Raptor (98 page)

“Almighty coincidence,” grunted Meirus. “Including the names of Thor and Thorn.”

“Ja,” Swanilda said gaily. “Was the name Thor only part of his japery?”

“Ne,” I said. “Coincidence or not, Thor really is his name.” And that was the first time in this telling that I told the truth—or part of the truth. “Well, our meeting was not at all friendly, at least not at first. I made the Greek at the pandokheíon show me which was Thor’s chamber and I burst in upon him with my sword drawn. If his own blade had been near to hand, we very well
might
have slain one another before any explanations could have been made. But he was undressed, ready for bed, and unarmed, so I refrained from striking the first blow. And then, of course, when his tale was told, we both had a hearty laugh over it.” Swanilda and Maggot laughed as if they had been there, too, but the old Jew did not. “That is the whole story. Now Thor will be joining me on this mission, and—”

“Joining
us,”
said Swanilda, laying a hand on mine.

I went on, “We will quest together, from here northward. And it may be—I have not yet had time to question him—that he already possesses knowledge that I do not. Ideas of where we might most profitably search… better evidence than old songs and dim recollections…”

“I think,” said Swanilda, “that Maghib also will be wishing to join us, if that is agreeable to you.”

“Ja,” said the Mudman, starting suddenly from his brooding. “I am trying to persuade Maghib to go and prospect for amber on my behalf.”

“But I wished to do it for
myself,”
the Armenian said plaintively.

Meirus said, “Maghib, if you are willing to take your nose into those far places, that is risk enough for you. Let
me
shoulder the other risks of the venture. I will continue your wages unabated, and then pay you a handsome portion of the profits from all the amber you can deliver here in Noviodunum. You see? You take no risk in case amber proves undetectable to your nose.”

That pendulous organ was drooping more and more, and Maggot sniffled sadly through it.

Meirus added expansively, “I will even present you with a horse of your own, young Maghib, so you do not have to trudge on foot all the way to the Amber Coast.”

At that, Maggot flinched slightly. But then he sighed and helplessly spread his hands in a gesture of resigned surrender.

“There we are, then!” the Mudman crowed triumphantly. “Saio Thorn, as marshal of the king, will you see this worthy subject of the king safely to the shores of the Wendic Gulf?”

“Well, now…” I said, and drummed my fingers on the table. “Look here. What I undertook as a solitary mission has been accreting company all along the way.” Swanilda gave me a startled look, so I addressed her directly. “I told you in the beginning, my dear, that there is terra incognita ahead, possibly teeming with savages. It is certain that the fewer we are, the more likely we are to survive—to get the information we seek.” I glanced around at the others. “I cannot refuse to take along my new associate, for Thor is the emissary of another king, and charged with the same mission. But I have to say that this quest is becoming a
clutter.”

Swanilda was now looking dreadfully hurt, and Maggot very downcast, and Meirus was regarding me steadily, but with no expression at all. I concluded my argument:

“I trust you all understand. I must talk this over with Thor. I cannot decide, on my own, who will compose this company from this point onward.”

Swanilda nodded, but sadly, and so did Maggot.

“Now,” I said, “I will return to the pandokheíon and sit down with Thor in my chambers, where I have certain notes and maps that I made earlier in this journey. I will share with him all that I have learned so far, and solicit what knowledge he has—and discuss what he and I will do next, and with what companions, if any. That will probably keep us up all night, and when we finally do sleep we will no doubt sleep late. Since that chamber is also Swanilda’s, and Thor and I will be monopolizing it, I would ask you, Meirus, if you might be hospitable enough to let her stay here until I come tomorrow and call for her.”

“I will do that,” he said to me, very frostily, and then to Swanilda, most warmly, “Will you do an old man the honor of accepting his invitation to lodge here this night?”

She nodded again, looking stricken, and she said nothing, not even a “gods nahts” to me as I departed.

Thor was already in my chambers when I arrived there, and asked, “What did you tell them?”

I said, “I lied.”

“You lied?” said Thor, but indifferently, uncaringly. “Why bother?”

“Because the Mudman was carping at all the coincidences attendant on our encounter. If he—or anyone—knew how many coincidences really conspired to bring us together…”

“Incredible, ja. But
you
are incredible. I am incredible. So let the ignorant be incredulous. Why should you and I care what anyone besides ourselves may think of us? And you have not yet told me… what
do
you think of me? Am I not personable? Desirable? Irresistible?”

Thor was lying naked on my bed, and now smiled provocatively and stretched voluptuously in the warm lamplight, to show off a face and body that I would indeed have praised, acclaimed, exalted—except that to do so would have been most shamelessly immodest of me, because the face and body were so very nearly my own.

Still smiling and slightly undulating, Thor murmured, “I once heard a priest say that the only irredeemably credulous people are those who do
not
believe in miracles.”

I remembered how I had first seen Thor, at a distance, on the dock at Durostorum as my barge pulled away from there, and even then, from afar, I had discerned something curiously familiar in that figure. Thor was a Visigoth, two years younger than the age I estimated myself to be, and was a finger’s breadth shorter than my height, and was of the same slight build and fine-textured fair skin. We were not twin-identical of face, Thor’s being more triangular and sharper of features, but we both would have been called exceptionally handsome—or beautiful. We both were beardless, and Thor’s hair was the same pale gold as mine, worn at the same medium length, suitable to either a man or a woman. Thor’s voice was equally ambiguous, soft but husky. The most immediately noticeable difference between us, when we both were clothed, was that Thor’s eyes were blue and mine gray.

Unclothed…

“Look at me,” said Thor, standing up and standing close to me.

“I have been looking.”

“Look at me some more. It has taken us all our lives to find one another. Look at me and tell me how jubilant you are that I have found you and you have found me. Tell me how much you long to possess me… while I undress you… like this. Then I will gaze at
you,
Thorn. And tell
you
tender things.”

Except for having seen my own reflection in water or in a speculum, where of course I could not have seen even my own self reflected entire, I had never before had the opportunity of looking my fill at a naked mannamavi. During our brief earlier meeting, Thor had stunned me by proudly exposing to me only what I might call the essentials, and, though more reticently, I had reciprocated, and thus we two mannamavjos had identified ourselves to one another, as it were.

Now, seeing Thor totally disrobed, I decided that the exuberantly tip-tilted breasts might be a trifle more full than mine, their nipples and areolae larger, darker, more feminine. Thor’s navel was a dimple as unobtrusive as mine; the pubic escutcheon was of curlier hair and more distinctly delta-shaped. I could make no comparison of our buttocks, never having seen my own, but I hoped that mine were that firm and peach-tinted and nicely contoured. Thor’s male organ, at this moment standing as if to invite inspection, was shorter, thicker than mine—I might say stubby, more like a woman’s genital nub extraordinarily overgrown—and, in fascinum erection, it pointed forward rather than upward. Behind it, there was no testicular sac, but a cloven purse, like my own, and Thor’s was at this moment pouting a little open, like a mouth about to kiss…

Now I was naked, too, and assuredly displaying similar signs of arousal, but Thor was raptly gazing at only my throat.

“I am so glad to see that you also wear the Venus collar.”

“What?”

“You were not aware that you have one? You did not notice that I do?”

“I am wearing nothing whatsoever. Or nothing but the goose-flesh of excitement. I do not know what a Venus collar is.”

“This little crease that encircles your throat, just here.” Thor traced it with a fingertip, making my gooseflesh positively ripple. “Men do not have it, and only certain women. And at least we two happy mannamavjos. It is not a wrinkle, for it is evident in the smallest girl-child, long before she merits it.”

“Merits it how?”

“The Venus collar is the certain indication of a prodigious appetite for sexual indulgence. Have you not seen some women wearing a ribbon about their neck, right there? They are chastely trying to conceal that evidence”—Thor laughed—“or trying to pretend that they
have
it.”

Though I had not noticed our matching Venus collars, I could not have missed seeing the one glaring difference between our bodies. My own bore only trivial marks of misfortunes past—the tiny scar that bisected my left eyebrow, where I had long ago been clubbed by that Burgund farmer, and the crescent scar on my right forearm, where Theodoric had excised the snakebite. But Thor’s upper back, between the shoulder blades, was blemished by a really gruesome scar. It was shiny white and puckered, so old a scar that Thor must have acquired it in childhood. It was as big as my palm, and it was the memento of no accident, for it was in the shape of the “cramped cross,” those four right-angled arms that represent the god Thor’s hammer being swung in a circle. It hurt me just to look at the scar, as if I could feel the searing pain of its being cut or burned into the child Thor’s smooth skin.

I asked, “How did you get that?”

“My very first male lover,” said Thor, as casually as if neither the lover nor the injury mattered at all. “I was very young and not very faithful. He was very jealous and not very forgiving. Hence the brand of shame.”

“Why brand you with the gammadion?”

Thor shrugged carelessly. “Ironic humor, I suppose. Because Thor’s hammer is swung over the newlywed, to assure constancy. But I try to make
some
use of everything that comes my way. The scar at least gave me the idea of adopting Thor as my masculine name.”

“And you said your feminine name is Genovefa. How long have you had that?”

“As long as I can remember. The nuns gave me that one in my infancy. They named me after the queen-wife of the great Visigoth warrior Alareikhs.”

“Interesting,” I said. “I got my names just the other way about. The masculine Thorn in my infancy, and I later chose Veleda for the feminine.”

Thor gave me an inviting smile and an intimate caress. “Are you nervous, Thorn-Veleda? Is that why you prolong the talking? Really, Thorn! This night was a long time coming. Here. Let us lie down and prove what our Venus collars promise.”

As we reclined, I said, a trifle shakily, “I thought myself experienced and worldly. But this is a… first time…”

“Akh, for me as well. And
vái!
for all I know, it may be a first time in human history. So… this first time… who shall we be? Will you be Thorn or Veleda? Shall I be Thor or Genovefa?”

“I… frankly, I do not even know how to begin…”

“Let us hold one another in tight embrace, and begin with kissing, and simply see what happens…”

We had been doing that for only a short time before one of us, I forget which, quietly laughed and then murmured:

“I am finding it difficult to clasp you as close as I would wish.”

“Ja. Something encroaches between us.”

“Two things, actually.”

“They want satisfaction.”

“Most insistent, are they not?”

“We ought to oblige at least one of them.”

“Ja. This one. Yours.”

“Ja… ah-h-h…”

Right here, I have to confess that, when Thor and I coupled, my fond recollections of the delights accorded me by previous lovers began to dim and dwindle. The pleasures I had so recently been relishing with Swanilda seemed tepid in comparison to what I was now given to savor. So did every other consummation, every other partner, in all my life past—Widamer, Renata, Naranj, Dona, Deidamia, the others whose names I have forgotten—even the Gudinand of long-treasured memory.

It must be manifest to anyone of any other sex that the physical means of mutual stimulation and satisfaction possessed by two mannamavjos are not just numerous but capable of almost infinite variation and combination of application. It ought also to be self-evident that the multifarious pleasures thus produced are of nearly as infinite
duration.
Though our male parts would, like those of a normal male, require intervals of rest and regeneration, our female parts, like those of a normal female, could go on functioning almost indefinitely without depleting their energies, exudations, responses and sensations. And it may have been, as Thor claimed was indicated by our both wearing the Venus collars, that Thor and I had female resources even exceeding the normal.

What is probably not so manifest is the
intensity
of thrill, passion, ecstasy, delirium, paroxysm attainable by two mannamavjos in sexual embrace. I can only inadequately describe it by calculating that it must reach threefold the peak of sensation ever possible—or even imaginable—in the copulation of man and woman, or man and man, or woman and woman. In my dalliances with other partners, I had sometimes indulged the fantasy of picturing myself, or each of us, as being some other person, or several persons. But Thor and I really
were.
Each of us was literally, physically, authentically two persons. Therefore, at every blissful moment, each
one
of us was partaking of the rapture of all the other three.

“Let us do it in a different manner this time.”

“Ja. Like this, shall we?”