Raptor (55 page)

Soft music was being played by a group of women seated on one of the couches nearest the table. As my eyes got accustomed to the dim light, I could see that one was plucking a lyre, another shaking a sistrum, another gently tapping on a lap drum, another tootling on the panpipes and the fifth singing quietly into an onion flute. All five of the women were naked.

There seemed to be not much formality about the Bacchic ceremonies. Quite a number of people were already there when we four arrived, and others slipped in after us, by ones and twos. Almost all were women; there were perhaps ten or twelve men at most. And every one of the celebrants, even before claiming a seat, went straight to the marble table and filled a cup or goblet with wine. All made repeated returns to the casks, probably drinking hard to rid themselves as quickly as possible of any timidity or demureness. Dengla drank as deeply and frequently as any, and pressed many cups of wine on both the twins, and urged me to drink as well. I did go and get a goblet for myself, and refilled it several times, so as not to appear unmannerly, but each time I surreptitiously spilled most of my wine into a nearby flower vase.

Also, not to appear overly inquisitive, I refrained from craning about and peering at other people. But I could easily discern that the gathered Bacchantes were not all from the ranks of the plebecula. Without turning my head, I could see several women attired in fine gowns, and I recognized three whom I had met at the banquets and convivia that I had attended as Thornareikhs. They were women of the sort I have already mentioned with disdain: the sort of witless woman who is forever consulting an astrologus. One elderly, inordinately fat man I likewise recognized, and with astonishment, as the praefectus Maecius.

So, I thought, the widow Dengla did not pry out secrets about her betters by haliuruns sorcery. She did not have to. For her extortionate purposes, she had only to threaten to make public the fact that Maecius and those highborn women—and probably other persons whom I had not yet seen here—were practicing Bacchantes. Melbai had already warned me of the one most sacrosanct rule of the Bacchic societies: that no participant ever disclose to the uninvited what occurred inside the temple doors. Perhaps Melbai and the others never did, but I judged Dengla to be capable of violating any trust, if it profited her to do so.

After some while, the five naked women paused in their playing of music, and the murmur of conversation and gulping of wine ceased. Then the musicians began again to play, and more loudly, what I took to be the anthem of Bacchus, and it was not at all melodious, but jarringly discordant. A door opened in the wall behind the marble table and the priests and priestesses made their entrance. There were three men and eleven women, one of them Melbai, and each was dragging on leash a reluctant and dolorously bleating kid. The Bacchantes shouted to greet them: “Io!” and “Salve!” and “Euoi!” and here and there a “Háils!”—and kept on shouting as the fourteen paraded around the circumference of the room. They did not do that solemnly, but lurched and staggered in real or pretended drunkenness, sometimes tripping over their little goats and nearly falling.

“Always fourteen Venerables,” Dengla said in a slurred voice, leaning close to my ear to be heard above the noise. “Because, when Bacchus was an infant, he was reared by the fourteen nymphs of Nysa. And of course we sacrifice kids to him because goats are detested by the god. They eat his grapevines.”

The fourteen wore crowns of ivy and grape leaves, and about their shoulders panther-skin cloaks. They wore nothing else, and a panther skin is not very large or very concealing. The nearly nude priestesses were nothing to ogle at, all of them being of about Melbai’s age and plainness. Two of the priests were clearly eunuchs, pale and fat and flabby. The other must have been one of the men who had castrated himself late in life, for he was very skinny, but he was so old that I wondered why he had bothered with the castration. Each of the Venerables, in the hand not holding a leash, carried and waved and waggled what Dengla called a “thyrsos,” a tall staff topped with a pinecone.

I said loudly, over the shouting and bleating and dissonant music, “I know that the panther is sacred to Bacchus, hence the skins. But what does the pinecone stand for?”

She hiccuped and said only, “It represents the reaming,” and giggled drunkenly.

When the procession of Venerables arrived again at the front of the room, thirteen of them stood back against the wall and the old man took a commanding but unsteady stance before the marble table. The musicians muted their playing and the congregation gradually ceased to shout, while the priest drew himself a brimming cup of wine from one of the casks and took a long, refreshing drink. Then he began to speak—what I assumed were the Bacchic versions of invocation, homily, benediction and so on.

“Euoi Bacche! Io Bacche!”
he commenced, almost in a shriek. Much of his preaching was in Greek, and I was not too well versed in that language. Anyway, his tongue was so wine-twisted that I doubt that even a native Greek could have understood him. Other parts of his harangue were in a language that I could not even identify—the speech of the Rasenar or the Egyptians, for all I know. The one brief utterance that he made in Latin quite startled me, for it was from the Christian Bible, from the Book of Luke. The priest absolutely bellowed it:

“Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the paps that have not given suck!”

Apparently that was the only part of the sermon requiring or inviting a response from the congregation. All the women in the room, Dengla included, cried in their several languages: “True!” and “Blessed are they!”

After some more incomprehensible babble, the priest concluded, “Now for the singing and the dancing and the feasting and more drinking. Euoi! Io!” He tossed away his panther-skin cloak, the music soared into a rollicking Lydian cantus, and the old man was the first to leap into the clear space on the floor, dancing rowdily and bonily, all knobby knees and elbows. The two fat eunuch priests, and five or six of the female Venerables, including Melbai, also dropped their cloaks and began to dance, leaving the other priestesses to hold the leashes of the frightened, fidgeting, bleating kids. There was a rush of lay worshippers—the more drunken ones—to join the frolic. All danced, just as furiously as the first and oldest priest, and few of them any more gracefully, and they began to fling off one garment after another. While they did so, they cried the name of the god: “Bacchus!” or “Diónysos!” or “Fufluns!” interspersed with screeches of “Io!” and “Euoi!”

Dengla doffed her outdoor cloak, dropped it on our couch and, without urging me or the boys to accompany her, vaulted onto the dance floor, where she loped and bounded and shrieked and began to peel like the rest of them. That revealed Dengla’s legs to be short and stumpy, but with long, narrow feet that flapped against the mosaic floor with smacks and slaps audible even above the general pandemonium. Nor did the other naked dancers make a captivating sight. The few men and many women were all Dengla’s age or older, and no more alluring than she was. Except for Filippus and Robein, I was the youngest person in the temple, and I must aver, however immodestly, that I was by far the handsomest. Even though still fully clothed, I was being stared at, waved at and winked at by various of the women on the couches roundabout.

The light was too dim for me to see whether the dancing women were manifesting any signs of sexual arousal—tumescent nipples, for example—and their wild contortions and ululations could as easily have passed for insanity as for the stirrings of carnal passion. So could those of the men, for none of them had yet developed a fascinum; the torchlight
was
sufficient for me to see that. The praefectus Maecius, for one, had excited himself only to the point of discarding all his dignity along with his clothes. He bounced lumpishly about, jiggling his bulges and billows of suety old fat, but the thing that dangled below his wobbling sack of belly was visibly not yet any more amatory than an earlobe.

The dancers, whenever they danced past the marble table, would snatch a few grapes or a cluster of them from the heaped trays, and then would slovenly spray juice and seeds as they went on singing. Whenever a dancer got winded, he or she would drop out of the milling crowd for a replenishment of wine. Some simply lay down supine under a cask and let the wine pour directly from tap to mouth, with the result that the floor was soon sloshy and slippery. More than one dancer fell asprawl, evoking much merriment among the others.

By now, there were only a few women, and no men, still seated on the couches. Those seemed content to observe, like myself, bur they had all disrobed, though three or four of them Romanly kept on a single undergarment: a strophion about the breasts, a belt around the waist, a skimpy loincloth. And they were casting reproachful glances at me and the twins, so I leaned down and said to the boys what St. Ambrose had once said:

“Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more…”

They probably did not understand the Latin, but, when they saw me begin to undress, they did likewise. The boys stripped to the skin; I of course retained the band around my hips to conceal the evidence of my maleness. To disguise the fact that it was a disguise, I had worn a decorative band of fine linen sewn all over with colored beads. And now I made sure to relax my chest muscles, and sat somewhat bent forward, to make my small breasts as prominent as possible.

However, when I and the twins were conformingly nude and reseated—each boy sitting with his hands primly cupped over his private parts—I discovered that no one was casting glances at us any longer. The gaze of every onlooker was fixed on the front of the room, where now occurred the only ritual sacrifice I had ever witnessed. Dengla and numerous others of the naked female dancers ceased their deranged dancing and, just as maniacally, flung themselves upon the leashed kids.

Every woman—all the while screaming, “Io Bacche! Euoi Bacche!”—snatched and grabbed and clutched to get one of the kids for herself alone. If she did, and Dengla did, she went for the little goat’s vitals, crooking her hands into claws and using her fingernails like talons, tearing the belly skin open, then plunging her face inside to gnash and gnaw. Where two or more women had to settle for sharing a kid among them, they yanked or bit at its extremities to take it apart. The wretched animals screamed more shrilly even than the women were doing, as their legs were torn off, and their ears and tails were chewed off, and their lower jaws were ripped off, and they stopped screaming only when their heads were twisted off their necks.

When eventually all the fourteen kids had been completely dismantled into bits and pieces, what pieces the butcher women had not already devoured were picked up by the Venerables and flung broadcast about the room. Some of the dancers had gone on deliriously dancing during all that bloody activity, even when they were struck by a flying goat rib or eyeball or tangle of intestines. But most of the Bacchantes had stopped dancing in expectation of the bestowal, and all the nondancing spectators had run from their couches to stand with the crowd.

Now everybody in that mass of people elbowed and fought and scrambled to get a fragment of the meat—even something unidentifiable because it had been stepped on, even something as recognizably revolting as a goat’s pizzle—and blissfully to eat it raw. Most then rushed to the casks for wine with which to wash it down. The twins were making small gurgling sounds, so I looked down again at them. They were heaving, gagging and adding vomit to the puddle of spilled wine that by now had flowed as far as our couch.

If the abundant nudity, the music, singing and dancing had not excited much sexual fervor among the Bacchantes, their bestial eating of raw meat certainly had done so. The male votaries now
were
displaying erect fascina, and began to employ those organs, though not on any of their female co-worshippers. Maecius seized onto one of the eunuch Venerables, a man as obese as himself, and impelled him to a couch. There, without caresses, kisses or any other preliminaries, Maecius bent the priest face down across the edge of the couch, humped himself atop the man’s vast buttocks and proceeded to penetrate him per anum. The other males were doing the same, and all of them, the ones on the bottom as well as the ones on top, writhed and moaned and whimpered happily, just as if they had been in the thrilling throes of normal man-woman intercourse.

Everything that I had so far witnessed of these ceremonies could have come straight from the
Satyricon
of Petronius, except that none of this was meant to be humorous, lighthearted or sardonic; it was all being done in sanctimonious earnest. Small wonder that persons such as Maecius paid money to the extortionist Dengla. He and others of his status had reason enough to prevent her revealing them to be even attendants at the Bacchic rites. He would have far more reason to fear her making it known that he was what Roman law calls concacatus, “besmeared with excrement,” which is to say a male who copulates with a male. The law decrees a heavy fine and punishment for that crime against nature, and assuredly Maecius would have lost his eminent station as praefectus of Vindobona.

And the female Bacchantes were doing very much the same unnatural thing. I had, of course, assumed them all to be sorores stuprae, and they were indeed. But I would have expected them to pleasure each other in the warm, close, loving, intimate ways that Deidamia and I had done when we
thought
we were sorores. These women did not. Melbai and several others had produced olisboí from somewhere, and strapped those implements at their crotches. An olisbós is an artificial fascinum made of smooth leather or polished wood, and some of these olisboí were of a normal man’s size and coloring, but others were grotesquely immense or studded with warts or shaped all crooked, and some were dyed Ethiope black or were gilded or were painted in other garishly inhuman colors.

Now I realized what Dengla must have meant by “reaming,” because the women equipped with olisboí behaved as Maecius was doing with his passive partner. Without any show of flirtation or affection or seduction, they simply pushed other women down on the couches, flung themselves on top and
raped
those women. Or perhaps “rape” is not exactly the correct term, for the victims were clearly
willing
to be raped. Melbai was pumping away at one of the highborn women I had earlier recognized, Dengla was being pumped upon by a hideously ancient hag, and neither the clarissima nor Dengla was struggling or crying to get loose from her assailant.