Alas, the sweet sensayer knew my name now. The ears of Carlyle Foster were deaf to the words of Mycroft Canner. If I called, Carlyle would cut me off in seconds. I might get in a sentence or two first, and I would save those for the true crisis moment, when it came. Better to head down in person, since a switch’s flick could not silence me if we stood face to face. So I raced, and watched, and dispatched a silent prayer too as I watched, on the off chance that This Universe’s God was not as deaf to me as was His priest. You may, if you wish to aid us, pray as well, reader. The Hand that weaves Providence knows everything from creation to infinity, and takes account of the future when He plans the past; if prayer has any power to sway Fate, then even though, from your perspective, Carlyle was either saved or not saved long ago, it could still be your prayer, now, as you read, that swayed the Judge. Free and righteous as you probably are, you may pray for any intervention you imagine: a timely call from a bash’mate, Kosala wandering by, a house fire. For myself, low creature that I am, I dared not ask so much: only that Fate might be so kind as to let Carlyle find Dominic in a gentle mood, as I had found him thirteen years ago, the first time I begged my way back into that house.
Should I share that scene too with you, reader? The gentler version of what Carlyle may be about to face? It was long ago, my first day as a slave, the day I donned my Servicer uniform, still hostile in my heart to the changes that were remaking me, and unused to coming as a suppliant. But I had to see Jehovah Mason again. Some weeks had passed since my trial, my first encounter with He Who Changed Me, and my soul was still one great wound after my transformation. My old self had been so armored in conviction that it had never hesitated, even as I made all the world my enemy. My new, raw self did not yet know to name these icy stab-wounds ‘doubt.’ I had to see Him again. If the only way was to throw myself upon the mercy of the looming dragon who seemed to control access to this Prince, so be it. I slipped my tracker, and slinked my way to the alley behind Madame’s. A young and fierce Chevalier dragged me inside, and hurled me at the feet of Brother Dominic, seventeen then and not yet ordained. How did kind Fate have me find him? Naked in his cell, his youth-firm breasts and hips just starting to swell with Venus’s fertility, all callously bare, as when a bandit chief plays with his drawn sword, watching the wide white eyes of prisoners follow his naked blade. Dominic’s posture was all power, his expression too as he dismissed the Chevalier only after a lazy, appraising stare which said that he could have enjoyed this servant during our meeting had it been worth his time. Brother Dominic chuckled at my stammering petition for an audience with He Who Had Shattered My Illusory World, and he consented at once to teach me of the real world, and what my place in it must be if I wished to have access to our Master. Dominic had pets in those days, gifts from Madame, a lion, a leopard, and a wolf bitch, almost tame, and as he lectured me on the Enlightenment, and secret politics, and the rules a slave must follow when addressing God, his pet beasts squabbled, competing to lick the meat-sweet monthly drippings from his cunt. Such a scene I prayed might wait for Carlyle Foster in Dominic’s room, but Providence was not so merciful.
“Wait, that’s not Sister Helo?se, I … Wait!”
Carlyle sought escape at once, but the two maidens who had been his traitor-guides flitted away fast as summer butterflies, and bolted the door too firmly for pounding fists to even rattle it. That room reminds one why prisons and monasteries are both composed of ‘cells.’ It is dim, no softness, no color, no throw pillows or smiling toys, just bare walls, raw wooden furniture, and books in piles, much fingered but not loved. Madame insists on printed books for her creatures’ education despite the expense, for an electronic text ceases to be quite real the instant it leaves the reader’s lenses, easy to forget. Paper, with its must and bookmarks, lingers in the corner of the eye, refusing to be unread. Dominic has all the theologians as his roommates: Calvin, Ramanuja, Augustine, lazing on every surface of the room like flies so persistent that one no longer bothers to shoo them away. Carlyle found Dominic there on his knees, his back to the door, hands clasped in prayer, with the shapeless folds of a monk’s long habit pooling around him like sacking. It was a Dominican habit, a black mantle over white beneath, the rough layers rustling with the rhythms of his prayer, like the wings of a hooded hawk. Dominic’s feet, half hidden in the folds, were bare, and his wig discarded, so it no longer hid the blush-red bare patch of his tonsure. Nothing remained of his daily gentleman’s costume except the tracker at his ear and the long, hooded sensayer’s scarf draped across his shoulders like a priest’s stole. On the wall above, where Dominic focused his devotions, hung the room’s sole decoration, framed in plain gold against the bare plaster: a portrait of Jehovah.
Carlyle collapsed at once and vomited into the trash can, which waited by the door for victims such as we. She convulsed over it, wriggling like a half-crushed maggot as her body usurped the mind’s control in its desperate need to purge itself. Hot tears followed the waste, forced out by the violence her muscles did to themselves. She fought, not to rise, not even to stop retching, but just to breathe.
‘She,’ Mycroft? For Carlyle thou meanest ‘he.’
No, reader, I refuse. It is wrong, this pronoun they commanded me to force on her, they who are so proud to number the prince and heir of la Trémo?lle among their playthings, but it is wrong. Look at this kind and tender Cousin, her giving smile, her flowing wrap, her courage strengthened daily by the knowledge that her existence helps so many others. Has Carlyle made one choice in all this history that does not declare the strong and beauteous ‘she’? I will not erase Carlyle’s choices anymore, not in deference to this mad law, revived in Madame’s antique pageant world, that only penises inherit. Let censors change the pronoun later if they wish; I shall lie no more. And you, reader, you need Carlyle to be ‘she’ here too. Do you remember when you first smelled the rot? When alien Dana?, armored in the extinct pelt of ‘woman,’ drew forth my secrets? Perhaps your better age is finally past it, reader, but my society—despite our neuter efforts—still shoves gender down our throats, imbibed in toddlerhood when a child whom the adults label ‘girl’ gets chided just a little more for getting her nice clothes muddy than a child we see as ‘boy’ and associate with snails and muddy puppy tails. The residue of ancient archetypes embedded deep in Mycroft Canner knew that I was supposed to become the shining knight when Dana? presents the tearful princess. That learned, unconscious chivalry made me helpless before her, and you would not have understood why if I had not given Dana? her ‘she.’ Just so you need it here, Dominic’s overwhelming ‘he’ as Carlyle’s ‘she’ responds with that tender, honest, feminine goodness which makes this fell bloodhound smell prey. Carlyle is a thousand times stronger than I, fights back where I surrendered, but it is still millennia she battles, the learned detritus of millennia, deep inside her.
Are these thy true motives, Mycroft? Thou claimest that this sudden switch to ‘she’ is for my better understanding, but this feels more like thy prejudice, that, because Carlyle is the victim here, thou seest suddenly the ‘weaker sex’ and concoctest these excuses to justify thy change.
I wish I could prove you wrong, reader. When I ask myself why I reach for ‘she’ here it feels as if it is for you, your better understanding, and for Carlyle, respecting her choice to be a Cousin. Those motives feel so real. But I cannot be certain these are not veneer over some grosser instinct. The poison of millennia is in me too.
Methodical Dominic finished his prayer, the rote-swift syllables punctuated by the music of his victim’s nausea, before he turned to gaze upon his prey. “Tell me, Cousin Foster,” he began softly, “what’s it like getting up in the morning every day knowing thou hast a coward’s religion?”
Carlyle barely had the strength to raise her eyes as she retched over the can.
“The unexamined can get away with it,” Dominic continued, not rising from his knees but gazing over his shoulder at his shaking visitor. “But as a sensayer thou knowest perfectly well that, of the hundreds of faiths thou’st studied, thou’st fixed on the most toothless. Deism, the comfortable fancy that all religions are coequal puzzle-piece interpretations of the same Clockmaker God, Who made this universe but does not interfere with blights or miracles, trusting Nature and mankind to run ourselves with the hands-off guidance of His beneficent, rational laws. Thy studies have taught thee well how cowardly that is.”