Raptor by Gary Jennings

lowliest slovens in some regards. As I was to learn, there are physical afflictions unknown to males but suffered by all females. Sister Tilde and I had one day been given the job of scrubbing the dorter floors, when we suddenly noticed strange noises coming from one of the cells. We crept close and peeked in. It was the cell of Sister Leoda, a novice of about our own age, and she was writhing on her pallet, whimpering and moaning, and the lower half of her shift was nearly sodden with blood.
    “Gudisks Himins,” I muttered in horror. “Leoda has somehow injured herself.”
    “Ne,” said Tilde, unperturbed. “It is only the menoths. The menstruum. Nonna Aetherea must have excused Leoda from her duties today.”
    “But the girl is in pain! She is bleeding! We must do something to help!”
    “There is nothing to do, Sister Thorn. It is a normal occurrence. All of us must endure that for a few days every month.”
    I said, “But you do not. Or not that I know of. And certainly I do not.”
    “You and I will, though, in time. We are of the northern peoples. Sister Leoda is from Massilia in the south. Girls of the warmer lands mature at a younger age.”
    “That is maturity?!” I exclaimed, appalled, looking in again at Leoda, who was paying no attention to us or to anything else but her private and lonely torment.
    “Maturity, ja,” said Tilde. “It is the curse we inherited from Eve. When a girl becomes a woman—of an age to conceive and bear children—she suffers her first menstruum. Then it recurs every month, unless she does get pregnant. The misery lasts for some days each time, and it goes on happening, every month of a woman’s life, until she can no longer conceive, until all her juices dry up, and she is an old woman of forty years or so.”
    “Liufs Guth,” I muttered. “Then I should think every woman would wish and strive to get pregnant, if that brings surcease.”
    “Akh, ne, say not so! Be happy that we of St. Pelagia’s have renounced men and marriage and childbirth. The menstruum may be a curse, but it is as nothing compared to the agonies of giving birth. Remember what the Lord said to Eve, ‘In sorrow shall you bring forth children.’ Ne, ne, Sister Thorn, be glad that we are to be forever virgins.”
    “If you say so,” I sighed. “I will not eagerly look forward to my maturity, but I shall resign myself to it.”
    Although I had to exert constant and painstaking effort in learning how to behave like a female, I was pleased to find that I had little trouble in coming to feel like one. I have already told how, before I ever knew of my physical peculiarity, I seemed to be manifesting various feminine traits—uncertainty, doubt, suspicion, even the extremely unmasculine sense of guilt.
    Once I had accepted my femaleness, it appeared that all my emotions came closer to the surface of me, so to speak, and were more easily indulged, expressed and influenced. Where once, boylike, I might only have admired Christ’s manly fortitude on the cross, I could now reflect almost maternally on the pain he had suffered, and could unashamedly let tears come to my eyes. And I could be femininely mercurial in my moods. Like my sister novices, I could take joy in such frivolous things as dressing up and feeling pretty. Like them, I could just as readily get sullen at some real or fancied slight, and sulk about it.
    I came to realize that, like them, I was acutely sensitive to odors, whether appealing or repellent—and later in life, when I encountered perfumes and incenses, I would find that they could profoundly affect my mood or emotion or disposition. Like my sisters, I could discern when another female was having her monthly indisposition, from the look of her face, as well as from the subtle blood-scent she gave off—and in the outside world, I would still be able to do so, even when a woman tried to conceal her condition with a veil or a cloud of perfume. Like my sisters, I somehow knew—what