Raptor (33 page)

In times past, when I knew that Deidamia and I would soon be lying entwined—and more recently, when I might espy a beautiful and desirable girl or young woman on the streets of some place like Vesontio, even here in Constantia—that caused me to feel a curious but pleasant sensation in my throat. I felt it below the hinges of my jaw—why there, I do not know—and from beneath my tongue came an increase of salivation that made me have to swallow repeatedly. Whether that particular response to sexual arousal was peculiar to me alone, I have no idea, and never asked another man whether it happened likewise to him. But I am sure it was a distinctly
male
response.

Because now, when I was in Gudinand’s company, I felt a different, though still curious, still pleasant sensation. This one I felt in and about my
eyes
—and why there, again I do not know. They felt heavy-lidded but not sleepy, and if at such a moment I looked at my reflection in a speculum, I could see that my pupils were widely dilated, even in brightest daylight. So I am certain that this response must have been the female counterpart of the male’s sensation in the throat.

I felt physical changes in more expectable places, too. My nipples stood up and became so tender that just the cloth of my tunic brushing against them made me fairly ripple with excitement. My nether female parts I could feel getting engorged and warm and moist. But, oddly, although my male organ at those times became even more sensitive to touch than did my nipples, it did not get rigid and rear up into a fascinum, as it had done when I was sexually engaged with Brother Peter and Sister Deidamia.

This new and anomalous condition—an access of sexual agitation but no upraising of a fascinum—I could only attribute to the fact that, all the while Peter was molesting me, I had believed myself to be a boy, and when Deidamia and I frolicked, she had been indubitably an alluring girl. So, in both cases, my virile organ had evidently responded as a boy’s would be expected to. But now I knew—and all my organs seemed to know—that Gudinand was indubitably a male, that I wanted him as a female would, and that my female self was in control of every part of me.

At last, I was so much obsessed by my wishful daydreams, and so frustrated by the impossibility of their ever coming true, that I seriously considered saying farewell to Gudinand and wandering southward down the lake after old Wyrd. But then, one Sunday—it was a day too hot and sticky for any arduous play—Gudinand and I were lolling in a field of wildflowers outside the city. We were eating bread and cheese that we had brought, while we idly discussed impish ways of spending the day, such as our going into the back alleys of Constantia to taunt and harass the Jew shopkeepers there—when suddenly Gudinand said:

“Listen, Thorn. I hear an owl hooting.”

I laughed. “An owl awake at midday in midsummer? I do not think—”

And then Gudinand got an anguished look on his face, and his thumbs curled tight against his palms. There was one thing different this time: just before he ran away from me, he uttered a dolorous cry, as of real pain. I had never before followed him when those episodes occurred. Now I did. Perhaps I chased after him just because of that unusual noise he had made, perhaps because I had lately been entertaining so many feminine feelings that they may even have afflicted me with a trace of maternal solicitude.

Gudinand might have been able to outrun me, even on his hoof-feet, but I caught up to him in a copse near the lake, because he had fallen to the ground there. Clearly, he had run only far enough to find a place of concealment before succumbing to the convulsion that now had him in its grip. He was not thrashing about; he lay on his back and his body was rock-rigid, but his head, arms and legs were in spasm, all quivering as does a bowstring after the arrow is loosed. His face was so contorted that I would not have recognized it. His eyes were rolled back in his head so that only the whites showed. His tongue was thrust far out of his mouth, and an excessive salivation spilled out around it. He also stank most revoltingly, for he had voided both urine and feces.

I had never seen such a convulsion before, but I knew what it was: the falling sickness. An elderly monk at St. Damian’s, a Brother Philotheus, had suffered from that infirmity—which was why he had taken the cowl, his seizures having been so frequent that he was unfit for any other vocation. Philotheus never endured an attack in my presence, and he died while I was still quite young. Nevertheless, our infirmarian, Brother Hormisdas, told all of us at the abbey what those fits were like, and gave us some rudimentary instruction in what to do to help our brother if we
should
be nearby when he fell into one.

So now I followed those instructions. I broke a twig from one of the saplings in the copse and, braving the awful smell and appearance of Gudinand, went to him and thrust the twig between his upper teeth and his tongue, to prevent his biting it off. Having with me the waist wallet in which I had carried my meal, I took from it my screw of salt, and sprinkled that on Gudinand’s thrust-out tongue, hoping some of it would trickle down his throat. I had also on my belt my case knife, so I took it from its sheath and wedged the blade under one of Gudinand’s clenched thumbs so he held it against that palm. Brother Hormisdas had said, “Put a piece of cold metal in the victim’s hand,” and the knife was barely cool, but it was the only metal I had about me. Last of all—and breathing through my mouth as best I could, to keep Gudinand’s smell out of my nostrils—I leaned over and pressed my hands on his abdomen and maintained the pressure there. Those several assistances, the infirmarian had said, would ameliorate and shorten the seizure.

Whether they did or not, I do not know, for it seemed to me that I remained leaning on Gudinand’s belly for an excruciating long time. But finally, and as abruptly as he had spoken of the owl’s hoot, Gudinand’s tense abdominal muscles relaxed under my hands. His extremities ceased quivering, his eyes rolled into their proper position and wearily closed, his tongue retracted into his mouth and my twig fell away. His countenance was again that of the Gudinand I knew. Then he merely lay there, breathing so that his breast shuddered, as if he had just then collapsed after running a long footrace. I plucked a wisp of grass and wiped from his chin and neck and cheeks the spittle that slimed them. There was nothing I could do about his other excretions, for they were inside his clothes. So I, rather thankfully, withdrew to a distance and sat down against a tree and waited.

Gradually, Gudinand’s ragged breathing subsided. After another while, he opened his eyes and, without moving his head, he looked up, down, to either side, obviously trying to calculate where he was and how he had got there. Then, cautiously, he raised himself to a sitting position and turned his head this way and that for a better look around. He caught sight of me, sitting well away, and what he did then astounded me. I might have expected him to grimace in embarrassment or distress at my having witnessed his seizure. Instead, he smiled brightly and called buoyantly to me, as if our mealtime conversation had never been interrupted:

“Well,
are
we off to make mischief among the Jews? Or are we simply going to laze about all day?”

As I have said, I had often wondered, when at other times we had met again after one of his disappearances, whether he had forgotten having done so, or merely preferred to appear that he had forgotten. Now I knew that he truly never had any remembrance of anything that happened on those occasions. Because it certainly was evident, this time, that Gudinand had no least recollection of his mention of that nonexistent owl, of his having cried out and dashed away, of the agonies he had gone through in this copse, of how much time had elapsed since either of us last spoke of making mischief. I could only sit where I was and gawk at him.

So he got to his feet, rather stiffly, for his muscles must have been painfully cramped by their recent rigor, and started to saunter over to me. But when he stood up, the movement gave him a whiff of his stench, and he stopped as if lightning-struck. Now his face did crumple, almost to weeping, with dismay and self-disgust, and he shut his eyes tightly and shook his head in abject sadness. He said, so quietly that I barely heard him, “You saw. Goodbye, Thorn. I go to wash,” and he stalked stiffly off toward the lake, taking care to walk well wide of me.

When he returned, he was wearing only his athletic loincloth, dripping wet, and carrying in his arms the rest of his equally wet clothing. At sight of me, still sitting against my tree, he looked genuinely surprised.

“Thorn! You did not leave?”

“Ne. Why should I?”

“Except for my old mother, everyone else who has ever learned of my—learned about
me
—has gone away from me, and stayed away. Surely you must have wondered why I have no friends. I used to have, from time to time, but I lost them all.”

“Then they were not worthy to be called friends,” I said. “Is that also why you continue in that squalid occupation at the furrier’s?”

He nodded. “No one else will hire a worker who is liable to fall into a fit in public view. Where I work now, I am out of sight, and”—he laughed bleakly—“if I suffer a convulsion in the pit, it does not much interrupt my labors. It actually helps in the agitation of the pelts. My only worry is that sometime I may not have sufficient warning of the attack, and will not have time to seize the pit’s edge to hold myself upright. If that happens, I shall drown in that ghastly liquid.”

I said, “I once knew an aged monk who suffered from the same affliction. His medicus made him regularly drink a decoction of darnel grass seeds. It was supposed to make his attacks less frequent or less severe. Have you tried that?”

Gudinand nodded again. “My mother used to spoon it into me religiously. But a too heavy dose of darnel extract—and the dosage is difficult to judge—can he a lethal poison. So she stopped doing that. She would rather have a live monstrosity than a dead one.”

“You are no monstrosity!” I snapped. “Why, some of the great men of history have been afflicted with the falling sickness all their lives long. Alexander, the Caesar Julius, even the sainted Paul. It did not hinder their being great men.”

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “there is a remote chance that I may not have it all my life long.”

“How so? I thought it an incurable ailment.”

“It is, for someone who first gets infected with it when he or she is full-grown—as I assume was the case with your aged monk. But for one who has it from birth, as I have… well, they say that it will disappear when a girl has her first menstruum or a boy his, er, sexual initiation.” Gudinand blushed deeply. “Which I have not.”

“That really will cure it?” I said excitedly. “But how marvelous! Then why in the world have you remained a virgin for so long? You could have lain with a female when you were my age. Or even younger.”

“Do not make mock of me, Thorn,” he said miserably. “Lain with
what
female? Every woman in Constantia and for miles around knows about me. Every girl-child is early warned against me by her parents. No female would risk getting pregnant by me and bearing an equally afflicted child. Even men and boys avoid me, for fear I will infect them. I should have to go very far away from here to befriend or seduce an unwary female, and I cannot leave my ailing mother.”

“Akh, come now, Gudinand! There are the local lupanares. They do not cost much for a—”

“Ne. Every prostitute has refused me, either from fear of catching my disease or for fear that I might go into convulsion in the middle of the copulative act and somehow injure her. My only hope is to encounter some girl or woman newly come to the city, and win her love—or at least her acquiescence—before the gossips warn her against me. But female travelers are few. And anyway, I hardly know how I would accost her. I have been a solitary for so long that I am awkward and tongue-tied with other people. I thought it a blessed circumstance that I met
you
as I did, sheerly by accident.”

I pondered for a bit, and an outrageous idea came into my head (and my eyes got heavy-lidded), and now it was I who blushed. But I reminded myself: I had long ago sworn that I would never be inhibited by conscience or what the world calls morality. Besides, even if my idea was inspired in part by my own selfish desires, the most fanatical moralist ought to condone it as a good deed, since it might be the one thing that could liberate dear Gudinand from his hideous affliction.

I said, “As it happens, Gudinand, there
is
a newcome young female in Constantia, and I can arrange for you to meet her.”

He said eagerly, “There is? You can?” Then his face got glum again. “But she is sure to hear all about me before I could possibly—”

“I will
tell
her all about you. And you need waste no time in prolonged courtship or elaborate seduction. She would not, in any case, fall in love with you. She has vowed never to fall in love with anybody. But she will gladly lie with you, and will do it as often as it takes to cure your falling sickness.”

“What?!” Gudinand exclaimed unbelievingly. “Why in the name of heaven
would
she?”

“For one reason, she fears no pregnancy. Her medicus long ago told her that she will be forever barren. For another reason, she will do it to oblige me.”

“What?!” Gudinand exclaimed again, now utterly awestruck.
“Why?”

“Because I am your friend, and she is my sister. My twin sister.”

“Liufs Guth!” cried Gudinand. “You would play panderer of your own sister?!”

“Ne. I really have no need to. I have been praising you to her all this summer, so she knows of your many good qualities. And she has seen you, when you accompanied me sometimes to the door of our lodgings, so she knows that you are comely. Most important, she is a very kind, warmhearted person, and she would unhesitatingly do anything to ease your suffering.”

“How could she have seen me without my seeing her? I did not even know you
had
a sister. What is she called?”

“Ah… er… Juhiza,” I said, snatching at the first feminine name that came to my mind, recalling it from my conversation with the caupo Dylas in Basilea. “Like myself, Juhiza is a ward of the old man Wyrd you have met. And he is most strict with her. She is forbidden to set foot outside our lodgings until we all three are ready to move on from here. It was from her window at the deversorium that she saw you. However, now that Wyrd is out of the city, I shall disobey his orders and arrange for you to meet her. Juhiza will not confess the misdeed to our guardian, and neither will I, and surely you would not tell on us.”