Raptor (80 page)

He laughed his tombstone laugh. “I have been ugly all my life, and in that time I have heard more gibes and jeers and insults than you could possibly fling at me, so save your breath for screaming ‘rape!’ “

“A princess does not scream,” I said, trying to sound as lofty as a real princess. “It is impossible to express disgust and contempt and disdain in a scream. But these calm words I will speak, Strabo. You expect from my brother some concession, submission, ransom, whatever. You must be aware that he will not pay for damaged goods.”

“Vái, he will have paid before he knows the goods are damaged. It may even be that he will not care about the so-called damage, when he does know.”

“What?”

“Remember, he is only a minor pretender to kingship. Many a real monarch has found it to his advantage to pander a sister or a daughter to a mightier monarch. Your tetzte brother may have been long contemplating doing just that—offering you to be my wife or concubine—in exchange for some recognition of his pretensions.”

I seriously doubted that, but there was one thing I was truly curious to know, so I asked, “Why the world, old man, would you want a mate who finds you repellent and detestable?”

“Because I do not find
you
so,” he said, calmly enough. But then, abruptly, he ceased being calm. He darted out one huge hand, clutched the neck of my blouse, gave a violent tug and ripped Amalamena’s filmy white gown completely off me. Under it, I wore only the amulet chain, the strophion about my bosom and the decorative band around my hips. He cocked his head from side to side, so that first one eye, then the other could regard me appreciatively from top to bottom. After a moment, he went on, calmly again:

“Ne, I do not find you at all repellent. Rather less than ample, for my taste, but no doubt I can fatten you up in due time. But now, enough of this paltering. Let me see the rest of you. Or must I do it all myself?”

I was almost angry and outraged enough to fling away both of the concealing scraps of cloth, just to astonish the brute with the sight of a person possessed of not only female breasts but also a male member, and to enjoy seeing what his response would be. However, since good sense suggested that his most likely response would have been to slay me on the spot, I restrained myself, and peeled off only the strophion.

“Less than ample,” he repeated. “But maidenly enticing, and they will of course swell with pregnancy.”

He began leisurely removing his own outer garments, and I merely glared at him without remark, so he continued:

“Ne, I do not find you repellent, and I have no other wives or mates or concubines at the moment. Your predecessors all died without giving me any male issue, except the one fish-faced son, Rekitakh, whom you have met. The Emperor Zeno thinks he is holding that son hostage to my good behavior. Vái! He is welcome to the dolt. But you are young. No older than Rekitakh, I think. Perhaps you will give me a more commendable heir. And then, you see, we will be inextricably united.”

“Heaven forfend,” I said, making an effort to keep my voice steady and icy. “Suppose that child should turn out to be as deformed as you are. Rekitakh only looks like a fish, not like a frog with—”

Slap!
His hand again shot out, and I fell supine on the couch, half stunned, one whole side of my face burning.

“I told you, wench, do not spend your breath on idle insults. Use your mouth instead to spit copiously into your hand. Then apply that to moisten your nether parts, or they will hurt far worse than your face does. I do not waste time on preliminary play to prepare a woman, and I do not require any such play from you. No pretended arousal or endearments or caresses. Or, for that matter, even your undressing to the skin. If it makes you feel less wanton, you may go on wearing your pitiful amulets—even your affected and ever so coy Roman modesty band. Do you hear me? All I need from you is that you lie there and
endure!”

That is what I did. That is all I could do.

There was some initial pain, because, old and grizzled though he was, he was immense and leathery and energetic. After only a short while, though, I suffered no more pain. I felt only abominably
used,
and thereafter managed to resign myself to being used, as if he had merely been pumping his member inside my armpit or along the cleft between my breasts. His sweating and slobbering over me might have been only that of a pestiferous large dog, and his other emissions I managed to regard as no more than disgustingly messy.

I do not mean to suggest that there is anything remotely extenuating to be said about the brutal act of rape, even—I suppose—if it were to be committed by the fairest and gentlest of men. But, in my particular situation, I could at least be thankful for three palliative circumstances. One was that, even if Strabo might be as potently fertile as a bull úrus, I had no fear of getting pregnant with a fish-faced child, a frog-faced child or any other sort of child.

Another gladsome circumstance was that I never had to look into my defiler’s eyes. Even when Strabo’s reddened and bloated and straining face was directly above mine, his eyes’ irises were off to either side, and all I could see was the whites of his eyeballs. It might have been a blind man lying atop me and pumping at me. So I never had to see whether his eyes were glazed with bestial glee or triumphant with gloating—or whether they were searching my own for signs of anguish or terror or debasement or any other such response that might have heightened his feeling of domination over me.

The third small palliation for me, while this was going on, was my being able to keep Amalamena in mind. Earlier, I had been only reconciled to her having died comparatively mercifully, from a single sword thrust instead of a ghastly decay. But now I had good reason to
rejoice
that she had perished when she did, because she had died unsullied and unshamed. I was quite certain that I could survive this night much better than she could have done—or any other woman, and I include Veleda.

It must be remembered that, at this time, I was not in any way being Veleda. I was Thorn—purely, totally Thorn—only in Amalamena’s clothing and semblance. Of course, to support my disguise, I had instinctively been exhibiting feminine graces and movements and mannerisms, but I was not
feeling
female. The distinction may seem trivial, but it really amounts to a vast difference. That is because every human female, from childhood to old age, has one realization ever infixed in her innermost mind. She may take pride and pleasure in it, if she early decides that she was born to be no more than a wife and a mother. She may despise the realization, try to deny and dismiss it, if she has other aspirations—anything from nunnish lifelong chastity to more worldly ambitions of achievement. Nevertheless, whoever the woman—even a mannish-seeming soror stupra or an Amazon—the realization is always there, the realization that
she was created by nature primarily as a receptacle, a vessel with a cavity shaped and ringent and lipped to be filled.

But for now, since I was not Veleda, that realization was not engrossing my consciousness, was not even dormant in the recesses of my mind. Therefore I did not have to feel my femaleness being violated and polluted and defiled. During this night, I could almost have been an observer standing off to one side and indifferently watching Strabo rut upon an inert nonentity—just as, long ago, an observer might have watched the vile Brother Peter repeatedly abusing the still-unformed, still-unsexed, still-uncomprehending child Thorn.

None of this, needless to say, made the night any less of a misery and an indignity and an outrage for me. But I know that my evincing nothing more than bored listlessness made the night considerably less of a joy for Strabo than he must have anticipated. There transpired something more palpable, too, that further diminished his pride in conquest and mastery. After he had consummated his first assault upon my person, he reared off me, roughly pawed my crotch, examined his hand and bellowed:

“Damaged goods, indeed! Tight you are, ja, but not virgin! You fraudulent slut! Not a trace of blood!”

I merely looked coolly back at him.

“You have been deceiving your trusting brother, as well, have you not? I can tell that there have not been many before me, but there has to have been one. I know you were closely cloistered at Novae, but you have been long on the road lately. Who was it who plucked the kernel from the fruit? Who was it, niu? Was it that Saio Thorn with whom you journeyed?”

At that, I could not help laughing aloud. And my unexpected response seemed to disconcert him more than his discovery of my already lost virginity.

“Vái, you fitchet bitch! Well, your dear traveling companion Thorn is dead now. And I shall see to it that you make no more fond attachments. From now on, you had better learn to enjoy
me!
You can start learning
now!”

He lifted me and flipped me over so that I was on elbows and knees, and entered from behind, ramming himself into me more violently than the first time. The chain around my neck and its pendent hammer-cross, monogram and phial swung hectically—as if they were horrified to be witness to sacrilege—while I was rocked back and forth. But I cared little about the amulets’ trepidation. The Virgin’s-milk phial in particular I had frankly come to contemn. It had done nothing to save my juika-bloth from harm, or old Wyrd, or Amalamena, and now it was doing absolutely nothing to relieve my own distress. What really concerned me was the security of the beaded band around my hips that clasped my own male organ up against my belly. If Strabo, in his frenzy, should rip away the band and let that member dangle—small and limp and uninterested though it was in these particular proceedings—he could hardly fail to notice its presence.

But Strabo did not tear away the band. He did not then or ever afterward—for this was not the only night on which I was to suffer his foul attentions. I do not believe he simply neglected ever to remove the band; I believe he deliberately let me continue to wear it. Since I never once shrieked or whimpered or pled for mercy—however awful were the acts he performed on me or made me perform on him—I believe that his leaving in place my “modesty band” was the only way he could continue to convince himself that he
was
violating my modesty. So he never did discover what sort of creature he was forever futilely trying to despoil. To his mind, he was forever wreaking his lust upon the young, beautiful, desirable Princess Amalamena. In my mind, I was never other than Thorn, and my only real response to being thus used was to swear to myself that I would eventually make Strabo most bitterly regret it.

Once, and once only, I told him so, and I told him truthfully, and it was that very same night. When at last he was totally spent, and rolled off me, he panted wonderingly:

“This is most curious. This is the first time of lying with any woman that I have not, soon or later, smelled the sweet fragrance of the sweet spilled juices. Perhaps
you
have spilled none, you dry wench, but I cannot even discern the familiar aroma of my own. Why is this, niu? All I seem to scent is a faint but most unfragrant… a sort of…”

I said, “It is the smell of death approaching.”

When Strabo left me, sometime before dawn, to go and sleep elsewhere, he slung open the carruca curtains and commanded me to leave them that way. The two guards stationed outside smirked in at my nudity, they of course having heard and realized all that had occurred. I was past caring about things like that, and ignored them, and simply rolled myself in the couch coverings and fell asleep myself. However, in the morning, I got out another of Amalamena’s gowns from among her belongings, and put it on, so that I should not have every passerby on the road gawking at me.

In late afternoon, we arrived at Serdica. As I discovered, it was not a city subservient to Strabo or to any other claimant except the Roman Empire. There was even a garrison of the Legio V Alaudae stationed there. However, since that legion belonged to the
Eastern
Empire, and since Strabo was currently in favor with the Emperor Zeno, this sudden arrival of a considerable troop of armed and armored Ostrogoths did not bring the legionaries swarming out of the garrison to repel us. Anyway, Strabo was not there to besiege or pillage, only to pause in our journey toward his own lands. So he left most of his men to make their own camp outside the city, and engaged lodgings at a deversorium for himself and me and his chief officers.

The deversorium was hardly of the luxuriousness that I had chosen when I was escorting an Amaling princess. I was given a room very poorly furnished; it did not even have a door or a curtain flap for privacy. And again there was a guard stationed outside to keep watch on me and to trudge with me whenever I had to go outdoors to the rere-dorter. Strabo’s room was as sparsely appointed as my own, and directly across the hall, so that he too could keep an eye on me. (Even in my currently unenviable situation, I could find some mordant humor in that: reflecting that Strabo literally could keep
only
one eye on me at a time.)

But at least he did not object when I asked him to send one of his soldiers to fetch something for me from the packs that his men had plundered from my own ill-fated train. What I wanted was one particular saddlebag that Velox had carried, and I described the bag so that the soldier could find it. Doubtless the saddlebag was searched before it got to me, to make sure it contained no knife or poison or anything of that nature. It did not; its contents could have caused no remark, for they were only feminine garments and fripperies, which is to say Veleda’s. When a deversorium servant brought a basin of water to my room, I was able to wash off not just the road dust of the day’s journey, but also the various smears and encrustations of Strabo’s múxa and smegma and bdélugma from the night before—and the brómos musarós that had clung about me ever since I began playing the part of poor Amalamena’s maid. Then I put on one of my own Veleda gowns, and felt really clean and odorless for the first time in recent memory.