Fantastic Metropolis

In the Oratory’s nighttime silence that the sister has always thought of as God’s, in the shimmering pool of light cast by the great, thick candle, the Abbess’s fingers, tongue and lips draw great gasps and cries from the Master. It is the Master who obeys the Abbess, not the Abbess him, speaking words the sister knows only from the fabliaux she heard as a child in her father’s Hall, overpowering the Abbess with embraces fiercer and wilder than any act of love the sister has dared to imagine, until at long last the Abbess, crying out, impales herself on his member.

Sister Sebastienne creeps soundlessly back to the dormitory. Her teeth are chattering, her knees trembling, but her private places are thrilled and moist, burning with an intensity she had not known possible. What she saw cannot be, she is certain. It must be that the meat and wine have given her this lewd, wanton vision, sending her imagination to places it has never before visited. So vivid, yes, so real, but surely impossible…

13.

Carefully, lovingly, Sister Sebastienne copies out the first couplet of her carmen onto the smooth, clean vellum a lay sister prepared for her. Perlegi vestram studiosa indagine cartam, Et tetigi nuda carmina vestra manu—“I read your letter with embracing zeal, And with your hand I have touched your naked songs.” It is a joy to write out her verses, a joy to see them written on the vellum—giving her almost as great a pleasure as she took composing them.

Sister Sebastienne glances over at the Abbess, seated at her desk, the sunlight pouring down on her head like the radiance enveloping a saint in a painting. She writes, “At last, weary, I tried to get to sleep, but love that has been wakened knows no night…” Hearing her own words in the privacy of her mind makes Sister Sebastienne’s palms tingle as though filled with the shapeliness of her soft, naked breasts. Love that has been wakened…

How much the Abbess has taught her! She may be a handmaid and hostage of God, but she knows now, in her heart, that not only are the delights of a life of study prodigious, but that the power of love surpasses that of the grave—and that of the Master himself.

“The Abbess’s Prayers” was originally published in Dying for It, ed. Gardner Dozois (HarperPrism, 1997).