Raptor (13 page)

I emerged from the Ring of Balsam into a world that was very nearly as uncertain about its identity and destiny as I was about my own. Of course, for a long time, the chroniclers had been writing and the minstrels singing dolefully of the disarray into which had fallen the once orderly, steadfast and mighty Roman Empire. Not that anyone had to read books or hear songs to be aware of that fact. Even a person as young and lowly as myself, cloistered in an abbey that was sequestered in a valley nook remote from most of the outside world’s doings, had been able to discern that the empire was getting ever more fragmented and feeble.

The man who occupied the imperial throne at Rome when I arrived as an infant on the doorsill of St. Damian’s, the Emperor Avitus, had ruled only briefly before being deposed and exiled. Since then, in just my own short lifetime, three other men had been emperors at Rome.

I ought to explain that we citizens of the Western Empire dutifully spoke of the emperor and the imperial court as being “at Rome,” rather in the conventional way that Christians speak of dead loved ones as being “in heaven.” Nobody knows anything for certain about the situation of his dead loved ones, but everybody knew where his emperor was, and that place was not in Rome. Though the Roman Senate still met there, and the Bishop of Rome still commanded much of Christendom from there, no Emperor of Rome now ruled the Western Empire from there. For fifty years past, the emperors had resided and maintained their courts—for the sake of safety, not to say cowardice—in the north Italia city of Ravenna, because it is surrounded by swamps and therefore easily defensible.

Anyway, the imperial throne “at Rome” was no shakier than all the rest of the Western Empire had been for some ages now. As I have mentioned, it was only the death of Attila, which occurred shortly before my own time, that made the Huns withdraw from Europe into the wilds of Sarmatia, whence they had erupted a full century before. But the Huns had left their traces on the empire because, in their advance, they had pushed various Germanic peoples off their longtime home grounds and onto new ones, where now they remained.

The Goths had been uprooted from their lands around the Black Sea, and now the Ostrogothic half of that nation was settled in the province of Moesia, the Visigoths in the provinces of Aquitania and Hispania. The next most eminent Germanic people, the Vandals, had migrated clear out of Europe and now ruled the entire northern coast of Libya. Others of Germanic origin, the Burgunds, held the land in which I was born, and the Franks most of Gallia north of there. While all those lands were still nominally Roman provinces, and ostensibly owed fealty to the empire, Rome regarded them with suspicion that their occupying “barbarians” might at any time turn belligerent.

The one force that should have held the
whole
empire intact, the Christian Church, was too often busy with its own internal rivalries and jealousies. The Christianity professed in the Western Empire was doctrinally at odds with that in the Eastern. Meanwhile, the patriarch bishops of the five principal Christian sees—Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem—were forever vying to be the
one
bishop acknowledged as sovereign in Christendom, to be the
one
fondly called Papa, and to have
his
see recognized as primate over every other. Also, despite Christianity’s having been the state religion of the empire for two centuries now, heretical sects and pagan cults abounded. The empire’s Germanic population either was still faithful to the Old Religion—of Wotan and his family of gods—or had embraced the “heretical” Arian Christianity. Many Romans still adhered to their old worship of Jupiter and
his
god family, while Rome’s military men swore by the “manly” Persian cult of Mithras.

So this was the confused and forlorn outside world into which I, myself confused and forlorn, was now setting foot. I was not aware that I was taking the first steps of my journey toward meeting the one person destined to restore peace and unity, law and order to the Roman Empire in Europe. How could I have known? The empire itself was not aware that such a person existed, for Theodoric—one day to be known worldwide as Theodoric the Great—was then, like Thorn the Mannamavi, still a child.

For that matter, he was probably much more childlike than I was at that age—in virtue and innocence, I mean—because I had already, during the past many months, learned the numerous pleasures and the occasional pangs and the sometimes grievous consequences of functioning as a very nearly mature sexual being, and not of just one sex, either.

I should remark here that, when I
did
come to maturity, I was—as that long-ago infirmarian Chrysogonus had predicted—spared at least some of the infelicities of both my sexes. I never did bear a child; I never even once suffered the menstraum that afflicts other females. And, as far as I know, I never sired any children. So I was happily exempted from the frets and impediments and responsibilities of home and family that shackle most men and women.

Akh, I will confess that once in a while, when my life was being unusually hectic, hazardous or just uncomfortable, the feminine part of me might wish for nestlike safety and security. But that happened only infrequently and briefly, and I never did settle down to what most people would regard as normality. Looking back, from both my masculine and feminine points of view, I am glad of that. Had I ever been content with commonplace standards and values and morality—or even been content to choose one sex, and forever comport myself as either a man or a woman—my life would have been far easier and more free of blemish, but it would also have been far less full of excitement and adventure. I often wonder about the normal, virtuous, domesticated folk: what have they ever
done
to look back on, to remember with either a reminiscent smile or a rueful frown, to boast of or lament or even be ashamed of having done?

My physical appearance stayed as ambiguous as my sexual nature, even when I was full-grown, and I have been called a handsome boy or man as often as I have been complimented on being a beautiful girl or woman. I have met many women taller than I was, and many men shorter. I kept my wavy hair at a medium length, suitable to either a man or a woman. My voice never broke and changed, as does that of most adolescent males, so I could pass for either a soft-spoken man or a provocatively husky-voiced woman. Whenever I traveled alone, I usually went as a man, but even then my appearance was conveniently ambiguous. Because I was gray-eyed and fair-haired, the darker people of southern Europe took me for a northerner. Because I was slim-figured and beardless, the northmen took me for a Roman.

No, I never sprouted a beard or chest hair—and only tufts under my arms—but neither did I grow much in the way of breasts. As female mammaries, they were almost indistinguishable from male pectorals. What soft fleshiness they did have, I could either flatten altogether beneath a binding cloth or enhance into the appearance of a real bosom by tying the cloth in the manner of a strophion so that it squeezed them upward. Their pale pink areolae and nipples were somewhat larger than those of a man—and certainly more erectile when excited—but no woman who thought me a man ever seemed to find them disagreeably unmanly. At any rate, when I was undressed to the skin, no other female after Deidamia ever mistook me for a sister female.

I did grow an escutcheon of pubic hair, a shade or two darker than that on my head. It was neither diffuse in outline like a man’s nor distinctly delta-shaped like a woman’s, but almost nobody except the occasional medicus is aware of that difference between the sexes. My navel was not precisely at my waistline, as a man’s is, and not much below it, as a woman’s is, but that is another difference that few people know about. My male organ was of sufficiently normal size that, with the hair around it—and if I took care about the postures I assumed when I was naked—no one noticed my lack of scrotum and testicles. But the organ could be made next to invisible, held tight up against my belly by a girdling band, when I was being a woman.

It may sound as if I early accepted my peculiar nature and easily adapted to it, but that is not so. As I shall tell, my adapting to it and to other people took a very long time and involved sundry encounters, both social and sexual, with both males and females. Some of those encounters were experimental, some became quite emotional and some turned out to be frankly embarrassing or downright painful. It also took several years for me to come to terms of acceptance with my own self. Often and often I wondered: should I rightly be wearing the soccus of comedy or the cothurnus of tragedy? During those years I was not only inclined to be uneasy in the presence of normal men and women, I could even feel so in the presence of normal lesser animals like horses and mares—and mules, of course. Akh, I could be made uncomfortable and unhappy with myself even when I happened to glimpse one particular
flower.

All flower blossoms, however beautiful to look at and aromatic to smell, are really nothing but the sexual organs of those plants. The one flower, though, that I personally disliked in those days was the lily. That was because the lily, with its fleshy spadix standing erect from among its vulvate spathe of petals, always seemed to me a mockery of what my own sexual organs look like.

I was not really able to begin to accept my dual nature until I had done a great deal more of reading pagan histories and listening to old pagan songs that I would not have found in a Christian abbey. I learned that I was not by any means the first of my kind—that not the Gothic word mannamavi or the Latin word androgynus or the Greek word arsenothelus had been coined
just in case
someone like myself should be born. As Pliny wrote, “Nature in sportive mood can produce almost anything,” and, if the pagan tales were true, nature had produced other freaks before me.

For example, those legends tell of an ancient, Tiresias by name, who during his life wavered back and forth from being a man to being a woman to being a man again. And Ovid wrote about the minor god Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite (which is to say, Mercury and Venus). That boy was loved by a wood nymph, but he spurned her advances, at which she appealed to the other gods, asking that he never be parted from her, nor she from him. The gods mischievously complied, on a day when Hermaphroditus and the nymph chanced to be bathing in the same pond, by merging him and her into one being of both sexes. The gods then let their enchantment remain on that pond, which is somewhere in Lycia, so that, to this day, any man who bathes in it comes out of the water half female, any woman comes out half male. I used to wonder what
I
might become, if I could find that pond, but I never got into that Lycian region of the Eastern Empire.

There was also the godling Agdistis, who, like me, was
born
a mannamavi. But the other gods cut off the male organ and left only the female, after which Agdistis was the goddess known as Cybele. Among the ancient mortals, as well as the gods, there were others besides Tiresias who changed sex during their lifetimes. And Rome’s own early Emperor Nero, though no androgynus either, took as much pleasure in lying with males as with females. When he publicly “took in marriage” one of his love-boys, a bystander at the wedding made the caustic remark that “the world would have been happy if Nero’s father had had such a wife.”

Not only did I learn of all those persons of equivocal or inconstant sex who has lived before me, I also came to believe that others of my mannamavi nature were still being born into humankind. There seemed, for instance, to be some of them extant among the degenerate remnants of the Scythian people. In the ancient world, the Scythians had been notorious for being fat, indolent, and their men and women alike so indifferent to sexual pleasure that that was the reason for the diminishment and decline of their race. Nevertheless, their scattered few descendants still had a word, enarios, meaning a “man-woman,” and surely that must refer to a mannamavi of my sort.

What I learned from my reading made me feel less alone and lonely in the world, or at least not unbearably unique. If there were others like myself, then I might someday meet one of them. I even thought once of betaking myself to those torrid Libyan lands south of Africa and Egypt, whence come the curious double animals—the tiger-horse and the camel-bird and such—because in those lands there might exist some patchwork humans, too, of my sort. But I never went, so I can recount nothing about those lands. And, anyway, I am getting far ahead of my chronicle.

That second and final time that I was expelled from St. Damian’s, I again departed, as I had when I was banished to St. Pelagia’s, with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, now wondering what adventures or misadventures I might encounter
outside
the Balsan Hrinkhen. I had previously been no farther beyond the valley than the nearest upland villages and farms, and then not often and never alone. I had gone only when one of the brothers took me in an abbey wagon to help him load some kind of provender or supplies that had to be fetched from there. Now, as I ascended from the Ring of Balsam onto the great undulating Iupa plateau, though I was warmly bundled in my fur-trimmed sheepskin and had my eagle riding on my shoulder for company, I felt almost naked against the fast-deepening winter and defenseless against whatever might befall me in the times to come. At the abbey, everything had been predictable. But I was on the road: the unwalled, wide-open, unprotected and endlessly reaching-out road, where there almost never is any predicting of what might occur from one day and one place to the next.

The first two or three villages I came to along that road, I had earlier visited, so I was recognized as “the monastery boy” and—though the villagers eyed my juika-bloth with much surprise and curiosity—they doubtless assumed that I had been sent afoot on some errand for St. Damian’s. But once I was past those places and in territory unfamiliar to me, I had good reason to be wary of one particular hazard. That was the very real possibility that anyone I met would assume or falsely claim that I was a runaway slave and would seize possession of me.