by Torey Hayden
Torgon knew well enough already what existed within the body. As a child hunting with her father, she’d watched the ritual removal of the internal organs from the animals killed, had partaken of the special nourishment of still warm liver and brain, had seen the heart given to the hunter to grant him the animal’s bravery. But those had all been lifted lifeless from dead, defeated things. The Power showed her very different images – visions of hearts still pumping, lungs frothing with air and blood moving in a current, as if it were a river – visions of life and growth.
The hare had been her own idea and Torgon was pleased at her ingenuity, at this effort to make the visions come real. Holding a cloth soaked in the diluted death oil, she felt the fight seep slowly from the animal. It was a prolonged process and once, when she removed the cloth too soon, the hare burst back to life and leapt from her grip, although it was too drugged to do more than flop dozily around her feet. The second time she kept the cloth there longer and at last it stayed limp.
Amazed, Torgon regarded it. In her experience living hares were panicked, struggling things, but this one lay heavy and warm in her lap. For several minutes, she did no more than study it, watching the animal’s side rise and fall rhythmically. She stroked the fur to feel its softness, but gingerly, for it had fleas. This in itself was worth the effort, Torgon thought, for she was gaining much just by being able to look at a living hare so closely. As the animal had already made her wiser, she offered it the gesture of veneration.
Laying the hare out on the stone floor, Torgon loosed the ceremonial dagger from its sheath at her wrist and then cautiously slipped the knife under the skin of the hare’s belly. She slit it in a neat line. Easing back the skin carefully, she saw smooth muscle beneath it.
Blood was suddenly everywhere. Consternated, Torgon fingered hastily along the edge of the flesh until she came to a small gushing vein and squeezed it. Carrying the limp hare with her to the fireplace, she plunged the tip of the knife into the embers left from the morning fire. She’d often watched her father take the manhood from the young bull calves to make them quieter for the cart, and it was his hot knife that had sealed the blood. Yes, it would do so here too, she discovered. There was a sizzle and a faint smell of burnt flesh, but when Torgon gently wiped away the blood, none came to replace it.
While waiting for the knife to cool, Torgon brought over the needle and silver thread that Mogri had got for her. Then she settled down again on the stone floor. Slipping the tip of the knife through the translucent covering over the body cavity, she pulled it aside and there beneath her fingertips was the small beating heart of the hare.
This is a great wonder! Awe momentarily overcame her. She’d meant to venerate Dwr at this moment for showing her so great a miracle, but she just stared, bewitched. Here was the heart. Here was the liver. Here was the stomach. Each part she’d perceived before only a bit of meat. Now it juddered with life.
Gently she prodded the stomach, feeling the living warmth of the creature for herself. Lifting her fingers, she smelled the scent. It was all just as the Power had shown her in her dreams, with each part of the living body coexisting peacefully in small separate kingdoms. Laying down the knife, Torgon lowered herself, pressing her face against the cold flag floor to do full obeisance to the sacred hare.
Afterwards, Torgon carefully pressed the flaps of peritoneum back together, then the muscle and finally the skin. Taking the needle with its shimmery thread, she bent close over the body of the animal and endeavoured to stitch its skin back together.
The hare didn’t live. Indeed, it never woke from the sleep of the death oil and Torgon was obliged to go back out into the forest and trap another. And neither did that one survive, so she had to go again. And again. And again. As she waited in the grass for yet one more to approach her trap, she fretted that the summer would soon pass and it’d grow too cold for hunting.
“What unholy thing is this?”
Startled, Torgon jerked up. She was in her innermost cell. The Seer had no right to enter without seeking her permission, but he was there nonetheless.
Panicked, Torgon leapt quickly to her feet. She tried to hide her hands. There was blood on both of them and blood on the floor. Blood, she’d long since realized, was very disinclined to stay within its kingdom. The small room stank of it.
“This is the work of the Power,” she said as calmly as she could. “It has commanded that I do this.”
“What? Dwr has commanded the letting of blood by your own hand? On holy floors? Do not add blasphemy to so many sins.”
“I am not letting blood. Blood has flowed but the animal still lives. See? I can show you a great miracle: its beating heart.”
His eyes grew huge with horror. “This is not Dwr’s domain!”
“Dwr’s domain is greater than we have even dreamt of.”
“You have allowed yourself to be led into darkness! Dwr does not command your hands in this. Why would Dwr countenance the breaking of so many holy rules? Answer me that.”
“Holy sir, I do not wish to be discourteous to you for you are old and should be venerated, and you have taught me much of what I know. But the truth is, I have no need to answer you for anything. I am the divine benna. So I answer not to you but Dwr alone, as Dwr answers only to the One.”
“You dare speak to me thus?” he cried. “Divine benna? You? What know you of sacred things, except for what I’ve taught you? Were it not for me, you’d still be living midst the dung and mud from whence you came.” He raised his staff and swung it out.
The staff had struck countless times before. Despite his age, he could swing it very hard, and Torgon had always cowered quickly, because she was embarrassed to be seen with so many bruises. Not so on this occasion. When she saw him lift the staff, she reached out to stop it. Not in anger. Indeed, Torgon found she had no feelings at all in that very moment. Her blood, instead, lay in her veins like shattered ice.
When the old man realized she meant to take the staff, fury raged through him, turning his face from pink to red to nearly purple. A terrible struggle ensued. He wasn’t going to let her have it, while Torgon now realized she had to finish what she’d started. She didn’t wish to hurt him. Ferocious as he was, youth and strength were on her side. It would be unjust to hurt him. Moreover, even as she realized she must take possession of the staff, she knew it was unseemly that they should fall to fighting thus, hand to hand, as if they were naught but beggars after scraps.
Unable to get a hold on the flailing stick, Torgon finally plunged past it and grabbed the old man by his robes. He jerked back. She grabbed the flesh of his neck to keep him from breaking free. Within a heartbeat she had both hands there, her thumbs pressed to his throat. At that, his anger passed abruptly into fear.
“You have sought to be my overlord too long,” she said. She was only inches from his face and her voice, staccatoed by panting from the struggle, was naught more than a whisper. “Drop the stick.”
The staff clattered to the floor.
Beneath her thumbs Torgon could feel the rapid flutter of his pulse. It would be easy as crushing the dry reeds at the riverside to close her grip, and in that fleeting moment, she knew he expected her to do it.
She met him eye to eye. “Know that I am made for better stuff than the killing of an aged man. It would be unseemly to take the life of someone so much weaker than myself.”
When she let go, he staggered, then fell to his knees, then finally forward until he was as an animal on all fours.
“You are at the feet of the divine benna,” she said quietly. “Show rightful obeisance.”
The old man went down prostrate on the floor.
“Kiss the holy shoes lest you forget again who serves whom.”
He did.
“Now rise.”
With anguished slowness the old man struggled first to his knees and then, totteringly, to his feet. He kept his head down as he turned and began to hobble towards the door.
“Here.�
�� Torgon bent and picked up the wooden stick. “You forget to take the staff which aids you in your walking.” She held it out to him.
The Seer reached for it but when his hand was on the staff, Torgon didn’t release it. “First tell me one thing, old man,” she said. “Is this really all there is to power between the divine benna and the holy Seer? A stick and who possesses it?”
He said nothing.
She let go of the staff. “I am sickened to my very soul to think that such a thing is true.”
The eighth hare lived and Torgon saw this as an auspicious sign, for eight had been given her as her luck number on her naming day. Summer had ended by then and it was the month of the big moon, so Torgon fed the animal generously on fresh-made hay and harvest roots to make it strong again. Each night she examined its abdomen to feel the tiny ribboned scar where the skin had knit back together again.
This success made her brave and she captured one of the village dogs. The dog was easier to catch, but it felt unholier this time. Dogs were unclean creatures, forbidden in the compound, and she had to resort to guile to get it into her quarters. This gave the activity a shameful aura and kept Torgon keenly aware of how many holy rules she was forced to break to follow where the visions led her.
Yet after Torgon lay the sedated dog out on the stone floor of her private cell and began the now-familiar process of opening the body cavity, a sense of renewed wonder overcame her. The dog’s organs were hand-sized, not minuscule like the hare’s, and their strange, living smell filled the room. She sat in awe and stared. This was not evil. Torgon knew this utterly. No matter how profane what she was doing might look to others, Torgon knew she had been given insight into a truly sacred thing.
Chapter Twenty-One
“When you talk about your university years,” James said, “I hear real happiness. You were enjoying the freedom to be yourself, to study what interested you, to experience Torgon whenever you wanted. You talk about enjoying the social set-up because it provided interaction without – from what I’m hearing – too much commitment. You could just dip in and out as you pleased. But what about boys?” James asked. “Did they figure during these years too?”
“Yes,” Laura said. “I had my first boyfriend in my sophomore year. His name was Matt and he was a fellow pre-med student. We were both a bit socially inept.” She laughed heartily. “In Matt’s case, it was just brains. He was one of those people who could think better than he could do anything else. And he was absolutely passionate about medicine. He was planning to become a specialist in tropical diseases. Life with Matt meant getting excited about parasites and Lassa fever. Hormones would overcame us periodically and we’d indulge in a bit of kiss-and-cuddle, but it was so innocent. We never had sex. We never really even made out seriously. I didn’t mind. After Steven, I didn’t want anything to do with sex.
“The relationship was sustained by our mutual obsessions. While we didn’t share each other’s interests, we both knew what it was to have such an all-consuming enthusiasm for something. Consequently we spent most of our time together separately, me writing, him reading. Hardly a word would be exchanged between us for hours. He never asked me what I was doing; I never asked him. The relationship lasted about two years and happy as clams we were during that time, just being who we were.”
“Medical school was when it all really came together for me,” Laura said. “My undergraduate years had felt free simply because home had been such a cage, but I outgrew college quite quickly. My focus shifted and I became an increasingly serious student. Because I was doing it for Torgon, classes meant more to me than just grades. I really felt motivated to learn the stuff. So it got annoying when other people were farting around, getting drunk, making noise in the middle of the night. I’m an eight-hour-a-night girl. Without it I can’t concentrate. So if people were making noise and I didn’t sleep well, it meant I couldn’t focus in class but it also meant I couldn’t focus on writing.
“Medical school was entirely different. Everybody was serious there. It also meant having my own place for the first time. I was twenty-two and my first apartment was dark and dinky and up five flights of stairs, but I loved it for just that reason. It was a regeneration of my attic bedroom on Kenally Street, only this time without Steven Mecks.
“Studying medicine was just so fantastic. I had chosen medicine because of that child with the cleft palate in Torgon’s world, and that inspiration was burning so brightly by the time I got to med school. I was able to relate everything I studied to Torgon, to societies like hers where people died from easily preventable causes. Wonderful plans were beginning to form in the back of my mind. When I finished my degree I decided I would go abroad to work in the Third World, and this would bring to reality what I’d been overhearing in dreams all my life. It just seemed so right to do this, such a complete full circle. Torgon had given me a deep awareness of the importance of medicine and I, in turn, would bring this knowledge back to people like hers. This gave a powerful sense of meaning to my life. Torgon was no longer a silly fantasy, or worse, a form of mental illness. She was a muse, an inspiration directing me to a vocation. A calling. Isn’t that what the word ‘vocation’ really means? And how can you be ‘called’ without hearing a voice?
“I don’t think I was ever so happy as I was in those first two years of med school. During my classes and seminars I would consciously pull Torgon into my mind and try to see it through her eyes. How would this information look to someone who was not literate? Who had never seen an operating theatre? Who had no recourse to antibiotics? How would she evaluate it? How could she use it? When I looked at things that way, everything stood out in such clear detail. Through her eyes, everything was new and incomprehensibly fascinating. School became almost a spiritual experience for me.”
James had got into the habit of opening the folder of Torgon stories as soon as Laura’s session had ended and reading. In the beginning, he’d read whole stories at a time, soaking up thirty or forty atmospheric pages of life in Torgon’s rigid tribal society. Of late, however, he’d been rationing them. There were only about a hundred of the dog-eared, typewritten pages left, so he tried to restrict himself to only four or five at a time.
Now he opened it where he had last left off, and began to read.
During the month of deep snow, Torgon was awakened in the night by distressed crying from the acolytes’ quarters. Someone was ill.
She remained in her bed and listened. The health of the acolytes was the Seer’s domain, not hers. She wasn’t expressly forbidden to come into the presence of an ill person, but as she was divine, it was assumed she wouldn’t wish to taint herself. Consequently, no one expected her to leave her cells.
At first she didn’t. The Power was stirring, as it often did when she awoke in the night, stirring and turning, as if making itself comfortable within her body, much as she imagined an unborn child must do within its mother.
What came to her as she lay in the darkness was the image of the moon-kissed child. More than three years had passed since the baby had been put to death, but the child’s shade still lingered near, something Torgon never dared mention to the Seer. And it came now, wandering into her mind as a girl of five or six, smiling, her mouth healed to naught but a crooked line. Like the line on the belly of the hare, Torgon thought.
Could lips and palate be sewn back together? As with the abdominal skin? Like a flint struck in darkness, the idea sparked through Torgon’s mind. Was there a real possibility of repairing a moon kiss with a weapon no greater than a needle and a thread? She tried to visualize the act.
A sudden clamour outside in the corridor dissolved the vision.
One of the holy women was hurrying down the corridor, a basin of steaming water in her arms. A gaggle of acolytes came trotting after. “Holy benna, we have awakened you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She dipped her head in a brief gesture of obeisance.
“What’s happening among the acolytes?”
“One
has fallen ill with the retching illness.”
“Take me there.”
“The Seer is already with her, holy benna. Do you not think it better you should remain here? You would not wish to take the illness yourself.”
The Power stirred, interfering with Torgon’s view of the woman. “No,” she replied. “It is Dwr’s will that I go.”
A murmur of surprise ran through the throng of children when Torgon entered. They knelt quickly in obeisance. Beyond them in the second row of pallets the Seer was beside a young girl clad in the night garments of a high-born child. Torgon came nearer to see that it was Loki, the warrior’s daughter.
The Seer already had holy candles lit. With his fingers he dripped cleansing oils into the small flames. The oil’s astringent scent mingled with the sour smell of vomit.
The girl was as pale as a ghost, her eyes dull and dark in the wan light of the holy candles. Nonetheless, she managed a flicker of a smile on seeing Torgon. “I am honoured by your presence, holy benna,” she murmured, “but I am sorry, for I cannot do you obeisance.”
“I’m sure it is in your heart to do it, Loki,” Torgon said, and pulled over one of the low stools.
The Seer reached a hand out to prevent her from sitting. “It would be better if you are not so close. She has grown sorely ill and the candles have not burned for long.”
Ignoring him, Torgon sat anyway. “How old are you now, Loki?”
“I’ve seen thirteen summers pass, holy benna.”
Torgon reached forward and stroked back the girl’s dark hair. “You are very hot. How long have you felt ill? For when I saw you at your prayers this evening, I noted nothing wrong.”
“My stomach has been vaguely sore a day or two, but I have not felt ill. It only comes upon me now and gives such pain. It makes me bring my stomach up, but even afterwards there is no relief from it.”