Raptor (35 page)

But I did not swoon. I began to feel the familiar, but this time immeasurably enhanced, sensation of a gathering of indefinable forces within myself—not just in my sexual parts but throughout my entire body—and then the delicious rushing sensation, as of drunken giddiness. The inner sheath of my female cavity, through no volition of mine, began that same sort of engulfing, swallowing spasm with which Deidamia’s inner muscles had used to clasp at my own fas cinum. My thighs, widespread on either side of Gudinand’s hips, also went into a spasm that was new to me. Their sinews and muscles quivered, twitched, convulsed uncontrollably. And all those things kept on happening while my ecstasy culminated in the most eruptive, tempestuous, surpassingly blissful release I had ever yet enjoyed in any sexual act.

It must have been much the same for Gudinand, though I was too happily preoccupied with my own gratification even to feel the geyser of his ejaculation inside me. At any rate, his burst of release was certainly simultaneous with my own, for together we uttered such long, loud cries and moans and exclamations that we might have been heard by fishers in their tomi far out on the lake.

When he was spent, Gudinand collapsed upon me as if
he
indeed had swooned, but I did not feel his weight. I felt feather-light, disembodied, euphoric, and I would not have been surprised to hear myself purring like a comfortable cat. But then, suddenly, something
did
surprise me. Without any help from Gudinand—his organ having gone flaccid inside me until I could no longer be sure it was still there—I experienced again an internal gathering and a rushing and a burst of pleasurable release. It was softer, milder, nowhere near so epic as the previous one had been, but it did happen, and apparently of its own accord, and it was assuredly not unwelcome.

I wondered at that. And I wondered even more when, some few minutes later, it happened
again.
And, after another short while,
again.
Each time it was lesser in intensity, but never less than enjoyable. Finally, those inexplicable happenings diminished and ceased entirely, but they had taught me another new thing about my female self. I was blessed with the capacity for the additional enjoyment, after a really grand episode of sexual release, of what I can only describe as afterclaps—like the continuing, sporadic, gradually dwindling echoes one hears after a tumultuous crash of thunder. That wondrous capability of enjoying additional little blissfulnesses may have been peculiar to myself alone, or all women may be so fortunate; I have never inquired of another female. I do know, though, that it has never happened to me when I was being the male partner in sexual intercourse.

Something else I learned—not just about my own female self but about women in general—is that there is one thing no woman can feign or pretend.

A woman, for whatever reason—to flatter a lover, or to beguile one, or to deceive one—can pretend that she is experiencing all kinds of loverlike sensations. She can make her face falsely express any degree of rapture. She can will her nipples to stand enticingly upright—or the nipples can innocently do that of themselves, from their being chilled, or from their merely being stared at by a man. A woman can make the petals of her sexual organs part invitingly and become alluringly moist, by secretly manipulating them herself—or they, too, can do that innocently, depending on the time of the month and the phase of the moon. A woman can feign any degree of sexual arousal, from first girlish blush to final, thrashing, wailing culmination—and she can do it so convincingly as to delude her own long-married husband or the most widely experienced seducer.

But one thing she
cannot
simulate, strive though she might. That is the convulsive spasm of the thews of her inner thighs, the quivering, twitching, throbbing of them—as I have described having happened with my own. A woman has no least control over that particular manifestation; she can neither quell it when it occurs nor counterfeit it when it does not. It happens only when she is entwined and coupled with a partner who can send her
genuinely
into the throes of that final joyous burst of sexual release.

It was long after nightfall when Gudinand and I had finally exhausted all our physical capacities and our imaginative faculties, and drained ourselves of our various juices, and I had taught him just about all I had ever learned about sexual coupling. As we redonned our clothing in the dark—a task made more difficult by our both being rather weak and trembly—Gudinand told me, and fervently, and over and over again, what a splendid girl I was, and what an unbelievably enjoyable time it had been for him, and how slavishly grateful he was to me. I tried to convey, with equal gratitude bur with maidenly demureness, that he had given as good as he had got. I added that I hoped we
had
effected the cure of his falling sickness.

We were taking different roads back to the city, so we parted with a kiss, and I—probably he, too—wobbled off toward Constantia on legs that seemed to have turned to jelly. I went directly to a therma that was reserved for women only, and was admitted without demur. In the apodyterium, when I undressed, I again did not strip entirely, but kept the binding band around my hips. This caused no comment, for many of the other female bathers likewise retained one or another small undergarment. One woman might keep her pudendum covered, another her breasts, and I assumed that that was simply for token modesty. But others kept concealed innocuous parts of their bodies—just one foot or one shoulder or one thigh. I could only suppose that they were hiding a minor deformity or a birthmark, or perhaps the imprint of a lover’s nibble. Some of the attendant slaves were women themselves, and others were eunuchs, but all were evidently well trained in discretion. When I was anointed with oil in the unctuarium, and later scraped clean of it in the sudatorium, none of the attendants remarked on my having to be cleansed of several encrustations that the human body normally does not accumulate in the course of a day.

In the last room of the therma, as I splashed luxuriously about in the balineum’s warm waters, I eyed the other females who were doing the same. They were of all ages and sizes and degrees of comeliness or plainness, from children to budding maids to obese or scrawny old ladies. I wondered idly how many of them had come to the baths to recover from just such a session of amorous dalliance as I had enjoyed.

There was at least one in the pool who was attractive enough to make me suspect that she might have done just that, and she was drifting about as lazily and languorously as if she
had.
She was a matron perhaps old enough to have been my mother—or even Gudinand’s—but she was dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful and shapely, unmarked by time and clearly proud to show the fact. Even here in the company of none but other females, she was displaying her charms as if for the benefit of a whole legion of lovers, for she was one of the few among us swimming entirely nude.

No doubt I let my speculative gaze linger overlong on her. She returned my look, then swam sinuously over to me, and I expected her to scold me for having stared so rudely. But she did not; she merely spoke some trite pleasantries: how refreshing it was to see a new face hereabout… and was not the bath blissfully stimulating to all one’s senses?… and her own name was Robeya and what was mine? Then, as she talked, she reached out, took my hand and cupped it over one of her bare breasts, while her other hand caressed my own (much less ample) bosom. I gasped at her unexpected audacity, and I gasped again when she leaned close, to whisper in my ear a decidedly explicit invitation.

She added, “We need not even leave the water. We can go to that far and darker corner yonder to do it.”

Had I been Thorn, I might readily have accepted. But, being Juhiza, I merely smiled at her a sweetly satisfied smile and said, “Thank you, dear Robeya, but I have spent this entire evening being extremely well pleasured by an extremely
manly
lover.”

She let go of me as if she had scalded herself, and snarled a word—no doubt some Helvetic expletive that I had not yet learned—and thrashed angrily away across the pool. I simply went on smiling, and was still smiling as I dressed and left the therma, and I smiled all the way to my room at the deversorium, and I think I went on smiling the night long, as I slept the good sleep of the sexually well-satisfied female.

By the next day, I was revivified, no longer trembly of body, no longer awash in sentimental recollection of those emotional hours with Gudinand. Having now experienced
such
a transcendental release and assuaging of all my feminine desires, I believe the female half of me had—at least temporarily—subsided to a sort of slumbrous abdication, and my male half was again in control of me. I was able to dress as Thorn, and act as Thorn, and think as Thorn, and
be
Thorn, when I went again to the lakeside copse to meet Gudinand after his stint that day in the furrier’s pit. I was able to greet him and regard him, not with any feminine yearnings or stirrings, but with the same simple boy-to-boy comradeship I had earlier felt when we were first friends and playmates.

In truth, I was again so much Thorn, so much the male, that it rather annoyed me to hear Gudinand exult about the marvelous girl and the marvelous doings he had enjoyed the night before. (I mention this only to make plain how many and disparate were the feelings that I, as a mannamavi not yet grown, had to learn to deal with.) I really ought to have been flattered by Gudinand’s compliments and plaudits to my other self, Juhiza. But I suppose any normal boy—and at the moment I was
being
a normal boy—hearing another boy crow about an amorous adventure, and he being unable to counter with any braggart stories of his own, is bound to harbor some envy of the other boy’s superiority in that regard. Anyway, Gudinand went on declaiming at length:

“Liufs Guth, friend Thorn, but your sister is extraordinary! Extraordinary in her beauty, her kindness, her courage, her talents, her… er…”

Well, he was decently reticent about the details, but I knew every one of them. So, among all my numerous conflicting feelings was another, and this one not normal but irrational. I actually felt resentful of my friend Gudinand’s having had such pleasure with me, but
without
me, if that makes any sense at all. I said to myself: Stop this! You are verging on dementia!—and managed to interrupt Gudinand’s effusions by remarking:

“I know Juhiza to be a loving girl-child, and I am sure her company was pleasant to you. But the most important thing is this. Do you think her—her attentions have allayed that affliction of yours?”

He shrugged helplessly. “How can I know? Unless I never again suffer a seizure. That can be the only test.” He gave me a weak half-smile. “I could almost be grateful for having
had
the falling sickness, since it led me to such a gloriously memorable remedy. Indeed… and the liufs Guth knows I should not say such a thing. I could almost wish that the one cure might prove to have been less than totally efficacious…”

For an instant, the slumbering Juhiza woke inside me, and made me say, “Well, you know, for some ailments a medicus does prescribe a
course
of treatment…” But I sternly suppressed that lascivious impulse, and said, “My sister and I have already once disobeyed our guardian’s command. If we do it more often, Wyrd. is likely to hear of it from some gossip. Or even return here unexpectedly and find Juhiza absent from our lodgings.”

“Ja,” Gudinand said despondently. “I have no right to put you two in peril of his anger.”

“However,” I said, “your peril is greater than ours. If you do suffer another attack, do not conceal it from me. Tell me… and I will tell Juhiza… and…”

His face brightened and he gave me a full smile. “Let us hope that the one cure did serve. Right now, I feel healthier and happier than I have ever felt in my life. That should be a good augury, should it not? Let us put it out of mind. Let us be the Thorn and Gudinand that we were before any of this happened. What say you? Shall we enjoy what is left of today? Shall we race or wrestle or go out fishing on the lake or go back to town and make life livelier for the Jew shopkeepers?”

Let me fell only briefly of ensuing events. It was not more than a week later that Gudinand came to our meeting place looking haggard and wretched. That afternoon, he said, while laboring in the leathering pit, he had gone into another convulsion, so suddenly that he had barely had time to seize the brink of the pit and support himself from sinking and drowning. He was sorry to have to tell me, he said, but it appeared that the “sexual initiation” cure had been ineffective… or at least insufficient…

Thus, the next evening, it was Juhiza who met him in the lakeside copse. What then occurred was much the same as on the previous occasion, so I need not repeat myself; I will say only that it was an even longer and more rapturous coupling than the first had been.

Nor was that time the last. At intervals of perhaps a week thereafter, Gudinand would shamefacedly report to me that he had endured another seizure. I never actually witnessed any of those, but I never doubted him. I refused to believe that he would lie to take advantage of either his friend Thorn or his lover Juhiza. So, every time, I took him at his word, and every time arranged for another meeting between him and Juhiza.

During one of those encounters, besides expressing his earnest thanks and gratitude, as he always did, Gudinand abruptly added, “I love you, Juhiza. As you know, I am—clumsy at expressing my feelings to other people. But you must have suspected that I regard you as far more than a gracious benefactor. I love you. I adore you. If ever I
am
relieved of this cursed affliction, I should like us to—”

I laid a finger across his lips, and I smiled, but I shook my head. “You know that I would not be doing this, my dear, if I did not feel real affection for you. And I confess that I enjoy it as much as you do. But I have sworn never to be in thrall to real love. Even if I were to break my vow, it would be unfair to both of us, for I shall be leaving Constantia at summer’s end and—”