies of love.

  I was Thorn the Mannamavi, and no man or woman in all Creation would ever be anything more to me than prey.

  2

  I have said that I was “perhaps” twelve years old when Brother Peter first lifted my smock. I cannot be any more precise about my age, because I do not know when I was born, or even where. For one who would eventually journey so far, among so many different lands and peoples… for one who would take part in so many events that now are reckoned to have changed the course of civilization… for one who would someday stand at the right hand of the greatest man in our world… mine was a lowly and ignominious beginning.

  Of my beginning, all I know for certain is that, a
bout the 1,208th Year of the Founding of Rome, during the brief reign of the Emperor Avitus, sometime in the Year of Our Lord 455 or 456—which is to say, a year or two after the birth of that man who would be the greatest in our world—my infant self was found one morning on the muddy doorsill of the Abbey of St. Damian Martyr. I may have been days old, weeks old, months old, I do not know. There was no message left there with me, and no identification except that the peasant hemp cloth in which I was swaddled bore the chalked character þ.

  The runic alphabet of the Old Language is called the “futhark,” because those letters—F and U and so on—are the letters commencing it, as A, B and C are in the Roman alphabet. The futhark’s third letter is the þ, and it is called “thorn” because it represents the “th” sound. If the mark on my swaddling clothes meant anything at all, it might have been the initial letter of a name like Thrasamund or Theudebert, indicating that I could have been a Burgund child, a Frank, a Gepid, a Thuringian, a Suevian, a Vandal or any other of the nationalities of Germanic origin. However, of all the peoples speaking the Old Language, only the Ostrogoths and Visigoths are still employing the ancient runes in some of their writings. So the then abbot of St. Damian’s took the chalked initial as proof that I was of Gothic parentage. Only, instead of endowing me with any pure-Gothic baptismal name beginning with “th”—which would have required him to choose a masculine or a feminine name—he simply gave me the name of that runic character: Thorn.

  Now, it might be supposed that I should have harbored a lifelong resentment against my mother, whoever she was, for her having abandoned me to the mercy of strangers. But no, I do not disprize or condemn that woman. On the contrary, I have always been grateful to her, for otherwise I should not have lived at all.

  Had she, at my birth, made known my freakishness to her people, whoever they might have been, they would naturally have assumed that such an abnormal infant must have been conceived on a Sunday or some other holy day (sexual intercourse on such days being well known to have dire consequences); or that I was the product of my mother’s having mated with a skohl, one of the forest demons left over from the Old Religion; or that my mother had for some reason been the victim of an insandjis, a Sending. That is a malevolent curse cast by what is called in Gothic a haliuruns, meaning someone—usually an ancient hag—still faithful to the Old Religion, still capable of writing and Sending the dread runes of Halja, old-time goddess of the underworld. (It must have been from the name Halja that we northern Christians derived the world “hell,” for we preferred that word to the Latin word “Gehenna,” that having come from the language of the Jews, whom we despised even more than we despised pagans.)