Raptor (12 page)

“So, when I come to die,” I said bitterly, “I shall leave no trace that I ever have lived, except my copies of other people’s words. And all during that bleak life, I must suppress every normal human appetite, even an entire half of my own God-given nature.”

The abbot frowned and said in a stern voice, “Anything that is possible to a Christian is obligatory to a Christian. It is possible for a Christian to be perfect; hence it is obligatory that he or she strain to
be
perfect. Morally, spiritually, intellectually, even physically. If he or she persists in imperfection—ja,
even in being a freak,
as you described yourself—then it must be a willful imperfection, therefore execrable, therefore punishable.”

I stared at him, aghast, and finally said, “You can believe in a virgin birth, Nonnus Clement. You can believe in a resurrection from the dead. You can believe that angels are neither male nor female. Yet you find
me
incredible and intolerable.”

“Slaváith, Thorn! You verge on blasphemy. How
dare
you compare yourself to one of God’s angels?” He struggled to put down his surge of wrath, and after a moment said more calmly, but tremulously, “Let us not part on that sour note, my child. We have been friends too long. I have given you the friendliest advice I know how to give, and now in friendship I give you this silver solidus. It will buy you food and shelter for a month or more of days. Be friendly to yourself, and go as far as possible from here—where you have been known—before you settle down to start your new life, whether that be the life I have suggested or any other you may choose. I pray that God will go with you and be with you always. Vade in pace. Huarbodáu mith gawaírthja. May you fare in peace.”

So I parted from Dom Clement, and both our hearts were heavy, and I never saw him again. But I did not immediately depart from the Ring of Balsam, as commanded, for I had some things to attend to before I went—first of all, to retrieve my juika-bloth from the cow byre at St. Pelagia’s. That same night, I stole back to the nunnery, as I had frequently done before. Well knowing my way, I did not need to strike a light even to climb the ladder to the loft. I was feeling my way across the hay toward the wicker cage when a feminine voice suddenly said, “Who is that?” and I think my hair stood on end.

But I recognized the voice, and my hair subsided to its proper place. “It is I—Thorn. Is that Sister Tilde?”

“Ja. Is it really you, Sister Thorn? I mean… Brother Thorn, is it now? Oh vái, good brother, please
do not rape me!”

“Hush, little sister. Keep your voice down. I have never raped anybody and I never will—least of all a dear friend. But what are you doing up here? And at this hour?”

“I came to make sure that your bird had food and water. Is it true then, Thorn, what we all have been told? That you have been a… a male person all this time? Why did you pass yourself off on us as a—?”

“Hush,” I said again. “It is a long story, and I do not yet fully comprehend it myself. But how did you know about my bird hidden here?”

“Sister Deidamia told me. While she still could talk. And bade me care for it. Have you come to take it away?”

“Ja. But it was kind of you and Deidamia to give thought to its welfare. Wait. What do you mean, Tilde? While she still could talk?”

Tilde gave a small whimper and said, “I think something is broken inside her now. Nonna Aetherea has been beating Deidamia most ferociously—and with the horrible flagrum—at intervals, all this day long, whenever Deidamia came to consciousness after the previous beating.”

“Atrocissimus sus!” I said through gritted teeth. “The old sow neglected her opportunity to beat me. So now she makes poor Deidamia suffer for us both.”

Tilde sniffled and said, “I doubt that any male person would concern himself with Deidamia any longer. She is not pretty now, or shapely, as she used to be. Nonna Aetherea flailed the flagrum most wildly and indiscriminately.”

I swore a dreadful curse: “May the devil take her napping!” Then I paused and considered. “Napping, that is it. The abbess sleeps very soundly, ne?”

“Akh, exceedingly so, when she has well tired herself with the violent exercise of wielding a whip.”

“Very well. I shall arrange that she has something to think about tomorrow besides Deidamia. Come, Tilde. I will leave my bird here, while I make my way to the abbess’s quarters. You will keep watch there for me.

“Gudisks Himins! You do talk now like a boy, and a foolhardy one. No well-disciplined sister would dream of intruding on—”

“As you have said, I am no longer a well-disciplined sister. But you need have no fear. If anyone approaches while I am visiting Nonna Aetherea, simply give a hiss of warning and scurry away to safety. Come, do it for Deidamia’s sake.”

“I could hardly do anything for
your
sake, you being male. But even for the sake of a sister, it is a heinous crime. What is that you intend to do? To harm the abbess somehow?”

“Ne, ne, only to teach the fiendish Halja-woman that she would do better to emulate another woman, one of long ago, one of tenderness and loving kindness.”

So Tilde came with me to the window aperture of Domina Aetherea’s quarters, whence we could hear her snoring as loudly as any peasant wife. I climbed in through the opening and, by now having been so long in deep darkness, could see well enough to sneak silently to her palletside. Except for the horrendous noise she was making, the abbess was sleeping the sound, serene sleep of a woman well satisfied and clean of conscience. Gingerly, I felt about her throat until I found the small but heavy crystal phial. It was capped with a stout brass ring threaded on a rawhide thong that hung loosely from her neck but was tied in a tight, hard knot.

Hearing no warning from Tilde and no sound of anyone else at large inside the building, I trusted that I had plenty of time. So I copiously wet the knot with my spittle and worked the wetness into it until the rawhide swelled of itself. When it did, my fingers were small and nimble enough to untie it. As I did that, I took note that the knot was quite an intricate one, evidently of the abbess’s own devising. I slid the phial off the thong and dropped it into the top half of my belted surcoat. Then I painstakingly re-created the knot as it had been before.

I slipped out the window and rejoined Tilde, but I waited until we were back at the byre before I told her what I had done. She almost shrieked, “You stole the holy relic?! The Virgin’s breast milk?!”

“Hush. No one else will ever know that. By morning the rawhide will have dried and shrunk tight again. When Domina Aetherea wakes and finds her most precious possession gone, but the knot apparently untampered with, she will have to conclude that the phial was removed by no human agency. I hope she will believe that Mary herself took back her own drop of milk. The abbess may infer that she has been chastised and bidden to mend her ways. If so, our Sister Deidamia may be spared further torment.”

“I hope so,” said Tilde. “What will you do with the relic?”

“I do not know. But I have few other possessions. It may serve me in some way.”

“I hope so,” Tilde said again, and she sounded sincere. So I quickly leaned forward and pecked a kiss on her snub little nose. She recoiled as violently as if she thought that a prelude to rape, but then she giggled delightedly, and we parted friends still.

I have earlier told that I left the Balsan Hrinkhen with two things that did not belong to me. Well, I had them now—the captured juika-bloth and the pilfered reliquary phial—but I did not yet depart from the valley. I had one more self-appointed task to accomplish. While it was still night, I stole into the cookhouse garden of St. Damian’s and plucked up a few winter turnips that would keep me from hungering and thirsting overmuch, and took them with me as I climbed a tree overlooking one edge of that garden. I climbed awkwardly, for I still had my bird in its cage; I could not take the chance of letting it go hunting before I wanted it to.

When Domina Aetherea had brought me back to St. Damian’s and told one of the monks to keep me in an outbuilding, I had inquired of him what job Brother Peter, the former kitchener, had now been assigned. He had told me. Peter was now (and probably permanently) the lowly spreader of dung—human, fowl and animal ordure—on whatever abbey fields and plots needed top-dressing. So I knew that sooner or later Peter would be bestowing that nourishment on this garden. I was prepared to wait, through many cold days and nights if necessary, until he did so.

As it turned out, I had to perch and shiver in my tree for only the remainder of that night, the next day and all the next night During that one, I descended again to replenish my supply of turnips, and even found a few earthworms for the juika-bloth; it clearly did not relish them, but it ate them. Then, on the following day, after I had heard the brothers indoors chanting the Matins service to greet the sunrise, and after a short interval for the monks’ breaking of their fast, the several outside doors of the abbey—two of them visible to me, the others not—began to disgorge the field-working brothers.

From one of the doors within my view came Peter. He went into a shed, emerged with a pitchfork and a hod heaped with ordure and carried them straight to the garden between the cookhouse and my tree. He set down the heavy hod, steaming in the sun, and with the pitchfork began laggardly to scatter the dung along the rows of vegetables.

Still I bided my time, until he was almost directly beneath me. Moving slowly and quietly, I reached my arm into the juika-bloth’s cage and nudged my wrist against the back of its legs. In reflex, the bird stepped backward onto my arm. I withdrew it, slipped off the juika-bloth’s hood and waited some more. By now, Brother Peter had got warm with exertion and had tossed back the cowl of his robe. But he necessarily worked bent over, so the bird and I could see only the back of his head. I waited until he stood up straight and stretched to unkink his spine. Now, with his head up, his grease-smeared, dead-white tonsure, fringed by gray-red hair, was a passable simulacrum of the slimy and glistening egg in a red-moss nest with which I had in recent weeks been training the eagle. I pointed and whispered to the juika-bloth, “Sláit.”

My arm jerked upward as the bird eagerly vaulted off it, and the limb on which I sat bounced. Peter must have heard the swish of branches and leaves, or the drumming of the juika-bloth’s wings as it reached for altitude, because he looked puzzledly around him. But he did not look up, so, though his head turned about, it still resembled an egg in a nest, and down toward that the eagle hurled itself from on high.

It plummeted, on rigid pinions, almost vertically downward and with incredible speed. But the raptor’s shadow, cast by the low morning sun, came racing even faster, because it had farther to travel. The small dark shadow dropped abruptly down a western cliff, rippled urgently over the intervening fields, at the last dashed furiously across the garden below me. The juika-bloth and its shadow and their target met and merged all in one fraction of an instant.

The eagle hit Peter’s head with a loud
thump
and clenched its talons in his fringe of hair—probably into his scalp as well, for Peter uttered an unearthly scream. But the scream did not last for long. The juika-bloth immediately drove its fearsome hooked beak into the monk’s skull, at the very center of his tonsure, and at that the white egg turned redder than the moss around it. Peter fell silent and fell prone between two rows of high-growing kale. The bird continued to raise and ram down its beak, again and again, seeming infuriated that this egg had such an osseous shell.

Two other monks, drawn by the brief scream, came around a corner of the monastery and peered out over the garden, but they could not have seen Peter stretched out among the leafy kale. I called quietly, “Juika-bloth,” and the eagle obediently flapped upward—its beak clamped on a strand of gray matter that stretched out of Peter’s broken head, then came loose and trailed behind as the bird, its head feathers all bloody, returned to settle on the limb beside me. “Akh,” said one of the monks, “that noise was only a rabbit or a vole struck by yonder eagle,” and they both disappeared again to their own labors.

I took the juika-bloth on my shoulder—it still avidly champing on its long, limp string of gray substance—and tucked the wicker cage under one arm, and clambered down the tree. I no longer needed the cage, but I wanted to leave no evidence, so I carried it a good way before I hid it in a copse dense with underbrush. I had earlier left in that same place my bundled other few belongings, and now retrieved them.

It was time for me to go. I was both Adam and Eve, banished from the Garden. As a presumed Goth by birth, I had long been an object of some suspicion on the part of the Catholic Christian Church, and now, as a mannamavi, I was an abomination to that Church. Now, also, besides all the other dubieties, criminalities and sinfulnesses inherent in my nature—a nature not of my own making—I had two nights ago deliberately become the thief of a sacred relic, and this day had deliberately become as much a raptor as the juika-bloth. Of those two sins, thievery and murder, I wondered: to which was I impelled by the Adam in me and to which by the Eve?

No matter. It was time for me to go, and go I would, to be a Goth—
and
an Arian, if the Arian Christians would accept a mannamavi more charitably than the Catholic Christians had done. So, when I trudged upward from the Ring of Balsam and gained the Iupa highlands, I turned left on the road there, toward the northeast, toward the land that civilized folk called the “barbaricum,” where the Ostrogoth tribes were said to live—or lurk like savages—deep in the fastnesses of their forbidding forests.