Raptor (32 page)

“As my priestly name,” he concluded his announcement, “I am taking Tiburnius, in reverence to that long-ago saint. I shall henceforth be your stern but adoring father, Tata Tiburnius. However, as tradition requires, I ask if there is any single person among this congregation who challenges my fitness for this priestly service.”

The church was crowded to the very doors, but no one of the congregation raised his voice. It was understandable, for they were all eminently practical Helvetii, all engaged in commerce, and the man standing before and above them could, with one word or even a glance of rebuke, have withered any parishioner’s business prospects forever.

To my surprise, though, one voice
was
raised. To my further surprise, it did not speak in a Helvetic accent, for it was Wyrd’s voice. I knew he could not have cared whether the Basilica of St. Beatus had for its priest Tigurinex or Satan himself. Perhaps he was drunk and merely making mischief. Anyway, he called loudly up to the altar:

“Dear father, dear
Tata
Tiburnius, how do you reconcile your Christian principles with the fact that this city owes much of its prosperity to the perpetual waging of war between various factions of the empire? Will you preach against that?”

“I will not!” Tiburnius snapped without hesitation, sending a blazing glare in Wyrd’s direction. “Christianity does not forbid the making of war, so long as it is a just war. Since every war has its end in peace, and since peace is a divine blessing, then
every
war can be called just.”

Tiburnius solicited no further challenges—and Wyrd did not volunteer any more—and went on to say:

“Before I pronounce the Dismissal of this service, my sons and daughters, I beg leave to read to you a lection from the Epistles of Paul.”

Tiburnius had cunningly culled from the saint’s letters to please his fellow tradesmen among the congregation… to intimidate the commoners, workers, laborers and any slaves attending this day… and, in case some resident or visiting noble was present, to flatter him fulsomely.

“St. Paul says it thus. Let every man abide in the same calling in which he was called. Whosoever are servants under the yoke, let them count their masters worthy of all honor, lest the name of the Lord and his doctrine be blasphemed. Let every soul be subject to higher powers, for those that are, are ordained by God. Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due; custom, to whom custom; fear, to whom fear; honor, to whom honor. So says the sainted Paul.”

By now, I was edging my way through the enraptured crowd, to be early out the door, and I was thinking that Constantia had acquired not only the priest it wanted but one that it fully deserved. He was coming to the end of his address:

“Let St. Augustine speak the only homily on that text. The saint wrote, ‘It is you, Mother Church, who makes wives subject to their husbands and sets husbands over their wives. You teach slaves to be loyal to their masters. You teach kings to rule for the benefit of their people, and you it is who warn the peoples to be subservient to their kings…’ “

In my haste, I collided at the doorway with a young man also evidently eager to escape. We backed apart, murmured apologies, motioned to one another to go first, stepped forward together, collided again, laughed, then carefully departed side by side. And that was how I came to meet Gudinand.

Although Gudinand was three or four years older than myself, we became friends, and remained so during all the rest of that summer. His only family, I discovered, was an invalid mother, and he worked to support her and himself. But whenever he had free time after work, and all day on Sundays, we were almost constantly together. We frequently entertained ourselves with boyishly mischievous recreations (though I would have thought, at his age, Gudinand would have considered such playfulness beneath his dignity)—snatching fruit from a peddler’s cart and running off without paying; tying a line of twine to a street post and hiding behind something on the other side of the street, then, when some pompous-looking man came along, raising and tightening the string to trip him and make him fall in a most comical fashion; things like that. We engaged in less roguish activities, too. We ran races against one another, and held tree-climbing contests and wrestling matches, and Gudinand now and again borrowed a tomus in which we went fishing on the lake.

While Wyrd was still in Constantia, selling our pelts—and getting a very good price for them, and giving me a sufficiency of money for my day-to-day spending (the rest of my share of our earnings he tucked away for safekeeping)—he met Gudinand once or twice and appeared to approve of my having found a new friend.

After I had first introduced Gudinand to Wyrd, the young man said to me, “He looks too old to be your father. Is he your grandfather?”

“No relation at all,” I said. And then, not wanting to diminish myself in Gudinand’s esteem by admitting that I was but an apprentice to a master, I lied and said, as if I were the coddled offspring of some noble family, “I am his ward. Wyrd is my guardian.”

Gudinand might well have wondered what I was being guarded
against,
and why any noble scion would have been made the ward of a rough-hewn old woodsman, but he did not inquire further.

When Wyrd had concluded all our business transactions in Constantia, since there would be no more fur-hunting for us to do until autumn, he spent the summer rambling on horseback around the margins of the lake, calling on other old-soldier comrades of his—at the fort of Arbor Felix, and in the hill city of Brigantium, and at the island garrison of Castrum Tiberii. I was not overeager to idle away the summer in drinking with him and his elderly fellows, and listening to their interminable reminiscences. I was satisfied to remain in Constantia and consort with Gudinand as often as I could.

I was free to gambol and sport and make mischief with Gudinand, and I enjoyed that immensely, never having had such a congenial friend before. But there were things about Gudinand that puzzled me. Here was a young man, eighteen or nineteen years old, tall, well built, handsome, intelligent and of almost unfailingly cheerful demeanor—yet
he
seemed never to have had
any
friend, male or female, until I came along. I knew he was an only child, and maybe I was a surrogate younger brother for him. But I could not make out whether he shunned every other person of his own age or whether they shunned him. All I knew was that I never once saw him in the company of anyone else, and that he and I were never joined in our games and frolics by any other boy or girl.

Furthermore, while I had cowardly misrepresented to him my status as a mere apprentice, Gudinand made no secret of what
he
was—even more lowly by any social measurement than I was myself, for he held the meanest and dirtiest employment in one of the local fur-dressing establishments. For five years, he had been an apprentice in that furrier’s yard where newly acquired pelts were “leathered”—that is, immersed in a pit full of human urine, to which are added various mineral salts and other substances, and then continuously agitated, pressed, squeezed, wrung out and agitated some more.

That was Gudinand’s job: standing day-long and neck-deep in a pit full of rancid urine and other smelly ingredients and even smellier raw pelts, trudging and trampling them with his feet, wringing one after another after another with his hands. Gudinand always, after his day’s work was done, either spent a long time in one of the city’s cheaper thermae or took several successive soap baths in the lake, before meeting me for our playing times together. And he strictly forbade me ever to visit him while he worked, but I had seen that revolting work done at other furriers’ establishments in Constantia. So I knew what the work entailed—Iésus, I thought, Gudinand was probably leathering some of the pelts I myself had procured!—and I also knew it to be such a vile employment that usually only the most worthless slaves were compelled to do it.

I could not understand why Gudinand should ever have accepted that dismal occupation, or why his superiors had never promoted him from the pit to some more estimable position, or why he had uncomplainingly done that filthy work for so many years, or why he seemed reconciled to doing it for perhaps the rest of his life. I say again: here was a fine-looking, personable, affable young man, never very talkative but not at all slow-witted—he had not had my advantages of schooling, but he
had
been taught by his late father to read and write the Gothic script.

Every merchant in Constantia should have been vying to hire him as a welcomer of customers, to do the first dealings with them, and to put them in an expansive mood, before the merchant himself would slither out to handle the hard haggling of whatever business was to be transacted. Gudinand would have made a superb welcomer. Why he had never applied for such a position, or why no merchant had ever sought him out for it, was beyond my comprehension. However, since Gudinand asked me few questions about myself, I forbore from pestering him for answers to my puzzlements about him and his reclusive way of life. He was my friend and I was his. What more do two good friends really need to know about one another?

There was, however, one additional aspect of him that not only bewildered me but actually troubled me. Now and again—and we might be engaged in some merrily active game—Gudinand would suddenly, stop still, look solemn or even worried, and ask me something like:

“Thorn, did you see that green bird that just flew past?”

“Ne, Gudinand. I saw no bird at all. And I never saw a green bird in all my life.”

Or he might remark on the hot wind, or the cold wind, that had sprung up—when I felt no wind whatever, and no nearby bush or tree had so much as rustled its leaves. It was not until after Gudinand had several times seen or felt something imperceptible to me that I noticed something else about him. On each of those occasions, he would draw his thumbs so tightly against his palms that he appeared to have hands with only four fingers apiece. And if he chanced to be barefooted, his toes would curl so tightly under his soles that he seemed almost to have hoofs like an animal. Even more disturbing to me, at that moment and without another word, Gudinand would go running off, as fast as he could run on those hoof-feet, and I would not see him again for the rest of the day. Then, when we did next meet, he never proffered any explanation or apology for his odd behavior and abrupt abandonment of me. Each time, he acted as if he had totally forgotten having behaved so, and that was more mystifying yet.

Still, those occasions were seldom enough that they did not seriously interfere with our companionship, so—on this subject, too—I forbore from prying. Anyway, I must confess that, by this time, I had recognized that
I
was having strange emotions and thoughts and daydreams of a sort I had never had before, and that realization gave me more cause for perplexity than any of Gudinand’s eccentricities.

During the early days of our friendship, I had admired Gudinand as any younger boy would do—for his being older, more athletic, more self-assured, and for his befriending me without any hint of elder-brother haughtiness. After a while, though, especially when we would both strip down to mere loincloths for a footrace or a wrestling bout, and I could see Gudinand all but naked, I found myself admiring him more as a moonling adolescent girl would do—for his handsomeness, muscularity, manly grace and attractiveness.

I would be putting it mildly to say that this surprised me. I had supposed that the female half of my nature was soft and passive and shyly retiring. Now I was discovering that it could manifest appetites and urges just as assertively as did my male half. Here again, as had happened when the child Becga was slain, I was troubled by the disharmony between the disparate components of myself. Back then, I had with only
some
difficulty made the masculine part of me subdue the sentimentality of the feminine. But now it seemed that the feminine was being the dominant part, while the masculine was able only to look on, so to speak, and view with some alarm what was happening to me.

Before long, it was costing me an effort to stay my hand from reaching out to caress Gudinand’s bare bronzed skin or to tousle his tawny hair. Eventually, it required all my determination, but somehow I managed to conceal those impulses and feelings. I knew that Gudinand would be astonished, disconcerted or even repulsed if ever he should glimpse that aspect of myself. And I valued our masculine friendship too much to risk impairing it, just for some brief and trivial gratification of my transitory whims. Except that they were not whims and they were not transitory. They were yearnings, and, after a time, instead of occurring only now and then, they more and more often possessed me, even when Gudinand and I were strenuously engaged in some definitely boyish activity, until they were a constant hunger in me aching to be allayed.

When we wrestled together, I more often than not was the one who was finally pinned helpless on his back. Though I was strong for my age and slender size, Gudinand was the heavier and more adroit in the holds and twists of that athletic contest. So, every time he prevailed, I pretended petulance and anger at my having lost the struggle. But in fact I enjoyed having him masterfully atop me, pinioning my wrists with his hands, my legs with his, both of us panting while he easily restrained my heaving to get free, and while he grinned down at me and dripped warm sweat from his face onto mine. On the few occasions that I pinned
him
to the ground and victoriously straddled his supine body, I had an almost irresistible urge to lower myself full length upon him, to clasp him gently instead of forcefully, and to roll both of us over to set him on top.

I realized—with perhaps as much dismay and near-horror as Gudinand would have felt if he had realized—that I wanted him to hold me, to fondle me, to kiss me, even to possess me sexually. But while my rational mind was recoiling from the thought of any such absurd doings, some less rational recess of my mind was thrilled and titillated whenever I imagined those things happening. And so was my body, in ways quite new to me.