Raptor by Gary Jennings Page A

died, when a synod was convened at Aquileia. Happily, the sainted Bishop Ambrose had the foresight to weight that synod with other Athanasian bishops. Only two Arian bishops attended, and they were literally shouted down, vilified, anathematized and expelled from the Christian episcopate. Arianism was overthrown, and the Catholic Church has had to suffer no stain of that heresy ever since.”
    “Then how did the Goths become Arians?”
    “Sometime before Arianism was made anathema, the Arian Bishop Wulfilas went as a missionary into the wilds where the Visigoths had their wolfish dens. He converted them, they converted their neighboring brother Ostrogoths, they converted the Burgunds and other outlanders.”
    “But surely, Brother Cosmas, there must also have been Catholic missionaries going among the outlanders.”
    “Akh, ja. But you must remember that most of the Germanic people are of only brute intellect. They simply cannot realize how two divine entities, the Christ and the Father, can be of one substance. It requires an exertion of faith, not reason. Of the heart, not the head. Ignorance is the mother of devotion. But the Arian creed, that the Son is merely like the Father— that the outlanders can understand in their brute heads, and not have to employ their brute hearts.”
    “Yet you have called them Christians.”
    Cosmas spread his hands. “Only because they undeniably do follow Christ’s admonitions—love your neighbor, and so on. But they do not properly worship Christ; they worship only God; I could as well call them Jews. No matter. Among their absurd beliefs is the belief that two or more forms of worship can be equally valid. So they stupidly allow the incursion of other religions—including ours, Thorn—and ours will inevitably triumph over theirs.”

* * *
    It may seem odd—it seemed odd even to me at the time—that I alone of our entire Catholic Christian community should have dared to question, to challenge, even to begin to doubt the precepts, rules, strictures and beliefs by which we all lived. Looking back, though, I believe I can explain my dare-the-devil inquisitiveness and my incipient tendency to rebel against my upbringing. I believe, now, that it was the first emergence of the female aspect of my character. In my lifetime I was eventually and often to observe that most women, particularly those with a modicum of intelligence and a touch of education, are very much like what I was in my youth—vulnerable to uncertainty, liable to doubt, ready to suspect.
    I might have gone on indefinitely poring over books and scrolls, and intensely questioning my instructors, and keeping a watchful eye on other persons, trying to resolve my doubts about what was supposed to be a God-given religion—what was supposed to be my religion—trying to reconcile, by perception and not merely assumption, the many inconsistencies I found in it. But it was at this time that the ruttish Brother Peter began using me in the manner of a female slave.
    Though I had long prided myself on my acquisition of much knowledge, and even some measure of worldliness, I was totally unprepared for Peter’s molestation, and knew not what it really was. I did know—Peter himself made it clear—that what we did together was something to be kept quiet and hidden. So I surely must have realized, though I just as surely refused to allow the realization room in my conscious mind, that ours was grossly impermissible behavior. Still, for all my independence and even contrariness in other matters, I had for so long been imbued with respect for authority—meaning subservience to everyone older in years or superior in rank—that I never tried to repel Peter’s advances.
    I think also, after the first assault, I was secretly so ashamed of what had been done to me that I could not disclose it to Dom Clement or anyone else, and have others feel the same revulsion and disgust at my pollution that I felt myself. Besides, Peter had