Raptor (99 page)

“Ja… ah-h-h…”

If there was one thing that prevented my enjoying this night wholeheartedly, it was a small puzzlement lurking somewhere in my mind. Ever since Swanilda had remarked on the similarity of the names Thor and Thorn, I had been—what?—stirred? bothered? excited? disquieted?—every time I heard the name Thor spoken. But why? I might have had some premonition of who and what Thor really was. But the prospect of discovering that I was not unique among humankind should hardly have annoyed or affrighted me. After all, from my childhood days, when I had learned what I was, I had wistfully hoped to meet another like myself.

Then was it possible that I had had a premonition of something else? Of something
dire
in the coming together of Thor and Thorn? I could hardly believe that, either. If ever there had been two human beings designed by nature to give joy to one another, destined by nature to cleave to one another, it had to be Thor and Thorn. And certainly Thor had not been troubled by any misgivings. On first hearing a hint of my existence—that there might just be another mannamavi living in the same world at the same time—Thor had eagerly set out in search of me.

It was all the doing of Widamer, that emissary from the Visigoth court at Tolosa, because his visit to his cousin Theodoric at Novae had involved him first in some felicitous hours with a townswoman named Veleda, and then in an equivocal encounter with a herizogo named Thorn.

Widamer’s parting words to me had been “This I will ponder on… and remember…” And so he obviously had done, though it seems he never did quite construe the real connection between Veleda and Thorn. Anyway, later, at a festive convivium in Tolosa, when he was perhaps inebriated, Widamer uttered some remark about the baffling two persons he had met in Novae. It may have been only a frivolous or even salacious speculation on the nature of those two persons. However, one among the guests at that convivium, hearing the remark, had instantly grasped what Widamer had not. The very next morning, Thor had saddled a horse and ridden eastward toward Novae. Learning there that I was off on a quest, Thor had followed, and kept on following, and finally had found me, and now here we were, intertwined.

“Vái,” said Thor good-humoredly. “That last contortion has given me a cramp.”

I laughed. “It must be what the apostle meant when he said that the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

“Not so much the flesh as the muscles. I am less athletic and gymnastic than an outdoorsman like you. Let us rest a moment.”

While we lay there, trembling slightly from our exertions, I asked, “Do you remember yet, Thor, exactly what it was that Widamer said?”

“Ne. But it gave me only a hint, not a certainty of what I would find. The woman Veleda that he mentioned, well, she
could
have been nothing but a real woman—deluding everyone in Novae with her impersonation of a man named Thorn. Nevertheless, I went… in hopes…”

I said admiringly, “You came all this way, sustained merely by those hopes.”

“And a devilish chase you led me, I must say. I have always been a city dweller, and I was delicately reared, and I am not at all adventurous. I have no love of robust activities or of travel or of the wilderness.”

“If you dislike travel, why do you own a horse?”

“I do not. I stole the one I am riding.”

“You stole it?!” I exclaimed, aghast. “Why, that is a capita! offense! You will be hanged… crucified…”

Thor said negligently, “Only if I am fool enough to go back to Tolosa, where I stole it.”

I was stupefied. I had never heard of any criminal so recklessly confessing such a heinous crime. Granted, I personally had not always been the most law-abiding and sinless of mortals, but neither had I ever spoken blithely of my transgressions or, in my own mind, lightly regarded them. However, even the killings I had done, I could not count as vile as stealing the horse of another man of one’s own people. That villainy is adjudged, in Gothic law and custom and general opprobrium, more reprehensible than murder. What bothered me most was that the evildoer in this case, unconscious or uncaring of having committed such a gross immorality, was the one person in the world nearest being my kindred spirit… or my twin… or my destined mate… nearest, in fact, being
me myself.

Possibly sensing my dismay and disapproval, Thor got up and wandered about the room, then opened the closet in which I had stored my spare clothes before Swanilda and I rode out into the delta. Finding among them my Veleda garments, Thor got those out and began fingering and examining them. The coiled-bronze breast guard that I had bought in Haustaths seemed of particular fascination. Thor put it on and, otherwise still naked, went to lean over the water basin, bending this way and that to admire the reflection. I already had been shown the feminine attire that Thor also carried—including a hip-band undergarment, like my own, to bind and conceal the male organ—so I refrained from voicing annoyance at Thor’s so impudently toying with my belongings. Also, eyeing that ugly gammadion scar on Thor’s back, I felt inclined to leniency even in greater matters. Perhaps ill treatment in early life accounted for Thor’s seemingly insensitive disregard of other people’s property.

I said, “You do not intend ever to return to Tolosa? But I would have assumed, from your attending a convivium at the court there, that you must be a young noble of some degree.”

“Would that I were,” Thor said, then stunned me yet again. “I am—or I was—cosmeta and tonstrix to King Euric’s wife, Queen Ragna.”

“What? A
male
cosmeta? A cosmeta named
Thor?”

“Named Genovefa. And not male. In my native Tolosa, and wherever else in the Visigoth lands that I have gone in company with the queen, I was known and respected as her skillful cosmeta Genovefa. I have striven not to sully that reputation. Genovefa’s little indiscretions have always been conducted discreetly. Only when I had to satisfy my male urges have I become Thor, and on those occasions I would sneak off to a low lupanar where the women ask few questions of the men who rut upon them.”

“Interesting,” I said again. “I too go to great lengths to protect my identity, only the other way about. I live publicly as a male.”

“I told you, I was delicately reared. I was a foundling, raised and trained by nuns, and taught the occupations suitable to a female. Sewing, cleaning, cooking, eventually the arts of applying cosmetics, dyeing and crimping hair. And then I left the convent to make my own way in the world.”

“But, while you lived there, did not any of the nuns notice… well… that you were different?”

Thor smiled reminiscently. “What would nuns know of such things? When I was a child, they regarded me compassionately—a poor little girl afflicted with an unfortunate but not disabling abnormality. When I grew into puberty, they discovered that my abnormality had its uses. They may not have known what to call it, but they made use of it, in secret—everyone from the elderly prioress to the novices. Nevertheless, all the time I lived among them, they thought me just an oddly developed female. And so did I.”

“How did you learn the truth?”

“When I was fourteen, the prioress found me employment as cosmeta to a Tolosa matron. And the lady’s husband soon found other employment for such a pretty girl as I was. He was not at all disturbed, but overjoyed, when he encountered my… unique equipment. He called it my ‘overblown rose,’ and said it beguiled him, excited him. He seemed never to imagine that my equipment might someday compete with his. But the lady did, when one day we bathed together and
she
espied my overblown rose. It was she who taught me how to function as a male—in that regard, at least.”

Thor paused and shrugged. “Akh, well, my namesake, King Alareikhs’s Queen Genovefa, was an adulteress too. For more than a year, I alternated between serving master and mistress, sometimes both within the span of one sexta resting hour. The lady was well aware of my being her husband’s nymph, and never objected to that. But when he caught me energetically playing satyr to his wife, he raged and then he wept. Then he burned the brand into my back and threw me out of the house.”

“Well, let us hope that your hurts and your scandals and your sneakings-about are behind you now. Henceforth, perhaps you will be able to gratify
all
your urges without stealth, without having to seek. Or stray.”

“You mean… with you?” Thor let drop my Veleda garments and smiled across the room at me. “Openly with you? And
only
with you?” Next moment, Thor was lying close against me again and making soft caresses. “Does that mean you love me already? Or is it merely lust? But akh! lust is love enough, surely!”

“Hold! Hold!” I said gently. “Let me tell you the lies that I told about you to my friends here.”

“Why?”

“So that you will not contradict my account of our meeting when you talk to Meirus or Swanilda or Maggot.”

“Why should I talk to them?”

“Because they are all involved, one way or another, in my mission of compiling a Gothic history.”

Thor drew a little away. “I was hoping that, after tonight, you would abandon that silly mission.”

“Abandon it? I am on the king’s business!”

“Well? I rode away from a queen, without explanation or apology, just to find you. More than likely Queen Ragna has cursed me with a Sending.” Apparently not worried by that prospect, Thor snickered and added, “I know very well that she must
look
like a haliuruns hag by now, bereft of my services.”

“I am flattered that you were so eager to find me. But I must point out that you were a cosmeta. I am a king’s marshal.”

Thor drew farther away from me, and said petulantly, “Akh, ja.
Only
a cosmeta. This lowly domestic begs your pardon, clarissimus. You are ever so much better than I am. I must forever bow to your wishes.”

“Now, now. I did not mean to sound belittling or—”

“You have the superiority of rank, Saio Thorn, but only when you are wearing your title and your insignia
and your clothes.
Right now, I see on this bed only two naked mannamavjos, both of them abnormities, outcasts from all normal folk. Neither of them one iota better or different or of higher status than the other.”

“True enough,” I said, but stiffly. “Still, you must concede that you had rather less to give up than a marshalcy.”

Thor abruptly warmed again. “Vái, we are quarreling—like any commonplace man and wife. We must never do that. You and I are two against the world. Here… let me hold you again…”

In another moment we were doing something that would be anatomically impossible to any other two human beings of whatever sex. And the culmination of it was so sublimely paradisiacal as to be indescribable to anyone of any other sex except mannamavi—and then
only
to a mannamavi, like Thor or myself, who had had the transcendent good fortune, like Thor and myself, to have found and coupled with another mannamavi.

And here I must confess something else, or many of my subsequent actions will be unfathomable.

To be quite truthful, before this night was over, I was abjectly besotted. I had by no means fallen in love; I was not even moonily infatuated with Thor
as Thor;
I was simply overwhelmed and captivated by the superabundance of sexual gratification that Thor provided. I hardly need say that I had never in my life suffered from the crippling Christian vice of pudicity, nor had I been abstemious of sexual appetite, nor had I been lacking for opportunities to slake that appetite. But suddenly I was like a gluttonous man who, long constrained to a frugal diet, at last comes upon an inexhaustibly bountiful table—and not just of staple fare but of ambrosial delicacies—wherewith to feed his insatiable gluttony over and over again. Finding myself now fettered by an addiction to sexual surfeit, I was able to understand how a drunkard gets enslaved by his wine, and why the old hermit Galindo repulsed every company and comfort except that afforded by his damnable weed smoke.

When, after that lyrical round of our debauch, we lay with our bodies glistening of sweat, I said:

“Since you followed me here, Thor, knowing of my quest, I would have expected you to join me in it, not speak of my abandoning it.”

Thor said again, “I detest travel and hardship and the outdoor life. I much prefer a settled and sheltered existence. To attain that—
and with you
—I should be not at all reluctant to give up the dubious advantages of my dual identity. I should be not at all fearful to live as my true self, and cheerfully endure whatever infamy it might cost me. Why would you be averse to doing the same, Thorn? In Novae, I learned that you are passably wealthy, and I was shown your fine estate. Why should not you and I simply go back there, live comfortably and happily together in leisured retirement, and let the commonfolk think or say what they will?”

“Liufs Guth!” I exclaimed. “I worked, I fought, I killed to earn the rank and affluence of a herizogo. I have worked and fought and killed to deserve the keeping of my station. If King Theodoric were to learn that he had conferred nobility on a mannamavi, how long do you think I would be a herizogo? Or affluent? Or owner of that estate? Ne, I will not throw away everything I possess, merely to make a show of defiance to the normal world.”

It occurred to me that I was sounding very like a Christian: staunchly insistent on being good and doing right only for the rewards attendant on such behavior. So I said also:

“Theodoric and I were friends long before he became king and I swore my auths and he made me his marshal. Our very first meeting occurred when he saved me from dying of an adder bite. I owe more than vassal fealty to the king, I owe comradely loyalty to the man. And with the privileges of herizogo rank, I took on responsibilities as well. More than that, I have my own self-respect to maintain. I accepted this mission; I will pursue it. You may come with me, Thor, or stay and wait for me, as you choose.”

If those sound like firm and masterful words, they actually constituted a weakling evasion. I omitted to mention a third alternative: that Thor return to Tolosa or go elsewhere, and leave me forever. But remember, I was already besotted. Anyway, although Thor could not have helped noticing that I had laid down only two of the three choices open, I heard no exulting over that, only a sulky silence. So, while I waited somewhat anxiously for Thor to say, “I will go with you” or “I will wait for you,” I remarked: