Raptor (3 page)

“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.

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, about 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.)

Only when a community has been severely diminished by war or pestilence or famine or some other calamity will it sometimes let its ill-begotten infants live—cripples, weaklings, the feebleminded and other undesirables—or at least let them live for a while, to see if they can be nurtured up to some measure of usefulness. Should such a child’s own mother and father be too ashamed of it to rear it, the community elders might even pay for the maimed child to be “knee-seated” on some pair of childless and needy foster parents. However, at the time I was born, there was peace in the Burgund lands—that war-making hellion the Khan Attila having recently died and the rest of his predacious Huns having fled back eastward toward Sarmatia, whence they had come. And in any land enjoying comparative peace and prosperity, when an infant is born deformed or defective in any way—or often if it merely happens to be born a lowly female—that child is declared “the unborn born,” and is summarily slain or starved or left to die of exposure, for the obvious good of the race.

My mother would have realized very soon, if not at first sight of me, that she had given birth to something inferior even to a normal female, and something more monstrous even than a skohl-child. That she dared to defy every civilized people’s custom of destroying the unborn born is to the woman’s credit—or it is in my opinion, anyway, I having been the beneficiary of her defiance—that she did not immediately toss me onto the midden heap or leave me in the woods for the wolves to devour. She was maternally softhearted enough to let the brothers of St. Damian determine my destiny.

The abbot of that time—and the abbey’s infirmarian—of course unwrapped and examined the foundling, so they too soon knew what an anomalous creature I was; hence the meaningless and ambiguous name with which I was baptized. It may have been only out of curiosity that the abbot, like my mother, decided to let me live. Still, he decided also to have me brought up as a boy-child, and it must have been out of real compassion that he so decided, for he thereby accorded me (if I should survive to adulthood) the male status, privileges and rights-at-law that, in every Christian country, are unattainable by even the highest-born woman.

And so it was that I was accepted into the abbey, just as if I had been an ordinary boy oblate given by his parents to be raised in holy orders, and a village woman was recruited to be my wet nurse until I was of an age for weaning. It is difficult to believe, but apparently none of those three persons who knew the truth about me ever whispered it to anyone else, either inside or outside the abbey. And, when I was perhaps four years old, a plague of disease descended upon the Burgund Kingdom. Among the inhabitants of the Balsan Hrinkhen who perished of the plague were that abbot, that infirmarian and that woman who had nursed me, so I afterward had only the vaguest recollection of them.

Bishop Patiens of Lugdunum soon appointed a new abbot for St. Damian’s—Dom Clement, come from teaching at the seminary at Condatus—and Dom Clement naturally took me for the boy-child I seemed to be and believed myself to be. So did the other monks continue to regard me, and so did all the village people whom the pestilence had spared. Thus my equivocal nature went unnoticed or unsuspected by everybody in my small world, including myself, during another eight years or so, until the lecherous Brother Peter accidentally and gleefully discovered it.

Life in the monastery was not easy, but neither was it unbearably onerous, for St. Damian’s did not adhere to such strict rules of asceticism and abstinence as did the much older cenobitic communities in lands like Africa, Egypt and Palestine. Our more rigorous northern climate, and the amount of physical work we did, required us of St. Damian’s to be better nourished, and even to have our inwards warmed by wine in winter or cooled by ale and beer in summer. Since our abbey lands produced quite prodigious quantities of every sort of food and drink, neither our abbot nor our bishop saw any reason to inhibit our consumption of them. Also, we worked so hard that most of us cleansed ourselves of sweat and dirt oftener than once a week. Unfortunately, not all of us did. Those brothers who bathed but seldom—and the rest of the time went about smelling like goats—said sanctimoniously that they were heeding St. Jerome’s dictum: “A clean skin means a dirty soul.”