Raptor (9 page)

“Akh, ja. But you must remember that most of the Germanic people are of only brute intellect. They simply cannot realize how two divine entities, the Christ and the Father, can be of one substance. It requires an exertion of faith, not reason. Of the heart, not the head. Ignorance is the mother of devotion. But the Arian creed, that the Son is merely
like
the Father—
that
the outlanders can understand in their brute heads, and not have to employ their brute hearts.”

“Yet you have called them Christians.”

Cosmas spread his hands. “Only because they undeniably do follow Christ’s admonitions—love your neighbor, and so on. But they do not properly worship Christ; they worship only God; I could as well call them Jews. No matter. Among their absurd beliefs is the belief that two or more forms of worship can be equally valid. So they stupidly allow the incursion of other religions—including ours, Thorn—and ours will inevitably triumph over theirs.”

It may seem odd—it seemed odd even to me at the time—that I alone of our entire Catholic Christian community should have dared to question, to challenge, even to begin to doubt the precepts, rules, strictures and beliefs by which we all lived. Looking back, though, I believe I can explain my dare-the-devil inquisitiveness and my incipient tendency to rebel against my upbringing. I believe, now, that it was the first emergence of the female aspect of my character. In my lifetime I was eventually and often to observe that most women, particularly those with a modicum of intelligence and a touch of education, are very much like what I was in my youth—vulnerable to uncertainty, liable to doubt, ready to suspect.

I might have gone on indefinitely poring over books and scrolls, and intensely questioning my instructors, and keeping a watchful eye on other persons, trying to resolve my doubts about what was supposed to be a God-given religion—what was supposed to be
my
religion—trying to reconcile, by perception and not merely assumption, the many inconsistencies I found in it. But it was at this time that the ruttish Brother Peter began using me in the manner of a female slave.

Though I had long prided myself on my acquisition of much knowledge, and even some measure of worldliness, I was totally unprepared for Peter’s molestation, and knew not what it really was. I did know—Peter himself made it clear—that what we did together was something to be kept quiet and hidden. So I surely must have realized, though I just as surely refused to allow the realization room in my conscious mind, that ours was grossly impermissible behavior. Still, for all my independence and even contrariness in other matters, I had for so long been imbued with respect for authority—meaning subservience to everyone older in years or superior in rank—that I never tried to repel Peter’s advances.

I think also, after the first assault, I was secretly so ashamed of what had been done to me that I could not disclose it to Dom Clement or anyone else, and have others feel the same revulsion and disgust at my pollution that I felt myself. Besides, Peter had accused me of being an impostor among the brothers—and what he had found between my legs evidently confirmed that accusation—so I had to heed his warning that, if anyone else learned of it, I should be expelled in disgrace from St. Damian’s.

When that sordid business was discovered, and I was expelled, I had first to undergo Dom Clement’s sad and compassionate but searching inquisition:

“This is extremely difficult for me, Thorn, my—daughter. Any imputation of sin to a female, or any female’s voluntary confession of sin, is customarily made to Domina Aetherea of St. Pelagia’s, or to one of her deaconesses. But I must ask, and you must tell me truthfully. Were you a virgin, Thorn, when this nastiness commenced?”

I must have been as red in the face as he was, but I tried to make a coherent reply. “Why… I… I hardly know. It is only just now, Nonnus Clement, that you have begun to call me a female. I am so… so astonished and bewildered to know that I
am
one… Well, Brother Peter also told me so, but I could not believe it… Since I never have thought of myself as a female, Nonnus Clement, how could I ever have wondered whether I was a virgin or not?”

Dom Clement looked away from me, and said to the empty air, “Let us make this easier on us both, Thorn. Do me the favor of telling me that you were
not
a virgin.”

“If that is what you wish, Nonnus. But I truly do not know if—”

“Please. Just say it.”

“Very well, Nonnus. I was not a virgin.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “And I shall accept your word. You see, if you
had
been a virgin, and had allowed Brother Peter to take advantage of you, and this had come to my knowledge, I should have had to sentence you to a hundred lashes of punishment.”

I swallowed loudly, and nodded silently.

“Now, another question. Did you take pleasure in the sin you have been committing?”

“Again, Nonnus Clement, I… I hardly know what to reply. What pleasure
is
to be found in that sin? I cannot be sure whether I found any or not.”

The abbot coughed and went red once more. “I am not intimately acquainted with any of the venereal sins, but I have it on good report that you would recognize the pleasure if you did experience it. And the intensity of the pleasure taken in any sin is a reliable measure of that sin’s gravity. Also, the more irresistible one’s impulse to repeat and to reexperience that pleasure, the more certain one can be that it is at the devil’s instigation.”

For the first time in this colloquy, I spoke firmly. “Both the sin and the repetition were at the demand of Brother Peter.” I added, “All that I know of pleasure, Nonnus… well, pleasure is what I feel when… akh, when I bathe in the cascades… or when I see a juika-bloth take wing…”

The abbot looked even more troubled, and bent forward to peer narrowly at me, and asked, “Have you ever, perchance, seen omens in the flowing of those waters? Or in the flight of those birds?”

“Omens? No, I have never seen omens in anything, Nonnus Clement. It never occurred to me to seek for any.”

“It is well,” he said, obviously again relieved. “This affair is already complicated enough. Have the goodness now, Thorn, to take yourself out of sight of the brothers for the remainder of the day, and sleep tonight in the stable’s hayloft. After Vigil tomorrow, I will escort you to the chapel for absolution.”

“Ja, Nonnus. But may I ask…? You said I risked being punished with the lash. What of Brother Peter, niu?”

“Akh, ja, he will be punished, never fear. Not so severely as in the case of your having been a virgin. But he will be confined and made to do lengthy penance with the Computus.”

I went meekly off to the stable, as bidden, but I was harboring an unchristian resentment that Peter should be so lightly dealt with. The Computus is the treatise dealing with the calculations of the sun’s and moon’s movements that determine the variable date of Easter, hence every other Church date during nearly a third of the year. Granted, it is fiendishly difficult to study. But I did think that Peter’s merely being confined to his pallet space in the dorter, while he deliberated on the mystic complexities of the Computus, was not at all the punishment he deserved.

My gloom was hardly lightened by the realization that I could not take my juika-bloth with me to the nunnery. But I was at least able to tell my stable-hand friend, kindly Brother Polycarp, of the eagle’s existence in a coop of the pigeon loft. He promised to feed and water it until—Guth wiljis—I could somehow return and retrieve it.

The next morning, after my absolution, I went—again meekly—with Dom Clement, to be delivered to Domina Aetherea at St. Pelagia’s. I may seem to have been
exceedingly
meek about my disgrace and dismissal. But now, in thinking back on that time, I believe I can perceive the reason. I believe that I was evincing more of my female nature. I felt that somehow I
was
to blame for all that had happened—that perhaps I had unwittingly invited Peter’s loathsome attentions—and so had no ground for complaint about the consequences. That was a feeling possible only to a female. No male would so readily indict himself in his own mind.

Yet, at the same time, I
was
a male. And, like any normal male, I was disinclined to let the matter stand, without the urge to put the blame elsewhere, and to see the culprit properly punished. This contrast and conflict of masculine and feminine attitudes was hard for even myself to understand, so I hardly could expect anyone else to. That is why I did not protest my humiliating expulsion from St. Damian’s, and Peter’s being allowed to stay. That is why I determined to keep quiet, but to effect my own requital. That is what I did eventually do, and I will tell of that in its place. Let me now recount more than the little I have so far told of my stay in the nunnery of St. Pelagia Penitent.

I cannot deny that it had been the worst shock of my life, to learn that I was not a boy, but, as I then believed, a lowly girl-child. It was hardly less of a shock to be thrown out of my accustomed and more or less comfortable monastery surroundings, to be ejected from the hearty masculine companionship of monks, into what I expected would be the soft, silly and twittery company of unintelligent, uneducated, ingenuous widows and virgins. Still, I was not entirely dreading that prospect.

For one reason, I had been much confused or upset or repelled by various things I had been regaled with during the past year or so at St. Damian’s—the revelation that there were Arians all around me; the discovery that Arians were not necessarily subhuman savages, but only believers in a variant sort of Christianity; my realization that paganism overlapped disturbingly with
all
Christianity; and, not least, my suffering the abuse inflicted by Brother Peter. So I may even have felt some relief at being removed from that arena of unsettling disclosures and events.

But also I was young. I had the resilience and optimism of youth. Just as I had dared to explore the caves beyond the cascades, had caught and tamed a juika-bloth, had welcomed and dealt with the responsibility of being an abbot’s exceptor—just so, I now regarded my banishment to St. Pelagia’s as giving promise of being one more new adventure. For that matter, I thought the novelty of being a female might provide new experiences, too.

I could not, of course, expect those to be more than small adventures and experiences. I had long known that the women and girls of St. Pelagia’s were kept closely cloistered. Except for their Sunday and other holy-day crossings of the valley to attend mass and Communion in St. Damian’s chapel, they were not allowed ever to leave the nunnery grounds. The local peasants who supplied certain comestibles and necessities to St. Pelagia’s, even the monks who brought from St. Damian’s things like tools and beer and leather articles that the nuns did not make for themselves—none of those, male or female, could approach any closer than the gate of the convent’s main yard.

The discipline inside the nunnery was equally strict, and any infraction of its rules incurred drastic punishment. I soon learned that the mind of a convent inhabitant was no more free to roam than her body was. I forget what was the first question I raised during one of Domina Aetherea’s catechism classes—I know I asked something quite innocuous—but I do remember her slapping me nearly halfway across the room. At any given time, about one in three of us younger girls wore a puffed and fiery red cheek from the fearsome slap of the abbess’s meaty hand—and the older women unsympathetically told us that we should not mind those chastisements, because those brisk facial massages would do wonders for our complexion. Well, we did not mind too much, because when Domina Aetherea wielded her hand, it meant that she had nothing more hurtful within her reach. When she had opportunity, she could use any weapon from the ferula birch switch to the flagrum whip of stiff, rough oxhide.

The other aspects of convent life did not much compensate for the miseries of it. Well, we did each have an individual cell, even the novices, instead of having to sleep in a communal dorter. And I will also admit that the food was decent, and usually plentiful, as it should have been in our bountifully producing Balsan Hrinkhen, so we did not starve, except intellectually, and I was probably the only female who realized that. St. Pelagia’s had no scriptorium, and any codices or scrolls that the abbess owned she would not have shared with anyone. Not a single other nun knew how to read, even among the older women who had lived long in the outside world before immuring themselves here.

The only learning available to us was that imparted in lectures, sermons and admonitions, sometimes delivered by the abbess, but oftener by one or another of the elderly nuns who were our chief instructors.

On the importance of virginity: “The human race fell into bondage through the misdeed of the once virginal Eve, but it was redeemed through the virtue of the ever virginal Mary. Thus virginal disobedience was balanced in the opposite scale by virginal obedience. You see, my daughters, so meritorious is virginity that it is even capable of atoning for the sins of others.”

On the practical advantages of virginity: “Even a good marriage, said St. Ambrose, is abject slavery. And he asked
what,
then, must a bad one be, niu?”

On the solemnity of virginity: “Silence is the most ornamental robe a virgin can wear, and it is her stoutest armor as well. Even to speak what is good is a breach of virginal good conduct. And laughter is even more unseemly.”

Although it had been impressed on me that my education, from now on, would consist only of what was preached by our instructor nuns, I had some other and urgent learning to acquire that I could not get from that source. I had to learn how to be a girl.

I found no trouble in getting used to some of the basic exigencies of being female: the accepted way to relieve my bladder, for instance. Since our rere-dorter was not partitioned for privacy, like our dorter cells, learning that was necessary. So I did it as does every other female, lifting up my smock and sitting down. But to master some of the other female peculiarities required concentration, practice and the example or advice of my sometimes puzzled sister novices, none of whom knew—and I did not want to invite ridicule by confessing—that I had spent all my life until now as a boy.